by Woods, Mark
Kevin had no idea where they might have gone – maybe they’d gone out shopping and got stuck in a supermarket somewhere, surrounded by infected; or maybe one of them might have been the family he’d killed outside, who knew? – but helped himself to their canned and tinned goods anyway.
He’d half-expected to find a couple of the houses empty anyway, he thought, because he’d been watching the street the last few days and had seen very little movement, no twitches of curtains or people looking out of windows – in the three or four days he’d been watching.
Apart from the Dead in the streets, he’d seen very little other sign of life so to speak.
Theirs was a small street, practically a cul-de-sac, with only about a dozen houses or so on it, and though Kevin knew few of his neighbours to speak to, he did know where a couple of them lived.
The third house he broke into belonged to a small family.
A mother, a father, and their two twin daughters.
The mother he found in the bathroom, having obviously slashed her own wrists.
Infected, the woman had come back to life in death but had been unable to push her way up out of the bath; both because of the damage she had done to the tendons in her arms, but also because all the blood in the bath had made the ceramic surface too slippery to get any purchase.
When Kevin had found her, the mother had been squealing like a stuck pig and thrashing around in her own rotting juices and the stagnant water of the bath like a beached whale.
Kevin had simply closed his eyes and brought the cricket bat down on her head again and again until the squealing eventually stopped.
The smell in the bathroom had been one of the worst he had ever smelled in his life – the mother having soiled herself in the last moments of her death.
Kevin himself had almost thrown up, moments after leaving the bathroom, but that had not been the worst he had encountered.
In one of the bedrooms, the father had hanged himself in a bid to free himself of his misery.
Unfortunately he too must somehow have become infected because where he hang, his body still thrashed in a cruel semblance of life. The electrical cord around his neck had started to cut into his throat both from where his body had started to rot, and from his constant thrashing around, and the man’s eyes rolled in their sockets constantly as his now useless fingers attempted to free himself from the knot he himself had tied around his neck whilst alive.
Just like his wife, the man had soiled himself in death, but unlike with the mother, Kevin had elected not to put the man out of his misery.
This was because Kevin judged it would put too much risk to his own person.
As Kevin had started to draw close, the dad had stopped trying to free himself and had, instead, started reaching for him instead, gnashing and snarling at him with his teeth like some kind of crazed animal, until Kevin had chosen to withdraw.
Kevin had just shut the door and walked away.
The worst sight in the house had come in the third bedroom.
It had obviously been the girl’s room from the way it was decorated, and the mother and father must have shut them both in here when they’d realised they were infected. The older of the two girls was still feeding on her dead twin when Kevin entered, but soon broke off as he opened the door.
Screaming at him, the elder sibling by a few hours had flown across the bed towards him and Kevin had only just been able to raise his cricket bat to block her before she was upon him; pushing him to the floor with the crazed strength she now seemed to possess; her teeth gnashing merely inches from his face; blood, saliva, and bodily fluids flying from her as she thrashed her head back and forth, trying to get past the bat he was holding so she could bite into his flesh.
It had taken all his strength to eventually push her off him and as soon as he did, she came flying back towards him in attack. Kevin had dropped the bat this time, unable to get enough momentum in the small space of the bedroom to swing it at her and still cause enough damage to drop her, and had instead grabbed either side of her head with his gloved hands as she attacked.
With all his strength, Kevin had smashed her head into the wall, and then continued smashing and bashing it until her skull had cracked like an egg, and something he strongly suspected might be brains had started to leak out.
This time as he’d left the room, he had thrown up…and had carried on going until all the contents of his stomach had been brought up.
By the time he was finished, Kevin was shaking and had started to think maybe the Zombie apocalypse wasn’t such a godsend after all.
***
As he sat in the family’s front room, Kevin started to remove some of his cricket gear. He was hot, and he was sweating, and he thought he could smell his own body odour on himself he smelled that bad.
He felt hot, feverish, and out of breath – and wasn’t sure how much of that was from all the exertion he’d just out himself through, and how much of it was from him still feeling a bit rough.
He found himself wondering how the family in this house had become infected.
As far as he knew, they had not been near any of the initial Terrorist attacks that had started this whole thing off, and hadn’t appeared to have been bitten.
So how had they become infected?
He thought again about some of the stories he’d been reading on the internet about H1N1-Z, in the days before Z-day had arrived.
How the British government had supposedly been covering everything up and playing everything down in the early days of the virus, and about how violence was reputed to have broken out in parts of mainland Europe, leading to the governments there implementing martial law and ordering their police to shoot people on sight if they left their homes.
Things were supposed to have started getting better over there in the past few weeks leading up to Z-day, and life had allegedly started almost, but not quite, getting back to normal over in parts of Italy and Spain, but that was only if you believed what the mainstream media wanted you to believe.
