by Woods, Mark
Jesus, you idiot, he berated himself. Don’t wind the buggers up for fuck’s sake, concentrate on getting out of here!
Harry moved towards the stairs heading down, then stopped himself.
There were sounds coming up from below him in the stairwell, he suddenly realised. The zombies on the other side of the door had been making too much noise when he was closer for him to hear, but now he’d moved away from them, he could hear the sound of something else, several somethings, making their way up the stairs, and it sounded like more of the infected.
He could hear snuffling sounds, grunting sounds - like the sort of sounds he could well imagine some kind of rabid animal might make - and as those same sounds echoed up the stairwell, reaching him even as he stood up here, listening, he could tell they were drawing closer.
They were coming, not from the floor below, he realised, but the floor below that – the basement – and were headed his way at a very rapid pace.
He had to move, Harry thought, and quickly.
He had to get out of this stairwell, and with the twin options of him going back the way he’d come, or going down the stairs now removed, that only left him with one other option.
Up…
Harry peered over the staircase, through the gap in the bannisters leading down.
From here, he could see all the way down the stairwell to the floors below.
A woman, presumably a shopper, was running up the stairs towards him – her stockinged feet bare where she had kicked off her high shoes to run faster – and was currently being pursued by several Zombie infected Santa.
As Harry watched, the woman stumbled and fell, and was just about to pick herself up and resume running when one of the Zombies grabbed her by her hair from behind and smashed her face, hard, into the stair in front of her.
Even from here, Harry could hear the crunch of her jaw breaking and her nose exploding as the Zombie pulled her hair back by the roots, then smashed her face into the stair again – much as he had seen the sexy Santa shop assistant do repeatedly to the female customer she had attacked earlier, back on the ground floor.
As the woman’s head was pulled back a third time, Harry saw one of her eyes hanging from its socket. As though seeing him watching her, the woman stretched out one hand seemingly beseeching him for help, but just as she did, another Zombie Santa behind her bit down on her hand – instantly severing three of her fingers.
Oh fuck, Harry thought, then realised he had just spoken out loud.
The sound carried down the stairwell to the horde below.
One of the Zombies attacking the woman below looked up, saw Harry watching from further up the stairs, and stretching out one of its hands, pointed up at him, alerting the others to his presence with a godforsaken howl that slowly began to build in pitch and tone to a crescendo until it began to sound like something you might expect to hear from a Banshee.
Almost immediately, all of the other Zombie Santa’s that had been feasting on the female shopper below stopped what they were doing.
As one, they dropped her now lifeless body to the floor and as Harry stood there watching, rapidly began moving up the stairs towards him.
Realising his decision had now been made for him, and that there now definitely was no other option left to him but to go up, Harry quickly turned around and fled – his earlier plan to escape out of the back entrance to the store below now completely and one hundred percent abandoned.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…Harry thought as he ran up the stairs.
He knew what he was doing was stupid, that once he reached the top of the building he would be cut off with no escape, and that there would be nowhere else left for him to go, but it didn’t look he had no other choice now and even though he suspected he was walking into a trap, he really didn’t see what else was left for him to do.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, he cursed again.
As he passed the next landing, he saw more Zombie Santa’s attacking another hapless shopper through the small panel of glass in the door to the second floor. Just as he had seen twice before now, one of the Zombies had the customer by the hair, and was relatedly smashing their face against the glass in a bid, no doubt, to smash open their head so it could get to the juicy brains inside.
Harry could not even tell if the person getting their face smashed to a pulp was male or female any more – their face now nothing but a bloody mess, having been pulverised by the hard glass of the small window so much it now resembled nothing more than tenderised steak. Blood, and gore, and what looked like bits of brain coated the window, and Harry even thought he could see a small hairline fracture starting to form in the glass panel from where the Zombie had smashed its victim’s face against the small window so hard, it had begun to splinter the glass.
So much for it being too thick to break, he thought.
He paused for a moment to catch his breath – fuck, he had forgotten just how out of condition he actually was – then quickly started pelting it up the stairs once more as he heard the horde behind him rapidly starting to close in.
Gotta keep moving, he told himself. Can’t stop, those things are right on my tail…and then…why couldn’t they at least have been slow Zombies like in those Romero films?
In the movie series by George. R. Romero, the Zombies had moved slow, had been easy to escape and avoid unless they were in greater numbers. It was only in the later movies, such as 28 Days Later, and the remake of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead that Zombies had started to move fast.
Of the two, Harry cursed the fact that the Zombies chasing him more closely resembled the latter. It made the odds of him escaping, or actually somehow managing to get out of this situation alive, all the slimmer - for once he reached the roof, Harry did not have a fucking clue where the fuck he was going to go, or what the fuck he was supposed to do next.
