by Frank Tayell
Someone went to a lot of work in preparing an escape route. All I need to do is attach the walkway and push it forward, gravity will do the rest and I’ve got a ramp to walk down to the other side. More of a slide, I suppose, and there’s going to be a drop at the bottom. Won’t be able to get back up here afterwards either, but that’s okay. I wasn’t planning to.
I’ve made a splint out of some lengths of aluminium, gaffer tape, and electrical wire, and strapped it over the cast. I have to be careful with the leg now, something scrapes inside when I try and move it. As long as I don’t panic I think I’ll be able to outpace Them. Yes, yes I will. I’m certain of it. I’ve been practising up here. There’s not much space, only fifteen steps from one edge to the other, but that’s more than I had in the flat. I’m good to go. Just need to wait for Them to disperse a bit, I’ve just got to wait. Yes. All in all a good day.
Hope it rains. Best not to think about it I suppose. I should think about something else. What though?
This is the first time I’ve seen a group of Them up close. At home, They were always in that sort of torpid state. When I was in the gym, and from the flats above, I couldn’t see much of the streets below, and on the web the distance afforded by the screen kept me removed from the reality of what I was seeing.
There are a couple of bodies out there, killed, I assume, by whoever sought refuge here before me. Who were they? When did they leave? How far behind them am I? As to why they left, that’s clear enough. This is a good place to defend as long as you have supplies, but without them, without anything to burn, with no real shelter against the elements, with no water to drink… No. I mustn’t think about that.
Where did they go? It’s not that I want company, you understand. I mean, it’d be nice, one day, when all this has settled down, but I’m coping okay on my own. I got this far alone, didn’t I? Other people would just slow me down. Too many arguments, too many compromises. I’ve a plan, as long as I stick to it, I’ll be fine.
Very thirsty. It’s cold up here and there’s nothing to burn. I should have thought to carry some kindling and firewood with me. I could burn this journal I suppose. No, this is my link with… with sanity, I suppose. Besides it wouldn’t keep me warm for more than a few seconds. I’ll remember to bring wood or something with me next time.
They're not really pounding at the door. They’re trying to reach through it. The banging is as often caused by their heads as it is by their hands. And those hands aren't knocking with the knuckles or slapping with the palm like I would. No, They are clawing and pawing at it, as if They can’t understand why this great impediment is between Them and their prey. I suppose They can't understand, can They?
How many calories do the undead burn up doing that? How long before their bodies are exhausted? It can’t be long. I can’t imagine They actually eat their victims, not eat and digest I mean.
Are these zombies decaying, or just desiccating as I feared? It’s still too early to tell. Some look far more ragged than others, but I don’t think it’s decay. I think it’s just that They aren’t healing. Open wounds just widen as movement pulls and tears the skin and muscles apart, but that doesn’t slow Them down much. I suppose this explains the torpid state, when They rest on their haunches and hibernate, or whatever it is.
Time. That’s what I need. Time to rest. Time to outlast Them. I need to find somewhere safe for a few months. Somewhere with water, maybe until the end of summer, then I'll need food for the winter. That’ll be the tough one. Which direction to go, though? The river’s to the north, not far to the north either, and that’s about the only direction that there isn’t any smoke. Everywhere else, south, east and west, and across the river, pillars of smoke dot the skyline. I could go back to the house, I suppose. It’s not far, and the car would be there, the car which may work and the gun which probably does, but that’s going back.
There’s Buckingham Palace, of course, that will have food for thousands of people for a decade or more, plus a fire suppression system that’s bound to work even in a power cut. Trouble is, that so’s the alarm system. It’d be just my luck to get that far and find bars over the gates and windows. No. Besides it’s on the wrong side of the river.
It’s the same with the Tower of London. I can almost see it from here. It’d make a great place for a stand-off. After all, it was built as a proper castle, wasn't it? But the Tower is also north of the river and unlike Buck Pal it wouldn't have any stores.
