Harry and Grace were pushed to the front, underneath the pulpit. Father Dave looked down upon them, smiling.
“Our new children of the Lord, you are welcome,” he held out his arms. “Stanley, the anointment.”
Grace heard footsteps behind her, she turned to watch Stanley walking to the back of the church, his figure covered in shadow.
Her and Harry looked at each other, he raised his eyebrows slightly; incomprehension, a little worry. Grace felt something in her stomach rise; anxiety, maybe fear.
“What’s the anointment?” said Harry.
Father Dave smiled. “Only the clean, can live in the Lord’s new world, Harry. We have to test that cleanliness.”
Father Dave’s eyes gleamed and shimmered. She had seen eyes like that a long time ago, only once. Barry McKenna, the five year old boy who lived next door, had caught a frog once. Six year old Grace had found the squirming green creature fascinating; she loved its bulbous eyes, its slimy skin and the way its little webbed feet pushed against her hands. Then Barry had taken the frog and, with the same eyes that Father Dave had now, ripped off its legs. It had squealed. She had screamed.
The door to the church was behind them, if they ran, they could make it, maybe. She grabbed Harry’s hand.
“Stop!” shouted Gary. A click reverberated in the church, a loud and ominous click. The pulling back of a trigger, a gleaming silver gun in Gary’s hands, pointing, in turn, from her to Harry. “Stay there,” he said.
“You are righteous, aren’t you?” said Father Dave. “If you are righteous, then you have nothing to fear.”
Chapter 10
Grace stood rooted to the spot. This was the second time in her life a gun had been pointed at her. She had seen the damage a gun could do, close up, for real. She had pulled a trigger and torn the life from a man; a man who deserved to die, she told herself. True, the man she killed really deserved to go to court and be judged, but she considered courts thin on the ground these days. did this make her justice correct? Had she been ‘righteous’ in dispensing her justice to Taylor?
She looked at the gun in front of her. Maybe it was those with the guns who decided what was righteous, now.
“What’s the anointment?” she said quietly.
As if to answer, the clunk and echo of a lock being undone rang through the church. A chain dropped to the floor, its rattling and noisy collapse like every old horror film, a tortured ghost of Marley carrying around the weight of his sins for eternity.
Grace was still holding Harry’s hand. He squeezed hers and she his. They looked at each other. His deep eyes, which only thirty minutes ago had promised so much warmth and comfort and the possibility of love and a new hope, were now only cruel reminders of the uncertainty of this world; a stark beacon of something to be lost, now it had been found.
A sound cast fear into her heart. A moan filled the wooden timbered and stone hall of the church. The most terrifying zombie call she had ever heard. It hissed and snarled.
“Come on ya bastard,” said Stanley’s old cigarette tarred voice. “Get out here.”
Stanley emerged from the darkness at the bottom of the church, pulling a chain wrapped around the hands of a disfigured fleshy mass. A motorcycle helmet was on its head, the visor down, hiding the face, but not the clattering and clicking of the teeth. It grasped blindly with its bound hands, uselessly clawing the empty air.
“Shut it,” said Stanley, pulling the zombie to the front of the church, to stand before Harry and Grace.
Grace put her arms around Harry. He pulled her close. His heart thumped heavily against her chest.
“Remove the visor of sin,” said Father Dave.
Stanley took the helmet off, revealing the zombie’s rotten head. Wisps of hair clung to peeling yellow skin. One side of the head was staved in, fragments of bone poking through the thin leather like flesh. Its jaws worked furiously as it pulled towards Harry and Grace, but Stanley held the chains fast.
“Behold the judge, himself judged guilty only one week ago,” shouted Father Dave, his voice like a beast in the woods at night. “May the righteous ones be cleansed, and the darkness of their masks peeled away to reveal the true light of their heart. For, verily, if thee are of the dark, then the emissary of God will reveal it to you, and to us, the righteous witnesses of God’s great creation!”
