Among the Fallen: Resurrection (23 page)

Chapter Sixteen: Dead Alive

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the
Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they
may live.’“
Ezekiel 37:9

Alex made her way along the litter strewn road and shivered as her lifeless skin dropped in temperature, her bones frozen and her breath steaming into the empty night. The crows sat along the rooftops quietly as she passed underneath, slowly watching her with their tiny bead-like eyes as they cawed amongst one another. Suddenly, Alex stopped at another barricade and sighed in further frustration as she started to heave herself over the abandoned military vehicles and concrete bollards. She stood at the top and just stared into the street below, hands snug in her pockets as she blew out the steam into the icy air. Below her seemed to be some sort of Military Outpost; makeshift to say the least; tanks; jeeps; bikes and other such vehicles waiting abandoned and decorated with dead soldiers and civilians alike. A military helicopter sat embedded in the side of a building, its blades creaking and bowing into the street as if they were about to snap, the building that held it crumbling and heaving with dust every now and then. She stood there simply staring at the sight with very little on her mind, it was hardly the worst sight she had seen, but there was something about it that was unquestionably eerie.

She reached down and pulled a handgun from a soldier’s hand that lay twisted at her feet, holding it in front of her baffled as she examined it carefully. Without a thought, she pointed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger, firing a lone bullet into the heavens. The sudden crack of gunfire echoed through the silent streets and thousands of crows frantically leapt into the sky as if the whole street before suddenly took off. Cawing and screaming, they filled the skies above her, landing on the rooftops and circling in alarm. Alex clicked at the trigger a few times, its chamber locking as it smoked gently. She frowned grumpily and threw the gun from the blockade, leaping down to the ground smug and impatient.

So where now? Where was the next sign?

Alex strolled hastily through the streets trying to ignore the corpses and the bodies of the innocent as they peeled and decayed, savagely eaten away by bacteria, insects and mould. She climbed over makeshift barricades and threw aside anything that got in her way, leaping over concrete bollards and climbed charred vehicles. The calm haunting silence was only broken by the noise she made as she clambered over obstructions, crushing glass and rubble under her feet; almost carelessly and without thought. All the fires were now nothing more than sparks of flame, cindering spring exposed car seats and melted dashboards. Street lamps lay across the road, their heads hidden in shop windows or propped up loosely by scaffolding and brick walls. She stepped on metal signs as they lay flat in the road and peered into the looted shop windows and burnt out buildings while ammunition shells littered the floor. It had crossed her mind that since it was only dead people she was seeing, then maybe the battle here was against each other, looters maybe?

She listened to the
dead
, as the good Doctor put it, far off in the distance. They definitely sounded creepy but in all honesty she weren’t buying the whole dead thing. There’s hundreds of dead as far as the eye could see, but were they moving? Well no? So what was the old fool talking about?

Alex climbed up onto a jack-knifed lorry and stared at the street below, the tight avenue empty apart from the usual macabre and now commonplace chaos. She leapt down onto the bonnet and entered Beulaville Boulevard, a strip of shops popular with the girls and ladies, high end fashion and cheap clothes for all sizes. Probably one of the only places she knew like the back of her hand considering she spent a lot of her time here with Sarah; window shopping and spending obscene amounts of money on disposable outfits. The strip was dark and the shops were shut, their windows shattered and their goods ripped and trampled upon. Mannequins and shop dummies stared blankly into space without a care in the world, their plastic and chiselled expressions hiding the accounts of the horror they secretly bore witness to. The street was quiet and grey, the dead sprawled the sidewalks smothered in trash and newspapers, and yet, even they were less than interesting in this street. The veins and scaffolding covered the whole street and the strange iron skeletal walkways went from roof to roof and across the boulevard casting their ill-omened shadows to ground beneath her feet. The walls bled rust and black sludge and wept in pain silently, the fleshy parts throbbing and giant stained fans trapped behind grilled mesh slowly heaved.

She suddenly turned, gazing towards an opening in a wall, closed off with mesh and a red light that faltered from within; revealing machinery and the strange movements of something that seemed to watch her from the shadows. She approached the opening as the gears hissed on the other side, tubes pumping with dirty red fluid as a man’s head swiftly appeared from a small hole, his head wrapped in sacking and featureless. Alex stepped back startled, its eerie gaze staring at her as a black eyeball blinked from behind a rip in its hessian hood. Suddenly, it reached down with a grey arm, its skin streaked with blood and grease, turning a gear painfully before suddenly disappearing back into the darkness.

