by G G Garcia
“I’ll take that as a yes then.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Melvin opened the door and closed his eyes. It took a while, but the infected female ran inside the house, snarling, and raised her hands. She made them into claw shapes and went for Lisa.
Lisa brought the rolling pin back and seemed in control. And Paul was ready to intervene if Lisa needed the help.
As soon as the infected individual got closer, Lisa struck the female at the side of her head, but it wasn’t enough to put her down. The infected female took a step back and shook her head, but by the time her vision had been restored, Lisa stepped forwards and struck again.
The woman with the green shirt collapsed to the floor and her arms shook. The adrenaline was coursing through Lisa, and although she could see that Paul was ready with the knife, if she needed him, she struck the thing once more as it lay on the hall carpet, convinced that she had killed her ... or it.
She then looked over to her husband. Melvin still had his eyes closed and was also still holding the opened front door.
“You can open your eyes now.” She huffed, and shook her head in disgust at her husband. “Honestly, I’ve seen bigger balls on a rat. You never used to be shy of a bit of violence.”
Melvin opened his eyes and saw the dead woman, he assumed, in his house, his wife holding a rolling pin, and to his right he could see Paul Newbold, a man he didn’t know a few hours ago, holding a knife, and scratching the inside of his ear with his free hand. Of all the strange mornings Melvin had experienced in his lifetime, this had been the strangest so far.
“Shall I shut the door?” he asked his wife meekly, feeling rather ashamed of himself for his cowardly behaviour.
“No,” she said. “Leave it open. Could do with a bit of fresh air.”
“Really?” Melvin looked confused.
“Of course not, you stupid bastard!” she yelled. “We don’t want any more of those twats coming in, do we?”
Melvin began to shut the door, but Lisa stopped him when more words came out of her mouth.
“In fact, keep it open. You can make yourself useful and get her out of here.”
Melvin looked at Paul, but Paul lowered his head, embarrassed for Melvin. Melvin knew his actions were cowardly, but to be lambasted by his wife in front of their guest made the man angry.
Melvin approached the body and stood by its legs, as Lisa disappeared into the kitchen. Paul put his knife into his front pocket and walked over to Melvin to give him a hand.
Melvin took the legs and Paul took the arms of the female.
“Where to?” Paul asked Melvin.
“Over the fence,” Melvin said softly, still feeling shamefaced. “On the other side of the road.”
The two men carried the body out and stepped out onto the country road. A gentle wind licked their faces and it was nice for Paul to feel the breeze, despite the dangerous situation that they were in.
“Better hurry up,” said Paul, and looked down the road on the left and right side. “Just in case.”
The two men struggled to carry the body to the other side of the road, and then finally dumped it when they reached their destination.
“Not too sure I’m gonna be able to lift it over the fence.” Melvin was panting hard and wiped his brow with the back of his right hand.
“We’ll just leave her here then.” Paul hunched his shoulders. “She’s dead anyway. So what difference does it make?”
“I suppose,” Melvin sighed.
Breathing heavily, the two men wiped their hands and began to make their way over to the opened front door of Melvin’s house, on the other side of the road.
A ruffle from behind the men stopped their legs from progressing any further. Both males slowly turned and looked at one another, and then turned their heads to look over their shoulders.
Lisa may have struck the female across the head, but it appeared that it wasn’t enough.
The female staggered to her feet, looking disorientated and dazed, and once her eyes clocked the two men, she made an awkward run for them.
Melvin could see she was heading straight for him and brought his fist back and knocked her out, putting her straight to the floor. He smiled and looked rather pleased with himself, but his fist was smarting.
“What are ya smilin’ at?” Paul queried the fifty-two-year-old man.
“That’s the first time I’ve attacked one of those things,” he said with a smug look on his face.
“Ya have just knocked out a young female, she’s still not dead, and if there’s one or two, it’s not that difficult puttin’ these things down. When there’s a group of them, however...”
“She’s ... she’s not dead, did you say?” Melvin stammered.
“No.” Paul shook his head and took out his knife. “I think ya just knocked her out. I think Lisa did most of the work earlier.”
Paul approached the body with caution and could see the chest rising as the female inhaled and exhaled. He crouched down, paranoid she could soon sit up and take a bite out of him, and rammed the blade into the front of the woman’s chest, straight through the heart.
He looked at a shocked Melvin and pulled out the blade, blood running off the steel as he held it with his right hand.
“How many have you killed now?” Melvin asked. “Three?”
Paul nodded.
“You’re becoming quite the little serial killer, aren’t you?”
“I had no choice with the two by the garden centre,” Paul tried to justify his actions. “And the same with this one.”
“Still,” Melvin said with a smile. “This thing didn’t kick off until the early hours of this morning, and you’ve killed three already.”
Paul sighed, “And ya point is?”
“I’d be quite happy to keep you at my house for a few days,” Melvin said. “You’re fearless. A killer.”
