“Help us,” the pleas began again.
A groan behind Tim caught his attention. He turned and saw that police officer had begun to stir. Somehow, he had survived the crash. Tim ran over to him, and bent down to… he didn’t know what he was going to do. The officer gave another groan, a deeper, longer sound, something guttural. Tim realized that it was a growl, just before he reached the crouched point of no return. The officer twisted its head and snapped its jaws shut, narrowly missing the same two fingers on Tim’s hand that had caused his own transformation.
The growls grew closer. A glance over his shoulder told Tim that he didn’t have long before they were upon him. He looked down at the people he had injured, and with a pang of guilt he turned and ran, hurdling the rising, undead police officer as he did.
They had followed the ring road, but there were plenty of houses in the area. Tim ran until he saw an open door. He bounded up the steps and charged over the threshold, doing his best to shut out the screams of those he left behind, and the wet ripping sound of their bodies being torn apart.
Only the officer followed, crashing into the door a few moments after Tim had slammed it shut. The door withheld the initial impact, but Tim knew he needed to do something to keep him safe long-term. Looking around, he saw the house was modern, and well kept. The hallway led directly onto the stairs, with what looked at first glance, to be the living room off to his immediate left. To the right was a door opening onto a small toilet. Between the door and the foot of the stairs was a heavy pine cabinet which could have had many uses, from bookcase to shoe cabinet, but it appeared to have been used as a little bit of everything. Unbothered by the contents of the cupboard, Tim ran and heaved the heavy cupboard over to the door. It was heavier that it looked, and by the time he had it in place, the pounding had ceased. Moving carefully, Tim crept into the living room, checking to see if anybody or anything lay in wait. The ground floor was deserted. The overturned dining table and chairs, along with half-eaten meals and blaring television, was evidence of a hasty departure.
The evening sky was beginning to darken. Tim knew he needed to hide, from the undead monsters that filled the street. He could hear the TV playing some sort of warning, begging people to keep calm. Tim couldn’t help but give an angry, coughed laugh before silencing the set. He also, after trying all three switches, managed to turn the lights off in the house. With the Venetian blinds closed, the darkness was disorienting. The layout of the room was foreign to him, and it took a while for Tim’s night vision to kick in.
He moved slowly through the ground floor, and into the kitchen. The door was closed and locked, the key missing. With the ground floor locked up and secure, Tim made his way back into the living room and peered through the blinds. The officer stood before the door, staring at it. He didn’t move. Behind him, in the street, the carcasses of those that he had left to die had begun to stir.
Within a few moments, five of the seven stood, and sniffed hungrily at the air. They ambled up and down the street, stiff and disjointed. Even in the light of the rising moon, their injuries were clear. Three walked on broken legs. The protruding bones caused them to move with a severe limp, but failed to stop them. Another walked with their intestines hanging between their legs like a long link of sausages. Every few steps, it would stumble over the hanging entrails and further pull them from their natural location. The fifth walked with the shoulder dislocated, and their head twisted on an angle that looked as though they were holding a mobile phone to their ear. Two other figures lay still. Seeing as how their limbs lay separated from their bodies, Tim assumed that they were stuck there at the very least.
Pulling away from the window, he checked the upper level of the house. It was empty. There was a pool of bloody vomit on the floor and walls of one of the bedrooms. Judging by the decorations and the toys, it had belonged to a small boy. Tim didn’t need any more information to understand the tragedy of what had happened in the house so went back downstairs.
