The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology (15 page)

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Authors: Christopher Golden

BOOK: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology
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‘What is it?’ Jamie asked.
 
‘Nothing.’
 
‘So where the fuck have they gone?’
 
I shrugged, but my eyes were drawn to the smoke still rising from the pyres, the fires and pits hidden beyond a thick copse of trees. After we brought the bodies out and they’d done their tests, that was where they disposed of them. Someone was burning now. The smoke was black and greasy, the smell sickly and mouthwatering.
 
‘Moved back,’ I said. ‘Pulled the perimeter out away from the village.’
 
‘Why?’ he asked, but I could see him looking at the smoke as well. ‘Fuckers,’ he said softly.
 
I turned and looked back down the curve of the bridge at Bindy. She’d stepped in front of the trailer so she did not have to look at the little dead girl, and she was staring up at us, eyes wide and hands clasped between her breasts. When she saw my expression, she looked at the road surface.
 
‘They should tell us what they found, shouldn’t they?’ Jamie asked.
 
‘So ask them.’
 
‘What do you mean?’
 
I nodded across at the torn-up field. Birds were flocking across it, exploring for worms where the soil had been recently turned. ‘You don’t think they’d leave us alone, do you? We could climb the wall, swim the river. Walk out of Usk.’ I was scanning the landscape as I spoke, searching for movement, or the telltale glint of sunlight on binoculars or rifle scopes. I could see nothing, but that didn’t mean they were not there. ‘They’ll be there to make sure we don’t.’
 
‘Well, I’m going to try,’ Jamie said.
 
‘Don’t be a fool.’
 
‘Fool?’ He turned to me, eyes wide and glaring, and the fear beneath his constant outrage was patent. ‘You’ve been treating me like a kid ever since we started this, and I’m a lot younger than you, so I can take that. But I’m not a fucking fool.’
 
‘Fair enough.’
 
He turned back to the view, scanning the hedgerows and hillside beyond, as I had.
 
‘They’ll let us out, Toby, won’t they?’ Bindy said behind us.
 
‘No,’ I said. It was so quiet that she didn’t hear, but Jamie did. He glanced at me again as he jumped down from the wall.
 
‘Later,’ he said. ‘I’m going to swim the river and get out of this shit- hole later.’
 
I followed him back down to the street.
 
‘What do we do with that?’ he said, pointing at the girl’s body.
 
For a second, I was at a loss. By discovering the corpse splayed on a tomb slab in the churchyard, we had effectively taken ownership of it, and the thought of simply dumping her somewhere felt terrible. She was somebody’s daughter, someone’s little girl, and she deserved more than that.
 
‘Well, chuck her down a drain somewhere for all I care,’ Jamie said, when neither of us answered. He walked off along the street. ‘I’m going to the Queen’s. I’ll be in the bar.’
 
Bindy turned to me.
 
‘Let’s put her back where we found her,’ I said, and she seemed to find that acceptable. She almost smiled.
 
 
Jamie was on the way to drunk by the time Bindy and I arrived at the Queen’s Hotel. He was sitting at a table in the bar, and we arrived in time to see him stagger across, lift the bar flap, pour himself a single whiskey, and then sway back to his seat. By the time he sat down again, he’d almost finished his drink, but perhaps there was something comforting in the process.
 
‘Whadidya do with her?’ he asked.
 
‘Back in the churchyard,’ Bindy said.
 
Jamie snorted, but I wasn’t sure what that meant.
 
‘I’ll get food,’ I said. ‘Then we should talk about what to do.’
 
‘Talk?’ Jamie shouted. He looked ready to rage, and I tensed. Then the glass slipped from his hand and dropped to the table, landing upright without spilling a drop, and he put one hand to his forehead. He sobbed, once, then looked up at us again, putting on his hard face again.
 
‘Jamie—’ Bindy began.
 
‘Fuck it!’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to do but get out. I’ve done nothing . . . nothing wrong. Nor you.’ He pointed at us, and I wondered how many people he saw. ‘It’s wrong, them keepin’ us in, and . . . I’ll get out.’
 
‘I’m getting food,’ I said. I sensed Jamie about to break - it had been coming for days - and I had no wish to see that. I went through behind the bar and into the big kitchen, glancing at the huge walk-in freezer door we hadn’t dared open since the power had gone off. There was still enough food in the larder - tinned stuff, packets, dehydrated fruit and vegetables. At lunchtimes over the past few days, we’d almost laughed about how disgusting it was, but knowing we were now trapped here with no chance of escape, laughter was distant.
 
I knocked together something quick to eat, because there were more important things to do. I carried it back through to the bar and was amazed to see that Jamie had calmed down. He was still drinking steadily, and Bindy sat at the table opposite him with an open bottle of wine and two glasses in front of her. As I sat down she poured me a glass. Jamie stayed on the whiskey.
 
‘That fire,’ she said. ‘We haven’t taken a body out for two days. Could it be that one?’
 
I remembered the body she meant - a huge, fat woman, naked, her breasts pawed and scratched and teeth clotted with rotting meat. And those eyes, so falsely alive.
 
‘They burnt that one the day we took her out,’ I said.
 
‘Right,’ Jamie agreed.
 
‘So there’s been another outbreak,’ Bindy said. She was staring into the deep violet depths of her glass. The drink had already stained her lips, an effect that I had always found unbearably sexy in women drinking red wine. Not in Bindy, though.
 
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘If there had been, why trap us in here?’
 
