No. What frightened Sammy about this man was the sense she got from his bloodshot eyes and the twitching of his fingers. The sense that he was about to snap at any moment, explode in a frenzy of madness.
“Thank you so much for saving my life,” Sammy said. “Really – thank you. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get going. My friend lives in the village. Her house isn’t far from here.” In truth, she wanted to go back to the bus and pretend none of this had happened, but she didn’t want to lead these strangers to her friends. Hopefully, they wouldn’t ask questions or try to follow her.
The men said nothing. Only traded strange looks with one another and scoped her suspiciously.
“Nice meeting you.” Sammy went to sidle past the old man on her left, but was shoved back in front of the van.
“Where are your friends?” It was the guy with the bloodshot eyes who spoke, his voice low and raspy as if he had strained it from shouting too much.
Friends. How did he know? Sammy stammered, groping for a response.
“I… Friends? What fre—what are you talking about?” The specks of blood on the man’s fleece jacket seemed all the more sinister now. “Who are—” she began, but stopped as her eyes were drawn to the pocket knife clutched in his right hand.
Her Swiss pocket knife.
In a flash of fear, Sammy remembered where she had seen the logo on the van behind her. It was the same one that had adorned the butcher’s van outside Darren’s flat in Braintree; these were Darren’s friends. They must have followed her and the others to Kelvedon.
And they had taken Sammy’s knife from James’ body where she’d left it like a bouquet on his grave.
Sammy’s mouth opened and closed several times, her rattled mind trying to form something coherent to say. But all that came out was, “Shit,” before the cricket bat hit her head and fear gave way to cold, black unconsciousness.
E P I S O D E T H R E E
Leave
1.
Two days earlier
Emma’s OCD had just begun to improve when the dead started walking.
Sitting in her therapist’s office, she sighed and tried to think how best to describe the turn her pervasive thought spirals had taken recently.
“They haven’t gone away. I’m still aware of them happening but… they don’t overwhelm me anymore. When I feel myself starting to spiral, I do the breathing exercises you showed me and it helps me recentre. As long as I have something else to focus on, they pretty much fade away.” Emma raised her eyes to meet her therapist, Mrs Eccleston’s, placid gaze.
“That’s brilliant to hear. I think we made some strong progress last week,” Mrs Eccleston said. She made a few notes in Emma’s record, then regarded the clock on the wall behind her patient. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes so I think we’ll wrap this session up now. I’ll book you in again for the same time next week if that suits you, and then we’ll work out a plan for our sessions moving forward. I think we’ll start seeing each other once a fortnight rather than weekly…”
Mrs Eccleston stopped as she realised Emma wasn’t listening. Her patient’s attention had shifted to the window. Mrs Eccleston craned forward over her desk to see what was out there, but her view was obstructed by the magnolia tree on a grassy knoll outside the tall window.
Emma watched the scene unfold on the street outside the office; a woman backed away from a man who staggered towards her, reaching his arms out to grab her. She was shouting at him. Emma couldn’t hear what the woman was saying, but it sounded like a name – the man’s name. The woman clearly knew him, and just as clearly felt threatened by him.
Emma’s first thought was that the man was drunk or high. The way he was acting, it could have been either.
But his walk was strange. It was not the unbalanced, sluggish gait of a drunk person, but more like the limp of someone with a disability. And the man seemed to be saying something to the woman – or at least trying to, his mouth opening and closing repeatedly.
Perhaps he was having some kind of seizure.
The woman was now holding her phone to her ear and speaking into it. Calling an ambulance. Or the police, maybe. Her backwards walk had slowed and she held her arm out to keep the man at a distance.
Mrs Eccleston rose from her seat and went to the window to see what was going on.
Suddenly there was a scream from outside. Emma got up and joined Mrs Eccleston. Both of them watched as the man bit down on the woman’s hand and she howled in pain, pushing at his head with her other hand which had dropped the phone.
Other people had been drawn to the scene by the commotion and now the bystanders crowded the screaming woman, struggling to free her hand from the man’s jaws. When they finally pried him from her, the man turned and tried to bite someone else, but two people restrained him and held him back.
Blood seeped from the bite mark on the woman’s hand and dribbled down her wrist. Emma moved away from the window, her face pale.
“Christ,” she said. “Should we call the police or something?”
Mrs Eccleston shook her head slowly, still staring out the window. “They’re already getting help by the look of it.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs Eccleston turned to Emma. “Go home. Get some rest. Are you okay to drive?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Same time next week?”
Emma nodded.
*
Back home, Emma couldn’t shake the image from her head of the man biting the woman’s hand, blood dripping down her arm. She wanted to know what had happened, why the man had acted like that, what had been wrong with him.
