by T. A. Sorsby
‘Let’s just see what happens first.’
I was torn between selfishly pursing Katy, chasing down my chance to save her, and the life of another woman. But I tried to reason it away. I tried to think that Anita was potentially infected and maybe there was nothing we could do to save her. But I still made the selfish choice. And I’m not proud to say I’d probably make it again.
Minutes ticked by like hours. After a few weeks, Morgan rested her head on Neville’s shoulder and started to cry again. He pulled her in closer and tried not to follow suit, just kept his eyes on the darkening sky.
‘Twenty past.’ He muttered.
He had a box of nine-millimetre rounds on the floor in front of him, but comforting Morgan, he was no longer able to reload his and Anita’s guns, which’d been set out on the little table. They were different models, but used the same bullets, I guessed. I reloaded them for him, both guns, all four magazines, trying to familiarise myself with the weapons. Anita’s had been all but empty. Wonder what she’d been through.
Just shy of ten bullets rattled around the box when I set it down. Even if Anita didn’t pull through, at least we’d have an extra gun. I tried the maths again, Greenfield minus bullets equals zombies. The result wasn’t much better.
But we’d set out to save people – those were always going to be shots well fired, in my opinion. Still…with no cavalry coming to Greenfield, us and those bullets, we were on our own. So we really needed another steady pair of hands.
*
Fourteen
Lucile came out of the apartment.
‘She seems to have lost a fair amount of blood, but a little time, a lot of painkillers and some rest, and she should be back on her feet. She’s awake.’ She added with a nod.
I was up like a shot, so quick I nearly took Morgan with me, who’d been holding my hand after I’d done with the guns. She made a noise of amused protest and wiped the last tear from her eye.
Lucile sat back down on the sofa, nursing Anita’s head on the pillows beside her lap and making her drink water through a straw. We filed in. I took the armchair while everyone else got on the second sofa. Anita didn’t look any worse, but she didn’t look any better either. Pale, blood-stained, she looked half-dead – which is way better than undead by anyone’s reckoning.
‘I really need a shower.’ She grunted, her voice rough.
‘We’ve still got hot water,’ I smiled, ‘Lucile. Could you help her with that?’
‘Sure. You want me to take a crack at the genny too? For the elevator?’ she asked.
‘If you’ve got the time, please.’
‘Sure thing boss.’ She hummed.
I hoped she felt valued, rather than bossed about. Like her skillset was needed. I sure wished my skillset was in demand right about now, but delivering packages didn’t seem applicable to the current situation; unless you counted delivering Anita to Stan’s apartment. You’d probably need to sign for something like that.
‘You feeling okay?’ I asked Anita.
‘A hell of a lot better than I was a couple of hours ago, because of you guys.’ She nodded, ‘Thanks for getting me out of there. I…couldn’t be in that room any longer, and, too cut up to run far.’ She said, turning her head away. “Cut up”. She wasn’t just talking about the bite there.
I looked over to Morgan, staring intently at the carpet. They’d both lost Becky, a sister and a best friend.
The darkened apartment, and the darkening mood, reminded me that the sun was setting – it’d be more dangerous out there after dark, where we couldn’t see what was coming. I certainly wasn’t leaving Katy out there another night.
I looked to Neville, then Damian. They seemed to be waiting for me to speak.
‘Come on then,’ I sighed, putting on a brave face even as I looked out at the sky, ‘one more job for today.’
‘You a busy man, Kelly?’ Anita asked.
‘I’ve got to go save my fiancée.’
Lucile chimed in. ‘This Katy, she must be some special lady for you to want to risk your ass like this. How long did you say you’d been engaged?’
‘Three days.’ I grimaced, ‘I haven’t even seen her since she put the ring on.’
‘I’m not sure if you’re a romantic, or a remedial.’ Lucile laughed, ‘But good luck out there. Come back in one piece.’ She added, glancing toward Damian. They shared a look.
The menfolk were walking out into the foyer, when Morgan caught up with us.
‘I want to come too.’ She sniffed, eyes still puffy.
