“…tried to bite me,” he had said. Seconds ticked by in strained silence as the trooper called out a very slow progress report on the movement of their only contact.
“Clear this gate of non-essential personnel,” Johnson barked, sensing more than hearing the sound of boots scraping as at least two men responded to his orders. He watched intently, now able to see the outline of the approaching man, with the sun beginning to set somewhere far behind his left shoulder, and he knew instantly that something was very wrong about the slowly-encroaching threat. He had to wait a full three minutes as he endured the agonisingly slow updates from the trooper with the binoculars, until the SSM’s nerve broke and he climbed up to the front of the big armoured car and held his hand out for the instrument. Placing the glasses to his eyes, he fought to control the gasp threatening to escape his throat. Something flapped under the man’s face, as though a purse swung from his mouth and lolled grotesquely with the jerky movements of his footfalls. Twice he saw the man fall, only to slowly regain his feet and stumble onwards.
Eventually, the man progressing at an excruciatingly slow pace, Johnson no longer needed the binoculars to see him, and what was much worse was the realisation that the thing swinging from under the man’s head, was his lower jaw held tenuously on one side by flesh and sinew.
“Christ on a fucking bike,” Johnson muttered under his breath, swallowing to calm his roiling stomach.
THIRTEEN
“Hold your fire,” Johnson said in a voice that invited no disobedience. He lowered his own weapon and wandered towards the man, or the thing that had been, up until recently, a man. It stumbled headlong into the fence, rebounded, then tried again to bull its way through the seemingly invisible force field that was reinforced chain link. Johnson, feeling secure behind the fence with a two-foot buffer of space between them, stepped close enough to see and smell the man.
The smell was what caught his attention first, because it smelt like old meat and shit. The latter because the man had clearly soiled himself, but the former puzzled the soldier. When the acrid smell had pricked at his eyeballs and prompted a responding drop of water to form in both eyes, Johnson took an exaggerated step back and was startled into taking a second when the man without a full face snapped his head towards him and snarled, throwing himself against the fence once more with increased excitement.
Johnson was locked into its gaze then, his own brown eyes mirroring the milky orbs that stared back at him. The thing looked like it had cataracts and would surely be blind and unable to focus through the cloudy vision, but somehow it zeroed in on him effortlessly, and held the acquired target like a hawk looking down on prey. The soldier slowly took a long step to his right, away from the gatehouse, and the thing followed his movement like a stumbling, rotten mirror image.
He, it, was wearing a torn shirt which had once been pale yellow, and light brown trousers. One dark tan shoe remained affixed to one foot, the other lost somewhere nobody knew. The breathing, if the noises it made could be called breathing, came in whistling hisses in and out and made different noises as it did so, like an old set of bellows.
He tilted his head, locked into its terrifying visage and unable to look away, and the thing mirrored his slow movements like some awful reflection from the other side of a horrible death.
“Sir, permission to engage?” came a shaky voice from behind his left shoulder. In response to the new sound, the thing snapped its head right and homed in on the source of the interruption as though this new thing consumed the entire attention span of the mangled man. The hissing, groaning, rattling noise that emanated from the mouth, or half of the mouth to be precise, of the thing before Johnson ramped up by a factor of five as it threw itself once more into the chain link. This time, as it tried to force its face through the too-small gaps in the metal, the side of its lower jaw that still clung on to the upper half snagged in the fence and stuck. Horrified, Johnson swallowed the spasm in his gullet that threatened to bring up the last cup of tea and biscuit he had thrown down his neck, just as the thing pulled away and he watched in gory, seemingly slow-motion detail as the remaining skin tore, and stretched to its limit, before the resistance finally became too much and the jawbone dropped to land on the soft grass with a gentle thump.
It was too much for the trooper who had approached behind his left flank, and he dropped to his knees as he vomited uncontrollably.
Something, either the sound of the retching or the smell of the regurgitated food or both, whipped the now chinless man into a desperate frenzy, and a new sound ripped from him.
“Eeeeeeeeerrrrrrrgh,” it screeched on an inward breath, making a sound that was the direct fleshy equivalent of nails being dragged down a chalkboard. It seemed to vibrate as it threw itself over and over into the chain link fence again and again, until the force of meat hitting metal rang an echoing sound along their section of the perimeter and threatened to bring yet more unwanted attention to them. Thinking, Johnson cast his eyes around the grass at his feet and located a raised tuft of thicker, more hard-wearing grass. Using the heel of his boot like a pickaxe, he swung a few times until the clump came loose, then reached down to grasp the stalks and heave the lump of turf high over the fence and away, behind the thing as though he were tossing the severed head of an enemy by its hair.
As soon as that thought came to him, before the replacement for a severed head landed, he admonished himself for having the idea and drawing the similarity.
When the grass did land, the soft thud made the screeching noise stop, and he watched in stunned silence as the thing temporarily lost all interest in the trooper, who was still throwing up the remainder of his last meal, as well as the SSM who he had been so feverishly trying to get to before the interruption. The thing staggered away in the direction of the last noise. No sooner had it stumbled five paces away than Johnson cleared his throat and made it spin its head back towards him, and it reached out in the direction of the latest sound which had caught its attention.
