I sat down on the couch and lay back with my eyes shut. I didn’t sleep. I was just resting.
*
I had no idea how long I had my eyes closed, but the screech of tyres made me shoot up off the couch. I opened the blinds and saw a woman running down the road. I moved away from the window, making sure that she didn’t see me. I know this was selfish, but I couldn’t help it. I was used to being alone and the only company I really wanted was the company of my wife, son and daughter. My mother, dad, sister and cousins as well, but I had never heard from them during the end of the first week when we still had power. I had already come to the conclusion that they were dead.
I heard the hammering of the door belonging to my neighbours. The woman was distressed, and I was worried that her hollering would attract some of the dead from afar. I then thought about the two rough-looking men that had walked by earlier.
The hammering had stopped, and I moved to the reception area and could see through the frosted glass of my main door that she was now approaching my premises.
I didn’t know what to do.
She sounded desperate, and I didn’t want any danger brought to my door after six months without an incident.
I headed for the door and opened it, before she had a chance to scream and hammer at it. I dragged her in, locked the door and walked her to the old living room. The girl was a mess. She had thick red lips, curly blonde hair, big blue eyes and was only an inch or two shorter than me. She was a reasonably attractive girl, big breasted but slim in the waist.
“Thank you,” she cried. We both sat on the couch and she huddled next to me.
“You okay?” I asked. Yes, I know, it was a stupid question, but I was nervous, my social skills had been depleted over the last six months due to lack of interaction, and I didn’t know what else to say to the poor girl.
“I heard tyres screeching,” I said.
She said, “I crashed my car.”
“How come you crashed your car?” I asked further, not giving her time to answer my first query, “Was somebody … something chasing you?”
She threw her head back, lips quivering with fright. “Six miles I drove for, then two of those freaks comes out of nowhere and I crash into a friggin’ tree. Nearly shat myself.”
I hadn’t had company for ages and within a day I get Annie and now this female stranger. It was fair to say that she seemed the more sociable, whereas Annie, if given a chance, would have ripped my throat out.
In normal circumstances I would have asked her if she wanted a cup of tea, but only had stale bath water and snacks I had stolen from the neighbours. I offered her nothing and queried, “So what happened?”
She shook her head and said, “Weren’t you listening? I crashed into two of those DCs.”
“DCs?” I shook my head. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“D stands for dead,” she sighed impatiently, “and the C … surely you can work it out.”
For a person that had been welcomed into my house I found her a little ungrateful, but put her attitude down to the fright she had just received.
“I come from Lichfield.” She began to speak with a bit more calm now, and added, “Me and my boyfriend were in our flat when it kicked off.”
“Parents?”
She hunched her shoulders. “Dead … probably. Don’t know. Never spoke to them since the second week when we lost power.”
“They’re not local?”
She shook her head. “They live in Sheffield.”
“And your boyfriend?”
She paused for a moment, took in a deep breath. She seemed more upset about her boyfriend more than losing the rest of her family. She finally said, “He used to be with this biker gang, but left them to find me when it first kicked off. We moved about, went where the food was. We stayed in a supermarket for a while, with others.”
“What happened?”
“We were attacked and we fled. We lost people … good people.”
“I’m sorry about that.” I was nervous to ask but said it anyway. “And your boyfriend?”
“He died last month. He was bitten. We were staying in an abandoned hotel, but we were attacked and had to leave. Same old story. Every safe place you find, you have to leave eventually.”
“I wouldn’t know.” I lowered my head, almost embarrassed. “I haven’t left my street since it started. My family have been missing ever since.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She patted my thigh, but didn’t seem interested in my predicament. “Me and my boyfriend were desperate for kids. So glad we didn’t bother now.”
There was a long silence between the pair of us, and the woman moved away from me on the couch and thanked me for taking her in. She seemed a lot calmer now and introduced herself as Emma. I told her my name, Shaun. I then told her about my trips to the neighbours, about running short of supplies.
“I think I can take care of our supply problem … temporarily,” Emma spoke up once I had finished my story.
“We?” I tried to joke.
“I’m staying, right?”
“Erm…” I then raised a cheeky smile.
“Are you planning on kicking me out?” She picked up that I was joking, but responded anyway.
I sighed and said, “And how are we going to solve our supply problem … temporarily?”
“My car is fifty yards up the road.”
“And?” I guffawed.
“The boot is full of food and water.”
I stopped laughing.
Chapter Seven
My nerves were shot to pieces.
I was going back out, but this time I was being accompanied by a female I had only met a few minutes ago. Emma told me that if any of the DCs turned up, I shouldn’t worry if there were only a few. She told me that they were pretty easy to kill, one on one. I had no idea what she had been killing these things with. She had turned up at my house empty handed.
She went into the kitchen and helped herself to a knife. I told her that I was happy enough with my hammer, but gave me a funny look, and then she asked me where I kept my bags. I had a large rucksack in the bottom cupboard, by the reception area, and told her that I would get it.
