Demise of the Living (41 page)

All hope of hiding or finding a
weapon evaporated as the office door swung open.

Liz stood there, a camping
lantern in one hand, the bloodied kitchen knife in the other.

“Are you going to kill him too,
Ma?” Melissa asked just out of sight.

Billy’s dog was yapping
excitedly somewhere out of sight.

Liz turned. “Just be a minute,
honey.”

Colin seized his moment with
Liz’s head turned and he sprang up. He hadn’t finished pushing
himself upright when the pain slashed the strength from his
muscles. He landed gasping at Liz’s feet.

“Calm down,” Liz said gently.
“You’ll only make things worse.”

From his place crumpled on the
floor, all Colin could see were Liz’s blood-stained court
shoes.

“Why?” Colin said, burbling
through the fluid in his throat.

“Simple mathematics, Colin,”
Liz answered. “The less mouths to feed, the longer the supplies
will last, and the quicker I got rid of you guys the more for me
and Melissa.”

Colin’s eyebrows
furrowed. He was either in pain or confused by the
answer.

“
I failed my son,” Liz
said, crouching down beside Colin. “But I will do everything I can
to keep my little girl alive.”

Sensing her close, Colin
thrust out his hand to try to fend her off, but he only succeeded
in smacking his knuckle against the camping lantern.

“
This isn’t helping,” Liz
chided. She glanced at Melissa standing in the doorway.

Colin lay there, his strength
robbed from him by the gaping wound in his chest. He had no energy
to fend Liz off.

“Quiet now,” Liz said in a
soothing tone.

Colin knew he would be
dead in a moment, either from the shotgun blast or Liz’s
coup de grâce
.

She placed the tip of the blade
in front of Colin’s eye. A drip of blood was caught by the lantern,
glossy and dark. It splashed onto Colin’s cheek.

He willed himself to resist,
but his body refused to obey. It was then he realised he wasn’t
even breathing.

Liz thrust the knife deep into
Colin’s skull.

Chapter
21

“
It’s not fair to leave
you like this,” Liz said to the twitching zombie. “I didn’t want to
think that you were gone, but you are. The little boy I loved isn’t
in there anymore, is he?”

Grant showed no signs of
understanding. He merely fought against his bonds and tried to
snarl behind the duct tape.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you
safe, Grant.”

Liz levelled the rifle at the
squirming child and pulled the trigger.

The child dropped like a stone
and lay still. For the first time in days the little boy wasn’t
moving.

Liz took in a succession of
deep breaths, trying to stifle the tears.

She put the gun down and rolled
the dead boy into the waiting sleeping bag. He was lighter than she
remembered.

She recalled how heavy Grant
had felt when she had last carried him from the car fast asleep. He
had become an impossible weight for her to carry.

She would have wanted nothing
more than to hold him in her arms and kiss him goodnight one last
time, but who knew how virulent the infection would be. Instead she
zipped the sleeping bag up and pulled the drawstrings of the hood
tight to veil his face.

She would be more gentle with
this body. The sleeping bag-shrouded bodies of John and Karen she
had unceremoniously dragged down the stairs and dumped just inside
the office doors of the first floor.

Liz knew it would be a pain
dragging all the supplies up to the fourth floor, but it would be a
far easier task than trying to clean up after last night’s
carnage.

She picked up the adult-sized
sleeping bag. It felt half full with the delicate frame of her son
inside.

She opened the door and saw
Melissa was standing there.

“I thought I told you to go
downstairs and move the camping equipment up here,” Liz said, angry
that Melissa might have been watching.

“Ma, come quick. You have to
see this,” Melissa said excitedly. She went running over to the
window. “Ma, ma! You’ve got to see this!”

“Just coming, dear,” Liz said,
gently lowering the sleeping bag she had been hauling.

She stood up and became aware
of the rumbling noise and the burst of distant firecrackers.

“They’re leaving,” Melissa
said, pointing down at the street.

The dog that had become
so attached to Melissa over the past few days darted to and fro,
imbued with the excitement radiating from the girl.