So Emma did what she always did when she had questions. She went to Google.
The explanation that made the most sense to her was that the guy had been having a seizure of some kind and it’d caused him to act uncontrollably violent towards who Emma assumed was his wife or girlfriend. She knew that seizures could affect different parts of the brain and cause a variety of strange repetitive behaviours. She had googled all kinds of things related to seizures, heart attacks and strokes before, during a crippling bout of OCD when her health anxiety was through the roof and she was convinced she would die if she didn’t give in to her compulsions.
Yes. A seizure would explain the biting, the way the man had opened and closed his mouth over and over again as if he’d been trying to say something.
Emma opened her laptop and brought up the Google browser. She typed can seizures make you violent? into the search bar and hit enter. Several links popped up with reference to violent and aggressive behaviour in cases of frontal lobe epilepsy.
Scrolling through the search results, Emma suddenly thought, What am I doing? I don’t need to know this.
Her mental health had been good recently. The best it had been since the accident. So why was she obsessing over the details of an incident completely unrelated to her?
No, she had to stop. She couldn’t let herself spiral so easily.
Emma closed the tab, breathed in through her nose, held it for a few seconds, breathed out. Searching for a distraction, she realised she hadn’t looked at the news today, so she brought up her newsfeed and began scrolling through the morning's headlines.
There were multiple news articles with the words virus and infection in the title. Emma clicked on one and started to read it. It looked like another outbreak scare, like the Ebola thing in America a few years ago. The article reported multiple deaths in London and other cities across the UK that had been linked to an emergent virus.
Part of her wanted to read all of it and make sure she knew everything about this virus, so she could take measures to prevent herself from getting it. But she knew it was likely being blown out of proportion. And she was trying to distract herself from obsessive thoughts, not add to them.
Emma closed the newsfeed.
She decided to make a cup of tea and do some reading. She’d recently found books to
be an effective distraction. You could get lost in another world with them, and it required focus to read, more focus than was needed to watch a film or TV show, making books more mentally stimulating.
As she filled the kettle and switched it on to boil, Emma heard a scream.
She looked from through the kitchen doorway at the living room window that faced the street, her heart thudding in her chest. The scream sounded like it had come from right outside her house.
Then she heard it again.
A figure zipped past the window and Emma moved into the living room to get a better look. Standing at the edge of the window, she could see the retreating back of a man hurrying down the street – then another figure waltzed into view, following the man.
Emma shrank back from the window at the sight of him. This guy wore a grey tracksuit, blood leaking from a wound on his neck and staining his collar. But that wasn’t the most unsettling part.
The thing that made Emma recoil was his walk, the way he stumbled and swayed as he trailed the other man; it instantly brought to mind the incident outside the therapist’s office and the man who had bit that poor woman.
Something was wrong. Something strange was happening to people, and Emma needed to find out what was going on right now.
She returned to her laptop and opened the newsfeed again.
2.
Sammy was gone. They struggled to accept it.
Neither Kingsley nor Eric wanted to leave for Colchester without her – especially Kingsley, who felt guilty for not realising sooner that something was up, that Sammy had gone off on her own and didn’t intend on returning. It’d been Kingsley who was keeping watch when she left, the only person awake to see her go.
When Sammy had stepped off the bus in the night for some “fresh air” and had not come back after ten minutes or so, Kingsley hadn’t thought much of it. She was grieving. He could understand her needing a bit of time to herself. Maybe she’d gone outside to cry so she wouldn’t wake the others who were sleeping in the bus.
But the minutes had stretched on and Kingsley had started to grow concerned. Then he found the note on Sammy’s seat – the one that said don’t follow me – and after realising what it meant, he immediately woke the others.
Kingsley, Eric, Kara and Rebecca all searched for Sammy along the quiet back lane in the dark. They couldn’t scour the entire length of the road. It was too long, passing several wheat fields to the southwest and leading back into the village to the north.
There was a dead snapper in the road some distance from the bus, head cracked open. It might have been killed by Sammy. Other than that, no sign of her.
She could have gone anywhere.
They drove back through the village at first light, scanning the streets for anything that might tell them Sammy had been there – more dead snappers, open doors. Anything.
When they didn’t spot anything that hinted at her presence, they decided to go back to her parents’ home and see if Sammy was there.
She wasn’t. The bungalow was empty except for the bodies of her parents and their dog. The smell of rot was thick, making Kingsley cough, and the rising sun slanted through the windows to spotlight the gore in the kitchen; if Sammy had come back, she wouldn’t have lingered.
