Diaries of the Damned (25 page)
Brian Crawshank addressed them all as he spoke, and they all listened to him. Their bond had grown, and with it, their desire for answers.
They had slowly started to piece things together. The virus was a biological weapon. They had been attacked by terrorists – or so they assumed. The initial flu virus had been the weapon, but it had mutated somehow, or at least, it reacted differently to what had been planned, because anybody who died from the flu rose up as a zombie, and set everything in motion. One by one they had all told their story, and each time learned something new, either about the zombies, or the world around them. When Brian rose and offered his assurances that the zombies were smarter than people took them for, they all snapped to attention. Their desire for knowledge burned inside them with the same lustfulness that the zombies had for flesh.
“You see, everybody thinks those things are brainless. Nothing more than dead husks hell-bent on consuming every living thing they come into contact with.” Brian spoke with the flair of a man used to addressing a crowd. “Sure, those things are dead. There is no bringing them back, that’s for damned sure. But dumb? Hell no! If you would have seen what I have seen, you would understand that these things aren’t dumb. They’re smart. It may take them a while… like rats in a freaking maze or something, but they get it.” He spoke to the group, and ensured that each one received eye contact from him. It was a small detail, but something that struck all of them. Until then, most of the people had looked at the floor or their own hands while talking. Only Leon and Tracey had looked directly at Paul the whole time.
“Would you care to tell us about it?” Paul asked hopefully.
Jessica fidgeted nervously beside him, crossing her legs one way and then the other in search of a comfortable sitting position.
“Are you alright?” Paul asked her. Jessica looked pale, and the bandages around her wrist had started to stain a litt
le. “You’re wrists are bleeding,” he noted.
“No, they are just leaking a little.” Leon answered for her. “It’s the altitude. “You really should keep your arms elevated a little more Jessica. Try this: put them on the top of the seat in front of you. That should help. If you feel as though you’re going to pass out, give me a sign,
okay?” Leon had placed his hands in the same position he advised Jessica to adopt. He only lowered his once she had copied his instruction to the letter.
“I’ll be fine,” s
he whispered, her voice a little distant…weaker. Paul had almost forgotten in the buzz of things that she had slit her wrists but a few hours before.
Once Paul was certain that Jessica wasn’t going to pass out on them, he redire
cted his attention to Brian, who was staring at Jessica with a strange look in his eyes. There was something behind the gaze, something that troubled Paul, but he wasn’t sure what it was. It was as though there was something trapped within him, some second part of the man that wanted to break free. It had forced its way to the surface, and when Brian noticed Paul staring at him, he closed his eyes and shook his head, hiding his face within his hands. When he pulled them away, the look was gone, forced back below the surface.
“As I was saying,” Paul continued, unable to shift his gaze from Brian’s face. He did his best to adjust the expression he wore as a c
ounter measure. “You say these…things, can learn. I’d very much like to hear about that.” He flipped once more to a fresh page in his note book and began to write in his own form of shorthand.
Brian paused for a second, and for most people, Paul understood that they were searching for the right place to start their tale. With this man however, Paul got the distinct impression that he was not thinking about where to start, but rather about what bits he should tell, and which should be omitted. Paul didn’t like it. Something about the man made Paul feel uneasy, but Brian had gotten through the quarantine just like the rest of them. Plenty hadn’t, so he w
as probably just over reacting.
The creatures that wandered the streets were a strange sight for Brian Crawshank when he woke late one afternoon. After a particularly problematic midnight shift he had marked the start of his week vacation by treating himself to a six-pack of beer and a pizza. He had passed out midway through the sixth beer, just as the sun was starting to rise. He was surprised to see that his mobile had no missed calls. The workforce was operating on a skeleton staff after a bad flu outbreak had stripped them down to below regulation numbers. He had pulled three double shifts in a row that week.
A strange growl rang up from the streets. With a dull ache in his head, Brian opened the curtain and winced at
the bright grey light that assaulted his eyes increasing the ache from dull to moderate in a fraction of a second.
The streets were filled with people ambling in all directions. They were covered with blood. Several were limping down the road with broken legs, and in one case, a partially severed leg dragging behind them.
“What the hell?” Brian called out, but his house was empty. His wife was out of town, helping her mother move into a nursing home. It was a choice that had been hard on her, but her mother’s rapidly failing health and her reluctance to move closer to her only daughter made it a choice of practicality.
A more focused look out of the window showed a car wreck further up the road, but it didn’t look like anything major. Certainly not large enough to result in the number of injured out there. An image flashed in Brian’s mind. He saw a plane crash; a broken wreck lying in a burned out field. Debris was scattered everywhere and the survivors and those injured on the ground were walking the streets in the state of shock.
It would explain their pale faces
he thought to himself.
A pregnant woman came into view, stumbling down the road. Her face was covered with blood, and she clutched at her swollen belly as she walked. As she walked through Brian’s line of vision, he saw the large knife that jutted from between her shoulder blades. He was on the move and charging down the stairs before he knew what was going on.
