After the Fall

by Stephen Cross

  A zombie hit the side of the truck as Harriet pulled onto the road. She turned to the right, the opposite direction the army trucks had gone, and put her foot down on the accelerator. She didn’t look in the rear view mirror.

  “Could we have saved him?” said Harriet.

  Arthur shook his head. “He would have been dead in minutes with the blood loss. Better to die from that than torn apart.”

  The truck bounced along the small B-road as it wound through overgrown fields. They were well into Devon. Night would soon be upon them, and they would pull over into a field, lock the doors and try to sleep.

  When she looked into Arthur’s eyes she saw the same pain, the same doubt. They said nothing. She knew if she opened her mouth then her and Arthur would both work to convince themselves that what they had done was right, that it would either have been them or the soldier.

  The soldier. Scott. A man who was a boy once, who had cried in the middle of the night for his mummy. Who had played and laughed in a garden. Who had giggled with delight the first time he had seen snow.

  Scott. He had lost people, just like her, like Arthur, like Adam.

  She wasn’t ready to let her humanity go yet. She wasn’t ready to let go of the pain and fear. She had extinguished a life. In self defence, but still, could she have done something different? Could they have saved him?

  More death would follow, more pain. She would have to harden if she wanted to survive. If she wanted to keep Adam alive, and safe.

  She looked at him. What use was his life, in this world? What sort of man would he become, hardened by the misery around him. Who was she to think that she could save him?

  Adam leaned over and rested his head on her knee.

  “My Dad says that sometimes bad things can be good things,” said Adam. “Do you think this is what he meant?”

  Harriet couldn’t answer, but only looked at the young boy and smiled.

  Arthur said, “Yes, Adam. I think this is one of those times.”

  “Do you think we’ll find my dad?”

  Tears pooled in Harriet’s eyes. She wanted to scream, to curl up in a ball and scream. “I think we’ll find him Adam.”

  “Good. He’ll know what to do.”

  Soon after, they pulled into a field and parked up tight to the hedge. Arthur would take first watch, but Harriet didn’t think she would sleep.

  They were only forty miles from Tulloch’s Bay. She wished it was four thousand miles away, because once they got there, how would Adam survive knowing that his Father was really gone?

  How would she survive without Adam?

  Stadium of the Damned

  Chapter 1

  Fires glowed throughout the empty stands of the football stadium, the autumn grey of evening settling upon the survivors.

  Sarah poked her small fire with a wooden stick. Sparks escaped and dazzled briefly before fizzling to nothing.

  Three months ago the Fall had hit the UK. Sarah had been on a train under the channel tunnel when a young Frenchman died, before quickly came back to life with an appetite for flesh.

  She had escaped the tunnel with Abdul, the train’s conductor. He sat opposite her now, both of them rubbing their hands over the warmth. Five of them altogether shared the fire, their small group completed with Mark, an accountant in his forties, his wife Kathy, and their teenage son, Max.

  Their firewood would run out soon, at least before the next ration arrived, courtesy of the soldiers that kept them locked in the stadium; the supposed ‘Safe Zone’ they had been taken to after escaping the tunnel.

  It had worked, they were safe, but the soldiers hadn’t got the memo that the world had ended; they wouldn’t let anyone leave. Like some dumb machine unable to change direction, they insisted on keeping the deteriorating community of a few hundred survivors trapped in the dank stadium.

  So, like an ambivalent God, the soldiers supplied firewood, small amounts of petrol, food, and blankets. The provisions appeared almost mystically, the survivor’s benefactors hidden behind barricades and barbed wire and machine guns. The demarcation was clear; the civilians out on the pitch and the stands exposed to the elements, the soldiers snug inside the innards of the stadium’s tunnels and changing rooms and offices.

  The fire crackled and a healthy flame took hold, joining the many others in the stands. Each one, like a glowing red heart, represented another small group like Sarah’s.

  Kathy reached into a sports bag and handed out pieces of bread.