They tore the floral curtains from the lounge window and covered the bodies before leaving.
“We can’t search forever,” Rebecca said as the four of them trudged back to the bus.
Kingsley faced her. “We also can’t just abandon Sammy.”
“She left a note telling us to not go after her,” Rebecca said. “It doesn’t seem like she’s worried about being abandoned.”
“She made a stupid decision. Her mind is in a dark place and we can’t just leave her like that.”
“Sometimes your mind needs to be in a dark place. Sometimes, dark thoughts are the only thing that will get you through a tough time.”
Kingsley stepped onto the bus, turned in the doorway and glowered at the mousy woman.
“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Kara stood next to her friend, said, “Rebecca’s only trying to help… We told you what happened to Rebecca’s family… how she saw it. She watched all of them die, saw them being eaten. If anyone understands what Sammy is going through right now, it’s her.”
“Is that so?” Kingsley said. He looked at Rebecca again. “You told me you hated your family yesterday. Well, Sammy sure as shit didn’t. She loved her parents.” He turned and walked down the row of seats.
Kara followed him. “Regardless, Rebecca still has a point – we can’t search forever. We have no idea where Sammy went and she clearly doesn’t want us to find her. I know it feels like you’re abandoning her, but you’re not. She abandoned you.”
He wasn’t going to argue any longer. He picked up a bottle of water from the floor beside his seat and took a long swig.
Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he put the bottle down and turned to see Eric. The look in his friend’s eye was enough.
“You… agree with them,” Kingsley said, unable to keep the exasperation from his voice.
“They’re right,” Eric replied. “I hate to say it, but we really don’t have much choice. You want to find Emma, don’t you? We don’t know what it’s like in Colchester. It could be safer than Braintree or it could be a lot worse, but we can’t hang around and hope for the best. We have to go now.”
He did want to find Emma. Of course he did, he still loved her. But he also wasn’t sure if he was ready to see her again. They hadn’t spoken in a few months and the last time they had – the day after the accident – Emma had looked at him like he was a murderer, like she didn’t know him.
Kingsley didn’t blame her for feeling that way. It had, after all, been his fault they’d lost their child. But he couldn’t stand Emma looking at him like he was dirt.
On some level, he knew he had been putting off going back to Colchester to find her because of it.
He couldn’t put it off forever, though. And it seemed that Eric, Kara and Rebecca had made their minds up. It was three against one.
Kingsley lowered his gaze to the floor. “Fine,” he muttered after a moment and slumped back in his seat.
3.
Two days earlier
Stay indoors. Avoid contact with infected individuals. Await further instructions from the military.
That was what the emergency broadcast playing on Emma’s TV said.
The information circulating the internet and the news was discombobulated; there were some theories about a nerve agent released by terrorists, others about a mutated virus. There were even pockets of people speculating about mind-control devices being used by the government. The kind of talk that would normally be dismissed by the public as the ravings of paranoid, weed-smoking tin-hat-wearers.
Only, they didn’t seem so crazy now. Because something inexplicable was going on and the emergency broadcast had explained little. And far-fetched answers were better than none.
“Attention all British citizens,” the voice on TV began for the hundredth time. “For your own safety, and the safety of those around—”
Emma switched it off. She’d received the message loud and clear, and it wasn’t helping her state of mind. It was starting to freak her out.
She wanted to know more. She wanted to know exactly what was happening, how bad it was (pretty bad, she guessed, considering the emergency notice). Because at least then she would know what she was dealing with.
The worst part: Emma could feel the compulsions coming on, the burrowing urges that toyed with her day-to-day and sometimes consumed her, spitting her out in a puddle of crippling anxiety. The compulsions had never completely gone away and Emma knew they never would. But recently – with regular therapy sessions and a calm, quiet space to herself – she had made a lot of progress, developed ways to redirect her anxiety and stop herself from spiralling.
However, Emma had learned that her OCD tended to ramp up wh
enever she found herself in a position that made her feel helpless, and therapy had taught her that this was because her compulsions gave her a false sense of control. Or maybe control was the wrong word for the illogical but certain feeling that, as long as she carried out her compulsions, the disasters she imagined everywhere would not happen. If I touch every lamppost I walk past on the street, my best friend will not die.
Shit. She would go crazy sitting alone on her sofa, twiddling her thumbs and wondering what the hell was going on out there.
Emma needed someone to talk to.
She rang her mum, knee bouncing while her phone dialled… No answer. That was unusual. Her mother was constantly nagging Emma to call more often, tell her what was going on in her life, keep her updated; she worried about her youngest daughter.
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.
Thrive | Season 1 | Episodes 1-5 Page 9