He lived in a small semi-suburban area on the outskirts of town. He was on the wrong side of the ring road for it to be considered country, but the properties were large and the streets quiet enough for someone not to guess the actual location on a map. It was a quiet neighborhood. Most of the people had lived there a long time. The woman was foreign to the street, for none of Brian’s immediate neighbors were still of child bearing age… at least not naturally.
“Miss….
Hey, Miss wait, let me help you,” Brian called as he sprinted into the street. The woman turned around, as everybody seemed to do upon hearing his voice.
The moment Brian saw the woman from close range he knew something was wrong. Her skin was not pale or sickly, but deathly white. Her features were not contorted in pain as he had f
irst thought, but into something else. She reached out for him, growling.
A voice called out to him, but he heard it too late. “Get away from them…”
The woman was upon him; her teeth snapping closed a split second after Brian instinctively pushed her away. The stench that she gave off was another pungent indicator as to her condition. It was the stench of illness…an odor of death.
“Get away…” the same distant voice called.
Brian turned and saw a young man, probably in his mid-twenties, running down the street toward him. He was covered in blood, but there was something fluid about his movements which, in the presence of the disjointed, lumbering bodies that surrounded them, seemed somewhat surreal.
Brian opened his mouth to call out, but the man was grabbed by another figure, that ap
peared from behind a white work van. The younger man fell to the ground. When the new arrival hauled him back onto his feet, Brian's blood ran cold as he saw the blood erupt from the young man’s throat. The body dropped to the road in a powerful rainbow of arterial spray. His conqueror stood above the body, chewing on the chunk of meat it had ripped away. On the pavement, the body jerked and twisted as life flooded from the wound. It fell still just before a group of three others arrived, drawn by the scent of the blood. They all fell to their knees, and in a scene that strongly reminded Brian of an Animal Planet documentary of lions lunching on a felled zebra, they began to tear away chunks of clothing and flesh. The man’s torso ripped open and a burst of steam erupted as the warm organs spilled into the cool wintery air and were shoveled into the hungry mouths of the undead.
Brian felt his world begin to spin. He had forgotten about the woman he had pushed away. She wrapped her arms around him, breaking the trance he had fallen into. The only thing that saved his neck from meeting a similar fate as the younger man was the protruding belly of the woman, which kept her from getting a good grip on Brian and meant her salivating mouth could not get close enough to clamp down on anything.
Brian spun around, and pushed out, once again acting on instinct. The woman gave a howl and fell to the floor. It was then that Brian saw she was still wearing what appeared to be either a night dress or a hospital gown.
In any case, as she fell, the loosely fitting clothing rode up and exposed her crotch to the world, and what Brian saw would haunt his dreams until the day he died. The woman had fallen with her legs spread, and between the
nest of scabby hair, a tiny misshapen head peered through the blood-encrusted lips. Its mouth was a toothless snarl, while its body was forever encapsulated within its mother’s cunt.
Brian stumbled backward
, his world alternating from light to dark, as if the sun had become a celestial strobe light. Growls echoed around him as every zombie in the street bore down on him. Brian spun around. Only the zombies seemed to have any color of definition. The rest of the world was matte black. A woman drew close to him. Her shoulder was dislocated and her neck twisted sharply to the left. She had five deep gouges running down the side of her face and neck. The slits opened and closed like gills as she limped toward her prey…toward him. Brian understood that she meant to eat him. He turned to flee, but the gap was closing fast. He sprinted between the zombies, who grabbed at him, and ripped his clothes. Brian pushed his way through their ranks, and upon breaking through found himself on the wrong side of the group to his house. There was no time for him to regroup however, for they were closing in on him. Their lumbering gait had lulled Brian into a false belief that they were slow. In reality their walking speed, when blood was in the air, reached a speed that bordered on swift.
The pounding in his head thumped in near perfect synchronicity with the slapping of his feet against the damp tarmac as Brian sprinted down Costello Drive. He ran with no purpose, no direction. His mind was a sea of black; his conscious brain working hard to hide the events he had witnessed from his mind.
He had to keep going, to stay away from the group that pursued him. Their numbers had swollen. The undead appeared in doorways and from behind cars. From behind each new obstacle he passed, a new snarling face emerged; each hungry for blood and closing the gap between him and his demise.
Brian lived two miles from the city’s main hospital. He knew that his physical condition – even with the heavy head –was more than able to complete the run. So it was
there that he aimed himself. The simple logic being used was that something was wrong. People were sick and dying. A hospital seemed like the sensible choice.
By the time Brian reach the junction of Costello Drive and Main Street West – the road that led to, and past the hospital - he had a group of around fifty zombies lumbering after him; including one in what looked to be military attire, with a rifle slung over its shoulders. The weapon bounced against the dead man’s torso like an oversized necklace.
