The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 3): The Fall

by Deville, Sean

  They didn’t deserve to.

  23.08.19

  Sydney, Australia

  For some unknown reason, hundreds of zombies had wandered onto Bondi Beach, which gave Bruce the perfect view for his target practice. Lying on the fourth-floor roof of the apartment he lived in, Bruce lined up another head in the scope of his hunting rifle. Steadying his breathing, he slowly squeezed the trigger and watched with satisfaction as the zombie jerked. That was the twenty-seventh he had killed so far today, and he was determined to do his part to end the zombie menace.

  Bruce had a thousand rounds of ammunition, and he intended to expend every one of them. After that, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do, but he knew it would involve alcohol and the man he had tied up on his bed. His captive was a neighbour who had been mistaken by Bruce’s good historic behaviour. Bruce had always been so charming, so courteous, he had surely been the ideal person to help now that they were all trapped in this building.

  Downstairs on the ground floor, a group of zombies had been trying to break into the building, so far with little success. Their presence, however, meant that anyone left in the building was trapped. Bruce would have shot them, but he just didn’t have the correct angle to get at them from his present position.

  His neighbour had come to him expecting a fellow survivor only to find himself the recipient of a rear naked choke from a merciless predator. Bruce’s fun with his neighbour would come, but first, Bruce would kill as many of these dead fuckers as he could. His dad had introduced him to hunting whilst Bruce was still young, and it was something that had crept into his blood to become almost an obsession. There wasn’t a month that didn’t go by where he didn’t pack up his Yute and venture into the outback.

  For once, the excitement had come to his door.

  The sun beat down hard on him, but his tanned beach body could weather that assault without difficulty. The cap shaded his eyes, and the six-pack of beer that was half consumed kept his body suitably hydrated. When nature called, it was no great hassle for him to piss over the side. Bruce would stay here until the light fell, and then he would go and engage in his other passion. Forced sodomy.

  Chambering another round, he shot another zombie, disappointed in his aim. The bullet sliced through the zombie’s neck, causing the head to tip awkwardly to the side.

  “Bloody useless mate,” he said, scolding himself. It shouldn’t take more than a single bullet to kill one of these fuckers, and he corrected his aim and made amends for his tardiness. The zombie was a former police officer which made the prize even juicier, and it fell to the sand.

  With a black sharpie, Bruce ticked off another line on the low wall that marked the edge of the roof.

  “Twenty-eight,” he said with a sense of satisfaction.

  There was an increased noise from the ground floor, and momentarily abandoning his weapon, Bruce squirmed to the edge of the roof so he could look down. The building’s main entrance was protected by a concrete veranda which protected the zombies whilst they tried their best to gain entry. More were running over now, the sounds of his shots definitely inviting more undead to the party. He hadn’t realised that his shooting was what was drawing so many of them to this location.

  There was the sound of something giving way, what he could see of the zombies below seeming to surge. How long before the door failed? It was sturdy, as were the reinforced windows, but it was surely only a matter of time. Even if they did penetrate through, Bruce reckoned he was safe up here on the roof. Might it be better to put off the slaughter for the fucking though?

  No, Bruce needed the light to shoot. The bitch downstairs could wait. He cracked open another beer, relishing the fact this was the most fun he’d ever had in his entire life. It might be the apocalypse, but Bruce was going to be one of the few people to actually enjoy it.

  At least for a time.

  23.08.19

  Preston, UK

  After the first few minutes, the slaughter had become tedious. He’d seen enough death the last few days, he didn’t need to see any more. Despite the vocal objections of The Voice, Smith had left his vigil and had ventured outside into the fresh air. The atmosphere inside the quarantine room had been tainted by death and despair which, while not distressing, had left Smith feeling jaded. Someone had tried to mask the aroma with copious amounts of bleach, but that had only made the stench worse. In the past, the cooling breeze outside would have felt refreshing to him, but today it was just something to fill his lungs with.

  The simple things held no enjoyment for him now.

  Smith figured half an hour would be enough for the men to self-select themselves. The hope was that he would return to find three able candidates strong enough to accept the antiserum. He really didn’t want to waste a dose on someone who would die during the process. Their battle would be further complicated by the fact that anyone killed would need to be dealt with in the now traditional fashion. Killing each other was bad enough without having to fight off zombies with the meagre melee weapons Smith had left them with.

  Thirty minutes was plenty of time to think, and his mind pondered how he had ended up here, The Voice now quiet. Where did The Voice go when it wasn’t ranting in his head? Smith thought. Was it like tuning into a radio station, the sound always there but only noticeable when he turned his head a certain way perhaps. Smith actually experimented with that idea, turning his skull this way and that to try and illicit a random utterance. The Voice stayed strangely silent now that it had been denied witnessing the violence it craved.

  The time slipped by and, looking at his watch, Smith was astonished to see that the required time had passed. From where he sat outside, no zombies were now visible, the last of them having likely drifted off in search of fresh humanity. There was plenty of that in the streets and houses around the barracks. The sense of despair of the average person must have been almost unbearable. There they were, living close to an army barracks that had at one point housed hundreds of men. Had the surrounding civilians considered themselves safer than most, only for their very defenders to be slaughtered and overwhelmed?

