by Brady, Eoin
“Sorry about that, Fin,” Rebecca said. “The islands can’t be much better, George was saying. They have food in Westport House and medicine.”
“I’m stuck here,” Fin said. “There’s no getting to Dublin, not now. We need to check the islands out, get off the mainland and make a plan. The infection could be out there, but if it’s zombies and not weepers, then we could try to handle it. Either way, we need to know. Our only other option is to wander the mainland. Can we survive it this time of year with the infected hunting us?”
“I agree,” George said. “You and Rebecca head out to the islands, I’ll scavenge from homes along the mainland. If we find a decent boat on the islands, we could make it out to Achill. Have you found a way to get away from the infected?”
“Not yet. How are we supposed to get out to the islands?”
Before she could elaborate, Fin held the button down on the radio to stop all noise. Hands slapped against the outside of the boat. “Guys, I have to go, they know I'm here.” He turned the volume down nearly as far as it would go.
“Stay safe,” Rebecca said.
“Conserve your battery, we’ll come for you in the morning. Try and get some sleep,” George added.
“Thank you.” Fin turned the radio off. He believed that they would do everything they could to help him. He felt shame, knowing if the chance arose, he would have left them to get home. Now they were probably coming up with a plan to save him. The infected soon lost interest.
There was nothing of value to him inside the cabin. The mattress was made of cheap, stiff foam. He wrapped himself in blankets that were riddled with cobwebs and dead spiders, towels tucked around his legs for warmth. It wasn’t much, but it made a difference. He watched clouds rush in front of the moon through the porthole and imagined that it was shining on Solene too. Let it find her well. Baby, if you could only see me now. She was alive, he knew it from the notifications on his social media. He just had to log on and read them.
Why did you leave me in silence for so long? He heard her voice, as well as his father’s, and those of his family and friends. Why did I? Fear? I can barely keep it together by myself, if I had to worry about others, I’d be lost. Selfish.
Gunfire from Westport House drew the brunt of the infected away from him. Watching the weepers, he noticed some of them fall and lie still, and he knew from Ciara in the hotel that they had entered the next phase of the infection, they were dead and would rise soon, slower than before. He wondered whether their lack of interest in him was boredom, or had they no object permanence? That would mean they could be safe in their hideaway so long as they remained quiet and unseen. During the night he was woken from a weak sleep by splashes. If only they would all walk off the end of the pier and into the water.
If he moved too much, his blanket cocoon fractured and the cold got in. When sleep did take him, he dreamed of being on rough seas, the engine faltering and the ship floundering. He was sinking and he knew exactly what awaited him below the waves: dead that would not drown.
Morning light came late in winter, weak and brittle but as welcome as the spring thaw. Night gave the infected more power over the living; menace grows in the dark canvas of the imagination. During the day, it was hard not to pity them. He turned the radio on and waited. Parched with thirst, his head ached. The slower infected and the ones still lying on the ground were covered in a layer of hoarfrost.
“Fin?”
“Morning, Rebecca.”
“Are you set?” The voice did not come from the radio. George was talking to him from outside the boat. The infected started weeping.
The morning air made him shiver when he stepped out on deck. Mist floated above the river. Only a few infected still wandered around the pier. They seemed unphased by the weather. He couldn’t hope on an Irish winter to freeze them, whereas getting caught outdoors on a frosty night was as dangerous to him as the infected.
It was like he was on stage, or a busker trying to grab attention. Those shambling few still around the boat moved on him, arms raised. Most of them had wounds on their hands, necks and torsos. The faces looked terrifyingly serene for such affronts to the human condition. They were not surprised when Fin distracted them, they looked like a group of wide-eyed sleepwalkers. Fingers stretched and cracked, trying to reach him, he knew what harm they could cause. A lot of fingers no longer had nails.
These were the first infected that he had seen up close since Ciara. Some had grazed skin and torn jackets, and it only occured to Fin now that they could spread the disease by accidentally knocking into things, like cats spreading scent. A child amongst them had a cycle helmet on in a hope it would keep him safe. That will make it harder to put him to rest. Most wore winter jackets, gloves and scarves. They looked no different than those hiding in the woods of Westport House, reaching up at him like they were seeking salvation, their calm stares promising that if they could, they would turn him.
George and Rebecca were on the water, wearing wetsuits. George stood on a paddle board with a long oar. Rebecca sat at the back of an inflatable kayak. A second paddle sitting inside was waiting for Fin.
“Nice morning for it,” Fin said. “Watch out, I heard a few of them fall over the edge in the night. If they haven’t drowned, they could still be dangerous.”
“I don’t think they can drown,” Rebecca said. “Let’s hurry this up, I’m freezing.”
George paddled further up away from them. After a few moments he let the current take him back, holding the paddle in the water only to guide his passage.
“There are a few soldiers in the factory, maybe we can help them out one at a time,” Fin said.
“They left this morning, the zombies around your boat kept the factory clear of them,” George said. “They snuck around the other side to get away. We waited for them to leave.”
That stung more than it should have. If not for George and Rebecca he would have been trapped until thirst made him risk infection. They abandoned me. How long did they deliberate over that?
