After the Fall

by Stephen Cross

  Amongst the scavenged shelves, however, they were a few packets of crackers, a few tins of cat food and several out of date chocolate bars. “Enough for a feast,” said Singh, laughing without humour.

  They moved the civilians in.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” said Allen. “We can take the watch in turns, an hour at a time if we have enough volunteers.”

  A good number of hands shot up. Neil took the first watch, even offering to do extra hours. He was obviously conscious he was slowing them down.

  “No Neil, we’ll all do an hour,” said Allen. “Let’s make sure we all get some sleep.”

  They settled around the floor, keeping tight together. Everyone was comfortable enough now to sleep close and preserve warmth. There was no coyness after the Fall.

  Allen dragged the dead zed out of the shop and studied the insignia. He called Lewis and Singh out. “Look, from our unit.”

  “Dalby’s been here?” said Singh.

  Dalby had been their Lieutenant at the time of the Fall. The man who had ordered the mass slaughter of civilians at the London Barrier.

  Allen didn’t answer, but walked over to the jeep. A standard army issue, dirty and rusted around the wheel arches. The door was wide open. He shined in his torch. The inside was covered in blood, the site of a slaughter. The seats, the dashboard, the doors, all thick with deep red and sticky blood, glistening like varnish in the light of Allen’s torch.

  “It’s fresh,” said Allen. “Can’t be more than a few hours old.”

  The three men suddenly felt awake, a heightened state of alert capturing them all. Allen felt his senses light up, an invisible switch pulled in his mind, one that he didn’t know how to turn on or off, but always came on at the right time.

  “Let’s kill the lights,” he said.

  But as turned off his light, something caught his eye and it froze in red freeze-frame on his retina against the darkness. He flashed his light back on.

  On the floor of the jeep.

  A piece of clothing. Allen swallowed. He reached in and picked it up.

  “What is it Sarge?” said Singh.

  Allen held it up. A child’s t-shirt with a Tomcat F14 fighter jet on the front. It used to be white, but was now splattered with red, like a hippy tie-dye experiment.

  Allen felt hollow, his breathing fast and sharp. He looked in the neck of the T-shirt.

  Adam Allen. Written in thick marker on the label.

  Adam’s T-shirt. His favourite T-shirt. The one he had wore the last time they had been in Cornwall together. The memory of his ten year old boy, running in the surf, jumping through the waves, laughing with delight, was the ice-clear vision that had kept him alive this past three months. It was the dream he played over and over.

  “Sarge, you ok?” said Lewis.

  Allen felt his legs go from under him. He sunk to the ground, his knees folding.

  “Sarge, what is it?”

  Allen reached into his chest pocket and fetched out the picture, holding it up for Lewis and Singh to see.

  The two soldiers looked at the image, confused faces at first, but Lewis noticed it first. He pointed out the T-shirt to Singh, who closed his eyes.

  Lewis put his arm on Allen’s shoulder. “It doesn’t mean… well, you know, doesn’t mean anything,” said Lewis, faltering.

  Lewis’s arm on his shoulder made him uncomfortable.

  “I know,” he said.

  He pulled himself back up, his legs still feeling weak. He had never felt like this before. The only word he could use was incapacitated. The thought that drilled at the back of his mind was that his boy was dead. He had spent the past three months believing that Adam was alive, that somewhere, somehow he was alive, he had made it. Now he was faced with hard evidence that his son was gone.

  But there was no body….

  The pragmatic part of his mind that had kept him alive through numerous tours of Afghanistan and Iraq kicked in. There was no body. That meant he could still be alive. Adam had to still be alive.

  “Sir?” said Lewis from the distant real world.

  Allen forced himself to return to the darkness of the garage forecourt. The silent cold world. Lewis and Singh were staring at him.

  “Lewis, continue securing the area,” he said. “Singh, get back in the shop and make sure everyone is good and safe. We all need sleep, we’ve got a long way to go.”

  “We still going to Cornwall sir?” said Singh.

  “Of course we are.”