  Everything around him was peaceful, almost serene which really didn’t fit with the butchery he had just orchestrated. Would this stillness be the world once humanity had left it? An empty husk bequeathed by civilisation, slowly decaying to dust so that nature could reclaim the planet for its own. As resilient as the undead were, it was clear to Smith that the ravages of time and decay would return them all to the ground eventually. Nothing lasted forever, and when the last of them fell, the virus would fall with them.

  Enough of such whimsical notions. It was time to get this show on the road.

  When he returned to the quarantine room, three bloodied figures were staring at each other in a nervous standoff. They had finished methodically ending any chance of the bodies around them resurrecting, having survived Smith’s Battle Royale. They all had injuries of one sort or another, which was something Smith hadn’t properly considered. Hopefully, none of the victors had received life-threatening insults to their bodies because that might hamper the results of the upcoming experiment. Smith didn’t think so looking at them and was surprised to see that the Sergeant with the knife was not one of the survivors. Such a man should have come through this on top, but Smith was willing to take whatever the fates gave him.

  All three of those who remained were Privates, although ranks were a pointless concept now when you thought about it. Across the country, if the army weren’t being defeated, it would be disintegrating, fragmenting into smaller units as those who wore the uniform realised there really was no point fighting for a country that no longer existed.

  “So you are my champions,” Smith stated. “Impressive. The temptation for you now will be to kill me. Just know that I am the only person who can administer the cure to you. I’m also the only one with a gun,” Smith said, waving the firearm he held at them. “Finally know that if it weren’t for me, you would all be dead a da
y from now anyway. I know you will reject the concept now, but in truth, you all owe me your lives. That is a debt I expect you all to repay with interest, but if you choose to reject my offer, you are free to stay here and rot with the bodies around you.” Standing in the doorway, Smith picked up the case containing XV1 and backed up so his champions could leave the room. They all did, and, keeping a safe distance from them, Smith led the way for the three men to follow.

  Smith knew he was right in what he said, but it didn’t stop the utter contempt he felt oozing off the three soldiers. They could think what they liked for they would probably hate him even more after they experienced the side effects of XV1. He hoped that, with time, they would see the wisdom of why he had done things this way, but Smith suspected that much of that would be dependent on how his little experiment was going to play out.

  Smith hadn’t told the three everything that he had planned for them. It was important that they retained a modicum of hope as well as a good helping of ignorance. He still wasn’t totally sure himself why he was even doing any of this.

  The first survivor was called Dawson. He was nineteen and a bull of a man. The only fight Dawson ever remembered losing was to Lazarus, most men not even close to his equal. Dawson had no idea how he had acquired the virus, the symptoms appearing just over a day ago, passed onto him from a fellow soldier. During the fight for dominance, he had broken several bones in both his hands as he had fought those struggling to get one of the weapons left for them. Even with the damage, Dawson had continued to rain down devastating punches that few could withstand. In all, he had killed ten men, one who he had even considered a friend. It was a price he had been willing to pay for his own life, friendship an overrated concept in his mind.

  Dawson was not well liked amongst the majority of his fellow soldiers. He was overbearing, prone to use his size to get his way. A bully for want of a better word, but one who knew when to toe the line and show the officers the reverence they expected. For some reason, he was also not in possession of anything resembling a sense of humour, rarely saying anything of any worth. Deep down, he was someone who would always put his own welfare above that of the men around him. Not a soldier you wanted covering your back when you were in the thick of it. He was feared and tolerated, but not trusted.

  The second man was called Shah. As a Hindu, he had initially experienced a degree of bigotry from his fellow squaddies, but he had soon dealt with that with his cutting sense of humour and his ability to match anyone he met pint for pint. Right now, with the blood still dripping off the hammer he held, he felt delirious from the effects of the killing rage he had devolved into. At Smith’s insistence, he dropped the hammer before leaving the confinement of the quarantine room. Such weapons weren’t needed now.

  If Shah was honest, for a time there, he had lost himself to a barbarity he didn’t even know he was capable of. Had he displayed such against an enemy on the battlefield, it probably would have rewarded him with a medal for gallantry. Here, it gave him a chance to be a part of Smith’s ongoing and somewhat depraved experiment. In his heart, there was no shame at what he had done, relief the dominant emotion felt having defied the odds. For some reason, he found himself wondering if his father would have been proud of him which depressed his spirits somewhat for he feared that the answer to that question would have been no. Shah’s father had been a peaceful man, who had escaped seeing his son join the military via the heart attack that took him when Shah was only fifteen.

  Cartwright was the third person to survive, although he had lost an ear in the process. Whereas the other two had relied on sheer brute force, Cartwright had retreated in the initial stages of the fight. Being at the edge of the group, he had slunk away and hid so that most of the work was done for him. Only towards the end did he re-join the battle, extracting a knife from the throat of a Corporal he hated. He made short work of those closest to him.

