Don't Be Dead- Heartache After The Outbreak

by Paul Wilcock

  I see that he’s back in the queue again, obviously a favourite with the crowd as he keeps drawing blood and also for being the victim of my vicious and unprovoked attack. As he picks up his third axe I pull the axe from the wheel where it was lodged against my arm and throw it into the crowd. I miss my target but do hit one of the children sat on the edge of the bank watching, he falls into the water screaming and the crowd goes crazy, screaming at my “prey” to kill me; the child is still alive and dragged from the water by the bystanders as I wish I hadn’t thrown the axe but had used it to cut my remaining bonds instead. I do still have one hand free however and there’s the axe stuck in my leg up for grabs. It’s an awkward angle for me to grip and I have to close my eyes and grit my teeth in pain as I try to pull it free from the wood beneath my thigh without ripping up my flesh too much more. Splinters shower the side of my face as another axe comes way too close to ending my life. My efforts are disturbed by the sudden rush of water as I’m dragged beneath the surface again and I come out choking and spluttering from not being able to take a breath. I give the axe another hard tug and it comes free, slips from my grasp and plops into the murk below. I curse loudly as another blade spins past me, through the spokes of the wheel, harmlessly but frustratingly away. The water rushes up to meet me again and I quickly turn my head to the side and take a deep breath, the axe that landed near my head catches my eye and as soon as I break the surface I reach across and wrench it free. I chop at the rope around my other wrist, it only takes three solid hits to cut myself free and I’m able to bend at the waist and grip my leg for support while I hack at the ropes around my ankles, thankfully this position keeps me from being dragged through the water again and both legs are free within seconds. The crowd rages behind me, not impressed by my ingenuity and they surge towards the wheel ready to stop my escape. I clamber onto the edge of the wheel riding it to the top, spring to my feet and walk in place as the wheel spins beneath me while I weigh up my options; angry mobs on both sides of me, stinking fetid water beneath me, rooftops above me? As I look up my balance is thrown off and I fall through the boards and into the centre of the wheel catching hold of the supports above me which are now rotating me down towards the waiting crowd, at the front is my “prey”, eager to get his hands on me. His good hand reaches through the slats of the wheel, takes hold of my shirt and I’m forced to let go of my handhold and take hold of his hand, pulling him into the wheel. A slash with my axe cleaves his hand free of his arm and we both drop down into the water below. I tuck the hand into my trousers, after all of this I don’t want to come away without my proof, it feels weird to have a man’s hand so close to my cock but it’s not moving so I guess I can deal with it. I can’t see anything at all in the dark filthy water and so just slash wildly around until I feel the blade connect, once it does I pull him in close and find that there are infected down here in the depths; bloated, slimy infected, biting into my target’s throat, shoulders and arms. I panic, the breath I was holding escapes me and I watch it rise in bubbles to the surface as I swallow a huge gulp of dirty river water. I kick away downstream, in the opposite direction to the crowds and eventually break the surface coughing and choking, out of sight, out of immediate danger. Minutes go by before I can drag myself onto the bank and then another ten minutes of lying on my back gasping and panting go by before I can stand. I have what I came for, it wasn’t anywhere near as easy as I’d hoped and I decide that whatever happens next I definitely won’t be making my final payment.

  I skirt around the central population this time, keeping to the dark alleyways on the edges of town as I wend my way back to Madame Tussauds. Thankfully the journey back is mainly uneventful, an infected man did come out of a doorway behind me on one of the abandoned, unused streets; I didn’t hear him and he would most likely have grabbed me and infected me if a bullet from a military issue sniper rifle hadn’t splattered his brains against the alley wall. I heard that, and it took a while for it to register in my brain exactly what had happened; looking up I see a sniper on a nearby rooftop, scope aimed at me now, he gives a little wave, I give a cautious wave back, thanks for stopping the infected but the point has been made clear, there is always someone watching me and they can kill me in an instant if I don’t follow the rules, the fat man in the brothel wasn’t lying. Shit.

  There’s none of the previous friendliness and welcoming host when I enter Madame Tussauds for the second time, they have me now, I’m nothing but a worm on their hook, no need to try and impress me anymore. I drop the severed hand and the file on the desk and the fat man looks up at me with a smirk on his face.

  “I hear you had a spot of trouble at the Mill Wheel, I forgot to warn you about the locals down there, they don’t like your kind much.” I want to kill him, or at the very least punch him in the face but I control myself, say nothing and he lets out a small grunting laugh as he rises from his seat “Well, the first part of your payment has been made so let’s get you set up for your hour in paradise!”

  “Hour?” I ask, genuinely shocked, even though I’m not actually here for the sex it still doesn’t seem fair that I only get an hour for what they wanted in return.

  “Trust me, an hour is plenty, these fantasy situations we provide are so exciting, so stimulating, you’ll only need fifteen minutes,” he quickly adds “payment remains the same if you don’t use the full hour though, so relax, take your time! I leave you now with Simon, he’ll get your costume, take you to your room.”

