by Owner
Yeah, well let her. It’s not like she’d be able to catch him. Kevin ran into the middle of the road and sprinted to the end of the street. He then stopped and turned around. Claire had reached the gate. She paused, too, then slipped out of the garden and lurched away in the opposite direction.
Kevin turned onto Breaks Road and walked over to the white lines. He stopped in the middle and slowly turned in a tight circle. It felt like he was the last person on the estate still alive. Nothing moved. The main road leading out of the estate was at the end of this street. He consoled himself knowing that in a few moments his nightmare would be over.
He started to jog. There was no point in knackering himself out by going hell for leather. He passed an upturned pram in the middle of the road and turned away when he saw the lumpy mess spattered all over the tarmac, not wanting to dwell upon the horror that must have happened on this spot earlier tonight. Jesus, the whole of Breakspear had descended to hell. He continued on, his mind conjuring images of a zombie infant crawling towards him, clacking its jaws like a set of comedy teeth.
“Is the situation not bad enough without you thinking up disturbing shite like that?” muttered Kevin.
In a house a few doors from where he stood, an upstairs light flicked on. His hope surged knowing that he wasn’t the only person in the estate still alive. No dead person would turn on a bloody light unless they leaned on it. He altered course and jogged towards the house, already planning on what he would say to the occupants.
As he approached, a high-pitched scream blasted out from the house. Kevin shuddered to a halt and fell to his knees. He couldn’t take any more of this. It was just too much.
The screaming abruptly stopped, and Kevin spared a single thought for the poor bastard who had just been got. He didn’t have a clue who lived there. Unlike the rest of his family, he had kept to himself. He guessed he’d feel a lot bloody worse if he actually knew who had lived at that house.
It was bad enough when his sister turned into one of them, and they hadn’t liked each other for years. It was like having a stranger living in the house. Kevin had always preferred his own company, and yet for the first time in his life, he craved the company of another living person.
The silence was broken when he heard a frantic tapping on glass. He automatically looked over to the house before realizing that the noise came from an estate car parked on the other side of the road. Through tear-soaked eyes, he saw a round, pink blur pressed against the rear window of the car.
Kevin heard the door open as he wiped his eyes. He got ready to run, just in case the figure turned out to be one of those things.
He watched a young girl, possibly a year older than him, approach him. He didn’t have a clue who she was. He didn’t recognize her from school.
“Oh my God!” she gasped. “Are you really alive?”
Kevin nodded.
The girl sobbed and ran up to him. She wrapped her arms around his body, hugged him tight, and then buried her face into his shoulder. Her brown hair smelled of strawberries and honey.
“Oh my God, I thought I was the only one left.”
Kevin didn’t know whether he should hug her back or not; he’d never hugged a girl before. He decided to risk it.
“My mum’s dead.” She peeled her face off his shoulder and nodded over to the house next to them. “We only came to drop off my gran’s birthday present. Everything was normal, and then all of a sudden my dad dropped the paper he was reading and jumped on my mum.”
She put her head back on his shoulder and quietly sobbed.
“What the hell is going …” the girl stopped in mid-sentence; her body went rigid and she began to moan.
“What’s wrong?” he said, fearing the worst. Kevin tried to release her grip, but she wouldn’t let go.
“There’s one behind you.”
She finally let him go, then grabbed his hand, and dragged him to the car. Kevin spun his head to see a woman with no arms staggering towards them.
He was so focused on her that he failed to notice the thudding sound of approaching boots until it was too late. The bayonet was snatched from Kevin’s grasp.
“Give me that knife, you fucking useless clown.”
He watched, shocked into inaction, as a gangly youth wearing a biker’s jacket and sporting a blonde crew cut ran forwards and pushed the blade through the woman’s eye. The youth then lifted his leg high and booted her to the ground.
“How the fucking hell have you two managed to stay alive for so long?”
