by RR Haywood
‘Yours then,’ Dave hands it to Blinky.
‘Got a stick,’ Blinky says.
‘Dave,’ Cookey whispers, ‘say, Dave.’
‘Got a stick, Dave,’ Blinky says knowing she is in the company of a master.
‘Mine,’ Dave selects two equally sized knives and spins them over the back of his hands to test the weight and balance point, ‘lead,’ he orders Blinky.
She leads them back through the dining room and lounge where Dave signals for her to drop back and finds Meredith pushing past him. She’d got through the door and remembered the pan of water in the kitchen so ran that direction to quench her raging thirst. Then scuttled to a corner to take a desperate piss as Dave led the others through.
‘We charge and divert their forces,’ Dave says in his dull deadpan voice, ‘draw them back to this doorway.’
‘Got it,’ Cookey says.
‘Yep,’ Mo Mo confirms the order.
‘Yes, Dave,’ Blinky copies the others.
They charge through and out into a line as Meredith once more leaps into the fray. The flanking movement done by the living this time and the first few kills are glorious and quick but the host bodies they fight ramp up a level with increasing savagery. A dirty fight. A filthy dirty sordid scrap and the infection pits the many against the few.
On the stairs they give ground, forced back step after step until Charlie and Paula join the front rank as they hack down at the never ending surge of bodies throwing themselves without any sign of weakening.
Dave spins through the ranks slicing and killing but the battle is pitted against them. Mo Mo stabbing but he slips on the wet floor and just manages to avoid the instant lunge taken on sight of the mishap. Voices shouting, giving warnings to each other but drowned out by the howling undead.
Clarence knows they can’t hold the line. The hockey sticks give range but the blades are poor and no match for the axes they are so used to fighting with. His fury builds up as he prepares for the final onslaught and the soldiers mind is already working, knowing he and a couple of the lads can hold them back while the two young girls and Paula get away. Sexist. Misogynist but there’s no point in everyone dying when some can get away and he knows the lads won’t step away from the fight, probably not Paula either but he can scream an order for her to go with the girls and maybe she’ll see the sense.
A wave of pressure sweeps through the infected. A new charge that drives them wild with fury and harder they push to get through that door. Harder they drive into the old house. Something pushing them. Eyes flick up to the wide doorway and a strange change in the action taking place. Mo Mo beaten back towards the lounge doors, flanked and encircled by a closing group. Cookey screaming as he batters and swipes. Dave slicing into anything he can stab. Blinky overextends and fights deep into the lines with strong arms that yield the stick and strong legs that drive her on. She takes hits and swipes but the protective clothing absorbs the impacts and only serves to give a false of security.
By the door now, too far from the others and she slips on the tiles but without the dexterity of Mo Mo and weighed down by the clothing she staggers, tries to find balance and falls hard to the ground. On her back and a head drops onto her chest. Dave snaps round, his eyes fixed on the door and a rare smile shows on his otherwise expressionless face. Nick on the stairs finds fresh energy surging into his arms. Cookey and Blowers get a pulse of strength and suddenly the fatigue is gone. The infected ramped up but the team matches that level. Blinky, on her back with a detached head on her chest stares in horror at the old woman lunging towards her. Slow motion now, the final seconds of death and her body dumps endorphins and hormones into her system, slowing everything down, speeding her mind up, greater strength, greater speed but frozen in fear of the final act. The old woman’s teeth are bared. Her eyes ablaze with a terrible red bloodshot appearance. Hands ready with jagged broken nails that will slice Blinky’s skin open. Gravity and thrust working to drive the old woman over and down onto the hockey player. A foot slams into the side of the woman’s head and knocks her clear to the side. A roaring voice filling the air, louder than all the others. A man’s face glaring down at her with eyes so dark and filled with such death that it sends more terror into Blinky’s heart than anything she has ever known. Dark hair dripping wet and plastered to his scalp and lips curled back in such primeval rage that it seers the memory of that view into her brain. A double bladed axe rises over him, held tight on the shaft by knuckles showing white from the pressure. Heads lunging towards her. Hands outstretched to rake and claw. The man closer now, smiling an evil grin as he glides through the air and that slowness ends as abruptly as the world began and he swings the axe into everything and everything is taken away. Nothing can withstand him. He steps easily over her and into the battle and she snaps her view with eyes wide to see them wilt from his presence. Blinky has seen it before. On the field at play when her aggression sends an instinctive impulse into the opposing players and they can’t help but fall back from the onslaught of absolute hatred bolstered by an unwavering certainty of victory. That’s what it is. There is no doubt to be had for this man drives an energy before him that sends electric pulses through her body.