A rocket whistled into the sky, hissing as it gained altitude, a split second of silence before it erupted. Smaller explosions crackled as red and green light scarred the morning sky. It was a beautiful sight. The infected ran towards the noise and light, ignoring Fin completely. George held up his hand, signing for Fin to wait. Another rocket went up and then a third. Once there were a few feet of distance between Fin and the infected, George waved him on.
Fin dropped down quietly enough that none of the dead turned around. He sat on the edge of the pier and climbed down a long-rusted ladder. Some infected had fallen in, he had heard the splat as they hit the wet, sucking silt. The tide was in now and all he could see of them was torsos and legs sticking out. He could think of no greater horror than falling into that filth and becoming trapped in foul mud and darkness.
Rebecca brought the kayak in as close as she could and George knelt on his board to put pressure on the other side, so Fin’s weight would not unsettle it. When he was safely onboard, Rebecca pushed off against the seaweed-covered pier wall. Fin grasped George’s shoulder and hand. He took a few steadying breaths, tears of gratitude fell. “Thank you.”
Fin lay down on the kayak. Rebecca rubbed his head, shushing him softly, telling him it would be okay. On the shore, Fin watched as a zombie went over into the water. It did nothing to stop its fall; no hands went up, no gasp of surprise. It hit the dark water with a splash, its back rose up and floated. Disgruntled gulls that had been displaced by the fireworks landed on street lights after the last shot fired.
At the end of the pier a car had crashed through a mound of crab boxes. They were too fragile to stop it from careening into the water. Fin sat up and took his paddle. They fell into an easy rhythm. “Where did you get the fireworks?”
“Nobody got to ring in the new year, so every fifth house has a little arsenal of rockets,” George said. “We found boards and the kayak in the shed at the bottom of the garden.”
“You see the house
up ahead, the one with clothes on the line?” Rebecca said. “The one to the right of it is ours.”
It was easy for the eye to pass over it. The outline of the house was masked by bare tree branches and the weathered green coating made it wilt into the background.
“We’re going to paddle around the headland a bit and get out of sight before we land,” George said. “I don’t like doing this in the morning and I certainly don’t want anybody in Westport House knowing where we are. I don’t trust a group that can so easily abandon their own.”
They stayed close to the shore and scanned each field and house they passed. There was a large farm with plenty of machinery and a mound of silage. George was excited at the prospect of excavating the old world, as he put it. He had formed a new fondness for breaking into other people’s homes. He never stole anything he could not use to survive, he just liked being there, in a building that somebody else had made into a personal sanctuary. For him it was spiritual; though the person may be gone, there was still a glimpse of a memory of what they were once like. Fin could not commit to that type of thinking, not yet. These were consecrated grounds, biding time until their owners returned.
They pulled up on a worn stone shore, sheltered by sand dunes. Behind them there was a large, new and well-built house. It was designed to stand out. A symbol asking to be seen and of no use to them during the epidemic. Fin’s arms ached from paddling, and he shook them out before they dragged the kayak above the tideline. They hid it amongst bleached white driftwood. The kayak had deflated a little during the paddle, they could not safely go far in it if there was a puncture.
“Will you unzip me?” George asked, turning around so Fin could get at his back.
“We might have to let it out around the gut,” Fin said, when the zip came down revealing white, freckle speckled skin.
“It’s the only one we could find in such short notice.” George raised his eyes when he looked at Fin’s own gut. “You’re telling me you’d be a striking model in this?”
“An upsetting one maybe. No, if you zipped me up in that I would have asphyxiated before making it five feet.”
“Can you two stop comparing bra sizes and help me?” Rebecca said as she covered the colourful kayak with old seaweed.
The morning mist floating above the water melted as the sun rose higher. Searching for things to cover the craft with, Fin came across some beautiful shells and colourful stones, and he was brought back about two decades to wandering the strand near his home in Drogheda, asking his dad for the origin of every curiosity he found; his dad always had answers. How could I be so cruel to not try and contact them? Fin felt like he had put it off long enough. He pocketed a polished black stone with the intention of returning home and asking his father all about it.
George shouted out and danced backwards, wringing his hands and wiping them on the wetsuit as if he had unearthed a large and unexpected spider. Hidden amongst the seaweed and sand, invisible because of its silt-covered clothing, lay a body. Lank hair covered most of the face and its ears were filled with sediment. Its legs were broken and the eyes were gone. It had a dead crow clutched in its hands.
Rebecca poked it with the edge of the paddle and let out a yell when it slowly pushed itself up. It was trapped, blind and deaf. Its head turned as if it were looking through empty eye sockets, like a badly made animatronic. With no further stimuli, the head stopped moving and it remained still.
“That shouldn’t be alive,” George said.
“Shut up.” Rebecca held the paddle like a weapon.
“I don’t think he can hear us,” Fin said. “Let’s just go.”
They climbed up the stormbreaker boulders onto the land, through fields of coarse grass and weeds, lying flat from recent rain. They hopped over a wooden fence and a metal gate that they chose to climb because the hinges squeaked when they tried to open it. No more infected crossed their path. It was too easy to walk along the shore and gain access to the back garden of their sanctuary. As the undead near the kayak proved, they could just wash up on the beach.
