by John Riley
‘We don’t know that.’ Sarah said with a frown, ‘we’ve never seen anybody turned into one, they could be swapped!’
The others ignored her as Mary looked incredulously from one face to the next,
'You can't honestly expect me to believe this isn't complete bull…’ She glanced to Steven who was happily sitting in the patient chair, 'look I get something happened, I'm guessing Stevie ran off whilst you were doing whatever it was you were doing in the factories, he gets hurt, you see the side door is open to let some air in and you take your chances. Can't go to the hospital because the zombies have taken over!’ She faked a laugh.
Sarah had known how crazy it all sounded, she had known the story was ridiculous and as battered as they were they were lucky to be alive if what they were saying was true; but the laughter was a bit much.
'Listen you stuck up…’ Sarah stopped herself, 'I watched my fiancé tear my neighbours apart and then try to force himself through a four-inch gap in an attempt to do the same to me.’
Mary made to say something but Sarah put her hand up,
'I’m not done!’ She snapped, 'last night at my engagement party I got to watch as the people in the club I was in got slaughtered. I don't mean just killed Mary, some lost limbs, others had their throats torn open. I saw one guy practically ripped in half. But the worst part…’ Sarah saw in her mind’s eye, Daniel's loving, expectant expression turn to rage and fury, the burning hatred making spittle fly from his lips, 'the worst part is having them call for you. Having them beg you to come to them, to ask why, to want to know what they did wrong, then try to kill you when you do.’
Sarah hadn't meant to cry. She desperately wanted this all to end, desperately wanted Mary to quit being a smartarse bitch and stop looking like she was trying to explain something to a child.
‘It sounds fucked up.’ Sarah was beyond caring what Steven heard, ‘it sounds crazy as hell and you know what? I wish it were all bullshit. I wish I were some drugged up bum looking for somewhere to crash; because that reality, that life doesn’t involve me running from the man I love!’
Mary didn’t respond. She sat silently, slowly folding her arms and leaning back in the chair. She looked to Laura, then Miles.
'You need to believe us Mary,’ Miles said quietly, 'if you don't you’ll die when you leave.’
‘But zombies!?’ the woman whined,
‘They’re not zombies.’ Sarah huffed, ‘they’re not dead or anything, they look like normal people.’
‘They don’t look like normal people.’ Miles muttered,
‘No but…’ Sarah paused, ‘Are there any windows in this place?’
‘Only upstairs.’ Mary pointed to a windowless door with “stairwell” written above it.
‘Let’s go see.’ Sarah said.
14
It had been decided silently that the kids and Miles would remain downstairs. If the monsters saw them, Sarah wanted Miles downstairs barricading. As Mary lead the way upstairs the two women heard the first sounds of Miles shifting filing cabinets around in the little filing room.
‘Stupid…’ Mary whispered to herself,
‘What’s wrong?’ Sarah asked up to her,
‘Oh nothing,’ The woman sighed back, ‘I’ve just realised that you and your friends are stealing the medical supplies and I’m happily isolating myself upstairs with the crazy woman.’
‘What…?’ Sarah realised that this did look exactly like that, ‘well if that’s true why would you say it out loud?’
‘I’m already doing it now,’ Mary said with a shrug without looking back, ‘I’m not going to stop you, not that I could anyway and at least if the man isn’t taking me up I shouldn’t be… hurt.’
Sarah got really annoyed at that,
‘Look we aren’t here to rob you or hurt you,’ She growled, ‘and Miles isn’t that kind of guy.’ She paused for a fraction of a second. She didn’t know Miles, but no, he had saved her life twice at least and helped the kids out when he didn’t have to. Now that she thought of it, she was surrounded by strangers as much as Mary was.
She didn’t want anything in common with this woman though, not right now.
‘We really aren’t lying to you Mary.’ She finished quietly.
They reached the top of the stairs and Mary lead her into a room with a single paned window. The room was completely empty except for a stack of tables and chairs against the wall opposite the window.