‘Get up,’ A voice breaks through the static charged air, a hand on her arm tugging her to rise, ‘get up!’ the woman urges and tugs harder. A beautiful woman holding a machine gun, ‘GET UP,’ the woman shouts and fires the weapon into the face of a monster bearing down.
Blinky rises, her feet scuffing to gain purchase and she gets pushed roughly back against the wall by the beautiful woman who steps in front to shield Blinky from the still raging infected bodies.
Against the wall she stares in rapture at the battle taking place in front of her and the man with an axe moving faster than any man has a right to move. The others rally on him. Fighting with an intensity that sends her heart soaring with incredible beats per minute. Dave at his side and that grace defies the executions he administers. Blowers from the stairs to the side of Cookey and with snarling faces they bear down with unrelenting force. Mo Mo on his feet whipping left and right to fell those that encircled him. The giant discarding his weapon to hammer fists into faces that break necks. She watches him bend with a speed that defies his size and rip a full grown man from the ground by his ankles and use that living form to batter at the helpless undead. Round and round he spins and the body bloodies into a pulp but it’s not enough, it’s never enough. The violence in him explodes and a berserker he becomes. Smashing, stomping, snapping and downing them with horrendous blows. Nick like a demon that smiles wryly as if he knows something they don’t. That they can’t be beaten. That they will never be beaten and the huge dog matches him kill for kill and without Nick knowing it, the dog chooses and protects her partner within the battle. Paula flaying with a wildness and always watched by Roy and there, in amongst them and snarling with the pulsing energy that drives them on is Charlie. The captain of the team. The leader that saw them through the dark days when the world was falling. Charlie snarling and raging with hair flying out as she scythes left to right. That energy catches. It extends from the group to flow into her. Blinky feels it. Deep inside. A real thing that drives and makes her launch from the wall and attack. Attack anything that gets in her way. Slaughter them for that man with the axe leads and everyone must follow. The beautiful woman fires the weapon into the crowd then slams the butt of the gun into a face that looms too close and always, like the others, her eyes flick to the man with the axe.
He gets faster still and like a ghost the dark brooding man whips through them with Dave forever at his side. Between them they kill more than the rest combined. Death after death is given out but it’s clean and pure and the exact opposite of the tainted touch of death so threatened by these things.
Then it’s over and a single solitary infected man stands stock still amidst the bodies of his kind that lie broken and forever dead on the tiled floor. The fighting ends. Chests heaving, eyes dark and
fixed. The brooding man turns and stares across to the single undead. Dave adjusts the grip on his knife, ready to flick it out and across that short distance, always watching, always scanning. The dog drops her head and moves out to the side of the brooding man, her lips pulled back to show the teeth that wait. The speed is stunning. From one side of the room the brooding man crosses until his hand clutches the undead by the throat.
‘He is coming,’ the infected man chokes the words out.
‘Bring him,’ the man with the axe hisses.
‘One race…’
‘MY RACE,’ the brooding man rallies the words back without a flicker of hesitation, ‘and we win this day,’ with a vicious twist he sends the undead down onto his knees and into the open lunging jaws of the dog that snaps and rags and the last one dies a terrible death.
Twenty-Six
‘Where are we?’
