Infection Z

by Ryan Casey

  Something went flying towards the high rise buildings in the centre of the town.

  And then … boom.

  The blast was a good four, five miles away, but Hayden felt it rattle his insides from all this distance away. Or maybe it was just the realisation. The acceptance that his home town was being bombarded. His home town that was safe. A shelter that he’d spent his life in. A rock which he’d hidden under for so, so long, gone.

  Sacrificed for the greater good.

  “We really, really need to get away from here,” Newbie said.

  And he was right.

  Hayden took in a deep breath and walked over the piles of mangled zombie bodies and headed in the direction of the countryside. He heard more planes whooshing overhead. Heard more blasts. He imagined the screams of the citizens of Smileston—at least, the ones who’d made it this far. He imagined their realisation that the government and the army weren’t trying to help them, not anymore.

  He thought about his mum, his dad, his sister, and he hoped to God Preston was okay.

  And if not, he prayed they’d left for the countryside.

  He turned and looked back at Smileston as smoke rose from the debris of the blasted flat blocks in the middle of town.

  He took in a deep breath of the smoky air.

  Together, the three of them left their home town for whatever awaited them over the horizon.

  Thirty

  They passed the Thank You For Visiting Smileston! Hope You Leave With a Smile! sign ten minutes later.

  Blood was splattered over the bottom edge of the rusty metal display.

  The houses dwindled the further away from the sign they got. They took the country lanes, which were quiet and abandoned. There was an amazing silence to the countryside. Like the disaster-stricken world beyond had been placed on hold, or that everything was fine out here—like nothing had happened at all.

  But every once in a while, Hayden heard that rumbling, whirring of a military jet overhead, or felt the concrete shake beneath his feet as another missile blasted into his home town, and he remembered exactly what kind of world he was living in right now.

  They didn’t talk much on the road. It was like they didn’t have to, really. They were together in this God awful situation, and that was understanding enough. They had survived—but only survived events so far. Hayden had no idea how much more survival was ahead for them, or what ahead even meant anymore.

  All he knew was that it wasn’t in the comfort of Smileston.

  They climbed the steep incline in the country lane and spotted an old wooden shack in the middle of some trees up a hill. They headed towards it, Hayden holding a brick just in case he had to beat down a zombie. It wasn’t the ideal weapon, but anything would do right now.

  They climbed to the top of the hill. The cabin was full of crinkly old ivy. Moss covered the rusty steel roof, which had a few holes in it where rain inevitably tumbled down. The outside of the cabin was surrounded by fallen leaves, stacked so high that it was obvious nobody had been in here for a long, long time.

  “This place look okay?” Hayden asked.

  He looked at Newbie and Sarah. Sarah’s large blue eyes peered at the cabin like it was a shitty toilet stall at a music festival. Sweat dripped down Newbie’s cheeks, his wide jaw shaking.

  Hayden took that as a yes and turned to face the cabin. Of course it didn’t look okay. That was a stupid question to ask.

  But it was something. Somewhere. Some place to hold out until …

  Well. Until when?

  Hayden smashed the old steel padlock wrapped around the cracked wooden door of the shack. Newbie and Sarah stepped to his side and helped him pull the door open. When they yanked it aside, a nasty smell of damp surrounded them. Hayden held up the brick. Readied himself to attack whatever was inside.

  But the place was empty.

  The uneven, holey wooden floor was covered in water. Mould was growing all up the sides of the shack, stretching right up to the roof. There was a little old portable cooler in the corner of the single room, and a stack of New Scientist magazines dated up until 2011. Yes, this place really did look like it had been left in the lurches for a while.

  Which was exactly the kind of place they needed.

  Newbie opened the creaky cooler door. It was filled with icy Budweisers and nothing else.“Drown our sorrows, maybe?”

  Hayden pushed the door to. “I think we’d better keep ourselves at our most alert. For now, anyway.”

  “So what’s next?” Sarah asked. It was the elephant in the room. Or more, the fucking herd of elephants in the room. What, indeed, was next?

  Hayden leaned back against the cold wall at the back of the shack, then immediately hunched forward when even his slight weight made the wood creak like it was going to snap.

  “We need to wait here,” Hayden said. “Until—”

  “Smileston’s being bombarded,” Sarah said. “There’s still people back there who are alive. But there have to be others, too. Others who have escaped, just like us. And bombs might blow a few zombies up, but they won’t kill the infection.”

  Sarah’s words resonated with Hayden’s thoughts—although, they were thoughts he wasn’t all too keen on admitting himself. Because, sure, bombs might kill or maim the bulk of the undead psychos. But it only took one. Just one infected to break out of Smileston, bite someone. And then the chaos would all start again.

  He wanted to believe the government would have everything under control soon. He wanted to believe Jamie’s story about the riots in New Zealand were just coincidence. But he’d lost faith in the government after today.

  Newbie perched beside Hayden. “Whatever we do next, we need to rest. It’s getting on three o’clock. Sun’ll be setting in an hour or so. We need to secure this place. Make sure it’s as safe as possible for the night. ’Cause I tell you one thing—I do not want to be out there in fourteen hours of darkness.