‘Morgan…’ her father said, despondent.
‘Katy’s my friend, I want to help.’ She said, her voice shaking.
She was looking for something to take her mind off of losing more people she cared about. I got that, I understood that. But this wasn’t just something therapeutic, something cathartic, like digging a grave or drinking your way through a Kilmister wake. Night would fall while we were out, and while I wanted her ready to face those things out there, seeing them at night might do her more harm than good.
I walked past Neville, and brought Morgan in for a hug.
‘Stay here with Anita, kiddo.’ I mumbled into her ear, ‘Talk to her. She just lost her sister and she’ll want to talk to someone about that. You two can help each other through this. You’ve been so brave today, but you ought to sit this out…’
‘I don’t want to just sit here and be useless.’ She said, ‘I need to be doing something.’
‘Then make sure Anita’s okay. Help her get cleaned up, keep her company while Lucile has a go at that generator.’
She squeezed me uncomfortably tight, gave a great sniff, and let me go.
‘You going to be okay?’ I asked.
‘If today doesn’t leave me traumatised into professional therapy, yeah, I’ll be good.’ She shot back, smiling weakly. ‘You bring her home, yeah?’
‘Damn right I will.’ I said, bumping fists with her.
I was a little glad to leave Morgan and Anita alone. Maybe that’s somewhat uncaring on my part, but I don’t mean it that way. I wasn’t trying to get her out of the way because I didn’t care, just the opposite. You know me by now. But aside from keeping her out of the night, I didn’t want to see her in pain.
Grief doesn’t sit well with me. Like Morgan, I needed something to do while my mind processed it. I’d had a friend die when I was a teenager. Car crash. Closed casket. Never got to say goodbye. Being around other people’s grief, that didn’t help me, I needed to process it solo. Digging the grave, or the aforementioned wake, that’s not to everyone’s tastes. But maybe helping Anita get cleaned up would be more her speed – and if she helped Lucile save us all from a trip on the stairs, I could live with myself.
‘This is dangerous,’ Neville said as we left the building, and Morgan’s earshot. ‘We should wait until the morning.’
He’d left Anita’s loaded gun behind in Stan’s flat, just in case something happened while someone was in the shower. I didn’t feel comfortable with treating Anita like a timebomb, but I couldn’t see any other options short of just euthanizing her now, and I certainly felt that was a last resort. Maybe we could have tied her down, but if she wasn’t infected, she’d probably hold it against us later.
‘You can always turn back.’ I suggested, still heading for the 4x4.
‘Nah, I’m good,’ he said, nonchalantly rubbernecking around the parking lot, hand on his gun.
I called shotgun again, and we mounted up in silence, headlights off so we wouldn’t attract so much attention. The clock was getting closer to six as we were pulling onto the road, the world cast into shades of darkening grey, blue and brown. No streetlights flickered to life, so as we drove our eyes just adjusted to the lengthening shadows.
I gave Damian directions, trying to stay away from roads we already knew were blocked, but we still came to a couple of dead ends, having to mount the curb or simply shove a car out of the way. I’d thought Damian would be worried ab
out damaging his 4x4, but the cattle bumper on the front seemed tough enough to take on a herd of bison.
After a while, Damian had to give up peering out of the window, and turn his lights on. Now we were a noisy, brightly lit target for the zombies. It was probably just my imagination, but I hadn’t seen that many zeds on the road before we were lit up. Now, it was different.
Dark shapes moved on the streets outside, every one of them a zombie in my mind. I know that most of them would just have been wrecked cars, newsstands or mailboxes but the thought that they were out there, watching us, set my teeth on edge. I chewed my tongue and continued to eat the silence.
Damian drove carefully; never going above fifteen or twenty miles an hour, plenty of stopping distance if he saw another roadblock. He could see about forty yards in front of him thanks to his halogens, but it wasn’t enough as we came face-to-face with another row of smashed up cars, and carefully negotiated the pavement around them. Something else bumped into the side of the 4x4 and groaned into the night. I wiped sweaty palms on my jeans.