He moved with the aid of the light on his phone. The police officer had moved away from the door, and entered the current of undead that now filtered down the street. A few people ran by, and every now and then a car, but it was all in vain. Inevitably, a scream would come. By the time the complete darkness of night fell, Tim was glad to have his vision obscured. He fell onto the sofa, and the paralyzing acceptance of his new reality set in. He felt the darkness draw around him, he heard their stumbled footsteps and growls, the cries of those they caught. His breathing became a battle, each lungful of air was a fight to take and a war to expel. Pressure crushed his chest. Tim couldn´t breathe. He stumbled into the kitchen, stubbing his toe in the darkness. The pain brought a scream to his lips, but he silenced it; swallowed it back down. He rummaged through the fridge. While a meal had recently been cooked and plated, the general supplies were low. He grabbed a can of beer, opened it and took a drink. The effect wasn’t instant, but by the time Tim had finished the can, his breathing had relaxed. By the time he threw the sixth can onto the floor, he had blocked out the sounds of the real world, and with a self-satisfied smile, collapsed onto the sofa and tumbled into a fitful sleep.
Tim woke to the sound of shattering glass. His legs trembled beneath him, their power gone. It was dark, and his head swam with the lingering images of the bad dream that had gripped him, while the room spun from the alcohol that still buzzed in his system.
He looked around, momentarily lost. “Mary?” he called out for his wife. Then the memory came back. The dream was real…his wife was dead. She had come back a zombie and he had left her. A scream pierced the night and pulled Tim over to the window. He stumbled as he walked, and almost pulled the entire blind from the fixture. He peered through and saw that the zombies had all gathered around a house in which a light shone on the ground. It had drawn them all like a swarm of deadly moths. He watched as they shattered the main front window and clambered through the broken pane, ignoring the glass shards, which ripped chunks of flesh from their frames.
Tim felt sick. He saw a small face appear in the upper window. A child, whose bad dreams and pleas for his parents had caused them to turn on the light through sheer force of habit. Tim stared as the child pounded the glass, and then suddenly disappeared from view. A few moments later, blood splattered against the window, mercifully obscuring everything that followed from view.
Tim collapsed to the floor. Screams echoed in his mind, as he recalled the accident: the cop, his broken face, partially skinned from his ejection through the windscreen. He heard their pleas for help. They were so loud, that for a moment Tim thought that somebody else was in the house with him.
A zombie moved past the window, its frame brushing against the glass as it limped along. Tim gave a yell of surprise and the creature spun with lightning quick reactions. Tim jumped back from the blind, and stumbled backward through the room. His heart thundered as he waited for the glass to break. When the thump came, it didn’t shatter the glass, but came close. Tim jumped, he turned to run, tripped over the rug that lay on the floor and fell head first into the dining room table. His world fell black before he realized what had happened.
Morning sunlight shone across Tim’s face. When he opened his eyes, the world screamed at him. His head felt as though someone had put his eyes and brain through a cheese grater. His stomach cramped, and his eyes rang. He got to his feet, his balance broken. The table steadied him. He looked around, lost. The living room he was in was nothing like he had believed it to be when he arrived the previous evening. Children’s toys dominated the house. Two clothes racks stood in the far corner, piled high with ironing that would never be completed.
There was a mirror on the wall behind the dining table. With trepidation, Tim looked at his reflection. One eye was swollen shut from the accident. The skin was an intoxicating mixture of blue and purple; shades he didn’t think actually had a name, but thoroughly deserved ones. There was also a large swelling above his eye from where he had fallen against the
table. It looked as though he were growing a horn.
It hurt to look at his image, but the faces that stared back at him from the mirror made him soon forget his own problems. He spun around, but there was nobody.
“Who’s there?” Tim called out. The sound of his voice brought with it another crash at the window. The sound of splintering glass followed a second assault.
Tim looked around the room, his ears deaf to the zombie that was close to breaking his meager defenses. The room was empty. He was alone. He looked back at the mirror, but saw their faces still. They had gathered around him, their skin pale and white, eyes sunken and black. Blood covered their flesh and open sores cut deep into the meat beneath.
“Help us…” their cry echoed in his mind. Tim knew who they were. He didn’t need to see their walking forms outside the house to remember their faces.
