by Burke, Rowan
“Fuck you!”
I yelled, as I slammed the toilet top over his head, instantly spraying sharp pieces of ceramic material all over the place.
With the slam, I kicked it backwards into the wall, and now, out of the cubicle, I ran forward and smashed it again, knocking it against the wall and collapsed in a heap on the floor. The second zombie, now very much aware of my presence and showing a distinct lack of remorse to its brain thirsty accomplice, was in the middle of the bathroom slowly pacing towards me. The beast moaned this distinctive, low toned, demonic siren as a marching theme as he moved steadily in my direction. It was a grotesque monster, completely white eyed with green, decaying, lifeless flesh on his face and hands. It had clearly been clothed in a suit before ‘turning’, but that suit was now torn to shreds, barely covering his thighs, torso and midriff. Its mouth remained open with strings of broken skin hanging down to hold its jaw in place as it echoed moans and groans like a rotten-tooth lined megaphone. The smell of its breath hit me for six; whether it was its rotten, sore-ridden flesh or that of its victims emulating from his stomach and out of its blood stained mouth I don’t know, I really didn’t care to ask and find out, but what I did know is that its external demeanour was far from picturesque. The toilet lid was smashed to smithereens from the duel impact upon this monster’s undead friend rendering me again completely unarmed, so thinking as quickly as I could I picked up the bin next to me, smacked off the lid and threw it over the second zombie’s head to stifle his arms and cover his jaws. I walked alongside the frantic zombie before doing my best impression of a karate kick on the bin, which did the job and sent it tumbling down to the floor to join its mate.
After a brief moment looking down at the crime scene, I thought; fuck this, it’s time to go.
I leaped over the inside out carcass of the man and pelted through the two doors back into the hallway, then bolted down the two flights of stairs back into the bar. Hitting the bottom step I stopped in my tracks as I took in what I saw; it was complete carnage. There were zombies everywhere, ripping people’s limbs off and tearing people apart mercilessly. People were screaming and running in panic to any possible exit, most of whom were being caught in their attempts and pulled back into Hell. I had a very clear route to the door as the stairs were immediately after the entrance to the bar, but there was no way I was going anywhere without my brother and my pals.
It was hard to see through the army of the undead, wearing thick capes of blood, but I spotted Jon and Derek behind the bar, looking desperate to get away but confided to hiding as a zombie was tucking into some poor woman’s face just on the other side of the counter. Any move would draw attention to them, but for now they seemed to be fine.
I then saw Lance who, from what I could see, was actually embracing the invasion. He was a bit shorter than me and slightly less athletic, but he was very strong and someone you always wanted on your side in a fight. This was no exception, it seemed like the zombies in his immediate vicinity could have done with him on their side as he used bits of table and pint glasses to fend them off with great effect. He was shouting a war cry as he fought, and didn’t look like for now he was in need of any help whatsoever. In fact, I would have felt bad to interrupt his fun.
Ok, Phil? Where was Phil?
My eyes scanned the room, and far off on the other side of the pub I could see him fending off some hungry jaw-snapping zombie with half a table. He was laying on his back on the floor, holding the table upside down, using it like he were a lion tamer with a chair. The zombie put its weight on him and snapped it’s jaws wildly and dangerously in his direction; it really didn’t look like to could hold off the attacker for much longer at all.
Looking around the bar I knew to get to him was to run a gauntlet of impending doom, but he needed help. With Jon and Derek stuck and Lance otherwise engaged, I needed to get to him.
There was a distinct lack of grace and it certainly was no Moses parting of the sea, but grabbing two chair legs I ran in a straight line towards Phil, smacking every zombie in my way onto the floor. They all grabbed and swiped their sharp, decayed finger nails at me, but somehow I managed to avoid every attempt at them enjoying a ‘me’ sandwich. I was about six feet away from Phil and his attacker, and with my fast approach I used a stool as leverage to pounce high up into the air. Dropping one chair leg with my leap, I swung the other into a grip of both hands with the sharp end facing down. As I landed, with all my might I thrust almost the entire object through the zombie’s skull, pinning him to a bench, and getting him the fuck away from my friend. Cunt.