He turned the last landing and suddenly he was there, right there by the door that led out onto the roof.
There was a big sign painted on it in big letters that read, STAFF ONLY: ROOF ACCESS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, NO UNAUTHORISED ADMITTANCE!
Yeah, right, Harry thought, and barged right through the door, thankful as he did that at least it wasn’t chained up or locked to prevent access. That really would have summed up his day, he thought. He slammed the door shut behind him, just in time too, as the Zombie Santa’s that had been pursuing him suddenly burst around the corner.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought.
They had been even closer behind him than he’d realised, Harry thought – he really had been cutting it a bit fine.
The Zombies on the other side slammed against the door.
Hard.
Almost jarring Harry and sending him flying.
There was a long metal bar by the side of the door he had just come through, the only way up here onto the roof, and as Harry attempted to keep the door shut, he reached over and grabbed the metal bar, then jammed it under the door handle to try and hold the door secure. He had no idea if that would work, but it always seemed to do so in the movies.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the movies, this was real life - a fact of which Harry was all too aware – and the door did not look to be the strongest or well-made.
He wasn’t sure how long it would hold.
He began looking around for another way off the roof.
The snow was falling thick and fast now, in fat white flakes.
At any other time, to anyone else, it might have made everything feel all Christmassy like something off a greeting card, Harry thought, but not to him, not tonight.
No, tonight, the snow was just one more thing he had to contend with.
If he stayed up here long enough, he thought, he would end up dying not at the hands of the Zombies behind him who wanted nothing more than to tear and rend his flesh, but of exposure.
He would, quite literally, end up freezing to death.
No, Harry thought, he needed to try and find a way off of the roof and to
safety and just as it had seemed to have been all night so far, time was of the essence.
Harry spotted a rusty fire escape, leading off the side of the department store roof. Moving quickly, he moved to the edge of the building and looked over.
Below, Harry could just make out the flashing blue lights of the Emergency Services, but that was all he could see through the intense blizzard blowing all around him.
Something was obviously going on down there on the street though.
Harry could tell, because he could hear the sounds of panic and people screaming coming from street level, along with the occasional gun shot as Police opened fire on whoever or whatever was attacking them - no doubt in a desperate bid to try and take back control, and contain whatever it was that was happening down there.
For a second, Harry considered taking the fire escape back down to the street and escaping from the roof that way. But then, hearing what was going on down there, he started to think better of it.
Not only did he have no idea what he would be walking into if he went down there, but the fire escape was rusty and dilapidated and didn’t look as though it in any way, shape, or form complied with any kind of current fire regulations.
He could well imagine the whole thing collapsing or falling apart as he attempted to make his way down it.
What was more, Harry didn’t fancy getting half-way down, only to find himself getting cut off mid-way as Zombies started coming at him from both above and below when they managed to force their way through the door behind him, as he knew they would eventually – and probably sooner rather than later.
If they managed to cut him off while he was still mid-way making his way down, there would be nowhere for him to go and he would be trapped.
The only other option he had was to try and jump over to the roof of the next building and try and escape that way – but Harry didn’t much fancy that option either.
From the look of it, it was only a short gap, and Harry had always been quite good at long jump, back when he was still in school, but high school was quite a long time ago now, and Harry wasn’t convinced he could still leap the kind of distances now that he had back then in the day.
As Harry stood there, deliberating, the fire escape began to shake as though someone was climbing up it.
Harry backed away, quickly, ducking out of sight of whoever was coming up.
Behind him, he heard the sound of the door leading up to the roof starting to splinter, as the Zombie Santa’s on the other side finally started to break through.
One of them thrust its head through the gap it had made in the door and growled at him, and all Harry could think of was that scene with Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Heeeere’s Johnny....he thought.
Time was running out, he had to make a decision.
Harry stared over at the rooftop of the next building.
The gap between the two buildings didn’t seem that far, he thought.
He could clear that distance easily.
Harry wondered who it was he was trying to convince.
In for a Penny, in for a Pound, Harry thought, as the door behind him finally gave way, giving the Zombie Santa’s chasing him access to the roof.
Time to shit, or get off the pot…
Harry started to run.
The only way he was going to clear that distance was with a run up, he thought.
He pelted across the rooftop, the sound of pursuit close behind him, then leapt out into the void.
At the last minute, his foot slipped on a piece of ice – ruining his take-off.
Even then, for a minute, Harry still thought he was going to make it…
His fingertips brushed the neighbouring rooftop. Harry tried desperately to grip, to hold on, but the cold in his fingers caused him to let go.
He started to fall…
And as he plummeted to the ground, Harry looked up – back up at the roof he had just fallen from.
The Zombie Santa’s that had been pursuing him were likewise falling over the side, as they blindly followed him like Lemmings jumping off a cliff in their bid to try and get to him; too stupid to realise that they, too, were now falling to their death.
