by RR Haywood
It comes to a stop with the sound of braking and the engine growing less throaty until she hears the ratchetting of the handbrake going on. A door opens, the clunk of the handle releasing the lock. Another one after that. Two doors. Two people. She holds still, mouth open and staring up to the spot on the wall she vaulted over.
‘You sure, Vince?’
‘I’m bloody sure. I saw someone running across.’
Male voices. Older, deep and coarse. Accented with a southern almost London twang. Like builders or workmen. She twitches, eyes narrowing while she grips the shotgun that little bit harder.
‘Like a bird,’ the second voice says.
‘Bird?’ Vince asks.
‘Yeah bird…’
‘You lost me. What bird?’
‘Bird you fucking idiot. Like a woman. A chick. A fucking bird!’
‘Oh, right, yeah with you now, Derek.’
‘Fuck me,’ Vince mutters. ‘You been in the sun too long.’
‘The Doc don’t want women though. He wants kids…boys…’
‘I know what the Doc wants you twat. I’m just saying I saw a woman running across here. Look over that wall.’
She flinches, glaring hard. Her fingers finding the trigger guard.
‘Not here,’ Vince calls out, sounding slightly further away. ‘Maybe she went up that road.’
‘Yeah maybe,’ Derek says, snorting air through his nose. He sounds close, too close. She pushes back further into the base of the hedge, gripping the shotgun.
‘Derek, we’d best go, mate. This ain’t our section today.’
‘Fuck it,’ Derek spits. ‘Could have done with a fuck today.’
Anger starts to bubble, her eyes twitch while glaring but the voices recede, the doors thump closed, the engine starts and the van pulls away leaving a silence behind it as Heather shakes her head at the pure evilness of mankind.
She gets up slowly, peering over the wall to make sure they’re gone while a tiny bit of her almost wants them to come back so she can punch them in the nose and stab their eyes out with forks. Then she’ll eat chocolate and cry.
The van is gone. The area is clear. She gets over the wall and heads on to the junction of the side street she was originally aiming for and turns into it, feeling the change in environment from main road to side street. The gaps between the houses are narrower and the front gardens that bit smaller. Cheaper houses, crammed in but still sold as family homes ready to be made beige and cream with laminated floors and massive flat screen televisions.
At first it looks okay and some of the houses even have intact front doors. No bodies, no blood and only the barest signs of carnage. She keeps going to gain distance from the main road in case the van comes back while musing over what the two men said. Something about a doctor and children and this area not being their section. It doesn’t matter what they meant. Whatever they’re doing has nothing to do with her. She isn’t a part of it. Hiding is her thing.
It’s looking good here. Maybe a bit more distance and she can try and find a way into one of these houses. Get washed and changed, find some painkillers and duvet and some chocolate. It’s too hot to be under a duvet but having one near is essential. Maybe just to lie on and read a book while feeling like she’s bleeding to death from her vagina.
She stops, pauses and feels that sadness weighing down as it did before. A corpse in the road and it looks a bit fresher than the old lady she saw in the country lane. She holds still to detect movement or sound. Nothing. She goes on, clinging to the edge of the pavement to get past the body in the road. She spots the injuries to its neck. Like the throat has been ripped out by something sharp. She can’t see the eyes but the essence of the corpse makes her think it was one of the infected. The hands are still clawed, like frozen with rigor mortis and it’s filthy too. Covered in dried blood that looks older than the injuries to its neck.
She doesn’t hang around too long but rushes on quietly. Full of stealth and ready to flee. This street is no good for a hiding place now. She moves into the next street following a long curving bend that leads to more corpses that look the same as the first. Fresh but not immediately so. The blood they’ve spilled is dried. Throats have been ripped out again, some have been run over and a couple look like they’ve had their necks broken.
Heather waits at the side of the road, crouching against a wall. Assessing the route ahead while checking the sides and the rear. The cramping comes on harder, more urgent. Her back hurts like hell too. Everything hurts.
There really isn’t any choice now. She has to keep going. The church is too far away to be reached before dark so that leaves only one option which is to keep searching for a suitable hiding place.
The next street is the same. More corpses with the same types of injuries. Ones and twos, small groups and others that lie scattered or close together. Necks broken, tyre tracks over faces and stomachs. Legs and arms mangled and those same awful neck injuries. Something has been through this place killing them as they went. That thought settles and turns over in her mind. Maybe this entire area is cleansed and safer than it looks. A trickle of confidence grows and she pushes on in the energy sapping blazing heat while following a trail of broken bodies.
Every street takes her closer to the town centre. The houses densely packed on both sides and the odd convenience store here and there. She examines the outside of those closely but each has obviously been looted with smashed in windows and doors hanging off. It’s so quiet too. Deathly quiet. The church was silent but that was different. There is an expectation of quietness and silence from a rural church but this is jarring. This was a thriving town packed with dwellings and people. Silence here is weird and not right. It unsettles her and adds to the irritation she feels from the pain and mood flitting between foul and emotional.
