After the Fall

by Stephen Cross

  Andy pulled the dining room door shut and locked it.

  Chapter 12

  The zombie wobbled as powerful waves flung the boat to the left and right. White water skimmed off the top of the rollers and sprayed on its face.

  The zombie felt none of this.

  It didn’t feel the cold, it didn’t feel the wet. It had no fear over its precarious position on the side of the boat, with only the low safety rail between it and the blue depths. It was vaguely aware others like it were nearby. It felt them.

  It also felt something else in the boat. Different from itself, but somehow like it. Fixated on the moving figure beyond the glass it pushed and moaned towards it, but got no closer, an invisible barrier holding it back.

  It didn’t hear the regular clank of metal as the anchor was raised. It didn’t hear the roar of the engine as it fired from the stern. It wasn’t aware of the push of the boat though the waves, towards the shore.

  A flap of skin on the zombies head raised like a flag as the wind from the new speed of the boat blew around its head.

  A sudden rise as the boat hit a wave hard. The zombie was in the water, sinking, all around it becoming dark, dank.

  It came to rest on the sandy bottom. It got up again in the black, and began walking across the seabed, with no idea as to where.

  The zombies banged on the door separating the dining room from the living area.

  Andy pushed the boat to full throttle and held the wheel straight, aiming for the shore. A wave, three or four feet high, appeared at the bough. The boat hit it and the hull shook violently with a heavy bang. The wheel spun hard and fast and Andy pulled his hands back.

  Several zombies fell from the deck as the boat lurched through the fierce topography of the sea.

  Andy lowered the throttle to three quarters and turned the boat back towards the shore. He glanced behind him. Carl still lay motionless in the lounge. Andy didn’t know if he was dead or alive. The door to the dining room rattled under the weight of the undead behind, trying to get through.

  The shore approached with frightening pace. Andy held the wheel steady.

  The sky, grey with bulbous plumes of dark cloud, threatened rain. The wind splattered thick drops of sea water on the front screen of the powerboat. Andy fought with the wheel as the sea pulled the boat to the left, the right, and back to the left, time and time again.

  The shore raced towards them. Andy braced.

  The whole boat shuddered as the hull scraped onto the shore. A hollow bang filled the air. Andy was flung from the wheel, landing hard on his back. The engine roared, then clunked with a repeating whine, stuck in the sand.

  He got to his feet. A huge crack in the dining room door writhed with the arms and faces of the undead, desperately trying to push through.

  He ran to the lounge and grabbed Carl under the arms, dragging him down the small run of stairs to the bedrooms below. He rested Carl in one of the rooms. He ran back to the lounge, and grabbed the axe that Carl had been using.

  The dining room door snapped and gave way. A zombie fell through, its hissing almost triumphant. Immediately another zombie followed, tripping over the first, and within seconds a writhing pile of grey arms and bloodied ripped bodies were pulling and crawling their way through from the dining room.

  Andy sprinted back down the stairs, into the bedroom. He closed the door.

  The bedroom had a single bed and an en-suite. One small porthole let in limited light, half of it taken up with lapping sea water as the waves rolled against the grounded boat.

  Andy checked Carl’s pulse. It was weak, but he was alive. He rested Carl on the bed, then took the axe and smashed it into the wall above the porthole. It embedded into the fibreglass, the threads of material splitting under the weight of his blow. He struck again and again, each swing widening the gap in the wall.

  Anger, fear, fury, despair fuelled each strike against the boat wall. Ten minutes, twenty minutes. His arms screamed in pain and his hands ripped red raw in blisters.

  Water poured in the hole he had made. His feet were numb. He looked down to see he was standing in two feet of water. Another foot and the bed would be covered. Carl would drown.

  The bedroom door rattled, groans and clicking from the other side. He didn’t have the strength to take them all on. Him and Carl were trapped in the bedroom. His arms ached with every movement. His hands could hardly grip.

  He had fucked up.

