The Undead Day Nineteen (8 page)

The epicentre of the blast and the damage in here is significant. Deep holes gouged in the concrete walls from rounds ricocheting. Blast marks from the grenades. The inner wall smashed down with only the corners and far edges remaining in place.

It stinks of smoke, wet ash, chemicals and burnt human remains. Like a foul stench of rancid pork.

‘You gonna try and fuck her then?’ Liam’s words float into the room, snapping Pea’s and Sam’s heads round.

‘Maybe,’ Zayden is sulky with an aggressive edge to his voice.

‘Fit, bruv,’ Liam announces, thinking his voice quiet and muted but knowing full well the women can hear him. ‘You fancy her?’

‘Dunno,’ Zayden mumbles.

Sam glares at the door. Her mouth pursed. Pea grimaces with a wince showing as she reaches out to touch Lilly on the arm, ‘hey, ignore it.’

Lilly nods. A small motion but her heart beats harder. Hearing herself as the topic of conversation in such a way makes the brick in her stomach twist round and drop further.

‘Yeah,’ Liam gloats, ‘might have a go on her, you get me?’

‘Whatever,’ Zayden’s voice, sulkier, harder.

‘You’s don’t mind yeah? We’s bro’s yeah? We share, you get me?’ He asks, goading Zayden with a malicious grin that goes unseen.

‘Said whatever.’

‘You go first if you want…or we can spit roast her…’

‘Sam,’ Pea shoots her hand out, grasping her friend by the wrist, ‘stop it…Sam!’

Lilly blinks and moves purposefully away to distance herself from the voices of the young men. She goes through the ruined doorway into the next room with the broken outer wall and stares through the gap to the blue sea outside. The humidity is crushing. Intense. The filth is worse. The stench. Her eyes fill with tears but she blinks them away, clenching her jaw and making fists at her sides while Pea hisses at Sam and drags her into the room with Lilly.

‘This is shit,’ Sam growls, her voice low but ready to climb up, ‘I mean fucking shit. How dare they…’

‘I know I know,’ Pea says quickly, quietly, trying to calm her friend, ‘they’ve got guns, Sam. Machine guns. There are children here…’

‘I’ve got a bloody gun too.’

‘Sam, no. They’re boys boasting, that’s all,’ Pea says, knowing they are not just boys boasting.

‘Lilly,’ Sam reaches out to grasp the girl and pull her in close, ‘you’ve got to take the gun…’

‘No, gosh no,’ Lilly says, ‘If they see it…’

‘They won’t. Just take it…’

‘He keeps staring at my bum,’ Lilly whispers, ‘He’ll see it.’ So wide eyed and innocent Sam and Pea could either cry or laugh but crying isn’t an option.

‘Come here,’ Sam sighs, pulling Lilly into a hug, ‘you have to stay close to us, okay?’

‘You must,’ Pea whispers, ‘at all times.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘You’ll do more than try, young lady,’ Pea whispers firmly, thinking of her own daughter.

That mothers tone hits hard. The brick gets heavier. Harder. Twisting more, ‘I’ll be fine. I will…gosh it’s hot today.’

Pea goes to tell her not to change the subject but stops herself. These are hard times. Dangerous times and Lilly is switched on. Instead she turns away, full of the sadness of everything and feeling that sadness only increase at the sight of the body. ‘Oh Christ,’ she groans.

‘What?’ Sam asks, looking in the same direction. She closes her eyes at the sight. Hardening her resolve.

‘Oh dear,’ Lilly sighs a long breath. Lani dead. Lani still clutching a blackened knife with her guts strewn out now half cooked. The once beautiful silky black hair all gone. The skin blistered deep red. The skull showing in places. They take in the utter viciousness of the final act and as one they slowly look up to the wall above the corpse.

‘He is coming,’ Sam reads the words in a low whisper.

If anything, the sight of the body and the words serve to harden Lilly. The reminder of Nick and Mr Howie. Of everything those people have done and everything they have been through. There is a bigger game going on here. Something bigger than all of them. Nick said they’d killed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. He’d said they’d fought every day and every day the infection sent more against them and every day the infection lost.

