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by Owner

  His favourite chair now beckoned. He collapsed into the soft leather and stared at his concoction beside him, wondering if he dared to taste this one. The chances that this drink tasted just as vile as the last one that he’d thrown down the sink were very high. He could have tried it out whilst still in the kitchen, but where was the fun, suspense, and potential danger in doing that?

  “That’ll be the impulsive hat talking there, boy.”

  Apart from the occasional slip, Dennis considered himself to be a logical and exact man. Making a hot chocolate should have been as difficult as riding a bike. He had followed the instructions on the side of the box accurately, and yet the stuff still tasted just horrible. He came to the conclusion that the makers of this stuff had no idea how proper hot chocolate should taste. Dennis would just have to experiment with different quantities. All he wanted was to taste a hot chocolate like his late Ethel used to make for him every night. Was that too much to ask for? Then again, his dead wife had never known the meaning of the word ‘exact’. Knowing his absent-minded, now dead wife, she probably would not have even read the instructions on the side of the tin.

  He gazed with annoyance at the cup, noting a dribble had run down the side. It looked the same as the cups that she used to make for him. He had even got the shade right with this one. Maybe he should just console himself with that one fact. It was more of a sense of carrying on the routine than anything else.

  Dennis turned his attention to the old television which stood in the corner of the room. The test card had now replaced the static. He wasn’t sure whether that was an improvement or not. He hadn’t seen the test card in years. Still, there it was. After what he had witnessed so far tonight, Dennis knew that it wasn’t going away anytime soon. He also knew that if he chose to try his radio again, only white noise would greet his ears.

  Still, he did have his vast collection of Westerns to fall back on in case he did become bored. Dennis didn’t believe that would happen anytime soon; besides, he’d been telling himself that staring at the gogglebox for so long wasn’t doing him any good at all.

  He picked up his binoculars, brought them up to his eyes, and adjusted the focus wheel to bring the garden across the road into sharp focus. The street next to the garden was quiet now. It appeared that Mr. Harding and the other dead chap had now wandered out of view, probably to hunt for more panicking residents.

  He remembered hearing the Harding’s close their front door a few hours ago. His annoying neighbours, Eileen and Donald, were about to embark on their usual walk around the edge of the housing estate. The couple had been following this stupid routine for almost twenty years now, every single night at eight o’clock on the dot.

  Watching them play out their sweet, sugar spun life had been irritating Dennis for years. Their happy-go-lucky outlook on life made Dennis physically retch. There had been countless times when he had hoped that at least one of the scrotes in Breakspear would decide to knock the crap out of them, or even better, rape and murder the pair of them. Yet somehow they just carried on following their rainbow-coloured lives, never getting beaten up, not returning home to discover someone had broken into their house and crapped on their bed, and never suffering verbal abuse from any of the kids.

  Anyone else stupid enough to try a trick like that wouldn’t have lasted a single night. Wandering around the edge of the estate after the sun had gone down was the same as asking for pain. They would either have testicles the size of footballs or be mentally disturbed.

  Their unbroken luck had drastically changed that night when the husband noticed a young, blond-haired youth stumble over a low wall opposite their house and hit the ground hard. Of course, the pair of the idiots had rushed over the road to investigate, to see if they could be of any assistance. Dennis had watched the whole drama unfold through his new binoculars. It almost felt as though he was standing right next to Donald Harding.

  Just by looking at the face of that young man still lying on the ground, Dennis knew that the guy had passed on. He’d seen enough corpses in his previous career to know what a dead person looked like. He had trouble containing his excitement when the cadaver opened his eyes. The youth snapped out his arm and grabbed Donald’s ankle. Those two good Samaritans were now in serious trouble. The corpse pulled Donald down, grabbed his hair, and bit a large chunk of meat out of the side of his neck.

  Donald smacked into the pavement with his life fluid streaming out of the side of his neck. The blood flowed into the gutter and disappeared down the closest drain. The man’s poor wife had shrieked like a banshee. It must have finally dawned on the silly bitch that their neighbourhood was not made from fluffy white clouds and cute cartoon bunnies. Dennis had seen that the only response to her cries for help was the twitching of curtains. He suspected that half the houses on the road would have locked their doors when she had started up her scream motor.

  Her husband’s body had started to jerk and twitch a few minutes later. The woman hadn’t noticed, she was too busy trying to stay away from the other man. Dennis grinned in disbelief when Donald’s hands began to spasmodically open and close. For Dennis, a man so intimate with death, this was the most exciting event of his life. What was happening here? The dead stayed dead, they did not come back to life. Donald should not have been able to do that—he had bled out like a stuck pig—that man was deader than dead. Despite the impossibility of the situation, that dead man had gotten back on his feet. He wasn’t that steady on them, but he was still moving about.

  The whole situation got more interesting as each moment passed. The woman had yet to notice that her darling husband had just come back to life. The hysterical woman’s eyes hadn’t left the other man. Dennis thought that all his birthdays had come at once when both men lunged for the woman from opposite sides. She didn’t stand a chance. The men wrestled the screaming woman to the ground, then pulled off her arms like an old rag doll and proceeded to tear out lumps of flesh from her legs and chest. It took her a while to stop screaming.