Neither of us said anything. I panted from my sudden burst of energy - it certainly wasn’t a normal action after so much alcohol consumption. Phil looked shocked, adopting a ‘what the fuck is happening’ expression across his face. There was no time to sit and chat about what was going on, just an unspoken sure-fire determination to get up and get gone. As I pulled Phil to his feet, we in unison took to getting Jon and Derek to safety. Phil grabbed an umbrella from the grasp of an old man’s fist, which unfortunately for him was no longer attached to the rest of his body. Learning from my weapon of choice previously being a success, I grabbed the second chair leg again, and we both hurtled toward the bar, knocking down anything in our way like polystyrene skittles. I don’t know why or how, but for some reason as we got to the bar, Phil managed to get the zombies at bay by opening and closing the umbrella really quickly, like he was trying to scare birds at the seaside. It may have been bafflement, but I didn’t care; whatever the reason, it kept those snapping- tooth fuckers away long enough for me to grab the other two and pull them onto the consumer side of the bar to join us. Jon and Derek both picked up glasses and bottles as we slowly and cautiously edged toward the door, launching them at any zombie who tried to get to us. They were slow, but plentiful, and we had to keep our wits about us. I grabbed Lance’s arm; his fun had to stop some time but he was full of adrenaline and still fighting hard. Admitting it was time to go, he backed away, keeping a firm eye on any potential assailants, and eventually joined us four as we gingerly retreated. With the exit now in sight, we stopped, counted down from three, and fucking ran.
Running out of the front door instantly showed that the streets of Fleet was experiencing the same reckless carnage as inside the pub, so there was no time to stop and smell the zombies. We all stood in the road, looking around us as undead were chasing people down and tucking into them, ignoring their prey’s pleas for mercy or screams of pain. People were sprinting in random directions, meeting trouble, then turning and sprinting another way to meet equal problems. It was quickly turning into a fenceless prison, zombies rounding up helpless citizens like herds of sheep before pouncing and sinking their teeth in. Everyone was panicking; terrified by the sudden introduction of these flesh eaters who seemed hell-bent on devouring everyone they could without thought, mercy or reasoning.
We stood in the road, all five of us, staring in awe at the terror unfolding around us.
“Where shall we go?”
Shouted Derek
My mind raced to a late night conversation in my old gaff on the high street, above a series of shops, only a couple of buildings down from where we were. I remember clearly depicting the benefits of the flat should there be a zombie apocalypse, but in that playful hypothetical conversation many people have had, not actually expecting it to ever come into fruition. Irrespectively, the conversation’s consensus was that it was the perfect place should there ever be an outbreak, and it was fortuitously a couple of minutes away from where we were standing.
“My old place”
I replied, and coursed my feet in that direction.
2.
I hadn’t lived in my old flat for well over two years, almost three in fact, but I still remembered the security code for the door to the stairs leading up to the flats from the high street. Punching in the numbers, I held the door for the others who ran straight up the concrete stairwell, following them before slammin
g the door back into its previously locked state.
The flat was on a concrete rise about 12ft in the air, overlooking the high street on one side and a private car park on the other. The side we ran up was concrete, which stretched across a six-house walkway before hitting a set of steel stairs at the other side that lead down to the carpark. The entire area looked somewhat deserted as the carpark was tricky to get to from the high street which was on the other side of the houses. The area was conveniently hidden, and noticing it to be a zombie-free zone, we stopped for a moment and tried to catch our breath.
“Let’s try each house”
Jon suggested.
“See if anyone is home”
My old place was the second to last house at the end of the strip, so we knocked on the other four on the way to see if anyone was home, soon revealing the act to be pointless as received no response. I guess we could have entered any house as were all exactly the same, but remembered hiding a key in my old place when I lived there. Quite fortuitously, the key I had hidden was still sitting undisturbed in the gutter above the door, so with care I clicked the lock and watchfully entered the property.
An old lady and her son had taken over the maisonette after Ashley and I had vacated it, yet after scoping both floors it looked as though they were gone. Their car had disappeared too, so they either got out of here at the first sign of danger or were conveniently away, convenient for both them and us. Wherever they were, we had a place to stay hidden, a place to try and stay safe but we had things to do before lying low.
Checking my phone I could see a message from Ashley asking what we were up to. She clearly hadn’t heard anything about the outbreak just yet, but the good news was that I knew she was OK. I told Phil the good news which gave him the same sense of relief I had felt – our women were fine, they were safe, and it didn’t seem like the zombies were in New York, maybe not even America, at least for now anyway. I tried to text her back; maybe not to tell her what was happening or that there were zombies attacking, but more so she knew we were OK in case the news got to her of what was happening. Plus if the news hadn’t made its way to her yet and I told her we were being attacked by zombies, she’d most likely just assume I had taken some kind of suspect substance and dismiss the whole thing. My attempt to reply was struck short though as we all checked our phones and it became abundantly clear that every mobile phone provider was down with none of us having any signal at all. It was a real fucking downer, not only because I couldn’t reply to the message she must have sent me before the servers were lost, but also because it disenabled us to contact any other loved ones, or even to contact one another should we get separated for whatever reason. Now deemed pointless, inanimate objects, we chucked all our phones on the floor.
Now we had a sensible place to be and fend off the inevitable attacks, first thing in the agenda was to block the stairwells.
