The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 3) (37 page)

Rolling onto her back, Melanie saw that the vanguard of the rotting horde were just a few metres away now. They were illuminated by the ring of light from the open sky above them. Their blistered skin and sunken eyes terrified her as their mouths opened and shut repeatedly. She whimpered and turned her eyes to the roof.

“Please, God,” she prayed, her eyes filled with tears. “Somebody help me. Please, God, I don’t want to die here.”

The snarls and growls of the infected grew in volume as they advanced on her. Their putrid smell filled her senses, and their inhuman eyes caused her mind to freeze over. At that moment, she realised that there was no one coming to her rescue. The noises and voices she had heard had been from the dead surrounding her. Her mind had played a cruel trick on her, filling her with hope and then snatching it away.

She raised the pistol and fired, unable to stop her hands from trembling as she loosed off a number of shots into the leading corpses. Two of them tumbled forward, their brains being blown out through the exit wounds in the backs of their skulls. Others took their place and continued the advance. More rounds clapped raucously through the restaurant, but the falling bodies did nothing to stem the flow or drive back the crowd of ravenous ghouls. They wailed loudly, filled with excitement as they staggered towards her.

“Bastards,” Melanie howled at them.

As the first corpse, crawling over the body of Mike, reached out towards her, its fingers just centimetres away from her body, she turned the pistol towards herself. She was crying uncontrollably as she stared back at the horrific features of the monster that slithered towards her. Its fingers reached her and closed around her lower leg. She felt it tug at the cloth of her flight suit and heard its lustful groan as it lowered its drooling mouth towards her soft warm flesh.

“You bastards.”

Placing the barrel beneath her chin, Melanie pulled down on the trigger. A flash of light shot through her vision and then there was nothing. Melanie’s body slumped, a pool of blood spreading out from the gaping hole in the top of her head.

The infected swarmed in around her body and began ripping at her clothing and tearing at her flesh. A feeding frenzy erupted, and within seconds, as limbs were torn from their joints and the sickening cracks of Melanie’s ribcage being pried open echoed over the grunts and groans of the dead, the floor became awash with her still warm and steaming blood.

The writhing mass of putrid flesh continued their feast, oblivious to anything that was happening around them as they gorged on Melanie’s remains. They did not hear the growing howl above the city or see the fiery object hurtling down from the sky. In the fraction of a second between the missile detonating and the blast wave flattening everything in its path, the blinding light and searing heat of the atomic flash vaporised everything within the city that it touched.

Above London, the billowing mushroom cloud from the hydrogen bomb grew rapidly, reaching high into the atmosphere above the remains of Britain’s capital.

24

It had been almost a week since the mushroom cloud appeared over the horizon towards the south-east. Now Peter stood at the window watching the rain as it beat against the glass, running over the panes in rivulets and cascading down onto the crowd of diseased corpses beneath. He arched his neck to see them more clearly. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all packed together and jostling one another as they fought for a position closer to the house. Their sound carried far and wide, an electrified murmur that never ceased. The noise of the swarm had driven him to despair at the beginning, but now it had become as familiar to him as the twitter of birds or the sound of car engines from the old days.

He turned his attention to the sky. It had been raining for days now; the rolling dark clouds above were heavy with water and radioactive fallout. The landscape had steadily turned grey in colour as the sunlight failed to penetrate the thick blanket of murky and death laden clouds, and the radiation killed the plant life and trees.

He was thirsty again. The water that they had collected had run dry that morning, and he knew that he would need to refill the empty jugs and buckets. He could hear the patter of the rainwater as it splashed onto the bare floorboards of the room next door. The hole in the roof had been a welcome alternative to having to hang from a window to collect the water.

He coughed, his shoulders trembling as another bout of uncontrollable wheezing forced his body into spasms. A trickle of blood dripped from his bottom lip and fell onto his chin. His body shook, and a shiver ran along the length of his spine. He felt weak and frail, and the nausea was not helping his condition. With every mouthful of water that he swallowed, he would spew out twice as much.

Peter turned and checked on his brother. Michael lay in a foetus position in the centre of the room, wrapped in a dirty and tattered blanket, and shivering uncontrollably. All around him was a great swathe of murky fluid. Some of it was vomit, and the rest was urine and excrement. His breathing sounded strained, and his body twitched endlessly.