  The walking dead men left the woman’s body slumped against a lamppost on the other side of the street. It had been there for some time, and not one person had passed it save for a mongrel dog who rushed past, stopped, then pissed on the body before running off. Her left arm lay in the middle of the road across a faded white line where the men had dropped it. Most of the road marking was hidden under a congealed puddle of blood.

  Dennis hadn’t seen what happened to the rest of the arm; he just assumed that the men had taken it with them. Their behavior brought up so many infuriating questions aside from the obvious—how did the dead come to return? Why had they not finished eating the woman? Why had they left that arm in the road? He so hated mysteries.

  Walking away from the fun-packed scenario happening outside his living-room window had been one of the hardest tasks that he had ever undertaken, but Dennis had no other choice. Just as the two men were getting up, he suddenly remembered that he had left a pan full of boiling potatoes on the hob. He could let them boil dry, but it would take him hours to clean the pan.

  There were times when he so hated his sensible hat.

  Once he turned off the heat, Dennis had attempted to phone the police. He had no real desire to see them anywhere around, but he had to keep up appearances, just in case anybody was watching his movements. Predictably, the line was dead. It didn’t take a complete idiot to figure out that all the events were connected. Something truly earth shattering was happening right here on his doorstep. Dennis hadn’t been this excited in years.

  He quickly glanced at the wall clock above the television and saw that it had been seven minutes since those two had mauled the old bag. He zeroed in on her face, eager to see if his prediction would happen. The old man had come back quickly, but he had only sustained a single bite. The woman resembled a chewed-up rump steak. Even so, he believed that she’d still reanimate.

  When after another couple of minutes her facial muscles started to twitch
, which was followed by the woman opening her eyes, Dennis whooped and gave himself a high five. He kept watching, noting that at no point did she realize that both her arms were no longer attached.

  Dead people with no sense of their previous life and no realization of pain were now shuffling around the estate, looking for other residents to eat. Dennis was so happy. His dull nights had become a great deal more interesting.

  His dull nights had already been livened up a couple of days ago, but nothing so exciting as biological automatons killing and eating anyone who was stupid enough to stray too close to them. Dennis had noticed, quite by accident, that the young woman who lived opposite his house had taken to stripping off her clothes in front of the bedroom window. He couldn’t remember her name, but his wife would have known it, as well as her parent’s names, as well as her full life history. He did wonder who she was trying to impress. It was no accident, he wasn’t that naïve; the slow erotic dancing gave that fact away.

  He’d purchased a pair of binoculars out of his pension money from a second hand shop in Leeds City Centre the next day. He knew that he’d feel like a right buffoon if it had only been a one-off, but she was there the next night, and the night after that. He might have stimulated his long lost libido, but staring through the eyepiece for such a long time played havoc with his eyesight.

  Dennis almost felt betrayed when the young woman had failed to make an appearance at her window tonight. Of course, he now knew the reason for her non-performance issue. Dennis guessed that the woman might have suffered a similar fate to Mrs. Harding. The thought that one of those dead creatures had torn that naked girl into tiny bloodied pieces of meat was far more exciting than watching her undress.

  He dropped his binoculars into his lap and stared at the door leading to the stairs. The window in the spare room directly above him would give him an excellent view of the estate. The idea was attractive, as he would like to see if this phenomenon had spread beyond the boundaries of the housing estate.

  “Maybe in a while,” he whispered. “Once I have calmed down.” He rubbed his eyes before reaching for his reading glasses. It had been such an eventful night. Dennis chuckled to himself. That was one way of putting it. He hadn’t had this much fun since before his wife had died. He looked at his hot chocolate and sighed. After all those years of marriage, her drinks-making was the only thing he missed.

  Dennis leaned back against the back of the chair and allowed his eyes to close, recalling the multiple images that had already caressed and fondled his mind tonight. Each one had helped to awaken the beast within him that Dennis had believed to be permanently dormant.

  His charged emotions received yet another jolt once those two dead men had stumbled out of the view of his binoculars.

  Definitely dead.

  He had died ten years ago. Dennis knew this because it was he who had murdered the man and buried his body in the garden across the road while the house was between tenants. Ronald Spinks held a special place in Dennis’s heart. He had been the last person to feel the cut of his knives before he hung up his special tools for good.

  From that point on, events just escalated, exhilarating him and scaring him both in equal measures. From the safety of his living room, he watched two old men. He was sure that one of them was Albert Pannier. It was difficult to tell because most of his face was missing. They lurched out of the alleyway between number eight and number ten, stopped right in front of a young mother pushing her pram, and pulled the baby right out of its seat. It took them just seconds to extinguish the child’s light. The mother’s screams were cut short as they both dived on her too.

  Just ten minutes later, Rebecca Westwood walked past his window holding her son’s hand. Daniel Westwood was only eight, but he already had a good throwing arm. The little bastard had even tried to put Dennis’s windows out a couple of years ago. Dennis had soon put that little bugger in his place. He had shot him in the leg with his air rifle from the bathroom window. The kid had been very polite to him ever since.