  Deader Lands

  Chapter 1

  Harriet woke with a start, the sound of the opening zip of her tent mixing with her dreams. She gasped as a zombie pulled open the nylon flaps.

  But zombies couldn’t use zips.

  “Come on Harriet, Adam, we need to go,” said the zombie.

  They couldn’t speak either.

  Harriet rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath and shook off the sleep from her mind. It was Arthur. The whites of his eyes shone bright from within his black skin. “Come on, we must be quick,” he said in his thick French accent, urgency creeping into his voice.

  Harriet didn’t ask any questions. When one of them said run, they ran, when one said hide, they hid. Trust was what had kept the trio alive in the past three months since the Fall.

  “Come on Adam,” she whispered to the young ten year old boy in the sleeping bag beside hers. The ruffles of his blond hair shook like a small furry animal before his face emerged from the bag. He always slept with his head in the bag. He said he didn’t want to see the shadows at night.

  “What is it?” he asked, also in a whisper. It was the default volume once darkness came.

  “Arthur says we have to go.”

  Harriet climbed out of the tent. Arthur was rolling up his sleeping bag and tent into his backpack.

  “Do we have time?” she said.

  Arthur nodded. “I think so. Let’s be quick.”

  Adam climbed out of the tent and the three of them went about taking down the tents and stowing their belongings into their backpacks. They practised this every few days and had it down to two minutes. It seemed like an age in the night.

  The moon was half a silver disk in the sky, like a clipped coin at the bottom of a dark pool. They had camped by a tall hedge in a large field, their dark tents invisible from more than ten feet away. Across the other side of the wide field, Harriet saw motion; dull shapes only just visible due to their erratic, clumsy movements. Maybe ten, twenty. A mid sized group, on its way to being a hoard, being truly dangerous.

  Arthur, rushing to help Harriet pack, suddenly fell, all six foot four of him. He let out a cry as he hit the ground.

  Tentative moans from across the field soaked into the night.

  “They’ve seen us,” said Adam. He didn’t stop packing though. He merely looked up and, satisfied they were still far enough away, continued to roll up his sleeping bag.

  “Are you ok?” said Harriet, rushing over to Arthur’s side. She made a show of helping him up, but in reality she had no chance of shifting his bulky frame.

  “I’m good,” he said, looking to the other side of the field. “I tripped on something, banged my head. Let’s hurry.”

  Harriet noticed a thin trail of blood dripping from just beyond his hairline. But he had said he was ok, she took him on his word.

  “Ok ready,” said Adam, hoisting his small backpack onto his shoulders. “We’ve got about a minute.”

  Harriet looked across the field. The shadows were stumbling slowly towards them, their moaning more pronounced now they saw their prey.

  Harriet stuffed her sleeping bag into her backpack. Arthur finished rolling up the tent and the two of them pressed it in on top of the sleeping bag.

  Arthur put the backpack on his wide shoulders.

  “Let’s go,” said Adam, his voice still bereft of fear or anxiety. Could it be that his young malleable brain had accepted this world as normal by now? Three months being all it took for his mind to
accept that this was the world, and these were the things one had to do to survive. No need for fear, for anxiety. It’s just the same as going to school, climbing a tree, riding a bike. Scary at first, but once done a few times, perfectly acceptable and normal.

  She knew he missed his Mum and Dad though. Especially his Dad.

  The three of them dipped down into the ditch that ran along side the hedge and crawled through the gap into the next field.

  They set off at a light jog, the frustrated moans of the group of undead fading into the night, back into the dreams of the sleeping.

  Safe for now.

  Chapter 2

  The following day they woke late. Harriet had no watch, but she knew it was late; there was no dew on the grass, and the sun was peaking over a nearby tree line.

  She climbed out of the tent and stretched. A gentle breeze waved across the field they had camped in. There had been no more zombie alerts, either during her or Arthur’s second watch. He was sitting over a small fire, cooking the bacon they had found in a farmhouse a few days ago. It had been hard, but Arthur assured them cured meat lasted a lot longer than they promised on the packets.