From here, it almost looked like it were raining Father Christmas’s, Harry thought, as from below, the ground came rushing up to meet him.
Harry’s last thought was, Merry fucking Christmas…and then he collided with the pavement and everything around him all went black…
Solitary Confinement
Stephanie was lost in the woods.
She didn’t know where she was.
She knew she was in some kind of forest, could tell from all the trees surrounding her, in some instances blocking her path, but had no idea whereabouts those woods might be or just how long she had been wandering here amongst their midst.
Fragments of memory kept coming back to her as she stumbled along, almost tripping over her own feet, not even sure where she was going and seemingly unable to stop her progress forward; but these were fleeting, gone like wisps in the wind before she could take hold of them.
One of the last things she could remember, and was able to hold onto, was travelling in a car with her boyfriend down one of the back country roads that eventually led to the house her parents had owned before they died, but that was about it. Even as simple a thing as remembering her boyfriend’s name, or how long they might have been together, for now temporarily escaped her.
Other things started coming back to her suddenly, almost as if remembering the one memory had triggered new ones. She seemed to recall they had been heading down to her parents’ house where her sister now lived, somewhere deep in the heart of rural Norfolk. Her sister was ill, she remembered, diagnosed as having come down with the human variant of H1N1Z; one of the latest strains of Swine flu to start doing the rounds and that apparently, according to government sources, was not even supposed to be transferable to humans.
The local authorities had asked her and her family to keep her sister’s condition a secret for now until they could investigate further, as they wanted to avoid raising a panic, but in the last few weeks her sister had started getting worse. Stephanie and her boyfriend had agreed to travel down to try and help with her sister’s two kids, and stay over for Christmas, while her sister’s husband concentrated solely on getting her well and back on her feet again.
Or at least that was the official story.
In truth, Stephanie had wanted to come down here to help gather evidence so she could take her sister’s story to the papers.
As Stephanie thought back further, the memories suddenly started flowing thick and fast. It was like the floodgates had suddenly burst open.
Originally they hadn’t been intending to come down to her sister’s until the weekend, she recalled now, but the weather reports had all predicted heavy snowfall and blizzards and Stephanie had been worried if they waited, they might not make it at all.
As she didn’t know yet just how serious her sister’s condition was – only that her sister’s husband was worried enough to call them and ask them to come down - she had demanded they leave right away, and in hindsight, she thought, it was a good job she had.
The snow had started falling thick and fast almost as soon as they’d left and if they’d left it any later to leave, like, say, at the weekend as planned, then Stephanie wasn’t sure they’d have made it travelling down these back roads to her parents’ old house.
As she and her boyfriend had been driving along, she recalled, a news report had come on over the radio with updates on a breaking news story they’d heard about, just before they’d left earlier that afternoon.
According to the report, following a series of terrorist attacks that had happened all up and down the country earlier, people had been reported as suddenly turning violent and attacking others. In the capital especially, mass rioting was being reported and people were being told to stay in their homes or places of business.
Stepha
nie and her boyfriend had both listened to the report, and then dismissed it she remembered. Her boyfriend had even made a joke about it all if she remembered correctly – saying that it was probably a good job they were headed out here into the country because out here in the middle of nowhere, nothing exciting ever happened and chances were they’d not even see another person between here and her sister’s anyway.
The only trouble being reported was all in the big cities, he told her, doing his best to calm her, knowing she was already on edge because of her worries about her sister. It wasn’t like it was the end of the world or anything. By the time it came for them to return home in a few weeks, after staying just long enough to make sure her sister was on the mend, things would’ve all sorted themselves out just like they always did.
Most likely.
Stephanie hadn’t liked the sound of that last bit, but she hadn’t had to worry for long because right then, that was when the car had skidded on some ice and spun off the road.
Stephanie’s boyfriend had managed to guide the car safely to the side of the road by driving into the skid, but when they stopped, it soon turned out the car had a flat where it had collided with a heavy bank of snow. Her boyfriend had assured her that changing the tire would take no more than three or four minutes at most and while he had gotten started, Steph had gotten out of the car as well, in order to stretch her legs. This had given her a ringside seat a few minutes later, when she saw her boyfriend being attacked.
A cyclist, dressed in full, professional cycling gear, had come staggering out of the woods, bleeding from his neck - a cycle helmet on his head that looked all scuffed and scratched as if he had been involved in some kind of an accident. Stephanie had been just about to call out to him to see if he was alright, when the cyclist had obviously spotted her boyfriend, hunched over the jack he was using to lift the car, and had rushed forward to attack. Caught entirely by surprise, before Stephanie could even shout a warning her boyfriend had been sent sprawling.