Alex stepped away, waiting for the strange man to reappear, but he never did. She calmly backed into the street, gazing at all the areas that appeared similar, wondering if these creatures littered the whole of Blackwater. Had they been watching her the whole time? She eventually stepped away from the area and approached another; again, metal grids protected the elaborate fans and machinery, gears that hissed and cogs that turned laboriously, but she saw nothing living. She suddenly clutched her head, her paranoid mind trying to justify what she had seen with lights and shadows; but Alex knew, as far as tricks of the eye went, that was too good to try and ignore.

Calmly, she strolled further into the street as the scaffolding creaked and the plastic flapped.

Dresses, skirts and underwear littered the ground, blood stained and grubby; they merely festered away on the wet poisonous roads. She strolled up to a car and climbed up onto the bonnet and sat on the roof, thinking and wondering. As the Doctors macabre and chilling words rolled over and over in her head, she sighed as she tortured her thoughts with his gossip. Maybe the daft old sod had gone senile or maybe even turned a bit funny; in all honestly, she wouldn’t have blamed him in the slightest and she was most definitely half way there herself. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

She took a puff and held her breath for a moment or two and blew out the smoke, gazing at the meshed and sealed off areas with a distrustful sense of paranoia.

The sky above gave an almighty crack of thunder and she waited silently for the rain to come, but it never did. The dark clouds raced across the red sky and a slight wind blew across her face, bringing with it the fowl stench of decaying meat which made her wretch and hold her mouth as her stomach revolted.

Suddenly, she turned her head curiously towards a heap of corpses across the street; staring almost undeterred at the decaying pile. Men, women and children all piled up carelessly, their clothes tattered and torn, flapping quietly in the wind; their skin stretched over the bones like elastic, their skull like features frozen in sudden pain and riddled with flies. The sight sickened her, but weirdly, she couldn’t look away, she was drawn to this one pile as if she in some way was supposed notice something, something hidden. She slowly put the cigarette back in her mouth and pulled another lung full, her black eyes just staring at the corpses without repent. She looked at the child on top of the heap; the decay had made her so old looking and ugly that it somehow did not look real. What had this one child done that she deserved to be treated so heartlessly?

Alex coughed and looked away, wiping her eyes and dropping the cigarette to the floor. She panned around the street at more piles of bodies, crawling with flies as nature broke them down slowly to their bones. She leapt from the bonnet and calmly walked over to the pile that had her so mesmerized, pulling her hand into her sleeve and covering her mouth and nose with the cuff. She studied the dead almost too closely and noticed each had traumas to the head, bullet holes around the brain area, some had indents from bludgeons, but most of the wounds they had were in the skull; bite marks to the arms and legs, the throat in some cases, heavily bruised and ravenously infected, the veins were swollen and the skin blistered.

What had happened to these poor people?

Alex stood up and walked away from the pile of bodies and stood in the centre of the road just looking around, hugging her arms and her hands shaking nervously. She looked down at a handbag at her feet, its contents partially littering the ground. She pushed the contents around with her foot, examining the items curiously, suddenly smiling and picking up a small tub of vapour-rub. She unscrewed the lid and scooped some of the gel out, smearing it under her nose and taking a deep breath. The Menthol was a God-send, it didn’t get rid of the smell around her completely, but it was more tolerable at least; Alex put the lid back on and put it in her pocket.

The wind gently howled through the buildings and skyscrapers as papers and rubbish floated down from the heavens, softly landing on the metal coated roads and vanishing amongst the debris and litter. Her black eyes blinked erratically as she looked from one disheartening sight to another, her eyelashes clogged with black dirt and dried tears. All around her in every direction there was just death, blood and this strange metal skin and scaffolding that appeared to strangle the city and yet, there was not any conceivable purpose for it. She turned and started to walk further down the street, trying to ignore the mess of humanity and bereavement, closing her eyes when she needed to, avoiding the macabre sights that were too much for her. Suddenly, there was a smash from beside her and Alex jumped in fright as something hit the concrete across the road; a person?

