After the zombies
by
Amanda Steel
Dedicated to my zombie loving sister, Helen, one of the few people who would welcome the zombie apocalypse, as long as the zombies are slow.
© 2019 Amanda Steel
2nd edition – first published in 2016
Chapter one
Grace lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, making out the framework of the slanted ceiling above her in the murky bedroom. She closed her eyes and listened for any noises, which would indicate she wasn’t alone. The door was locked. Or was it? She was sure she had locked it, but when she tried to replay the memory of locking the door, her certainty began to diminish. That could have been the night before. She had to be careful, she told herself. Despite the fact it had all ended over a year ago, it could happen again at any time. She wasn’t prepared before, but she had to be ready, in case it happened again. She opened her eyes and rolled off the bed at the side farthest from the door, out of immediate view if anyone entered the room. She lay on the carpeted floor and reached up, pulling the top blanket off the bed and using it to cover herself. It was only then that she felt safe enough to go to sleep, knowing that she wouldn't be easy to spot before she had chance to hear anyone approaching.
She wasn’t sure where she was upon waking, but part of her sensed an element of danger, then she heard a clattering noise — and the memory came back to her. She was in her new home, the one given to her and Mark after their two years of torment. Nobody had explained to either of them or Luke exactly what had happened. It seemed likely to be a failed government experiment undertaken in Manchester, but nobody would ever own up to it. Grace smiled, but it felt out of place. She thought about how it had taken a zombie outbreak in her city for her to finally get somewhere to live. Her thoughts were interrupted by more clattering sounds, which she realised were coming from the kitchen. She threw off the blanket off and stood, while reaching under the mattress and retrieving her knife.
‘In the head,’ Grace reminded herself as she walked towards the kitchen, forcing her feet to move one after the other, doing the best she could to be quiet in the dark. She fought the desire to switch on the light, knowing it would alert whoever or whatever was there. Grace had gotten used to finding her way around in the dark. Power was lost shortly after the outbreak, but since the infection was brought under control, she worried she might have softened a little. Some people might think of her as unhinged and psychologically affected by all that happened, but she worried that the past year had weakened her and left her vulnerable. She would be caught off-guard if the infection broke out again. Grace rounded the corner. A screamed escaped from her mouth as she held the knife up in the air, finding herself face to face with someone. A hand gripped her arm and it was only when she tried to break free, she realised it was Mark.
‘What the hell Mark? I could have stabbed you!’
‘I know; that's why I grabbed your arm. I didn’t survive the zombie apocalypse to get stabbed by my wife,’ his words were slurred as he let go of Grace’s arm.
‘I thought you were one of the…' she began, not bothering to correct Mark. The outbreak had only occurred in their town and hadn’t been an apocalypse. For them, it felt like it was. Life everywhere else had carried on as normal though.
‘The monsters are gone Gracie,’ Mark slurred again, but his voice was gentler this time.
‘They could come back at any time,’ Grace replied, switching on the light and looking down at the broken glass and light brown liquid forming a puddle on the floor. ‘What happened in here?’
‘I dropped a few bottles of whiskey,’ Mark admitted.
Grace began to sweep up the broken glass. ‘I guess we’re both dealing with this in our own way.’
Mark sat down at the kitchen table. The silence was overwhelming. He waited until Grace had finished cleaning up before saying, ‘I bet you wish you chose Luke now.’
‘For what?’ Grace asked, sitting down next to him.
‘You never even noticed, did you?’
‘Noticed what?’
'The guy was clearly infatuated with you, now he’s got his old job back at the hospital, and you’re stuck here with me; the town drunk and a known thief.’
'Luke’s not infatuated with me. I married you. I'm not stuck.’
‘That’s the thing though, we’re not married, I said I do and you said you do, but we didn’t get a priest or a marriage licence.’
‘Do you want us to not be married?’ Grace asked.
‘I think you can do better, maybe get a job and see if Luke still loves you.’
‘And what if I don’t want to? I love you, I still love you, I didn't stop.’
‘But with him, you stand a chance of a new life, a normal life. With me, you’re married to a drunk and you’ll spend the rest of your life sleeping on the floor behind the bed and expecting the infection to come back.’
‘I don’t…’ Grace began, but realised it was hopeless to lie. ‘You could stop drinking.'
‘Then what? Let it all just catch up with me? I drink to forget.’
Grace wanted to tell him that she could help — that they could help each other — but she didn’t know if that was true. She knew things couldn’t keep going the way they were.
'I know someone in Wolverhampton, I'll go there.' She stood up and walked back to the bedroom where she began to pack a bag. Mark followed and snatched the bag from her.
‘I’ll leave instead,’ he told her. ‘You should stay. You need the security of this place, after everything before and during the outbreak. I have friends I can stay with, but when you’re ready, you should go to Luke and see if he still loves you.’