  The thought made Hayden feel sick, right to the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t even considered that the sun would set soon. He’d lost track of time today. It felt like the rest of time would be comprised of one long struggle of winter morning sun.

  Unfortunately, it was going to be much, much worse.

  “We need to find some fresh water, ideally,” Newbie said. “There should be a stream nearby. We need to stock up before …” He stopped talking.

  It took Hayden a few seconds to realise why. And then he heard the rumbling, screeching of a plane whooshing through the sky.

  He braced himself for the sounds of missiles thumping into Smileston. Waited for that noise to his right to ripple right through his body.

  But the plane whizzed on.

  Whizzed on way past Smileston, with no missiles and no explosions.

  The sound moved to the left. Somewhere in front of the cabin.

  “Where’s it going?” Sarah asked.

  Hayden figured it out right away.

  He felt a sickness rise through his body as he stepped up and walked over to the cabin door.

  Newbie stood up after him. “Hayden, where are you …”

  Hayden opened the cabin door as three more planes whizzed overhead, the sounds of their engines loud enough to tear the sky apart.

  He ran behind the cabin. Ran up the muddy side of the hill. He heard the cabin door clatter open behind him, and he heard more planes speed above.

  “Hayden!” Newbie called. “What is it?”

  He got to the top of the hill and he turned around right on cue.

  He saw the city of Preston. The closest major city to Smileston. He saw the high-rise buildings in the middle of the city. Saw Deepdale, the football team’s stadium. He saw the Ferris wheel that had just recently been installed in Avenham Park as a new year treat for the children and the adults who wished they were kids.

  He saw them, and then a second later, he saw a flash.

  The flash of flames. Of debris crashing everywhere.

  An explosion.
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br />   He heard the sound of the explosion then. It was louder than anything he’d ever heard. It was so loud that he could feel his eardrums vibrating, feel the ground wobbling beneath his feet.

  Sarah and Newbie reached Hayden’s side and looked back at the burning city of Preston. Sarah said something, but Hayden couldn’t hear her, the explosion was way too loud.

  And it wouldn’t have mattered if he had heard her. Because all his senses, all his emotions, were focused on one thing.

  The dying phone in his pocket.

  His mum, dad and sister.

  And the city of Preston, blasted to pieces.

  The city where his family lived.

  Thirty-One

  Forty-five minutes passed and Hayden and the other two still hadn’t been bailed out of the apocalypse.

  They sat on the damp, grassy verge atop the hill above the abandoned old shack they’d found and watched the military strikes on the city of Preston and the town of Smileston with a glassy-eyed, detached disbelief bordering on awe. Office blocks crumbled to the ground under the blast of missiles. Thick black smoke plumed up from the high street, the smell of it strong even from all this distance. And although the attacks and bombardment had receded some time ago, Hayden could still hear the blast of the explosions rippling through his skull.

  “I just … I just can’t believe it’s gone,” Sarah said. “I … I can’t believe it.”

  She said it with a tone that bordered on nonchalance, but Hayden knew it was just the shock. Because it had been a long, crazy day. It was impossible to believe and to comprehend that it was just hours ago that he’d been woken by his alarm clock on a typically lazy Saturday morning. Just hours ago that his landlord had knocked at the door of his flat. Just hours ago that his world had crumbled to ashes. A world that he’d never return to.

  He knew that now. Accepted that now. Seeing Preston—a real city, not just a small town like Smileston—being bombarded by the military was a wake-up call. An indicator of the severity of the situation he was in. There was no going back. There was no waiting for help because help wasn’t going to come.

  And yet, they sat here on this hillside waiting for something. Something that they didn’t know, didn’t understand, but something.

  Because there had to be something next. There had to be. Otherwise, what was the point of life at all?

  “My … my friends,” Sarah continued. She had her arms wrapped around her black coat, and Hayden could see she was shivering in the cold wind. “My … Pauline from New Look. And Andy from Revs. I just … I just can’t believe they’re gone. I can’t accept they’re gone. I can’t do that.”

  Hayden didn’t want to accept his family were gone, either. He didn’t want to accept his mum was gone or his dad was gone. He didn’t want to accept that those loving people were just … ashes. Because they’d shaped his life. Even with all the shit they’d been through with his older sister taking her own life, they’d carried him through his life.

  He saw that now. Recognised what they’d done for him, and how unappreciative he’d been. Because they’d lost a daughter. Lost their first child. Worse than that—their own child decided that taking her own life was a better option and means of escape than speaking and confiding in her parents.

  In their eyes, they’d failed to protect one of the three things that mattered most in life: their daughter.

  They’d failed to be there for her as a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen to her pains, her worries.

  They’d failed to take her seriously, to hear her problems out.

  In their eyes, they’d failed their daughter.

  And yet still, they kept up the image of good, loving parents. Still, they found ten minutes on a Sunday to go for a walk with Hayden. Still, they found the time to pick Clarice up from her parties that her teen years were filled with.

  Hayden had spent his entire adult life cursing his parents for not being there. For not raising his sister and him like normal parents.