Damian was silent in concentration, while Neville was visibly trying to gather his fraying nerves. I looked behind me to see him checking his gun again, resting the bat Lucile had gave him between his legs. Then I looked back out of the window and wondered why I was quiet.
Butterflies in my stomach reminded me of Katy, and the thrill of driving to meet her was strangely not dulled by the obvious danger. I’d love to ride to her rescue. Despite how she’d scoff at the whole white-knight notion, I’d still get a kick out of it. Replace the horse with Damian’s ride and I was all set, though I doubt getting a lift off your friend would be considered very chivalric.
I was getting excited, despite the zombies, despite the darkness, despite the icy doubt that was still creeping into the back of my mind. ‘What if she isn’t here?’ it whispered. ‘What if you’re going to get them killed, for nothing?’
We were driving for ages, well past sunset, before Neville leaned forwards from the back, and pointed up at the skyline. ‘Do you see that?’ he asked over my shoulder.
The moon cast just enough light into the sky to let me make out a plume of smoke rising up into the air, not too far away. That wasn’t unusual. I’d seen smoke out in the city from the top of Castle Towers, but this looked like it was on our way to Katy’s. As Damian pulled us even closer, I began to realise it wasn’t just on the way. It was there. We turned the last corner a moment later, driving up a short hill of terraced houses before the road flattened out again.
Someone had built a bonfire in the middle of the street, using smashed up household furniture. Chairs, tables, wardrobes, and dozens of misshapen, fire-warped things I couldn’t even guess what they used to be. They’d probably doused the whole thing in gasoline and lit it up. But Who? Katy? As a kind of emergency signal perhaps?
Damian parked us a safe distance back from it. I looked out of the window and cautiously opened my door before dropping down to the street, gun in one hand and bat in the other. There weren’t any zombies here, and I wasn’t getting the same vibe I got at the Mason house, so I was guessing there were no dogs either. But I knew something wasn’t right, and I hadn’t picked up on it yet.
The fire was big enough to light up the fronts of three or four houses on either side of the street. This whole area used to be student housing I think, before I’d moved to the city. It’d been invested in by former tenants and renovated into the classy kind of place that ‘young professionals’ lived in, but where it was still socially acceptable to share houses with your old university mates.
No candlelight flickered in any of the windows, the only light here was coming from the bonfire. My heart began to speed up when I realised that I’d be a pretty neat looking target; standing in front of the only light for miles around. Zombie, dog, anything. My neck began to itch, and the hairs on the back of my arms stood on end.
I turned full circle, looking for whatever was setting my teeth on edge. It felt like…someone was watching me. Corny, I know, but those primal instincts are there for a reason.
‘Hello?’ I asked the night.
The fire crackled, something within it popping, sounding for all the world like a spitting slice of bacon.
‘Get back in.’ Neville said, just loud enough for me to hear, ‘I don’t like this.’
‘I know, it doesn’t feel right…’ I muttered, still looking around for the source of my discomfort.
‘Get in man!’ Damain repeated, clearly spooked, ‘That’s not just wood on de fire!’
I finally twigged, something filtering through my senses. The smell of burning meat. I spun around to the bonfire, and met eyes with the empty sockets of a charred human corpse.
Gunfire split the silence, something a lot bigger than my dinky revolver. It cracked into the road next to my foot, kicking up chips of tarmac.
Instinct took a hold of me, fight-or-flight, and before I knew it I was cowering on the other side of the 4x4. It’s called ‘taking cover’ if you do it in a manly fashion, but I think I might have let out an un-manly noise while I did it.
‘I’m alive, I’m alive!’ I started shouting, that little voice in the back of my head wondering if that meant they’d stop shooting, or just shoot some more.
‘You’re tooled up too,’ a familiar female voice called out. ‘Lose the piece mate, and nobody get out of the bloody truck.’
*
Fifteen
‘Laurel?’ I shouted back.
There was a lengthy silence.
‘Who’re you?’ she asked, her tone confused.
‘It’s Tiernan Kelly you idiot!’ I yelled, getting back to my feet. There was another pause, punctuated by the sound of something on the fire doing the unthinkable bacon noise again.