Grace opened her mouth to argue, but knew it was useless. She would never go to Luke though. Mark was the man she loved. Luke felt more like family to her, except things had gotten back to normal and he had stayed away. That spoke more about how he felt than anything Mark had to say about Luke's apparent feelings for her.
Day 180 of the outbreak
‘Will you marry me?’ Mark asked as Grace looked him in the eye, trying to figure out if he was serious.
‘For real?’
‘Yeah, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
‘That might not be long,’ Grace couldn’t help pointing out.
It hadn’t taken much to persuade Grace to say yes and from then on, they had thought of themselves as a married couple. There was no real honeymoon, only more of the infected to fight off. Grace hoped for just one night to enjoy her newly married life, but the house the two of them boarded themselves up in — away from the rest of their group — hadn’t been strong enough to keep out a horde of the infected.
As she fell asleep in Mark’s arms, it became clear the door wouldn’t hold. The banging became louder and the door creaked, signalling that at any minute it would give way. She jolted awake and Mark leapt out of bed. He threw on his clothes while Grace did the same. Shortly afterwards, the door broke off its hinges due to the force of more than a dozen infected barging their bodies against it. Grace and Mark were fighting for their lives once more. By then it was automatic; slam a knife in the head here, slice off another head there. Grace couldn’t remember when she started to grow numb to the killing of those who had once been human. It was only when she and Mark came face to face with a former friend and member of their group, Lucy, that Grace stopped and stared, almost in defeat. She was ready to give in and let herself get bitten. She wondered what it would feel like, how much it would hurt and if she would still be aware after becoming one of them. As Lucy's teeth grew closer to Grace’s
arm, Lucy slumped to the floor and blood splattered everywhere as Mark skewered a knife through the girl’s head. The white carpet in the bedroom soon turned to red as Lucy’s blood and brain gushed into the fabric.
‘What the hell?’ Mark demanded once they had finished dealing with them all.
‘What?’ Grace asked, despite them both knowing how close she had come to giving up.
‘You just stood there, do you want to die or something?’
‘It was…Lucy,’ Grace answered.
‘Was. Not anymore,’ he snapped.
‘Is that all we are now? Friends; only until they turn, then pow, bang, cut, slash and we end them?’
‘They’re not them anymore. When they turn, they’re already dead, Gracie. You know that,’ his voice began to soften. ‘I just don’t want that for you. We agreed, for better or worse and so on,’ he reasoned.
‘We never actually said all that,’ Grace pointed out.
‘It was implied.’
‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this. What if we get infected? Or even if we don’t, what if they never let us out and we’re stuck here forever? They stopped leaving supplies after three months, Mark. What does that tell you? Because to me, that says they’ve given up on us. They don’t want or expect us to survive.’
‘I don’t give a crap what they want or expect. We’re going to survive this - Gracie - and we’re going to do whatever it takes, but if you just give up, then you won’t survive. So you have to fight, for me,’ he pleaded.
‘Okay,’ Grace agreed. ‘We do whatever it takes, it was just for a moment, I slipped up and I'm sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry, just don’t get dead,’ Mark said, before kissing her in a way which made Grace realise how scared he felt about almost losing her.
She decided that she had to do whatever it took to stay alive, for him.
Chapter two
Grace arrived at the job interview for a call centre advisor in Liverpool. It was the first time since before the outbreak that she had travelled outside of Manchester It felt unnerving, but she told herself that maybe this was what she needed to do, escape Manchester and the memories of that place. There was nothing keeping her there anymore. The physical obstruction of the army and their tanks, drones and helicopters were gone. Mark was gone too. If she could start afresh somewhere else, maybe she could forget the outbreak and move on, become a normal person and pretend it all never happened.
The interview seemed to be going fine. The government had offered her a multitude of so-called benefits, including somewhere to live in the place of her choosing, false references and any other help she might need. It was their way of keeping under wraps what happened. As far as most people outside of Manchester were aware, it was an unfortunate outbreak of MERS, which killed off most of the city's population leaving only a small handful of survivors. The manager seemed to be impressed at the end of the interview and Grace was pleased with her own acting skills. If she could pull off being a normal person, then maybe she could make a life for herself after all.
‘Fake it until you make it,’ Grace reminded herself as she made the journey back to Manchester. As the bus drove along the streets, she couldn’t help associating each street she passed with a memory of the past, most of which she would rather forget. By the time she walked into the house to be greeted by silence and empty drawers that once contained Mark's belongings, Grace had already decided to take the job in Liverpool if it was offered to her. So, when she received the phone call asking how soon she could start, she arranged to begin the following week. Grace knew it left her little time to find a place and move, but she also knew the government would rehouse her. It was part of the agreement made in return for her lies to the media. She wandered around the four-bedroom house, packing up everything she wanted to take and throwing away anything she wanted to leave behind, finding a T shirt left behind by Mark. She hurled it at the throw away pile, then quickly changed her mind, retrieved the T-shirt and packed it away with her own belongings as a tear fell down her face.