Turning back to the window, Peter looked again at the crowd of diseased faces below. The rain did not seem to bother them as it soaked them through to their rotting flesh, running through their tangled hair or over their thinly covered scalps. They would remain there forever if they needed to, completely unaffected by the elements or the radiation that hung in the air and settled over every surface.

A coughing fit wracked his body, and Peter soon found himself in convulsions as blood and vomit filled his mouth and throat. Retching, he bent double and emptied the precious fluids over the floor beside him, some of it spattering his boots and trousers. He paid it no attention. He no longer cared about his levels of hygiene. After a few minutes of hacking up every ounce of water that he had remaining in his deteriorating system, he dropped to his knees, his energy completely sapped. He wiped his face with his shaking hands and ran his fingers over his scalp. From his head, large clumps of hair began to tumble past his eyes. He reached up again and felt clumps of his hair easily falling loose from their roots.

He looked down at his hands and whimpered; his shoulders sagging as his eyes began to fill with tears. His pasty gaunt face and hollow eyes had been a fright to him when he saw his reflection in the filth encrusted bathroom mirror. Now his hair was falling out, and pretty soon he would look no different from the ghouls clambering at the house where he and his brother remained hidden.

He knew that they were both suffering from radiation poisoning. He had watched the bomb go off in the distance, and when the rains came, understood the danger of nuclear fallout. However, neither of them had taken in any fluid for days. They were slowly dying from dehydration, and faced with the prospect of further suffering while the land outside their windows was drenched with the cool autumn rains, they drank as much as they could.

Michael had been the first to show signs of the sickness. Within hours he was suffering with uncontrollable and violent bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. Peter suspected radiation but refused to allow himself to believe it. Dying from the effects of radioactive fallout was a thing of the past. It was something that their parents and grandparents had needed to worry about long before either he or his brother had been born. Now, both of them were slowly dying from the poisoning. It seemed impossible to accept.

“Funny. Guns, war, disease, walking dead people…” Peter whispered hoarsely. “Of all the things that could kill us in this day and age, we end up dying of radiation sickness.”

Michael squirmed on the floor in front of him, drawing his knees up closer to his abdomen and then proceeding to projective vomit. By now, the blanket was sodden with his own bodily fluids, but Michael did not seem to notice or care. He was in a bad way, and his condition was worsening by the minute.

“Can you hear me, Mikey?” Peter rasped. The effort of forming the words hurt his throat. It felt raw and swollen, and even breathing was becoming difficult.

There was no reply. His brother’s breath came in wheezing gasps and sputtering coughs. He seemed incoherent, completely unaware of his surroundings or their predicament as he lay suffering from the terrible symptoms. Peter crawled across to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Michael twitched beneath his touch and turned his face up towards Peter. He, too, had lost large clumps of his hair. His face appeared like that of a man who was ten times his age and had become little more than a thinly covered skull.

“Pete,” he groaned through cracked lips, “is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Peter replied. It quickly became evident that his brother had lost his sight as the radiation ravaged his cells. His eyes rolled within the deeply sunken and dark sockets and were unable to focus on anything. “I’m right here.”

“Where are you? I can’t see you, Pete.”

Peter began to weep as he watched his brother’s fear laden face. It was obvious to him that not only was he blind, but he had also lost his hearing. He called out repeatedly, demanding that Peter answer him. The poor boy was trapped within his own mind, unaware of what was happening to him, or why.

Placing his arm around his shoulders, Peter hauled him up onto his lap, holding him close to reassure and comfort him. Michael tucked himself in against his brother like a child against his mother’s breast. There, he drew up his legs and allowed himself to be enveloped in Peter’s embrace. He felt safe, and Peter did not mind or even move when Michael’s bowels once again gave out on him. Rocking back and forth gently while stroking his brother’s head, Peter cried and cursed the Gods for having allowed this to happen to them. As the sound of the rain intensified and was accompanied by the distant clap of thunder, Peter howled at the top of his lungs, spitting profanities towards the heavens.

Outside, the chorus of the dead shrieked back at him above the rumbling sound of the growing storm. They heard the voice of the living man, sending a surge of excitement through the crowd. The sea of rotting bodies, waterlogged and putrid, seethed and clambered at the walls, clawing at the brickwork and pounding their hands against the creaking doors.

For hours Peter remained that way, sitting on the floor and nursing his brother, whispering and singing into his deaf ears. His words and soothing tones were occasionally interrupted by the uncontrollable coughing that inevitably led to blood and vomit pouring from between his cracked lips. His eyesight was also fading now. The room around him was growing dim, and he was no longer able to see finer details. The tears that remained falling from his eyes added to his poor vision, but he could not stop them.