The scene changes. She spots it instantly. A house that has very recently been accessed with wet blood smeared across the white frame of a smashed in ground floor window. The door has gone, the frame ripped off by something attacking the outside. This time she doesn’t hunker down in the street but scurries into a garden and hides behind another wall. Energy hangs in the air. Like the displacement of a violent episode. She peeks over the wall, staring at the house. Her eyes running from the door and down the path to the street. Red spots of blood form a trail that grow smaller and fainter as it goes up the street. Like someone was cut who stemmed the blood flow as they walked or ran away. The other bodies she saw looked older, like a day or so at least. Here looks very fresh. The blood shines with wetness.
She drops down to rest her back against the wall wishing she had never left the church. This is shit. Everything is shit. She needs supplies. Desperate for a decent wash. In pain. Too hot. Her water has run out now too and this bloody shotgun is too heavy and cumbersome.
Should she go back? Go back to what? The streets are full of corpses. The main road had that van on it and the country lane only goes to the cottages that have also been attacked.
A despairing dilemma of life and death where the slightest wrong decision can get her killed.
She winces again. The cramps coming harder and longer. More sustained. She’ll start bleeding soon and that’s no good. Not without tampons or at least towels. She hasn’t got either.
‘Sod it,’ she mouths, bashing the back of her head against the wall. Tears prick her eyes, not for fear or the sense of danger but a physical response to the hormones raging through her body all in response to the menstruation cycle of pure shittiness. She bites her bottom lip. Willing herself to pull it together. Telling herself that everywhere is dangerous now. Every street will have been affected. This place is no different. She thinks back to seeing them through the goldfish bowl windows of the gym on that first night. How fast they moved yet how they also waited until something else drew them away. That stops her thoughts and she lifts back up to peer over the wall. If there was something here they’d wait and mass. They do that. She’s seen it happen. The fact they’r
e not here means they had something else to go and find.
She nods with some resolve firming and finally stands back up to thread her way back through the gate and onto the street. Her stomach gurgles from lack of food. She wipes the sweat from her face and pushes on. Heading again towards the town centre while veering away from the blood spatters already drying out on the hot tarmac road.
Eyes up and watching. Her brow furrowed with focus, ignoring the pains coursing through her body. The sweat is constant, never ending. A relentless loss of fluids that chafe her arms and thighs. The straps of the rucksack dig in and rub. Thirsty now too, and hungry. Her mouth is dry. She wipes the sweat from her face and keeps going. The shotgun held tight across her body.
A realisation starts to hit home. That this was a mistake. Coming here is a mistake. She can’t go back though and if you can’t go back then you have to go forward. She wants the cool interior of the church and the quietness of the open ground surrounding it. This town is tainted. Filthy and broken. A sordid place where bad things happened. Where men, women and children died and came back then died again. Run over or had their necks broken or throats ripped out by god only knows what.
Closer now to the town centre and she passes the entrance to an industrial estate littered with more broken bodies. The houses give way to shops and the buildings become higher, taller and more imposing. Like they’re leaning in to trap her. She feels too confined and the escape routes become less the deeper she goes towards the centre. The smell gets worse too. Pungent stenches of death. Rotten meat left in the hot sun writhing with maggots laid by flies hovering in thick clouds. A truly post-apocalyptic scene of every worst nightmare coming true. Every window is smashed in. Every door hangs broken and ruined. Blood smeared on walls, across pavements and cars left abandoned with doors hanging open. This is post war Germany after the bombing raids. This is London during the blitz. This is the warzones of the Middle East but here in a small town in southern England.
She spots the first bullet shining in the road. The brass casing glinting the rays of the sun golden and clear. It looks big too. Like something the army would use. She spots another then another then loads of them littered amongst bodies shot to bits. Bodies of the infected who were gunned down.
The sight is offensive and crushes her soul. She saw the world fall. Anyone alive now knows the world has fallen and all the destruction that has brought but those long days in the isolated countryside deadened the actuality of what is happening. Every one of these bodies was a person. A real person like her. People who had jobs, families and the same worries and dreams as everyone else. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to go. To be somewhere else but there isn’t somewhere else. There’s here and the reality of the situation.
It hardens her. It has to otherwise she’d crumple and weep for the loss and suffering so evident and real to her eyes. She ignores the cramps, swollen boobs, bloated tummy and backache. She pretends the headache isn’t there and holds the emotions back with every ounce of effort she can muster but it still hits deep. She feels the tug at the back of her throat and swallows the sob threatening to come up. Her eyes fill with tears making her blink furiously for fear of misting her vision. Don’t cry. Not here. Not now. Her lips tremble. Her heart sinks and breaks a thousand times again and again. The first tear falls to roll down her cheek, tracking a clean mark through the grime encrusted sweat. The second comes after until her cheeks become soaked. She doesn’t sob. She doesn’t make sound but cries silently in misery of everything she is seeing and smelling. The silence is the worst. Just the buzzing of the flies and the constant steady tread of her feet crunching along. Nothing else.
