Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel

by Lewis, Jack

I looked down and saw that the firework powder on my palm had caught fire from the spark of the gun. My skin was burning and all I could think about was the agony of it as my nerve endings cried out. I shoved my hand as deeply as I could into the sodden earth and though the dirt cooled it a little, my skin still felt like it was on fire.

  Ahead of me the stalker roared. I looked up and saw it crawling toward me in a jagged movement. There was a hole in its left leg from where my bullet had hit. It was a good enough wound to slow it, but not a lethal one. Bleed, you bastard, I thought. If you want to eat, you’re going to have to fight for it.

  I picked up the gun with my good hand and tried to aim again, but my left hand hurt so much that I couldn't focus. My ears rang from the explosion of the gun and threw me off balance, making it impossible to know if I was even aiming straight. I took a breath and fired, and the bullet disappeared into the trees far away from the stalker.

  Unperturbed by the shot, the stalker moved closer. Did these things have no fear?

  I pushed the pain of my hand back and filled my lungs. One last chance.

  I fired again.

  The bullet zipped away into the night.

  The stalker got closer and closer. My whole body shook, and I had the sickening feeling that this was it for me. Fifteen years a survivor and this was how it would end; packed up tight in a hollowed-out tree stump with a stalker chewing through my intestines. Whatever happened, I would give it a fight

  The stalker was six feet away now. It stuck its long wet tongue out of its mouth and trailed it along its bottom lip. Spit pooled down its chin. This was the closest I had ever been to one of them, and the reality of it sent sharp shivers through my spine. Up close I could see the vague remnants of the person it had once been, but now it was more monster than human.

  I reached to my belt and grabbed my knife, and I prepared for my last fight.

  "Over here!" said a deep voice.

  To the right of me were flames; orange and red and glorious. They got closer to me, and as they came near the stalker shied away a little. It took a cautious step back and looked at me and then the fire, deciding whether the proximity of an easy snack was worth enduring the heat.

  The flames were actually three torches, and they were carried by three worried-looking men. I didn't need to be told who they were; it was Noah and the others from the shack. They’d come back for me, the idiots.

  The adrenaline seeped out of me, and I started to feel faint.

  Noah looked over at me, his face shining in the flames.

  "He's alive." he said.

  I stretched out my arm and pointed to the stalker. This simple act drained me, and I felt faint.

  "It's wounded," I said.

  I saw the men crowd the stalker and beat it with hammers and bats. It fought back ferociously, sinking its teeth into Noah’s shin bone and breaking it with a crack. He screamed and dropped his torch into the wet earth, where it extinguished with a fizz.

  Angered by the screams of their friend, the other two men fought harder, raining down blows on the monster with animal-like fury. Before long the stalker didn’t have any fight left in it, and as I saw one of the men cave its head in with a hammer, my vision turned black and I fell back, smashing my head on the tree behind me.

  Chapter 3

  When I woke up it was daylight. I was in a bed in a strange room, the bed sheet drawn up to my chest and tucked tightly into the sides of the mattress. My head banged and my body felt weak. I wriggled myself into a sitting position in the bed, but when I put my weight on my left hand a shock of pain ran through me. I pulled my hand out and saw that it was covered in bandages, and I remembered the previous night and how the gun powder had exploded on me when I fired the revolver. I winced. To my right there was a window, and on the streets below I could see a few people stood shooting the breeze. I knew that I was in Vasey, the only real civilised place left in Lancashire. The question was, how did I get here?

  It was probably the men who had helped me fight the stalker, the ones who had offered me shelter. They must have carried me here during the night after I blacked out. However I got here, it didn't matter. All I knew was that I wasn't staying. I had avoided Vasey all this time for a reason - the people. If I wanted to be around people, I would have come here a lot sooner.

  I put the weight of my body onto my right hand and swung myself out of bed. An ache ran all the way up from the bones in my toes to my skull. My lips felt dry and my left hand stung like a bitch. I put my feet down on the floor. I wasn't sure I could even make it to the door, let alone outside, but there was no way I was staying. I got to my feet and stood shakily. How had I let myself get like this? I felt drained. An image flashed in my head of the previous night, of the men beating the stalker to death, its blood splashing out onto their clothes, of it clamping its teeth around one of the men's shin bones and squeezing until it snapped. The man screaming, and falling.

  My stomach gurgled. I felt bile rush up my throat, and I sank to my knees and heaved. Nothing came up but air. I wheezed and wanted to die.

  Across the room, the door opened, and I lifted my head. A boy walked in with a grin on his face. His hair was buzzed almost to the scalp so that the top of his head was dotted with little black pin pricks that looked more like a five o'clock shadow than hair. He was tall and skinny, and he had an awkward gait to his walk, as though he weren't fully in control of his own body. When he saw me his eyes widened and he looked at me in wonder.

  "What are you doing down there?"

