Chronicles of the Infected (Book 1): Finding Her

by Rick Wood

  “Two days?”

  “It’s the best we could do, over.”

  “Where’s our fire-power?”

  “In the rubble of Great Britain, sir. Over.”

  He sighed.

  Two days six hours until this city would be destroyed. For two more days, these ravenous arseholes would continue to batter against the walls. Without these bombs, Hayes knew they would need to reinforce the walls further, and even then, they probably wouldn’t hold. With the numbers and the strength and the sheer speed they could run at it with, it was only a matter of time. And if this horde was let loose, if they were to escape – that would be the country gone. They outnumbered the remaining military, not to mention the sad truth Hayes had to admit – their power would overwhelm any defence they were to put up on the ground.

  It was true. They had no choice but to wait for the reinforcements to arrive. They were lucky that they had enough allies to spare the firepower in a time of crisis.

  “Roger,” Hayes reluctantly confirmed. “ETA fifty-four hours.”

  “Confirmed, over.”

  “Over and out.”

  He placed the radio back on his belt.

  He cast his glare over the creatures.

  The noise was overwhelming; continuous growls, snarls, drooling. But that wasn’t what hit him the most.

  It was the smell.

  They smelt like death.

  Hayes had been around enough of it to recognise the stench. It was distinctive. Like rotting meat.

  Once upon a time, the smell had made him choke. Made him feel sick, even made him a little dizzy.

  Now it had as much effect on him as someone leaving a foul turd in his toilet bowl.

  It was a mild nuisance, but something he had come to tolerate.

  But these zombies…

  These foul creatures…

  These disgusting, carnivorous, detestable hordes of the ravenous undead.

  Hayes would not tolerate them.

  London was going up in flames.

  Each rotting face would be burnt until they were incinerated.

  “I’ll be seeing you later,” Hayes muttered at the despicable pale, rotting, flesh-torn faces below him.

  He climbed back down and returned to his vehicle, setting aim for the acting prime minister.

  3

  Eugene Squire stood solemnly at his window, overlooking the vast, empty streets below.

  Empty of people, anyway. Nights generally left the town deserted of anyone living. But the infected never slept. They were relentless.

  He watched as another infected hobbled past, dragging its leg behind it, its ankle missing its foot. Its greying face had a prickly moustache home to various pieces of mould, and an eye that hung down its cheek by a loose string of flesh.

  This isn’t what they were meant for…

  A brusque commotion announced itself down the street. A young girl came screaming down the road. She couldn’t be older than thirteen. She was followed by a gang of flesh-eating parasites at a far quicker pace, closing the gap on her quickly. Eugene briefly wondered if there was something he could do to save the girl, but that wasn’t the world he lived in anymore. Trying to be a hero would likely cost him his life. She was on her own.

  He closed his curtains.

  His thoughts dwelled on the girl. Then he realised it didn’t matter.

  He turned around and sighed, absentmindedly shuffling through a stack of papers on his grand wooden desk. He had always resented how the other half live, despite being part of that other half. He was used to just sitting in a Parliament building either heckling agreement or disagreement at whatever fool was speaking.

  Now the government was gone. Hundreds had died. And he just so happened to be the next in line to be acting prime minister.

  He had appeared to accept the job reluctantly. He had to have been. It was the only way he would be endowed the power to see this through.

  A knock resounded against his doors.

  “Come in.”

  Jacey entered, a young man who had led many expeditions into the wild, hunting animals and missing souls. Eugene had been sure his youth and experience made him the perfect person for the job, and he had been paid handsomely in response.

  Jacey indicated to the rest of his team to remain outside, and edged in nervously.

  “Any news?” Eugene asked.

  Before Jacey could respond, General Boris Hayes knocked on the door and entered.

  “Boris, is it urgent?” Eugene enquired.

  “It is,” Hayes assured him.

  “Fine, fine, wait there.” Eugene waved his arm flippantly, indicating the corner of the room, and turned back to Jacey. “So?”

  “We’ve tracked her, sir,” Jacey told him with a worryingly grim expression.

  “Really?” Eugene moved from foot to foot, barely able to keep still, wandering aimlessly around. “And? Where is she?”

  “That’s the thing, sir. We tracked her location, but… We couldn’t go in.”

  “Why?”

  “We have absolute certainty she is there, it’s just–”

  “Bloody hell, Jacey, for Christ’s sake, where is she?”

  “She’s in–” Jacey’s eyes nervously averted themselves from Eugene’s. “She’s in a building in London.”

  A lost look painted itself upon his face. A look that appeared to be someone who’d been hopeful, then had that hope snatched away and burnt before him.

  Everyone knew London was a no-go. It was a quarantined zone, with so many wretched infected, that not even the most adeptly trained and highly skilled fighter would be able to make it inches across the wall.

  He turned to Hayes.

  “You have to get her.”

  “That’s not as simple as you’d expect,” Hayes responded. “I came here with news. We have bombs on their way from multiple sources. London will be dust in T-minus two days, four hours.”

  Eugene appeared stumped.

  “My God…” he muttered. He brought a stutter to his lips, showing a lack of ability to speak, to move. “Call it off!”