  The two old men had dragged most of the pieces back into the alleyway, but that pram, splattered with bits of baby, still lay on its side in the middle of the road. Both Rebecca and Daniel paid it no heed as they walked past. Dennis was hoping that Rebecca’s maternal instinct would compel her to investigate. It looked, as his wife had always stated, that the girl obviously didn’t have any.

  It was just typical behaviour from Breakspear’s younger generation. They were so involved with their own sad and pointless lives that they just didn’t notice anything beyond their own blinkered vision. The feeling of community pride that had thrived on the Breakspear estate when he and Ethel moved here fifty years ago was long dead.

  Dennis had zoomed in on the kid’s face to see if the fallen pram would draw out any reaction from Daniel. His sullen features remained unchanged, at least until they approached their own garden gate.

  The change was as sudden as it was frightening. The light in Daniel’s eyes just went out, and his face lost all of its animation. Dennis had seen this effect happen before, lots of times. The most recent was when he’d watched his wife die. He was now looking at the face of a dead child.

  His heart began to beat a little faster when Dennis realised just what was going to happen next. He moved a little closer to the window, eager not to miss this. Sure enough, the little boy suddenly lurched to a standstill just before they reached their gate. Rebecca must have thought her darling son was just being awkward, and proceeded to give him what for. How she failed to notice that the kid was now a walking corpse was beyond him.

  The lass didn’t have the brains she was born with and Rebecca, like the rest of her family, weren’t born with that much in the first place. Daniel wrapped his arms around her neck and fastened his teeth round her jugular. Dennis found it unnerving how they always went for the neck first. The two old men had done the same with the young mother, but not with the baby. Dennis figured that they hadn’t perceived it to be that much of a threat.

  His hot chocolate was now cool enough for him to take a sip. He winced as the vile liquid hit the back of his throat. My God, this one tasted worse than the last one. This was just ridiculous, what on Earth was he doing wrong? Why did it not taste like his wife’s hot chocolate? It’s not like he could ask her, now was it? Well, he could, but it was unlikely that Dennis would receive a coherent reply.

  He grinned as he heard the slow, monotonous pounding on the cellar door. “And speak of the devil,” he murmured.

  His loving wife had awakened from her not so eternal sleep. Trust Ethel to be late; she never was very prompt. Then again, the ropes he’d tied around her wrists and legs had been very tight. Maybe it just took her awhile to work herself free. That would be ironic; before he’d taken the decision to bludgeon her to death with his lump hammer, she couldn’t tie her own shoelaces without his help.

  Dennis stood up and flicked through the channels one last time before turning off the TV. He supposed that he’d have to deal with Ethel before that noise drove him to distraction. He was at a loss as to how he was going to achieve this. Ethel was dead, and Ronald Spinks certainly was. The man had been rotting under a flowerbed for the best part of a decade. How do you kill something that’s already dead? It wasn’t the sort of question that usually got asked.

  The banging stopped, then re-started as he approached the kitchen door. The sound seemed louder, and it had definitely become faster, almost frantic. Could she sense that he was closer?

  He had a machete under the bed and a shotgun hidden in the base of the wardrobe. Dennis was positive that one of them should be able to put an end to her. He paused for a moment as a screaming man ran past the living room window. Light bulbs went off in his head. He’d just had an epiphany. It was madness out there. Residents were consuming or being consumed. There had been no sign of any police or ambulance or even the army. They must know what was going on. Dennis figured that they’d sealed off the whole housing e
state. Why stop at re-killing Ethel and watching the fun from the spare bedroom window? He could realize his dream tonight.

  He looked up at the framed portrait of Clint Eastwood hanging above the fireplace.

  “The Rojos on one side of town, the Baxter’s on the other, and me right in the middle.”

  The next few hours would prove to be very enjoyable. After all, it wasn’t like there was anything worth watching on the television.

  Chapter Five

  That shambling horde of undead rotting bastards had cornered him. There was no way he’d be able to get past the fuckers, not this time. He could feel the sweat dripping down his face. What was he going to do? They had him surrounded. Those things would eat him for sure if he didn’t find a way out. Bugger, he only had the baseball bat and the hockey stick left in his inventory.

  Jacob Kingsley nervously tugged at his long goatee. This was a bloody quandary. He couldn’t even ask his clan mates for assistance. The fucking Internet had died an hour ago. He sighed, then paused the game instead. Playing this off-line just wasn’t the same; it sucked big monkey’s balls. Leaning towards the television to study the screen, he looked past the frozen snarling dead faces to see if he could find a path through them. Thank God the designers had opted for the slow, shambling zombies. Oh this was so annoying; there must be something he had missed.

  The snarling faces splattered all over the game box got his bloody goat when he’d first purchased Dead City Rising for his 360. Since when did zombies snarl? Everybody knew that was wrong. Still, apart from that major oversight, it was a pretty decent game. Fucking hard too. Jacob had heard a rumor that someone in the States had actually clocked it on insane mode. Personally, he thought that rumor was a big pile of steaming poo. He couldn’t even finish the game on medium, and Jacob knew that his gaming skills were bloody good. They ought to be. Playing computer and console games was all he did in his spare time.