by Stevens, GJ
76
The car alarms screaming in the background reminded me I couldn’t linger on the horror. Using the tips of my toes I trod as lightly as I could through the great scarlet patch to lean out of the missing glass with my hair billowing behind me in the draft.
The last of the creatures were leaving the garden. The last of the creatures were rushing, just a little faster than their previous shambling pace, clattering and bumping to find the source of the noise.
I accepted the mini victory of the step ladder still being in place and I was on the flat roof without Alex’s offered helping hand. I took the air rifle as she climbed down and gave it back as I lifted the ladder, whilst checking all around before I placed it to the foot-flattened grass at the back. Climbing down, I peered around the corner and watched the backs of the last creatures moving toward the chorus of alarms.
Up the ladder and jumping down the other side of the fence, I watched Alex repeat the climb and balance on the wood with the thin slats bowing in and out as she took the ladder up before setting it on the other side. I flinched each time the metal gave the slightest clatter, hoping the alarms would be more than enough to mask it.
When both of us landed on the grass the other side with the ladder in hand, I couldn’t help think it was going too well. We were three houses down out of six, with three more to go and with the ladder handed into the fourth garden it wouldn’t be long before I could get what I needed; the camera equipment and hopefully the last vial of medicine.
My thoughts turned to my happy place, my posture straight as I imagined looking down the camera and telling the masses about the breaking story that would change their world forever.
As the thoughts whirled in my head in a noxious mix of emotions, the chorus of alarms turned to a pair and after a pause to check, became a single voice as I stepped off the ladder and jumped to the paving slabs the other side.
With another step, the last masking call dissipated and the world seemed to stand still.
I didn’t panic. My pulse didn’t inflate by a wide margin until Alex sat on the top of the fence; until it collapsed as she swayed with the ladder in her hand. The metal slapped down to the flagstones. The cacophony echoed like a dinner bell when Alex landed on top to send a second chorus ringing out.
I listened to the lull as the echo died, fixing my glare on Alex’s wide-eyed fright.
We were both afraid to do anything. Both afraid to rattle the aluminium call in our attempt to move. A rising fear told me we'd already done the damage and the creatures, fast and slow, would chase around the corner at any moment.
We couldn’t wait to find out. Holding my hand out for Alex, she clambered to her feet, pulling the ladder as she rose. The gentle rattle of the aluminium sounded less than I imagined but still seemed to echo in the quiet air.
We ran.
As I arrived at the next fence, I glanced along the side of the house where grotesque faces met my view as they headed our way and responded with a steady increase in their clamber to get to their meal.
With the ladder planted at the base, I climbed, but my feet slipped as they hit the first step. Swearing under my breath, I raised again, attempting more care to plant my feet with Alex’s hands fixing the metal’s shake.
Balancing on the top step, I ignored the fence, only peering with a glance over the wood before checking back along the side of the next house where the creatures were already getting within a couple of car lengths from us.
Dropping the baseball bat to the other side, I jumped and a sharp pain rose along my shin as I landed, but I would not die for the sake of a sprain. The faces of the undead spurred me on.
Running, I felt relief as I heard Alex land with a huff of air and the slap of her feet. As I turned, she launched the rifle through the air toward me, her attention turning to leaning over the fence before I’d caught the rifle midway with my left.
Indecision took hold of me for a moment as the crowd were about to pass the house and enter the garden, the stench of the sewer amplifying to catch in my lungs.
With a quick glance to Alex, I saw her struggling to pull the ladder from the other garden and over the tall fence. I let the rifle down to the flagstones and gripped the baseball bat with both my hands, raising it high over my head and took two steps forward.
Two creatures led the advance, shoulder to shoulder between the house and the wooden fence. Others stumbled and fell at their back.
I kept my stare on the tall woman to the right. I watched the barrel of fat around her midriff, her belly button on show through a rip in her shirt. My gaze traced the fabric open from her chest bone to her hips, following a scored, jagged line along her pale skin.
One, I said in my head and moved my gaze to avoid her impassive snarl.
Two. I counted in silence, turning my look to the man tall at her side. His arms were outstretched and his milky white eyes fixed on mine until something drew me to his fingers pointed in different, unnatural directions.
“Three”, I said, this time letting it go with volume. I raised the bat higher, stretching out the muscles in my arms whilst trying not to think of who these people had been.
On the fourth number counted in my head, I swung down with all my breath. With the bat flying through the air I couldn’t stop myself from imagining who they were before their first death.
The middle-aged mother of two, her children were doctors, one with a kid of her own on the way, fell to the floor as the wood bounced from the front of her skull to send a shiver along the ash.
The young bank clerk who’d lived with his wife and two point four kids seemed relieved when the bat returned from its lift to crack his skull open. His eyes fell closed as blood and lumps of flesh sprayed out with a sound like a melon shattering against the ground.
As the mother whose birthday it would have been tomorrow rose to her feet, I issued a second swing and she went the same way as the guy while I tried to scrub their made-up lives from my memory.
