Thrive (Episode 3): Leave

by Lamb, Harrison J.

  Emma tried her sister, Leena’s, number next…

  Leena picked up.

  “Hello, Em?” There was a note of urgency in her sister’s voice.

  “Leena. What are you doing? Are you at work?”

  “No, Dave made me come home. Have you seen what’s happening?”

  “Yeah. I don’t understand it though,” Emma said. “People are getting sick and it’s making them violent, and the government are telling everyone to stay indoors and wait for the military. That’s all I know. Did you get the emergency notice on your TV, too?”

  “Yes.” A pause, as though her sister was struggling to come to terms with it. “Dave’s packing our bags and saying we need to leave with the kids and go to his uncle’s place. He says it won’t be safe here for much longer… Emma, have you seen them? Like, actually seen them up close?”

  She knew Leena was talking about the infected people. Emma shuddered as she thought about the man who had taken a bite out of a woman’s hand outside the therapist’s office. And the other guy with the bleeding neck staggering down her street. She understood now that they’d been infected with this virus or whatever the hell it was.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them,” Emma said. “Not up close, though.” She hesitated, then asked, “Are they really zombies?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what they are, but I know they’re dangerous.” Emma could hear Dave, her sister’s husband, yelling at their children in the background. Then Leena saying something to him.

  After a few seconds, she came back to the phone. “Em, listen – you should get out of town as soon as you can. I know the broadcast says to stay in your home, but I’m worried about you. You live alone.”

  “But what about the military? We’re supposed to wait for orders from the army or something.”

  “I know, I know, but it already seems out of control in some towns, people being killed in the streets. And we don’t know when the army are coming. It just scares me.” Leena sighed. “Just… just stay safe. I have to go, but I’ll call you back soon.”

  “Okay,” Emma said. “Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  In the silence after they had hung up, Emma could hear her heart drumming in her ears. She stood and began pacing around the living room, wondering what the best course of action was. Leena’s words had unsettled her. It already seems out of control in some towns. Was she safe here in Colchester? People being killed in the streets. Was it safe to travel?

  Emma wished Leena would call her back already. As the little sister, she had always looked up to Leena when they were growing up in the way that younger siblings naturally do. And Leena had always been there for her, always helping her cope with a world that was too much for her.

  The idea of being alone with her thoughts at that moment must have been more distressing than Emma realised; her knee still bobbing up and down like a pneumatic drill, she opened the contacts list on her phone and scrolled to his name.

  Kingsley. Her thumb hovered over the green dial button.

  She stayed like that for a full minute, her eyes slipping in and out of focus, before the rational side of her mind caught up and she put the phone face-down on the coffee table.

  Get a grip, Emma chided herself. She stood and began walking in circles around the living room.

  Maybe it was that she missed him. Or maybe it was the fact that Kingsley had always seemed to come alive in chaotic situations – up until the accident, that was – and she craved the comfort of his grounded energy.

  Whatever it was, Emma needed to get a grip. She was alone now, and she needed to deal with that. She had put herself in that position, after all, by choosing to cut ties with Kingsley.

  Emma paced around the living room again and again, a goldfish in a bowl, trying to make a plan from her scrambled thoughts and emotions, whilst itching to open the kitchen cupboards and make sure the labels of every jar and tin of food were facing the cupboard doors (another one of her compulsions).

  I need to get out of here. The thought came unbidden and Emma knew it came from somewhere rational because it kept floating back to the surface of her mind, even as her obsessions began to create a tumult. And because it was true; she needed to get out of the house or she would go positively insane.

  Then – a shout.

  It came from the street again. The edge of desperation in the noise stopped Emma in her tracks and pulled her toward the window.

  The sight of another human being in danger was naturally a distressing one. Humans are social creatures, evolved to band together for survival, empathy an evolutionary trait.

  Still, when Emma saw the man fending off an infected woman in the road, the tug of empathy she felt for him surprised her. Not because it was unusual of her to empathise with strangers – quite the opposite was true – but because she recognised the man as one of the homeless from the town centre. And every time she had walked past him sitting cross-legged outside a convenience store and begging for change, Emma had forced herself to ignore the man’s pleas, averting her eyes and speeding up, convinced that he was a con artist pretending to be homeless.

  But Emma couldn’t simply ignore him now. She couldn’t ignore his fearful yells as he tried to hold the infected back while keeping his hands away from it’s gnashing teeth.

  At first, Emma didn’t understand why the homeless man was trying to fight the infected instead of running away.

  Then she spotted his dog, the rottweiler that always accompanied him on the streets. The dog was defending him from another of the infected, jaw locked around the zombie’s wrist, pulling it by the arm in staggering circles.

  The two infected were both unrelenting. Apparently unphased by the efforts of the homeless guy and his dog. Neither of the infected gave grunts of pain or screwed up their faces in hurt.

  That was when Emma noticed a third infected tottering toward the dog, heard the homeless man’s cries get more desperate as he also spotted the third one approaching.

  It wasn’t a very hard decision; for a few heartbeats, Emma watched the rabid shell of a human hobble closer to the vulnerable pair. Then she rushed to the front door and flung it open. Charged outside.