They’ve stopped banging at the door. Let’s see, it’s half past five. That’s sooner than I’d have expected. I’m going to investigate.
19:15
Half have already wandered off, the other half are milling about by the door to the building site, acting as if They can’t decide whether to continue to pursue me, or to follow the others. I slid the walkway back onto the main building and have climbed up to the fourth floor, that’s as high as the ramps go. I’m not going to risk the ladders.
They’re heading to a building south of here, it’s about half a mile away, maybe less than that. A third of a mile? I wish I had a map.
That building is completely surrounded by Them, five or six deep, and not just around the front, but the sides as well. There’s only one reason They are there, but I don’t think I can do anything to help.
Day 50, Surrey Quays, London
15:00
I am saying a prayer of thanks to whichever sainted politician decided to allow vending machines in schools. I’m sitting in the Business and Innovation Centre at St Miriam’s Academy, gorging myself on sun-dried tomato bites and cartons of genuine fruit juice.
I took a detour inland, to avoid the Rotherhithe tunnel, and whatever horrors dwell inside it. Maybe they blew it up, but maybe they didn’t. But I finally got a view of the river today. A proper view, and as far as I can see there are no floating zombies. There’s a lot of detritus in the water, but I think that it’s safe.
That building to the south, the one with all the zombies outside it, I decided to give it a wide berth. I thought a lot last night about what I might be able to do to help. Starting a fire is about the only safe thing I could think of (safe for me, I mean) but that wouldn’t distract the undead. Besides, I had nothing to burn.
In the end I did nothing. That wasn’t as callous a decision as it sounds, but I think that whoever is in there must realise that it’s noise that attracts Them. If those survivors stayed quiet for a day or two then the crowd would disperse and then they could escape. That they haven’t, suggests that whatever noise they are making is deliberate. It could be that the people in that building have plenty of food and are trying to gather the undead there to make it easier for others. Or maybe it isn’t intentional and they just don’t realise, like I didn’t with the pipes, that some mundane action of theirs is the siren song, bringing death to them. I couldn’t see a way to help them then, I can’t think of one now.
The best find here has to be toilet paper and an unblocked toilet. I can’t flush it, but I don’t plan on staying here long. It’s the simple things in life…
Some schools tried to open the morning after New York, many others couldn’t as staff refused to turn up. They were all closed whilst I was still in the hospital. It wasn’t that the kids at the schools were going to be a problem. These days, with their double locked security gates they’re about as secure as any prison. More secure really, and if there was an outbreak in a school then it would be easily contained. There was a plan for that, one that, as far as I know, never needed to be implemented, at least not at a school.
The day after I got back from the hospital a plane from LAX tried to land at Heathrow. It wasn’t a scheduled flight, far from it. A USAF Colonel, home on leave, had led a mixed bag of full-timers, reservists, and their families to the airport. They’d broken in, stolen a plane, and he’d managed to get two hundred of them airborne.
There was almost a happy ending. The Colonel knew the right frequencies, he’d warned London he was coming and we we
re willing to accept him, except he hadn’t said there was at least one infected person on board. He was smart. Or smart enough to wait until he was approaching the capital before he told air traffic control. By then it was too late to shoot down the aircraft. He must have known at least some of his passengers were infected even if they hadn’t yet turned. He’d kept his family with him in the cockpit and they, he assured the tower, were clean. That wasn’t good enough.
They used the plane as an experiment. A way of testing different nerve agents to see which would work on the undead. Not many did, Jen told me, which tallied with the reports from the countries where we’d got those weapons from in the first place.
The point is that we, no, they, the government, not me, they were ready to take out a school if it was necessary. But the real risk wasn’t in having to sanitise a school, but in some overly conscientious journalist backsliding and reporting it, and then we’d have ended up with the riots they had in Japan.
