Savage: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel (14 page)

“Farmhouse coming up ahead,” Kirk said.  “Want to
check it out?”

Garfield spied the small cottage at the edge of the
field and thought about it for a moment, weighing up the pros and cons. 
The plan was not to fill up on supplies before they got to where they were
going, but it wouldn’t hurt to check out the odd little place here and there.
 Some farmhouses had the occasional shotgun stashed away in their
pantries.  It was worth checking out.  “We’ll take a look,” he said.
 “Three man team; you, me, and Lemon; quick sweep for any food and supplies.”

“Okay
dokey
,” said Kirk,
turning the wheel slightly to take them directly towards the cottage. 

The building was old grey brick with a red slate roof
and a small porch over the front door.  It looked entirely benign and as
safe a place as existed nowadays, but each of the foragers knew that looks
could be deceiving.  The dead did not distinguish between nice places and
bad.  You could just as easily find a horde of them at a quaint farmhouse
than you could at a rundown shopping mall or hospital.

Still, it’s a cute little farmhouse.  I bet Poppy
would like it here. 
All this space to run around and
explore.
  The girl
is always wanting
to
explore – she’s like a little blonde squirrel.  Maybe someday she’ll
get to live in a place like this.  Or someplace beside a pond like the
house she grew up in.

Kirk pulled the van to a stop outside the cottage and
applied the handbrake.  They all sat and waited for a minute, making sure
that nothing came out of the nearby outhouses and sheds.  Once the coast
was clear, Garfield opened his door and stepped out onto the gravel, the stones
crunching beneath his boots.  Kirk stepped out, too, from the driver’s
side, and slammed his door loudly.  Garfield winced.  “Do you want to
bring the dead down on us?  Try and be a little less obvious.”

Kirk huffed.  “Sorry, boss.  Wouldn’t it be
best to attract them, though?  Least that way we can see ‘
em
coming.”

“I’d rather them not come at all.”

“Fair enough. 
Lem
, you
ready?”

Lemon was coming out of the sliding door at the side
of the van.  He hopped down onto the gravel and nearly stumbled.  His
skin was pale.  “I think I’m g-g-gunna throw up.”

Kirk laughed and punched him on the arm.  “Man
up,
Lem
.”

“It’s just because you’re not used to being in a
vehicle,” said Cat stepping out behind him and rubbing him on the back. 
“Your tummy will settle down soon,
hun
.”

Lemon took a deep breath and nodded.  “I’m
okay.  Shall I check out the front door?”

Garfield nodded.

Lemon sorted through his tools in the back of the
minivan and then proceeded cautiously towards the cottage’s front porch. 
He held a steel pole in his hands that was bent and sharpened at one end, not
unlike a crowbar.  Lemon often referred to the tool as his ‘skeleton
key’.  At four foot long, it was almost as tall as he was.

“Get her opened up,
Lem
,”
Kirk shouted.

“But be careful,”
Garfield
added.

Lemon shoved his skeleton key into the door’s wedge
and yanked.  The lock broke easily and the old oak door swung open in its
frame. 

The smell came at them immediately.  It was not
as ripe as the smells of their early foraging days when the dead had still been
fresh and moist.  It was the odour of long time decay and animal
droppings.  It was a smell every forager was used to.  It meant there
was death inside.

Lemon gripped his skeleton key at the bottom of the
shaft like a baseball bat.  He looked to Garfield for orders. 
“S-s-should we back out?  Smells like this place could be a r-r-risk.”

Garfield was about to agree when Kirk let out a
snigger.  “Where’s the fun in life without a little risk?”  He shoved
past Lemon and headed inside the cottage, disappearing into the dank, dark
hallway.

Garfield shook his head and grunted.
 
He
couldn’t leave Kirk to sweep the house alone.  Foragers always backed each
other up – even impetuous fools like Kirk.  “Wait here,” he told
Lemon.  “Keep a watch with the others and be ready.” 