Kevin had heard just as many stories that even before Z-day, governments in Europe were still clandestinely burning the bodies of the dead, and not letting relatives claim any of them for burial.
At the time he had asked himself what they were trying to hide, but now he was starting to suspect the answer.
Contrary to popular belief, Z-day hadn’t been the start of the Zombie apocalypse.
It had already been here.
The world’s governments had just been covering it all up.
And now he was starting to feel ill.
Paranoia, Kevin thought. It’s just paranoia. I’ve been observing all the proper precautions – keeping my social distance, washing my hands.
True, he hadn’t gone as far as some people.
He hadn’t gone out wearing a face mask, or protective gloves. He hadn’t sanitised his shopping after coming back from the supermarket like he’d seen some people doing on social media – one of his friends had posted pictures of her washing all her shopping in the bath – or left all his post for 24 hours before opening it in case anyone handling his mail might have been infected, but he had been cautious and had listened to all the advice from the government.
There was a fine line, he thought, between being careful and taking everything to the extreme and the truth was, humans still needed to come into contact with germs and micro bacteria or their immune system would cease to work due to lack of exposure to potentially harmful microbes.
Kevin was still convinced that one of the reasons people had so many allergies these days was because all the chemicals cleaning companies produced claimed to kill 99% of all germs, thus contributing to this lack of exposure.
But what did he know, he wasn’t a scientist.
Kevin bent over and started hacking up again.
He had started to feel faint, a bit giddy, and was starting to struggle to breathe,
Hyperventilating, he told himself. I’m just hyperventil
ating from shock is all. I’m not ill, I’m not ill…I’ve just overexerted myself, that’s all. I just need some fresh air, that’s all it is.
Kevin pushed himself back to his feet and grabbing the rucksack of food that he’d gathered so far from the neighbouring houses, started to move towards the rear of the house.
Maybe if he stepped outside and stood out in the back garden for a few moments, he thought, got some fresh air into his lungs, then maybe he’d start to feel better. Black spots ran before his eyes, and Kevin thought he felt his throat starting to close up.
Blood started to trickle first from his nose, and then from his eyes.
Kevin put his hand up and wiped it away.
Not ill, he tried to tell himself again. Not ill…I’ve not been exposed. It’s all fine…
As Kevin stepped outside the back door, he tripped on the back step and fell flat on his face, blood from his nose and eyes still running, pooling on the ground all around him.
Not ill, I’m not ill…can’t be…were the last words Kevin thought, and then everything went black.
It took about half an hour before he rose again.
Getting back to his feet, the thing that had once been Kevin abandoned the rucksack he’d brought with him and started moving towards the end of the garden and the open back gate that waited there.
As he caught the scent of something on the wind, Kevin’s walking corpse let out a moan, then leaving the garden behind him, slowly started moving in the direction of the scent he’d detected.
The scent of the living…
Somewhere out there were other survivors…
But not for long.
Within moments, others just like him joined Kevin on the street – walking corpses like himself, who now emerged from some of the neighbouring houses and gardens he had never gotten a chance to explore – and before long, what had started as a small group slowly became a horde.
Reaching the end of their street, the horde turned and as one, slowly started moving towards town...
All of them following the thing that had once been Kevin.
Chapter ten: Stuck on the roof (continued)
Day 5
Dear Diary…I’ve been writing this diary for 5 days now and yet, it feels like I’ve been writing this forever.
Five days…that’s all it’s been.
Five days since The Anniversary of Z-day, and yet somehow I’ve still not managed to finish telling you the story of what led us here.
How we got to where we find ourselves today.
Stuck up here on this tower block roof, two years into the Z-pocalypse.
As the situation in the capital began getting worse and worse, riots, looting and violence began erupting not just in London and across all the major cities, but in the outlying towns and villages too. Myself, and several other members of the tower block’s Residential Housing Committee all got together and decided that it was time we took swift action to defend ourselves.
A few years back, when the Brexit riots had all broken out, a group of us had all helped barricade the doors and entrances to our tower block when it looked as though trouble might spread into our own neighbourhood. Now, with things rapidly spiralling out of control again and looking like they might even be worse than last time, all of us who made up the Committee decided that we needed to act again before the violence and the looting made it all the way out here.
We might be over-reacting but those of us who made up the Committee wanted to be ready just in case.
We sent out a mass email to all of the residents, and then another message via our WhatsApp group, and then went round and knocked on the doors of anyone who still didn’t have a computer or access to WhatsApp - of which there were a few – to announce our plans, and tell them there would be an informal meeting down in the lobby later on for anyone who wanted to discuss our decision.
A few of the residents in the tower block didn’t like the thought of being barricaded in, and wanted to go out and check on their friends and families - after only being able to contact them these past few weeks by Skype or by phone because of the recent ‘lockdown’ - so those people we allowed to go, but the general consensus seemed to be that we were making the right decision.
