Thrive (Episode 2): Follow

by Lamb, Harrison J.

  THRIVE

  Harrison J. Lamb

  Copyright © 2019 by Harrison J. Lamb

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Visit the author’s website at:

  www.harrisonjlamb.com.

  Contents – Episode Two

  Previously…

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  Author’s Note

  Previously…

  Lifelong friends, Kingsley, Eric, Sammy and James are reconnecting with each other on a camping trip in the British countryside. When they hear screaming coming from a quiet road near their camp in the woods, they investigate and find that there has been a car accident. It is here that James is attacked by a zombie-like man who bites him on the arm.

  The group drive to Braintree, the nearest town, to get medical help for James and report the car accident and James’ assault to the authorities. But when they get there, they find the town has been overrun by zombies. With James’ health deteriorating fast, they push on to the hospital – only to run into a large group of zombies.

  A man named Darren saves them from the zombies and offers shelter in his flat. They learn that Darren is an apocalypse prepper with an arsenal of illegal weaponry and a stockpile of food, drink and other supplies. He calls the zombies snappers as they are constantly snapping their teeth.

  When James collapses in sickness, Darren notices the bite on his arm and becomes fretful. Darren then shoots James in the head with a crossbow to stop him from turning into a snapper. In a rage, Eric and Sammy overpower Darren and kill him. They then take the weapons and supplies and leave the flat in search of a safer place to stay for the night – but not before Darren’s companions, having returned from a supply run, see them leave the building with Darren’s possessions…

  E P I S O D E T W O

  Follow

  1.

  There was just enough light in the mini supermarket for Kingsley to find what they needed. It was only around midday but the sun was strained by thick clouds, bleeding silver through the poster-covered front windows and casting everything in monochrome grey. A sickly yellow light fizzed above a staff door at the back of the shop, but the main lights were off.

  Kingsley knew he wasn’t alone in here. He’d heard footsteps a few seconds ago and now he could hear what sounded like the crinkle of food packets.

  It was probably an undead – a snapper, as they had started calling them.

  He listened for breathing, sighs, grunts, whispers. The undead didn't use their lungs.

  He couldn’t hear anything except for the faint plastic noise.

  Kingsley edged along the front of the shop, peering down each aisle as he passed. Many of the meat-based food items on the shelves had been ransacked by snappers. Packets of jerky torn open with eager teeth and stiff fingers. Dented tins of chilli scattered on the floor, their contents abandoned for easier meals.

  He would grab some of the untouched foods before he left. They couldn’t risk eating anything that had been touched by the undead in case it made them ill, or infected them with whatever it was that turned people into snappers.

  But right now, Kingsley had to find out who the stores other occupant was. The sound was coming from the refrigerator aisle, the one farthest from the door.

  His hand tightened around the handle of his machete as he approached the last row of shelves. Then, holding his breath, he leaned into the refrigerator aisle and stared down it.

  A snapper – male, checkered shirt, ashen skin, blood coating it’s neck and hands, the entire lower half of it’s jaw missing. Unable to remove the clear plastic packaging from a joint of beef, the snapper attempted to eat the piece of meat by repeatedly shoving it into it’s gaping half-mouth, tongue writhing against the plastic like a leech trying to attach itself to flesh.

  Kingsley’s head swam in dizziness for a moment, eyes locked on the hideous spectacle. As usual, his brain tried to deny what he was seeing. Then, realising that it was as real as his own strange existence – that this world really had become a place in which a person could be missing half of their face and still be walking around – he shook his head and tried not to think of the living, breathing man the snapper had once been.

  He tried instead to think of everything that was happening as the workings of nature. Because really, nature was full of all kinds of horrors. There were animals that participated in cannibalism, parasites that invaded ecosystems and destroyed other lives just to survive, wolf packs that had no care for their weakest members and would leave them behind to fend for themselves in a heartbeat.

  It was only human morals that deemed these things bad. Nature didn’t give a fuck. And while humans were at the top of the food chain, they were spineless in the face of nature.

  Though I guess we’re not top of the food chain anymore, are we?

  The snapper had not noticed Kingsley. It was too busy trying to eat. The urge to devour any meat that it could find was too strong to let a piece of plastic and a mutilated jaw stop it. So Kingsley backed away from the freezer aisle and left the snapper to it, thankful that he wouldn’t have to use the machete.

  He could do it. He had done it enough times. But it felt so wrong, spineless human he was.

  Kingsley went to the back of the shop where the flickering light taunted him by illuminating, over and over again, the barren medicine shelves.

  That was what he had come in here for. Darren hadn't been lying when he’d told them he was low on medical supplies. Although they weren’t in desperate need of meds right now, they wanted to make sure they were well prepared for another situation like James’.

  There were a few boxes of ibuprofen, a bottle of paracetamol-based child medicine and four boxes of congestion tablets.