  But he understood now. They didn’t raise his sister and him like normal parents because they weren’t normal parents. How could any parent whose child had taken their own life possibly go on and lead a normal life?

  “I killed a man,” Newbie said.

  Newbie’s voice barely guided Hayden out of his thoughts. He just kept on staring down at the smoke rising from Preston, listening to the wind rustle against the bare branches of the trees around them.

  “It’s okay,” Sarah said. “We’ve all done bad things today. We’ve all—”

  “I killed a man before the outbreak,” Newbie said.

  Hayden did snap out of his thoughts at this point. He looked at Newbie. He was holding his quivering lips together, squeezing his hands so tight that the palms were turning white.

  “You …” Sarah started. “You killed—”

  “When Jamie and I first arrived at the petrol station,” he said, the words tumbling out of his mouth like they’d been bottled up inside for ages. “We … we’d done something. Something bad. I … When I left the army. When I left the army six years ago, I came back and I was no good at anything. So I … I started working for hire.”

  “You’re … you’re a hitman?” Sarah asked.

  “No,” Newbie said sharply. “No. I don’t kill people. Not … not until today. I just put a fright into people. Collect debts. Maybe give people a little beating if they owe a lot of money. But then Vlad Khirkhov came along and things changed.”

  The muscles in Hayden’s body tightened up. He couldn’t say a word. He could only listen.

  “To cut a long and drawn out story short, Vlad owed a lot of money to mine and Jamie’s employer. But he was also prepared for us. Someone tipped him off. Things got messy, and …” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “You can figure out the rest for yourself.”

  Hayden didn’t want to figure out the rest for himself. He couldn’t even if he did. He was still wrapping his head around the turn of events today. He’d woken up this morning as lazy and hung-over as ever with his phone vibrating against his bedside table. And then his landlord had thumped at the flat door. Not even seven hours had passed, and here he was, looking at a military bombarded city seized by walking corpses in the company of a murderer.

  Sarah rubbed her hands together and blew on them. “What Frank said. About … about the past not mattering so much. About the present defining us. Defining who we are. I think he was right. You … you shouldn’t look back on what you’ve done. Because that’s not who you are. Who you are is this person right now. This person you can choose to be.”

  Newbie looked at her. Tears were built up in his big, brown eyes. He half-smiled. “I don’t think I agree with you,” he said. “I think the past matters a lot. In fact, I think it matters more now than ever. Because it’s only through recognising who we were in the past that we can decide how we are going to be in the present. It’s only through recognising our faults and our failures that we can even dream of moving forward.”

  Newbie’s words resonated with Hayden on a deep level. He thought about his life before. The amount of times he’d sponged off the system, leeched off his family. His laissez-faire approach to life—days wasted to drink, to Xbox, rent payments missed and made up for by the very parents he blamed for not supporting him. He didn’t like the person he was but a few hours ago. He saw exactly what he was, and he didn’t like it.

  He was about to spill everything out to Newbie and Sarah when he felt something vibrate against his right thigh.

  He flinched. Figured it must be a zombie or someone grabbing him.

  But there was nothing there.

  Nothing but the phone in his pocket.

  Sarah and Newbie looked at him and frowned. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Sarah’s voice drifted into the background. Hayden’s body froze. No. This was wrong. This was bullshit. His phone was broken. He was going insane. Nobody was trying to contact him. Nobody could contact him.

  He pulled
his phone out of his pocket with his shaking hand and saw three letters on the cracked screen that nearly made his chest explode.

  Mum.

  He hit the answer button and pulled the phone to his ear.

  “Mum? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  Nothing but static and crackling on the other end of the line.

  Hayden took in a deep, quivery breath of the cold winter air. The static was just like it had been back outside the terraced house on Westleigh Road.

  But he couldn’t let this drop. His mum was calling him. He couldn’t just let her go.

  “Mum,” he said, his voice breaking up. “If you’re there … please. Please just give me a sign. Give me a sign that you’re okay.”

  More static crackling on the other end of the line.

  Hayden squeezed his watery eyes shut. Warm tears rolled down his cheeks. He listened intently to the white noise for some kind of hidden code or embedded meaning, like some Beatles songs supposedly had if you played them in reverse.

  No. He was going insane. He was losing his mind. His mum wasn’t calling. The networks were down. His phone was malfunctioning. That’s all this was. Nothing more than an accident. A horrible, fucked-up accident.

  “Please, Mum. Please be okay. Please … please all of you be okay.”

  Greeted by more crackling, more buzzing.

  He sniffed up and wiped the salty tears from his cheeks. He had to let go. He had to move on. He had to put the phone down and stop believing in ghosts. He had to grow up and be an adult. He couldn’t cling on to his past. His past was gone. Dead. Ashes.

  He had to put the phone down and take responsibility for his own actions, his own life, for the very first time.

  He tightened his grip on the phone. Let more tears dribble down his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He was about to put the phone down when he heard his mother’s voice crackle through the static.

  “Help us, Hayden. Please, son. Please.”

  Thirty-Two

  Hayden held his phone to his ear long after his mother’s words faded away.