  Costume? This is all too weird, I need to remember that I’m here to find David and see if he can tell me what happened to Sarah, I can’t get distracted by the bizarreness of everything here.

  Simon greets me with a bored face like he’s seen it all before, every kind of sick pervert, every twisted fantasy, he’s become totally desensitised to it all and even the strangest requests are met with boredom “Star Wars detention cell princess fantasy, here’s your costume, you can put it on in that cubicle.” He hands me a black bundle and I take it into the cubicle.

  It’s actually nice to get out of my stinking drenched old clothes, a shower would have been even nicer but nothing like that is offered. As I step out of the sodden pile of my clothes and pull out my costume, a sweaty, fetid smell comes out with it and I realise that the outfits aren’t washed after the customer sessions, a hundred other sweaty men have fucked a dirty infected woman in them and now my own sweaty, river pollution encrusted body will add to the filth. I pull it on, I have to play along; it’s a baggy, one size fits all (badly) Dark Invader costume, they haven’t even got an official costume, it’s near enough though I suppose. I put the helmet on, quickly remove it again as another foul odour fills my nostrils, and exit the cubicle carrying the helmet under my arm.

  Simon looks up as I come out and I see my second smirk in half an hour as he appraises the costume “Ready? Come with me.”

  I follow him down the corridors trying to see into the other rooms we pass but whatever is behind the curtains is kept hidden from view. We stop at one of the entrances and Simon says “This is you, bring your costume back when you’re done and get your clothes. Enjoy.” Then he walks away back down the corridor. I watch him go, he doesn’t stop to peek behind any curtains or listen to anything going on in the rooms, completely uninterested, which suits me fine.

  I’m alone and I know I should just go looking for David now but I can’t help feel curious about what’s behind the curtain. I pull it back and step inside a grey room that looks roughly like the Death Star interrogation room as far as I can remember, but it basically is just a grey room with a grey surface to sit on sticking out of one wall and a dirty bed has been placed against the other. On the bed is a woman dressed in a once-white Princess Leia costume and wig, the costume is now as grey as the room and torn in places, the legs sticking out of the costume do look quite nice and I can feel myself getting a bit too interested in this, distracted from my true mission; luckily as she turns her face towards me and her dead blackened e
yes look at me and her toothless mouth hangs open, rotten infected tongue hanging out, I come back to my senses and leave the room, stalking the corridors at a fast pace, curtains whipped back as I pass, checking for David.

  I find him caged in an otherwise empty room, naked and dirty, he shrinks away as I open the curtain, squashing himself as small as possible against the far end of his cage. I’m pretty sure it’s him but I ask anyway “David?” He turns his head towards me now, but I’m just a silhouette against the opening to the room “David, I’m a friend of Sarah’s,” I continue “do you know what happened to her, where she is?”

  He comes to the bars now and starts pleading “Please, get me out of here, I can’t live like this, they…..make me do things…..”

  I look at his cage, it looks solid, firmly padlocked, I can’t get him out “I can’t get you out, I don’t have the key, Sarah, David, do you know where she is? What happened to her when the infection started spreading?”

  David isn’t paying attention to my questions, he just keeps begging and pleading to be set free, I feel bad for the guy but what can I do?……then I think of something “David,” I say “if you tell me what happened to Sarah I’ll give you this axe, it won’t get you out of the cage but it will give you a fighting chance when they next open it, do we have a deal?” He looks at me for a long time, tears in his eyes, he still wants me to set him free but decides to take the axe as a second best.

  “Ok, give me the axe, give me the axe.” He hisses it, scared that I’ll be discovered before I get chance to hand it over or that I’ll change my mind and leave. I pass it through the bars and he places it into a bucket in the corner of his cell, pushing it below the surface of his faeces “They only empty it once a week, safe in there,” he says.

  “Sarah?” I ask “Do you know what happened to her?”

  He thinks for a second then blurts it out and I have to try and keep up “We were filming out at Deptford Park, one of the zombie attack scenes but one of the zombies didn’t stop when the director called ‘Cut’ and started biting one of the other zombie actors and we thought it was a joke, but he kept on biting into him and then more started to do the same and then everyone started to panic and run, me and Sarah ran into the school across the road and managed to barricade the doors. A large group of us lived there for a while but I was grabbed one day while out scavenging and brought here.”

  “Was Sarah still living there when you were taken?” I ask.

  “I think so, I hadn’t seen her in a while to be honest so….maybe not, I don’t know.” He looks down and then slinks away from the bars of his cage and sits on his dirty thin mattress crying softly and hugging himself, rocking back and forth.

  I wish him “good luck” as I turn away and peek through the edge of the curtain, checking both ways are clear before running back down the corridor towards my own sex room. As I round the corner I’m met by Simon and one of the door goons, the goon grabs me roughly by the shoulders as Simon addresses me with a sneer “Where have you been, your time was up ten minutes ago.” Had I been that long?

