Great Bitten: Outbreak (6 page)

I watched dumbstruck as
Ass abruptly got out of his chair and ducked outside the front door. He was gone for a couple of minutes and we all stood looking at each other, shoulders shrugging and mouths gaping. I’d fired a shotgun a couple of times out hunting with friends and I’m pretty sure of all of us Rick would be the most handy, having been more than a bit of a hunting jack throughout his years at university and beyond. I was already eyeing up his shoulder’s potential to stand up against the repeated recoil as we stood the line against a shambling zombie horde. I’m pretty sure my eyes were glazing over at this Hollywood fantasy when Ass shambled back in clutching an armful of anonymous double-barrelled guns as if he was a toddler bringing a bunch of branches to a scout’s fire. Well, I say armful, I meant four. He dumped them on the sofa and brought round a rucksack that I’d overlooked as I’d been gawping at the guns. He threw that to the floor with an unceremonious grunt and looked over first at me, then at Rick, who’d rushed over to start pawing at the new toys.

“
Alan these are too much. I mean are you sure you can spare these? How are you going to defend yourself?”

“I’m heading to my boat
, so I won’t need to defend myself. I suggest you do the same. They might have stopped the planes but I can’t see how they can even begin to police the coastline. People are going to start leaving this blighted place and I’m going to be one of the first of them, so I suggest you start getting your act together.”

I watched him look around the room, seeing his eyes take in the planks of wood leaning across walls and, I hoped, my own arrogant and pissed off alpha-male demeanour.

“You’re going to try to make a stand here?”

“There’s no try about it,
Al” I said with a swagger. “The house is big and we have a high vantage point. We can fortify and last it out. I’ve been checking things out online; the main populace around here is to the south and we’re away from most of the major roads. I can’t see us being swarmed by those things. In fact, if we just hole up and keep dark, I think the whole thing will probably just pass us by.” My hackles rose as I saw the early sneer forming on Ass’s smarmy middle-class red-wine rosy cheeks, and before my brain could get in to gear my mouth was on auto pilot. “So thanks but no thanks, I don’t want my sister shooting her leg off below the knee, so you can take your pea-shooters home and wait for the Old Nick to take them. Or take them to the museum, whichever they’re better for.”

Carla
looked like she was going to slap me again and I was genuinely grimacing inside at my words, but far too far gone now to take any of them back. “If we want some proper guns I’ll go to that shop down the road in Broadwater and buy some myself, we don’t want your charity. So kindly pick them back up and fuck off.”

I had expected forlorn humility however
Ass started bellowing in genuine humour. I frowned in confusion as he happily stooped and grabbed three of the four guns, leaving the rucksack of bullets. “Ah lad, you’ve got balls but it’s a shame they’ve replaced your brain. The gun shop in Broadwater only sells deactivated guns, they’re good for nothing but photo shoots and exhibitions. You’ve given me a laugh though, so I’ll make you a deal.” He picked up the remaining shotgun and happily threw it into Rick’s gratefully waiting hands. Rick hugged the firearm close, as if it was the last of an endangered species which, as things stood, I suppose it was. “You can keep that gun. If you three are going to have to live together through the apocalypse,” he looked at me with a glint in his eye “I’m sure you’re going to give in at some point and want to shoot this twat in the face.”

Carla
snatched the gun off Rick and brandished it at me. “Alan, you have no idea. Stay the night, we can all shoot him together.”

The older man relented, handing over two more guns
. “One each. I’m sure someone loves him and wants him to keep alive through all of this. Just shoot him somewhere non-fatal.”

“Oh no trust me, there’s no one left that gives
a flying fuck about this monkey apart from his boss, at a stretch.” Carla appeared to ponder this for a second. “Actually, I can’t see anyone buying rounds at the bar any time soon, so we’re back to no one.”

Ass
smiled, hugging Carla before he left which took the Ice Queen herself clearly by surprise. “He wouldn’t be here if you didn’t care for him. Look after each other. Trust me, it’s hell out there.”