Grace spun round to face Father Dave. “You’re crazy! It’s a virus! It’s just a virus,” her voice turning to sobs.
“Get back,” said Gary, motioning at Grace with the gun.
Father Dave raised his hand. “Grace, my child. Have you not listened to anything of the sermon? There is only peace in this world once the truth is revealed. You will either live in peace, knowing you are of the good, one of God’s flock, or you will be passed to Heaven, forever to live in his exulted host.”
“What about you,” she shouted, “What about all of you? Have you been ‘anointed’, have you let it bite you?”
“We don’t have to,” said Brenda. “We were in the church when the Fall came. It’s obvious the Lord has chosen us.”
“You’re all fucking crazy,” shouted Harry. “Murderers!” Desperation in his voice.
“How can there be murder in the house of the Lord?” said Father Dave. “Everything that happens in the house of the Lord is willed by the Lord. Please, my children, understand.” Father Dave pointed at Stanley, his eyes wide open, wild with what seemed to be delight. “Stanley, release the Angel of God!”
Stanley let go of the chains and the zombie lurched for both her and Harry. Harry shouted, “Run!” his voice simply a background instruction that seemed to feed directly to her reptilian base brain. Bypass all software, a hardware instruction, impossible to be ignored.
But first. Something she needed to say.
“I love you,” she shouted back as Harry pushed her away from him. She didn’t know if she did, but she wanted him to hear it, that someone loved him.
Harry ran to the zombie and punched at its head. He yelled as the zombie lurched for him and sank its teeth into his neck. His skin stretched and broke, blood spurted in a wide fan from his throat like from a hose, covering all around. Harry yelled, not in pain, Grace liked to remember, but in defiance. He turned and pushed the zombie towards Gary.
There was a shot, but Harry didn’t stop moving, the zombie in between him and Gary.
Someone let out a desperate and prolonged shout of “No,” it sounded like Beth.
Another shot, a scream. Harry and Gary and the zombie fell to the ground.
No one was watching her.
She ran down the aisle of the church.
“Get her!” someone shouted.
A terrible scream rang out, forever embossed across the watchful air of the church.
She pushed through the door leading out of the church.
Chapter 11
Grace lay on the old musty bed, its smell worse given her brief flirtation with a clean life at the church. New clothes, clean hair, smooth skin bathed with the touch of Lily Of The Valley shower cream.
Darkness outside, silence. The odd owl tooting from the distant park. Sometimes she heard the roar of an engine, a truck. They were still looking for her, but they wouldn’t find her.
She had ran from the church with tears streaming down her cheeks; the pain of allowing herself to feel free, to feel forgiven. To have it all ripped from her. Her insides had wanted to scream like a toddler, to lie on the floor and kick her legs in the air, but she couldn’t, not if she wanted to live. So she had ran.
Harry. Poor Harry. Why did he give himself to save her? Maybe because he knew that she would have stood there and they both would have died.
Maybe he loved her.
Maybe he was just tired of it all. Sick of the scrambling for survival like a mountain goat on an eternal rise, each step throwing rocks thousands of feet down the side of the mountain, a reminder of their precarious existence.
She had ran out of the church and t
hrough the gates into a balmy autumn evening. A shot had clanged on the metal of the gates. An engine had started up.
Grace managed to lose them in the small alleys and pathways that threaded through the Victorian terrace estate. No way for trucks to pass. A maze of roads, streets, houses, avenues, little parks. She had run in circles, maybe; she didn’t know.
Eventually a house, she didn’t need to break in, most doors where open. Ran to the attic room, her old familiar haunt. The front windows, the back windows, back and front. For a few hours.
Then she needed to rest. She’d had enough.
So she lay down, but she didn’t sleep, and now she was getting up again.
Her fear and sadness were slowly mutating, as all emotions do given time, to more useful ones. She felt them rising; anger, vengeance, fury. Incandescent at the lack of justice .Who’s justice? That was a question she wouldn’t ask anymore. Her justice was enough. Her justice was right. She was right.