‘Does it open?’ Sarah asked, holding the door to stop it closing,
‘Yup.’ Mary replied, making her way to the window quickly, her heels clacking loudly on the tiled floor, ‘The whole thing swings out.’ She demonstrated immediately.
Before Sarah could take two steps Mary had flipped the latch across and pushed. The whole window swung out and up, hinged on the top. Mary hung her torso out,
‘HEY ZOMBIES!’ She yelled, ‘OR NOT ZOMBIES OR WHAT…’
Sarah sprinted to the window as the screaming started,
‘Fucking idiot!’ She hissed, yanking Mary back into the room. She could see that the window wasn’t at the front of the building. This was possibly the reason only one of the things had responded, it was a female, haring across its front lawn on their side of the road.
‘What the…’ Mary’s eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open. It wasn’t hard to believe that the monster wasn’t human. It was moving at a speed matched only by internal combustion and doing so with a strange loping sprint, using hands as well as feet at times.
Mary put a hand to her mouth and started to back up. The thing got to within ten feet of the building and sped up. Sarah leant forward quickly and grabbed for the window. She pulled hard and fell back. The window slammed into the frame and bounced back open an inch.
‘Shit!’ Sarah swore, rushing forward again. As she grabbed the latch she saw the monster below. It had managed to kick off the wall at a run and launch itself up. It began to slide down with its hands millimetres from the bottom of the window. Sarah pulled the window closed and locked it.
‘No,’ Mary moaned, ‘no no no no no no…’ She held both manicured hands to her mouth now, staring at the window in disbelief. Sarah froze for a moment looking at Mary’s shocked face. For the first time in the last forty minutes Sarah realised what she was doing. She was destroying this woman’s world. She hadn’t caused any of it, hadn’t been saved having her own world destroyed either come to think of it; but she had still been the reason Mary was now having to deal with it. Mary had had no idea what was going on. She had obviously gotten here early this morning, started doing paperwork and hadn’t been out since. Then along came Sarah and her trusty band of battered humans and now Mary’s life would never be the same again.
‘I’m sorry…’ Sarah muttered.
She felt awful. Seeing Mary try and come to terms with it made her feel like it was happening to her all over again. She watched as confusion, loss, fear and a multitude of other emotions all flooded across the woman’s face. Mary’s eyes flashed with anger as she turned them on Sarah, but she calmed immediately. Sarah couldn’t read her mind but she assumed the other woman had just realised that everything Sarah had told her had been true. Everything. Mary wiped at the corners of her eyes quickly and turned back to the window. The thing outside had stopped screaming.
‘What do we do about it,’ She whispered,
‘Hang on…’ Sarah replied, creeping to beside the glass.
Peeking out she saw what she had expected. The monster had puppeted.
‘Come see.’ Sarah waved Mary over and she came hesitantly, stealing a quick look before staring enraptured.
‘What is it doing?’ She asked quietly. Sarah watched with her, the thing was twitching and jerking its way back to the lawnmower it had abandoned.
‘Puppeting,’ Sarah answered unhelpfully, ‘we don’t know to be honest. But if you can get so they can’t see you for a while, or damage them enough…’ She nodded to the monster. It straightened as it reached th
e lawnmower and Sarah pulled Mary back from the window as it began to mow its lawn.
‘They don’t remember anything they do either.’ Sarah muttered, walking back to the door and the stairs, ‘well they act like they don’t remember anyway.’
‘Your… fiancé?’ Mary asked. Sarah looked at her as they started down the stairs side by side,
‘Yeah.’ She sighed.
Mary sped up a little to reach the door at the bottom of the stairs first. She pulled it open and smiled back at Sarah. It looked more like a grimace.
‘How do you…’ Mary started, then her face dropped, ‘oh God the boys!’
Sarah found herself having to lurch forward to catch the door as the other woman rushed through. She hurried after her to see Mary clawing at a coat on a hook.