  He walked over to the side of the bed and stuck his arms out toward me as though to help me up.

  "I got it." I waved his arms away.

  "How's your hand?"

  I felt a stinging pain run through my burnt palm. "I'll live."

  "Did one of the infected do it?" he asked. He looked nervous.

  I put my right hand on the ground and pushed down on it, using it to support my weight. My body felt like lead, but I managed to get to my feet. When I stood up, I felt dizzy. Looking up, I noticed that the walls of the room were stripped down to the stone, as though someone were decorating.

  I looked at the boy. He was about fifteen years old, sixteen at a push. He looked green to me, like he'd never spent a day outside of the town in his life. Fifteen years into the apocalypse, some kids were being born into this nightmare. They didn't have to make the transition from the old, safe world to this new, dangerous one - this was the only life they knew. This kid was one of the lucky ones though; he was obviously born in town and had lived here all his life. The walls protected him from what was outside, and he didn’t have to give much of a thought to survival. I considered the question he had asked- "Did one of them do it?" - and I couldn't keep the scorn out of my voice as I spat an answer.

  "Kid, if one of them did it, do you think I'd be here?"

  He looked confused. "What do you mean?"

  "If someone got bit, I don't imagine you'd let them back into town."

  "Why not?"

  "Jesus. Kid - "

  He interrupted me. "My name's Justin."

  "I don't care." My head was pounding and the corners of my eyes were blurry. I heaved myself onto the bed and let my body sink into it.

  Justin walked over to a dresser on the far side of the room, opposite the window. He poured water from a plastic bottle into a chipped white mug. He brought it to the side of the bed and offered it to me, but I had no interest in taking a drink off him no matter how much my cracked lips begged for it. I waved him away.

  "Where are you from?" asked Justin.

  "Nowhere."

  "Were you looking for Vasey?"

  "No."

  "Then where were you going?"

  I felt blood rush to my head, and my face was starting to get red. I felt like giving the kid a clout behind the ears, anything to get him to stop asking me questions. "For god's sake, give me some space."

  Rather than pick up on my cues, Justin grabbed a wooden-backed chair and dragged
it to the side of the bed. He sat in it and stared at me with curiosity, as though I were the new animal in a zoo.

  Behind him, the bedroom door opened and an old man walked through.

  His face was beaten and wrinkled, like a crumpled leather purse. His hair was grey, wiry and ran down to his shoulders, though on top it was noticeably thinning toward his crown. I couldn't help but wonder why he didn't just stop pretending and shave it all off, but I guess he was too stubborn for that. He gave a wide smile when he saw me, but I didn't read anything remotely friendly behind it.

  "You're a lucky man," he said. He had a thick Lancastrian accent but his pitch was higher than I expected.

  I looked down at my stinging, bandaged hand. My head throbbed and my body felt so brittle that I couldn't even get out of bed without heaving. I didn't feel too lucky.

  "Yeah, guess I really won the lottery here."

  The man motioned at Justin to get up. He took his place in the chair beside the bed.

  "Name's Moe."

  "Great."

  "Yours?"

  I let the seconds drag out and a silence took over the room. I wasn’t going to tell him a damn thing. The only thing I wanted to do was get the hell out of here, because every second I spent here was time wasted. Every minute I didn’t spend getting closer to the farm meant someone else could find it and take it, and I couldn't let that happen. I needed to leave, and to do that, I needed to feel better. I looked over at Justin. The kid was perched awkwardly on the dresser.

  "I'll take some of that water, please," I said. If I was going to leave, I needed to get hydrated.

  Justin looked up at Moe, and the old man nodded. I looked at them both to see if there were any facial similarity but there didn't seem to be any, so they probably weren’t related. What was their connection? Justin brought the cup of water over to me and offered it out. Before I sit up, Moe grabbed it from him and held it away from me.

  "What do they call you?" he said.

  It seemed he was going to withhold the water unless I answered him. I took a deep breath and counted to five in my head, trying to bite back on the annoyance rising in me. I looked at the cup of water in his hand, and I felt my mouth try to salivate, except that it didn't have the moisture to do it. My lips were dry and my tongue was rough and fuzzy.

  "Kyle," I answered.

  He offered the cup to me. I took it, and sniffed at the water. It was a little musty, and there were flecks of white powder at the bottom.

  "What the hell is this?"

  "I crushed up a paracetamol for you," said Justin.

  “Paracetamol?” I said. “Hasn’t that stuff all gone out of date yet?”

  “Still works,” said Moe.

  “Drink it,” said Justin, and nodded at the glass. “You’ll feel better.”

  I eyed him with suspicion. The kid had a trustworthy face, almost plain in its honesty. Moe, on the other hand, looked like a man you’d hide your cards from in a poker game. It was obvious he was a boss of some sort to Justin, and the kid seemed so naive that he'd follow any instruction.