Lemon nodded and stepped back from the porch. 
Garfield went inside.

The reception hallway was narrow and cluttered. 
An old-fashioned bureau sat off to one side, a framed family photo perched on
top of it.  The family in the picture looked hard and serious –
tough farming stock that had probably owned the farm for generations. 
Garfield wondered what had happened to them, and if they were still inside the
house. 
I’m sure I’m going to find out.

Garfield crept down the hallway and entered a kitchen
on his left.  The large room was chilly and had a musty, faintly sweet
odour.  The smell was not coming from the dead, though.  It was
coming from a bin in the corner.  Flies swarmed around the lid, breeding
and living in whatever filth had been left to decompose inside.  Garfield
pulled his shirt up over his nose and tried not to breathe more than he had
to. 

The only thing of interest in the kitchen was a large
carving fork on the centre island, which Garfield wrapped in an old tea towel
and secured to his left triceps with a couple of elastic bands from a
drawer.  It could come in useful.  The weapon he was currently
carrying was a claw hammer, not unlike the one that Kirk favoured.  Blunt
force trauma was much more effective against zombies than stabbing.  Plus
the hammer always came back for a second and third blow, whereas knives
sometimes got stuck in bone.

There was a thud from somewhere else in the house.  Garfield
headed cautiously back out into the hallway.  He was pretty sure the noise
had come from up ahead, so he followed the hallway to its conclusion and gently
slid through the door at the end and entered the room beyond.

The smell overwhelmed.  The sickly sweet odour of
the recently dead had given way to the earthy, spicy smell of the long
rotten.  When Garfield moved further into the old-fashioned parlour he saw
the reason it smelled so badly. 
Dear God.

Kirk was standing still, shaking his head and blinking
slowly, uncharacteristically forlorn.  “Just when you think you’re used to
it all,” he said glumly,  “then you find something like this.”

Garfield studied the three swinging bodies and
wondered if they belonged to the family in the photo.  His guess was that
they did.  An old man and woman wriggled from thick nooses around their
necks strung over an oak beam crossing the centre of the ceiling.  They’d
obviously been infected and had hanged themselves in hope of not coming
back.  The caked shit down their inner thighs showed they’d been alive
when they’d taken the noose.  Not everyone understood that it did no good
to commit suicide when infected.  If you were bitten, you came back. 

The dead old man and woman reached out for Kirk,
trying to grab a hold of him with their gnarled fingers, but he was too focused
on the third hanging body to pay them any attention.  Garfield turned his
attention to the swinging child and immediately thought of Poppy.  While
he’d been able to rescue one little girl, there were innumerable children who’d
been doomed to fates such as this. 

The little girl was about Poppy’s age.  She had
long brown hair all the way to her waist, but much of it had slid away from her
scalp and was hanging loosely down her bony shoulders or on the floor beneath
her dangling feet.  She, too, reached out her hands for Kirk, trying to
draw him closer, trying to taste him with her snapping jaws.

After a while, Kirk turned away to leave.  “You
do the honours,” he said to Garfield, then went back out into the hallway.”

Garfield swallowed back his sadness and dealt with the
family as quickly as he could.  He wanted to get out of there.  He
didn’t like the way the dead family looked at him so hungrily and he couldn’t
bear the stink that filled the room.  Three clean strikes from his hammer
and it
was
over.  Garfield dropped the tool on
the floor afterwards.  He did not want to keep it. 

Back outside, he was surprised to find not ten other
men waiting, but eleven.  There was a stranger amongst them.  The
newcomer had been shoved down onto his knees by Cat and wore muddy jeans and a
brown leather jacket.  The smile on his face was handsome.

“We found this guy skulking about the sheds,” said
Cat.  Like her name suggested, the proud look on her face made her look
like a feline who had caught a mouse.  “He surrendered quickly enough.”

“How’s it going?” said the stranger.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Garfield, taken
aback.  “And where did you come from?”

