The Z Trilogy Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Whittington, Shaun

  I walked towards where my kids’ swings were, passing the tied up Annie, and stood next to Emma. I lifted myself up and had a three second look. “Bollocks.”

  There was a male teenager in the girl’s garden, at the bottom of her window, and I didn’t ask who it was. I already knew that it was her brother. It was a feeling I had.

  Emma asked who it was anyway, and the young girl confirmed that it was her dead brother that was also stopping her from fleeing the house. She told us that her parents downstairs had kept her up in the rooms and from fleeing the house. I had no idea how this scenario had developed and how the girl had survived all alone, but the primary goal was to now get the girl out of there.

  We couldn’t just leave her. Not now.

  “What’s your name?” Emma asked the frightened teenager.

  She replied, “Jane.”

  “Right, Jane,” Emma began to explain. “We’re going to come over and get you out of there.”

  “Erm…” I gulped and turned to Emma. “We are?”

  Emma never acknowledged me and continued, “But we’re gonna have to do something that you could find upsetting.”

  “Upsetting?” I tapped Emma on the shoulder. “What do you mean by upsetting?”

  Emma turned to me and told me that the girl’s brother was a DC—I wished she stopped calling them that—and that she needed to take care of it.

  “You’re going to kill Aiden, aren’t you?” the girl cried.

  We assumed that Aiden was her brother, roaming around the garden in his new dead world.

  “Yes, we are.” Emma pulled no punches.

  “What about my parents?”

  “You told me that your parents are on the bottom floor, so they’re no danger to you if you’re going to escape out of your bedroom window. We can just leave them.”

  “I don’t want to jump from my room,” she cried. “I might break something.”

  I turned and whispered to Emma, “Look, I’m not going to go in there and kill two of those things if we don’t need to. Just make her jump.”

  “I don’t think we have much of a choice. She’s too scared to jump.”

  I sighed. I know it was selfish and a young girl was in desperate need to escape, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the two dead in the house, as well as the brother in the garden.

  I had spent six months managing to avoid these things and now I had to do this. I think it’s fair to say that Emma was braver than me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Emma climbed the fence first and made sure that the girl’s brother was facing the wall when she landed on the other side, in their garden. I followed her, with my bowels well and truly loosened. Apart from Rena, I had managed to avoid these things, and now I was about to come face to face with one of them and then go into a house that had more of them inside. If I hadn’t have tied Annie up and left her where she was, this wouldn’t have happened. We wouldn’t have gone outside and we wouldn’t have spotted the girl in the window. It was all my fault.

  “I’ve got the brother,” Emma turned around and whispered.

  That was fine with me.

  I watched as Emma crept up behind the ghoul, knife in hand, as if she had done this many times before. I guessed that she had, considering the way she handled herself in my street when we were coming back with the supplies from her car.

  She walked with silent steps, in the long grass, and grabbed the dark hair of the teenage creature. I screwed my face as I saw her knife stick into the back of its head. I wasn’t even sure a knife could penetrate a skull. I could feel myself getting nauseous, but Emma had made it worse when she pulled out the knife, revealing the blood running off the blade, and then allowed the body to drop to the floor and said, “Right, let’s go inside.”

  I looked up to the bedroom window and saw the girl crying, which was understandable. Emma had stuck a knife into the back of her brother’s head. Yes, he was a ghoul, but it must have been an awful thing to witness for the girl. I then began to wonder how I’d feel if it was the wife or one of the kids getting knifed if they had turned.

  I shook my head and decided not to torture myself with these unnecessary horrific scenes. Emma headed for the side door, the main door of the house, and gave it a try. It was locked. Of course it was locked.

  “Just get her to jump down,” I said with a panic. I had seen enough. “This is madness, going in with those things in there.”

  “She won’t jump down.” Emma snapped, then said, “I’m gonna try something.”

  She turned around, sat on the concrete doorstep and began to take her right boot off, followed by her sock, I wondered what the hell she was doing, but never asked. I just stood and watched.

  She put the sock over her right fist, and once I looked at this and then at the glass panes in the door, I then began to understand what was about to happen. She put her fist through the pane of glass, took off the sock and reached in for the lock. She had managed to unlock it as well as take the chain off the door, and a huge smile spread across her face. I had no idea why she was smiling. It meant that now we had to go inside, or at least that was what I thought at the time.

  She sat down on the outside doorstep and put her sock and boot back on. She stood to her feet, placed her hand on the door and flashed me a smile. “Ready, big boy?”

  I gulped. “Not really.”

  She opened the door and began to knock it.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” My heart was beginning to giddy-up and gazed at Emma as if she had lost her mind.

  She took a step back, clasping the knife and looked ready to attack. I then realised what she was up to. It was simple really, but at the time I was quite impressed with her thinking. Rather than going inside, she was trying to entice them out, which was a safer idea.

  She knocked again, and this time we could both hear the sound of dragging feet.

  Emma took a few more steps back and I grabbed my hammer with both hands, the sweat making my grip weaken.