He walked up to the corpse and pulled the bayonet out of her head, wiped both sides of the blade on the woman’s coat, and tucked it under his belt.
“I mean, just how dangerous can this bitch be? She’s got no fucking arms, and yet you still piss your pants and cringe away.”
Kevin tried to place the boy’s face as he swaggered up to them. He’d seen him around the estate but didn’t know his name. He did know that the lad hung around with Ashton Naylor, so obviously the bastard was going to be trouble.
“Is this your girlfriend, big nose? She’s cute, far too pretty for an ugly bitch like you.”
The boy pushed past him and tried to place his arm around the girl’s shoulder. She whimpered, ran behind him, and got hold of Kevin’s hand.
Her clinging to him made him feel strange, but in a good way. His mother had been the last female to hold his hand—when he was about nine.
The tall lad sneered. “Suit yourself, you weird bitch. I’m Darren, by the way. I expect to hear you scream my name when the next dead freak wants to scoff you and your queer boyfriend.”
He spun around and stormed away.
“Good riddance,” muttered the girl.
Kevin wished he knew what this girl’s name was, but he was too scared to ask her. He watched the tall boy getting further and further away and began to panic.
“Wait on!” he shouted.
The girl squeezed his hand. He felt the same way, but Darren knew Ashton, and that meant that the fucker was tough. It might only be about half a mile to the edge of the estate, but Christ alone knew what could jump out on them between here and the edge. He was sure that he could swallow his pride for the next few minutes. The girl would understand his reasoning, he was sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to protect her; Darren had stolen his bayonet.
Darren stopped and turned. “Are you addressing me?”
“Do you not want to come with us?” Kevin stammered. “We’re getting out of here.”
The boy slowly grinned, humorlessly, and walked back up to Kevin. “Well, then, why the fuck didn’t I think of doing that? I mean, here I am running about like some brainless dog turd just hoping that someone like you would show me the light.” He rapped his fist on Kevin’s forehead. “The estate’s been cut off, you fucking moron.” Darren sighed. “Wait on, I bet this is the first time that you two scared little bunnies have dared to venture out of your hidey holes, isn’t it?”
Kevin nodded. It seemed the safest thing to do.
“Trust my luck to be saddled with a pair of little mice,” he muttered, then grabbed hold of Kevin’s arm and pulled him out of the girl’s grasp. “You stay there, princess.” He bent down to Kevin’s level. “If you want to stay with me, you’d better pull your fucking weight. Are we clear on that?”
Kevin nodded again.
“I was with a couple of lads earlier, and they pulled their weight; we made a good team until some Army dorks in gasmasks put bullets through their brains.”
Darren gave him back the bayonet
“You’re gonna fuck up the next zombie we find. If you start blubbing or try to run away, I’ll ram your pig sticker up your fucking arse.”
Chapter Seven
The group had all stopped running a few minutes ago. Ernest actually thought that his heart was going to explode. He looked at the young ones, noting that they were in a worse state than he was. Ironic, considering he was twic
e their age.
“How do you feel, old man?”
Ernest studied the young lad. He looked as though he had just completed a marathon. He grinned, his mouth widening when he saw Adrian hurriedly wiping the sweat off his forehead. “I think I’m doing okay—for an old man, that is. Should I not be worried about you, Adrian? I suspect this running about thing must be alien to you.”
The boy shrugged. “I’ll be okay. It’s just a matter of getting used to it, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I guess it must be,” Ernest replied. He despaired of the modern generation. Their over-reliance on technology had turned them all into slobs. Rigorous exercise would not interest any of them unless you could download it as an app for their stupid phones.
He pushed those irrelevant thoughts to the back of his mind and took a deep breath to prepare himself. “Adrian, you’ll be okay here?”
The boy nodded back. “Yeah, look where we stopped.”