The stranger grinned widely.  “Why, you can call
me Sally if you’re a mate.  Call me what you want if you’re not.” 
The man had an Australian accent.

Lemon chuckled.  “Sally’s a bird’s name.”

“A name is what you make it,
cobber.
  My
name might be Sally, but I’m no less a man than you, I can promise yer.”

“Where did you come from?” Garfield asked again.

Remaining on his knees, the man pointed.  “From
inside that yonder shed.  Bloody freezing it was, but safe enough.”

“Why didn’t you go inside the house?”

“Not my place to go breaking into people’s houses and
using their
dunnies
.  I live off the
land; not trespassing.”

“You do know everybody is dead, right?” said Kirk
incredulously.  “You can go wherever you like.”

“Yer, I do know that, fella.  Still doesn’t make
me king of the world, now, does it?”

Garfield glanced around at the nearby fields and the
main road about a hundred metres away beyond a row of high hedges.  He
rubbed at the stubble on his chin as he took in the sight of the man.  The
Australian was amiable enough, but that in
itself
was
sending up alarm bells.  For someone to be so cheery after surviving out
here alone was unnatural.  The dead family inside the cottage added to
Garfield’s unease.  “Are you alone, Sally?” he asked.

The Australian nodded.  “I am.  Bit of a
lone wolf, you might say.  Never stay in the same place too long.”

“Why is that?”

“Because them dead buggers tend to come and eat
everyone after a while.”

“So you were with a group?” asked Kirk.

“For a time, yer.  Was holed-up in a bar where I
used to work.  Place in Bristol called
Tuckers
, ever been?”

Everybody shook
their
heads.

Sally blew air into his cheeks and let it out. 
“Ah, well, shame that.  I take it you fellas must have a camp around here
someplace.  There’s too many of you to last long on the road.  Plus
it looks like most of you have had a bath in the last year, which is more than
I have.”

“We have a camp,” said Lemon.

Garfield put a hand up to stop him from saying any
more.  It would not do to give away the location of the pier to a
stranger.  “We have a camp,” Garfield said, “but it’s not around
here.  We’re heading up north for supplies.  What were you doing
here?”

“Just staying alive.  I stick to farms and the
countryside because there’s less o’ them dead buggers about.  You can find
the odd veggie growing wild in some places, too.  I just wish I could find
me a field full of
tinnys
.”

Lemon looked confused.  “
Tinnys
?”

“Larger, mate.”

“Oh.”

Kirk looked at Garfield and rubbed at his nose to
cover his mouth.  He whispered, “What do you want to do with him?  I
say we leave him here and keep on.”

Garfield’s first thought was to agree.  He didn’t
have a good feeling about the Australian; but it didn’t feel right to just
leave him out on his own either.  “What are your plans, Sally?”

“Well, I’d quite like to stand up, if that’s
okay?  The gravel is killing my knees.”  Garfield nodded to Cat who
helped Sally to his feet.  “
Strewth
,
that’s better,” he said.  “Now, as for my plans…” He shrugged.  “I
told you, just staying alive.  I don’t think much beyond that most days.”

“You can join up with us if you want,” said Garfield,
regretting it as soon as he said it.

“For real?”

Kirk didn’t miss a step and followed Garfield’s lead
for a change.  He was less cocky since coming out of the farmhouse. 
“As long as you tow the line and don’t give us no reason to dump you,
cobber.
”

“I would be most grateful to join you good men.”

Cat cleared her throat.

“Oh, pardon my manners.  I would be most grateful
to join you good men and
Sheilas
.”

“That’s lovely,” said David, “but I would just like to
point out that it was hard enough with eleven of us in the minivan.  Now
you want to add another body?  I don’t mind Cat on my lap, but that’s my
limit.”

“He has a good point,” said Squirrel, who folded his
arms and became grumpy.  “I can’t take any more elbows and knees in my
ribs inside that bloody coffin.”