  Sarah chewed on the dry meal. At least her jaw muscles were keeping strong.

  “Rations are getting smaller,” she said.

  Abdul nodded, looking mournful. When she had first met him, he had been a very large man, his ample belly straining under his conductor’s uniform. He must have lost 10kg since the Fall. None of his clothes fit anymore; his trousers were tied around his waist with string.

  “Here, have some water,” said Mark. He passed a plastic bottle of rain water to Abdul and Sarah, before sharing his with Kathy and Max. They were one of the few intact families Sarah had seen. She had last spoke to her husband, Ian, on the morning of the Fall. A hurried, slightly strained, conversation about the school run. Sarah stopped her thoughts as they naturally moved on to her daughter Clarissa. She couldn’t bear to think of her daughter. The hole it opened was too large, and threatened to swallow her completely.

  She felt for the weight of her useless mobile phone in her back pocket. Hundreds of photos of her family hidden somewhere in the dead black plastic. It might as well have been a magic stone.

  The smell from the many pyres cast a pleasant and primal odour of burning timber in the dark air. In another time, this could have been the setting for some hippy festival, everyone waiting for a band of dreadlocked youths to take centre stage.

  But it wasn’t another time.

  “How are we for firewood?” asked Kathy.

  “Ok,” said Sarah, lying, glancing to their small pile of branches tucked under a row of seats, just off the aisle where their camp was, if you could call it that; a cold flat concrete space at the junction of two flights of stairs, with enough space for their five sleeping bags and a fire. The more appealing real estate - the bigger clearings, the corners tucked away from the wind and the rain - belonged to larger, and more violent, groups. Like Alex’s group.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. Sarah listened to the crackling of the fire and hum of distant conversation, like whispering sprites in the dark.

  “I don’t know why the army bother with this,” said Mark, staring at the flames. “Why don’t they just leave us to die. It’d make life easier for them. They could just get up and run.”

  “Where would they run to?” said Abdul.

  “They have their orders,” said Sarah.

  “Orders? Ridiculous,” said Mark. “Don’t they realise by now that it all means nothing? They should just let us go.”

  “Orders are all they have,” said Sarah. “I guess we lucked out with a particularly conscientious squad.”

  The small group looked up, suddenly alerted to the sound of shouting from below.

  On the pitch, two groups of five or six people stood near the middle of the muddied field, by a water butt. Vicious shouts and expletives filled the air. It wasn’t long before there was the sound of fists hitting flesh, sharp cries of pain.

  Sarah looked on impassively. Before the Fall the sight of this fighting would have terrified her and had her scurrying for cover. Now, she might as well have been watching two cats fighting over a piece of fish. She had witnessed six deaths by now as a result of these running battles.

  “Who is it?” said Abdul, craning his neck to stare into the gloom of the pitch, shadows crawling from the corners of the stands.

  “I think it’s Alex’s lot,” said Sarah.

  “It’s always Alex,” said Abdul.

  Kathy snorted. “He’s an arsehole.”

  “He was sniffing around here yesterday, when you were
getting the supplies,” said Abdul. “He didn’t say anything, just walking around, checking everyone out, seeing what people had.”

  “It’s getting worse,” said Kathy. Her voice shook a little, the whites of her eyes very clear in the darkness.

  “I don’t see how it’s going to get better, either,” said Sarah.

  “At least there’s no zombies,” said Mark.

  “Give me the zombies over Alex’s gang, any day,” said Abdul.

  The battle below had turned into a running melee, one group giving chase to the other. She couldn’t see who was who, and the shouts had merged into one.

  The sudden sound of violence echoed around the stadium, unsolicited and powerful. One last cry, and then the silence of the night.

  Chapter 2

  Another cold night followed by another grey morning.

  Sarah sat up and shivered. Their fire had burned itself out a few hours ago and her blanket had failed to stop the chill of the night from settling into her bones. She was getting used to being cold.

  She rubbed her hands vigorously under her armpits to glean whatever warmth her body had to give.