‘The sooner I get out of here the better,’ she told herself. Her voice seemed to bounce around the oversized house. The idea had been for her and Mark to start a big family, making use of all the extra bedrooms. Grace wondered how she could ever have believed that would happen. They were both too damaged to bring up children.
Two days later, she was driving around Liverpool in the newly acquired second-hand car. Waiting for a new car would have taken longer. Her belongings were in the boot as she searched for a new place to live. The first place she saw would have been most people’s first choice. It was spacious with its three large bedrooms, two bathrooms, an enormous kitchen and a front room, which had a large and immaculately cleaned window looking out onto the main garden containing trees and well-kept plants, in addition to a freshly mown lawn. All Grace could think about was how many places they were for someone or something to hide both inside the house and outside in the garden, and whether she would be able to spot them before it was too late. The second place was a flat. It was smaller, but Grace still felt that she would never be able to relax knowing all the blind spots where the infected could be at night and she might not see them in time. She reminded herself, it might only be a matter of time before the outbreak started again and spread further than the last time. The final viewing of the day was a bedsit. Grace could only see the wardrobe as a potential hiding place for an intruder and no blind spots. She signed up to rent the bedsit for six months with the option to renew the tenancy at the end of the six months.
Day 1 of the outbreak
Grace slept in the shop doorway on Market Street, inside a sleeping bag that had once been light blue. She hadn’t had a bed to sleep in for a few months and felt like she probably wouldn’t last the cold winter. August was fine. It was warm then. September meant upgrading to a warmer sleeping bag using two weeks’ worth of change, that she had managed to get from shoppers and commuters passing by. By November, the rain left Grace almost constantly soaked and with the drop in temperatures, she began to wonder if she would ever feel completely dry again. She woke suddenly, from a half dream about a warm bed and a kettle to make a mug of hot chocolate.
A drunk, she told herself as a man who smelt worse than she did, staggered towards a group of women. They looked like they had been to a late business meeting, dressed in their smart skirt suits, modelling immaculate hair and expensive bags, which matched their outfits perfectly. Grace watched as two of them spotted the drunk and swerved out of his way. She couldn’t see the expressions on their faces, but imagined it was disgust — similar to how people looked at her since she became homeless. Grace was jolted out of her self-loathing when the drunk grabbed at the other two women. One ran in fear and the other wasn’t quick enough. She was out of her sleeping bag by the time the drunk seemed to take a bite out of the woman. Grace found herself slowing her steps as she walked towards the drunk, for no other reason than morbid curiosity — then backed away — almost tripping over as he turned to face her. Half of his face seemed to be hanging off and blood dribbled from his mouth. Some might have been his own, while the rest could have been the woman’s, along with what looked like part of her face, which he had bitten off. He was still chewing it when he lunged at Grace. She felt sure that he was going to do the same to her, then a hand grabbed at her arm a male voice said, 'run,' before she was pulled away.
She found herself running alongside the stranger, not knowing who he was, but it beat the alternative of staying to deal with the cannibal drunk. Other people who had been out for the night were running in different directions and screaming. Some stumbled and fell, but Grace stayed with the man and followed his one-word instruction. It was only when they reached Oxford Road that he led her into a building and barricaded the door behind them.
‘What is this?’ Grace demanded, temporarily forgetting what she had seen — feeling like she was locked inside the building with a potential rapist or murderer.
&nbs
p; ‘That thing you just saw, it’s what you would call a zombie,’ he replied.
‘A zombie?’ Grace couldn’t disguise her disbelief.
‘I didn’t call it that, it’s just the best way to explain to you what it is. It eats your flesh and you die and become one of them, so as I said, like a zombie.’
‘Okay then.’
‘You don’t believe me; I understand. It sounds crazy, but you know what you just saw.’
‘I don’t…I’m not sure what I…’
‘That man, or the thing that used to be a man; he chewed that woman’s face off.’
‘I’m just a homeless person.’ Grace wrapped her arms protectively around herself. ‘Nobody would ever believe…’
‘Well, I’m a doctor and I’ve been dealing with these things all night, ten cases, they killed everyone in the hospital where I work and those people all turned. I only just got away.’
Grace studied his face trying to distinguish whether he was joking, crazy or telling the truth, but he couldn’t be, she told herself. He looked deadly serious and he didn’t seem crazy, just distressed. She thought that backed up the possibility that he could be telling the truth. What he claimed to have witnessed at his hospital would leave most people distressed.
‘I’m Grace,’ she introduced herself.
‘’Luke,’ he said. ‘We can’t stay here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s night now and it’s still busy out there and if even half of those people get bit and turn, we’ll never get away alive. It’s only going to get worse when the morning rush starts. We need to get somewhere less populated as soon as possible.’
‘Where?’
‘It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s away from here.’ Luke took a gun out of his bag. ‘The ammo won’t last long, but I’ll be able to get a few of them if they get in our way.’
Grace was too overwhelmed to question how a doctor owned a gun and she could only stare as he held out an axe to her.
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