In my head, I counted down from three and, with a hand skimming over the handle so fast it may as well have been on fire, I flung the door open. Nothing but stale air greeted us. The curtains were open, and I could see the dust we’d stirred dancing around in a dying sunbeam. I hustled over to the window and threw it wide open, taking in deep gulps of fresh air. This room was at the back of the house, and I had a decent view. It turned out we hadn’t made it all the way down the hill. This street was a dainty little lane, and there were half a dozen more running parallel down the hillside. Each looked as serene as the last. Turning back into the room, I eyed the remaining two doors with suspicion. It was Rick’s turn next.
This room had been a decent enough size; that meant the middle room was likely to be the other large one. The last door at the front of the house and the end of the small landing would be the box room every youngest child loathed. The fresh air was starting to push away the stale air, but I would bet everything I no longer owned that our unwanted jackpot was behind door number two.
Rick did the same as I had, counting down, but he did this on his fingers so I could see what he was planning. He had to be sensing the same horror scene behind that door as I was. As his fist closed, he twisted the door handle and, this time, gently opened the door. We were hit with an immediate wall of reek that had me gagging. I dropped to my knees coughing, and Rick leaned over the banister heaving, his empty stomach producing a thin slime of bile which hung pitifully from his bottom lip before falling to the steps below. Behind us, an eddy of air from the opening door set one of the bodies swaying, the leather belt suspending it from the ceiling creaking gently. They were side by side, as they probably had been throughout their entire lives. An elderly couple, their faces blue and their bodies bloated in death, had hung themselves to escape the bloom of the infection, and the violent death that had already met millions. I could perhaps understand why; they had already lived their lives. Why did they need to put themselves through this hell on earth for the sake of another couple of years together, spent in quiet darkness and fear? They had decided that enough was enough and taken fate into their own hands. I shuddered as I pulled myself back to my feet and tried to put myself in their place. I wouldn’t have the courage to take that final step, even if it was the less painful way out these days. I would prefer to have my death served to me at the end of a hard fight rather than admit defeat and enter a place inside my heart so empty that I would be able to take my own life. For me, there was always another way.
Rick was still heaving over the banister. One of us would have to cut the poor couple down. I supposed it would have to be me, with Captain Chunder pouring his stomach out over the stairs. No longer feeling so good to have a knife in my hand, I lifted my stained t-shirt over my nose and still held my breath to put up a barrier against the stench. My arms went light and I lost my nerve as the woman twisted around in the noose. The noise of Rick hurling onto her precious staircase had her turning even in death. Or undeath, as it turned out to be. Her eyes were still open, and I felt warm liquid seep down my leg as I saw her mouth try to open and her arms lift apathetically to her sides as she tried to reach out to me. She didn't make any noise. We knew now that none of the dead ones made noise. But her eyes were full of the desire to kill that I had seen in other zombies, and my hand slackened in numb shock, the knife sliding to the carpeted floor with a mute thud.
"Rick? Rick? They’re not dead man."
Rick answered me in between quivering heaves. "What?"
"The hanging didn’t kill them. Well… it killed them. The woman… she’s… argh!"
It looked like she tried to spit at me, black putrescence running over her chin and dribbling down on to the floor. Her arms rose, her legs kicking as she simulated walking, her movements stirring the motionless body of her dead husband. Maybe he had snapped something critical in the neck that she hadn’t. Maybe he had simply committed suicide, where his wife had been infected. Whatever had gone wrong for them, she hadn’t fully removed herself from the world of the living—at least not nearly enough for my tastes. As her husband rocked and spun in his makeshift noose, his body turned to face me. His eyes were open too, but they were clouded and in the harmless void of death. At least I would only have to deal with one of them. My heart broke slightly when I registered what they were both wearing. He was in a suit and tie. She was wearing a floral dress. It wasn’t something I’d look twice at in the street, but with the way the man had dressed... She, too, had picked this particular piece of clothing to be her burial shroud. This was how she wanted her husband to see her; for those who would find them, to see them, together. A hat was on the floor beneath her feet, discoloured with dried urine, no doubt. Not satisfied with just picking their own end, they dressed up for their final act, too. I wondered if they had believed they would be going to a better place; whether they had decided better the hell you know and gambled for uncertain damnation against certain purgatory.
I inched towards the woman with uncertainty. I tried approaching her first from one side, then the other. Like the immortal portraits of gothic horror films, it was as if her eyes moved to follow me, her rigor mortis-locked body swinging stiffly afterwards. I felt like I was being judged and, against all reasonable logic, felt guilty that I was going to end her life in a way that wasn’t ultimately of this old woman’s choosing.
In the end, I waited for Rick to finish expending his guts. He staggered next to me, his breath reeking of days upon days without brushing, and his eyes were bloodshot and watery. He took one look at the woman, and another at me.
"Oh fuck off," he whined as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Come on, sort yourself out. I can’t do this on my own. Look at her!"
She reminded me a bit of Old Ma Deathly, the first undead I had encountered. I realised then that I hadn’t seen too many old people in the hordes we had met so far. Probably they hadn’t left their houses. I didn’t know of many octogenarians that felt a need to riot and loot, and many more may simply not have found out what was going on before it was too late. Some may have been picked up by their families. I wondered where this couple’s family was.