Raising the bat with blood dripping in an arc as I pulled up, my gaze fixed on the next two in line, the fairy tale of their lives already forming when the car alarms took up again in near unison.
The front two kept up their advance, but the outnumbered crowd at their backs took a slow turn, their arms pointing back out towards the road.
I twisted, racing to Alex who was at the next fence, holding the ladder ready for me to climb with the rifle shouldered over her back.
We were in the last garden before the alarms silenced and relieved to see the teeming mass of creatures were dispersing in all directions but towards us.
Alex peeled from my side, shoving the rifle from her shoulder as I peered over the last wooden fence, welcoming the thin smell of creosote cutting through the sewerage taste.
There it stood all alone. The van I’d wanted to get back to all this time.
There it was, a little dirty with red smears and new finger-sized holes near the ladder fixed to the back door, which gave me concern for the safety of its contents.
Still, there it was, a short run from the other side of the fence, with only a handful of creatures who hadn’t made the journey towards the alarms.
An unfamiliar electronic song rang off from the road and I turned, catching Alex relaxing the rifle down, a wide smile gleaming across her mouth.
Up the ladder before she reached my side, I watched the backs of the last few humanlike creatures receding.
My breath paused and eyelids batted as I saw the carpet of bodies scattered across the tarmac, the shock soon replaced with a guilt-laced struggle to silence my rising joy when I saw the discarded pistols, fingers gripped around the triggers and the rifles. Real rifles loaded with dead killing bullets.
I knew I’d become desensitised to the worst. I knew my training, my prior experience of what I had called horror, took me further from the person I wanted to be.
Alex took hold of the ladder and pulled me back into the moment. I landed on bent knees in a spot I’d
hastily picked out between two bodies I was desperate to consider someone’s people.
Shaking away the battle in my head and the pain in my ankle, I focused on the goal. There would be time to work out how I felt. To work out if I was a bad person or if my experiences had killed my humanity, but only if I took action now for those I could still warn and save.
Arriving at the passenger door, I stretched out my fingers and pulled the cold handle. I knew already the locked door would hold firm.
I closed my eyes and my head filled with Toni in the flash of gunfire. She held out the keys in her hand as a patch of red grew around her chest, a smile widening on her face.
77
“Step aside,” came Alex’s breathy whisper at my back.
“No,” I said, regretting the volume as I turned and found the rifle butt filling my view. I quickly stepped between the passenger window and Alex. The air rifle looked so slender compared to its big brothers scattered across the blood-soaked tarmac.
“No,” I repeated in a stage whisper. “You’re a locksmith and that’s your plan?” I said, looking her up and down in a vain search for the tools of her trade, or at least a bulge in her trouser pocket to show she’d brought something useful with her.
“I didn’t get time before the place burned,” she said, struggling to keep her volume from rising through gritted teeth.
“No,” I replied as she again raised the butt high. I turned along the road to check I hadn’t disturbed the withdrawing masses.
The creatures still crowded, scratching at the Freelander, its hazard lights blinking and electronic beat pulsing out. Each blink drawing the creature’s gnarled hands open, clicking their teeth together as they groped at the metal.
The sound soon dulled, in my head at least, as if heard through cotton wool ears. My gaze fixed on the clustered olive drab vehicles and the hint of the house where I’d been taken. Where I’d been held. Where I’d been betrayed.
“No,” I said again, snapping back to see her withdraw the butt, confusion thickening on her brow as it lowered. “It’s alarmed. You’re just going to bring them this way and I need the van, the satellite equipment.” I slowed my exaggerated nod up to the roof as her confusion melted, eyebrows raising as she processed the information.
“So where are the keys?” she said as she scanned our surroundings, shaking her head.
Turning to the side, I peered past her to look beyond the flailing mob and stare at the house where I’d last seen Toni.
To the house where she’d died.
To the house she taunted me from.
Her words came back slow and exaggerated.
“No way.”
I turned to Alex, eyebrow raised as she spoke again, giving a slow shake of her head.
“You are kidding right?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t lower my brow. Instead, through my distraction, I watched as she seemed to contemplate with her eyes unmoving from mine.
“So we’ll need another distraction?” she eventually said with her brow furrowed.
I could have hugged her. I could have wrapped my arms around her tight.
I didn’t. Instead I left my gratitude to a shallow smile, cheeks bunching as my face relaxed.
I watched her sling the air gun over her shoulder and pick her way around the dead soldiers to pluck a rifle intertwined with its former owner.
“Go around the edge,” she said, pointing in the direction a copse of trees the other side of the road beside the church yard. “I’ll draw them away,” she added, as she raised the long gun and peered through the optical sight.
“No,” I replied. “We should stay together.”
She didn’t listen and was already climbing the ladder bolted to the back of the van, her hands soon on the cold metal rung at the top and pulling herself up by the steel supports of the folded satellite dish.
“No,” I repeated. “You should come with me,” I said, gripping the wood of the bat as I crept around the back of the van.
