It’s a typical old-fashioned pub, with trinkets, tankards, copper pieces, and other junk dotted about the place. Low, thick wood beams criss-cross on the ceiling and a fitted bench with faded red fabric goes around the length of two of the walls, while mismatched chairs and tables are dotted about the place. I could almost imagine the old men in this village smoking in here, as they escaped their nagging wives...that is if smoking hadn’t already been banned. I glance over to the till and smile, it was probably older than Luke, and there was no card reader either. Yep, stereotypical, out-dated establishment in the middle of nowhere.
I can’t seem to find any bodies or zombies, something that makes me cautious as we push our way through into the kitchen area. I know it’s been almost two years, but something barricaded that door. Whether it stayed human or turned is what I’m interested in, and if it turned, where the fuck is it now? I can see Luke is thinking the same as me, as he carefully checks around each corner and shadow. Good boy, I think, as he holds the knife I gave him, ready should anything try to run at him.
The kitchen isn’t anything special, in fact, it’s tiny. Like box room tiny. How the heck they cooked anything in here, I have no idea.
Luke goes to open the huge walk in freezer, and I practically scream “No!” as he does.
The stench of rotting and mould fills the tiny room, and we both gag. Quickly, he slams the door back shut, but the damage is done. The smell lingers, and it turns my stomach. There are two smells in this world I can’t stand, rotting food and rotting corpses. Anything decaying, basically.
“That’s disgusting…” Luke says as he covers his face with his sleeve.
“You should know better, I thought you used to go on raids with Leo and Sam?” I ask as I check the shelves.
Salt. Breadcrumbs. Oil. A jar of pickles. A large container containing some dried raisins and nuts. A box of mixed crisps sits higher up, and next to that, I spot, of course, some pork scratchings. Luke starts opening the cupboards under the worktop, squatting down to do so, but he doesn’t say anything for a few minutes.
He places some tins of tomatoes and corned beef on the counter. “That was different.”
I pause for a moment and watch him. His body has tightened up, and he’s gone as stiff as a board as he crouches, faced away from me. He still stacks tins on the counter above his head.
“How?” I ask gently.
He scoffs, “Because there were always zombies. We had to rush. Just snatch what you could.”
His tiny voice is empty, like he’s trying not to think about it, and I don’t blame him. Isn’t that what we were doing here? Snatch and grab? He exhales like the weight of the world is pressing down on his small shoulders.
Turning to me, he says, “Here it’s quieter, we can have a proper look. Take our time.”
I look at the stash he’s built up; there are some good things, including three one kilo bags of pasta, some powdered soup, and various tins. Hey, every little helped.
“To a degree, I guess,” I answer eventually. London was more intense, there were more dangers, and I guess in one way it was a good thing that he felt safer here. It was also a bad thing, because that’s when mistakes were made. I couldn’t let him get sloppy.
Fischer’s voice interrupts us, and we quickly run to the cellar. In the UK, our cellars aren’t always underground like you see in creepy American horror films. Usually, it was just a crappy room out the back, where the beer barrels and various bits of equipment were stored in a chilled environment. This one proved to be no different.
“What’s the matter?” Luke asks as we reach her.
“I need a hand, these empty barrels will be perfect for collecting water if we can just cut them open back at the base.”
“Christ, woman.” I run a hand through my hair. “We thought something was wrong.”
She shrugs. “Sorry.”
There’s a door for deliveries at the back of the cellar. Fischer unbolts it, and with a loud creek, she pulls it open. We’re not prepared for the zombie waiting on the other side, and it lunges at Fischer with a snarl. I push Luke back behind me and grab my knife.
Fischer struggles to keep the thing at arm’s length as it tries to bite her neck and face.
“A little help here,” she growls as its teeth snap.
Without pausing, I grab it by the tattered jumper, yank it backwards, and slide my knife into its eye socket. The thing was so decomposed it was like cutting butter.
“Bit slow off the mark there, mate,” Fischer says, narrowing her eyes at me.
“Sorry.” I shrug with a grin. She steps over the dead creature and punches me in the arm.
We push three of the barrels out by the back door and round the side of the pub, ready for later. Then we go back inside and gather up all the bits Luke and I collected. We make our way over to the rendezvous point and wait for the others to return.
We don’t have to hang around long as Sonia and Galen come jogging over.
“Good haul?” Fischer asks.
“Yeah, I’ve radioed back to base and told them to collect from here, the pub, and the office.” He has a quick look through our bags and smiles at what we’ve found. Like I said, every little helps, and in the apocalypse, no one was a fussy eater.
“Where’s Gareth?” Luke looks around, a frown on his little face.
“Dull fucker couldn’t follow orders.” Galen rolls his eyes and shoots Sonia a pointed look. “He got bitten.”
Sonia looks away, tears in her eyes. Galen says no more, but we all understand, Gareth was a risk. We couldn’t take him back to base on our own and pickup wouldn’t be here until the morning, so the only thing to do was to put him out of his misery. We couldn’t risk him turning and coming after us. It was a harsh reality of our world, but a necessary one. Dr. Landry, slimy weasel, still hadn't sent word from Leeds, but I know Kelp was just as desperate as us to find out what became of the army facility and labs up north as us. I heard whispers that he was going to send some soldiers on a scouting mission soon, but who knows what Kelp had in mind. He certainly didn’t like to share with us. I wonder if the doctor is any closer to a cure or if he even made it. It annoyed me that the chance of a cure rested in the hands of that pompous prick, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers.