At the junction, Brian emerged onto a busier road. For the first time he could see the extent of the problem. Cars stood abandoned in the road. Bodies littered the street. The echo of emergency service sirens hung in the air like a music score. Slowly, his focus returned. He saw people – living people – being pulled down and torn apart by the undead. Tears streamed from his eyes as he ran through a cloud of pain. A family sat trapped in their car, while a child lunged from the backseat and removed the passenger’s throats with the brutality of a wild animal.
A car sped down the street, and ploughed through the group that was chasing Brian. Their bodies fell like Skittles in an alley. Their skin split from the impact and peppered the air with thick, semi-congealed blood globules. Bodies and assorted loose parts rained down with wet smacks
as Brian pushed himself onward. The car, having pushed through the crowd sped around the corner and out of view. It too was headed in the direction of the hospital.
Half a mile further up the road, a few hundred meters before
the hospital driveway began, Brian came across the car. Its front end had been crumpled, the roof flattened. He found the radiator first, and was shocked to see the shift in structure of the vehicle. The driver lay on the hood, having been thrown through the window upon impact. His shirt had been torn, and the glass had raked deep gouges into his flesh. The rear of his skull was also missing, exposing what remained of the man’s brain. In the passenger seat, and doubtlessly the cause of the crash, sat a young woman, whose face was the very picture of pestilence: gaunt and pasty, with a decidedly green hue. Her eyes had sunken into deep pits while her body emitted a stench that was overpowering. Part of the meaty aroma came from her sizzling lap, as it roasted beneath the hot motor that had landed there. Had it not been for the way she still snarled and growled at Brian, her arms reaching for him, oblivious to the way the flesh on her legs bubbled and melted beneath the engine, he would have felt sorry for her at having met such a grizzly end. Ultimately all he felt was relief; relief that she was pinned down and that her seatbelt was also still intact to hold her in place. He slammed the door of the car, and ran onward toward the hospital, his heart sinking further every second as more and more of the undead appeared around him. They came across the grass fields that stood before the famous old building, and through the wooded thicket that acted as the right side boundary of the grounds. On the other side was the old college building, which was now used exclusively by medical students. The zombies came in droves, and forced Brian to abandon his plans to find shelter in the hospital. Instead, he turned around and headed back toward the residential area.
The zombie pack that had been chasing him had dispersed. The litter of emptied out corpses, their freshly opened torso’s still steaming, told o
f the distraction that had ultimately saved him.
The houses that ran along the main street were old, but sturdy. Many of them were abandoned; their doors left open, the occupants scattered to the wind. It was one of these empty looking houses that Brian fled to. He slammed the front door closed and collapsed to the floor. His legs became jelly and his lungs burned. He took in deep gulps of air, closing his eyes as a series of tremors shook his body.
There was no time to relax however as his undead groupies collided with the door and sent Brian spilling into the hallway. The door splintered from the frame and the dead spilled into the house.
“Come on, give me a break!” Brian cried as they crashed to the floor. The bottleneck created by the narrow door opening gave him the second lucky break of the afternoon. He turned and ran through the house, into the kitchen and into the garden. Being terraced houses, it was easy for Brian to jump over the fence, and the three that followed, until he landed in an overgrown garden filled with weeds and all manner of oversized vegetation. The For Sale board that had been attached to the rear wall of the property told Brian all he needed to know. He sprinted through the garden, moving so fast that he collided with the rear door of the property. To his relief it was unlocked. Brian slipped inside, pulled the door closed: and sunk into the darkness.
All of the curtains in the property had been not just closed, but pinned together, cutting off all light from the outside world.
The air in the house was stale. It had been empty for some time. A thick layer of dust covered everything. It tickled Brian’s throat and irritated his eyes. He fought against the desire to sneeze. He did not want to attract any of those creatures to him.
Moving slowly, he crept through the dark house and peered through the front window, rubbing a small viewing space for himself on the grimy glass.
The street was no longer teeming with the undead. The ones that Brian did see appeared to be moving; constantly roaming the streets, rather than hunting for anything they couldn’t see. Brian breathed a sigh of relief. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he saw that the house still contained a few meager furnishings. A small table, two chairs, and a camping bed. It actually looked as though somebody had been living there. Fast food wrappers and beer cans covered the floor. In the kitchen, the debris that Brian found in the sink confirmed his suspicion. The water in the property had been turned off, and there was no light for the bulbs had all been removed.
There was an upstairs portion of the house, but Brian didn’t have the energy to go and explore. The stairs were guarded top and bottom by an old baby gate. Brian decided to sit down for a few minutes first, and then plan his next move. The camping bed creaked beneath his weight as he sank onto it. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. The sounds of the undead shuffling through the street, the cries of the living as they were discovered and eaten alive seeped into the house in a macabre lullaby. Brian felt the world around him begin to blur. The edges of reality softened, and the dream world broke through. Before he knew it, Brian was asleep.