‘What happened?’ Miles asked, he had managed to move two of the heavy cabinets into the way in the filing room and the storage desk in the procedure room to block off the front door.
‘Mary shouted out the window and one of those things heard.’ Sarah watched Mary pull a phone out of one of the coat’s pockets and flick through it before putting it to her ear.
‘Things.’ Miles said to himself, ‘we need to give them a name.’
‘What?’ Sarah wasn’t paying any attention to Miles, Mary had swore under her breath and tried her call again,
‘Mary, it won’t matter…’
‘He has to answer!’ She snapped, Laura looked up at her then across to Sarah,
‘I think she’s trying to call her kids.’ Sarah explained, she looked to Mary for confirmation but the woman was busy redialling.
‘Why can’t we just keep calling them, “ahhhhh”’s?’ Laura quipped sarcastically,
‘They look like statues.’ Steven said quietly.
Mary held her phone in both hands and placed it against her forehead,
‘It wouldn’t matter if you got through,’ Sarah tried again, ‘They would just sound normal when they answered.’
‘I’m not calling my sons, I’m calling their Dad.’ She moved her hands to look at the phone again, ‘My ex-husband appealed to have unsupervised access. The only thing I could get the judge to add was that if I called him he had to answer, no matter what.’
‘Not my dad, is he?’ Laura joked, folding her arms and leaning back against the wall.
‘He used to be violent towards me.’ Mary said, pushing redial and putting the phone back to her ear, ‘he’s never hurt the boys as far as I can tell but I don’t trust him and he’s not answering the phone and I’m fucking pissed off and scared and fuck fuck fuck…’ She faded off into more swearing and finally threw her coat on and dropped her phone into the pocket.
‘Right I’m going to get them.’ Mary looked around at the others, then started towards the filing room.
‘Wait you can’t!’
‘No Mary!’
She stopped.
‘What... am I supposed t...to do?’ She stammered, ‘what if they’re hurt? What if he took them out? What am I supposed to do!?’
Sarah knew how she felt. It had been exactly how Sarah herself had felt after seeing Daniel kill their neighbours; a sickening mixture of fear for and fear of, the people that she loved.
‘You can’t go looking for them.’ Sarah stated carefully, ‘you don’t know where they are and if you get seen by any of the monsters you’ll be killed. How will that help your boys?’
‘Sarah is right.’ Miles added, holding his hand up as if trying to hold her still with his mind, ‘their dad might not be able to answer the phone.’
Mary’s shoulders dropped. She turned around, tears making tracks in the makeup on her face,
‘So, we just wait here?’ She gestured around the room, ‘we’ve got nothing to eat, we’re going to have to leave eventually!’
Sarah and Miles shared a look,
‘We could go back to the factory, we have food there…’ Miles suggested tentatively,
‘Didn’t you say you were hiding there when Stevie got hurt?’ Mary asked, Steven smiled at her saying his name and she managed a smile back to him, ‘why didn’t you bring the food with you?’
‘We left in a hurry.’ Sarah muttered darkly,
‘Our Mother came to call.’ Laura chimed in.
‘Your Moth…’ Mary’s tone softened as she got it, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Laura shrugged, but Sarah saw her expression as she looked away. Not made of stone then.
‘Is she still going to be there?’ Mary asked, directing the question at Sarah,
‘We left the factory in the opposite direction to here, so we had to double back.’ Sarah said slowly, ‘Going past we didn’t see her car and I doubt it drove itself away…’
‘We should still probably get there and get out.’ Miles insisted, ‘and it’s about a twenty-minute walk with no guarantee we won’t get seen.’
‘We won’t be walking.’ Mary stated, pulling keys from her other pocket and waggling them in the air, ‘I think we should all go though, I don’t like the idea of leaving the children behind.’ Sarah had been thinking of doing exactly that, but she bit her tongue. It made sense to stick together just in case anything happened.