  “Negative. It’s all been put in place. They are being readied as they are; it can’t be reversed. Sir, if we go back on it now, our allies may not be so amiable next time. London will be bombed.”

  Eugene’s feet gave way, and he used the desk to steady himself.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Prime Minister, the bombs are coming from multiple sources. We could not manage to get the message to all of them in time; and even if we managed to call off a few, we could not be sure to reach all of them. Not in the state the world is currently in.”

  “Well then, deploy the army! Send them in there to retrieve her!”

  Hayes sighed.

  “Negative.”

  “What the hell do you mean, negative?” Eugene shouted, a face full of rage, scalding anger spewing out of his mouth. “I am the fucking prime minister! If I tell the army to go in, they go in!”

  Hayes hesitated. “No one would be willing to go into London. No one. And even if they could – we are at your service for all country needs, but this is personal. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?” Eugene venomously spat. He had to keep this up. He had to seem hysterical. “You can stuff your sorry up your sorry arse!”

  “I am sorry,” Hayes lied. “The only way is to get someone to volunteer, and I can’t see any of my troops volunteering to risk it all for one person.”

  “That one person is my god damn daughter!”

  Eugene could feel his blood pumping, feel his fists clenching, feel himself lurching forward. Jacey had already snuck out unnoticed, such was the direction of his rage toward his military leader.

  “We have to think about the bigger picture.”

  An uncomfortable silence overcame the room. Eugene covered his face in his hands, trying to control his fake tears, his fake uncontrollable weeping forcing its way to the surface.

  Hayes stood at ease,
watching their leader, the unelected man in charge by default.

  Then an idea grew.

  An idea Hayes was certain he would regret voicing.

  “There is one person,” Hayes slowly articulated. “One person we could ask. One person I think we could persuade.”

  “Who?” Eugene said. “Tell me, who? And I’ll give them whatever they want.”

  Hayes sighed a sigh of hesitation.

  “Gus Harvey.”

  Eugene froze.

  “Gus Harvey?” he repeated.

  Hayes reluctantly nodded.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Eugene couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “He is our last resort, but I think he’ll do it.”

  “But – but – but he’s a drunk!”

  “Yes, but the guy basically wants to die. He’s the only one crazy enough, or doesn’t care enough, to do it.”

  Eugene scoffed. He stood and found himself drifting toward the window.

  “We could send that Donny boy with him, sir,” Hayes suggested. “I think we could convince him to be in charge of communications for the mission. He doesn’t have much else going on for him, he could at least report back on progress.”

  Eugene hovered, looking upon the dark street below. The remains of the young girl were left strewn across the ground. Her lungs, her heart, her legs, her limbs, her eyeball. All left squished in bloody heaps where she had been fed upon and left. Her head still remained, barely recognisable, but groaning in its catatonic zombie state.

  He wondered whether she knew her body had been ripped away, or whether she even had the awareness to know what a body was.

  “Well?” Hayes prompted.

  Eugene took a big, deep breath, held it, and released.

  Gus Harvey was inept. An uncontrollable wreck. A drunk. He didn’t stand a chance. He’d off himself at the first opportunity. And Donny was an imbecile. The lad would screw up a boiled egg, he was such an idiot.

  It was a disaster in the making.

  Perfect.

  “Send for him. Get him here immediately.”

  “Roger that,” Hayes responded, and hastily left the room.

  4

  A trickle of spilt whiskey dribbled down the bedsheets, exploding in a small pool upon the stained carpet. A busy fly fluttered over Gus’s closed eyes, prompting an automatic slap of his own face that abruptly woke him from his vegetative state.

  “Fuck!” he growled, hazily flickering his eyelids as he rotated his head, readjusting his drunken vision to the blurs of the room.

  A whiskey bottle lay upside down on his duvet, leaking the entirety of its contents; which Gus considered to be an act of sacrilege.

  “Aw, shit!” he huffed, punching his heavy fist into the bottle, immediately regretting it as his palm delved into a few shards of glass.

  He held his bleeding wrist in his hand, at first pressing against the wound, then deciding he couldn’t be bothered to hold the position and ignored it. He pushed himself off the bed, leaving a bloody handprint in his wake.

  He trudged his hefty weight – a weight that was once from muscle, but had turned to excessive fatty width and extra insulation – and limped across his bedsit. He lifted his wounded leg and placed it in the sparse areas of the floor vacant from litter, dirty clothes, or mouldy plates. His limp had been as engrained into his demeanour as much as his voice or his thoughts, and he had even grown a resentful fondness for the bullet lodged in his calf.

  His chubby hand clutched the fridge door, opened it, and withdrew a supermarket own-brand can of lager. He poured it down his gullet like a child feeding on his mother’s tit.

  He meandered to the window, peering at the street below, checking that the world had still gone to shit.

  He scorned the rising of another shitty day, angry that he had not somehow died in his sleep. It took him so many drinks and so many pills to fall into his catatonic state, he always hoped that it would be enough booze and meds to leave him in it.

  He sighed.

  There was nothing to do.

