SURVIVAL
Great Bitten Volume Two
Warren Fielding
A MALEVOLENT PRESS book
SURVIVAL
Great Bitten Book 2
© 2015 by Warren Fielding
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Danielle Tunstall
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Dedication
To Becky: Not Giving In.
To Tracey: Don’t Stop Me Now.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
I watched, my feet feeling numb, as the lead corpse shuffled towards me. I think I sighed inwardly when I didn’t recognise its face. Friend or foe, I had left a lot of dead people behind in Worthing, and I wasn’t quite ready to face any of them again yet in the afterlife. This frontrunner—if you could offer that kind of adjective when describing the silent fraternity of the infected—had definitely not been at the forefront of his species in life. His sloped shoulders looked almost natural, as if that had been a permanent posture imposed through endless hours on some anonymous gaming console. His polo shirt was ripped open to the chest and revealed a series of crescent moon puncture wounds. They were blackened by coagulated blood. Days of staggering around the overgrown routes of the South Downs Way had also taken their toll, but the fact that he was out here at all said that these scars were probably bite wounds. I thought of the women and children that had died in the club on the pier. Austin had bound them to that fate, before abducting my sister. Heartless little fuck that he was, he’d locked away women, children, and pensioners together with one infected. What chance did they have? This zombie approaching me now, had he been in a safer place? Had he been with allies who hadn't wanted to kill him, or to use him for their own ends to gain a place of safety? He was outside. That’s more opportunity than being locked in a room with the things. More avenues, more roads to survival, and yet the thing had still managed to wander down a one-way street, so to speak.
I didn’t know what kind of a chance I stood against this world alone. I watched Rick trot down the hill, not looking back, not checking to see if I would follow. His hand strayed to the jaw that I had walloped not ten minutes ago, stroking absentmindedly at the swelling that was already starting to appear. I began to wonder again, not for the first time, if he did suffer from a lack of the vindictive courage I thought I had to survive in this cruel new world, or if he simply hid his intentions well. More than once, I had thought that Rick was nothing more than a splendid accessory—useful when I needed him but ultimately expendable—until a flicker of his eyes or a change in his stance belied the majority of the words coming from his lips. In the here and now, Rick was the only ally I had. The script at the moment said I was in charge. I was happy to believe it.
I peeled my eyes away from Rotting McChesterson and followed Rick down the hill, trying to keep my footsteps light. We had seen infected wandering around, more than just this one, and I had no desire to alert them to our existence. More than that, Lana probably hadn’t got very far before she turned, and I didn’t want to deal with her as she sprinted towards us, intent on tearing us apart. More to the point, I probably wouldn’t be able to deal with her even if I wanted to. I jumped down alongside Rick. He looked up at me briefly, throwing me a wan look and a false smile. We were as far from being amiable in-laws as he and Carla were from getting married before the UK collapsed—we were further from it now than we had ever been. I opened my mouth to say something conciliatory when he was knocked backwards off his feet. I looked around instinctively searching for an attacker. There was no one. I looked down to Rick, who was in turn looking down the hill. His mouth had creased into a grin. I followed his gaze and saw an anonymous body rolling uncontrollably down the slope. I placed my hands on my hips, my brow wrinkling as I tried to stop myself from joining in.
"He’s going to beat us to the bottom, Warren."
"You know what? I don’t think I mind losing that race. Think he’ll break his neck on the way down?"
"I hope so; it’ll save us from doing the job."
I offered my hand down to Rick to lift him back to his feet. He grasped it gratefully. Ice broken and humour restored, thanks to the ungainly infected, we made sure there were no other lemmings sliding down the slope after us before we carried on our way. There were still a couple of the shamblers in the distance, but the only way they would be able to catch us would be by taking a tumble, the same as the fleshball that had taken out Rick. They weren’t a threat to us, and more importantly they weren’t drawing the attention of their faster, angrier, and more dangerous cousins. There weren’t many trees around us and we had a great view of the entire countryside from here. I could even see back to the sea, for what it was worth. The water was a murky grey and, far from it being a scenic view, it simply served as a stark reminder of the destruction we were leaving behind us. Even now, there were tendrils of black smoke drifting up from the ruins of the smouldering pier. I tugged at Rick’s shoulder and pointed it out to him. He shrugged.
"It’s done, and we survived it," he said. "The important thing now is to keep going and to find Carla. And after we find out she’s alive and well, we need to castrate Austin and make him eat his own ball sac."
I took the time to survey the landscape. We hadn’t done so last night, unsurprising given the atmosphere and the lack of light. There were plumes of smoke no matter which direction I looked in. Even the isolated urban areas appeared to have fires of some form or another. One lonely plume of smoke was petering out, to the north and slightly east of where I stood now. Its thin trail was too bold to be a campfire, and too helpless to be a house, or anything of substantial size. A car crash perhaps? I bet enough of those had gone on when people were fleeing the disease, before they realised that the government had closed all major roads and prevented all transport from leaving the country.