  “Hey!” Emma’s shout was lost in the hubbub of yells, dog growls and snapping teeth. Only the third infected twisted it’s head toward her.

  A wide-eyed face ogled at her from a window in the house across the street, and she wondered why nobody else had come out to help. Then she thought of the emergency broadcast and the mention of infection, the warning to remain indoors; Emma was either crazy or stupid to have come out here.

  Definitely crazy, she thought as she ran past the struggling man and his dog, intent on luring the third infected away from them. But the homeless man’s yells suddenly changed tone and Emma realised he was speaking to her.

  “Help me, please!” he called. She turned to face him and saw that he was pointing with one hand at something on the ground by her feet. “Pass me one of those!”

  Looking down, Emma hadn’t the foggiest what he was talking about – there was nothing there.

  “Pass me one of the bricks! Please!”

  Her eyes went to the red bricks that lay at the foot of the crumbling wall of her neighbour’s front garden. She snatched one up and placed it in the man’s outstretched palm. Adjusting the brick so that he had a decent grip, his face tightened and he swung it at the undead woman’s temple.

  Dark blood spritzed his mucky coat sleeve, and the infected reeled from the blow. But that didn’t stop it from lurching back, forcing him to clop it on the head a second time before it collapsed.

  The man turned to help his dog just as the rottweiler’s jaw slid down the arm of the infected it was biting and tore off a finger. Tossing his brick to the side, the man whistled at the dog, then spun and fled. The dog gave no indication that it had heard it’s master’s call, growling and steadily backing away from the ceaseless infected. Then, abruptly, it whirled and dashed away after the
man.

  Emma had no intention of locking herself in her home and waiting, hoping that help came. Especially not with the infected out there banging on her door.

  So she followed the homeless man.

  She caught up with him as he turned the corner onto a busier street. More zombies shuffling across the road. Emma counted eight of them.

  It disturbed Emma how quickly she had begun to think of the infected as inhuman, as monsters, but when you came into close contact with them, it was hard to think of them as anything but malevolent. Demons with a corroded human appearance. Emma understood now why Leena had asked her if she’d seen one up close.

  The homeless man made a run for a corner shop halfway up the street, the dog at his heels barking at the infected as they staggered after the pair. Following, Emma was able to dart past the infected while they were distracted by the dog’s noise.

  The three of them reached the shop, stumbling inside one after the other. Emma assumed the man’s plan was to go through the staff door and exit into the alley at the back of the shop, so she started to run there as soon as she got inside.

  The man stopped her with a gruff call for help.

  She whirled to find him crouched by the front window, trying to push an ice cream freezer in front of the entrance to block it.

  Joining him, Emma gritted her teeth and put her shoulder to the freezer. It was heavy – a waist-high, plastic and steel container with the added weight of all the ice and frozen desserts inside. But their combined efforts were enough to gradually move it. Emma considered unpacking some of the frozen products from the freezer to make it lighter and easier to push, but one glance out the window put an end to the notion; the infected were drawing close to the shop. There was no time.

  The freezer was inches from the door when an infected man in a dishevelled suit burst through, stumbling into the corner of the freezer. Emma immediately scanned the shelves for something to use as a weapon. Her eyes stopped on the two-litre bottles of lemonade lining a shelf to her left. She snatched one up, hefting it in both hands.

  Emma hesitated. Stared at the stony, snarling face before her. Monsters, she repeated to herself. Not people.

  As the infected lunged at her, fear trumped her other emotions – as it always had – and Emma took a swing at it’s torso. The infected tottered back a step but was unhurt.

  “Aim for the head!” the homeless man yelled at her.

  Emma swallowed, her throat dry as bark. Then she lifted the bottle again and obliged the man, bringing it down on the forehead of the zombie. It wobbled on it’s feet. But the second hit still hadn’t hurt it. Clenching her teeth, Emma clubbed the infected with the bottle a third time.

  This time the bottle punctured from the impact. Lemonade sprayed out, wetted her arms and chest and puddled on the plastic flooring. The dog barked at the spouting liquid.

  In agitation, Emma flung the leaking bottle at the infected, then turned a shoulder to it and shoved the monster back through the doorway. The slippery floor helped, causing the infected to lurch and fall onto the pavement outside.

  Emma quickly slammed the door shut and returned to help push the ice cream freezer the last few feet.

  Once they were satisfied that the entrance was secure – standing back to watch as several of the desperate zombies piled up against the door and the window, smacking on the glass – they sat against the wall in semi-shocked silence. The contrasting smells of sour sweat and sweet lemonade muddied the air.

  Emma’s hands were sticky from the sugary drink that had spilled over them when the bottle split open. The sudden thought of her sticky hands touching her phone screen made her cringe.

  That was when she realised she’d left her phone at home.

  The anxiety that had been redirected to the infected outside began to creep back into the forefront of her mind.

  4.

  The bus was nearing Colchester, and there was no telling what the survivors would find when they got there.