She could see an arm amongst the pile of bloody mess and on further inspection there was what was left a man. Its innards were steaming slightly, but they were more of a light brown in colour than a rich blood red, blistered and rotten the organs just rolled to the ground painfully. Suddenly, there was another, this time hitting the ground close by, splashing its insides everywhere. Then another; and then another. Alex looked up at the skyscraper and watched as more and more people walked through a window up on the thirtieth floor, not jumping, but walking; as if the ground suddenly vanished or they simply didn’t care. More and more dropped to the ground, piling up until the final few simply hit the pile and rolled off onto the ground. What was making these people step from such a massive height? What had they seen? Alex stepped back cautiously as the final few bounced from the rancid pile and slowly moved, their heads cracking and their necks creaking, their arms slowly stretching out and pulling themselves along the ground. They did not cry nor speak; they were purely silent as they crawled towards her exalting great effort and obvious pain. Alex backed away nervously until suddenly there was crash as a door from a squad car hit the ground revealing a police officer, agonizingly dragging himself from within, his skin burnt and black, his uniform welded to his flesh. All around her people started appearing from the shadows and shops, cars and alleyways. Slow moving, yet increasingly determined, their heads lowered without looking up, they simply shuffled blindly and crawled towards her from all directions. Soldiers crept from bus windows, dragging their weapons behind them, their grey paper-like skin cracking around their mouths as they gasped at the putrid air around them. Hundreds of people from all walks of life, suddenly descended upon the streets with nothing but a hunger fuelling them; pushing them headlong towards the only living creature for miles around.

Alex backed up against a wall and looked around in fear as the masses lumbered silently and slowly towards her, wounded and rancid; missing limbs and their skin decayed, bones broken and snapped from the flesh. She had seen far too many movies to not know what these were, but these were different, almost too realistic, these actually moved as if they had been dead a long time. She watched as some toppled over as their leg joints snapped, their solid coagulated muscles breaking down under the strain of their strenuous movement. Some wheezed as they gasped, others simply collapsed under the strain; others juddered as their limbs dropped to the ground without reaction; but all walked blindly, as if their necks were powerless to lift their heads.

As they closed in on her, all she could think was sorrow, guilt and sympathy for these poor people.

Suddenly, her suit came alive, wrapping her up in armour and her eyes turned to a vicious red glow.

The skin on her arms ripped painfully as bone snapped out and into blades, her suit writhed and thick black tentacles whipped and lashed around her as it whispered and hollered in her mind.

“What?! I can’t! These people are sick!” she mumbled angrily. She gripped her head in pain as the silent voices screamed in her mind. “Please, these people are not well, they need help!” she begged almost innocently.

Alex watched as the burnt police officer crumbled and broke apart limb by limb, collapsing to the floor as he heaved and vomited. Suddenly, a cadaver lunged for her and she grabbed its throat, its arms stiffly by its side, rigid with solid blood. As the cadaver snapped at her angrily, its black eyes crawled with mites and its jaw dropped, ripping the flesh from its cheeks and revealing two or three rows of teeth, these were not human; or even the creatures she knew from the movies, these things were far deadlier. Alex frowned as she realized the voices were right, these were not people, these were what the people of the city were fighting, and they knew exactly what they were doing to, the heads were the weakness. Alex pushed the creature away and it stumbled falling onto its back. She hastily stepped over it and started to run through the hordes, slicing off the heads of those unfortunate enough to be in her way. She ran in and out of the crowd, slashing violently as the heads and bodies fell where they stood. She looked up suddenly and more and more of the sickening creatures fell from the windows above, pouring from shops and streets, buses, cars; they were everywhere. She paused briefly and considered her options, but sadly, there weren’t that many. If just one of these things grabbed her, the others were sure to gain up, and with this many, she would never regenerate quick enough before they had her down to the bone. She ran up the boulevard as quick as she could as they surged into the street, darting and weaving in and out of the un-dead hordes as they lunged and collapsed, dragging themselves desperately after her. As limbs and severed heads fell to the ground, all that could be seen was Alex running lightly, swiftly through the hundreds that had gathered around her almost instantly; they had her surrounded and she needed a plan fast. She grabbed a chain and agonizingly pulled herself up to one of the bridges that over shadowed the street and wrapped her arms and legs around the scaffolding desperately as they all gathered below. As Alex clambered over the metal anxiously, the cadavers froze, still and motionless; they stood without even looking at her, thousands of the zombie like creatures, just staring at the ground and waiting for her to come down.