It was not for himself that he wept, but for his brother. Michael did not deserve the cruel fate that he was suffering, and Peter felt as though he had failed him. He had vowed to keep Michael safe regardless of what he needed to do in order to keep him that way. He had been willing to kill for his brother if he needed to, but their chances of survival had been taken out of their hands.

They were both becoming weaker, and he knew that neither of them would last much longer. Michael was suffering a terrible and slow death, and Peter hated himself for not having enough ammunition to take care of them both. He reached down for his pistol, pulling it out from his pocket, and studying it for a while. There was only one round remaining, and he had already decided that it would not be used against himself. It would be the final act of love for his brother, saving him the cursed destiny of becoming one of the things that they had been running from for all that time. He would never allow that to happen to Michael, even if it meant sacrificing himself to that very fate.

Michael’s wheezing breath continued as he lay in Peter’s arms. It was breaking his brother’s heart to see him in such a way. Despite his mistakes, Michael did not deserve the suffering that he was going through. He had never hurt anyone or anything in his entire life. He had been full of love for everyone that he knew, and happiness and joy was something that radiated out from within his soul, infecting those around him.

Snorting back his tears, Peter brought the pistol up and pressed it against his brother’s temple. The time had come to end his suffering, but Peter hesitated, feeling for a moment that he would also fail in that final task. He closed his eyes tight and tried to steady his hand.

“Are we going home now, Pete?” Michael’s weakened voice asked.

“Yeah,” Peter nodded. “That’s right, mate. We’re going home now.”

The shot was drowned out beneath Peter’s rage and grief filled roar that echoed through the room as he pulled the trigger. His brother convulsed against him for a moment and then suddenly became heavy in his arms. Peter refused to let go of him. As the light of day began to fade, he sat holding him, rocking back and forth as his own sickness continued to grow.

Sometime during the night his body finally lost its battle, and his breath gave out. Hours later, as the two brothers remained entwined in the final embrace the fingers of Peter’s right hand began to twitch.

25

For months they had drifted through the countryside, scavenging anything they could and endlessly on the move. Their perpetual uprooting, however, was not a deliberate decision on their behalf. No matter how quiet they were or how remote their location, the dead always seemed to find them, eventually. No sooner did they make themselves comfortable and begin to breathe again, did the shambling cadavers roaming the land stumble upon them. At first, it was always just a few, but eventually their numbers would grow until the men had no choice but to flee and find a new place to hole up. Stan and his group were tired. Unable to rest and recuperate for any real length of time, they were constantly on the run, and life seemed to be getting harder with each new day.

There were now just six of them remaining. Stan, Taff, Bull, Kyle, and two of the sailors which were all that was left of Werner’s U-boat crew, the third seaman having died from pneumonia a week after they were washed ashore.

After a hard and cold night, shivering wildly to the point that their chattering teeth threatened to crack, the team had headed east. Their intention was to reach one of the caches that Bull, Danny, and Marty had placed almost two months prior. It took them a week to reach the first one, their hopes quickly being dashed when they saw that the location had been discovered by raiders. The vehicles, weapons, food, and water… it was all gone.

From there, they turned north, hoping to find the next cache intact. What they found was a place swarming with the dead. Taff cursed the others for having placed the equipment too close to an urban area, and a fight had broken out between him and Bull. As they sat nursing their wounds, Stan and Kyle attempted to lure away the hordes of infected from the area. However, the ruse did not work. They only attracted more of the dead to the vicinity. Eventually, they conceded defeat and moved on, headed further north and deeper into the unforgiving and cold wilderness. They avoided cities and built-up areas, but nevertheless, the hordes of walking dead seemed to be drawn to their life-force. No sooner had they caught their breath, then they would need to be on the move again.

Stan and Taff were sitting on the hilltop watching the two distant figures as they slowly approached. They had been waiting for hours, suffering the freezing rain and the bitter wind that never seemed to let up. Above them, the blanket of grey and blacks seemed so vast and thick that they began to wonder whether the sun actually still shone above the earth.

As they bounced from one village and town to the next, they grabbed anything that could be of use to them. They had found some weapons along their travels; a few discarded army rifles and a shotgun, but they were low on ammunition and far from being a fighting force. Each member of the group had a means to protect himself, either with a pistol or one of the SA-80s, but none of them had the ability to launch any kind of attack against the swarms of dead that infested the landscape. Not a single round had been fired for almost a month as the team did their best to conserve the precious ammunition, and more importantly, remain undetected.