How did I feel about learning that my erstwhile colleagues had devised and were prepared to implement a plan to kill school children if they felt it might halt the outbreak? I can’t even think of a single historical precedent for such actions, not until a few months ago at least.
I can blame the painkillers, the pain itself, or just the whole psychological disconnect everyone must have felt when they found themselves in a living nightmare, but maybe it goes deeper than that. How did I feel? I didn’t care.
And now? I think I feel differently. It’s hard to say. I’m so emotionally drained, so tired, so on edge, I don’t know what it means to be human any more beyond that basest, simplest desire to live.
I should just be grateful for something to eat, something to drink and somewhere safe to sleep. And toilet paper. I’m grateful for that, one more thing I didn’t think to include in my pack. Two rolls now have pride of place at the top of the bag where they’ll be easy to reach. Double wrapped in carrier bags, of course, because there’s nothing worse in my little world than soggy toilet paper!
There’s a thought. Maybe there’s some plaster of Paris, or whatever the modern day equivalent is, in the art room. Surely there’ll be something. I’m off to investigate.
Day 51, New Cross, London
05:00
The school was infested. That’s a good word for it. Infested. One almost got me. Almost. It was breathing into my face. I spent all night worried that it had spat some of its saliva or whatever into my mouth or nose or eyes. It can’t have though, I mean, I’m still here, right? Yeah. Lucky again.
There were twelve of the undead, that’s how many chased me. They weren’t old. I mean They were newly turned. Their ages before, I’d have to put at between twenty and thirty, maybe a little older but not much. They didn’t appear dried out and desiccated the way some of the others do.
One of them, at least, must have worked in the school because the doors were unlocked. I should have noticed that.
I was looking for the art supply room. The only floor plans of the school I could find listed the classrooms but not the subjects that were taught in them, so I looked around for the block with the most student art on the wall, hoping that was a logical place to start my search.
The ground floor had nothing but rooms filled with chairs and tables, and no sign of any supply cupboards. I went upstairs, and found a classroom that had a promising collection of pottery on the windowsill, and a likely looking door at the back.
I heard it before I got to the second row of desks, not coming from the supply room, but from behind me, from the door I’d just entered. Slowly, I turned around. As quietly as I could, I let go of the crutch and pulled out the hammer. I inched forward. I could hear it, and it wasn’t getting any closer, but nor was it getting further away. The creature knew I was there. I decided to make a run for it.
Gingerly I stepped out into the corridor. I saw it on the other side of the fire doors, about ten yards from me. Our eyes met. It snarled and staggered along the corridor towards me. I hurriedly stepped back into the classroom. I didn’t know if fire doors could be locked, and what would happen when it hit the plastic windows. I was hoping they were locked. They weren’t, and they weren’t made of plastic. It ran straight into the plate glass and kept going, over the banister and down into the stairwell, landing in a twisted gory heap about halfway up.
I followed the creature down the stairs, not sure if it was still alive. Its body was punctured by jagged shards, but that’s not enough to kill one of Them. It started to move, its grunting hiss and moan punctuated by the crunch of glass as it tried to stand. A flailing arm caught the crutch, knocking it from my grasp. I was unbalanced. I slipped. I fell, landing on the stairs, three steps up from it, and it was crawling towards me, as slivers of glass bit into my skin. I kicked at it, pushing it away with my foot, until I had enough room to stand. Then I swung the hammer again and again and again, until it finally stopped moving.
I slipped and fell to my knees, screaming. I was sure I’d been infected. That’s why I didn’t hear the others. Three faces appeared above me from the top of the stairwell. I pushed myself to my feet, limped out of the building, and out of the school.
I kept moving for the rest of the day and into the night. Sometimes I lost some of Them, sometimes I picked up more. I finally escaped by leading Them up the ramp to the roof of a multi-storey car park, speeding up when I got to the top so They didn’t see me when I ducked into the stairwell. When I finally got out of that car park and headed out into the street below, the zombies left on the top floor spotted me. They started pushing and shoving until the safety barrier broke and They plunged down, one after another, sixty feet to the pavement.