“Good,” she said. “The car’s fucked. It won’t be moving anywhere. I think I damaged the radiator. Ideally we could have parked it on your drive, but…”
“But … you crashed it,” I said with a smirk.
“Yep. Into a tree.”
Emma was devoid of emotion as she put the knife into her pocket, and threw the bag over her shoulder. She looked like she had done this before, a true warrior, putting me to shame. I was a man that had been hiding for half of the year and had only killed my first one the day before: Rena.
I asked her, “Will we need another bag?”
She shook her head. “This bag will be enough for the food. You can carry the two water canisters that are in the back. They have handles, so you should be fine.”
“Water canisters?”
“I broke into a gym yesterday.” She nodded and headed for the main door. “Ready? Any more questions?”
“Now?”
“The longer we leave it, the more chance that somebody else will take the stuff.”
I began to think about the two men that had passed by my living room window. She had a point. If we didn’t go now, someone else would take it.
I sighed and reluctantly told her, “Okay. Let’s go.”
I’m not going to lie to you. I was sweating bullets.
She opened the door and stepped outside. I followed her out and locked the door behind me, putting the key into my front pocket. “Here we go,” I muttered under my breath, out of earshot from Emma. “What the fuck am I doing?”
We both walked along my drive and stepped onto the pavement.
It’s funny the types of things people used to moan and worry about, back in the old world. I used to worry about my mundane job, my weight gain and my hairy back. Now, I had to walk u
p my street in an apocalyptic world and possibly bludgeon a reanimated corpse, if one showed up, to save my own skin. Give me back the old days.
*
“I left the keys in the ignition,” Emma announced as we approached the damaged Citroen. “What we need is in the boot. Should be already open.”
I took another look around my street, my seventh since leaving the house, and it was still clear. You would never have thought that the apocalypse had come to my street. A couple of things were out of place, but that was it. There were remains of a body on the other side of the road, on the opposite pavement, some shattered glass and, of course, Emma’s crashed car that had ploughed into a tree near the roundabout.
Once she approached her car, she looked longingly at her vehicle and a look of sadness could be seen. It was obviously something that was dear to her. Maybe it was a gift from her boyfriend. I didn’t want to ask and bring her mood down any lower, so I slapped my hands together and told her jokingly to hurry up.
She opened the boot and dropped the empty bag off her shoulder and began to fill it. She had tins and packets of other stuff already in carrier bags, so it was a small matter of picking up the carrier bags and putting them into the large rucksack. She then nodded at the two water canisters. They were the same kind of canisters you would see in a gym or a workplace. I picked them up and could feel my arms shuddering already. There wasn’t a hope in hell that I could carry these canisters all the way back home without making a few stops. I was going to have to have a couple of rests on the way back to my house.
I gazed around my area and tried to remember back in the days when cars used to zoom past, some of them slowing down at the last minute because of the hideous-looking speed camera that was outside my house. Bastards! Always hated the council for putting that monstrosity there. Opening your blinds first thing in the morning and seeing that blue steel camera ruined the view of the street. I also missed the children going up and down the pavements on their scooters or bikes, my children especially.
“You okay?” Emma asked me, making me snap out of my daydreaming of yesteryear. She must have seen me becoming emotional, just like herself a few minutes before me, and I replied with a single nod of the head.
She threw the bag over her shoulder and walked ahead of me, going back down the street, back to my house. She was hunched over, so the bag must have been heavy. Probably the tins, I thought. I progressed myself, water canister in each hand, and could see one ghoul coming out of someone’s drive from the other side of the road. I tried to hurry my feet, but the thing had already spotted the pair of us.
The dead individual looked to be middle aged, male, and was overweight. I had no clue who it was. It was a big street, and wasn’t really an area where we all mingled. Maybe it came from somewhere else.
I called out to Emma. I could see she was way ahead of me and the thing was crossing the road. I wanted to get Emma’s attention before she went into the house. I wanted to ask her opinion about what to do with our new admirer. I had killed Rena, my first, which was difficult in itself, but I was quite happy to avoid another killing if it was possible. I released a short whistle.
Emma stopped, turned around and said, “What do you think I am? A friggin’ sheepdog?”
I nodded over to the beast that was heading over our way. She huffed, as if it was just an inconvenience rather than something that was terrifying, and placed her hands on her hips. She slowly placed the bag on the floor and asked me if I wanted to take care of it. I tried to act cool and shrugged my shoulders and told her to ‘knock herself out’.
It was clear that she had killed these things before, just by her response when she saw it. She wasn’t panicking, or terrified, she was more annoyed than anything else. She also didn’t know my experience, or lack of, of killing these things. The apocalypse was six months old and I had made my first kill only the day before. Shameful, I know.