“How many of them do you think came off the train?”

“I don’t know. Over a hundred? Enough for me to be on my way before the night’s over, put it that way. If you’re going to hole yourselves up, I’d start doing it sharpish. They’ve tried their best to stop this thing from spreading but we’re talking about the British government here. They’d struggle to organise a piss-up in a brewery and this my dear, to coin a very American phrase, is one hell of a clusterfuck.”

“Look after yourself
Alan. And stop swearing, it doesn’t suit you.”

The old fart left, thankfully leaving the majority of the guns behind him. He was probably going to do that all along, he just wanted to put a rocket up me. Fair play,
Carla gave me two minutes of peace after he left to sit and anticipate the shitstorm that was about to land on my pig-headed shoulders. Then she spent about a minute cat-slapping me and a further ten minutes screaming and stamping, waving her arms around not greatly unlike an octopus being given an electric shock. Carla would have made an amazing Mediterranean housewife. As it was, she was an angry lawyer that lived in a posh suburb of a lost little town on the south coast of England; her talents, alack and alas, were wasted.

“Are you done?”

Her chest heaving, Rick guided her away, this time pouring her quadruple what I’d had in my own whisky tumbler. She took one long gulp, her hand shaking. Her words, when they came, were cutting barbs that I really couldn’t argue with.

“You’ve done the research, Warren. It’s what you’re good at. You’ve seen what’s happening outside. People are dying. People
we know
are dying. You might not have any friends, anyone you care about, but other people do! So take your thumb out of your ass for one second, just one short second, and think how other people feel right now.

Alan
’s pretty sure his daughter is dead, and we have nothing to say to him that will give him any comfort. He was probably in shock when he came round here, just wanting to find someone he could actually help, and what do you do? The classic Fielding charm, oh how the women must fawn over you. No, wait. You’re single, alone, a workaholic and miserable shit, which is why you’re such an arsehole in the first place.

If you were listening to him which I highly doubt, as you appear to spend most of the time sucking your teeth and looking annoyed which is a fair blessing as it keeps your mouth shut,
Alan said the zombies are in Bennington. If they’ve made it to the train station then they’ll be in the town centre, and we don’t have enough police here to deal with that kind of threat. If they’re taking guns off normal people, I’m guessing they think they don’t have enough to cope. So we should start boarding it up now and make sure we can go dark tonight. Rick? Rick where have you gone?”

Carla
started screaming at the house in general and I slumped my shoulders in relief. When Carla decided to rail at you, it was like being pinned up against a wall by your neck with a hurricane-force gale blowing fully at your face. Being released from her wrath, it wasn’t uncommon to feel like falling to your knees and kissing the blessed peace and stability of the floor. Rick clattered to the bottom of the stairs, dropping a hammer and anonymous boxes in a racket of clattering and swearing. Carla cursed him in return.

“I think if we’re going to be keeping ourselves incognito we
need to start turning down the volume in here.”

“Let’s start with your voice, no?”

Clearly too soon to start with the lip again. Thankfully Carla wasn’t Medusa, and I wasn’t reformed in to limestone, so I helped Rick pick up the detritus from the hall floor and we traipsed to the back of the house to begin properly boarding up the patio doors, our largest and most vulnerable point of ingress.

