by Burke, Rowan
14.
My foot had started showing signs of spasm, moving uncontrollably and causing me to stand peg-legged to avoid risk of falling over. There was a new pain unveiling itself; a third pain adding to the fun of the break and the bite. It was a warm, tingling pain that sent bullets up through my leg, causing the whole thing to seize, like I were being electrocuted in small, quick, but very painful charges. The injury was getting harder and harder to cover up; eventually I was going to have to tell my friends that I have been bitten. But then what? What kind of position would that put them in? They wouldn’t throw me out with the wave, I know they wouldn’t do that. They would try and get me to carry on hiding it until we were safe, until we had reached the Isle of Wight or maybe even got into Europe. They would never discard me, but ultimately that could be their demise. Was I going to turn? And if so, when? If I turned on the boat or in a small, confined area, I could unbeknown to my normal, human self be of harm to them and everyone else on the vessel. They were three strong male adults, sure, but if they weren’t paying attention, even for a second, I could inflict pain even in the sense of one bite to them, and that was a risk I simply couldn’t take.
I was no expert on when I would turn. I mean, really no one ever could be. You could document people turning and study the time, but those who would know for sure were those who now walked the Earth seeking the blood of others. They weren’t human anymore, and something told me that sitting them down for a coffee to ask them a couple of questions would most likely not go to plan. I could have minutes, hours, days, or just seconds, who knew? Again I thought back to Stacey; She must have been within 24 hours I would guess, and her bite was more central. She turned from human to zombie in mere minutes, but the total process from bite to turning was probably about a day. I was only an hour or so in now, so felt like I may have time. Perhaps I could make it to the other side of the sea and be treated? A blood transfusion perhaps? I was no doctor; maybe they had found a way of isolating the infecting cells? I could be saved from this.
However, all my hope seemed unlikely. All my possible positive outcomes to me were futile. If there was a cure, we probably would have seen signs of it, even as late in the day as being here. I don’t think many people were spending a lot of time seeing if they can help the infected, but more so making every effort to get away from them. The Army was under strict orders not to let anyone who even had a hint of infection through, despite their leniency with me which really was just a momentary lapse in concentration during an attack. So with no zombies getting off the island, I knew in my heart no one would be working on a cure, outside of the UK anyway. If someone was working on a cure within the island then it could be months or even years before they are discovered, assuming that they even make it out at all. I simply had to be true to myself, true to the situation I was in; that I should under no circumstances risk the lives of others by leaving Britain. Hope may come in other forms for me, but this wasn’t it, this was not my escape.
“They’re in the tunnel!”
The call came from behind us, which immediately preceded a huge unleash of gunfire on our side of the tunnel; soldiers flowing in as plentifully as possible, sparing every man they could to try and hold the wave back. From where we were, and with the dip down into the passageway, we couldn’t see what was actually happening, who for now was winning the battle, but we could hear the reverbed noise and it was deafening. The gunfire echoed around the air, thick and rapid. The piercing screams of the zombies were soon met with those of the soldiers as they cried out in agony, giving us a clear aural stipulation that more and more of the guys fighting our cause were meeting a horrific ending. More soldiers flooded in, but with every passing moment the deafening cloud of gunshot was subsiding, indication the battle was being won by the enemy, and ultimately that we were all in very serious danger. With most of the Army becoming increasingly out of the picture, should the zombies breakthrough then we stood no chance; the women and children would be brutally murdered and then eaten in front of their families before they too met the same fate. My friends and everyone else still standing would use every ounce of their strength to fend off the zombies. But if they fend off one, there’ll be another just behind. If they fend of the second, a tertiary zombie will be behind it, and so on and so forth until the fighter’s energy diminishes and they are forced to submit. We can never win this if they get through, so someone needed to make sure they didn’t.
One of the soldiers who had been shot was lying on the floor very close to us. The explosion from the helicopter had fired him across the beach where he now lay in a heap, or at least most of him did anyway. Around his waist was a belt with three grenades strapped to it. I averted my gaze down to the three grenades before looking up and catching Phil’s eye.
“Don’t.”
Tina, Derek and Jon turned to see the reason for Phil’s instruction, but my mind was made up.
“Make sure you get out of here. And when you do, tell Ashley I love her. Tell her, I’m with my brother and we’re doing fine”
I bent down and quickly pulled the grenades off the soldier’s belt before sprinting toward the car, the engine still running as it was sitting abandoned on the sand and pebbles. The boys chased after me, but I was that split second quicker than them which allowed me to get into the car and lock the doors. Phil banged on the window as Jon tried to pull the door open, Derek hobbling on his wounded leg to stand in front of the car in some hopeless attempt to stop me. They didn’t know I’d been bitten, so I guess to them it seemed unnatural and unprovoked for me to take the reins, to try and save them from the death that awaited them a mere half mile down an open tunnel. Phil stopped for a moment and stared me in the eyes.