  He tried to pull at the gap with hands too cold to grip. The fibre glass side of the boat was solid; what did he think, he was going to peel it back like a sheet of wrapping paper? The water was up to his knees, the mattress was soaked, soon Carl would be covered. His legs ached with cold and he started to shiver.

  Andy reached over and shook Carl. “Come on Carl, come on.” He slapped his face a few times, but nothing… Water pooled around Carl’s head.

  Andy had to go for it.

  He rested his hand against the bedroom door. Scratching from the other side belied the presence of the zombies, waiting for him, somehow knowing he was there.

  He held the axe in his right hand. It hurt just to grip the handle.

  He took a deep breath and unlocked the door, pulling it open.

  The door wouldn’t open fully, the force of the water in the bedroom holding it back. A hand shot through the small gap.

  Andy hacked at the arm, just a bloody appendage, white and rotten.Save your energy, he chastised himself.

  He stood back and let the zombie do the work of opening the door. Water slushed out into the hallway. The first zombie pushed through. Impossible to tell what age or sex the zombie had been. Its face was simply a mash of red and pink flesh, torn and ripped in so many places to make it unrecognisable as having once been human. An eye hung from the socket. White bone jutted from beneath the jaw line and through the neck. A hole where the nose should have been.

  It opened its mouth to make a noise of some sort, but it didn’t get the chance. Andy brought the axe down hard on its head. The skull crushed easily, sinking into the bone and soft tissue below.

  Andy pulled the axe handle to retrieve his weapon, but his hand slipped. The zombie fell forward, dead, face first into the water by Andy’s feet, the axe embedded in its head . Andy reactively fell back himself, onto the bed, the only place for him to go in the cramped cabin. The cold wet mattress sank under his weight.

  He pushed to get up, but it was like he was being held by a huge marshmallow, his efforts to gain traction foiled by the sinking of his arms into the mattress.

  Two zombies squeezed for a moment in the doorway, before one popped through. It launched itself at Andy, its teeth clicking manically. Andy pushed at its shoulders as it fell on him.

  Inches from his face; insane, lost eyes, rancid flesh, a lolling tongue, inches long with no muscle control. It lapped at Andy’s face. Its teeth began clicking, manically, cutting through its own tongue. Blood sprayed from the zombie’s mouth.

  Andy’s strength wained. He sank further into the mattress. The next zombie would be on him in seconds, probably chew on his legs first. He would have to endure that pain, as he fought to keep another from his throat. How would it feel, to have the skin ripped from his bones, to have the tendons snapped from his muscles? To feel his blood squirt into the air. To be ripped apart by the blunt instruments of a dead human.

  A heavy thump.

  Blood squirted over Andy’s face. Pieces of flesh slapped onto the ceiling.

  The weight in Andy’s arms went limp, and in a second the zombie was gone. Hands gripped Andy’s and pulled him up.

  A woman stood at the foot of the bed. She wore a leather jacket, splattered in blood. Her face was covered in a motorcycle helmet. In her hand was an axe.

  “He alive?” said a muffled voice pointing to Carl.

  Andy nodded, although not sure if he was.

  The woman shouted out the doorway, “I’ve found them, two down here.” She turned back to Andy. “Can you walk?”<
br />
  Andy nodded dumbly.

  “I’m Ash,” she said. “You’re safe now.” She pulled off her motorcycle helmet. Light brown skin, small features.

  Two more people arrived at the door, dressed similarly to Ash.

  “Get that guy out, he’s alive, apparently,” said Ash, speaking to the two men who had arrived. “Come on,” she pushed Andy towards the door. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  The path to the deck was lined with the bodies of zombies, their heads caved in. Blood decorated the walls and floor. Body parts quivered in time with thumping boots.

  Ash brought Andy to the deck. Rain. Grey clouds. Cold sea. Biting wind.

  Several people moved around the boat, all in protective gear, carrying weapons. Some were watching Andy and Ash. A ladder reached up from the water to the deck.