They had all stopped in what Adrian had earlier named ‘the safe zone’. That meant any place away from low walls, corners of buildings, and parked vehicles, especially the bloody vehicles. The group had spotted a dozen of the ‘deadies’, another phrase coined by Adrian, hiding under cars. Any poor sod that got near them found a pair of arms reaching out, pulling them off balance, and dragging them under the car. They’d seen it happen a couple of times whilst travelling through Breakspear.
Ernest nodded once. Adrian nodded back, and so did Emily. Mrs. Watson just leaned across and pecked his cheek.
“Good luck, dear,” she whispered.
They’d picked her up about twenty minutes ago. Ernest saw the woman as they were running past the shops. Her back was flat against the mini-market’s metal shutters. Three of the deadies were shambling towards her; his group had been on the other side of the street, and Ernest privately thought that they wouldn’t be able to reach her in time.
There was only one of the buggers left standing when they reached the woman. Adrian took that one out with his weighted sock. It turned out that Mrs. Watson was more than capable of looking after herself, as her husband had found out when he went all funny just after ‘EastEnders’ had finished earlier on.
Ernest also discovered that she delivered Avon products in her spare time, and she promised him that when this was all over, she would be more than willing to slip him the odd free bottle of shampoo as long as he kept quiet about it. She was the only person in their little group who seemed to think that everything would be back to normal in the morning.
As agreed earlier, Ernest swapped his trusty pool cue for Adrian’s weighted sock. Their journey had not been without incident. After the fourth dead thing that he’d put down, Ernest had become rather proficient with his new weapon. He’d also managed not to vomit from the stomach-churning sound of the pool ball smashing into dead flesh.
“Make sure you look after it, Granddad,” whispered the lad.
You needed space to swing the cue, which was something Ernest would be desperately short of where he was about to go.
“Are you sure you don’t want backup?”
Ernest shook his head and patted the lad on the shoulders. This was something he needed to do alone. They had already worked out that it started with the headaches. Accepting that his wife was likely one of them now had been bloody hard, but due to their situation, he’d hardly had a spare moment to dwell on it.
“Remember what I said, do not follow me inside. If something does happen to me, just get the hell out of here.”
He needed to know for sure what had happened to Brenda. He feared that she, like most of the other residents, had turned into a monster. The others had already shared their ideas and views, although nobody had a clear idea about what had happened, but they all shared the same theory that the headaches were the start of it. That meant his wife and Jess must have turned as well.
Ernest just hoped to God that they were wrong, and she was with another group trying to stay alive just like he was. Brenda got headaches all the time; it might not have been the onset of this disease. It didn’t worry him that they hadn’t found her yet. The estate was massive, and he knew that other groups were trying to stay alive on Breakspear tonight.
He had heard sporadic gunfire all night. It seemed that some of the local gangs had dug out their toys. Those idiots must have thought that all their birthdays had come at once. It was an open secret that if you needed a gun in Bradford, the best place to come was to Breakspear.
Their group had already checked out Adrian’s house. He’d explained that he didn’t live too far from the Horse and Jockey. It made sense to check out his place first. The boy had stayed with the girl while Ernest had searched through every room. The permanent stench of a slaughterhouse hung in every room, and there were bits of flesh everywhere. The state of the kitchen had been a shock to his hardened stomach. It looked as though a dozen people had swallowed grenades before having a big group hug, whilst standing on a worktop.
He found no living person in the house, but his expert eyes did see the damage that a boot had done to the pebble-dashed wall just above the living room window. Judging by the fact that the window above was wide open, it looked as though somebody in Adrian’s family had managed to escape. The lad was relieved when he relayed that information, although Ernest kept what he’d seen in the kitchen to himself.
Emily had flatly refused to go back to her home, saying that she lived with just her dad, and she couldn’t give a fuck what happened to that drunken bastard. A subtle warning glance from Adrian told Ernest everything he needed to know.
Mrs. Watson had already explained what had happened at her house. That just left Ernest.