  “It’ll last for months,” he said.

  The smell was enticing. Adam stuck his head out of the tent and sniffed in the air.

  “You think the dead heads will be after that?” said Adam. “Got to be tastier than eating someone’s brain.”

  Arthur and Harriet laughed. She gave Adam a quick kiss. “Morning. Did you sleep ok?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” said Arthur. “We’ll be quick. It’s ready now, just a few rashers each.”

  They sat around and bit into the bacon. It was devoured within less than a minute. Just two small and crusty rashers each.

  “You sure this is ok? We’re not going to get poisoned?” asked Adam.

  “No problem,” said Arthur. “In my fifteen years as a nurse I have never seen anyone with acute bacon poisoning.” He wiped down their plastic plates.

  “Let’s pack up,” said Harriet. “I think we should go.” That strange anxiety she had only noticed since the Fall was back again. It gnawed slowly at the back of her brain.

  No-one questioned her. Arthur packed the cooking equipment back in his rucksack. Harriet and Adam began their practised routine of putting the tent down.

  Harriet cast anxious looks into the forest at the far edge of the field. A solid brown and green wall, promising darkness beyond. Everything seemed so silent in this new world. The birds still tweeted and the wind still blew through the trees, but her mind had so much space to move. The narcissistic electronica that had sucked so much of her attention with alerts and likes and notifications was gone. The traffic that hummed in the background like a constant mechanical artery was silent. No planes buzzing gently above. No shouts of nearby children and joyful cries of families - the only one she missed.

  In its space, the real world crept in. The rustling of small animals with their squeaks and scurries. She could feel the age of trees, just by resting against their trunks. She knew what the weather was going to do for the next few days without need for a TV report or an app update; she just knew.

  And she knew, or thought she knew, when they were close, the undead. A twitching in the depth of her spine, like her soul was kicking out in fear. Her antenna.

  Packed up, ready to go.

  “Let’s go this way,” she said, pointing away from the wood. It was back the way they had come last night, but the others didn’t mind. Backtracking had become a way of life. What else did they have to do anyway, but walk, from one place to the next? Their final destination was still a good hundred or so miles away. Weeks, yet.

  A few hours later, they crossed a hedge into a flat overgrown field. They stood on top of a gentle slope. About two acres in size, the field dropped to a modern farmhouse, next to a large dark wood barn.

  “Targets,” said Adam, a smile on his face.

  Along the span of the top of the field, were a number of circular thick disks resting on what looked like artist’s easels. The circles were painted in decreasing concentric circles in bright alternating white, red and blue.

  Archery targets.

  “You ever fired a bow?” said Arthur.

  “‘Course,” said Adam. “Let’s go have a look. Maybe we can find some.”

  “Ok,” said Arthur, “but not so fast.” He smiled at Harriet, and she rolled her eyes, also smiling. It was a constant battle to keep Adam from charging into every situation, his enthusiasm not dulled by the end of the world.

  They approached slowly along the side of the field. There was no movement from the house, but that didn’t mean anything. There could be someone hiding, watching. Zombies could be jammed behind a door, trapped in a vehicle. Everywhere new required a careful, furtive approach, like a feral cat stealing food from inside a stranger’s cat flap.

  They reached the barn first. A large construction with an open side. Bales of hay lined the inside walls. On the walls hung more targets along with bows and arrows of all lengths, widths and construction.

  “Bingo!” said Adam, his eyes lighting up.

  “Careful,” said Harriet in hushed tones as he ran ahead into the barn.

  “You go and watch him, I’ll have a look around out here,” said Arthur turning and casting a steady eye over the farmhouse, only twenty or so yards away.

  Harriet followed Adam into the barn. He was picking up a number of bows from the wall, testing their weight and studying their construction with what looked like an expert eye.

  “Did you used to do archery with your Dad?” asked Harriet. She was careful when to mention Adam’s Dad, sometimes he would get upset. Although, she had a gut feel for when he wanted to talk about him. This felt like one of those times.

