No Zombies Please We Are British

by Alex Laybourne

  Cooper is still yelling profanity, saying Allen fucking killed her. Just in case nobody knows what’s going on. But Cooper’s not entirely right, because Nancy’s not quite there yet. She’s making a different noise now.

  In another part of the house, back at the stairs, two sets of feet are pounding the floor and getting louder as Bretta and Denise come up the second floor. Cooper turns and grabs both of them before they can step into the doorway.

  “Don’t go in there!” he yells in their faces.

  They’re wrestling in the hallway and Denise crying and shouting What happened? and Bretta is in the doorway, her face curling up like she’d just been punched in the mouth.

  Scott looks at her.

  Allen swings for the fences.

  At the last moment Scott senses the movement and ducks, pure instinct, throwing his wooden bat up into the arc of the incoming aluminum one. The two weapons crash together, and Scott’s wrists fold painfully to the side. He almost loses his grip. Allen swings again, chest-level this time, and Scott jumps back out of the way. Allen whiffs on dead air. The follow-through crashes into candles and half-empty cans of meat sitting on the dresser. All of it comes down on Nancy and her open wound of a face. Under the stink of all that blood and mess, vanilla and sunshine candles. If Scott’s mother was here right now he might have killed her for that.

  Allen swings again, and this time, Scott counters with a swing of his own. The two baseball bats crash together, stopping instantly. Scott’s wooden bat cracks, and the sound of the impact changes mid-strike, dropping down an octave and ending with a buzz, like a fly caught in your fingers before you roll it around and end its miserable bit of life. The impact sends painful jarring vibrations into Scott’s hands, across his sore wrists, and up into his forearms.

  Allen starts to pull away for another swing, and that’s when Scott jerks his broken bat down, sliding it the length of Allen’s weapon to catch him across the wrist. If they were swords, a cross guard would have rendered this move useless. But they’re not. There’s no protecting your hands in baseball. Not really. Allen screeches and pulls the damaged hand free, away from further violence. It’s a fatal error.

  Scott gives another half-swing, down again, targeting the other wrist. He steps into it this time. The bat hits Allen mid-forearm, and the meat buckles at the point of impact. Now Allen’s aluminum bat is on the floor. He’s leaning over his hands, his mouth open, his screams pushing drool out of his mouth. Scott finally takes his eyes off Allen, just for a moment, and then he looks at Nancy, who isn’t bubbling anymore but her eyes keep blinking. Like everything will be okay if she can just get a bit of dirt out of her eyes. Calm like that, and blinking, blinking.

  It’s the blinking that gets Scott back on Allen again. Each blink is hot roofing tar onto his soul. It’s more black rage than he can handle. Bretta’s voice is far away, tickling the back of his neck like a stray hair. Screams, lots of screams.

  “Oh my God, they’re broken, they’re fuckin broken—”

  Nancy’s eye flutters are slowing down, like a moth on a cold window. She wasn’t a sister to Scott but like one. Like they are all family now, because there aren’t many people left, and they are all in this together.

  Scott brings his cracked bat to bear. More screams. Entombed in his parents’ house while a million dead people wander the streets looking for meat. Too much. It’s all, finally, too much.

  The bat comes down square on the back of Allen’s head, knocking his left eye out of alignment, so it’s staring straight down at his cheek. Allen snorts and falls forward, a large dent in the back of his head where he’d been struck. A moment later he is venting blood out of his mouth and his nose and his ears. From where Scott is standing, it looks like Allen just peeled open his face so the blood can all come out at once.

  Bretta is yelling something at Scott, but it’s still too much for him to process. Allen is kicking his feet, and he keeps kicking Nancy in the face and in the chest, and his feet catch on one of her exposed tits and the force knocks her sideways.

  Scott looks down at the floor and his feet are bloody, and then he looks at Bretta she’s just standing in the doorway, not screaming, just crying and looking at him with scared, dark eyes. Her hand is over her mouth.

  Denise and Cooper are behind Bretta, and then the three of them are holding on to each other. Denise crying into Cooper’s shoulder, and Cooper has an arm around her, but he’s staring at the floor where Allen and Nancy are tangled up. His face is passive, like he’s seeing it all on television. Bretta is looking at Scott like he did the right thing, even though it was a horrible thing. The dead people outside are drumming their lunatic anthem. It’s the only sound getting through.

  He walks toward Bretta. He drops the bat and it makes that muted buzz again when it hits the floor. Bretta unwinds herself from Cooper and Denise, and she’s nodding at Scott. She opens her arms to him. He steps into her warmth and she pulls him close, pulls his head down so his face is on her shoulder and her neck so they can share their breath. It’s the warmth and the taste of her breath that finally brings Scott around, finally causes the drumbeat to die away and finally he can hear what Bretta is saying to him. She tells him it’s okay, he’s okay now, and everything is going to be okay.

  “You did what you had to do,” she says. “He would have killed us all.”

  She leads him away from the blood and the death, and away from Cooper and Denise clinging to each other, Denise sobbing with a snotty nose, her face shiny and wet. Her bleached blonde hair clinging to the tears on her cheeks and to the stubble on Cooper’s face.

  Denise keeps saying it’s going to be okay but Scott doesn’t believe her. He knows they’re going to die here. Sooner or later, they’ll all go out like Allen, complaining of headaches and being sad for days on end until he picks up a bat and knocks out his girlfriend’s lights.

  Walking down the stairs, back to their room, Scott sees it all and it’s still too much. Everything he’s just done is a pointless waste of time. Survival isn’t extending their lives. It’s living in denial. It’s futility. Drawing breath is futility.

  He pulls away from the sanctuary of Bretta’s arms and approaches the window. Bretta tells him to be careful, there’s glass all over the floor.

  He looks down. Why so there is. Long, clear fingers with razor-sharp edges. He reaches down and picks one up. So very long. So very sharp.

  The first gash across his wrist opens like a puckering fish mouth for a moment before it floods his arm with red. He cuts hard enough to slice his palm and fingers with the glass he’s holding. There’s pain, and then burning where the glass kisses flesh. His legs are spattered with hot and wet. His hand looks like a candy apple that’s melting red caramel all over the floor.

  He sits down on the bed, and there’s a moment or two before the screaming starts up again, a moment when Bretta is confused about what just happened, and where all the colour is coming from. It’s a moment of perfect, utter peace.

  And then it’s gone.

  Living Dead is available from Amazon here.