by Burke, Rowan
“We know, mate. We know”
Phil reassured him, verbally emphasizing the hand still patting his back.
Carl and Stacey had been together since he was 17, so most of his stories had involved Stacey in one way or another. Although I was concerned that she may be infected, and that there may not be an opportunity to make any new stories as a couple, I felt, or maybe hoped, that what Carl said earlier emulated a sense of truth; maybe it’s not like the movies and a bite isn’t the end. It’s been a while now, and he was absolutely right; she seemed fine…
Acknowledging Carl’s apology, we continued getting ready before heading into the living room to discuss the plan. We had been busy for half an hour or so, trying to ignore the noise the zombies were making with both their accumulative moans plus their persistent attempts to tear down our barricades, hurtling clumps of furniture behind them as they covered more and more ground. I had found a belt, in which I cut to slits on either side and slid in plastic ice lolly making trays in as holsters. I put in a kitchen knife on either side, taping foam around the top of both holsters to hold the knives steady and hopefully reduce the risk of self-infliction. Stacey quite understandably hadn’t been helping; she was hurt so we thought nothing of her resting in the living room and not getting involved. But knowing she needed weapons too if we were going to brave the zombies I walked into the living room to give her the belt. My weaponry concoction was fucking cool as shit, so I was reluctant to give it away, but knew she’d be able to use it well, plus probably wasn’t strong enough with her injury to hurl around a golf club or cricket bat.
The living room was starting to look as cataclysmic as the outside world; there were clear signs of our earlier struggle, picture frames and crockery smashed all over the place and the coffee table crumbled to the floor after Jon and Carl wrestled on it. The curtains were still just about closed, which seemed pointless as every zombie fucker in Fleet now clearly knew where we were, but with a thin line of sunlight creeping through the central gaps to give a sullied drug den feel to the room. It had transitioned from a homely, well decorated living room as it was only a few days ago, to a dark, hot, derelict box filled with old food, splattered with blood and sweat. As I walked in to give Stacey her knife belt I noticed her standing in the far corner facing the wall.
“Stacey?”
She didn’t answer.
“Stacey? Are you ok?”
Again, I received no reply.
I warily made my way towards her, carefully moving bits of furniture out of my path. Standing 2ft from her I leant forward slowly and cautiously, fighting for a clear vision through the rays of light shooting through the cracks between the dusty, grey curtains.
“Stacey…?”
She was subtly swaying side to side during the entirety of my approach, yet the latter call of her name seemed to be the one that wasn’t unnoticed. Her head raised ever so slightly, causing a painful sounding series of cracks from her neck, like someone squeezing bubble wrap. Her feet shuffled matching the momentum of her sway, turning gradually yet maintaining the stiffness of her initial stature. It took a good 15 seconds to get all the way around, which may sound quick, but for a person to face one direction from another it’s an eternity. I still couldn’t quite make her out, only her shape silhouetted by the darkness of the room’s corner. I winced back as my heart dropped. Stacey took a step forward, followed by another, then a third to bring herself into the light protruding from the slit of the curtain. The sun ray crept up her body, revealing more and more blood from her bite wound, and as it edged up past her torso and neck, my worst fear materialised as the light eventually exposed her face; Her once soft, delicate beauty had been replaced with green, decrepit skin. Her eyes, once big, blue and glistening, were now completely white and soulless. They looked dry, the looked lifeless, and they were looking straight through me.
Oh fuck. She’s gone.
Stacey, or what was Stacey, launched toward me, hands wide and outstretched looking to latch onto my clothes or flesh. Her teeth started rapidly biting the air like a rabid dog or cannibalistic pac-man, slamming the top row so heavily against the bottom that they instantly started chipping and cracking, making them sharper and awkwardly jagged. I knew getting anywhere near her or her jaws was suicide, so acting as quickly as my mind would permit me I took out both knives from my home made belt before slamming each of them through both of her shoulders, piercing all the way through her skin and pinning her back on the wall. My action didn’t stop her biting and clawing at me, but meant she was securely affixed at a safe distance until I could figure out what the fuck to do next.
“Get in here!”
I roared.
“Get the fuck in here! Now!”
All five gents ran in with panicked expressions, weapons in hand ready for whatever awaited them. Jon, Derek, my brother and Phil instantly backed off after seeing Stacey mounted up like a moving portrait of Hell on Earth. Carl ran in a few seconds behind, rather unfortunately timed as he was now equipped with a chainsaw in his hands which we had found in one of the neighbour’s sheds during our smash and grab session. The chainsaw wasn’t running yet, but one of his hands was firmly grasping the pull chord, ready to start the contraption should the necessitation arise.
He bolted in the room expecting action, expecting to help Stacey and I, expecting anything except what he saw. Running in and instantly scouting Stacey, he stopped in his tracks, seeing his beloved girlfriend covered in blood, writhing around in her monstrous state with two knives through her shoulders holding her in place. Dropping the chainsaw to the ground, he slowly continued to walk toward her, his mouth moving but no words escaping his lips, and his eyes quickly filling with a thick, protruding layer of tears.
“wh…what is this?”
