Diaries of the Damned (23 page)

Tracey rose to her feet, quick
ly crossing behind the car and into the middle of the street. She said nothing, but stood still, and watched as the zombie’s attention snapped her way.

“Hey! Hey you, crazy chick! Get the fuck down! Run a
way! Those things will kill you,” the now panicked voice of the young man that had launched the bottle at them spoke up. He turned and rose into a crouch, only to be pulled back down by his friends.

“Tracey!” Alan shouted, his position forgotten. He sprang to his feet and ran to his wife, but she hushed him with a raised hand and forced him to stand behind her.

The approaching zombie took several steps closer to Tracey, and then paused. The others had joined, and stopped in the same position a few meters away from Alan and Tracey. They all stared at Tracey’s swollen belly. It held them transfixed.

A small, squeaky noise came from behind the car, as one of the women in their opposing group tried to stifle their cries. Tracey never broke her gaze on the zombies, but Alan chanced a glance and saw that they had all turned around to stare at the unfolding scene.

The sound of the suppressed cry caught the attention of the group, who swiveled like a marching platoon and descended upon the car, leaving Tracey and Alan behind them. The group did not stand a chance once the zombies heard them. In a flurry of kicks and screams, the massacre began. Blood sprayed into their air like the release of a series of hell geysers, and rained down onto the car. The sound of ripping flesh and hungry growls filled the street. The agonized cries of the group made Tracey vomit. It was a sound that she found indescribable. Not just for the pain that was expressed in that person’s final cry, but because of the simplistic, crisp sound with which the skin tore apart; a fragility that had never occurred to her before that moment.

“Tracey, we need to run, now!” Alan grabbed his wife by the hand and together they sprinted, as best as their respective physiques would allow, to the shop. The door opened as they drew near, and a Pakistani man appeared.

“Hurry,” he called to them.

Alan reached the shop half a step ahead of Tracey, but stopped, waiting for her to cross the threshold ahead of him.

It was dark in the shop, and Alan soon saw why. The quantity of shed blood, both inside and out, staggered his mind.

“Quick, get away from the door. Please, sit. Sit, here.” The owner of the store scurried around in the dim light and came back with an old, beat-up computer chair which he insisted Tracey sit on. She didn’t argue.

Alan stood, staring at his wife, a mixture of anger and despair sloshed through his mind. “You could have been killed.” He spoke after a time, only realizing once he had finished how obvious the statement actually was.

“I remembered the way the boy looked at me, and then the other zombie, the one you killed. They all seemed to stop when they saw I was
pregnant. It was the only way…but oh god, those people.” Tracey clapped her hands over her mouth as a tremor worked its way through her body. Suddenly the sound of their raw flesh being consumed by the undead echoed in her ears, and there was nothing she could do to silence it.

“They were trying to get us killed. You didn’t mean for that to happen.” Alan wrapped his arm around his weeping wife and pulled her close to him. As he held her, he looked over at the store owner, and mouthed his thanks.

“Those bitches tried to break in, to steal my stuff. They’ve been watching me for hours now. I won’t miss them,” he spoke with a second-generation accent.

“Thank you for lett
ing us inside. We appreciate it,” Alan answered as Tracey pushed herself away from his embrace and sat under her own power. The tears had subsided, but she knew they would not be the last.

The store was deserted, save for the bloody puddles, which were all that remained of several customers who had been doing their shopping at the time of the outbreak.

“Where are the bodies?” Tracey asked. Alan hadn’t even seen the way she sat staring at the blood. Her face was pale, and it shocked him.

“You need to eat. Please, do you have anything?
I don’t have any money with me,” Alan began, but the shopkeeper waved his hands.

“Please, take anything you need. My shop is closed. Take all you need.” He turned away from them and moved to stand by the door. He had a shotgun leaning against the wall where he stood. Alan assumed it was loaded, given the open box of shells on the counter top.

Alan had frequented the shop on many occasions, and knew his way around the shelves. He quickly grabbed a sandwich for his wife and a Cornish pasty for himself, as well as two bags of crisps and some bottled water.

“Here, eat this. You’ll feel better
,” he said as he handed the food to Tracey. She took it without comment and began to eat.

Alan opened his own and walked over to the door to stand beside the owner. “Ho
w many of them are out there?” he asked, his voice a forced whisper. The group that had attacked the other party had moved on. Their feeding was over and the momentum had been set on course.

“Three new ones. No idea where they ca
me from. I don’t recognize them,” the man answered without breaking his watchful gaze.

“It’s the flu. People started dying
and came back as…well, zombies,” Alan explained, unsure if he was talking sense, or boring the man with information he already knew.

“The world is ending. They predicted it would.” The man wore a pendant around his neck, which he clasped in one fist. Every so often, he would close his eyes and mumbled to himself, as if in silent prayer.

Alan stood in silence. The weight of the man’s words fell heavy on his ears.

“What’s the plan now?” Tracey asked when Alan had rejoined her. She had finished her sandwich and was munching her way through the second bag of crisps. The color had already begun to return to her cheeks.

“First, you are going to rest. Don’t forget: you’re pregnant. We need to take things slow, no matter what is happening out there.” Alan looked around, surveying the store. There was a fire exit in the rear right corner, and a large cooler / freezer unit in the center of the rear wall. “We seem to be secure here. As long as we keep quiet, I don’t see why we can’t just wait it out.” Alan continued. “The army or somebody will come along looking for survivors. They will have to,” he added, as if in an attempt to convince himself.

“I hope so,
” Tracey answered, rising from the stool. “That thing is more uncomfortable than standing,” she whispered.