“I’m just tryin’ to survive,” said Paul. “I’m a twenty-four-year-old college drop out, who works in a car factory, and still lives with his parents. I’m nothin’ special.”
“Still.” Melvin cleared his throat. “You’ve got more balls than I have.”
“It’s either them or me.” Paul looked down on the face of the female. The poor thing was someone’s daughter, probably sister and mother. “It’s an easy choice to make.”
“But you are fearless,” Melvin began to titter. “Right?”
Paul walked over to the side of the road and threw up for the second time in one day, taking Melvin by surprise. Once he was finished, he ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, against his teeth, and managed to find and remove chunks of puke that had stubbornly stuck in the gaps of his teeth.
Paul wiped his mouth with his sleeve, looked up at Melvin, pointed down at the pile of vomit, and said, “Wrong.”
*
David’s eyes opened and he found himself leaning back in the chair where he normally conducted business. He stood up and opened a window. The place smelt fusty and David Morton decided to allow some fresh air in the room.
He stretched his back and reached his arms in the air, making a groaning noise, and then went to the male toilets to drain his bladder.
He left the toilets a few minutes later and went back over to the window that looked out onto the pub, Wolseley Road and the Stafford Road that ran alongside the pub on the left.
He couldn’t see any activity, thankfully. Apart from when he and his daughter were leaving the house and were attacked, she had been shielded from the horrors that he had seen on his TV and what he was hearing on the radio.
He rubbed his face and yawned. He looked over to the office for the accounts department and decided to look in on his daughter.
Chapter Twenty-Six
John Jameson’s son had emerged out of his bedroom and had joined the rest in the living room. He smirked at Demi, before sitting down, making the young female twist her face in disgust.
“So what’s been happening?” he asked no o
ne in particular. “Anything new been discovered?”
“Not really,” his father mumbled.
“So what happens now?” his son persisted.
John Jameson was trying to watch the TV and listen to what the anchorman was saying, but his son’s constant queries were driving him beyond despair.
“I mean, you’d think they’d come up with new information by now,” his son moaned. “What do you reckon, dad?”
John Jameson never answered and tried to listen to what was being said on the TV.
“Dad? What do you think?”
John looked up and could see them all staring at the TV, apart from Demi, who was playing with her phone. She stood up and left to go into the hallway. John’s son probed further.
“Dad?” his son persisted.
“What?”
“I was wondering...”
Sobbing began to emerge from the hallway and Craig and Tony looked at one another. The two males both stood up as the Jameson family remained where they were, and headed for the landing. Demi was on her knees, her phone was by her side where she had dropped it, and both of her hands were covering her face.
“Demi?” Craig crouched down next to her.
Tony picked up the phone and hesitantly placed his ear against it. He could hear a mixture of screams belonging to a male and a female, which Tony presumed correctly were Demi’s parents, and listened as his hand shook. He obviously couldn’t see anything, but Demi’s parents were in some distress.
With their screams, the sound of snarling, and furniture being smashed, one could only come to the conclusion that her parents were in serious danger. The infected beings had somehow gotten inside, and now it sounded like her parents were being attacked by a group of them.
Tony listened on and now the male had stopped shrieking, and the female soon stopped afterwards. This was followed by a slopping sound. It took a while for Tony’s brain to register that Demi’s parents were being eaten. The feast didn’t last long. Whether the infected had been distracted or had had their fill, Tony was unsure, but the sound of hurried feet could be heard on the other end of the line as if they were running away.
Then the phone went dead.
He didn’t know why.
Maybe one of the contaminated beings had trodden on the phone. Or... He didn’t know. Whatever the reason, the line on the other end of the phone was now dead.
Tony gave Demi her phone back as she was being comforted by Craig, clinging onto him like a wet garment as her heart began to break. She held out her hand and put it in her pocket, her eyes fixed on Tony’s. Her sobbing had subsided and her eyes widened, awaiting a response. Tony simply thinned his lips and shook his head. They all knew it. Her parents were dead.
“Do you have any siblings?” Tony asked her. “I never heard any other...” Tony chose his words carefully. He was about to use the word screams, but chose differently. “...voices.”
Demi never answered.
Tony bent over and kissed Demi on the top of her head. He left Craig and Demi on the landing; he returned to the living room and asked John and Helen if he could use their toilet so he could go for a pee.
“Of course you shittin’ can,” John spoke up. “You don’t have to ask.”
Tony thanked the man and casually went to the bathroom whilst his stomach was doing somersaults.
He entered the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and his head began to concoct a mixture of images. Some were real and others were fictional. He thought about his family members being attacked, his friends, and even his uncle that he hadn’t seen in years. If they had perished, no doubt their deaths would have been gruesome.
Unless they had opted out.
He then thought about Emma, the guy he had ran over, and then Paul. Should he give him another call?
He lifted the toilet seat and fell to his knees.
Within seconds, whatever was left in his stomach was rejected from his body and he threw up. He looked down the pan and could see the vegetable soup-looking vomit floating in the water, and the look of it and the smell forced Tony to retch a couple of more times before he was finished.