Liz looked of the window, and
sure enough, the hordes of undead were shambling off down the
street.

“Oh my,” was all Liz could
say.

“Where do you think they’re
going?” Melissa asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,”
Liz answered.

“Should we try and leave,
too?”

“I don’t know?” Liz said
honestly.

She had never considered
anything other than holding up in the office block, but Melissa had
raised a valid point. Should they try to escape?

“What’s that noise?” Melissa
asked.

Liz listened. The rumbling and
the pops and bangs were getting closer.

“I don’t know,” Liz said as she
stretched up to open the window.

The noise became crisp, more
recognizable as gunshots.

“Look!” Liz said excitedly,
pointing out of the window.

In the sky, a black dot swooped
and hovered like a bird of prey hunting for food. As she watched,
it became apparent this was no bird. A trail of fire tore free from
its underside.

“It’s a helicopter,” Liz said
in amazement.

There was a blast of gunfire
from down the far end of the street and the deep mechanical
rumbling grew louder still.

Suddenly a line of zombies fell
to their feet, then eerily the sound of machine gun fire made its
way to their ears.

A sandy-coloured tank trundled
over the corpses and turned onto the street.

“Oh my God!” Liz squealed.

Behind the tank came a
staggered line of soldiers, helmets and body armour on, rifles at
the ready.

The helicopter with its black
painted hull and ugly angled body swooped down the street. Its
cannons gave a deafening roar and it cut a swathe of destruction
before it.

Liz clamped her hands
over Melissa’s young ears to protect her from the thunderous
racket. Blow yelped excitedly at the noise outside.

Looking down at the path mowed
clear of undead, Liz caught a glimpse of her car. It was
practically torn through at the middle by the bullets.

Gunfire now erupted from
down the road. Liz looked back to see the tank and two smaller
armoured vehicles had taken up position along with the men.
Although the chopper had obliterated many hundreds of walking dead,
there was still a sizeable mob. Unconcerned by the ordnance raining
in from above, the zombies staggered onwards to their living
prey.

The formed-up troops opened
fire. The crowd of zombies started to break and surge. Like waves
crashing on a beach, the lead would peter out into nothing only to
be replaced by the cresting undead behind.

Methodically ,the
soldiers worked their way forward. As the procession drew level
with them, Liz could see that there were support units in the rear:
medics on hand with prominent red crosses and flanking troops
dispatching any missed threats. Then squads of soldiers would
disappear into the buildings overlooking the street.

“Have they come to rescue us?”
Melissa asked.

“I think so,” Liz replied. “I
think so."

Liz looked around the empty
office.

“Quick, Melissa, run downstairs
and grab an empty sleeping bag. Push it out of the window and wave
it like a flag. You got that?”

Melissa nodded and ran
off, the dog obediently scampering along with her.

Liz bent down and picked
up her dead son. She swung his cocooned corpse over her shoulder
and followed her daughter down to the first floor. The butt of the
rifle slapped uncomfortably against her hip as she made her way
down the stairs.

By the time she got there,
Melissa was just standing on a table, getting herself ready to wave
for attention.

“Good girl,” Liz praised.

She laid Grant’s shrouded body
next to the other two and put her fist to her lips.

The gunshots outside were
getting louder as the troops approached.

“Right, right,” Liz said to the
dead bodies.

She dragged John’s heavy
corpse over to Sharon’s ripped and blood-soaked tent. Pulling the
shredded entry flap to one side, she could see Sharon’s dead body
folded at the knees, half lying back on the camp bed. There was a
gaping hole in her chest the size of a football. The raw pulped
organs were still a bright crimson. A pool of slowly congealing
blood filled the waterproof plastic floor of the tent. Liz unzipped
the sleeping bag and rolled John over to lay face first on the
blood-soaked ground sheet.

It had been an easy task
dusting the leftovers in aspirin. John had unknowingly consumed
enough to make him feel sick; not enough to kill him, but enough to
make it easy to suffocate him with paper towels while everyone else
was shouting out the windows at Stephen.