  Predictably, a middle-aged man, followed by a woman of similar age, stumbled out of the door.

  Emma front kicked the male, then the female. He tumbled, but never fell, the female did. Emma now only had one, for the time being, to deal with, and she dealt with the problem with little hesitation. She allowed the male to get near her and rammed her knife into the side of its head, into the left temple. She took a quick step back and we both watched as it fell to its knees, then hit the floor, face down. She bent over and pulled out the knife. We could both see the female getting to her feet.

  Emma was panting, some of her hair wet with perspiration, and said, “Your turn. And I wish you’d brought a knife instead.”

  I didn’t protest. I would have had a cheek to protest. Emma was making me look bad, and I had killed one before. Rena. It was time for me to step up.

  I allowed the female ghoul to stagger towards me, heart crashing against my chest. I gripped the hammer with my sweaty palms, and then I struck. The blow hit the woman on the top of her skull, but it wasn’t enough to put her down. I struck again. This time the blow was weaker, but this one had managed to make the creature tumble backwards. I used this opportunity to give her one more strike, the skull cracking with the blow. It fell and it bled from the head. It had been destroyed.

  I looked down on the poor thing and could feel my stomach doing cartwheels with the nauseous feeling. I felt pain in my stomach and thought right there I was going to get the squirts.

  Fortunately, I managed to keep everything inside and followed Emma as she entered the house.

  Chapter Fourteen

  All three of us had left Jane’s house.

  Wearing old clothes, consisting of black leggings and a black T-shirt, the teenage girl walked across her lawn, looking up and keeping her eyes from the ground. She was near Emma who had a comforting arm around the frightened girl.

  I walked in front of them and was the first to climb the fence that me and the wife had paid to be built many
years ago.

  When we first moved in, the back garden and the side of the house never used to have a fence there. There used to be a privet hedge instead, which was a bugger to trim. It'd take me two hours to cut, so ripping out the hedge and replacing it with the fence not only made it look better, but it saved me wasting two hours of my time, every fortnight, trimming a hedge that I detested. The only bit of hedge that was left was at the front garden.

  Once I managed to climb the fence, and to be honest I struggled, I turned and urged the girls to hurry.

  The young girl hobbled with Emma. She wasn't injured as such; she just looked exhausted, malnourished, and needed a good sleep. I was guessing that with what she had to put up with, with her dead parents there on the ground floor, sleep was something she struggled with for the last six months. But I could have been wrong. I suppose no matter the situation, tiredness usually wins in the end.

  I said to Emma softly, “Get the girl over first. Give her a bunk up. It'll make it easier.”

  “Okay,” Emma agreed.

  The fourteen-year-old looked at Emma and said, “It's okay. I can do it myself.”

  Emma smiled at the youngster and waited behind her as she climbed over the fence. I could see on my side that the bottom panels of the fence were stained green. I know it should have been the last thing on my mind, but I began to think how long it had been since I had creosoted it. I think it was before the neighbours had theirs done. And that was two years ago.

  I remembered, because they got some guy in to do it. Instead of painting their fence, he used a spray, and the creosote had come through the gaps in the panels and went over the decking and the kids' play swings. The wife was not happy and told him that once he was finished, he was going to have to come round and clean his mess up that he had left in our garden.

  The young girl seemed startled once her eyes clocked Annie, but Emma reassured her that the dead thing was tied to a tree and wasn’t going anywhere.

  As soon as all three of us had managed to get onto my decking, I had a quick scan around before sliding back the patio door. I still don't know why I did this.

  We entered the living room, or the back room, as the wife used to call it, and closed the door. Both females slumped on the leather couch and I went into the kitchen to see if I could get the young girl a drink.

  I returned with a small bottle of water. She snatched it off me and drank it like she hadn't drank in days. She passed me back the empty bottle, making no apologies for snatching the bottle out of my hand, and started becoming emotional.

  Emma threw her arm around the youngster and their heads leaned against one another's. Both females were emotional and I felt like a stranger in my own house. I decided to leave them be and take a walk around.

  I took my blue and silver Adidas trainers off and put them into the wooden shoe rack in the back room. Then I left with just my socks on my feet, and decided to take a stroll upstairs. I went by the rectangle hole in the wall to my right and reached the landing. The rectangle hole used to be a window with frosted glass. I missed the sun shining through that window on an evening. It would brighten up the hall and downstairs, but it was blocked off once we had our extension. Behind where the window used to be was the master bedroom, the new master bedroom where the wife and I slept, or used to.

  I decided to go into my bedroom and lie on the bed whilst the girls got acquainted downstairs. I looked up at the ceiling, hands behind my head, and noticed the small patch near the light. When I painted the ceiling eleven months ago, I had missed the small patch and promised the wife that I would fix it. I still hadn't got round to doing it. It didn't seem important now.

  I looked around at the room.

  Six years ago the room wasn't here. There was nothing.