  The emergency notice was still being broadcast on the radio but it gave no new information. Kingsley guessed a lot of people had listened to the advice on the broadcast and were staying in their homes; he recalled the twitch of a curtain and the retreat of a shadowed figure from the window of a building back in Braintree.

  Kingsley could get no service on his phone. Neither could Eric. Kara and Rebecca’s phones were out of battery, but Rebecca had kindly let Kingsley use hers to ring Emma before it died. She hadn’t answered.

  Hoping to avoid more impossibly clogged roads like the A120 near Braintree where they had been forced to abandon their cars, the survivors were taking the longer, but quieter, back road route to Colchester rather than the direct route via the A12. It wasn’t a route without obstructions, though; on one of the narrow country lanes, they came round a bend and almost plummeted into an SUV skewed horizontally across the middle of the road, the driver’s door ajar and a snapper strapped into the passenger seat, squirming in effort to free itself.

  The bus was too wide to slip past the SUV so they stepped off to see if they could move it out of the way. The engine had been left running, but not long enough to drain it of diesel. At a guess, the ginger-haired woman in the passenger seat – who had a bite on her shoulder, blood congealing into a purple mass in the fabric of her blue vest top – had turned at some point during the drive and attacked the person at the wheel, causing them to swerve and come to a stop in the middle of the road. Then the driver had probably panicked and fled.

  While Eric and Rebecca searched the SUV for supplies, Kingsley stood thinking about how quickly they had devolved into insolent scavengers who rooted through the belongings of the recently deceased without batting an eyelid.

  It had been two days of madness, and here they were. Despite the notion that humans were the conquerors of the natural world, it had always really been the other way around; it was the environment that shaped the psyche and gave humans the need to conquer things in the first place.

  Though some people had changed quicker. Surrendered their humanity in the name of survival on day one.

  The thought of Darren and his hasty decision to kill James was still laced with anger. It didn’t matter that the apocalypse prepper had only done what was necessary for safety, or that Kingsley would probably now do the same thing himself. Because Darren had not only taken their friend’s life – he had also forced them to lose part of their humanity.

  Kingsley despised the man for that.

  Mistaking Kingsley’s forlorn expression for regret about leaving Sammy, Kara approached him.

  “I doubt if it will make you feel any better,” she began. “But I’m going to say it because I think you need to hear it: we can’t worry about whether our decisions are right or wrong anymore. That’s rich coming from a policewoman, I know. But the truth is, when it comes to hard decisions, intentions matter more than right or wrong.”

  Rebecca stuck her knife in the head of the snapper that was strapped into the passenger seat, while Eric rummaged underneath the seats for anything that might have been tucked away out of sight.

  “As long as our hearts are in the right place,” Kara continued. “As long as we don’t lose sight of our own morals when we make those difficult decisions, that’s what matters.”

  “I don’t need a lecture on philosophy,” Kingsley bit back. Then he frowned, seeing the subdued expression forming on Kara’s face and realising his words had come out a bit harsher than he had intended.

  In the short time he’d known Kara for, Kingsley had come to recognise an unshakeable spirit in the way she carried herself, a constant glint in her wide, almond eyes. Though not as calculated as Eric, she was definitely as optimistic, if not more so.

  But for just a moment after those words had spilled from his mouth, Kingsley thought the spirit had left Kara’s face.

  Eric got in the driver’s seat of the SUV and steered it to the side of the road. They didn’t need Kingsley’s help here. He went to go bac
k inside the bus.

  As he stepped through the bus door, Kara said, “Remember that we’re all in the same boat here, just trying to survive.”

  Kingsley stopped in the doorway. Up until this moment, he hadn’t known it was what he wanted to do. It had been brewing in his subconscious. It was only when Kara said we’re all in the same boat that the words came to him.

  Speaking over his shoulder, Kingsley said, “Yes, we’re all in the same boat for now. But once I find Emma and make sure she’s okay, I’m leaving. I’m getting away from everyone else, going somewhere quiet and isolated.”

  Returning to his seat, Kingsley wondered whether it had been like that for Sammy, a sudden decision that she knew right away she would go through with. But Sammy’s decision had come from a different place than his – one of overwhelming hurt and grief. Kingsley’s had been borne out of frustration. A lifetime of feeling like he didn’t belong, like he was the only person who saw how pathetic a society the world had become. A lifetime of feeling aimless while he watched everybody else chase a dream that they didn’t understand.

  Deep down Kingsley had always wanted nothing more than to get away from it all. And now, at the end of the world, he could.

  *

  About five minutes after the abandoned SUV had dwindled in the rearview mirror, a man stepped out into the road in the path of the bus, waving his arms in wide semi-circles, attempting to get them to stop. They didn’t slow, hoping the man would move when they got close; for all they knew, there were several other survivors hiding in the bushes, waiting to jump out when they stopped and attack them, try to steal the bus.

  But it looked like the man was willing to be run over. He stood his ground, only waving faster and shouting as the bus neared.

  They braked, came to a stop a few metres from hitting the guy. Standing at the front of the bus next to Eric, who was at the wheel, Kingsley loaded a bolt into the crossbow and lifted it so the man could see they were armed. The man started towards the bus door, but Eric halted him with a stern gesture.