Emma brushed her blonde curly hair out of her face and put her right hand in her pocket to pull out the knife. She was standing outside a front garden, six doors down from where I lived, and waited patiently for the creature to come to her. I had no idea why she was doing this, but she stood still and watched.
Once the creature was a matter of yards from Emma, it held out its arms, ready to tear her lovely face to shreds, but Emma took a step back, grabbed the back of the hair of the assailant and rammed the knife through its right eye. She gave the knife a quick twist, then pulled it out and watched as it dropped to the floor. She then bent down, wiped the blade on the tattered clothes of the defunct thing, and grabbed its arms and dragged it onto somebody’s front garden, then left and returned back to the pavement.
She looked at me and smiled. “Break’s over,” she joked, picked up the rucksack and continued to walk back to my house.
After seeing that, I knew I was in good company.
Chapter Eight
After hydrating ourselves and having a munch on the new food, Emma and I decided to sit down and relax somewhere. This time I suggested the new living room, or the back room, and told Emma I’d be in to join her once I peed in the toilet that didn’t work. I told her that number twos were for the buckets upstairs, but she never responded.
After finishing my pee, I heard the patio door slide back in the back room.
What the fuck? Then I remembered something. “Shit. Annie.”
I ran from the toilet to the back room, heart beating out of my chest, and could see Emma leaving through the opened patio door. “Emma! No!”
She turned around, knife in her hand, and shook her head at me. Her face then changed to a more sombre look, went back inside and shut the patio door.
“What is it, Shaun?” She then pointed outside, at Annie, who was now heading over to the patio doors. “I saw her by the garden. It’s a DC.”
“Don’t touch her.”
“Why?” Emma looked confused.
“Just … don’t, please.”
“Who is it?”
I lowered my head, not sure how to explain to Emma why I didn’t want Annie to be killed. I said, “Look, this might sound a bit strange…”
“Go on?” Emma sat down and waited for me to continue. She looked at me with those wonderful large blue eyes.
I sat down on the leather couch, next to Emma. “I … I couldn’t kill her. I’ve been used to having her around.”
Emma wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not. “You do realise she’s dead, don’t you?”
“Of course. But she‘s just a child.”
“So what? If you’re waiting for me to give a shit, I suggest you better pack a lunch. It’s going to be a while.”
“Just … don’t touch her.”
“She’s still one of them. She’d still rip your face off, if given half a chance.”
“I know.” I knew she made sense, but something was stopping me from allowing her to be put at peace, despite me killing Rena. It was stupid, I know. If that was my daughter, I wouldn’t want her walking around this Earth, not in that state.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to get rid of her? It’s no hassle.”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
“I suppose she’s not doing any harm.” Emma relaxed a little and gave me a sympathetic look. “I don’t know your reasons.”
“Neither do I.” I smiled. “Stupid, isn’t it?”
She nodded with a smile. “Yes, it’s fucking barmy.”
I shifted in my seat uncomfortably and could see that Emma had similar features to Annie: blonde hair, blue eyes. It made me wonder that if Annie had been given a chance to grow into a young lady, she wouldn’t look too dissimilar to the young woman that was sitting next to me.
“So, has she…?” Emma nodded at the patio door, at the dead girl.
“Has she…?”
Emma tried again. “Has she been here the whole time?”
“Only a day or so,” I replied. “Funny … I’ve hardly seen a soul for months and then you and Annie turn up wit
hin a few days.”
Emma laughed, “Well, don’t forget that … Annie is dead. So you’ve seen one individual.”
“I did see a couple of guys going past, not long ago.”
“Guys?”
“They looked like thugs, carrying baseball bats.”
“Yeah, well,” Emma sniffed. “If they ever try and get in here, I’ll cut open their balls and put them in a jar.”
Emma pointed at the patio door and began to snicker. Annie was now standing centimetres away from the glass, staring at the pair of us, like something out of a horror movie. If she was alive, her breath would have been seen on the glass.
I stood to my feet and walked towards the patio door. I placed my hand on the glass and looked at the poor state that Annie was in, or whatever her name was. I gasped once the dead creature on the other side of the glass placed her own palm against mine, but that short moment was ruined once her hand ran down the glass and the little creature gnashed her teeth, confirming that she’d take a bite into my flesh if she was given half a chance.
“You’re gonna have to get rid of her eventually,” Emma suddenly announced. “In the long run.”
I turned around, facing away from Annie, and said, almost annoyed with her statement, “And why’s that?”
“A few reasons.”
“Go on.”
“Well, for one, it’s a bit fucking weird, isn’t it? You can’t have that thing as a pet, can you?”
“I don’t give a fuck!” I snapped.
My shortness had unnerved Emma and I didn’t know why. I was hardly an intimidating fellow. If anything, she had shown that she had bigger balls than I did. Looking back now, I think that maybe Emma thought I was going to ask her to leave.
I didn’t have a weird obsession with Annie. I was fascinated by the thing. And if it posed no threat to me, then why kill it?
The Z Trilogy Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 7