  When the extension to the house was built, it had given us a reception area, another living room, another bedroom, and a bathroom—although technically there was no bath. There was a shower, sink and toilet. The bath was downstairs, along with another sink and a toilet.

  Halfway through the work on the extension, the builder was complaining about how he struggled to go to the toilet. The reason why he decided to tell the wife was because he knew she was a nurse. She urged him to go to the doctors and he continued with the work, alongside a young apprentice called James, and inbetween working he was getting tests done.

  James had a bit of a mouth on him, so much so that my son, who was only four at the time, had picked up on James’ bad language and had unknowingly verbally abused my father-in-law, his granddad.

  After a visit from the father-in-law, whilst the work was getting done, my little boy toddled over to the front door and opened it for his granddad.

  “Thank you, son.” His granddad guffawed at his polite manners. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  My son's response? “Get fucking out.”

  To say that my wife's dad was stunned would be an understatement, and we had to spend many minutes persuading him that he was getting the bad language off one of the builders and not his parents.

  We promised that we would have a word with James when he arrived the next day.

  We did, and eight months later, our builder, the one that had tests done, had died from bowel cancer.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Fifteen

  A scream made me get off my bed. I ran out of my room.

  My feet galloped downstairs after hearing the scream, and my body began to shake with the adrenaline coursing through me. Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned left to get to my reception area and then left again. I jogged to the back room, the new living room, where Emma and Jane were hugging one another. Emma continued to console Jane and stroked the back of her head.

  I held out my hands, wondering what the hell was happening. I then began to think that maybe Jane had dropped off and had had a nightmare.

  “Your front door,” Emma said.

  “What?” I had no idea what Emma was talking about.

  “My front door? What about it?”

  “Didn't you see it?”

  Once you reach the bottom of my stairs and turn left into the reception area, there are two ways to go. Taking a left, which I did, would take you into the back room and out onto the back garden if you decided to open the patio doors. Taking a right would take you to my front door, just a couple of yards walk, and that would lead out onto my drive and my street.

  I took a step back and looked from the back room. The living room door was open; it was always open, so I was able to see from the room I was in, down to the reception area. My eyes clocked my main door, and through the frosted glass I could see one of the dead. It was on the doorstep and was smacking its rotting palms on the glass of the door. The slapping wasn't too hard, so I wasn't worried that the glass would give way, but what irked me was the fact that this one ghoul could attract more if it wasn't dealt with. One couldn’t get through the door, but a herd of them…

  I turned to Emma for advice, but before I opened my mouth, she said straightaway, “You know what to do.”

  “What?”

  Still consoling Jane, Emma said, “You need to get rid of it.”

  “Rid of it?” I snapped. “It's not a fucking Jehovah’s Witness.”

  “I mean … kill it,” Emma sighed. “You need to kill it. If you don't...”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I responded petulantly. “I know what'll happen if I leave it.”

  “It heard Jane scream once she saw it, and it probably saw you coming in here, so it's not going anywhere. It’s not going to go away.”

  I fell silent. I knew Emma had a point.

  “Okay. I'll go and get something,” I puffed, and then headed for the kitchen. I walked down the reception hall, stirring the creature even more, and turned right and went straight down, passing the bathroom to my right and the old living room to the left, then stepped into the kitchen and glared at the wooden knife block. There were a few knives missing, and it dawned on me that I kept takin
g a knife whenever I left the house, but wasn’t returning them to their home.

  “You don't have to use a knife,” I muttered to myself. Then remembered that I had a hammer somewhere. “Where the fuck have I put it?” I moaned.

  I then left the kitchen to go into the bathroom. Once I was in the bathroom, I opened the cupboard under the stairs that was to my right, and had a look around. Inside was my small toolbox and I opened it up. It consisted of screwdrivers, ratchets and spanners. Nothing that would be of help.

  I threw the toolbox back into the cupboard and left the bathroom. I remembered that there was a large ball hammer in the cupboard on the landing. There was also a wooden bat available, but I wasn't sure if the bat would do the trick or if it would break once it made impact on the skull of the DC, as Emma called them. I had kept the bat in that cupboard for years. I did this in case we were ever burgled.

  If somebody broke into my house and began making their way upstairs whilst my children slept in their beds, then arms would be broken and balls busted.

  I went upstairs, grabbed the hammer and went back down to the ground floor. To be honest, I was taking my time. I had put things off for most of my life and I don't know why. I've always been like this.

  I remember going for my driving test and pleased that it had been cancelled and was put forward another month because of bad weather. Most people would have the attitude let's just get it over with, but not me.

  I stepped into the living room, holding the hammer in my right hand, and could see Emma peering at me with a vulture's eye.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  Emma and Jane had broken away from their cuddle and both were now sitting up on my leather couch.

  “A hammer?” Emma shook her head.

  “And what's wrong with that?” I asked. “I used one on Jane’s mum.”

  Jane gasped, and I immediately apologised.

  “Bludgeoning one of those things will take time and will be messy. Just knife the dead prick.” Emma then turned to Jane and apologised for her colourful language.