  How would they last the winter? It was Autumn by her reckoning. The temperature would start dropping fast in the next few weeks.

  Abdul sat up, stretched and smiled. He always managed to smile, even when things were shit. She imagined he had been a wonderful father to his three children.Is, not was, she corrected herself. There was nothing to say his children were dead.

  But how would they ever know?

  Sarah looked over at Kathy and Mark, asleep with Max tucked in between them. She found herself able to smile; no fifteen year old boy would have snuggled up with his parents like that before the Fall. Maybe the Fall was good for something, like bringing families closer together.

  Or maybe Max was just so cold he didn’t give a fuck.

  When she first met Max, the UK had been in the first week of the Fall. Max had been that brand of teenage boy who thought he knew exactly how the world worked, how everyone else was doing it wrong, and was very happy to tell you about it.

  A pain in the arse, basically.

  She would have loved to see that version of him again though. Over the past few months she had watched the life drain from his eyes, his skin become sallow and wain, and his words become cynical, bitter and tinged with despair.

  In a way it almost made her glad to not have her daughter with her; she didn’t know if she would have been able to stand watching this world suck her dry, slowly and mercilessly like a vampire. There was sorrow in Kathy and Mark’s eyes, every time they looked at Max, their son’s waining as inevitable as the growing cold in the air.

  There were other children in the stadium. Some young ones, a few toddlers even. There had been a baby, but it hadn’t lasted more than two or three weeks. The mother killed herself a few days after the child died. Hung herself from one of the goal’s crossbar. She had swung for hours, like a macabre mascot, before one of the soldiers eventually emerged from his subterranean den to cut her down.

  “Well, we made it to another day,” said Abdul. Even though his weight had dropped desperately in the past three months, his personality was still big, and she was glad he was there, glad to bring a little light to the ever darkening days.

  “What have we got for breakfast?” she said.

  Abdul shuffled over to their stash, under one of the seats. He moved quietly so as not to wake the family.

  “Not too great, a few bread rolls, stale. We also have a few tins of sweetcorn. At least the bread doesn’t have mould on it, not like the last.”

  Sarah closed her eyes and allowed herself a few deep breaths. This couldn’t go on, they couldn’t continue like this.

  “Hey Abdul, fancy a chat with Crowe?”

  Abdul shrugged. “You think it’ll do any good?”

  “No, but it’s worth a try.”

  She got up, jiggling her body through a series of strange positions, trying to shake off the night’s cold and stiffness. Her breath burst in thin clouds of vapour.

  They walked down the stairs towards the pitch. The stadium was walking up. Smoke floated from a number of barrels, one of the ‘luxuries’ the army provided.Something to keep you warm. It took us a lot of trouble to get them barrels.

  The pitch was mainly empty. It was overgrown with sporadic clumps of tall grass in some places, and worn to mud in others. Common pathways were etched into the grass like rabbit tracks in a meadow. No one slept on the pitch, it was too open to the elements.

  Too open a target for others, too.

  As she walked across the pitch she felt her eyes veer to the top corner of the stadium. Two fires in two barrels burnt in the corner. Alex’s crew sat round, eating their healthy rations, wrapped warmly in their requisitioned blankets, the result of their unique ‘tax’ system. There was the odd burst of laughter, not all of it cruel.

  In the middle of the stand, at pitch level, was a wide tunnel opening that would lead to the innards of the stadium. Only four months ago highly paid, coiffured, manicured, tattooed footballers would have ran out of that opening to the raucous applause of tens of thousands of spectators. Now, those same superstars would be dead or struggling to survive, just like all the rest.

  The Fall - a great leveller.

  Now, the tunnel was barricaded with wood, sheets of metal and barbed wire. There was a small hole on one side where an inch-thick metal barrel, the business end of a large machine gun, protruded. Above the gun was another small gap, its shadows half concealing the wary eyes of a soldier.