As the time began to tick by, the silence in the shop began to grow oppressive. Their host never moved from his post by the door. Not even to shift his weight. He seemed uninterested in their company, yet had seemed rather insistent that they stay. Something about it didn’t sit right with Alan. He mulled it over repeatedly in his mind, trying to find the cypher that hung in before his nose, yet somehow eluded him.

He moved away from Tracey and walked back to shopkeeper. “My name’s Alan,” he offered his hand to the man, who refused to acknowledge the offered appendage, but gave his name in response. “Vijay…Vijay Patel.” 

“Thank you for saving us,
” Alan tried to get a conversation going with Vijay, while behind him, Tracey stood studying a pool of blood, and wondering where the smeared trail led.

Tracey heard the two men and their staccato conversation, but as she stared at the bloody trail that ran through the store, she found that their voices faded into the background. She followed the trail that led off from one a large pool – there were several areas of blood loss throughout the store – but this was by far the largest. The smear ran through the aisle, but in the
wrong direction to the one Tracey would have expected. They all ran toward the back of the building. Following the smear through the aisle filled with breakfast cereals and hot beverages, Tracey began to shiver. The air seemed to have grown suddenly colder as she approached the rear.
Knock it off Tracey
she chided herself and carried out.

The bloody trail led right to the door of the freezer / chiller unit. The blood that had gathered by the door was not what Tracey would call a pool, but certainly it showed her where the bodies
had been dragged and then left.
Maybe they became zombies and he led them out of the front door.
She reasoned with herself.

While Tracey was following the red scab road through the store, Alan continued to push Vijay into a conversation. The more the man refused, the more certain he became that there was something else afoot.

“Why did you save us? It strikes me as weird. I mean, if you wouldn’t help those others…” Alan tried again to dig for the information, and this time, unlike the previous seven times he had tried, Vijay gave a sigh and turned his attention away from the world outside.

“You seemed like nice peo
ple,” Vijay answered, but Alan could tell the words were false. His accent could not hide the lie.

“Ok
ay, but you couldn’t tell. Those others there, they looked decent too. Young kids, alone, scared.” Alan pushed, but something resonated in his head like a gong struck in just the correct spot.

“They were trouble.” Vijay had grown nervous. He turned his attention back to the window, but was not the same statue-like figure. He struggled to get into any position that he could hold for more than a few second.

It also became clear that he had nothing else to say, so Alan turned around and looked for Tracey. He didn’t see her at first and the panic in his voice when he called for her made Vijay spin around. It was then that the pieces came together for Alan.

“It’s my wife isn’t it? You saw how those things left her alone because she was pregnant. You just plan on using us to keep yourself safe.” Alan stepped back, away from the man, for he had grabbed his shotgun as he turned.

“Where is she?” Vijay asked in an accusatory tone.

“She must have gone to get something else to eat.
You know how pregnant women are,” Alan answered, his eyes focused on the barrel of the shotgun.

Tracey picked that very moment to both call out to Alan and give a startled cry of alarm, one following the other in a smooth flow of sound.

Alan ran after the voice, which had come from the back of the store, closely followed by Vijay.

“Tracey! Tracey where are you?” he called, but before she could answer, he spotted her, standing at the rear of the shop, against the freezer door. She was trying to open it.

“No, get away from there!” Vijay shouted, his accent heavier than ever. Tracey heard him, but it was too late to stop. She had turned the lock and pushed the handle down past the point of no return.

Alan was a few feet away from his wife, when the door to the freezer burst open and five bloodied zombies stumbled out of the dark with a rush of frozen air.

Alan jumped to the side, the moment he saw the first shadow pushed against the dark doorway. He grabbed Tracey had held her tight. Vijay however was not so quick on his feet. The years of working in a small shop had made him somewhat portly. He gave nothing more than an angry howl as the first zombie stumbled into him. A deafening blast ran out, as Vijay pulled the trigger on his shotgun. In a shower of innards and blood, a hole appeared in the chest of the lead zombie, and managed to injure the next in line. Yet both continued, unaffected. Alan saw Vijay through the hole in the creature’s chest, but as the group descended, only his screams told of his presence.

“We need to run! Here, use this door.” Alan grabbed his wife and hurried her through the
fire exit. As they moved past the row of breads and sandwiches, which occupied the rear corner, Alan grabbed an armful of whatever he could carry and followed Tracey out into the world.

They clo
sed the door and stood with their backs against the wall. The alley was empty, but the same could not be said for the streets at either end.

“We should ha
ve helped him. He saved us,” Tracey stumbled over her words. Everything had happened so fast, her brain and body had yet to catch up.

“He only saved us to save himself. He saw how those things ignore you, I guess because of the baby, and he wanted to use
you for his protection,” Alan answered. While he did not know it for certain, the actions of the man, and the fact that he had zombies trapped in the store with him, added up and pointed toward but one theory.

Tracey said nothing, and when Alan looked at her, he saw that she was trying hard to hold back the tears, which he could clearly see, were burning her eyes.

“We just need to keep moving. We will find an empty place and settle down. We can wait it out for a while. We have some food, so we can make it a day or so. I mean a house would have some food in it, too.” Alan gave his wife a kiss and then studied the alley. “We came from this way, and we know that there are several zombies standing around out there. So I guess we should try this way.” He pointed to the left. I think that's the road we take to get to our street. If so, we can skip around to the right, follow the road, and try to find something in the older houses around the football stadium.” Alan wasn’t a sports fan, but even he thought it was interesting to live so close to the local stadium. He knew that the team was in the top league. Whether they were any good or not, he had no clue, but the idea of going to watch the odd game didn’t strike him as being anything unbearable.