He looked at us for answers, two of us evading his gaze, the other three staring straight at him. He, as did all of us, knew exactly what was happening, but we felt allowing the silence for him to process what he saw was important. Plus it appeared that none of us could stifle up the courage to say anything.
“She was ok. She was…she was fine? She had a bite. Only a bite! It’s been days since she was bitten. Days! It was only one bite. She was fine! Absolutely fucking fine!”
Carl fell to his knees in front of her, carefully keeping just outside of her grasp. His chin pulled into his chest as the tears took over. He sobbed uncontrollably, liquid pouring from his nose, eyes and mouth, punching the floor with both fists as it clattered down to the carpet. Stacey continued to writhe, biting at Carl and making failed attempt after failed attempt at grabbing him. Carl lifted his head to look through his tears into her eyes, then leant back to scream in agony. His cry conjured up the deepest of emotion in the rest of us, having to palm tears away from our eyes whilst we watched him fall to pieces.
The culminations of his cry lead him to sob inconsolably, wrapping his arms around his body in a clear state of hysterics. The tears soon subsided as he started taking sharp, deep breaths and shaking his head.
“This was your fault”
He pushed back tears as his angst took another turn to anger.
“This was you.”
He pushed himself to his feet, eluding our attempts at visual contact. On his raise back up to standing, Carl grabbed the handle of the chainsaw with one hand, and the pull chord with the other, before jerking it back for an unsuccessful rumble of the power tool.
“Carl, easy now”
Pleaded Jon, palms raised in a hopeful calming motion.
“Just think about what you’re doing here”
Another pull of the chord, causing a momentary chug, but again to no avail.
“Carl”
The rest of us joined in with the pleading.
“Come on now, we know you’re upset”
Another pull.
“UPSET?”
He shrieked in retort; with a fourth unsuccessful yank of the chord.
“UPSET?! She was my world, she was my every
thing, my soulmate. But you know that I’m UPSET?!”
His fifth pull was his final one, releasing a loud petrol induced chugging noise which, accompanied by the fast rotating chain indicated that we were in trouble.
We all backed into the far corner of the room, the opposite to where Stacey was permanently perched, scuffling tightly into a five man ball. Kicking the remains of the coffee table between Carl and ourselves, we picked up every weapon we could and raised them up toward Carl in what appeared to be an ultimately vain attempt in stopping the inevitable massacre.
Why didn’t I grab the shitting chainsaw??
We had little confidence on how this was going to go down; having to defend a fast rotating power tool used to cut down trees with chair legs and other such inanimate objects that this bloody saw is going to make warm butter of did not fill us with any self-assurance. Oh. Shit. Maybe it won’t be the zombies that get us after all; it’s going to be crazy distraught vengeful Carl who does the honours of removing our limbs from our bodies. I really didn’t see that coming.
With a confident step in our direction, Carl’s deranged exterior discharged a terrifying war-cry, and just as we thought we were about to have a pretty fucked up fight, he turned away and ran down the corridor, across the broken glass and wood from the front of the house, then right out of the small concrete garden toward the steel stair barricades.
Standing in momentary shock, all four of us stared with bafflement at the wake of Carl’s outside run.
“What….the….fuck.”
A sudden smack back into reality erupted as Stacey loudly pulled one shoulder free of its steel blade imprisonment, showering a thick stream of blood across her side of the room. Not only was her radius now wider, with plenty more room for swiping and clawing, she also now had a hand free to take out the other knife should she be smart enough to figure that out. The latter seemed pretty likely to come into effect.
“Right, shall we go then”
Politely suggested Phil, said as if he were proposing a move from afternoon Pimms to a game of croquet.
It wasn’t possible for us to vacate the property by leaving out the front door. Noise of Carl yelling obscenities whilst waving his chainsaw around were still pretty prominent out there, as was there a strong army of zombies angrily awaiting their next meal. It turns out Carl was bat shit crazy, but his antics seem to be keeping the zombies back for the short term at least.
The roof was futile, and staying in the living room would be like waiting in a coffin, so there was only one option; down. Not out by the carpark, which swarmed with intently hungry flesh-eaters, but down onto the high street through the window. The high street, having glanced out through the curtains, was actually now pretty clear from what we could see. Most of the zombies had assumedly made their way or were indeed making their way into the carpark, which wasn’t easy to get to from the rest of town and therefore an interchangeable complication. It was easy to spot a couple of our undead chums lurking by bus stops or in the shadows of the off-streets, but being able to count them on two hands gave an element of hope compared to the abacus load in the other direction. If any did spot us, they would be so far away that we felt confident an outrun was in the offing, permitting adequate time to peg it somewhere else before they had an opportunity to see where we were going.