Not bothering to fold out the stock of the gun, he raised it and fired a short burst into the chest of the man at a range of about four paces. Convulsing like a landed fish, the man was thrown bodily backwards to hit the earth flat on his back. Johnson reapplied the safety on his gun and lowered the barrel just as he froze and dropped his jaw. The man, a handful of bullets riddling his chest, began to hiss and moan again, although in a different tone due to the holes in his lungs. Haltingly, it dragged itself upright and back to its feet to reach out towards him with both hands.
Interesting, he thought to himself, as he calmly drew the eight-inch bayonet and slowly twisted it onto the end of the lightened barrel of his sub-machine gun. He had rarely seen bayonets in his career but had long since given up wondering where Rochefort had found the random and unexpected boxes of forgotten gems.
Settling the blade into place and feeling the satisfying click as it locked in position at the diagonal angle to the magazine sticking horizontally out of the opposite side of the gun, he took two swift paces forwards and raised the gun to drive the bayonet straight through the open maw to burst the very tip of the blade out of the back of the skull. The man, the thing, became instantly lifeless, and as Johnson withdrew the blade as though demonstrating perfect form to raw recruits, he watched as his victim crumpled to the ground at his feet on the other side of the fence. He removed the blade from the weapon and wiped it delicately on the grass before restoring it to the leather sheath and turning.
“On your feet, Trooper,” he said to the shocked young man, who probably hadn’t breathed since he had finished throwing up, “and get that bloody beret off your eyes; it’s not a cap.” Then he strode purposefully towards the buildings as he fought the urge to fall to his own knees and burst into hysterical tears of crippling fear. Recalling the words that the naval air base to their north east had reported to them, his whole body went cold in shock and fear as the line returned to him once again with renewed meaning.
The dead
were rising.
Miles away, sitting alone in the gathering dark and growing fear, Peter watched from the seat that his father used to occupy as his mother remained unchanged for hours.
She breathed fast, the sounds eventually transforming into shallow gasps as she snatched the oxygen from the air with ever-increasing desperation. Just after she had lost consciousness, Peter had tried the telephone and waited for painful seconds as the dial clicked all the way back from the three consecutive nines he had dialled. He didn’t understand the tone, but the line didn’t connect to anything at the other end. He tried twice more, each time failing to get through to anyone.
By the time her breathing began to slow to the sporadic gasps which rattled from her throat, Peter could feel the heat radiating away from her red-hot skin. He knew that she wasn’t going to get better, not that he could explain why or how he felt that way, just that he knew and accepted it on a level of pure belief. As that realisation settled on his soul, and he recognised that it didn’t trouble him, he rose from the seat and went to fetch himself some food from the kitchen.
Peter had no way of knowing the complex biological processes that had taken place inside his mother’s body, nor would he have fully understood them even if they were explained in a fashion more suited to the learning capacity of a nine-year-old boy.
He would not have known that her body temperature had risen to above forty-four degrees Celsius, and that the rampant fever that was destroying her from within had effectively boiled her brain and damaged it beyond all salvageable levels. She had lost all higher brain function and was left with that part of her mind which was purely instinctive and uncontrollable; the part that remembered to breathe when she was asleep, or that reminded her heart to beat without any conscious thought. That part of her, so deeply buried by years of social evolution, by generations upon generations of civilised tweaks to the genetic code of her race, that still knew how to hunt and kill for food even if she didn’t know it.
Human beings are carnivores. Their eyes are forward-facing to better locate prey and gauge distance. They have incisors and canine teeth designed for killing other animals and ripping flesh. Humans might have forgotten these facts, but their deeply suppressed brain functions had not.
Just as the fever finally killed her body, the virus that had infected her when the saliva of the man who had bitten her came into contact with her blood and torn-open flesh took over. It kept certain aspects of her body alive but retained none of what made her the person she was.
Had Peter known this, it was doubtful that he would really have cared, because he hated the person she was. He hated her on such a deep, cellular level that he might as well have been infected with something just as virulent and potent as the disease which killed her, as he stood in the next room and ate a sandwich without using a plate, not caring if the crumbs falling to the floor would result in him being hit or shouted at.
Just as he finally began to accept that his life was never going to go back to normal, he heard a snarling, ripping, yelping sound from the other room.
Freezing in mid-chew, the half a sandwich still hovering near to his mouth, the sickening sounds of butchery drifted through the downstairs of the house to his ears. Unmoving for longer than he could possibly be aware of, he began to breathe again. His breath didn’t come in panicked gasps, because he too had unlocked some deep, primal ability which he didn’t know he possessed.
Peter, unknowingly, was a born survivor.
Keeping his breathing soft and quiet, he moved off the kitchen side and crept forwards in a half crouch as he placed one foot carefully after the other to cross the small yet impossibly long distance to the doorway, in his attempt to add vision to the sounds he could hear.