Bull and Kyle were getting closer, climbing the steep hill after carrying out a reconnaissance of the village below. Stan eyed them, but it was hard to tell if they had met with any success during their mission. They moved as though every step was a real effort, like exhausted climbers reaching for the summit of Mount Everest.

“Bollocks,” Taff huffed beside him with disappointment. “Looks like they’re coming back empty-handed again.”

Even from a distance, he could see that neither of the men were laden with the treasures that they had all hoped to find in the built-up area. They had chosen that particular town due to its remoteness and small population. It was surrounded by high windswept hills that even the dead tended to avoid. The land was inhospitable, especially during the harsh winters, and to anyone under-prepared or ill-equipped, the environment was unforgiving. It had been for those very reasons that Stan had earmarked the village for a raid, sure that they would finally catch a break. The only road in or out ran through the centre, dissecting the hamlet in two as it followed the lay of the land, hand railing a fast flowing river. It seemed a sure bet that they would find some food and maybe even a place to rest for a while.

“For fuck sake,” Stan grunted, shaking his head with disappointment.

“How many more times do we need to hit a brick wall out here? There must be somewhere that’s still untouched.”

“I thought the same thing, but I’m starting to wonder.”

Bull and the veteran finally made it to the crest of the hill. They paused for a moment, catching their breath from the steep climb. They were carrying one of the assault rifles each, providing them both with better firepower during their mission should they need it. They turned and headed towards the spot where Stan and Taff sat waiting for them. The wind on the high-ground buffered them from the side, causing their sodden clothing to billow. The pair of them looked miserable and disheartened. They were tired of surviving from one day to the next, barely able to remain on their feet by the time that darkness arrived. Their gloomy faces spoke a thousand words as they closed in.

“Well?” Taff asked with hope as the two drenched men dropped themselves down on to the wet grass beside him.

Kyle looked at him and shook his head, rubbing his hands together, and then blowing his hot breath into his cupped palms.

“Fuck me, it’s cold,” he grumbled.

“What month is it? I think it’ll be Christmas soon,” Taff added without really thinking about what he was saying. His mouth was in gear, but his brain was not. He knew that the raid had been unsuccessful, but at that moment he did not want to share in their frustration.

Nobody paid him any attention. They were either too busy trying to warm themselves up or contemplating their next move after another failed raid. Food had become scarce, and what little they did find was never enough to sustain six grown and continuously active men. Already they had lost a lot of body weight. Even Bull’s tattered clothing seemed to hang limply from his normally bulky frame. They were wasting away, and although none of them spoke of it, they all knew that they would eventually starve if things continued as they were.

“What’s going on down there?” Stan asked, and nodded towards the urban area, knowing that the answer would be the same as always.

“There’s a lot of them down there,” Bull spat, glaring with a glowering hatred towards the rooftops in the distance.

“A ‘lot’?” Taff replied, wanting clarification.

“Yeah, Taff, a
‘lot’
,” Bull snarled back at him. It had been a while since him and Taff had been getting along, and neither of them seemed to have any patience left for one another. They rarely spoke now, and when they did it was mainly insults and threats. “It’s an actual, countable number. It comes between
‘quite-a-few’
and a
‘shit-ton’
.”

“Calm it down, Bull,” Stan warned.

He could see that the frustration the big man felt was beginning to get the better of him, but the last thing that he needed was him and Taff beating each other to a pulp over a game of words. The tattered remains of their group could not afford to be carrying casualties at that point in time, and he was all too aware that if Taff and Bull found themselves in a slugging match, neither of them would be of any use for a while. They had only just recovered from their last tussle, and luckily the other four members of their group had been able to separate them before things went too far.

“Before the world went tits up, did you ever try to walk through Marks and Spencer on pension day when there was a sale on?” the veteran asked, trying to lighten the mood. “Well, that would give you some idea of what it’s like down there.”

“What buildings we did manage to get into had already been cleared out,” Bull grunted. “I think that’s why there’s so many of them down there. Someone else once had the same idea that we did.”