  “What about Carl?” said Andy.

  “He’s ok, we’ll get him back to the clinic,” said Ash as she guided Andy onto the ladder.

  “Clinic?”

  Ash pointed to the distant sand dunes. It looked like there was a barricade, a fence of some sort running along the bottom of the dunes. It stretched for as far as he could see, the heavy rain obscuring the far sides of the beach. “You’ll be safe here.”

  A man on the beach shouted up to Ash, “We got them? Come on, we need to get the fence closed.” He was a thin man with longish hair and a beard. He didn’t have the protective gear of the others, but carried a bag bursting with heavy looking tools.

  “Relax, Jack, we’re coming.”

  Andy climbed down the steps into the water. It reached his knees. He took long sweeping steps through the water, Ash always guiding him forward. Jack had disappeared into the distance, jogging towards the fence. Behind him, Carl was being lowered to several waiting hands.

  “What is this place?” said Andy.

  “Tulloch Bay Holiday Park. At least, that’s what it used to be,” said Ash. “It’s home now.”

  The sea was gone, the sand hard under Andy’s feet. He stumbled, his numb legs unable to cope with the rising whirls of the sand. Ash was there to catch him though, each time.

  Home, thought Andy. She had said Home.

  He began to cry.

  Faith of the Dead

  Chapter 1

  Grace stared into the fire, the yellow and orange flames licking the sides of the deep fireplace delicately, as if scared to scar the brick. She held up her cold fingers to the weak flames.

  Crackling of the wood, otherwise silence.

  It was her watch. She shouldn’t have been staring at the fire, she should have been crouched by the front window of the attic, watching the street below, then shifting to the window at the other side of the room to watch the gardens.

  But the room was cold. The old carpets and withering wallpaper sucked in the heat from the fire. Her fingers were numb. What use would she be if her fingers were numb and she couldn’t grip her baseball bat?

  It was no good, guilt got the better of her. She pulled on her gloves and moved quietly to the window that looked over the street. The floorboards of the old terrace house creaked like a bear stirring from sleep. Turn over again. Back to hibernation.

  She hoped she hadn’t woke Harry in the bedroom below. His shift had ended at two o’clock, he had been tired. Her shift would end when he got up, around seven, usually. Rising came with the light, these days. Since the Fall three months ago, and the sudden death of the electrical world man had spent thousands of years creating, Grace found her sleeping patterns had reverted to that of wild animals; up with the sun, down with the sun. Like an old switch had awoken inside her,this is how we used to live, how we are meant to live.

  Up with the sun, down with the sun.

  What would happen come the depths of winter? It was sometime in September now, by her reckoning. A few more months and the darkness would envelop England, its hungry claw releasing the sun for only a few hours each day. Would her and Harry be forced to sleep for hours, their awakening only enough time to forage and feed?

  Maybe they could hibernate, like old bears.

  Grace gently opened the velux window of the attic room. A blast of cold air brushed past her face, an icy contrast to the glow from the fire.

  She glanced with longing at the fire. Of course, keeping warm, like all things in this world, came at a price. The fire advertised their position via a column of smoke every night. It wasn’t the infected that worried her; the infected didn’t care for columns of smoke; it was the thoughts of wandering tribes of desperate survivors, clad in leathers with their rough hewn weapons and rusty blades, that she protected her thoughts against.

  She hadn’t seen any of these tribes except in her darkest dreams, but they must exist, mustn’t they? Every film that dealt with the apocalypse had them. Their rough Captains dressed like bikers, huge beards revealing nothing but their eyes, as black as the night… But maybe the terrible tribes didn’t wander the lonely tenement suburbs of Bristol. Much too pedestrian for their ravaging desires.

  The moon was high, the thin street below illuminated in soft glowing blue light, showing all the deserted cars, all the blowing rubbish in the wind, all the smashed windows on the blank rows of terraced houses.

  All the rotting carcasses.