He stood up, legs wobbling, and took some toilet roll to blow his nose. He blew hard, removing some bits of vomit from there, threw the paper into the toilet, and flushed away the sick.
He began to wash his hands and splashed his face. He then squeezed some toothpaste into his mouth, and began to rinse his mouth out and gargle. He splashed his face once more, looked into the mirror and broke down.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Both panting, Melvin and Paul returned to the house and shut the main door behind them. Melvin walked by his wife and dumped the rolling pin into the kitchen sink. The steak knife that was given to Paul remained in his right pocket. Paul sat down in the armchair, and Melvin sat next to his wife on the couch, TV still on.
Lisa looked at both men and said, “Well?”
Melvin was the first to respond. “Well? Well what?”
“How did you get on?” she moaned. “Is she dead? I saw her moving when I looked out the window.”
“No. We just—”
“Not in the mood for your sarcasm,” she huffed.
“Alrighty shitey. Calm down, woman.” Melvin sighed and looked over to Paul. “Of course she’s dead.”
“Did you kill her?”
Melvin was taken aback by his wife’s query and wondered what difference it made. Did it matter who killed her? She was dead. The danger was out of the way.
“I...” Melvin struggled to answer her at first as her stare unnerved him. She waited for an answer.
“He killed her with two strikes,” Paul jumped in.
Lisa looked at both males and could tell they were lying, especially Melvin. Paul looked at Melvin, but the henpecked man lowered his head and it was pictured all over his face that Paul was lying for him.
“Is that so?” Lisa stood and placed her hands on her hips. “So is this the same Melvin Leslie that shat himself a few years back when he went for a walk up the woods and he pushed me in front of a stick, thinking it was a snake?”
Paul raised his eyebrows at Melvin, and Melvin could feel his stare.
Melvin held his hands up, as if someone was pointing a gun at him, and said, “In my defence, it was quite a big stick.”
Lisa wasn’t finished there. “And the same Melvin that sent me downstairs during the night when we thought there was a burglar downstairs?”
“I had a migraine,” Melvin groaned. “Besides, you’d sort them out, no bother. Even Peter Sutcliffe would have given you a miss.”
“And is this the same Melvin that screams whenever he sees a spider?”
“Okay, okay,” Melvin huffed. “Paul finished her off, but I did hit her and thought I’d killed her. Didn’t I, Paul?”
Paul nodded, and Lisa believed the pair of them.
All three were now seated and watched the TV. There were fresh reports that attacks had occurred in Stone, Eccleshall and Derby. Shaky mobile footage from peoples’ bedrooms and one from the back passenger seat of a car had been taken and sent into the news studio. Other people had simply put their footage on Facebook and Twitter, and some parts of the media were snapping up the footage and playing it.
The new information was that people who were outside, roughly between after 12 to 2am, could have been affected, which highlighted that this could have been an airborne fiasco, but they never specified the details. However, they were adamant that it was unsafe to venture outdoors. This wasn’t because of the airborne virus, but because of the people infected that had turned into these lunatic cannibals. This wasn’t the phrase that the media used, but it was how Melvin, Lisa and Paul had interpreted it. It also stated that power shouldn’t be a problem ... for now, as there were people still in the area working on the grid.
“What time did you leave that nightclub?” Mel asked Paul.
“After two, and then we went to some lame party. Why?”
�
�Looks like if you had been outside a few hours earlier,” Melvin said to Paul, “then you could have turned into one of those freaks with whatever was in the air at that time.”
Paul nodded. “It appears so.”
“What do we do now?” Lisa asked both men.
“Dunno.” Melvin hunched his shoulders. “I suppose all we can do is sit and wait. Any one fancy a game of Monopoly?”
Both Paul and Lisa shook their heads.
“Coffee then.” Melvin stood up and headed towards the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The living room on the first floor of The Wolseley Arms pub was a sombre area. The news was on, phones were being played with by most of the people in the pub, and twenty-three-year-old Craig Shepherd rocked back and forth in the armchair the more he watched the news.
He was two miles from home. That was it. And so was Demi and Tony, yet, nobody seemed to be in a rush to get back. He knew it was dangerous out there, but he was desperate to get back home. Riding out this unusual disaster in his own home, with his parents, was something he was desperate to do, rather than spending the time in a pub, with his friend and four other people he didn’t know.
Nobody was aware what was happening. For all they knew, the smaller towns and villages may have been hardly tarnished by this epidemic. Most of the footage from the news was coming from big places like Birmingham, Derby, Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Walsall, not tiny places near Rugeley like Colwich, Hednesford, Great Wyrley and Armitage.
Craig looked around at the faces and only Demi clocked his.
“You okay?” she asked Craig, tears still falling from her eyes after her distress earlier.
Craig nodded unconvincingly and looked unsure what to do next. He couldn’t sit on his arse and wait. This thing could take weeks to come to a conclusion. He needed to be with his family. He took off his watch from his left wrist and slipped it into the pockets of his brown cords.