“Don’t do it!”
He mouthed again.
I stared at him for a moment, and through my tears I told him.
“I’ve been bitten”
I mouthed back.
“I’m infected, and I have to go”
He looked shocked, lowering his head and closing his eyes. His lip quivered as he began sobbing tears of acceptance onto the beach below him, before looking back up. I know he was trying to say something, but I didn’t want any more prolonged goodbyes, any more heart ache or torment, so I looked forward, dead set on the tunnel. I needed to go, and I needed to go now.
Revving the engine, I spun the back wheels firing fountains of beach rocks up into the air. The back threw out momentarily, then the wheels caught grip on the ground and I accelerated forwards. I appreciated Derek’s attempt to stop me but he certainly didn’t want to get hit by a car, so as he realised I had no intention of stopping, he immediately dived out of the way into a combat roll across the beach.
I don’t know how the guys and Tina looked as I shot off, refusing to look back or glance in the rear view mirror. I would miss these guys terribly, but I wanted to remember the good times we’d had and keep them as my lasting memory, not signs of sadness of hatred or remorse or whatever else they may have been portraying behind me. I thought of everything we had gone through in this whole ordeal; every bit of risk of sacrifice one person had made for the other, every ounce of heroism and comradery that had gotten us to this beach in the first place, everything that had given us the courage and the confidence to believe we could make it out. Lance, Stacey, Mark, Damian, Carl, Kate; every single one of them was as determined and frightened as we were but weren’t as lucky as we had been to get this far. Our bond was strong, and perhaps if one of those guys we lost had someone like I had those three then they would have made it out too. I wanted to thank them by doing this, and do what I could for everyone else on the beach in the process. I genuinely meant what I had told them to tell Ashley too; that I would be with my brother and we would be fine. We weren’t religious by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I knew that my brother was quite vocally agnostic at times, but I found some comfort in imagining an afterlife where he was there waiting for me; reunited once again, brothers in arms.
&
nbsp; Inevitably I took out a couple of soldiers with the car. I didn’t mean or intend to, but I was on a mission now and couldn’t swerve for anyone. It was only a matter of seconds before I was plummeted into the darkness of the tunnel anyway so it was impossible to maneuver around what or who I simply couldn’t see, ploughing forward as I heard bodies roll up over the car and bang across the roof before thudding on the ground behind me.
The car lights had never worked, so I had now lost pretty much all visual, driving as fast as I could in complete blackness using only the dim light ahead of the tunnel’s entrance as a target to aim for. The entrance was the only thing I had to help me try and keep the car straight. I waited until was about two thirds down, and as I heard one of those piercing screams just in front of me, I pulled the pins on all three grenades before launching one out the passenger side window and two out of the drivers’. Slamming my foot down as hard as I could on the pedal, I held my breath. Just in that brief moment, everything went completely silent. Everything was peaceful and tranquil, and I closed my eyes for a moment of solitude before I started counting down.
3….
I hope this saves the people on the beach.
2….
I hope this saves my friends.
1….
I’m coming, brother.
BOOM.
15.
All means of telling time were long since gone. I struggled to find a working watch or clock anywhere and there hadn’t been any electricity for months now. I was relying purely on keeping track of the sunsets and making a mental note of how many I had seen. As I stared up to see yet another ignite the sky with its vibrant oranges and luscious reds scattered across the broad atmospheric canvas, I wondered just how many there had actually been since I last saw another person. If I were pushed to give a definitive timeframe, I’d estimate that it was probably three weeks, give or take a day, since the incident at the beach. I should have started a tally, perhaps marking the sunsets on my arm or on a wall somewhere, but it seemed utterly pointless to monitor something that simply had no meaning anymore.
The explosion from the three grenades had caused the exact outcome I had desired; blowing out the roof of the tunnel and causing the mass amount of land above it to cave in. The explosion resulted in the underpass being blocked off completely, disenabling anything to get through it, and in the process taking out a significant chunk of the invading zombies. The latter part, although an added bonus, had little long term advantage as the waves would continue to come from the millions of ‘turned’ infected monsters who still dwelled in the UK. They would continue to come in the masses and parade the island determinedly searching for something, or someone to eat. But the collapsed tunnel meant everyone on that beach, Derek, Jon, Phil and Tina included, had the opportunity to get away, to get off the island, to get to help and safety.
I prayed that the carnage of the beach had subsided with the threat removed. The panic of approaching zombies was diminished by the collapse of the tunnel as the fence above it was still strong and unaffected by the explosion.