Chapter Eleven
Anna
I feel like we've been wandering along the motorway for days rather than hours. Before the outbreak, I never would have dreamed I’d be limping along this road, but that was when people used to drive like idiots, speeding down here in their fuel-guzzling cars. Now, there’s nothing. Just an eerie quiet and hundreds of deserted vehicles and woodlands on either side, closing us in. I still feel like I’ve been through a cycle in the washing machine with a ton of rocks, but what can I do? I keep taking the painkillers we found, but soon we’ll be out of them, and I’m dreading it, even if they’re only taking the edge off.
The stretch of motorway is like a scene from a horror film, anything could be lurking in the trees or the abandoned cars, except this is my life now—it doesn't stop, the only end credits are death or infection. Cars are queued up tightly, until we get further away from London, and then they begin to spread out a little more. It’s the overturned ones or the ones that have crashed into barriers that make me flinch as we hobble past. There have been plenty of dead bodies too, dried up husks of the people they once were, but I try not to linger on them for too long. We’ve been trying to scavenge as we go along, but there’s not much to take. It’s like everything has already been picked clean as we quietly open car doors or peek inside windows.
Lily manages to grab bottles of warm water from the glovebox of a Vauxhall Astra that’s obviously seen better days, while I find a few packets of biscuits tucked down the passenger side of a Ford Galaxy, the baby seat in the back making me pause. That one had brought me to the edge of tears. There had been dried blood on the dash, but nothing in the back, barring a small smudge on the window. All the doors are flu
ng open, so a small part of me wants to believe that whoever was in the car got the baby out and made it to the woods. I look at all the other vehicles, deserted, dirty, rusting with blood spatters, and I know deep down that they didn’t. There would have been too many infected already, chaos and panic would have reigned. The outbreak had crept up on us, and in the blink of an eye, we were tearing one another apart.
“Why are there no zombies?” Lily asks as she climbers into a Land Rover and emerges with a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. I’d been thinking the same thing, they couldn’t all have headed towards the towns and cities, could they?
She excitedly lights her fag before taking a long drag and exhaling the smoke slowly. Leaning against the bonnet, she sighs, “Dirty habit, I know. Lex and Ryan were always on at me to quit—and I did. But…”
“But this is the end of the world, and if you can’t enjoy a stolen cigarette, when can you?” I empathise with a smile.
It was strange how the end of the world brought about a huge shift in perceptions. I mean, smoking was bad for you and studies show it contributed to lung cancer. So, we didn’t smoke. But now...well, now, who was going to treat you if you did get sick? None of us were going to reach old age, so what was the point in denying yourself? Enjoy what you could, while you could.
She finishes her fag and throws away the butt, something catching her eye as she does. She heads back towards the Galaxy, bends down, and scoops something off the floor before holding her hand out to me. It’s a bloody baby shoe.
“I miss my kids, Anna,” Lily whispers. “I can remember when they were this little. Lexi used to do this thing when we would tell her no, where she’d fling her hand over her head like some diva actress.”
She chokes back the memory and wipes at the tears starting to form. Taking a deep breath, she puts the shoe inside the baby seat and closes the car door.
“It’s time to go,” I say. Not only because there was too much death here, but because the noise of the car door closing echoes up the road. I didn’t want to die on the M40.
We shuffle along, weaving in and out of the vehicles. Death. Death. More death. Open car doors, more blood, belongings strewn carelessly across the concrete. That’s what the next three hours of our life were like, the images burned into my brain as I made silent promises to Luke that I would never leave him again.
As we move further away from the bigger cities like London and Oxford, I start to notice that some stretches of road look like they’ve been cleared. Cars, vans, and buses seem to be at the edges of the motorway rather than scattered around like before. The lack of zombies is still making me very jittery.
“What’s this?” Lily says as she touches a symbol that’s been painted on a tree just on the other side of the barrier. It’s a circle with a line through it, painted in white.
“I don’t know…” I look back from where we’ve just come. I swear I’ve seen it somewhere else. I jog back a few cars, well...I say jog, but it’s a limping shuffle, and there it is again, painted in red, this time on the floor half-hidden by a car. I had just assumed it was some sort of road marking for motorway maintenance that never happened.
Lily calls, her voice low, “Anna, there’s another one up ahead.”
I squint, it’s a way off, but I can see it. This one has been painted on the bonnet of a Ford KA in black. I get back to Lily and pull her over the barrier, into the tree line.
“What are you doing? We need to stay on the road!” she whispers, trying not to draw any unwanted attention.
“I think those are gang marks, Lil, we can’t just keep walking along the road.”
She starts peering around. “They might help us.”
I look at her for a moment. We literally just escaped hell on earth, run by a gang, and already she is desperate to go back to that kind of life? We are two injured women travelling alone, with a baseball bat and scissors for weapons. If we don’t scream easy pickings, I don’t know what did.