She can’t be here. She has to get away. Find somewhere. Anywhere. She looks for doors but they’re all beaten down or smashed through. Nowhere looks safe or secure. She goes on past betting shops, dry cleaners, charity shops and pet stores. Looking for signs of somewhere she can go. A door that isn’t ruined. One that can be locked and made safe that will give shelter and a place to hide. She looks up, sensing the day is growing late. The night will come soon. The hours of darkness that will perpetuate the fear of the monsters. They always howl when night comes. She’s heard it time and again. The second the sun drops they lift their heads and screech at the sky. The first time she heard it she ran and didn’t stop until she was puking then she ran some more. As the days wore on it kept happening. She even heard it in the church once. A single far off howling voice that made her blow the candles out and sit behind the locked door clutching the shotgun to her chest all night.
‘Fuck…come on…’ she mutters almost silently, a faint noise of words floating on her breath. The sense of urgency grows. The need to be off the streets and so the perfection of the refuge in need starts to drop off. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just safe.
‘Please…’ anywhere, just somewhere. Somewhere safe out of sight that she can last the night then in the morning she can run and get back to the church.
Seven
Image. Suppressed. Memory. Suppressed. Déjà vu. Suppressed. The flashes don’t last long enough to have emotional connections but they keep coming.
He walks in the middle of the horde. Surrounded on all sides by fetid decaying and newly turned hosts. The stench is indescribable. Stale shit, sweat, rotting meat, unwashed forms, foul breath and rancid greasy hair all mixing with the metallic tang of blood.
The smells invoke a memory that is suppressed. He spots a body on the floor with a blur of an image that’s taken away as quickly as it forms.
They get towards the centre of the town. Restaurants, diners, bars and cafes all smashed and looted. The front door to an Italian bistro hanging open and the sight of the bright red carped inside brings the déjà vu on again. He falters, going slower than the horde around him who filter past bumping shoulders and hips. He gets knocked and pushed without malice but he’s a big man, tall and broad shouldered so his balance remains central to his core. He looks back at the Italian bistro. His red bloodshot eyes staring at the red carpet. The obese man wheezes past him, brushing against his arm. He lingers still as his mind whirls with memories that get shunted back and away from the frontal lobes of his brain.
He walks on behind the horde. A small distance now separating them. The urge to bite is still there as strong as ever. The need to find hosts to rake and tear flesh and pass the infection but behind those eyes there is something else going on. A split second of focus that recedes to nothingness so he becomes the slack jawed idiot again.
The horde pass a van. A minivan with a sliding door at the back. The flashes strobe harder and again he lingers, holding back without even the merest hint of understanding as to why.
The infection wins and on he goes. Dumb as a house brick. Stupid as the day is hot. He is a zombie. The undead. He died then came back. He is a host body for the true state of being. He is healing from the inside out. He has no pain. He is not human. Thoughts are for humans not hosts. Some infected can have thoughts but not you and not here. The battle here is done. We are here to seek any potential hosts left. We may be needed elsewhere in another of the millions of places the collective is in but not now.
He drools with saliva coating his beard. His mouth hangs open. He is hive mind. Not individual.
He stops dead. The horde keep moving. His head turns to the left. His body follows suit, rotating on the spot to stare at the deeply recessed doorway of the art deco building. Gorgeous brass handled doors wedged open to a vestibule of thick red carpets, display stands and sumptuous wallpaper. Huge posters adorn the walls of the recessed doorway. He stares, drooling and slack jawed but for a second his mouth closes and that flicker of intelligence shows in his eyes. He stares at the doors then at the posters. He lumbers forward. Stopping in front of one of the huge pictures. Seeing something that sets the flashes off in his head even faster. Every one of them is suppressed but they come so fast now. Flickering on and off. The poster holds his attention and he remains fixed to the spot. Red
eyed, drooling undead staring at a movie poster of an action film with the lead actor bursting from an explosion of cars and helicopters in the background. The image is powerful and holds him rooted to the spot.
He jolts with a spasm forced through his body. The infection ordering him to move on. Still he resists without knowing he is doing so. He jolts, spasms and rocks on his heels but a spark holds him there. It comes harder. He resists but stares at the picture. Mesmerised without seeing, without knowing, without understanding. Pain floods his form. Pain in every limb that sears through his stomach and into his head. He sags, dropping back as though struck in the gut by a bullet but still he regains his feet and goes back to the picture. More pain comes. His throat is on fire. Chemicals dump into his system. The flashes are taken away as quickly as they come. His adrenal gland kicks in but without the infection ordering it to do so. It ceases the production and dumps more pain and sends signals into more nerves. Finally, whatever the spark that held him breaks and withers and he sinks down onto knees that slam into the tiled surface of the cinema entrance. The pain goes. The flashes end. His mouth drools and he sits up slack jawed and dumb as a house brick. The red bloodshot eyes of the undead stare out into the street as he gets to his feet and walks on after the horde without looking back.
He moves to follow the horde. Not increasing his speed but maintaining course in their wake. He is pulled to them. They are he and he is hive mind. A pull inside competes with the urge to bite and makes him want to turn and go back to stare at the poster on the wall but he doesn’t. The urge to bite and rake becomes the stronger force within him.