  Weak shit that probably wouldn't help them much. Still, Kingsley took all the boxes of painkillers and tablets, as there was more than enough space in the duffel bag and he thought it might at least give them a bit of comfort to know they had them if anyone became ill.

  Rushing down the canned goods aisle, Kingsley snatched up as many cans of beans and sweetcorn as he could hold. He tried not to make too much noise, conscious of the dead man still in the shop with him – albeit a harmless one with half a jaw that wouldn’t be able to bite.

  Still, when he realised he could no longer hear the crinkle of plastic, he practically ran out of the store.

  *

  Sammy and Eric both seemed to not notice him when he stumbled out. Eric was examining the back of his hand and Sammy was staring up at the sky with unfocused eyes.

  Kingsley dropped the supplies he’d gathered into the duffel bag on the ground by the front window of the shop. “Nothing much in there, I’m afraid. Just painkillers and some congestion relievers.”

  Sammy swallowed and finally glanced and him and Eric.

  “Right,” she said with a noticeable lack of interest. “There’s something I need to talk to you two about. I’ve made a decision.”

  Kingsley raised his eyebrows, then nodded for her to continue.

  “My mum and dad live in Kelvedon, not far from here. I need to find them. I need to make sure they’re safe. Besides you two, they’re basically all I have left in this world. So I’m going to my mum and dad’s home.”

  "Okay. And?"

  “
And I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have to come with me – either of you. I have to find my parents no matter what, but I know you two will also have people you want to see. Your families, loved ones…” She looked Kingsley in the eye.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I need to get back to Colchester. I know me and Emma aren’t exactly on good terms at the moment, but I want to see her. I have to make sure she’s okay. Nothing is more important to me right now than doing that.”

  Sammy blinked and half-smiled in a show of understanding.

  “But I’ll come with you to find your parents first,” Kingsley went on. “Kelvedon is near enough in the same direction as Colchester anyway, and we’re stronger together. We’ll stand a much better chance of surviving as a group. We should try to stick together for the time being, at least until we have a better understanding of what’s going on.”

  Sammy’s half-smile rose into a full one and the dimples in her cheeks reminded Kingsley of the thoughtful, appreciative young girl he had known in their school days.

  They turned to Eric, who shrugged and agreed to the plan.

  “The only family I have are friends,” he said. “And I’m staring at the most important ones.”

  Having known him since early childhood, Kingsley knew that Eric’s biological parents had died in a house fire when he was a baby, and he had spent most of his youth in a foster ward before being adopted by a jolly, divorced man who loved him unabatedly. His adoptive father had remained single until he passed away seven years ago, and Eric himself was single and openly aromantic; he had few connections, but the people he did have were close.

  “As you said, we should stay together.”

  Kingsley nodded, picked up the duffel bag. “Okay. Let’s go find ourselves a vehicle.”

  2.

  Concrete, brick and glass. Drifting rubbish and blood stains. Corpses stalking the roads on expired legs.

  The tired colour palette of the urban sprawl was not alleviated by the weak sunlight, and the recurring signs of abandonment and death were more of an eyesore than a horror at this point.

  They had thought there would be at least a few cars left that they could take. But every car they came across was either locked – and even if they could risk the noise of smashing a window and breaking into one, none of them knew how to hot-wire a car – or surrounded by too many snappers for it to be worth checking out.

  Clearly, most of the people who had made it out of Braintree alive had taken their cars with them, and most of those who had died and/or been infected had never reached their vehicles which were locked up and collecting dust in the driveways. Likely never to be used again.

  Whether it was the same in the other towns and cities, they had no idea. Kingsley hoped the population of his hometown had fared better with the undead threat, that more people were alive there, barricaded in their homes, and there were fewer snappers on the streets.

  He hoped Emma would still be there when he arrived.

  After about an hour of searching and failing to find a vehicle, Kingsley started to believe they would end up having to go on foot. He wondered how long it would take, how dangerous it would be, whether he had any chance of finding Emma at all.

  Suddenly he was irritated. He didn’t know what exactly was causing the spurt of emotion – perhaps a combination of everything he had been through recently, along with the hopelessness of their search for a car.

  But his irritation grew into anger.

  And that anger swelled into a fury.

  A snapper shuffled across the road in front of them and Kingsley strode towards it as it turned in their direction, his machete rising. With a suppressed shout, he kicked the snapper in the middle of it’s chest, sending it to the tarmac on it’s back.

  Kingsley hesitated for a brief few seconds before the image of James sprawled out dead on his back, just like this sorry fucker, pumped motion back into his arms and he slashed at the snapper’s legs, severing one at the knee.

  Pinning the snapper to the ground with his foot, Kingsley stared down his blade at the face below him.