A moment later, she sighs, “Yeah...Probably not.”
“What do you want to do?” I ask, we were a team, and I needed to be mindful of that. We both wanted to get to Litchfield, back to our kids, and we were in this together.
After a moment, she replies, “I don’t want to go into the trees, we’re not going to see anything that creeps up on us, and we’ll get lost.”
She has a point, but we also can’t just strut along in someone else’s territory. That would be asking for trouble. I think for a moment, but the pain in my side and my leg keeps distracting me.
“Okay, what if we compromise and stay on the edge of the tree line, but keep following the motorway?” I suggest. I’m fresh out of alternatives at this point, and soon we’ll have to rest again.
Lily nods, but I can see that she's still unsure. It would mean having to keep an eye on the woods but also the roads, for both humans and zombies. “Fine, but we need to stop for the night soon.”
“Any ideas?” I didn’t really fancy trying to build or find a shelter in the woods. Not only was that time consuming and noisy, but it always bloody leaked if it rained. My teenage years spent camping with my friends in the fields by my house taught me that.
She points further up the road. “There’s a coach up ahead…”
It’s been moved to the side of the road, and it looked like a car had ploughed into it on one side, but it may be our best bet. The damage didn’t leave too much of the inside exposed, it reminded me of a crushed pop can.
“Barricade ourselves in?” I say, as we start creeping along.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Wordlessly, we approach the coach, and luckily, the door is open and nothing seems to be moving inside.
I go first with my bat and quietly move through the bus, checking under seats for anything that may be lurking. My skin starts to crawl as I get closer to the back, I feel like something or someone is watching me. I flex my hands before tightening them around the polished wood of my bat, and I carry on.
About three rows from the back, I hear it, the noise I was waiting for. That low groan. That throaty sound. I signal to Lily and crouch low, trying to spot it before it sees me, and I want to be sick when I find it. It’s a child, maybe about three years of age, trapped by one of the seats that had been crushed when the car had driven into the side of the bus.
I look away and compose myself before inching closer. That’s when it spots me, it starts snarling, twisting and writing, trying to get free. But it’s pinned at the waist, and despite struggling, it doesn’t move.
“Fuck, we need to kill it. We can’t leave it here like this,” Lily whispers.
“I know.”
She slams a fist against one the headrests. “Shit. This is so fucking shit.”
Understatement of the century. How many kids was I going to have to kill in a twenty-four-hour period? I never wanted any of this, but I couldn’t leave the creature here. I try to placate myself by saying that it was already dead, I was simply putting it out of its misery. As its chubby little hands reach out for me, I feel that resolve breaking. I hear something that sounds like ripping and realise that it’s literally trying to tear itself in half to get to us. If I was going to do this, I needed to do it now.
“Shhhh,” I whisper as I place my hand on the back of its head, stroking his hair gently before I hold him down. Using the scissors on the back of his neck I push the blades down, severing the spinal cord. He stops moving, and that’s when I pull the scissors out and wipe them on my trousers. The brain is what seemed to control these creatures, and if you cut off the head, severed the spinal cord, or even just rammed something into their heads, it seemed to do the trick. Experience had taught me that.
Lily pats my shoulder as I sit, squashed into the tiny aisle and saying nothing. She finds the lever for the door, down by the driver's seat, and pulls it shut, closing us in. The only way anyone was getting in now was if they climbed in the broken window at the back, and that was easier to keep an eye
on than if we stayed in the woods.
“You sleep first, I’ll keep watch.” Lily hands me the sleeping bag, and I open it out, still not saying anything. It’s like even my words are exhausted by what has happened today. I thought things would get easier two years down the line, not harder.
I climb into the sleeping bag and lie across two seats in the middle section of the coach. Sleep doesn’t come easily, everything keeps replaying in my head, and I just keep picturing zombie children, hordes of once beautiful and now terrifying children. Is that what would have happened to Luke if he’d gone to school that day?
I doze off, but wake again not long after. It’s dark and chilly out now, the temperature drop was likely what woke me. Glancing over to where Lily is keeping watch, I notice she’s drifted off. As I stretch out, preparing to cover her with the sleeping bag and take over on watch, something catches my eyes at the back of the bus. It’s quick, like something out of the corner of my eye, but there was definitely something there. I rush up the aisle and look out the window to see a shadowy figure running up the motorway.
Shit. We need to leave.
Chapter Twelve
Donovan
We stay in one of the houses on the outskirts of Marwton for the night, it’s the same one Mia and Alex hid out in. I know this because Mia wanted to come back here and raid the garden. I can see why, huge planters are now overgrown, but I can still see some wild garlic, chives, and mint surviving amongst the weeds. As we move through the garden into the house, I make a mental reminder to come back another time and see what we can salvage for the base.
The house is a Victorian-style house that sits on a gentle slope overlooking the whole town. Smart, Mia, it gives you an eye over everything while offering several escape routes. We set up downstairs, making sure the front and back door are barricaded for the night and that the curtains are drawn. Galen flips the dining room table, and with Fischer’s help, they move it in front of the huge bay window.
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