+++

“
I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.” – John Sturges

With
both
of us now clearly within Carla’s deadly radar, we exchanged withering looks as we tried to figure out how we could possibly board up a house without making too much noise. It was like the nachos in a cinema or the packet of crisps in a quiet office; you suck on them and think you’ve moistened them to dampen the noise, and you still think it sounds like someone’s stepping on bubble wrap each time you chew. So instead of being considerate and delicate, you eat the entire box or bag as quick as humanly possible, hoping to minimise the amount of disruption whilst still enjoying the maximum amount of snacking. We put up sheets around the frames, hoping to muffle our hammering. It seemed to be working at first – we were quite happy with the quick progress we made as the slats of wood were secured across a window whose light was already obscured by thick dark blankets – there was no way the zombies would be getting in this way. Carla was sorting out the canned goods we had from what we’d have to use up first and we were on our second-last slat when she called out to us to keep it down. Rick and I stopped so we could shout back, but the noise of hammering didn’t stop. I felt like dropping the hammer as a sickened feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. I felt the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up on edge as the adrenalin set off one of the most basic instincts we as humans carry – fight or flight. Rick’s eyes had gone wide and he was clearly feeling the same. The poor light was probably helping hide the pallor of his skin; if he’d gone as cold as I had, he would be showing a lighter shade of pale as well when we both needed to show our strong side and defend our home as a team.

The hammering continued and I shushed
Carla. She came out of the kitchen and saw us with our hands mutely by our sides and as if by telekinetic manipulation, her jaw slammed short before her next outburst could pass her lips. It wasn’t constant, but it was a hard and methodical thumping, solid and slow, like the beating of a heart through water. I gripped the hammer tightly in my hand and Rick did the same, mutual nerves and adrenalin passing between us as we inched our way from the back of the house through the living room keeping away from furniture, squeaking floorboards and any other horror movie pitfall I could think of.

As I stretched a shaking hand out to start pulling back the latches the door was hit again, shaking in its frame this time from the force of the blow. I
almost jumped clear off the ground, and Rick did the same though we managed to keep quiet. Carla, who’d been sneaking behind us, let out a petrified squeal, clamping her hands over her mouth in fright even as the high-pitched beacon left her lips. The thumping stopped and Rick glanced back to me. He mouthed the word ‘Alan’ and I shook my head in response as a dead-of-night interruption didn’t seem like his style, especially since he’d been determined to leave the country as soon as humanly possible.

There was another hard thump,
brutish in its promise this time and with a hard purpose instead of a muted knock. Someone’s attention had been changed by Carla’s exclamation and it was clearly from someone – or something – that we did not want to see. I walked up to Carla and pushed against her shoulders, physically shoving her back in to the relative safety of the sitting room. I didn’t have a reputation for being the nicest of guys, but even hearts of stone will heat up when the world is on fire. She stayed put, thankfully, and I went back and clasped Rick on the shoulder. We had another mutual jump as the door rattled again, and whilst we wondered silently what was laying siege to our house, it didn’t take long strides of imagination and purpose to come to the same conclusion. I counted down from three on my fingers and, with more courage than I’d ever possessed in my life
[2]
I yanked open the front door.

Why the fuck do doors open inwards? How does that help
anyone
in an emergency situation?

It didn’t help Rick as the bloodied dead weight of Alan fell through the opening door
, crushing Rick to the floor with a helpless yelp. That was a blessing in disguise compared to what made a grab at me as it fell in the door over the body that had smothered Rick, protecting him from the rotting half-man that clambered to get at the hot blood pumping underneath my skin. I darted backwards and in its mindless fervour the zombie fell to the ground, scratching clawed hands that were mottled black and brown with blood across my blessedly booted feet. I was scared and, in a state of shock, my instincts took over; I brought the hammer round in an arc and buried the clawed end in the back of the thing’s head. The world changed in that psychotic instant. The atmosphere felt soft and tinged with white as I raised the hammer high again and brought it crushing down. I had to wiggle it to release the curved claw from the back of the skull this time, with the squelch like a boot being brought out of sucking mud, so I didn’t raise it so high – it was going too deep. With shallow thrusts I brought the hammer home again and again, fragments of skull and putrid grey nuggets of brain matter ejaculating out around my feet and the shoulders from the shattered remains of its skull.