  The girl couldn’t have been any older than seventeen. A pair of white headphones clung to her neck, one of the speakers broken and hanging from the frame by a wire. Gym clothes hugged her body, clean and intact apart from a rip in her leggings where infected teeth had torn into her thigh. It looked like the girl had been walking to a gym session when it happened, drowning out the world with her music and blissfully unaware, probably up until the moment she was bitten, of what was going on around her.

  He didn’t want to think about the human being the girl had once been, but it was that frozen expression of shock, agony and regret on her face – the expression she had died with – that made him think about it.

  Kingsley felt a hand on one of his shoulders and flinched at the touch. Then one settled on his other shoulder. Eric and Sammy stood at his sides, looking down at the undead girl.

  Eric bent down and ended the snapper’s squirming with a knife to the temple.

  “We killed a man. We… we fucking murdered him.”

  “No,” Sammy said. Her tone was flat. “You didn’t kill him, Kingsley. It was me, and me alone. I pushed the knife into his neck.”

  “Why didn’t we listen to James? He wanted us to leave him.” Kingsley’s anger was subsiding into remorse now. “It could have all been avoided if we had just listened to him.”

  “Kingsley – look at me.” Eric was facing him, tear trails framing the hard, straight line of his mouth. “Remember what I said to you in the woods two days ago? That dwelling on the things you can’t change only makes it harder to plan ahead for the things you can change?

  “The second I stabbed Darren in the leg I regretted it, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I was thinking about it when we left James’ body to rot in the flat. I was thinking about it when I went to sleep last night. I was thinking about it while you were looting the shop. But at the same time, I’ve been thinking about how we can move on, what we can do to avoid something like that happening again.”

  Eric was right. Of course he was. That was why Kingsley enjoyed his company so much. The man was always telling the truth in a world where everyone was scared of reality and chose to deny what was right in front of them.

  He turned to Eric and clutched him tight in a hug. “I suppose it’s a good thing you don’t dwell on all the stupid shit we’ve done in the past.” A smile quivered on his lips. “If I talk like that again, just slap me in the face.”

  They finished embracing and Sammy cleared her throat. “Speaking of planning ahead…” She wandered over to a bus stop at the side of the road and began poring over a map of the town pinned to the wall of the shelter. “I wonder if there are any car dealers or garages nearby. We could be out here for hours looking for a car, and it’s going to start getting dark soon.”

  Kingsley and Eric joined her and the three of them studied the web of lines and icons that filled the street map. They searched for several minutes before Kingsley shrugged and turned to Sammy. “I don’t see anything on the map, but there must be garages in the industrial estate. We could try there next.”

  “Yeah, good idea,” Sammy agreed. “I can’t find anything either.”

  But she must have had a sudden spark of inspiration; she squinted at the map again, muttering, “Wait a second…” Holding her finger over an area near the shopping centre where they had stayed last night in a camping store, Sammy straightened and said, “What about this?”

  They looked over her shoulder to see what she was pointing at. It was a blue bus icon.

  “The bus park?” Kingsley asked.

  Sammy nodded. “I know it’s a bit bigger than what we’re looking for but a bus is better than nothing, isn’t it? Do you reckon it’s worth a shot?”

  “Yeah, better than nothing I suppose.”

  *

  Luckily, they hadn’t ventured too far from the shopping centre after finally plucking up
the courage to leave the camping store earlier, as it was now getting toward evening and they didn’t want to be outside when it got dark. But they also didn’t want to have to spend another night in this wretched town full of snapping teeth and blood-soaked memories.

  The bus park was an open area with parking spaces for multiple buses and a few sheltered waiting benches. It was behind the career centre, a nondescript, dun building that appeared to gape dolefully with its broken front door like a crooked mouth at the cinema across the road. Outside of which a snapper squatted, gnawing on the ribcage of a pigeon that had been flattened in the road.

  The three survivors kept to the wall of the career centre and walked slowly as they turned into the street between the two buildings, not only to keep their distance from the snapper but also because they were anxious that they would find the bus park empty and almost couldn't bear to have their worries confirmed.

  As they moved along the wall and, metre by metre, the parking area came into view, Kingsley's heart began to sink. Vacant grey filled his vision, split only by the faded white lines that divided the parking spaces.

  They were almost at the end of the wall. They could see no buses. Only a sliver of the bus park remained out of view behind the wall now and Kingsley wasn’t hopeful.

  They reached the edge and turned their heads almost in unison toward the last corner of the bus park…

  And there it was – as if the collective power of their wishes had willed it into existence – a single remaining bus, dazzling white and blue in the lonely grey space.

  Kingsley looked to his friends, all wide-eyed and beaming. The three of them stood there on the corner silently celebrating for a pause. Then Kingsley reminded himself that this was just one victory.

  What were the chances of the bus being left unlocked, no driver around, keys in the ignition? He started toward the bus, Sammy and Eric scurrying behind.