I took a quick look back after I made it through; the power of the grenades propelled the car with me in it up the ramp to the entrance, firing both vehicle and I a fair distance in the air before nose diving back to the ground. I had fortunately belted up; I’m not an idiot, but the impact winded me and hurt me pretty bad. In fact, a shard of metal from the front of the car had sliced through the driver’s side and straight through my shin, completely slicing my foot off altogether. Either good or bad fortune, whichever way you wanted to look at it, the car crash resulted in the loss of my foot, my infected foot, my foot that had essentially provoked me into driving the car in the first place. Irony’s a bitch sometimes.
As I lay there in the driver’s seat, under any normal circumstance I think I would have passed out from the pain of losing a significant portion of a limb; I doubt there’s anyone who would normally be able to carry on without passing out to be completely honest. Yet I had suffered so much agony on this foot, so much pain and irritation ever since I smashed it on the hard concrete of the high street that losing it as crazy as it sounds actually relinquished some pain; it gave me a release I could have only obtained by either losing it or by weeks of uninterrupted rest and a heavy dose of very strong pain killers. The latter was a long term albeit better solution, but the former had come at the only time where an optimist could have considered it beneficial.
Aside the pain, I knew I had to get out of there. I took out about 75% of the zombies with the explosion I would say at a guess, but there was still a quarter of them still swiping fiercely at the fence in attempt to get to those on the beach. The beach dwellers were safe now, the zombies were never going to get them however hard they tried, but they could easily get me, and I wasn’t running anywhere.
Gingerly, I popped my head out of the car like a meerkat as I did my best to stifle my moans of agony. They had fortunately ignored the car wreckage entirely, still remaining distracted by those still on the beach, but any hint of movement or noise would definitely have attracted them. If one saw me, the others would soon follow, at which point I’d be completely and utterly fucked.
The car was unsalvageable and there were no other means of transportation for me to exploit, so, grabbing a loose piece of wood on the ground, I carefully pulled myself up on my lone foot and as quietly as I could I hopped off in the other direction.
Avoiding bodies or any other remnants of bodies dispersed across the ground, I kept low and quiet, ducking down and using the remains of unfortunate people as shelter when I feared the zombies may had been looking over in my direction. It was a long and gruelling process, taking a brief sabbatical on my route to attend to the stump where my foot used to be; it was auspiciously a clean cut straight through so the metal must have been fired through the car at some immense force. Tying a new tourniquet over the old one, I used whatever fabric I could find to wrap it up tight and stop the excessive bleeding. Standard infection was also a risk let alone the zombie infection itself, so I knew I had to get somewhere really soon in order to treat it properly, or as properly as a person with zero medical training possibly could.
For now, it was just about stopping the blood pouring out and getting as far away as possible from the zombies. One sniff of me and they’d be over far quicker than I could attempt to get away. I was lucky to survive both the crash and the explosion, so the culmination of my actions being torn limb from limb by the zombies was of very little interest to me.
After about an hour, I managed to get far enough away from the beach to hide myself behind some of the coastline buildings. However otiose it was, I knew the zombies were ruthless enough not to give up on the fence at the beach for at least a day, parading it in effort to find any weak spots or ware it down enough to break through. I had faith in that fence; it was strong and cleverly erected, perhaps so as the Army had more time on it than they did the initial two which would have needed to go up immediately in order to control any further outbreaks abroad. Again, it also had no points of entry; no gates or doors or hidden passage ways, so there were no weak spots for the zombies to find and exploit. They could try, and try they certainly would, but I seriously doubted their success, at least before the people on the beach had apt time to make a getaway. Finding a local shop, it was evident that this, as probably a large majority of other stores, had been looted for all it was worth. Whether it was by kids taking advantage of the crisis or people who just stocked up on supplies before laying low or travelling elsewhere I didn’t know, but was thankful that they had been kind enough to leave me the following:
1x Unopened Tuna sandwich,
1x Tin of Chicken Flavour cat food,
1x Bottle of vodka and
1x Bottle of fizzy drink.
The latter I downed in seconds, suddenly realising I hadn’t had anything to drink for a very long time. The sandwich, albeit Tuna which I normally hated still went down a treat, again with the realisation I hadn�
�t eaten in some time either. I was starving, so eating cat food was the least of my problems, wolfing down a tin of jelly chicken chunks and thinking it tasted like the best meal I had ever had. I used most of the vodka to clean my wound; it stung like a bitch but it had to be done to at least minimise the risk of a general infection. The very last bit of the bottle I swigged back down my throat, providing a little extra strength and perhaps a hint of Dutch courage in order for me to get up and carry on.