After a quick sweep of the grounds and house to make sure they were clear, George put his paddle board back in the shed and turned the kettle on. Fin noticed they had strapped cloth to the bottom of the chair legs to stop them from scraping across the tiles. An extension cord meant they could boil the water on the table without having to get up and pour. Fin knew they would go through several mugs of coffee and tea before he was finished telling them all that had happened since they were together last. He downed a pint of water to quench his thirst.
“Are you bitten?” George asked as casually as if he wanted to know how many sugars Fin took.
“No, George, I spent the night in a freezer to avoid that. Are you bitten?”
“Only by your tone. Say you were bitten, what would you want us to do with you?”
The kettle boiled and clicked off. Fin sighed and filled three mugs with hot water. “If you’re giving me the option then I’d choose that you went to find a cure for me.”
George and Rebecca continued an argument they were having while he was away about how they wanted to go. Although the subject matter made Fin uncomfortable, the sound of their voices relaxed him.
25
Alive
The loft quickly started to feel like home. All the pictures of the previous owners were gathered up and respectfully placed in a desk drawer. Fin felt no guilt about staying in the house, but there was something unsettling about looking at pictures of strangers, not knowing if they were still alive. We could stay here. If the power goes out, we can read during the day and talk until we fall asleep. Fin knew it was not as easy as that. If he was guaranteed safety and a limitless supply of food and uncontaminated water, the nights would still take their toll; the long silences, the phantom sounds, the constant impending sense of dread. Apart from that, it’s fine.
Fin downed a bottle of water and noticed how sparse their supply of safe drinking water had become. We can’t stay inside forever. We have to face them, or die in here.
“I don’t get it,” George said. “Before all of this happened, I can’t remember the last time I drank my daily recommended amount of water. By the statistics on the news, I shouldn’t have lived this long. We have to be frugal with what we have.”
“I don’t trust the water in the taps,” Fin said. “Is it safe to drink? Imagine infected got into the reservoir. I’m assuming, considering we’re literally on the coast, we aren’t getting our supply from a well.”
“We’ll just boil it.” George filled the bath tub, every pot and unused cup in the house with water.
“What if you’re only heating up the virus?” Rebecca said.
George scoffed. “Me there thinking the end of the world was going to have some excitement. A bit of bleach in each pot and let it set for a while, should kill off the nastiness.”
Rebecca put her book down. “How far do you think we will fall as a species? Are we the new hunter-gatherers?”
“No,” George said. “We are the hunted gatherers.”
When Fin asked if there were any new developments in the ever ‘breaking’ news cycle, George and Rebecca shared an awkward silence and a look.
“To be honest with you,” Rebecca said, “we’ve been watching too much of it lately.”
“Yeah,” George said. “What’s that expression, a watched pot never boils?”
The kettle clipped off in the middle of the table and the silence endured. Fin did not have the imagination to wonder what had happened to make them act this way. After they ate a breakfast of porridge and nuts with honey and the last of the softening fruit, they hid away upstairs for the rest of the day. The cable at the back of the television that connected it to the satellite had been removed.
“We found a few games,” George said, passing him a handful of cases to look at.
“There’s Monopoly downstairs as well but considering what’s going on, we thought it best to keep that from tearing us a
part,” Rebecca said.
Fin chose a game at random and they settled in to play. The heating stayed on, and he relished the warmth after spending the night in unbearable cold.
After each death they passed the remote. Fin wondered how he wasted so much time on scripted paths and stories before the outbreak. So much wasted time. The pleasure, he knew, came from knowing there was going to be a happy ending, regardless of the difficulty. He could fail, learn and persevere, a pleasant fiction. Solene used to despair at the amount of time Fin wasted in front of the console, but that was what they needed now, a means of safely killing time.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Rebecca passed the remote to George, even though she had not died. She handed Fin a pilfered present; the wrapping had been torn open and badly taped back together again. “I know it’s a bit late, but here’s your Christmas gift. Latest model, no expenses spared – by whoever bought it originally.”
Fin smiled and tore the wrapping apart, revealing a top-of-the-range smart phone, still in its plastic. Every laptop, computer and mobile phone in the country was either thumbprint or password protected. The code to access this one was inside the box.
“I thought you could try to get in touch with Solene and your family,” Rebecca said.
Fin put the phone down to hug her. She pulled away first, taking the remote from George and wrestling with a smile that threatened to broaden across her face.
He retreated to the office and closed the door for some privacy. The phone was easy to set up; he put the new SIM card in, and let it charge while he thought about what he was going to say. The last time he felt this awkward about contacting his dad was when he was asking for a lend of money. Not all that long ago. He had no clue what he was going to say to Solene.
He could have spent the rest of the day preparing for the conversation. When the battery was charged enough, he turned the phone on. The moment he entered the default code to start the device the old government warnings flashed across the screen. From now on everything new in this world will have scars from this event. He connected to the Wi-Fi and logged into his Facebook account. Most of the new notifications were in response to his #Alive post. More than half of his friends list had not reacted to the post. Either they’re dead, or the algorithm has not shown it to them yet.