"If we find Carla alive and well, I’m sure she’ll be having a say in that herself," I retorted. Carla wasn’t the shy and retiring type, and if Austin didn’t have her tied down then she’d be making merry hell. What my sister lacked in strength, she made up for in fire.
Rick nodded at this and we continued walking in silence.
Soon the grass broke to a small gravel path which we decided to follow to the bottom of the road. It was taking much longer than I had originally thought to get off Cissbury Ring, and it was becoming obvious that I had no ability to judge distance visually. It wasn’t a good indicator for my other fledgling survival abilities. Rick didn’t seem to care. He just wandered alongside me in a mood all his own.
A short way down the path, we came across the body of the lemming that had taken Rick’s legs out from underneath him. It was McChesterson. It looked like the thing had indeed broken its neck on the way down. His—no, I reminded myself—its legs and arms were at
unnatural angles, but not as much as its neck, which was twisted too far back not to have snapped. Rick kicked at it gingerly before dismissing it with a shrug of his shoulders. I looked past him into the distance and finally I could see houses within a short walk. At least it looked short enough. I was thirsty and hungry and wanted to rest my legs to have a think before we went anywhere else. We hadn’t heard a radio broadcast, heard from a stranger or seen a TV screen in a long time, and anything else could be happening in the wider country. If there was some sort of rescue or uplift going on elsewhere, we had to seriously consider heading there, whether we were able to rescue Carla or not. It would certainly be nice to think someone out there had pulled their finger out of their arse to actually send some help to the UK. I pointed out the line of houses and Rick turned to follow my gesture.
"Thank fuck for that. My feet are absolutely killing me," he muttered.
We manoeuvred around the stricken corpse and pushed around a thickly growing bush. I guessed this was a council-maintained pathway, probably overdue attention anyway before people stopped clocking into their day jobs. No one would ever be coming back to trim it, and in a few months this area would probably be almost inaccessible. Pushing through a few more fledgling triffids, we found ourselves on a narrow country road. There were only houses on one side. Cars that had presumably belonged to the homeowners lined the street. The houses were the standard anonymous build, typical of the UK in the early eighties. They were terraced and looked mostly like three-bedrooms, two reception-roomed, standard builds. They had bay windows at the front, all of which were obscured, either by curtains or horrible draped nets. There was an odd scent to the air, faint, unwelcome, and also inexorable, like the portable toilets on the last day of a three-day festival. I wriggled my nose and started breathing shallowly through my mouth. Rick checked the soles of his shoes, but we both knew he hadn’t stepped in anything. Not far down the road, a couple of wheelie bins had been knocked on their side. They weren’t the recycling ones, either. All manner of debris lay across the road, and most of it had probably started to rot. I nudged Rick and pointed at them. He rolled his eyes in realisation. Hedge trimming wasn’t the only council service no longer in commission. Rick went to walk to the nearest house and I pushed him back, keeping in the cover of the trees.
It was eerily quiet, and abnormally so, compared to what we had experienced so far. There wasn’t any sign of rioting, flame, death, not even the vaguest hint of a cross argument over a garden fence in this idyllic little lane. Only a pair of upturned bins hinted at the vaguest possibility of unrest. I held a finger to my lips to hush Rick and emphasise my point. He crossed his arms and looked like a child about to throw a tantrum. I ignored him and peered down both ends of the street. Most of the neat terrace houses were darkly placid. I tried to take note of the things we had tried to do at Carla’s home that simply hadn’t been attempted here. No doors or windows had been barred; it looked like most of the first floor windows were uncovered so that any lights at night would be easily seen; there were vehicles outside most of the homes—if people had tried to flee they had done so on foot. Either they had a vicarious and effective neighbourhood watch program going on, they had all evacuated early, or… I’d seen the "or" in films.
I kept my eyes on the house directly opposite for a good five minutes, waiting to see if there were any signs of movement, whether it belonged to someone alive or not. There was no hailing and no challenge, not the merest hint of a curtain twitch at the two dirty strangers standing across the street. Nor did any gaping black maw wag interest at a meal standing idle. Eventually, I got annoyed with listening to Rick fidgeting from foot to foot and decided that, whether there were people in these houses or not, they wouldn’t be a threat to us. The front one was as good as any so I strode straight up the garden path and tried the front door. The plastic handle dropped without resistance. With a gentle squeaking, the door opened inwards. I pushed it all the way through, peering into an empty hallway and craning my neck in a strain to hear any noises coming from the rooms within. There was a faint smell of stale food and something else with an edge of foulness that I couldn’t identify. Rick moved past me to look in the hallway, but only just. He had the same reservations as me it seemed. Rick too sniffed and looked at me with unhappy eyes.
"You know what that smells like?" he asked.
I shook my head in response.
"That smells like dead," Rick stated, his mouth turning up into a sickened grimace.
"Are you sure?"