  Like Dawson, he was of poor character and lacked any kind of morals. Why he had even joined the military was a mystery to himself and those who had schooled him, the latter glad that he was off the streets and under the thumb of an organisation that might be able to teach him the concept of respect. Unlike Dawson he wasn’t actively disliked, but nor was he a favourite with his fellow soldiers. If you had asked the Sergeant of his troop to select the man most likely to engage in criminality, Cartwright would have been picked.

  His army career wasn’t exactly going to plan mind. At the start of the outbreak, he had been locked in a barrack’s prison cell for drugs possession. If not for Lazarus, he would likely have been tried and convicted and sent to the Glasshouse for several years. The apocalypse saved him that, every able-bodied man deemed essential for the fight that had quickly become unwinnable. It was just unfortunate for him that he contracted the virus from sharing a cigarette with a fellow soldier.

  “I suppose we had better get on with this then,” Smith ordered. Really, there wasn’t any need to wait around.

  23.08.19

  Manchester, UK

  Brian had been sent out on another errand. The first warehouse he had ransacked yesterday still had stuff that needed to be shipped to Clay’s mansion compound. The soldiers that were guarding it were no longer there, the sandbag emplacement they left by the main gate the only real evidence that they had even been guarding it. In a way that was both good and bad. Good because Brian wouldn’t have to bother with any more negotiations to get the stuff he needed for Clay. The bad was why the soldiers had left. If they weren’t here, it meant that the situation in Manchester had deteriorated rapidly. The army had seized all the main stockpiles of food so that it could be controlled and distributed to the population. The challenge was that if the army now felt the food supplies weren’t worth defending, then what did that say about the future of the country? More reason to get this job done so he could retreat back behind the high, thick walls of Clay’s mansion.

  With the engine idling, Bulldog slipped out of the passenger seat of the van and used bolt cutters on the chain holding the gate closed. The soldiers had at least locked the place up tight before abandoning their posts, the intact chain also indicating that no other crews had come to claim the contents of this particular warehouse. Brian had been surprised in that he’d expected to see more activity by the competing gangs that worked the streets of Manchester. Mind you, only the Crane Close Crew had anything close to the organisational structure that Clay’s organisation possessed, and they had been slaughtered on the night of the seventeenth. The Russians and the Ukrainians might become an issue as the days progressed, but somehow, Brian didn’t think so. The way it was looking, for Manchester at least, Clay was going to be the last man standing. Clay was the only one who had been given any kind of advanced warning.

  Bulldog opened the gates and motioned for the three vans to pass through, another man joining him. Both men were armed with AK47’s, an intimidating looking and sounding weapon. They would stand guard whilst the rest of Brian’s crew loaded up whatever they could. Ideally, they needed an articulated lorry to move the stuff from the warehouse, but the roads were perilous enough without trying to navigate one of those beasts around. Vans would have to do.

  On the way here, Brian had seen his first zombie. It had wandered into the deserted road they were travelling along, Brian driving the lead vehicle. At first, he had slowed, thinking it was just a pedestrian, someone perhaps who was injured and required help, something that would never be offered by Brian and his team. But then the zombie had turned face on, and Brian had seen the eyes, his foot going to the accelerator. Running at the van full-on, the zombie had been smashed by the bumper, going under the van, the wheels crushing parts of it. That was not something Brian would want to make a habit of for the van could only take so much punishment of that kind.

  Someone was also going to have to clean the van down, which was a task Brian would be more than happy to delegate. Top dogs like him didn’t do such menial work.

  The three vans pulled up out
side one of the main loading bays of the distribution warehouse. Inside would be food to keep hundreds of people going for weeks, as well as an array of other goods like toiletries and pharmaceuticals. There was also of course alcohol, which Clay was allowing his men to take for themselves so long as they controlled their intake. Word was if Clay found any man too drunk to function, he would personally make that man eat the bottle the alcohol came in, piece by shattered piece. Nobody considered that warning to be an exaggeration and so nobody had so far broken that sacred covenant. It would happen, mistakes like that always did when you were dealing with men who lived for so long on the edge of violence. They often had a tendency to let their base desires overwhelm them, self-destructing in spectacular fashion. Britain’s prisons had been filled with such.

  Brian stepped out of his van, issuing orders. The soldiers had locked the building up tight as well, so it took several moments for Brian’s crew to force entry through the security doors. The Yale lock didn’t last more than thirty seconds before it was picked, the men streaming inside. Brian watched them enter, some of them visibly excited as if they were kids at Christmas. While most of the country were fighting for their lives, those in Clay’s gang had so far pretty much been a law unto themselves, escaping the hordes and the violence that had swept the nation. It had been no surprise to Brian that most of them had easily abandoned any ties they had in the outside world. Most of the men who Clay employed were dispossessed, fractured from any family they might have. Those that weren’t were still men of violence who cared only for themselves. The few who had expressed their primary allegiance to loved ones hadn’t been invited to hide behind Clay’s walls.