  Adam smiled, “Yeah, all the time. Started about a year ago. He was really good, he learnt in the army. He says I’m good too. Wow, look at this one!” He put down the long thin bow he was holding and lifted a stubby short one off the wall. To Harriet’s eyes it didn’t look very impressive.

  “That’s a pretty small bow?” she said.

  “It’s a cross bow. Way more powerful than the others. Fire this at a dead head and it will totally nail its brain.”

  It was a good idea, though Harriet. All they had at the moment where hammers, a baseball bat, and an empty gun they’d salvaged during the escape from the military base. She felt nervous when Adam got close to the zombies. If he could shoot them from afar, all the better.

  “Can you fire that one?”

  Adam nodded his head, “I’ve fired them a few times. I’m better with a bow, but some practice with this, and no problem.”

  “Are there any arrows for it?” said Harriet sitting on a bale of hay.

  “They’re called bolts, for crossbows. There’s a few,” he said, digging around in a large bucket at the base of the wall. “Awesome, there’s a few proper sharp ones here.”

  Adam started to pull at the cross bow, fixing the bolt into the shaft.

  “Are you doing that right?” said Harriet, visions of the bolt embedding itself in his stomach.

  Adam rolled his eyes in that infuriatingly lovely way he did. “I’ve told you Harriet, I’ve done this before.”

  She wasn’t listening any more. Her head was cocked to the side, like she was a dog trying to catch the sound of a scurrying rabbit. Something was twitching deep inside her. Her antenna was signalling. Gently, but even so it was there.

  “Come with me Adam,” she said.

  “Ok, but first I need to-”

  “Now, Adam.” She held out her hand.

  Adam stopped what he was doing, stared at her for a second and then, without any further back chat took her hand tightly, the loaded bow and a few spare bolts in his other hand.

  Harriet led them out into a wide courtyard that sat in between the barn and the farmhouse. All was still, as quiet as before.

  The farmhouse door was open. Arthur.
/>   “Come on,” said Harriet. She jogged towards the house with Adam following her.

  She went in through the door that led directly into the kitchen. Not the wooden beamed kitsch farmhouse kitchen she had expected, but a bright modern expensive kitchen, all shiny appliances with a marble topped island in the centre. New units, seemingly repellent to dust and dirt sat like a showroom. Very poor taste, thought Harriet, no character at all.

  “Where’s Arthur?” whispered Adam.

  “I don’t know,” said Harriet. “Let’s go find him.”

  “Should we call him?”

  “No, we don’t know who’s here.”

  Adam nodded, satisfied.

  They walked through the kitchen to the far door and exited into a wide hall, again, decorated in modern tones, with abstract art thrown on the wall in haphazard confusion. Two closed doors, and a flight of stairs.

  “Where now?” said Adam. “How about you search down here, and I’ll take upstairs.”

  “Let’s stick together,” she said.

  “Ok,” said Adam. She was sure she saw some relief on his face behind the bluster.

  There was a thump from upstairs.

  Harriet and Adam looked at each other, and Adam motioned upstairs. They took the stairs softly, but even so a few of the cream carpeted stairs let out a creak as they passed over them.

  They climbed to a well lit landing, a large window at the end of a long and wide hall letting in all the light the day had to offer. Numerous doors led off the landing, before it turned to the right, just by the window.

  The sound of footsteps. Heavy footsteps reduced to damp thuds on the thick carpet. Harriet’s stomach tightened.

  She was expecting, hoping, to see Arthur appear at the end of the hall. She had no idea what she was going to do if it wasn’t him. Should they run back down the stairs, duck into one of the rooms?

  Adam clasped her hand.

  The footsteps became louder, paused, and then, to Harriet’s great relief, Arthur appeared.

  Surprise, and then amusement passed over his face. “Did I scare you?”

  Harriet let out a deep breath that she didn’t realise she had been holding, and it turned into a laugh. “I think it was my brain that scared me, not you.”