The door we came through was locked, but it was still glass, and seeing that those two zombies made extremely light of that poor guy’s stomach in the pub made me realise they were far from weak; that glass would last about as long as his skin did. Rightly or wrongly, we smashed our way into the first four houses as it looked as though all their residents had also got themselves somewhere else. We took all the food and drink we could, along with anything we could use as a weapon back to my old place. We now had a small army of knives, baseball bats, garden tools, a small chainsaw and golf clubs, and Lance had found a long handled carpenter’s hammer, which looked pretty mean indeed. We were all ready just in case we were called into action. Ultimately, it was a battle none of us particularly wanted, actually it was one none of us fancied at all, aside from maybe Lance, but fuck me were we ever ready for it should it come.
We then stripped each house of its furniture, creating blockades at the bottom of each set of external stairs at either side of the strip, doing so with both mathematical precision and also sensitive care so as not to create noise and thus, attention. These maisonettes were all two stories with three bedrooms, generous kitchens and outstretched living rooms with plenty of storage room on top, so furniture came plentifully. We had desks, beds, cupboards, draws, sofas, sideboards, and loads of other bits and bobs to build up our zombie-stopping barricades, and even though our actions were dictated by a fearful shadow of a potentially decapitating apocalypse, after a couple of hours of hard shifting and building, we stared at our work with a sincere level of pride and comradery.
After everything was built, we were deep into the darkness of the night. As hard as it was to switch off, we knew we’d need to get some rest in order to be fresh and ready for whatever faced us tomorrow. One of the neighbours had a nice 20 year malt scotch which we cordially acquired and with which we raised a ‘cheers’ as a nightcap. Settling down next to each other in the living room, it wasn’t long before we fell into a deep slumber. We could hear screams, smashes, explosions and what sounded like gunshots echoing the streets, but we had exhausted ourselves both mentally and physically, unaided by the beers consumed before the events of the evening unfolded, so sleep came relatively easy.
It was the sunlight that woke me first, rudely creeping through the curtain in the slightest slit and making its way into my eye line. But it was the external banging at the front door that woke all five of us. Confused, we all arose and stared at one another, soon escaping the post-sleep bafflement and realizing it wasn’t one of us who was causing the commotion. We sprung to our feet in panic, Jon and Phil taking position at the left and right side of the living room door frame, golf club in hand, as Jon darted into the kitchen and Lance and I up the stairs. The kitchen and front door had previously been giant bay windows, but we boarded them up during our barricading session with fear that they were far too easy to smash should anything get through our preliminary line of defense. A tiny gap between two sheets of wood we used to board up the kitchen window enabled Jon to try and see who, or indeed what, was banging at the door, but didn’t have enough of an angle to make out our potentially unwelcome caller.
“Hello?!”
Called a voice from outside.
“Is anyone in there?!”
Ok, well at least we know it’s human.
The front of the house sported a thick porch veranda which stuck out over the door. . During my time leaving here, I frequently used it as a way of breaking in when I locked myself out, which was a frequent occurrence for me, so had to hoist myself up onto it and crawl through the always open bathroom window. Part of our barricading session included reinforcing the veranda and converting it to a lookout styled balcony with a ladder up to the roof, and a secondary removable ladder used to get down to the concrete walkway. I snuck out of the window, and crawled belly down onto the veranda to look down at our visitor. Lance crept behind me, yielding his hammer and standing guard. I peered over the ledge to see a man wearing blue jeans and a clean white t-shirt. This was a prosperous look as permitted me to easily scope him for signs of any injuries, or more specifically, bites. He seemed clean, but he was fucking loud, and I could see a few zombies not too far off in the distance across the fields that can’t have been so far away that they wouldn’t notice his cries for help.
“Shut up, you fuck”
I hissed.
The man looked up at me and stepped back, shielding his eyes from the morning sun to make out my face.
“Help me!”
He yelled at a decibel still far too loud.
“I said shut up!”
I pointed across the fields in the direction of the zombies, silhouetted on the horizon.
“They will hear you, and they will kill you!”
The man calmed himself and toned down to just above a whisper, matching me.
“What’s your name?”
“Carl”
“Ok Carl, how did you get up here, through our barricades? Did you ruin all our hard work?”
Carl shook his head.
“I live next door with my girlfriend, we were hiding upstairs
in a cupboard as heard someone smashing up all the other flats”
That may have been us…
“We were terrified it was one of them so we hid and waited. When we came out this morning after the noise had subsided, we saw the barricades and that every house had been stripped but ours, and this one was boarded up like a fortress”.
It dawned on me that as Carl’s was the last flat, which somehow escaped our smash and grab antics. We didn’t even check to see if anyone was home. It was dangerous and neglectful of us not to check everything, which I put down to exhaustion, but took a moment to vow to myself it wouldn’t happen again as could have potentially put everyone in danger. We were negligent, and negligence in a scenario such as this would inevitably cost lives.
“Carl, are you injured?”