  No itinerary other than to mope around his shitty little flat, miserable at his pointless existence, draining the world’s depleting resources that could otherwise help someone who actually wanted to be in this damn life.

  There were no cinemas. No schools. And worst of all, no bars. No classic British pub he could go sit in and get wasted at the bar, lamenting his drunken troubles to whatever unfortunate barmaid was made to work that day.

  The schools had been turned into extra hospitals.

  The pubs had been turned into places of refuge.

  Eugene Squire had managed to put some semblance of society into this forsaken world in his unwarranted few months in charge, but they were a long way off being close to the life they had. In all honesty, they would likely never be able to have it back again.

  Gus would never be able to have them back again.

  A boom punched against his door.

  A visitor?

  “What the hell…” he mumbled.

  No one visited him. He had barely spoken to another human being since…

  Since it happened.

  The boom repeated itself, growing impatient.

  “Who is it?” he barked.

  “Open the bloody door, man!” came a voice Gus recognised.

  He waddled to the door, his right leg stiff. This was possibly the quickest he’d had to move with a wounded leg since…

  Stop thinking about it. Just stop thinking about any of it.

  He swung the door open and lifted his nose in revulsion at the sight of General Boris Hayes.

  “What are you doing here?” Gus demanded with a low-pitched hostility.

  “Your country needs you, Gus.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Gus returned to his messy bedsit and resumed gulping the remains of his can of lager.

  He could feel Hayes looking around his home, sticking his nose up at how Gus chose to live.

  To hell with him. This was Gus’s accommodation, and he liked – well, tolerated it.

  “This is where you live now, is it?” Hayes asked, a clear dig aimed at how Gus’s life had gone from military hero to pathetic loser in such a shattering fall.

  “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “You know, we have grand flats and lovely houses that have been vacated, all without owners.”

  “You want me to steal some dead man’s home?”

  “They won’t be needing it.”

  Gus snorted a sarcastic laugh. “That’s all the dead are to you, ain’t they? To be discarded.”

  “Yes, well, I preferred the dead when they didn’t try to get up and eat me.”

  “Weren’t those the days,” Gus retorted mockingly, crumpling the empty can and throwing it in the mess on the floor. He looked out the window, keeping his back to his former leader. “You want to tell me what you came here for, or what? I doubt you came for a social call.”

  Hayes hesitated.

  “No, I didn’t. Like I said, your country is requesting your service. There is a mission for you to undertake. And, still being under the paycheck of the military, you are unable to decline.”

  Gus snorted.

  “That how you persuade me, is it? Threaten to take money away?”

  “I was going to appeal to your better nature, but I assumed it would fall on deaf ears.”

  “And this mission you say I’m requested for. I imagine the only reason you came to me is because no other fool is willing to take it. Probably a suicidal mission, I bet.”

  “You would be accurate. So, are you coming or what? I don’t have all day.”

  Gus turned to look at Hayes, folding his arms and leaning against the window-sill.

  “You wouldn’t come to a cripple has-been like me unless you had no choice.”

  “Like I said, are you coming or not?”

  “Not. You can go to hell. And you can shut my bloody door on the way out.”

  Haye
s closed his eyes in angry frustration, flexing his hands in an act intended to calm himself down. Gus could see the fury flickering on Hayes’s face as he tried to resist losing his temper, and did not feel guilty in deriving a small amount of pleasure in seeing him squirm.

  “Eugene Squire, our acting prime minister, is the one requesting your presence, Gus.”

  “Like I said, you can fuck off. I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “For God’s sake, do you not care about anyone but yourself anymore?”

  Gus let out a loud, clearly audible, “Hah!”

  Hayes shook his head in irritation.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Hayes mused.

  “You can take that as a fuck off. Once again.”

  Hayes’s eyes meandered around Gus’s flat, eventually falling on a photo frame hidden behind a pile of dirty clothes. It was of Gus, in his military uniform, next to a doting wife and a loving daughter.

  “They would hate to see you like this, you know.”

  Gus immediately marched forward, ignoring the searing pain in his leg. Once he reached the general, he put his hands on his collar and shoved him against the door frame.

  “You don’t say a bloody word about them, do you hear?”

  “I was attempting to appeal to your better nature.”

  Assuming a tight grip upon Hayes’s collar, he pulled him out of the flat, shoved him into the corridor, and slammed the door behind him.

  He paused, feeling the rage shoot through his veins, feeling his hostility consume him.

  He looked at the photo.

  He peered into her eyes.

  Peered into both of their eyes.

  How pathetic he had become.

  He bowed his head.

  Sighed.

  “Idiot,” he muttered to himself.

  Gus grabbed his coat and swung the door open.

  “This better be bloody worth it,” he croaked, and followed Hayes to his car.

  5

  Gus peered around the lavish corridor leading to Eugene Squire’s office with a mixture of awe and resentment.

  Statues surrounded his path through the corridor, pieces of history decorating the walls. White beams ran up the wall and over the ceiling, sculpted into impressive pieces of architecture that twisted and turned into various positions. Expensive paintings hung over perfectly applied wallpaper, the eyes of historical monarchs following him as he passed through.