  “Sorry, I got a bit lost trying to find my way back to the changing rooms, I’m glad to see you I thought I’d be stuck in here forever.” I do a nervous little laugh, nobody else joins me and I’m marched back towards the changing room.

  “I hope you weren’t trying to get a free go on one of our other girls, that’s forbidden.”

  “No, of course not, I got lost that’s all, every corridor looks the same down here.”

  Back in the changing room my clothes are thrown at me, still sopping wet, and I go into the cubicle, but as I’m undressing I hear the goon tell Simon to bring me to the manager’s office once I’m done and I get that sinking feeling in my stomach as I realise that they are probably going to find out what I’ve been up to somehow; security cameras or torture or something so I need to escape instead and go and find Sarah at the school.

  I peek through a gap in the curtain, Simon’s back is turned to me so I burst through and wrap my belt around his neck, pull it tight. Simon’s hands instinctively reach for the belt but he can’t claw it away from his throat and I lean backwards, push him into the wall with my foot, slam his head forwards into the wall suddenly and then quickly pull back again, reapplying the pressure to his neck. He’s soon a deep red colour and his struggles get weaker and then he slumps and I let him drop to the floor before dragging him by the feet over to where the costumes are kept and bury him under a pile of them. I decide that my Dark Invader costume is well suited to sticking to the shadows and pull a wig from the shelves to cover my pink hair, it looks like it’s supposed to be some kind of 80’s Don Johnson style wig, I don’t know if it suits me, Simon very wisely doesn’t have a mirror in here so the customers can’t see how ridiculous they look. The corridor looks clear so I run for the fire exit and disappear into the night.

  Deptford Park looks quiet, there’s not much evidence of filming a movie, a sign at the entrance telling people where to go, one medium size caravan and a few bits of equipment; cameras, microphones and the like, broken and abandoned on the ground. The caravan door is open and the place has clearly been attacked and/or looted, there are photos from the filming strewn across the table and floor and I find some that have Sarah on them, swinging an axe at an attacking zombie, laughing with her co-stars while they eat lunch, one of them holds my attention for a few minutes longer, Sarah, staring into the distance with a sad look on her face, I’ve seen that look before and I think back to the night before we ended.

  I'm 21, it's June 2000, we started drinking at noon and now its ten thirty and tomorrow the world ends and I leave University behind for a few months but when I return Sarah will be gone and it won’t be the same, like a jigsaw with a piece missing, this is our last night together and it’s going way too fast when it needs to last forever. I look over at Sarah, she’s dancing now with her friends to Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence, I let my eyes wander around the room, there are numerous small groups of horny males eyeing the girls as they pass, nudging each other and laughing at something said behind the girl’s back. One sleazy looking guy is on his own, leaning against the railings that separate the dance floor from the rest of the club, watching Sarah, he doesn’t look away, even when taking a drink his eyes stay on her. I see him catch her eye and she smiles, he smiles back, she continues to dance, her group rotates so that her back is to him and she says something to her friends, they look over at him, lean in and say something into her ear. I don’t like the look on her face, she glances over at me and smiles, I don’t smile back, I take a drink, emptying my glass, breaking eye contact, and then return to the bar for another.

  The bar is busy, the queue is three people deep all the way along and it’s taking too long to get served, the person in front of me seems to be ordering drinks for everyone in the bar or something, at least six other people anyway, and it’s not just pints either, cocktails that take ages to make, I want to punch him in the back of the head but I don’t. When I reach the bar, squeezing in between the other thirsty people that have waited ten minutes to get this close to ordering, my hand rests in a sticky patch, anchoring me in place, confirming my position at the front of the queue, the girl by the side of me tries to order first when the barman leans in but I can lean in closer and shout louder and shut her out, my order only takes 30 seconds, one pint of lager, £1, no change needed, it annoys me even more that my order is so fast but I had to wait so long to place it. When I return to my spot by the dance floor, I can see Sarah’s friends still dancing but no Sarah, my first thought is that she’s gone to the toilet, but she would have gone with one of her friends, the way girls do. I count her friends; the fat one, the fatter one, the ugly one, the one I’d fuck, the lesbian with the pierced tongue, the ginger one I’d fuck, they are all still there. I look over at the queues of people buying drinks but I can’t see her there either. Then I check the railings by the dance floor on the opposite side and the guy, that fucking sleazy lookin
g guy, the one that was watching her, is gone too. My anger increases and I look around at the drunken idiots, laughing and having a good time and I want to push my glass into their faces and make them feel as bad as I do but I control my urges; I wish that Sarah would control hers, it’s our last night together and she’s gone off with someone else as soon as my back was turned. I head outside for some air, walk down to the river and stand at the railing watching the water rush by, I look up for a while, look at the stars, find the only constellation I know, the Big Dipper, wait and hope for a UFO to appear, an intergalactic war breaking out would be just the thing to take my mind off Sarah and her always constant baggage, full of other men.