  Every street had a carcass of some sort. If you were lucky it was a real cadaver, a body that had found real death. The type that didn’t claw, hiss, and moan from the bottom of hell.

  Death, everywhere, in this new England.

  A shudder of movement from the end of the street.

  Grace took a sharp intake of breath, then clasped her hand over her mouth. Sound travelled in the still of the night. They followed sound, it was one of their most developed senses. She knew this, not just anecdotally, but through her past job as a virologist, where she had researched all the government’s dirty little viral secrets.. As the Fall raged above her underground lab, the army had brought them asample.She had spent the last days of civilisation cutting it open. She had observed the dying frontal cortex turning black under the march of the virus. She had seen the growing tendrils reaching deep into the reptilian brain, the virus feeding connections between the senses, seeing all, hearing all.

  So she knew they could hear better than her, see better than her.

  And feel nothing.

  Altogether an improvement.

  There was three of them on the street. The shambles, she called them sometimes. That’s what they were, a shambles of existence. Decrepit and rotting, necrotic shells insulting the beings they used to be.

  They didn’t walk, they shambled. Was that even a verb, thought Grace? It was now. There was no English Oxford Dictionary commission to tell her she was wrong. She could make up as many verbs as she liked.

  The sound of their feet scraping the tarmac of the road echoed through the close rows of houses. She watched, entranced, like a mouse watching a precession of cats from safe in its hole.

  One stopped, the one in the middle with the awkwardly balanced head. Something white protruded from its neck - a shoulder bone maybe? It raised its head and sniffed.

  Grace held her breath.

  Its head moved slowly from left to right, scanning the street. The others stopped, aware, somehow, that their colleague had paused.

  Too stupid though, to look up.

  Nothing in front of it, nothing to the left or right. It didn’t look behind.

  Maybe not such an improvement after all.

  It walked again. Shambled.

  All three of them, on the move.

  Grace realised her heart had been thumping.

  Once they left the street, turning a corner that led further into the maze of old terraced houses, Grace pulled the window closed.

  Chapter 2

  Harry woke slowly. He slept deeply now, the constant anxiety that had filled his world after the collapse morphing into acceptance. The Fall was becoming a dark mist over his memory, his previous life nothing but a gossamer thin dream.

>   He squinted at his watch with its glow-in-the-dark hands. The room remained in shadow even though the sun had risen. Heavy green curtains that stank of mothballs denied most of the light, but still the sun managed to sneak in through gaps by the walls.

  It was past seven thirty.

  Or was it? There was no internet or TV or radio to set his watch against, only the sun. He didn’t know how to set the time by the sun. He was a virologist, not a fucking weatherman.

  He lay still, staring at the ceiling. A rotten orange colour. Nothing in the house had been decorated since the seventies, he guessed. He didn’t want to get up, but if he spent too long alone with his thoughts, the fear would get him; a dark blanket on his mind, driving him into a panic. The first week into the Fall, Grace had found him by a tree next to the car they had been sleeping in. Curled up, crying, trying to pull his hair out.

  He wished Grace hadn’t found him like that. He felt embarrassed. He wanted to be stronger.

  He got out of bed and pulled on his clothes. He supposed they stank, but he was used to the smell.

  He walked to the hall, the floor boards creaking under foot.

  “Hey Grace,” he called up the stairs to the attic. “Everything ok?”

  A pause. “Morning. You’re early?”

  He climbed the stairs. She was sitting by the back window, staring through the glass.

  “You see something?” said Harry.

  “Come look,” she said.

  He joined her. Four zombies in the garden of the property that backed onto their house (was it really their house?) They wandered aimlessly, milling like rogue remote control cars tuned into the frequency of everything; no direction, no aim.

  “That’s new,” he said.

  “They arrived a few hours ago.”

  The fence between the two properties was old and rickety, and in a state of disrepair. Heavy vegetation climbed and pushed against the grey-white planks.

  “Guess we keep an eye on them,” said Harry.