  A dagger of pain shot through my temple, and I felt another dry heave begin to rise up from my stomach. My body was crying out for the water. I looked up again at Justin's honest face, and I reminded myself that the most conniving men are brilliant at making themselves seem truthful.

  I put the water on the nightstand beside my bed. As I set the cup down, a shard of pain stabbed my skull, as though my body were admonishing me for refusing the drink.

  "They said you were a suspicious one." said Moe.

  "Who?"

  "Faizel, one of our scouts you met last night. He said that Noah offered you shelter, but you said no."

  "I don't like having to sleep with one eye open."

  Anger flashed through Moe's face, and suddenly his old eyes were dark and set deep on my own.

  "And I don't like losing a good man because of a stranger's stupidity."

  I bolted up into a sitting position. The movement nauseated me, and I choked back on a heave that rose from my stomach. Anger flashed through me and made my chest feel tight. Who the hell was Moe to speak to me like that? I looked to Moe and Justin, and didn't like my odds; I was down two to one, and I was practically an invalid right now. If something was off about these two, and I needed to get out of here, I doubted my body could even get me to the door. I was done with this though. I didn’t like being in Vasey, and I had somewhere I needed to get.

  The farm was waiting, and every second that ticked by without me making at least some progress felt wasted.

  I choked back my anger and tried to keep my voice calm. "If there was some stupidity last night, it wasn't mine."

  Moe snorted. "So what do you call pissing on an offer of shelter in the middle of the night when there are stalkers are prowling round? That sound wise to you?"

  I had to admit that put like that, it didn't sound too clever. I looked Moe up and down. He had to be in his sixties, so he must have been around before the fall. He had to have seen how the world used to be, and how it was now, how much it had changed and definitely not for the better. God knows how long he'd lived in Vasey, tucked up behind the town’s walls, but surely he knew the laws of the wilds. You didn't trust anybody, ever. Any man could turn on you and any man could do you harm. Giving your trust to a man wasn't free - it just might cost you your life.

  Moe crossed his legs. "Noah was a good man, and so are Dan and Faizel. They meant you no harm."

  "Good is an objective word. You have to know the qualities of something to judge it as good - and I didn't know shit about them."

  Perched on the end of the dresser, I saw Justin's head snap in my direction. I realised I was raising my voice and my tone was getting mean. This always happened whenever I spent too much time around people.

  Moe stood up. He was an old man, and on equal terms I could kick his ass. But now, with me in my weakened state and him towering over me, the odds were even. "I've spoken to Faizel. He says they saw where you decided to settle for the night, some grubby little hole in a tree. Probably you were sharing it with a squirrel or something, I don't know. At any rate, they kept an eye on you. They saw a stalker coming toward you looking for a taste, and they rushed in and saved your life. What do you have to say about that?"

  I clenched my left hand and felt it burn. "It was the smell of your man's piss that brought the stalker. There were three of them partying in that shack, and three's a crowd. You know what crowds of people tend to attract? Stalkers, and infected. If you’re going to blame anyone, then blame your guys for being too scared to travel alone."

  "A man can't live alone," said Moe.

  "I do pretty well."

  He looked at me and grinned, as though he had made his point. "Yeah, you sure are living the good life."

  I looked at my bandaged hand and my dirty jeans. I felt fatigued beyond belief, and my head was clamped in a vice. I'd been travelling for weeks and I was still four hundred miles away from where I needed to be, and I only had provisions to last me a day. The only things I had were my dead wife’s bracelet - useless unless I came across an infected with a taste for fancy gold -, a revolver with no bullets, some soggy fireworks and a GPRS that was my only link to my salvation. Maybe Moe had a point. I wasn't living, I was getting by. At least in town they had supplies, walls and something of a life going for them.

  But then again, they also had to live with each other, and that wasn’t a good thing. Every day you spent in the company of another person was a day you trusted your life to them, trusted them not to make some stupid decision that would get you killed.

  It was time for me to go. I sat up and tried to spin my legs round to the side of the bed. It took all the effort I had and the strain made me sweat. Justin stood away from the dresser and moved to help me, but I gave him a glare that stopped him cold. I finally got my feet on the ground, though I didn't want to risk standing up yet.

  "Where's my things?"

  Moe nodded
to Justin. The kid walked to the other side of the room and bent down to the side of a book case. He picked up my bag and put it on the edge of the bed.

  "Not sticking around?" said Moe.

  "Got somewhere I need to be."

  "Where?" asked Justin, his eyes alive with curiosity. Any mention of anything outside town seemed to excite him.

  "Unless you think you got a reason to know, I’m not saying."

  Moe stood up and reached into his pocket. As well as a stray piece of fluff, he pulled out my GPRS. I got to my feet. What was he doing with it? I felt my blood rush to my head and I saw spots, but I fought through the feeling and stayed upright. The sight of him holding my GPRS, my only link to the farm, made me want to knock him out cold.