Rounding the doorway with just one eye and a tiny portion of his face, he couldn’t contain himself any longer and almost let out a cry of horror. On the other side of the room, down on the floor on her knees, was his mother. Her hands ripped at the blood-soaked mess of fur and meat and organs which she was pulling apart hungrily.
As disciplined as Peter was by keeping silent, he could not control what his bladder did involuntarily as it emptied to run down his right leg. Before the hot liquid had reached the rough, brown carpet, his mother froze and stopped ripping at the corpse of their dog. She lifted her head up in the air and sniffed; long, hungry pulls through her nostrils as she tried to locate the source of the acrid smell of ammonia.
Spinning her head faster than he had ever seen her move, she whipped around to face him, apparently having forgotten all about the dog she had been tearing apart with her teeth and her nails.
Unfreezing from the spot as rapidly as he had become stuck there in the first place, Peter turned and fled. Skidding on the kitchen linoleum as his right foot was wet with urine, he slammed into the floor to scramble upright and fly towards the back door, where he snatched up his backpack without breaking step. Spilling from the door, he slammed it behind him just in time, as she was pressed against the pane of glass as though she were trying to chew her way through it. Standing there, just inches from the woman who had enjoyed hurting him every day of his life that he could recall, he felt no change in his attitude towards her, even now that she seemed to be a wild animal and a murderer. Backing away as he slipped his arms into the straps of his bag, his left foot bumped the outstretched hand of the dead fat man and made him stumble but not fall. Turning away, he made straight for the gap in the trees, and vanished into the gathering dark.
FOURTEEN
Peter shivered through the night, partly because of the chill air cooling the wet trouser leg he’d had to endure, but mostly through shock and fear. He had found himself somewhere high and relatively sheltered to spend the night in the upper floor of the barn, but that was still fairly exposed to the gentle wind that blew between the prefabricated panels, and it had forced him to stack some hay bales to provide a wind break.
He had fled wearing only a thin sweatshirt, but finding a thick, black coat of heavy, close-knit wool had been heavenly. Wrapped up inside the stiff, oversized garment which his father had called a donkey jacket, he settled down and tried to find sleep.
But sleep would not come, and every time he closed his eyes to turn the murky grey of the moonlit night into the black behind his eyelids, the scene of the dog torn to pieces and his mother ripping and chewing at it flashed vividly in his mind’s eye. He replayed the scene from colourful memory over and over like a short film stuck on loop, and it seemed to him that every time he saw it, he was drawn into his mother’s cloudy eyes deeper and deeper, until he felt as though she had pulled him close enough for her bloodstained teeth to bite down on his thin arm and tear out a chunk of flesh, just as had happened to her.
He had never seen a zombie film. Never read a book about the dead reanimating or seen comics or anything like it. The word itself – zombie – was barely ever used, because its relevance in normal society was unrecognised in most places. All he knew, and with a child’s perspective that made the facts all the more intense, was that his mother had been bitten by a person, then she had burned a fever, then she had woken up and torn the dog to pieces and eaten it. She would have eaten him, too, but he had got away.
Trying to work it through logically, he relayed the facts of the last few days over and over until it no longer made a semblance of sense, but instead confused him worse than before he had started trying to understand. Telling himself to keep to the facts, he laid out the world as he now knew it.
He was on his own.
People bit other people, then they got whatever it was.
People who had been bitten tried to eat you.
One other fact left off his list tickled at the very fringe of being an idea. As he concentrated more, shutting out the wind and the cold and the fear, he connected the dots.
When they are Biters, he thought, making up the name on the spot, given their most prevalent behaviour, they die if you stab them in the head.
That thought
stayed with him more than the other facts as he drifted in and out of restless slumber throughout the rest of the night.
When he woke, the sky was still the steely-grey pre-dawn with just the slightest of hints of a horizontal slice of yellowy orange in the distance. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep any longer, and he decided that he had enough light to return home and do what he knew had to be done. Climbing down and sitting at a hay bale at ground level as he ate Nik Naks and a Mars bar for breakfast, he left the heavy jacket over his backpack of goodies and straightened his resolve as he aimed for his house.
Finding the scene at the back door unchanged, barring the absence of his mother gnawing at the glass and squashing her face to smear frothing blood over the single pane, he took three deep breaths as he maintained an awareness of his surroundings. Three people, no three Biters, had wandered up to their house, and they lived in the middle of nowhere, so there was no way to be certain that he was safe just because there weren’t usually any people around. He cleared his throat for the purpose of clearing his throat, and not to gain anyone’s attention, and reached out for the pitchfork which still stood almost upright as it was buried in the unmoving skull where it had been so forcefully placed.
Tugging with both hands to free it, he staggered backwards as it came loose in some grotesque parody of the animated film that he had watched so many times with his sister. It had been one of the only VHS cassettes specifically for them in the house, so their choice of things to watch when they were left alone was limited. Still, he imagined himself becoming the king of all the land when the old pitchfork came free, and he held it aloft just as he had seen the character do in the film.
Nothing happened. No ray of light burst from the heavens to shine down on him and no music blasted from unseen speakers to announce his presence to the world.
Death Tide Page 10