  A metal sheet in the middle of the defence operated as a door. It would open every week, and the soldiers would emerge, heavily guarded, watchful, guns ready to fire. They would dump supplies, then back into their dark cave like wary predators.

  Their caution was well placed; there had been an attempt to storm the barricade two months ago. The six invaders had been cut down in seconds. The doors had opened and a torrent of machine gun fire had exploded from the depths of the tunnel, like an angry dragon. The men had been torn to pieces, their bodies exploding in red and pink chunks, their bones shattering as the heavy calibre bullets ripped them apart.

  No one else had tried since then, but that didn’t mean people hadn’t talked about it.

  “What now?” said Abdul.

  Sarah shrugged. She walked up towards the barricade, her eyes drawn to the silent watch of the machine gun. It turned gently to track her movements like a paranoid metal beast. Ten feet from the barricade, the gun was unable to turn any more.

  “That’s close enough,” came a loud shout.

  She stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Turn round, and fuck off,” said the same voice.

  Sarah took a deep breath, closed her eyes and imagined herself back in the board room of her old place of work. She had been a finance director, and was used to dealing with cocky and angry men. This was just a negotiation, like any other. Just the stakes were a bit higher, and her opponents had never been armed before.

  “I want to speak to Sergeant Crowe,” she said in what hoped was a confident tone, belying the anxiety rippling in her stomach. Her voice echoed clearly, bouncing around the walls of the stadium.

  “I said fuck off, Ma’am. You’ve got to the count of ten,” said the disembodied voice.

  “I just want to speak to him. Come on Crowe, you in there?”

  Sergeant Crowe had helped them escape the train tunnel, right at the beginning of the Fall. He had rescued her and Abdul and brought them them to the stadium. She hoped that would count for something. She just needed to get past the lackey at the barricade first.

  “Seven… Six…” continued the count slowly.

  “Crowe, it’s Sarah, come on, I just want to talk, that’s all. We need more supplies. We’re running out of food, and it’s getting cold.”

  “Three… two…” the voice was getting slower, less sure of itself.

  “Crowe? We need your help. P
lease.”

  “One…”

  Sarah braced herself, but nothing, silence. She let out a breath.

  “Crowe?”

  A rattle of fire, a volley of explosions, and the concrete in front of her feet danced into the air in chips and powder.

  Sarah flinched and ran backwards, tripping over herself and falling.

  Abdul ran forward and grabbed her under her arms, pulling her away.

  The barrel of the machine gun wafted thin trails of smoke as it span to a stop. The echo of falling shells punctuated the deadly silence.

  Loud laughter came from behind her. She turned to see Alex and a few men standing at the far corner of the pitch.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Abdul. “I think the home side got that one.”

  Sarah nodded as she stood up. She was shaking and her heart thumped fast. She took one last glance at the barricade. A pair of eyes were looking through the gap above the machine gun. They disappeared.

  Chapter 3

  “Well, I don’t know what you were thinking,” said Kathy, as she broke off a piece of stale bread and stuffed it into her mouth. Kathy would have been attractive before the Fall, thought Sarah, with her petite features and glorious blue eyes. Now, like everyone else, her looks had gone to shit. Matted hair, spotted and blemished complexion, fragile skin plastered across prominent bones.

  Is this what everyone used to look like, before civilisation? She wondered how the human race had ever got this far…

  “I was trying to make things a bit better,” said Sarah.

  “Things won’t get better,” said Kathy. “This is it. This is life. We’re lucky, to be honest.”

  Mark let out a snort.

  “What’s that for?” said Kathy with a sharp look in Mark’s direction. Max glanced at his parents, and shook his head, sighing.

  “Lucky?” said Mark. “Stuck in here with a bunch of psychopaths, no food and nothing to keep us warm. If this is lucky I’d hate to see unlucky.”

  “So you’d rather be out there with those things?” said Kathy, pointing in the general direction of outside the stadium. Her nostrils flared when she was angry. She was angry a lot these days.