‘No idea, I thought we were heading towards the square but…’ I look round at the featureless view of sheet rain greying everything out. Our feet splodging through the field becoming heavier with mud that clings to our feet, ‘listen,’ I reach out to place a gentle hand on her arm, ‘hear that?’
She stares at me than down at the ground while straining to hear. The rain is a blast of noise that strikes the ground in varying rhythms of water on water and water on mud, but it’s steady and almost formulaic. Something else. A harder sound of water being poured or a hose turned on a concrete path.
‘Hear it?’
She nods and bites her bottom lip while turning slowly, ‘this way,’ she reaches back to take my hand.
‘Sure?’
‘Definitely,’ she tugs me on but doesn't let go of my hand. ‘Water from a roof,’ she turns back to smile and the sight of her catches the breath in my throat. Soaked with wet hair plastered over her scalp with strands across her forehead and down her cheeks. A day of action, of movement, tension, fright, fear and it’s put a rosy hue into the golden skin of her cheeks.
It gets like this. A weird sense of hysteria, of a good mood and happy endorphins that get released when you survive something so dangerous and deadly. So close to dying and being hurt but we survived. We ran and survived, fought and survived. I grin back and jog a fast step to fall in beside her.
The different sound matches the description she gave and I can hear the intense pouring from an overflowing drainpipe as it falls the distance from roof to ground. The shape comes slowly. Indistinct and more a suggestion of structure, of something lurking and waiting. Approaching from an angle and we’re dead on towards the gap between two of the rows of buildings, but which ones I wouldn’t be able to say. The fences of the rear gardens show stark now and we slow down, dropping our profiles into a loping crouch so we can edge forward. The rain is so intense it masks any noise we make, but what masks our noise also masks the noises of others. We stop frequently, listening, waiting then another few feet we go. Between the buildings and the broken drainpipe cascades a water fall from the tiled roof down onto the ground. Marcy shivers but whether from a chill or fear I know not.
Open ground ahead of us but the rain is so intense I’ve got no idea if the Saxon is still there or not. Only a few corpses here which must mean we’re on the other side of the square, opposite to where we fought. For all I know there could be a hundred more undead gathered round the Saxon waiting for us. They might be inside it or hiding underneath.
I lean over to place my mouth into Marcy’s ear, ‘wait here.’
She shakes her head vehemently and grabs my arm, ‘no way.’
‘They might be there.’
‘Together,’ she mouths back and fixes me and angry stare to enforce her point.
‘We have no weapons,’ I try and give an angry stare back but I’m sure the water running down my face makes me look more comical than otherwise.
‘We have you,’ she mouths and nods for me to go on.
Her confidence is inspiring but very misplaced. Without a weapon I can’t fight my way out of a paper bag.
Fuck it. In for a penny and all that. We stand up, lean out from the building line then burst into a flat out run. Splashing through deep puddles and without the cover of the buildings the rain pelts us hard in the face.
There it is. Broad sided with those huge wheels and mighty engine block standing proud. We get to the side and drop down to a crouch before I ease forward and peer up through the passenger side window. Nothing obvious. Grimacing in anticipation of the consequences I crack the door and slowly open it. Inch by inch. Nothing. No snarls or howling decaying faces that charge from the back. I dart forward and snatch a view of the back which is exactly as we left it with boxes of ammunition and our hand weapons left in situ.
I waste no time and clamber into the vehicle, over the seats and get my beloved axe back. One of the spare assault rifles is next, checked, loaded and ready. There are two rifles and a pistol back in that house and those are weapons we can ill afford to lose.
‘Here,’ back outside I hand the assault rifle over, ‘safety is off. Listen, we left our rifles and the pistol in the house…’
‘You want to go back for them?’
‘We can’t lose weapons,’ I wince as though expecting a harsh rebuke but a look of determination crosses her face and she shoulders the weapon.
‘Ready?’
‘Guess so,’ she swallows at the thought of going back in, ‘what have you got?’
‘Axe,’ I lift it to show her.
‘Okay,’ she pushes the air out between her cheeks and nods, ‘let’s go.’