I was exhausted, tired and convinced I was already dead. I barely had the energy to climb up a ladder to the flat roof of this petrol station. I didn’t sleep.
I picked out six fragments of glass from my skin. Six! And I didn’t get infected. That’s not just luck, that's something else. From now on no more risks. All I want is somewhere quiet to hide for a few months. Somewhere where this will all just stop.
Day 52, Woolwich, London
06:00
Finally. Safety. I’m in a house to the north of Woolwich, a few hundred metres from the Thames. It’s a nice house, a late Victorian family place with five bedrooms, a plethora of bathrooms and a massive open plan downstairs living room, kitchen area. I’ve always fancied one of those. There’s a working fireplace too. There’s only the one left in the house and the Victorian mantelpiece has gone, replaced with something distinctly Scandinavian, but I’m not going to complain about that.
There’s lots of houses, here, almost one on top of the other, but there’s a lot of greenery too, lots of trees and large gardens. I got in last night, and after I’d checked the house was empty I collapsed on the sofa in the front room.
The fire’s lit, and writing in the journal is only delaying the inevitable. It’s time for the cast to come off.
09:00
God! What a stench!
I’d boiled some water from the water-butt in the garden. It’s a stagnant greenish colour, and there’s no way I’m going to drink it. Perhaps washing my leg with it wasn’t a good idea either. Still, like the old saying goes, “When the dead walk the Earth…”
As for the leg, well, it’s a mix of the disgustingly pale, the rubbed raw and the dirt engrained, but it’s still there and it still works. I’ve strapped it up as best I can with electrical tape and the supports from a shelving unit. It’s not perfect, and far from ideal, but it seems to hold.
10:00
On second inspection there is no way I’m reusing the water-butt. It’s caked with a greenish slime that seems to be making a run at becoming humanity’s replacement as this planet’s dominant life form. I’ve chucked out the rest of the water I boiled up, I really don’t want to risk getting sick. First order of business, I suppose, is to find a new water barrel.
12:00
Some pasta for lunch, cooked in wine.
I couldn’t find anything else. Makes the pasta almost look like there’s a sauce with it. There had been more food here, packets of some kind, but mice must have got in at some point. Anything not in glass or plastic has gone. They’ve even chewed through the labels on the few tins that remained.
I couldn’t find a proper rain barrel, but then what was I expecting, that there would be a spare, still in its sterilised wrapping hidden in a back room? It would have been nice. The largest of the saucepans is currently doing duty instead. Even that, I think, is optimistic. When did it last rain? A week ago?
Now that I think about it, I’m going to need more firewood. The owners had laid a fire, but I think they only used it for decoration. I filled the house with smoke before I found the lever to open the flue. I suppose I could always burn the furniture, but I don’t like the idea of that. I mean, this is someone’s home, someone who may plan on coming back some day. I know, I know, I’ve already been burning books and furniture, but that was in my house. It was my furniture, and those books, well, they were all mass produced, all replaceable, not dog-eared from years of reading and re-reading. As for the flats above the gym, I know that none of those occupants cared any more.
I’ve taken down the photographs. I couldn’t stand looking at the school portraits, holiday snaps, and the family pictures where they’re all standing by the Christmas tree. Everyone is always smiling, even when the smile never reaches the eyes. I’ve not hidden them or anything, just laid the frames down so the faces aren’t staring at me, aren’t judging me.
I wonder where they are and if they made it. I know they planned their escape, you can tell they’d packed and re-packed going by the mess in the kid’s room. There was only the one child still at home, the other two, about a decade older, must have moved out or been at university. Are they on a ship? Maybe they’re already at work in some field somewhere, turning a grass pitch into farmland. They’ll be thinking about this house and all the happy times they had here and about the times they’ll have here again, when it’s all over.