Lost in the moment, I was yanked back and brought the hammer
around for another deadly blow, but I held myself when I saw it was Carla, tears streaming down her cheeks and shock and fear playing over her large, petrified eyes. I looked at my hand and was overcome with revulsion. The hammer, my hand, the cloth on my arm, was soaked with angry coagulated blood. The hammerhead was unrecognisable as specks of brain matter glued tiny shards of skull on to its frame like a Halloween paper mache toy and I immediately opened my fist to drop it in revulsion at what I had just done. I ripped off my shirt, racing to the sink and turning on the taps as I rifled frantically through cupboards with my clean hand looking for disinfectant and a scouring pad. I found both and thrust my arm under the hot water, ignoring the scalding in a silent pleading for cleanliness. Weren’t the news reports saying the virus was in the bodily fluid of the victims? Did I have any open cuts on my hands? Had I swallowed any of it as I dealt my blows?

Carla
was sobbing behind me, probably in shock too. Rick had somehow heaved himself from underneath the corpse that had fallen on him, and was trying to comfort her as best he could. I felt the grateful pain of the sharp scour dig in to my skin and envisioned the tiny particles of viral matter being scraped off the surface, draining harmlessly down the sink and… and where? In to the mains system, to be apathetically filtered and put back in to circulation? How many other people had done this?

I staggered back from the running tap as if it was spouting lava. I looked wildly at my sister. “Have you had any water today?”

She looked at me as if I were a clown. “Water? What? Of course I’ve had water Warren. Want something a bit fucking stronger than that now though.”

“When? When did you have it? How much?”

“I… I can’t remember. I just had some filtered water from the fridge. Why?”

I sagged with relief and eyeballed the same question at Rick. He shook his head to indicate he hadn’t had any water at all. “Look
at what I’ve just done. If that’s a common reaction - if what’s happening is in the blood, and I’ve gone straight to the sink to wash it off, that infected blood is going right back in to the mains. We don’t know how many people have done that in the last day. Hell, some of those things could have even died in the water supply. We’ve got to keep away from mains water from now on. We don’t drink anything from taps.”

“That’s ridiculous Warren. How
long would the water take to circulate around the system? Weeks? And it gets filtered first. We need that water supply to survive.”

“We’ll take the water you bought from the supermarket, and we’re getting out of here. It’s not safe, not if they’ve already made it to people’s houses.”

“Alan’s dead because he was trying to get out of here. Have you seen him, Warren? Did you
see
what that thing had done to him? I’m not going out there! I’m boarding up the bloody door, putting a hole in the stairs and hiding up here until the government clears this place out!”

That statement caught me blindsided. Old
Ass had been caught making a run for it. His remaining and precious gun didn’t help him after all.

“Ok calm down love, we’re all alright, Warren wasn’t hurt, you weren’t hurt. We can’t help
Alan. There’s people dying all over the country and I hate to say it but he’s just a number now.” I became sorely aware of my solitude when Rick snaked a comforting arm around Carla’s shaking shoulders. “Let’s get him moved outside, away from the house, then we’ll board up and get safe upstairs. We’ll keep rationed and rational, and make sure we know what’s happening everywhere else, and especially keep an eye out for when someone is going to come and scoop us out of this shithole.”

Rick placed a kiss on her forehead and she leant in to him slightly, feeling his warmth and seeking comfort in his presence. With no one to focus on but myself, and embarrassed to witness their own tender moment, I became aware of myself for the first time in hours. I felt the stinging path of the scouring pad raw
on my skin and setting on fire the heat of the chemicals on my sodden arm; the ragged beating of my heart; my body seeking to balance itself against the unexpected energy it had just needed to expend to ensure its temporary survival. My head thumped dully and my outer limbs were cold, goose bumps standing up on my exposed flesh as the fear refused to be quelled. The back of my eyes pulsed in a sure sign of fatigue and my legs felt heavy, unused to rigorous exercise and now protesting severely at the strain they’d been put under for the last 24 hours. I was about to suggest to them we took turns at taking some rest as the others finished preparing the house in shifts, when the bloody body of Alan staggered in to view.