‘You’ve done well today,’ I say quickly, ‘really well.’
‘Aw thanks,’ she shoots me a wide humourless grin followed by a roll of her eyes, ‘you can thank me later but right now I’m soaked and getting cold.’
‘So ungrateful,’ I add my own tut and stand up.
‘Bloody should show some gratitude,’ she mutters.
‘Shush now,’ I wave my hand at her and step round the back of the Saxon to ignore the string of expletives being muttered.
We tread slow and careful, heading in a direct line towards the house and the weight of the axe held ready in my hands feels really bloody nice. Like I’m complete again. The rain is incredible and the sheer weight of water is already covering the flat ground in a huge shallow lake.
The bodies come into view first. Singles then more until the ghastly mound of bodies killed by the horse is right in front of us. It looks worse than ever. The rain has washed the blood away and left glistening exposed bodies that look like something from a wax works museum. Gnarled faces still twisted with expressions of utter hatred. Some stare open eyed with red bloodshot glazed looks to the sky. The wounds are clear without the blood. Hoof marks and broken limbs. Shattered skulls and knife wounds from my relentless stabbing. A bare arse catches my attention and I stop to point down, ‘Jimmy Carr,’ I call back softly with an emphatic nod.
‘That,’ she replies, ‘is not Jimmy Carr.’
‘It so is, look…look at him.’
‘I can bloody see and that is not Jimmy Carr.’
‘You can’t see! You can only see his arse…turn him over and…’
‘Howie I am soaking wet and am not turning bodies over to see which one looks like Jimmy Carr. Can we please just go.’
Her tone leaves no room for negotiation so with a huff I move on towards the house. Which turns out to be empty, apart from the bodies that is. No living undead. No snarling furious attacks. What we find is the kitchen ceiling hanging down and a waterfall pouring from the burst pipe in the bathroom above.
We find the assault rifles and I head upstairs to the bathroom and look down at the sagging floor. Bodies everywhere. Some are slowly sliding down the hole in the broken floor, others have already gone through and still the pipe pumps water into the room.
‘There,’ Marcy scoops it up from underneath the head of the corpse and passes it over.
‘You got the holster,’ I say and pass it back.
‘Smart arse,’ she shoves it down into the holster, ‘will it still work?’
‘No idea, water isn’t good for them but…Dave can strip and clean it.’
‘What about these rifles in the rain? Will they work?’
‘Er…’
‘Say if you don’t know.’
‘It’s not that…’
‘Do you know?’
‘No. No I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know if your weapons work in the rain?’
‘It hasn’t rained that much,’ I say weakly, ‘so er…it never really came up in conversation.’
‘Yeah but still, you’d ask right? If they worked in the rain?’
‘Um. Maybe Dave mentioned but…’
‘Okay.’
‘No, no it’s a valid point and I should have asked Dave or Clarence.’
‘It doesn't matter,’ she says politely, ‘you can’t remember everything.’
‘It just hasn’t rained that much, you know…like been really hot and…’
‘Seventeen days though?’ She says with a questioning tilt of her head, ‘and you didn’t ask if they worked in the rain?’
‘Yeah but…’
‘And the fort is next to the sea…so water everywhere…you know….just saying.’
‘No it’s fine, it’s a good point.’
‘Have I hurt your feelings?’ She asks, ‘sorry, I was a bit blunt then.’
‘No no, really, it was a good point and…’
‘No listen, I was out of order, sorry, Howie. I shouldn’t have been so blunt.’
I toe the head of a corpse and shrug, ‘yeah you know, been a lot going on.’
‘Course, yeah I totally understand.’
The eye from the head plops out, ‘I mean, you know…we haven’t done that badly considering.’
‘Oh you’ve done really well,’ she places a reassuring hand on my arm while I gently tap the hanging eye back and forth, ‘like so well and…it’s one thing, rifles and rain and you’re right, it hasn’t rained so…’
‘Yeah but I should have checked.’
