The Z Infection (35 page)

He rose from the chair he had been
sleeping in and kicked the other guy, Leo.

‘Get up you lazy fucker,’ he said.

Leo rolled over and opened his eyes. 
He looked like shit.  Assholes, I thought.  The first opportunity they got to
have a decent sleep for days and they ruined it by getting hammered and
sleeping in a chair.  What a waste.

The leader, I had to laugh at his
title since there were now only two of them, walked through to the kitchen.  I
could hear him rummaging around for something, then the kettle went on and he
made a coffee for himself.

He came back through and switched on
the TV.  There was another news item about something that had happened in York,
but I couldn’t hear it properly and he switched the channel, just as it got to
the interesting bit.

The other guy got up now.  He
wandered through to the bathroom and I heard him break wind as he relieved
himself.  Perfect house guests, I thought.

I decided that I was going to have to
communicate with them eventually and it would be easier on a one to one basis.

‘Where’s Xiaofan?’ I asked.

The leader almost jumped out of his
chair.  Obviously he had been living on his nerves for days and the sudden
sound of a voice had almost given him heart failure.  He soon recovered though
and was immediately back to his arrogant self.

‘She slept in one of the other
rooms,’ he said with a sneer.  ‘I got sick of the sight of her.’

I strained to see the TV.  ‘What’s
happening outside?’

‘The dead have risen,’ he said
theatrically, while waving his fingers in the air.

‘The dead?’

‘Apparently,’ he said, taking a slurp
of the coffee.

There was silence for a moment.

‘What do you plan to do with us?’ I
asked.

I was used to asking direct questions. 
It was my job.

He shrugged.  ‘Haven’t thought about
that yet.’

‘You can’t leave us tied up like this
all the time,’ I said.

‘Why not?  Why can’t I?’

‘Because we’ll need to go to the
bathroom eventually, for a start,’ I replied.  ‘In fact I could do with going
now.’

‘Maybe I’ll just untie you and put
you out onto the street,’ he said.

I realised he could be serious.  He
didn’t have any reason to keep us here after all.  The two of them could sit
out this problem for months if they were careful.  Xiaofan and I had already
worked out a plan that could have seen us through for years if need be. 
Somehow, I didn’t think these two were that bright.

I was about to ask another question
when I heard a noise.  It was like something had knocked against the front door.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘How should I know?’ he said, then
shouted at the top of his voice.  ‘Leo, you better not be having your way with
that pretty little China girl.’

‘Shut up,’ I said. 

I knew the sound hadn’t come from
inside the flat.  Someone, or something was at the door.  I was too late
though.

‘Don’t you tell me to shut…’

He didn’t get a chance to finish the
sentence.  Suddenly there was an almighty ruckus.  Unseen hands were clawing at
the front door.  We could hear low moans and the tell-tale groaning of the
infected.

‘Shit,’ I said.

He was off the chair in a flash,
sending the coffee mug flying.

‘Leo,’ he called.  ‘Infected.’

The two of them were running around
the flat, not knowing what to do.  Panic had set in.  Then I heard Xiaofan’s soothing
voice.

‘Calm down,’ she was saying.  ‘You’ll
make them worse.  Untie me and I’ll show you the secret way out.’

I could hear a muffled conversation
between the men now, then a frantic exchange.  They were losing it.  Right at
the time when a cool head was all that was needed, those guys were cracking up.

Thomas Buckle

06:49 hours, Monday 18
^th
May, Loch Leven,
Kinross-shire

I liked Dave.  He was a nice kid.  I
say kid, he was probably in his early twenties.  He just acted a lot younger. 
When he told me what the plan was, the first thing I thought was that it was
dangerous.  I had done exactly what he was proposing, searching through
buildings, looking for something to eat or a place to sleep and it was a scary
thing to do.

I also knew, almost immediately, that
I was going to have to help him.  Laura had already decided that she was going
to go with the main group to scavenge for food.  I couldn’t sit around on my
backside while she went to do that.

Besides, I knew that Pancho would be
able to sniff out any problems.  Dave and I discussed it.  He was as
disbelieving as anyone else, about Pancho’s abilities, but I assured him he was
quite able and he eventually, grudgingly took me at my word.  We made a deal,
that if Pancho decided it wasn’t safe, then we didn’t go in.  We would bypass
any farm and move on to the next one.

When it was time to go, we were rowed
across the loch to the mainland, to a point just beyond a golf course.  The
first farm was on the other side of the course, Dave assured me.  We waved to
our friends as they wished us luck and rowed back to the island.  Our
arrangement was that they would collect us on the southern side of the loch,
later in the afternoon.  It was going to be a long day.

The first farm proved to be a good
start.  There was a big, main house, with several smaller houses for farm
workers, scattered in the grounds.  There were also several outbuildings which
would have made it a dangerous place for two, if we hadn’t had Pancho’s nose. 
He sniffed around outside a couple of little cottages which sat on the side of
the road.

‘These are clear,’ I said.

Dave looked unsure, but I confidently
pushed open the front door and walked in.  Inside they were small.  We searched
through every room but couldn’t find anything in the first one.  In the second
one we found a note.  It was scribbled on a piece of paper and was from a wife
to her husband, telling him she couldn’t wait any longer and that she had been
advised to head north, to Perth.

‘That was a mistake,’ said Dave. 
‘Perth got it as bad as anywhere.’

We searched the house thoroughly and
eventually found the gun cabinet in a false attic wall.

‘A lot of them are well hidden,’ said
Dave.  ‘It used to be that you could keep a gun lying around, or in a glass
display case, but you can’t do that nowadays.  I knew a farmer once, who kept
one in an old fridge.’