She walked over to Colin’s
corpse and dragged it into the office from where he had died on the
landing. Putting her grubby court shoe on his jaw, she pulled the
kitchen knife out of his eye socket with a slurp. Some
yellow-tinged fluid dripped from the tip of the blood-encrusted
blade.

Liz walked back over to John’s
body. She knelt down over the top of him and pulled his head back
by his greasy hair. She slipped the knife under his chin and slid
it across his neck. When she had drawn it the full length, she let
go of his head, letting it fall back into the pool of blood with a
splash.

“They’ve seen me!” Melissa
called.

“That’s good, honey,” Liz said
sweetly. “Let me know when they’re coming into the building.”

She grabbed the foot of Karen’s
sleeping bag and dragged her back to her tent. Karen’s body was
lighter and much more easily manipulated than John’s, with his
rolls of flab. Liz unzipped the tent flap and hauled Karen’s dead
body into the tent to lay her on the camp bed. She unzipped the
sleeping bag slightly to expose her face. The skin had started to
turn a greenish blue, not unlike some of the zombies outside. There
was a lighter mark that spread from the mouth onto the right cheek.
Liz held her left hand over the girl’s mouth at the same angle as
the strange mark. It was the same size and shape as Liz’s hand.

Liz’s heart missed a beat.
She’d had no idea the bruising from where she’d suffocated Karen
would show up postmortem. If the mark had come up sooner or someone
had checked the body more closely Liz realized she could have been
caught.

“They’re almost here, Ma!”
Melissa called.

“Okay,” Liz said, leaving
Karen’s tent.

Standing in the centre of
the office, Liz looked around. The place was a shambles now.
Sharon’s tent was ripped and peppered with shotgun pellets. There
were the bodies of Colin, Billy, and John clearly visible, sprawled
on the blood-drenched carpet tiles. Liz looked down at the kitchen
knife she’d used to kill Billy and Colin. For a moment she thought
of wiping the handle clean. It wouldn’t take a forensics team long
to work out what happened here.

She walked up to her
daughter. She was still waving the sleeping bag from the
window.

The street below was
strewn with dead bodies. Thousands of them piled up like so much
refuse. The advancing line of soldiers was firing furiously at the
undead that were still being drawn to them.

Beyond the liberating troops,
Liz could see pillars of smoke dotted around the horizon.

They may be about to be rescued
from this office fortress, but she doubted the world outside would
return to normal anytime soon.

And she doubted there would be
a thorough investigation into what happened here.

“You can stop waving now. Come
sit here,” Liz said softly. She reached out to hold Melissa’s hand.
“Now, remember last night when you told me you were scared the
murderer would kill you, too?”

Melissa nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“
And I told you my big
secret that I was the one murdering all the people,” Liz said in a
calm and reassuring tone. “You remember why I told you I was
killing them?”

Melissa nodded.

Liz placed a motherly arm
around her daughter.

“
I told you I was doing
it to keep you and me safe. So we had enough food to eat and enough
water to drink. So we could stay alive and stay together,” Liz
said. She calmly stroked her daughter’s hair. “And I asked you to
go and ask for a drink of water so I could finish making sure we
were safe.”

“Uh-huh,” Melissa replied.

“Well, we need to do the same
thing from now on. I promise to keep you safe, honey, for as long
as I’m alive. Now you need to help me by promising to keep our
secret.”

Melissa nodded silently.

“If anyone asks, you tell them
Colin tried to kill us, okay?”

Melissa’s bottom lip
trembled.

“What is it, honey?” Liz
asked.

“But...but that’s a lie,”
Melissa burbled out.

“I know, honey, but it’s okay
to tell lies if it’s to protect the people you love. And if the
soldiers find out I killed all these people, they won’t understand
that I did it to protect you and they’ll take me away from you.”
Liz looked Melissa in the eyes. “And you don’t want them to take me
away from you, do you? Who would look after you?”