‘Oh,’ Laurel called out, quieter this time. ‘I suppose you’d better come in then.’
‘Too right!’ I shouted back, splitting into a grin.
I saw a flicker of movement in the front-bedroom window of their house - Katy, Laurel and Danni’s house. I ran around the 4x4 and towards the door; the other two shrugging to each other and following. Damian locked the doors with a click of his keys.
I waited in the front garden, a little rockery that we used to sit out on in summer, reading our books to each other and cracking open cold bottles. I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to look presentable.
Laurel opened the front door, at first a crack, then fully when she saw my face. She stood as a vague silhouette against the dim glow of candlelight from the kitchen, a tall, willowy woman with ash blonde hair that she usually straightened to halfway down her back. In the last few days, she’d trimmed it to a more severe cut.
It hung wet, freshly washed, grazing the shoulders of a comfy looking dressing gown, under which she wore some roomy jeans and a grey blouse. A scoped hunting rifle was slung on a strap across her back, and she carried a carpenter’s hammer through one of her belt loops. Leaning up against the wall beside the door was a pile of smashed up furniture, rough and ready planks for a barricade.
‘I was setting myself up for a last stand,’ She said, catching where I’d been looking, ‘really, really glad to see a friendly face.’ she stressed, putting an arm around me on the doorstep and bringing me in for a hug. I reciprocated. As she moved, the sleeve of her dressing gown rode up and I saw a streak of blood staining the cuff of her blouse. I put it out of my mind, and focused on the important.
‘It’s good to see you too.’ I said, squeezing her tight for a moment. ‘Everyone okay? How’s Katy?’ I asked as we filed into the hallway. She closed the door behind us, sliding the lock and the chain in place. I stood on tip-toe, trying to look into the kitchen, to see if my fiancée was in there.
‘You must be the world’s only surviving brain donor, coming out here after dark.’ Laurel said, looking me up and down, her eyes lingering on the gun, ‘Zeds will’ve heard the shots, but I guess you already know that.’
‘Not just zombies out there
.’ I said, lips pursed, leaning to one side to look up the stairs, hoping to see my girl. ‘What’s with the artillery, by the way?’ I asked.
‘Bloke up the road was a hunter,’ she sighed, looking more serious, ‘but he’s dead now.’
‘What happened?’ Damian asked.
‘We made a play for safety in numbers, about ten, twelve of us. Fella had a gun and the experience to use it,’ she said, eyes flicking to Neville’s shoulder holster, ‘but before we figured what you had to do to stop the bastards, the sitting room window was smashed in and the front door was off its hinges. Me and Danni, we ran upstairs, jumped out the window.’ She swallowed hard, ‘Left everyone down there. Ain’t proud.’ she added, jaw tight.
‘But in all the panic, one of them…before we…’ Laurel sniffed hard and put a hand up to her forehead. When she spoke again, she had a lump in her throat. ‘They caught her and…they bit Danni and –’ she stopped talking, shut her eyes and shook her head slowly.
A bucket of ice water fell into my gut.
‘What about Katy? Is she hurt too?’ I demanded, my voice rising.
‘Katy?’ Laurel said, putting a hand on my shoulder, pushing me backwards. I’d stepped into her personal space. ‘Katy left before this all started, she’s not here.’
‘What the fuck do you mean?’ I shouted, taking a step back, and forcing myself to tone it down. ‘Sorry, sorry. What do you mean? Where is she?’
‘Gone,’ Laurel said, as Neville put a hand down on my shoulder. Damian did the same for the other one, and squeezed hard. ‘Not dead, just gone. She packed a bag and turned into work after her call with you, even after seeing all that “stay in your homes” bull on the news.’
‘Did she say anything else?’ Neville asked, beating me to it.
My throat was closed and I wasn’t sure what was welling up faster, my eyes or my anger. My vision was blurring, and that urge to hit something grew even greater, forcing me to clench and unclench my fists. I paced into the kitchen and turned the tap on, splashing the water on my face until I could take full breaths again.