The cabinet was locked.  We tried for
half an hour to open it, but it wouldn’t move.  Eventually Dave found some
tools in a shed and removed the entire thing from the supporting beam it was
attached to.

‘I suggest we remove this to the edge
of the loch and find a safe place for it,’ he said.  ‘We can come back for it
later and open it across on the island at our leisure.’

We dumped it in the field across the
road for the time being, while we searched the other houses.  Some of the
smaller ones had cabinets and again we had to remove them completely.  It all
took time.  By mid-morning we had removed another three cabinets and dumped
them in the field, but it was taking much longer than we had anticipated and we
knew that Dave’s estimate, of getting round all the farms on his list, was way
off the mark.

Inside the main house it took us a
while to locate the cabinet.  It was in a tack room at the rear of the premises
but when we saw it we knew we had struck gold.

‘Some of these landowners have a
dozen guns or more,’ said Dave.  ‘Sometimes they keep their employees weapons
in there as well.’

There was no way we would be able to
carry this one, even if we could have removed it from the wall.  It was huge
and it would have weighed far too much.  We were going to have to get inside it
here.

‘We need the keys for this one,’ said
Dave.

We searched through various rooms. 
The keys could have been anywhere, I thought.  Most people had a hiding place
for them.  Only they would know where the keys were kept.  Not even a wife or
trusted friend was supposed to know.  It was all part of the security measures.

I was on the point of giving up, when
I found a door on the ground floor.  I pushed the door open.  It was a study,
with walls of books and a desk in the middle.  And there, in a chair, seated at
his desk, was a man.

He was dead.  He had shot himself
through the head with a rifle that he had placed on the floor with the barrel
under his chin.  His brains and pieces of skull were spread across the wall
behind him.  I had seen worse.

I checked the rifle.  I had no idea
what I was doing, never having used one before, so I called for Dave who came
running.

‘Oh God,’ he said as he came into the
room.  ‘What a mess.’

It had barely registered with me.  I
had seen so much, but then I realised that maybe Dave hadn’t been subjected to
the horror on the same scale as I had.

‘He took a rifle out to kill
himself,’ I said.  ‘But he locked the cabinet afterwards.’

Dave looked at me.  ‘He still has the
key on him, doesn’t he?’

It seemed like a good possibility. 
Where else would he have put it?  I approached the body and put my hand into
his trouser pocket.  Nothing. 

‘Check the other side,’ I said to
Dave. 

He shook his head.  ‘I can’t.’

I went round to the other side.  That
pocket was empty too.  I moved the body to the side, to check his back pocket
and part of the man’s jaw fell away from his head.

‘Oh Christ,’ said Dave.  ‘I can’t do
this.’

He walked out of the room and I heard
him being sick in the bathroom down the hallway.  I didn’t have time to be
sick.  I knew that the guns in that cabinet could mean the difference between
life and death for twenty-seven people.  It had to be done.

Finally I checked the man’s jacket
pocket.  It was a nice tweed one.  Expensive, probably.  And suddenly I had
them.  I felt the familiar feel and heard the jangle of a couple of small metal
keys on a fob.  I pulled them out.  This had to be them.

I ran downstairs, yelling at Dave
that I had them.  He followed me, no doubt glad to be far away from the scene
in the study.

In the tack room I tried the key in
the lock.  The sound, as the lock sprung open, was the most fulfilling I had
heard in a long time.  The door swung open and the two of us stood gawping at
the array of weapons within.

There were at least three shotguns. 
I counted six large calibre rifles, which would be used to shoot deer or vermin
and another eight medium to small calibre weapons.  All of them would be
capable of killing.  It was a veritable arsenal.

We removed each weapon from the
cabinet and Dave checked every one in turn, to make sure they weren’t loaded. 
While he was doing that I was removing boxes of ammunition.  I counted each
round.  There were a hundred and sixty shotgun cartridges, twenty-two large
calibre rounds and just thirty of the small and medium calibre ones.

‘That’s not as much as I was hoping
for,’ I said.

‘It’ll do for a start,’ said Dave.  ‘They
don’t allow you to keep a huge amount of ammunition but there might be some
more in the other cabinets.’

We carried the weapons out of the
house and into the field.  When we had removed everything we sat down with our
backs against a wall and had lunch.  We had taken a tin of corned beef each. 
It wasn’t something I ate a lot of, but I was hungry and we polished it off,
each of us giving Pancho a portion of our food.  He had earned it.

After we had eaten we carried each of
the cabinets and guns to the loch side.  It took a long time to complete the
task but we were able to follow the treeline on one edge of the golf course,
which hid us from view.  In the distance I could see smoke coming from the
island, but there was no sign of anyone on the shore and I couldn’t see the
boat.

‘There’s no point trying to go around
to the rendezvous,’ said Dave.  ‘We won’t make it in time.  We should try to
get their attention and get them to pick us up here.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.  I was
tired.  ‘Any idea how to do that?’

‘Fire a shot?’ he suggested.

‘Are you mad?’ I said.  ‘Every dead
person in miles will hear it.’

‘What about a smoke signal?’ he said.

That was a much better idea.  We set
to work building a small fire.  Dave had a lighter in his pocket and before
long we had a good fire going.

‘Now we need some branches from a
living tree,’ I said.  ‘They make more smoke.’

There were numerous small bushes
around.  Dave hacked at one with his axe and removed a large branch, complete
with leaves.  He threw it on the fire and went to get another, while I fanned
the flames.  It didn’t long until we started to see large black clouds of smoke
rising up into the sky.