The window to the concrete pavement below was much too high for us to jump and would have certainly caused injury, so an educated decision was made to scout for some rope. Unfortunately for us, none of the residents were budding rock climbers, so making a sensible assumption that gardening string probably wouldn’t hold, we opted to follow inspiration from watching many the prison movie and use bed sheets. Tying the sheets around the window frame and strips of clothes around our palms to avoid rope burn, Derek was the first to descend down to the hard surface of the street below. Under normal circumstances, I think all of us would have hesitated before the descent, perhaps allowing the dread of falling take over and act as a detriment. But when we had already seen Jon, the most apprehensive and cautious of all of us, try to cave a guy’s head in with a hammer, it didn’t look like any of us were going to let a bit of a drop get the better of us. However, not quite ascertaining an understanding of the physics behind the strength of both a window frame and a bed sheet when holding a climber, we thought it be better to permit each descendant a lone climb down before the next person took on the challenge.
Our climbing music was ecliptic and abstract, emitting a melody of a running chainsaw, anger fuelled shouting, zombie choir moans, and Stacey not shutting the fuck up. We were all music lovers, Derek himself actually writing scores for films, but this wasn’t a backing track that necessarily got our toes tapping, nor did it fill us with any level of confidence. But sure enough, after 60 odd seconds of graceful abseiling using floral patterned bedsheets, Derek got the soles of both feet firmly on the ground below with little fuss. A quick look around preceded a vertical thumbs to give the go ahead for climber number two. Phil and I encouraged Jon to be the next to take the plunge, and after hearing Carl’s outside screams hit an octave higher, he was only too happy to oblige. The same action followed, the three remaining helped as Jon edged over the window sill, back to the floor, and slowly moonwalked the bricks until he too was ‘safely’ on solid ground. Phil followed suit, and again signified another thumbs of for the fourth climber to ascend.
Stacey was noticeably moving more, meaning the remaining knife was on its last legs. At a guess, I would have said we had two minutes before she was free to roam, and I had a sneaky suspicion she was coming straight for us the moment she broke free. With a so far average time of about one minute to get down the sheet-rope to the high street, it was looking pretty tight to get us both down before Stacey came a-chomping. I signalled Lance to go next; there was no time for debate, so he too leant backwards out through the living room window. Lance hadn’t quite settled his legs for his first step yet when the chainsaw noise suddenly stopped. We had grown accustomed to the sound, amalgamated with that of Carl and the moaning of the zombies, so the sudden audio exclusion meant the silence was deafening. There was still a moan from the zombies, yet it seemed now to be one bass tone, humming on a constant note like a cello playing in a horror film to create suspense. Lance hadn’t started his descent yet, still high enough to see through the window back inside the suicide box from whence he came. I leant out the window, holding Lance’s arm whilst he set himself for the climb, but now was glancing back into the room over my right shoulder. The silence had stunned us; it had left us more apprehensive than the abundance of noise from only a few moments before. The sudden reduction had plummeted us down a log flume from a height of hope into the depths of anxiety.
I don’t know why we waited, why we had to pay such dedicative attention to what was happening, or indeed what was about to happen, but we did; we waited wide eyed with our hearts beating out of our chests, scanning the once secured fortress for a source of silence.
In an instant, the silence exploded to memories passed as Carl pelted back into the room holding a canister of petrol, slamming the living room door behind him and proceeding to move the sofas in front of it. He looked a state the last time we saw him, but an emotional state, not the state he was now. His once white shirt was no longer white, covered in dirt and blood and ripped beyond recognition. He wore bits of Zombies as jewellery, splattered all over his entire body. His jeans were ripped, and he had somehow lost a shoe to reveal a blackened, blistered foot, cut to shreds on the sole and smearing blood across the carpet with every step. Desperation commandeered his face, the fear now evidently taking prowess over the anger, torment and vengeance, with blood oozing from his hairline, across his face and down his neck. He looked utterly exhausted, and utterly beaten, but still had a distinct demeanour of determination; like even in his weakened, bloodied, beaten black and blue state he still wasn’t ready to give up the fight just yet. Before he could get the first sofa in place, the door began to rattle and
push ajar as decayed arms wrapped around it, swiping with random aggression and hurtful intent. Slamming the door against the arms, Carl moved to lift the second sofa to put it on his new, less convincing barricade, to which I moved in order to aid his seemingly futile attempts at keeping the zombies out.
“GO!”
He screamed at me.
“Go now! Get the fuck out of here!”
Carl didn’t take time to stop in order to yell his instruction at me, busying himself persistently to chuck as much in the pile as he possibly could. I didn’t like leaving him alone, I knew he had done a lot for us outside with the chainsaw, keeping the intruders at bay for that little bit longer to enable us time to regroup and escape. Yet looking at him, covered in blood, limping, wincing in pain with every move, I also knew he was done for and trying to help him get out the window down to the others would be wasted energy which would inevitably end up in him turning too.
It was pointless to thank him; He wouldn’t have heard it, but I honestly don’t believe it was something he needed to hear. His actions may have been out of vengeance because of what happened to Stacey, but we will always think of him as the one that saved us, giving us the time we needed to get out of the flat, and for that we will all be eternally grateful. But for now, Lance and I needed to get the fuck out of here and down to the other guys so we can get running. With a heavy heart, I silently nodded Carl as he blocked the door with the last bit of furniture he could find, then turned to Lance and nodded for him to climb down. We were still looking OK for time, and again thanks to Carl distracting Stacey it would appear that we still had at least two minutes for my brother and I to get down to join our friends.