‘Where’s your car?’ Sarah said eventually,
‘Round back, but I need to pack a bag first.’ Mary click-clacked her way across the room and began pulling things from drawers and dropping them into a medium sized green bag with a white cross on the front, ‘if we’re caught out in the open and somebody needs seeing to… I’ll be able to clean them up and make them comfortable at least.’ She closed the bag after placing in a couple of syringes and some bottles of clear liquid. Nobody said anything, afraid to ask.
‘Miles?’ Sarah looked pointedly at the impromptu barricade in the filing room, the big man sighed and started moving things out of the way, ‘ready to go guys?’ this was directed at the kids. Laura stood and drew her little brother towards her. They stood together looking small and pale,
‘Oh God.’ Mary muttered,
‘Yup.’ Miles huffed, getting the last cabinet out of the way.
Sarah silently volunteered to be first. Poking her head out of the door she could see that the only real danger of being caught was from oncoming traffic. All of the houses except the one directly opposite and the one next to it beside the wall and hedge they had squeezed past earlier, were blocked from view. Both houses seemed empty and Sarah saw with some relief that the road was straight for quite a way and afforded them a large window of opportunity between cars. She waited until a car had passed and none could be seen up the road.
‘Come on,’ She whispered back to the others, slipping out onto the tarmac and immediately spotting Mary’s car, all alone at the back of the clinic.
The group made it without incident, then Sarah heard what she had been dreading, an engine. Looking up at Mary in silent urgency Sarah watched as she seemed to take longer than was necessary to get the doors unlocked,
‘Ok, get in!’ Mary whispered frantically, they did so immediately. The kids and Sarah piling into the back, Miles opting to ride shotgun.
‘Down!’ Sarah barked as the doors closed. They all ducked their heads and listened to the sound of a motorbike passing. After a few seconds, Mary started the car. The engine rumbled to life and the radio turned itself on, not loud but nobody had expected it and they jumped as one. Mary turned it off.
‘So now I just need to get to the industrial park…’ Mary said quietly, chewing on her lip. She set the wheels moving slowly and flinched as another motorbike flashed past ahead of them, then another and another. The sound of them had been masked by the car.
‘Without having a heart attack.’ She grimaced.
Somewhat surprisingly they reached the gate to the industrial park without meeting any other traffic, their luck seemed to be turning for the better. Mary fed her car through the gap in the gate and started down the main road into the abandoned park. Factories passed slowly until Miles pointed out the one they needed to b
e at; their factory. Everybody got out slowly as Mary switched the engine off and locked the doors.
‘How do we get in?’ She asked, Miles pointed to the window with its missing planks,
‘Ah the naughty window!’ She said, smiling down at Steven. He nodded with a serious look on his face and held his arm tight.
‘C’mon.’ Sarah said impatiently. They got in safely, Sarah lead the way into the main floor and saw immediately that something was wrong.
Everything had been looked through. The pile of sleeping bags had been disturbed, they lay in smaller piles in a semi-circle around where they had been before. She saw that the other things had been strewn too. Then she saw her bag. It was lying on its side, contents emptied out onto the floor around it.
‘Bitch!’ She growled, stepping towards it.
‘You should be thanking her.’ Sarah froze mid-step, her foot literally hanging in the air, ‘If she hadn’t looked in your bag I would never have found you.’
Daniel stepped from around the vat, his eyes on her, not seeing the others behind him. Sarah’s heart stopped.
15
It seemed to take a lifetime, that single heartbeat. Sarah felt the absence of movement like a hole in her chest, only deepening as the milliseconds passed. Daniel was here. In this fleeting, soon to be gone moment his eyes were filled with love… if shaded over with a little confusion and hurt. He was gorgeous, absolutely incredible, his usually round face looked sharper, he looked edgy and confident. His hair was combed back, a feat normally impossible to accomplish and he was dressed in clothes she recognised; the jeans he loved that he couldn’t quite fit into anymore, the shirt that showed off too much of what he wished were slightly more muscled chest. It was muscled now, perfectly toned like a male model.