A surge of guilt at feeling self-pity when Nick didn’t say goodbye and the realisation that he is part of something so much bigger than any of this. His life is in danger every second of every day. He fights to keep his group alive so they can defeat these things and give everyone else a chance to live. What did Lenski say Maddox had told them?
Be seen somewhere else.
That was it.

They went out knowing the infection is hunting them. They went to draw it away. Almost sacrificial in mission and intent.

Suddenly the bragging sulky tones of two teenage boys seem insignificant and trite. What Nick is doing is big and important.

‘Who is coming?’ Pea asks.

Lilly doesn’t reply but smiles at the memory and the complete lack of fear Mr Howie had.
I see you. I see you too.
The sight of him and Meredith stalking at Lani who was turned and armed. Whoever is coming will lose. They will be beaten by men and women who hold strong and show no fear. What they have, that
thing
, that bond and motivation that keeps them together and keeps them moving touched her too. She wasn’t with them long but it was enough for her heightened senses to grasp the goodness of the understanding.
None of this is worth it if we don’t do the right thing.

A new energy settles inside her. A forged resilience. If Nick and his small group can face such odds and persevere then so can she. There
will
be a fort for them to come back to. There has to be.

‘How do we fix it,’ Lilly switches her gaze to the outer wall.

‘No bloody idea,’ Sam says, shaking her head.

‘Bricks and mortar I guess,’ Pea says as Sam turns to look at her, ‘What? I saw it on Grand Designs or something. Don’t look at me like that, Sam.’

‘Never said a word.’

‘You don’t have to say a bloody word,’ Pea says, ‘it’s bricks and mortar.’

‘Yep but we don’t have any bloody bricks…’ Sam stops as Pea lifts an eyebrow, ‘yes okay, we do have bricks but we don’t have mortar…what is mortar anyway?’

‘Cement I guess,’ Pea says, ‘you make it from er…from sand, er…water…and, bugger, probably cement powder. There’s enough men here to know. One of them will know.’

‘We’ve asked,’ Sam says.

‘No,’ Pea replies, ‘that zitty little walking erection asked,
we
haven’t asked…we’re women, we’ll ask.’

‘That’s so anti-feminist,’ Sam tuts then grins, ‘but I like it.’

‘Zitty little walking erection?’ Lilly asks, tilting her head to the side in contemplation. ‘That is perhaps, the best description of someone I have ever heard.’

‘Oh that’s mild,’ Pea says, ‘wait till Sam gets angry, then you’ll hear some descriptions.’

‘Really?’ Lilly asks.

Sam just nods and stares at the wall, ‘twatty fuck face twat magee is one of my personal favourites.’

Lilly smiles in response. She hardly knows these two women and yet that magnification of time once more plays with the concept of perspective. Up until a few hours she’d maybe shared one word with them. Possibly not even that. She had seen them in the fort but now they stand either side of her, maternal, protective and full of common sense.

‘Come on,’ Pea nudges the young girl, ‘let’s go find a builder eh?’

‘We need to move Lani,’ Lilly says, looking once again at the remains of the Thai girl.

‘To the shore with the others?’ Pea asks, after a pained silence.

The idea of Lani being stacked with the other corpses doesn’t feel right, but then nothing feels right now. ‘I think so,’ Lilly says. Dead is dead. It’s not the body that counts but the memory and the essence of them that you hold in your heart. The essence of her father and mother. Her friends, family and everyone else.

Lilly moves to the corpse and drops down, fighting the urge to gag. She’s seen violent death more times than anyone should see such things, but it’s the smell. The sheer ripe stench of the foul half cooked rancid meat. Flesh that has been heated and left to rot in a room full of water that steamed to evaporate and the high humidity has worked to advance the rate of decomposition far faster than it normally would.

It must be done though. Lani has to be moved. Not Lani. Lani isn’t here now. This is just a body of organic matter. That’s all it is. A collection of molecules held in a certain order and no different to any other organic matter.

With one smooth motion she reaches down, grips Lani’s ankles and stands up as the seared flesh tears from having adhered to the concrete ground. She grips harder, forcing the body to peel away. The skin under her fingers sinks in and rips open. Soft fat oozes out to slide thick across the backs of her hands and drip onto the ground.