“Leave me alone!” he roared at the mirror, grabbing the fruit bowl from the center of the dining table and launching it into their pleading faces. The mirror shattered, showering the floor with razor sharp shards. The sound also muffled the shattering of the window. The first Tim knew of the zombie was when he was thrust to the floor. Spinning himself around as he fell, an instinctive reaction above all else, he managed to raise an arm in self-defense and push the snapping jaws away just before they bit down on his face. The hot, rancid breath of the zombie hit Tim in the face and caused him to gag. The blood-crusted face stared at him with a wild fury.
The creature showed no sign of letting go, and was stronger than Tim had realized. It was only a matter of time before he ran out of resistance. With his left arm free, he felt along the floor, his fingers brushing over a long shard of broken mirror. An ironic twist of good luck he would later think to himself, one drunken night. He slid the shard into his hand and without hesitation slammed it into the ribcage of the zombie. The creature roared, but refused to back down, if anything the rage seemed to increase. With the glass slick with blood, Tim struggled for purchase when he tried to retrieve the weapon.
The zombie’s head inched forward. The snapping teeth creating a rush of air that dried out Tim’s eyes. As his strength began to fail, Tim found purchase on the blade and pulled it out, with a wet sucking noise. Striking quickly, he stabbed upward. The shard entered the back of the creatures head and split the softened bone. With a deep growl, the zombie gave a series of jerks and fell to the floor beside Tim, dead for a second time. For a while, they lay together, neither moved. The sound of other zombies out in the street, attracted by the noise of their scuffle no doubt, dragged him to his feet. He checked his hand for injures, and saw that somehow, he had escaped even the slightest knick from the razor sharp shard he had used to defend himself.
Three more undead began to climb through the jagged entrance. He looked around the floor, seeking another weapon, but all he saw in each reflective shard was the face of one of the people he had run down and left to die. Their screams echoed in his head louder than the approaching zombies. Tim turned, and ran through the house. The kitchen was large, and gave him enough room to breathe; to escape the closed walls of the dining room. There were two doors in the kitchen, one that led into the garden and another that led into the type of garage extension that had been so popular a few years earlier.
The zombies drew closer, their clumsy footsteps crushing the glass shards that littered the floor. Thinking fast, Tim turned and headed for the door that led to the garden. He grabbed a knife from the rack as he passed, and promised himself that he wouldn’t lose it as he had the previous two.
* * *
He yanked open the door and felt the cold morning air wrap its icy fingers around him. The door to the kitchen burst open just as Tim closed the door behind him. He pressed his back against the wall, in an attempt to make himself as small as possible. He closed his eyes and held his breath. His heart slowed down to a sedate pulse. His life had come down to one of two possible outcomes, and Tim knew it.
The growls told him the dead were close. The creak of the kitchen door that had not fully closed drew a slight gasp from him. Their hungry shouts covered it as they discovered a trail of blood that led them out into the garden. He hadn’t known that they would follow his blood, but the fake trail he’d created was his only chance of getting rid of them.
The moment they had all left the kitchen, Tim threw open the garage door and locked the one the led to the garden. After a quick check of the house, which told him that he was once again alone, he grabbed a towel and wrapped his injured hand.
The house was a wreck. Tim knew he couldn’t stay there, but he needed shelter, and a plan. He made his way upstairs, taking the bottle of liquor he had found with him. He hurried through the living room, eager to avoid any contact with the hundreds of screaming faces that glared at him from the glass littered floor.
Tim locked himself into the master bedroom, and pushed the bed against the door. He sat on the bed and closed his eyes. His hand throbbed, and his head ached. The beers from the previous night had given birth to a bastard ache in his skull, which seemed to pulse in alternating synchronicity with his hand.
The world was silent. When Tim looked out of the bedroom window, he saw why. The street was deserted. Blood greased the tarmac and bodies littered the view in all directions. Cars stood bumper to bumper on the ring road. Wafting above the houses on the other side of the street, in the direction of the city center, tendrils of thick black smoke rose into the air. As Tim watched, three helicopters flew over the rooftops low enough for Tim to feel the rush of air from their rotors.