She didn’t reply, leaving her concentration to lower herself to the roof as she scanned the horizon through the sight.
Pausing for a moment with my eyes closed, I steeled myself as I listened to the background of low-pitch moans and gnashing teeth to take my first steps.
Walking along the temporary fence-line, I stopped only to stare at a soldier’s feet as I peeled a pistol from his cold fingers. My first fleeting glance told me his face had gone. I couldn’t linger on what was left behind for the sake of my dreams.
I didn’t look back toward the van more than once, instead holding my concentration fixed at my feet whilst trying to give as little sight to weave around the bodies.
With my head full of memories I was trying not to make, I hoped Alex had heard my last words as I disappeared into the trees.
Hunger, the type everyone experienced I hoped, left a cavity in my chest and in my stomach as I walked, peering between the thick trunks with the pistol out in front. I fixed my view to the line of houses on my left, trying not to get distracted by the car alarming, its flashing lights barely seen through the crowd five or more deep as they surrounded it.
The alarm halted. I couldn’t help taking in the view and notice the lights not stopping their flash. I paused my breath and step, watching as the crowd lost interest without the wail of the alarm and they spread out in what seemed like random directions.
The pain in my chest grew, but I knew it wasn’t real. I knew it was just a sensation.
The hunger perhaps?
No.
Anger, maybe, but I didn’t have time or the inclination to interrogate the cause.
On my own again and I knew I should have been pleased. Back in charge of my destiny, not reliant on any other. So why did I feel like something was missing?
An alarm took off in the distance and cleared my head as I watched the crowd draw their slow, ragged steps in its direction like fish to food dropped in their tank.
She hadn’t needed to stay behind. She hadn’t needed to play the hero. She should have been at my side.
I kicked myself as the thoughts returned.
The alarm ceased and my head once again flooded with a dreaded void. The silence broke with each twig snapping, each rustle of the thick undergrowth sounding the dinner bell, but not for me.
I’d known her for less than a day. My ex had been dead for the same time. I couldn’t bear to think of her name.
The thoughts vanished again as the house came into view. I leant forward to peer at the dark scorch marks across the front and the shattered clusters of bricks which somehow still kept the building upright.
Moving to stare at each of the trucks, I was desperate not to linger on the smouldering carcasses.
There had been a great battle, the start of which I’d seen. The soldiers hadn’t been the victors. With so many lain across the street, so many dead now walking, how could they have been?
I tried to ignore the scene, instead looking beyond the chaos to peer through the wide doorway. My gaze caught on the door which lay fallen against great collections of shattered bricks and splintered wood.
I moved, each step helping to dissipate the caution as I readied to make the run, my body preparing for the long strides I would need to get over the corpses.
My heart rate jumped as a car close by lit with sound, the alarm calling the dead again. About to take this as my starting bell, I heard footsteps behind and I couldn’t help turn in hope to fill the gap in my chest.
I turned to see Alex, but she wasn’t there. Where she should have stood, another did. Someone else walking towards me with his arms raised out. A soldier with half his face burnt beyond recognition and a bloodied, dark mess dried across his fatigues.
I dropped the bat from my hand and raised the gun. Gripping tight with both hands, I pulled the trigger and ran.
Another sound came from behind, heavy footsteps and I dared not glance back for fear of seeing the soldier gaining, but I couldn’t just wait until i
t caught up. I stopped, twisting as best I could and brought the gun up level, already pulling the trigger nearly all the way before I saw Alex’s face set in alarm as I hoped the gun wouldn’t go off before my finger released.
78
I stumbled backwards, pulling the gun high just as the shot rang out from the chamber.
“Get up. Run,” Alex said as her hands collected me up as I twitched, checking for wounds across her chest, but reassured with her words.
With pressure under my arms, my legs were the first to take up, my lungs pumping hard before I realised I was travelling; before I realised I was being dragged. Held up. Pulled along.
My alarm didn’t hold back when I figured we were travelling away from the house. We were travelling in the wrong direction.
“No,” I shouted. The words came out dry and raw. We slowed as I tried to pull my arms out from her grip. Juddering to a stop, I leant over and gasped for breath.
Alex ignored my protests as my vision cleared. With her back facing me, her head darted along the treeline.
“Hurry,” she said.
I stood and looked up to see her still facing the direction we’d come. Eventually she turned, our eyes catching for only a moment until she twisted back away and pushed the sight of the rifle to her eye as she scanned the direction I needed to head.
Despite the car alarms still strong in the background, I drew a sharp breath at the sight of the crowd in the distance. I had no need for magnification, the crowd easy to see at the edge of the wood; the light it shut out obvious as they ambled in our direction.
Instead of speaking, I held my hand out, my finger shaking as I pointed toward the house we had to get to.
Turning back, Alex shook her head.
“Change of plan,” she said, her words hurried as she bounded toward me.
“No,” I said, pulling myself upright, but I couldn't fight as she hooked her arm around mine and pulled me deeper into the woods.
“No,” I said again as I tried to force my steps into a regular pattern.