"Well it’s either a corpse, or they left their lamb shanks out on the side."
"But dead doesn’t mean… dead," I answered, unsure now of my initial ballsy moves.
"No, but I can’t hear anything moving around in there. Hang on a sec."
Rick leaned into the hallway and picked up a tan ball that had been left on the floor by the door. He threw it halfway up the stairs, straight ahead of us. Both hall and stairs were lain with a light beech laminate and, in the silence of the day, the usually insignificant noise echoed around the house. We both tensed up and waited for the inevitable clattering of uncoordinated feet, the response of infected heading towards an anonymous noise. After a short time, I released a breath I hadn’t remembered holding. I raised my shoulders in a shrug to Rick. He cocked his head, exaggerating listening for noise. Neither of us had heard a thing. The coast was as clear as we were going to be able to make it. Before Rick pushed forward again to go into the house, I held him back.
"We haven’t got any weapons. What if there is something in there and it just can’t move?" I asked.
"Head straight for the kitchen?"
I nodded in agreement. That made sense. Hopefully, they’d have a full set of knives in stock for us at the very least, though if they were anything like the dodgy set Carla had stored at home, we’d be fighting off our attackers with blunt instruments. We made our way through the small hallway and left into the front room. There was no one in there. The room was, in fact, pristine. A light patina of dust lay over everything, the wheels of time already marking the room’s place in history. The furnishings were what I would describe as belonging to someone old or middle-aged. There was a high-back chair that might have, once upon a time, been green. It had tassels on it. I saw a huge sofa of the same faded colour, and blankets covered the backs of both. There was a neat coffee table with a newspaper on top. I recognised the headline. It had been from the day before the outbreak started. The smell wasn’t as pungent in here, but I could still sense the dank presence of decay in the air. At the back of the room was a small circular dining table with four chairs neatly tucked under the anonymous cheap veneer. The layout of the house was familiar, following the format of millions of similar homes across the country; small neat hallway, long lounge cum dining room. There would be a kitchen tucked at the back of the house, possibly long and thin, running underneath where the bathroom would be upstairs. The garden out the back would be as small and neat as the hallway, if the owners were as fastidious as their furnishings made them seem. Upstairs there would be three bedrooms, although one of them would be barely large enough to grace a desk and chair, let alone a bed to fit a fully-grown human being. The bathroom suite would be dated, possibly the same green as the sofas, and there would be a horrid old shower hanging above the tub, possibly attached to the taps.
There was no doorway to the kitchen, just an open arch. If there had been anything downstairs to greet us then, it would have surely come to say hello by now. Growing bold, our fear subsiding, we stepped through the archway into the last room downstairs. The kitchen was as predictably neat as the rest of the house. The floor was swept, and the sideboards had been cleared. I opened a cupboard out of curiosity and was stunned to see it brimming with neatly-arranged cans of food, lined up and label forward just as they should be. Rick saw this and opened another cupboard: pasta, rice, and flour greeted us, along with a loaf of bread—which was admittedly a week the wrong side of mouldy, green slices visible
through the plastic wrapping. Rick picked up the sealed loaf and we both grimaced as putrid green water dripped on the previously clean floor. That wasn’t the source of the smell, though. I found the bin and, lifting its lid, was greeted by a clean and mainly empty black sack. With more than enough food to survive the initial throes of the outbreak and a location that was apparently hidden away from most pockets of civilization, I wondered what had driven this family out of their home.
We opened a series of almost freakishly neat drawers until we found the one containing a set of joyfully-sharp carving knives. They were quite weighty, too, I was glad to feel as I hefted one. These hadn’t been cheap. At least now, they were multi-purpose too.
"We’re coming back for the food, right?" I sounded more hopeful than I probably needed to, though my stomach grumbled in protest at the spoils that might be unfairly left behind.
"Coming back? You think we’re leaving here tonight? No way."
Rick was right. This seemed to be a safe spot and an ideal location to try to get a handle on what was going on in the outside world. The only question that needed answering was what the fuck the smell was; given the house was spotless, I doubted that they had left a shit for us in the upstairs toilet. The best we could hope for was a pet left behind or a wild animal trapped inside the house. Knives in hand, we retraced our steps back to the hallway. In a moment of inspiration, I removed my shoes so I didn’t make any sounds heading up the hard stairs. At least, I don’t think I made any sounds. I would never win any stealth awards, but taking off my trainers was a definite improvement. I could almost feel Rick rolling his eyes at me, but he did follow suit. At the top of the stairs, I could see the beginnings of a salmon-coloured toilet seat. I was almost right about the decor. What I wanted to be wrong about was the pungent odour of decay, which was getting ever worse the higher up those stairs we climbed. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and, making a fist, pushed a protective arm against my mouth. There were three other closed doors up here. It was going to be a macabre lottery, and I did not want to win. We went logically and we went together. I picked the first door.
Great Bitten (Book 2): Survival Page 1