The noise of their passing seemed to bring the street to life. Bodies that Tim had thought to be dead rose to their feet, while others appeared from within houses or from behind cars. The street went from abandoned to thriving in a matter of minutes. With the dead woken for the day, Tim felt his hopes at escape sink. There were too many of them. He understood that he couldn’t outrun them. This fact was demonstrated by a small group the descended on a scared Border collie spooked from its hiding place by the helicopters' low-level passage. They ripped the animal apart before he had a chance to utter the start of a yelp.
Tim sat back on the bed and opened the bottle of drink. The growling sound of the horde outside the house grew denser rather than louder. It became a noise like static, back in the day, when the television shut down at midnight. The alcohol drowned out the thrum. By the time Tim had finished the bottle, he no longer heard anything.
The next thing Tim knew, it was evening. He was lying curled up in the corner of the room, the liquor bottle clutched in his hands like a club. The end had been smashed, and Tim had a gash on his forearm to match the wound on his hand. He couldn’t remember what had happened, but the sun had descended behind the houses, and painted the skyline a warm orange. For a second he thought that the city was ablaze.
Tim’s stomach churned and rumbled. He was hungry and queasy in one confusing combination. Holding the bottle as a weapon, having once again lost the knife he had taken, he headed downstairs. In the kitchen, he found some food in the refrigerator and made himself a few sandwiches. He moved as quietly as he could, because the sound of the shuffling undead in the street echoed through the house. As he was leaving, he noticed another bottle of alcohol in the cupboard. He stared at it: some sickeningly sweet and flavored crap according to the bottle. Yet he took it, for while his head throbbed, it was silent. The screams of those he had hit, the mental sensation of the car hitting them, rolling over their limbs, condemning them to their deaths, were gone; blocked out by the numbness that only alcohol can offer.
Tim made it back to the bedroom, and ate the food he had made while staring out of the window again. He watched the dead limp around. He thought of his wife. Was she still out there, walking the streets…killing...eating? His skin shrank around his frame at the thought. He tried to push it from his mind, but what replaced it was an image of the car he had crashed into the crowd. He saw the two limbless corpses lying there. He stared at them, and befor
e he knew it, the sugary alcohol had replaced his bread as the main form of sustenance.
He stared at the bodies, as the drunken, vision-clouding wave rolled over him. One had been ripped open – his torso a dark maw destined to cry out for eternity. The other, however, was alive. In spite of its limbless condition, the head thrashed and as Tim listened, the faint cries of hunger reached his ears. The body rocked as the bloodied stumps that had once been arms and legs twitched in attempted movement.
Tim drank the bottle empty and collapsed to the floor. When he woke again, his head was heavier. The sun streamed onto his face and the growls of the undead echoed in his ears.
Tim’s eye snapped open, and with a burst of pain in his skull, he sat up. The door to the bedroom crashed in its frame, and opened part of the way. Upon returning from his trip to the kitchen the previous night, Tim had neglected to push the bed against the door again. The gap was too small for the zombie to fit through, but it afforded him a view of Tim. That meant he would not leave voluntarily.
Time looked around for the broken bottle. It lay on the bed. He moved to grab it, trying his best to ignore the screaming ache inside his skull.
The zombie had an arm through the door, and grabbed at Tim as he approached. The flesh hung from its elbow in a long strand; stripped down close to the bone. Tim grabbed the bottle and slashed at the arm. The jagged edge of the bottle sliced the rotting flesh, but Tim knew what he needed to do. He waited for the right moment, then struck out with the bottle, thrusting it forwards into the face of the creature. One long glass shard slid through the dead eyeball, popping it like the yolk of a fried egg, and disappeared into the skull. The creature roared, and pulled backward, yanking the bottle from Tim’s hand. It stood for a few moments, before it collapsed.
Diaries of the Damned Page 16