She was righteous.
No food, no supplies, all back at the Church, including her laptop. The laptop from the lab that may contain the key to the virus.
She went downstairs and searched the kitchen. Another nice kitchen, new units. Would have been a lovely family home. A child’s pictures stuck on the fridge with cartoon animal magnets. If she stopped again to think on these things, she would go mad, truly. No more thinking, just do. Just survive.
She searched the drawers and found a reasonably sized knife, solid with not too much give in the blade.
Grace stepped out into the darkness, through the door at the back of the house into the thin alleyway, bathed in dark blue moonlight. Half way down the alley was movement. A fox stared at her for a second, then dashed into the night, suddenly gone.
She retraced her path, winding through the streets, avoiding undead when she saw them, turning back once or twice when the group was too big. She could take her time. If she didn’t make it tonight, then tomorrow would do. Or the next day. She had all the time in the world.
One step after another in the dark. Another call of an owl. The spire of the church ahead of her, beyond the next row of terrace houses.
She circled round to approach from the woods behind the church. It was a dangerous route, easier for the zombies to surprise her. Everything was dangerous though, she was past caring about danger. She wasn’t thinking, she was doing. What needed to be done. Survive.
The fence was a collection of horizontal wooden slats. She peered through. Lights of the church a hundred feet away, and the truck next to the door suggested they were at home. Did they have a watch? Not normally, but maybe tonight, she would have to be careful.
She sat for twenty minutes, still, staring into the dark, before she climbed up and over the fence. She moved slowly, silently, placing her feet carefully, crouching and shuffling towards a bush, where she sat, still, waiting and watching.
Grace’s patience paid off when a figure emerged from the dark, walking the perimeter of the church across the brush of the overgrown graveyard. It looked like Stanley. He circled away. Grace ran to a large statue in the middle of the graveyard, half the distance from the fence to the Church, and she crouched behind the towering stone angel, and waited.
Five minutes and Stanley appeared again, the same route, the same circle.
She waited until he was safely round the corner of the church, and she ran to the truck, crouching down behind its wheels.
Her heart raced. Her mind shouted to her, telling her to run. Her palms were sweaty.
She ignored it all.
The crunch of gravel as Stanley approached. She watched his feet under the truck. He passed. Grace darted from her hiding place.
Stanley turned, and she managed to catch the surprise in his eyes as he tried to raise the hand holding the gun. She stuck the knife into his face. It slipped off his forehead and embedded in his eye socket. The knife sank deep into his skull and brain. Blood squirted over her face, warm and thick as it dripped down her cheek, the taste of iron on her lips.
Stanley’s body shook, then went limp and dropped to the floor.
She picked up his gun.
Chapter 12
Grace pushed the door of the Church open slowly. It creaked, she paused, she listened. Nothing. She edged into the dark corridors, rooms leading to the left and right. She guessed they would be sleeping in the rectory.
She moved quickly through the church, seeing no one, hearing nothing but her own footsteps, impossibly loud in the dark of the night.
In the rectory.
She searched through the downstairs first. In the kitchen was her and Harry’s backpacks. She quickly checked through hers; the laptop was there. She only glanced at Harry’s. She didn’t want to see his clothes, his things, his photos.
She shouldered her backpack and moved back into the church, and paused.
She could just walk now, leave, forget about this place, forget about Father Dave and Harry. Move on, find other people maybe, somewhere to settle where she could build a life.
Grace closed her eyes and wiped away a tear. She had no idea she had been crying. She felt she was crying for a loss, but she isn’t sure if it was for one already experienced, or for one to come.
She made her way towards the bedrooms and slowly climbed the stairs. She entered the first doorway.
Beth and Gary were sleeping. Beth had her arms curled around Gary’s naked chest. They looked peaceful, in love, happy.