The four of them headed back to their hideout. It was a decrepit house situated in the middle of nowhere and at one point was probably somebody’s retreat from the hustle and bustle of modern society. It was hard to tell for sure, but the place seemed to have been deserted for years. The doors and windows were broken and hanging from their hinges allowing the freezing wind to penetrate through to the men inside. The roof leaked with rain, and the floors were rotten through. The only saving grace the place had was that it was so remote it would afford them a few days before any herds of infected stumbled upon them. The six of them sat huddled together. They had found a few sleeping bags and other outdoor equipment during their searches of derelict and remote buildings and now sat sharing what heat they could.

“Shame we can’t start a fire,” Bull moaned as he lay next to Stan, watching his breath mist above his head.

“You know what happened the last time,” Stan grumbled sleepily.

“Yeah, I remember. Taff made a bonfire and sent out a signal to every pus-bag in the country that we were running an ‘all you can eat’ buffet.”

“Fuck off,” Taff snorted from the darkness.

The group fell back into silence for a while. There were a few snores from those who had managed to drift off, but the remainder huffed and sighed endlessly. They were suffering, and most of them felt that there must be other options available to them. They had scoured the land, rummaging through ransacked houses and stores, searching for food and equipment. However, it seemed that someone had always gotten there before them.

Taff began to wonder and voiced that maybe there was someone following the group and playing a cruel trick on them. He knew that it was not the case, but he could not help but think it from time to time.

“This is shit,” Kyle suddenly growled and sat up, pulling the sleeping bag away from himself in frustration and receiving a number of curses from the others as the cold air was allowed in and assaulted their bodies. “This is utter shit, Stan, and you know it.”

“Yeah, it’s shit,” Stan replied groggily and pulling his woolly hat further down over his face. “What do you want me to do about it? Buy you a caravan?”

“Tell him what we were talking about,” the veteran spat, slapping his hand down on Bull’s shoulder.

“Tell him what?” Bull asked innocently, completely in the dark as to what the veteran was thinking and feeling at that moment.

“You remember? What we were talking about when we were on our way back from the village before.”

“Ah, yeah, I remember,” Bull replied in a sleepy voice. “You tell him.”

“Fuck it. Okay, I’ll tell him then. Lazy cunt,” Kyle huffed and turned, looking to where Stan was lying. He took in a breath and rubbed his hands together. “Right now, I reckon it’s our best option.”

“What’s our best option? Spit it out so we can go back to sleep,” Taff grunted.

“Steve and Mark reckon it could work,” Kyle began as he nodded towards the area where the two remaining crew members of the U-boat lay. “Steve was a mechanic on that old tin can, and Mark was an electrician.”

“I was trained as an electrician,” a voice rumbled groggily from beneath the sleeping bag. “I was actually a helmsman.”

“Ah, so it was
you
who crashed the boat?” Bull stated. He was making a joke, but only he knew that it was not an actual accusation. His voice sounded sincere in his comment.

“I didn’t crash the fucking boat,” Mark snapped, springing up from his lying position and spitting with venom through the darkness towards Bull. The comment had clearly struck a nerve, and Bull wondered if the man had been harbouring a feeling of guilt the whole time since the boat sank.

“Okay. Easy, tiger,” Bull replied in a calm but mocking voice. “I was just pulling on your pig-tales, my little princess.”

Before the argument became heated, Kyle continued to speak, shutting Bull and Mark up before either of them said something that could result in a fight, or worse, a screaming match that would attract unwanted attention from the surrounding woods and country lanes.

“Alright, well, Steve was a mechanic, and Mark was
trained
as an electrician. Anyway, they reckon that they could get it fixed up and working, providing that there isn’t too much wrong with it.”

“Will someone put me out of my misery and tell me what the fuck you’re going on about so that I can get back to trying to sleep?” Taff groaned.

“The ship,” Bull replied with a sigh. “He’s talking about that ship you all saw just before that bean tin was pulled from under us. Kyle’s just being dramatic.”

“You mean the ferry?” Taff asked with surprise, remembering the vessel they had seen anchored in the Irish Sea.

“Yeah, the ferry, battleship, or cruise liner… whatever the fuck it was. But that’s what he’s on about—us fixing it up,” Bull replied impatiently.

Stan sat up. It was hard to see him in the darkness, but the ruffling noises coming from his direction and the dark silhouette that suddenly jutted up from the pile of bodies confirmed that he had taken an interest in what the veteran was saying. He removed his woollen hat and scratched his scalp in the cool air before replacing it back on his head and pulling it down over his ears.

“That ship was crawling with those sacks of shit. You do know that, don’t you?” he asked, wanting to confirm that Kyle was fully aware of the inherent dangers of what he was suggesting.