Think of a drunkard staggering down the street. The drunkard’s probably been to a DIY store and fallen in the paint section, because almost head to toe he’s covered in red. It’s not the false fun red of a fast food outlet, it’s the dark luscious red of a brothel wall, heavy and hot and full of potency. The drunkard must have been at it all day because he can’t really talk. His chest doesn’t heave but what’s left of his throat – dear God, what happened to his throat – bubbles as part of the adam’s apple bounces up and down in mimicry of speech. You look down at the drunkard’s chest to see why he can’t talk and aside from the torn shirt exposing a strip of ripped flesh from the collarbone to the navel, you can see that his chest isn’t moving. Why isn’t his chest moving if he’s trying to talk? Perhaps the lungs have been damaged – you can’t see them for the muscle and sinew and the bloody cage protecting his internal organs, but there’s every chance a
finger has slipped in between those narrow slats and punctured a hole where there never used to be one before. But then you’d think there would be wheezing, and there’s not a single sound of escaping air anywhere.

If you can tear your eyes away from the horrific wounds on the torso, you see from the drunkard’s eyes that whatever he has done to himself today, it’s a massive step away from normality. His brow
is fevered, and small droplets of sweat still remain pooled at the temples, collecting blood and flavouring his skin a tempered red. His forehead is frozen in a shock concertina of wrinkles and his eyes looked surprised before the bloodshot flecks took over, painting everything that popular shade of red the man seems to have taken to. He takes another staggering step forward lurching, his arms coming forward to try to maintain some semblance of balance and giving him a shambling forward momentum, swinging backwards at the last possible moment and swinging the pendulum of his body back to an upright position, a few precious feet closer to where his bloodshot eyes are focusing. And when those eyes come to bear on you and you realise that it’s you that he wants, your own blood becomes frozen. Eyes that looked shocked and confused, perhaps even lost at my first quick glance, aren’t dead. I’d always expected zombies to have those stereotypically dead movie eyes, glazed over and devoid of the soul that the religiously inclined claim dwells within every human body. Perhaps there is no soul, and it’s all to do with the brain which at this point is clearly still alive and very vigorously kicking. Perhaps there is a soul after all, and the taint of the infection mutates it in to a dark and predatory core. Because Alan’s eyes are anything but absent. They are full of malevolence and hatred. Bloodshot, and with pupils dilated so far that much of the eye is ink black with the fury of a midnight storm, he takes drunken steps towards me and as far away from his toying around with me earlier as possible, there is no mistaking his inhuman intent.

I let out a
strangled cry of warning; Carla and Rick were between us and I didn’t want Ass tearing his way through them to get to me – I had no doubt at all that he’d try. They turned and Carla let out a full-blooded scream. Rick pushed her to one side and she crumpled to the side of the room, scurrying behind a chair. Ass ignored her. Some part of his barely-functioning brain must have still been registering her as a favourite. He didn’t seem that interested in Rick, either. I must have really pissed him off about the guns. I raised my hand to heft my trusty hammer again, thinking myself a nouveaux apocalyptic Thor, and instead a dribble of damp squeezed out of the sponge I was still holding, slipping down the side of my wrist. I looked at it, both horrified and mystified, as Ass charged me. Well, if you could have sped him up with a bit of fast forward he’d have been charging. As it was, the infected that we were encountering either had no balance or the forward velocity of a three-legged tortoise. I suppose I felt a little lucky, if you only think of the one-on-one situations. It’s a shame that this wasn’t one massive game of poker. I backed in to the kitchen and grabbed a knife out of the block on the sideboard. The heft of it felt immediately more comfortable, though it was difficult to get less deadly than a sponge. I suppose just knowing there was a pointy bit at one end that was specifically designed to stab filled me with a lot more confidence. Ass had no coordination and as he lurched towards me I braced myself. Not everything was like the movies so far, but the weakness, the only thing guaranteed to kill these things permanently, was by destroying the brain. The news and my research both had confirmed that much.