We did make it perfectly clear to those who wanted to leave that if they left now, depending on what happened, they might not be allowed back into the tower block again, but for the most part they all seemed okay with that.
If all that sounds a bit harsh now, then what you have to remember is that right then, the first reports of the Dead coming back to life were only just still starting to emerge.
Many people still couldn’t quite come to terms with the fact that we were in the midst of a Zombie apocalypse, and still thought it was just the sick and infected that were turning violent, not people that were supposed to be dead and as such, just wanted to be with their families – their parents and grandparents, who they might not have seen in weeks – so they could look after them and help protect them from potential rioters and looters.
To be honest, I couldn’t really blame them for wanting to leave. I did think they were being a bit stupid and would be much better off staying put, seeing as how information was still coming in about what was really happening out there in the world outside our doors, but then the whole situation was a little bit different for me. My own family had all emigrated to New Zealand years before to live with a distant aunt over there, who was starting to suffer from dementia and had no other family to speak of, leaving me behind, so it was not exactly like I had anywhere else to go.
Personally I was not too worried for my family’s safety, even though all my attempts to contact them in the last few hours so far had failed, because I had only spoken to them a few days ago and from what little I could gather, New Zealand pretty much had their own pandemic pretty much under control. I also knew full well that all forms of communication were currently being flooded by people likewise trying to get in touch with their relatives, so for now just figured that was the only reason I could not make contact.
I’m not saying I wasn’t a little bit worried, but from all I could make out, the situation over here in the U.K seemed a lot more dire.
I had no idea, right then, of the size and scale of what was happening.
If I had, then maybe, just maybe, I’d have tried a little harder to reach them…
***
Once we had the main entrances and doors to the tower block secure, many of us headed up to the roof, whilst others scoured the Internet or tried to find something on television to tell us what was going on and to get a better picture of what was happening across the rest of the globe.
As more and more hours passed, the sheer scale of what was occurring, not just here but everywhere all across the world now, started to quickly become more apparent. Though, as yet, no-one was still really talking about Zombies, or even mentioning the Z-word, it was clear that some kind of global event was underway that would have severe repercussions for all of our futures and most likely, moving forwards nothing would ever be the same again.
Mr. Singh, the owner of the local General Store and one of the founding members of the tower block’s Residents Committee, came around to my apartment and offered up a suggestion that we should start telling all the residents left in the building to start filling up their baths and sinks with water. This was something he had read about on the C.D.C website concerning what to do in an emergency. What was happening now, he argued, seemed to definitely qualify as an emergency and if water supplies became contaminated or started to run dry, this way we would all have a ready supply of drinking water at our disposal. Though some of the residents thought that we might be being a little over cautious, still I noted as we went around that not one of them dismissed Mr. Singh’s suggestion totally out of hand.
In the first few days and weeks, and months that followed Z-Day, with no sign of any rescue, Mr. Singh would go on to prove to be one of our most valuable sources of advice. It was bec
ause of him that, a few days later, we first began taking stock of all the food and supplies we had in the building, and it was also because of him and his foresight that we were as well off as we were.
Mr. Singh had been on his way back from the nearby Cash And Carry when he had first heard the news of the rioting, and so had parked his van, full to the brim with canned, tinned and bottled goods, in his lock-up underneath the building, in the tower block’s underground garage, rather than taking it back to his store to be looted. The building’s underground garage is secured from the rest of the world outside by means of a pair of thick, heavy metal gates that can only be opened with an electronic keypad security code – and so that meant that anything being stored down there, beneath our building was always going to be relatively safe from raiders.
It wasn’t just canned and tinned goods Mr. Singh had stored in his lock-up though. His brother, who owned a restaurant, had been storing a chest freezer full of meat down there as well these past few weeks, powered by an electric generator, whilst his restaurant was being refurbished.
All in all, once we had accounted for everything, it soon turned out we had a fairly good supply of food between us that should last us quite a few months, provided we were careful. And that was before we started scavenging what had been left behind in the empty apartments of those other residents who had chosen to leave and had left.
It was almost a whole month before the power finally went out for good, but by that time, we had pretty much organised ourselves and already prepared for that eventuality. The Internet had been pretty much been dead for weeks by then, with no one left posting anything on social media anymore, but before the power cut out for good, a few of us still managed to gather a few facts about what had actually happened back on Z-Day.
The general consensus amongst scientists was that the Terrorist attacks had been responsible for releasing a new, more virulent strain of the virus, H1N1-Z, than the one that had previously been sweeping the globe. This new strain was less communicable through direct human contact, and not as airborne as the original H1N1-Z virus that had triggered the pandemic but, much like HIV, was passed on instead through the exchange of human blood, bodily fluids, and saliva. It could survive for less time than H1N1-Z outside the human body, but appeared to work much more quickly and at a far accelerated rate on all of those that it infected.