Rick poked my shoulder. "You on this planet, Warren?"
I shook my head, snapping out of my reverie. "Barely. Come on. You hold her and I’ll stab."
"Why do I have to hold her? What if she bites me?"
I rolled my eyes. "She’s just as likely to bite me. Stop being an ass. You really want to stab an old woman in the head?"
"Do you? Getting some kicks off that? You volunteered for it."
"Shut up and hold her legs. We haven’t got time for this."
As I clambered on the dusty bed, I mused that we weren’t unlike a comedy married couple at this point in time. Luckily, Rick was doing all the nagging, which meant that I was the husband. He muttered a few more choice words, but knelt on the floor to hold the old woman’s legs and stop her from swaying around. She tried to bat at him with her arms, but she was just too weak to make any kind of impact. I held on to the back of her head, her thin blue rinse already falling out as her dead body began to reject those parts of her that were still living. Acidic bile rose in my throat at what I was doing. This had, after all, been someone’s loved one, but so had a lot of the people I had already put to death during this plague, and at least I would be sending her to rest with her husband, as far as her belief mechanisms were concerned. I closed my eyes as my grip tightened, and I plunged the knife into her neck. There was a little resistance at first, but the pressure of the knifepoint burst the surface of her skin like a bubble. It cut through the spinal cord, bringing her mediocre thrashing to an abrupt end. Rick scooted back and looked up at her to check she was gone. I cocked my head at him in query.
"Lights out. Odd. I thought it was just the brain you had to destroy."
"It is. She’s probably just paralysed." I cut the rope and her body fell unceremoniously against the end of the bed before rolling onto the
carpet. It looked so ridiculous that Rick actually giggled, albeit a little maniacally. "It’s going to be easier to hit a killing blow with her on the floor."
And I thought I was right. It had felt wrong, extinguishing her with the woman dangling in mid-air. I hadn’t wanted her to be in one position of humiliating death, only to be transported immediately into the second. I hadn’t wanted Rick looking at her either. Her body was face-down on the carpet. She couldn’t move, after all. I twisted her head to one side, careful not to pay attention to the details of her face. Her jaw still tried to work, her bloodshot eyes darting furiously around. No, this woman was not a human being any more. With a precise thrust, I pushed the knife into her soft temple. There was almost no resistance. Now her light would be out. There was very little blood. I wasn’t an expert in biology. I assumed most of it was around her legs, because of the amount of time she’d probably been strung up.
"What do we do with them now?" Rick sounded nonchalant, and I sensed more than a little reluctance to move the bodies. There was only so much, however, that opening a few windows would do, and I wanted the house as secure as we could make it.
"You want to sleep in a house with these things in it overnight?"
"Fuck no."
"Then we take them outside."
"I’m not fucking burying them!"
"I didn’t say we were going to bury them," I snapped. "We’re just getting them outside. They’re stinking the place out. And I don’t know, maybe they’ll act as a deterrent for animals and stuff."
"But what if the other zombies are attracted by the smell?"
"I don’t think the dead ones can smell."
"It’s not the dead ones I’m worried about, Warren."
I shivered in remembrance of the few sprinting infected we had encountered so far. Rick was right. I’d rather face a dozen of the shambling dead than a single fast one. The zombies did appear to cluster, but I guessed they were mostly reacting to sight than anything, though there was perhaps a herding instinct. There was very little we knew about infected hosts biologically, and even if I did have access to the Internet I doubted I would be able to find any credible and real information if I typed zombie into Google. So far, we knew they could survive being underwater if they were already dead. The fast ones, they definitely still had sets of lungs on them, and more than a little spring in their step. I took a weary breath, and once more, took the lead.
"I think if we’re quiet, with the amount of stink and rot around the place, these two are going to be overlooked. Come on, let’s get rid of them," I said.
I whipped the duvet off the bed and started wrapping it around the old lady. Rick followed suit with the sheet, though with the old man carrying more than a couple of kilos extra around the midriff, there were problems rolling the corpse around before Rick finally got the sheet completely wrapped. He was even panting when he finished. "Seriously, Warren, I’m going to need some help with this one. He’s not exactly a racing snake."
"They’re already dead, Rick. We’re not hauling them for burial at sea, we’re throwing them in the back garden. Just drag him down the stairs already."
It was easy for me to say. The old woman barely cleared five feet in height and weighed as much as a heavy bag of spuds. I hoisted her up in a fireman’s lift, glad we’d wrapped the limbs up securely in the sheets, and strode down the stairs. In the immaculate kitchen, I tried the back door. It was surprisingly locked, given the rest of the house was an open party, but the key had been left in the door. I glanced through the glass and couldn’t see anything, dead or otherwise, ambling around in the fenced-off rear garden. I pushed the handle down and kicked the door all the way open. In the background, I heard erratic thumps and curses as Rick dragged his own burden down the stairs. I did a quick scan of the garden, not wanting to stay outdoors any longer than necessary. I marched to the bottom of the small patch of grass, unceremoniously dumping her in a patch of burgeoning flowers that she had probably carefully tended for the last umpteen years. Of all the things that she probably hadn’t wanted from her death, this should be somewhere on the safe list. At one with her garden, and probably all the wildlife within it in the coming months. I clapped my hands together a few times, ceremoniously wiping them of the unseen zombie filth, when I realised I had wrapped the knife in there with her. I contemplated the job of unwrapping it, being presented again with her wrinkly corpse, and decided it wasn’t worth freaking myself out. There were plenty more in the kitchen.