He slowly wound the end of the sock tight around his fingers, took another deep breath, and then pushed open his garden gate. The evidence of Darren’s not-so-secret party was all around him. He saw crushed lager cans thrown around the front garden and a couple of smashed beer bottles under the window. The house was in darkness, but the door was wide open. Ernest wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad sign. His house hadn’t been spared from the mayhem that had blighted the rest of the estate. He saw evidence of that too.
The front porch lights shone on the ropes of wet gore that hung down from Brenda’s rose bushes in the middle of the front lawn, and the ground around the flowers was soaked in blood. On the freshly dug earth running parallel to the path were a pair of bright orange trainers with the feet still in them. Ernest had been planning to plant potatoes in that patch of dirt next Friday.
He stopped by his door and looked behind him, wondering if he really should be doing this. What if his Brenda or Darren was in the house? What if they had become deadies? Did he really have the strength to put an end to their suffering?
“Oh Jesus, please forgive me for what I may have to do.”
He placed his hand upon the door and pushed it open. Nothing jumped out on him, and there were no bodies. The hallway was deserted. He leaned over the threshold, looked to the right and up the stairs where he saw a young girl lying sprawled about halfway up the steps. It was difficult to judge whether she was still alive or had become one of them.
There was no way of knowing whether his kitchen contained any of those horrors as the door was shut. He could nip round the back and peek through the window, but he knew that Darren had turned the yard and the back garden into a junk yard for his bikes, so there were way too many concealed areas back there. Ernest stepped to the side and peered through the living room window. He saw two bodies lying beside the sofa, but he didn’t know either of them. He stepped into the hallway and checked to make sure the living room door was shut tight. He started to swing the weighted sock around his head before he coughed loudly.
Just as he thought, the girl lifted her head, fixed him with a pair of blank eyes, and began to groan. As she moved he saw that her stomach had been ripped open; it had only been her body pressed against the stairs keeping her guts from bursting out. Her
insides spilled out and splattered down the stairs, and his carpet now resembled a gutter from an abattoir. The girl hadn’t even noticed that she had just lost half of her body weight and continued to moan. He knew her noise would attract the attention of any others in the house, so Ernest ran up, ducked to avoid her grasping fingers, and smashed the sock into her temple. Her moaning stopped, and the girl fell back down.
“Rest in peace, little lady,” he whispered.
Ernest stepped over the body and climbed up a couple of steps. All the doors upstairs were shut, and the house was still silent. Again, he wondered if he was making the right decision here. Perhaps it was better not to know what had happened to Brenda. Ernest took a deep breath. No, he had to do everything in his power to ensure that she was put out of her misery. He looked down at the bloodied heap of teenager at the foot of his steps and wondered if her parents would feel the same way.
Those thoughts would have to wait; he needed to keep his wits about him. If he let his mind wander, he wouldn’t leave this house; not alive anyway. Ernest went back down to the hallway, wondering which one of them outside would vote to dispatch him if the unthinkable happened to him.
He opened the front door a little wider and placed Darren’s boots against it to stop the door from swinging shut. Ernest needed to be sure that his exit was clear, just in case. If those two lying on the floor really were a pair of deadies, then as soon as he opened the door they should both react. He’d have to check the kitchen too. Ernest knew that he needed to remove all threats from downstairs before he went up those stairs. Although he knew that if they did trap him, escaping from an upstairs window wouldn’t present much of a challenge, but why take the risk?
After counting slowly to three, he grabbed the handle and eased open the door. His eyes adjusted to the darkness fairly quickly, another skill that he still retained from his previous dishonest career. The bodies didn’t move, but just to be sure, Ernest coughed. Not one moan emerged from the pair. He let out a sigh of relief and placed his hand on the door. Somebody else’s hand fell on his. It seized his fingers and pulled them upwards. He squealed and tried to jump back; the door swung shut to reveal a pretty girl staring back at him and attempting to pull his fingers up to her waiting mouth.