‘It’s in the dust,’ Jamie said. ‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? I’ve been saying it all along.’ He ran one finger around the inside of his glass, smearing whiskey and touching his finger to his tongue. From day one, Jamie had been suggesting that the plague - virus, bacteria, nobody yet seemed to know exactly what caused it - could be alive in the dust of the deserted town. He’d seen dust settled on the eyes of the bodies we’d found, filtering the light that entered their dead eyes, and I think perhaps it had driven him slightly mad. We were all allowed our own madness.
 
We drank some more but didn’t really come up with anything like a plan. Jamie was drunk and bitter and scared; Bindy was too distant; and I really had no need of a plan at all. My aim had always been to find Fiona’s corpse, wherever it might be, and only one thing really kept me going - the hope that she had been killed and eaten by what people had started to call zombies.
 
The alternative was that she had become one herself, and the thought of looking into her dead eyes knowing that was just too terrible to bear.
 
 
We took three en-suite rooms next to each other. Bindy and I carried Jamie to bed, trying to ignore his rantings and tears, and then back in the corridor I bid her good-night.
 
‘Toby,’ she said, and her voice sounded different. ‘I know what you think of me, but I’m trying. I’m really trying.’ She slurred slightly, but she was more in control than I had ever seen her. She’d once served me breakfast at a café in town - maybe four years ago - and I’d flirted with her. ‘I keep thinking tomorrow will be another day, but it won’t. It’ll always be today.’ She turned to go to bed, and I reached out and held her arm. She touched my hand and smiled sadly.
 
‘Maybe they’ve just upped and left.’ It was fucking stupid, and I knew that, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
 
‘They built a wall,’ she said. ‘And Jamie’s right: none of us has done anything wrong.’ She went to bed then, and so did I.
 
I lay there for some time trying to sleep. The town lay around me, its geography altered completely by what had happened. The town square, its attractive clock tower bedecked with flower troughs, its cobble paving slippery in light summer rain, was now the place where I had found six dead zombies with the remains of several small children they had been fighting over when the Purge came. Where the old castle once stood, I could now only recall seeing the family that had fled there to die - father, mother, and two children, surrounded by their mingled blood vented by the knife in the man’s hand. Streets where I had walked with Fiona, pubs we had drunk in, restaurants where we had eaten and laughed and talked quietly of the possibility of children, all now tainted in some way by what had happened. Some taints were simply the silence; others, blood and rot and death.
 
I was trapped in my hometown, but I had never been in a place so strange.
 
As I drifted to sleep I wondered yet again what had happened to the rest of Usk’s residents. Most of them had fled after the first few attacks, but they were soon rounded up and kept in confinement in the old military base in Glascoed. The majority of those who stayed behind were killed or infected, and then came the Purge, where the whole town was sprayed hourly for three days with what the military had called an ‘antidote’ when Bindy, Jamie, and I walked out of town across the stone river bridge; the only reason we weren’t shot is that their solution hadn’t killed us.
 
They’d let us stay, suggesting that we help appropriate zombie corpses for the scientists to study. Every day they let us out to sleep in comfortable quarantine, and each morning, I expected it to be the day they no longer let us out. I didn’t care, because Fiona had remained behind and had not yet been found.
 
Faces of old friends and people I knew from the town appeared to me as I dropped into an uneasy slumber. Some of them smiled, some were slack in death.
 
Some of them raged.
 
 
The sound of helicopters woke me up. I went to the window and saw a military chopper buzzing the town. At first I thought they were spraying again, but then I noticed the cameras mounted under its nose.
 
‘Please come out into the street where we can see you,’ an electronic voice said. ‘Stand at the road junction, and make yourselves known.’
 
Make yourselves known!
I thought. We’d been dragging corpses from the dead town for three weeks for these bastards, and they couldn’t even use our names.
 
I met Bindy out in the corridor, and we knocked on Jamie’s door.
He’s dead
, I thought,
veins slashed, heart given up, brain popped with the pressure
. But then he opened the door, squinting in the dawn light. He had a hangover. I chuckled.
 
‘Fuck’s wrong with you?’ he growled.
 
‘Nothing. Come on, let’s find out what’s going on.’
 
Bindy and I waited at the road junction outside the hotel for several minutes before Jamie joined us. In that time the chopper swept past three times, the cameras seeming to turn slightly as it went. It was warm already this morning, but the rotors caused a storm in the street that blew waves of dust against smashed shop windows.
 
Jamie coughed and spluttered, washing dust from his mouth with a swig from the whiskey bottle he carried.
 
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said.
 
‘Hey, it’s a free country!’ He giggled maniacally and took another drink.
 
The chopper came in again and hovered a hundred feet along the street. We could barely see against the dust and grit, and the sound was tremendous. The speakers were even louder.
 
‘For your own safety, you will remain in quarantine within the town limits for the next forty-eight hours.’
 
This is unfair
, I thought.
We can’t ask them anything
.
 
‘During that time, certain work will be undertaken. You must not attempt to impede or interfere in any way. You must not attempt to escape.’
 
‘Try and fuckin’ stop me, you bastards!’ Jamie shouted. I realized that he was still drunk.
 
‘Any escape attempt will result in the use of deadly force.’
 
The sound seemed to decrease, and the three of us were trapped in a surreal bubble of shock.
They’ll shoot us
, I thought, and their military-speak suddenly annoyed the hell out of me. Why couldn’t they just say what they meant?

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