Rick emerged finally, dragging the man by his feet. I was expecting to see a trail of ooze or excrement behind him and craned my head to spot it. Surprisingly, Rick had managed to get the second corpse to its final resting place in one piece. I walked past him back into the house, ignoring his eyeballed pleas for help with the final steps of his task. I was still pissed off with him for his outburst earlier. We weren’t arguing any more, but we sure as fuck weren’t best chums again. I heard him swear at me under his breath and chose to ignore it. Rustling through cupboards, I found a couple of tins of minced beef. They would do. They probably smelt like dog food, but it was better than the wholesome nothing we were becoming used to. I opened a myriad of drawers until I opened one I thought I’d opened first. Grabbing an old butterfly tin opener that looked like it had never been used, I made short work of spilling out the slop into a large saucepan. I had been right; it did smell like dog food, and not an expensive brand, either. Tentatively clicking on the gas button on the hob—I hadn’t sniffed any odours that would indicate a leak—I was relieved to see a flame burst into life after only a few clicks of the ignition. I heated the meat gently, rustling through the freezer to see if there was anything more nutritious I could put with our makeshift dinner.
Rick came back in the door, shutting and locking it behind him. He didn’t meet my eye and I didn’t rise to the silent treatment. I found some frozen peas and threw those in the microwave.
A little lost in my domestic reverie, I didn’t pay attention to the back door. As I turned to check outside, I nearly lost my bowels as I was greeted with the snarling face of an undead. It was pressed up against the window, but had elected not to batter the door down in greeting. The snapping jaws told me it was hungry, but its silent gape meant it was thankfully one of the truly dead. I backed away slowly, food forgotten, and sidestepped into the lounge. Rick was sprawled on the sofa, cushion over his head and chest rising and falling slowly. I lifted the cushion and he lifted his eyes to me.
"What now, master?" he drawled with a lisp, imitating Igors of old. I managed a churlish smile at the reference.
"There’s something dead at the door. I think it’d be happy to speak to either of us. Don’t think he wants to tell us about Jesus though."
"Can’t you deal with just one of them?"
"Don’t want to go out there on my own if there might be more of them. How the fuck did it get in the garden?"
"Fucked if I know. Fences on all side aren’t there?"
I nodded. That’s what I had thought, too. There must be a break in the fencing somewhere. We’d have to get that fixed before nightfall.
Getting rid of one slow walker was, as Rick had already intimated, short and easy work. I opened the back door again with a hard shove that pushed the thing back on its rotting arse. Rick followed me up with a kitchen knife and stabbed it through the eye. We left the corpse where it fell and, as a two-man team, began walking the fence and prodding at it to check for weaknesses. We found our culprit behind the shed. From the looks of it, this section of fence had been down for a long time and the owners simply hadn’t done anything about it – perhaps they hadn’t even known. In its post-apocalyptic aftercare, it had been trampled down further, and our rustling around in the back garden must have caught the attention of the stumbling dead nearby. Thankfully that summed up the corpse already behind us and one legless non-entity which was trying even now to claw its way through an overgrowing and soggy garden backing onto ours— and not having much luck. I cons
idered putting it out of its misery, but it couldn’t get to us and it wasn’t attracting any other undead to our location. Stepping out into the next garden to put it down could bring even more attention to us, so I turned my back on it and waited for Rick to follow my lead. He did so silently, his face dark.
* * *
The dog food was bubbling like shit in heat, so I slid the pan off the hob, knocking off the gas and tipping the slop into two bowls. I popped the microwave and slung some peas on top of the pile, hoping my body wouldn’t rebel at the extra nutrition. Rick grabbed his bowl, and we ate in silence. It had been a tense day. Neither of us felt like exchanging pleasantries. We made sure both the doors were locked and pulled all the curtains across the windows. Sliding back in a chair each, we slipped into a short, heavy sleep. I didn’t dream. I barely remember dropping my eyelids.
CHAPTER TWO
I snapped out of heavy rest, straight into alert shock. The meagre nap hadn’t been enough. A dull ache laced my temples and a thudding behind my eyelids pulsed, imploring me to close my eyes and slumber some more. Rick however pushed another undelicious bowl of steaming slop in front of me and my nostrils forced the rest of my body into nauseous wakefulness. My body did need nutrition, no matter what disgusting form it took.
I ate again in a grumpy silence. I couldn’t see any light edging around our curtains and so I assumed it must now be night. There were no lights on in the house and I wondered if the old couple had extended their practicalities to keeping spare candles. As if responding to my unspoken thoughts, Rick threw a couple of duvets over me.
Great Bitten (Book 2): Survival Page 2