She raised the gun and fired, twice. The sound of the gun was like a crack in the sky. One flash in the dark. Two flashes in the dark. The bedsheets and wall now splattered in black. Gary moved, a gurgling sound coming from his mouth. She fired again.
Silence like the silence after a thunderstorm.
She ran out of the door and into the next room. She was met by a scream as Brenda’s huge frame, replete in flowery dressing gown, terrifying in her curlers, charged towards her. Grace raised the gun, but was unable to get a shot off before she was flung back against the wall, the weight of Brenda winding her. She managed to keep a tight hold on the gun.
“Bitch!” shouted Brenda. She pushed her weight against Grace, her thick forearm pressing against her neck. Grace struggled for breath. Her windpipe was being crushed. She brought up the hand with the gun and thumped the back of Brenda’s head. A sickening thud and Brenda’s eyes opened wide, but her arm stayed in place. Grace hit her with the gun again, and again. Her hand was suddenly warm and sticky. She struck Brenda again and her hand sunk into the back of her skull, surrounded by warm flesh, like a jar of liver.
Brenda’s hulk fell to the side, and Grace yanked back her hand. Brain matter clung to her gun hand.
She ran out into the hallway. A figure was there. A flash of light and the door to her left exploded. She felt something sharp in her right arm and shoulder.
Grace dived back into the room as Father Dave took a second shot, plaster and chipped wood exploding around her.
She heard a click, he was reloading.
She ducked back out of the room and fired. Father Dave fell, dropping the shotgun. He hit the wall and slid down, a thick red line trailing on the wall. He wasn’t dead. He gripped his shoulder and stared at Grace, his eyes full of venom.
“You Godless cow! Don’t you understand I’m doing the work of the Lord!” He tried to lift his shotgun.
Grace walked up to him, raised her gun level with his head and fired.
A flash, a damp thud. The wall was covered in fragments of bone and brain.
She turned, left the rectory, not looking back. Crossing the church towards the exit, she paused. Scratching and scrambling from the back of the church.
She walked down the aisle to the door with the lock, the door the zombie had been taken from. A thick lock and chain was wrapped around it. She went outside, found Stanley’s body, still warm, searched his pockets and found a key ring. Returning to the church, she found a key to fit and unlock the door.
She pulled it open and stood
back, gun raised.
A figure lurched from the darkness, its feet dragging on the floor.
Torn neck, fresh blood splattered down a new shirt. Eyes dark and empty. Hands raised. Teeth clicking like a broken machine.
Harry.
Grace raised the run and fired once. The bullet burst through the zombie’s head - not Harry’s head - and it fell to the ground, motionless.
Grace realised she was crying again. She wiped the tears away, just enough to see where she was going, and ran out of the church.
As the sun rose Grace was leaving the city.
She walked up the feeder road off the motorway, where the empty hulks of cars sat crashed and melded together like the remains of a blown up machine factory. The undead thumped on windows with rotten hands, broken hands, stumps. Hissing and moaning and clicking. Faces pushed up against glass unaware of their prison, happy in their eternal and unattainable desire.
Reaching the top of the slip road she crossed the roundabout and climbed the embankment into a field. She’d had enough of roads and tarmac, of houses and cities, of cars, or anything to do with people. Those she loved had been killed by people, not by the undead. She needed to be away from people for now. How could she trust them anymore? Those she loved were killed, and those who she didn’t love, she killed. She looked at her hands. They were still covered in blood. Pink and dry globules of brain still on the backs of her hands. She hadn’t washed. What was the point of washing? There was no way to clean what was inside her and that’s all that mattered, wasn’t it?
She had walked all night, and her limbs fizzed with pain and tiredness, but she kept going. She would sleep when she dropped. Would she eat? Would she drink? She didn’t know, she didn’t care.
Grace would head south, try to keep to the fields and country paths. Maybe find an old farmhouse or barn to settle in for the winter - she didn’t want to be wandering when winter came.
After the Fall Page 35