The disturbance releases gases that expunge noisily and bodily fluids leak, seep and drip from orifices but still Lani remains stuck to the ground.

‘Fuck,’ Sam grunts and moves to Lilly’s side to reach down and take a wrist. That too tears under her grip. The flesh parting like soft fruit. Pea comes next, grabbing the other wrist and together they pull back as the body sucks gloopily up from the ground.

The protected flesh on Lani’s underside remains less cooked, less crispy and it rips open leaving chunks stuck on the floor. Liquid drips out. The smell of cooked shit fills the room. Lilly gags first, hacking as she turns her head to one side. Sam follows suit. Yacking and gulping air in short hard breaths.

‘This was a fucking stupid thing to do,’ Sam gasps, turning her head to the side and immediately regretting talking as that means she now has to breathe back in.

‘We’re…we’re here now,’ Pea’s eyes water with tears that stream from the stench, the noises and the sight of the body falling apart with every foot they move it.

They drag the corpse across the ground and through the door into the main room. A wet slick left behind in their wake with Lani’s skull bouncing dully on the ground.

Sam pukes first. A dry heave and the water she only ingested a short time ago comes thundering out. She manages to twist her head enough for the spray to mostly miss Lani.

‘Oh no,’ Pea groans. One action invokes another and at the sight of Sam puking Pea feels her own stomach heave and contract. With a gargled yell she vomits down at her own feet adding the fine aroma of hot sick to a rotten corpse of burnt flesh leaking shit, piss and blood.

‘Fuck,’ Liam dances back from the door with a look of revulsion twisting his features at the sight of the three women dragging the ruined corpse out. Sam pukes again. Retching but refusing to release the body knowing she wouldn’t summon the courage to touch it again.

Zayden just stares. Too stupid to move and he notices the off-white fat oozing between their fingers and the gooey trail smeared behind that brings the smell to his nose.

‘Urgh,’ he gags first then pukes hard with half-digested Doritos spewing out with bits of popcorn floating in a marinade of 7up.

Liam is made of tougher stuff though and refuses to vomit. His eyes water. His face contorts. A vein in his neck stands out, throbbing at the denial of the natural reflex. Instead he forces a casual look at the mutilated cadaver and sucks his teeth, showing perfect disdain that just makes Zayden hate him that little bit more.

‘No sweetcorn,’ Pea grunts.

‘Eh?’ Sam grunts back.

‘Sweetcorn,’ Pea yacks, and widens her eyes, ‘no…no sweetcorn in the puke…always sweetcorn in puke…’

‘…Even, oh shit,’ Sam turns her head up in an effort to draw clean air, ‘…even when you haven’t eaten sweetcorn…s’always sweetcorn.’

‘Wasn’t though,’ Pea gurgles, ‘or carrots.’

‘Didn’t see any,’ Lilly mutters trying with all her might to breathe in through her mouth but that just means the stench is converted to flavour that coats her taste buds. ‘I’m…’ She fails in the warning and heaves to vomit on the patch of ground next to her.

‘God!’ Pea heaves with puke streaming from her mouth and nose.

‘Pea!’ Sam chastises her friend but like a yawn the action is seen and copied, ‘urgh,’ she yacks to the side, spittle and drool hanging from her chin.

‘Argh,’ Zayden heaves again, puking hard with projectile vomit splattering the ground. His hormone addled mind too dumb to realise he’s walking in Lani’s slipstream with every ripe smell going straight up his nose.

Like an orchestral movement the action sets them off, one in turn of the other. Zayden’s greater stomach contents triggering Pea who triggers Sam who triggers Lilly. Mouths stretching. Stomachs contracting. Drool, spit and bile sliding down chins to dangle and sway on strands that coat bare arms.

They walk fast, praying the body doesn’t disintegrate and fall apart. Seconds go by. None of them puke. Hope builds with the front gate now firmly in sight. Hands sliding over the limbs grip harder as the flesh slides from the bone but Sam can’t hold it in. The back of her throat pulls down. Her mouth fills with saliva and her stomach heaves with a mighty contraction. She bends double, entirely given over to the urge of her body demanding she expel the noxious gases coming into her mouth and nose.