by David Moody
I jog forward again. A body emerges from a nearby house, the front door of which hangs open like a gaping mouth. It’s back to business as usual as I tighten the grip on the machete in my hand and wait to strike. The corpse lurches at me. I don’t recognise it as being anyone I knew, and that makes it easier. I swing at its head and make contact. The blade sinks three quarters of the way into the skull, just above the cheek bone. Kill one hundred and forty-nine drops to the ground and I yank out my weapon and clean it on the back of my trousers.
I turn the corner and I’m in Harlour Grove. I stop when I see our house, filled with a sudden surge of emotion. Bloody hell, if I half-close my eyes I can almost imagine that everything is normal and none of this ever happened. My heart is racing with nervous anticipation and fear as I move towards our home. I can’t wait to see her again. It’s been too long.
A sudden noise in the street behind me makes me spin around. There are bodies coming at me from several directions. At least six of them are behind me, staggering after me at a pathetically slow pace, and two more are ahead, one closing in from the right and the other coming from the general direction of the house next to ours. The adrenalin is really pumping now I’m this close. I’ll be back with Georgie in the next few minutes and nothing is going to stop me. I don’t even waste time with the machete now – I raise my fist and smash the nearest corpse in the face, rearranging what’s left of its already mutilated features. It drops to the ground, bringing up my one hundred and fiftieth kill in some style.
I’m about to do the same to the next body when I realise I know her. This is what’s left of Judith Landers, the lady who lived next-door but one. Her husband was a narrow-minded idiot but I always got on with Judith. Her face is bloated and discoloured and she’s lost an eye but I can still see it’s her. She’s wearing the remains of the hardware store uniform she wore for work. Poor cow. She reaches out for me and I instinctively raise the machete, but then I look deeper into what’s left of her face and all I can see is the person she used to be. She tries to grab hold of me but one of her arms is broken and it flaps uselessly at her side. I push her away in the hope she’ll just turn round and disappear in the other direction, but she doesn’t. She grabs at me again and, again, I push her away. This time her legs give way and she falls. Her face smashes into the pavement, leaving a greasy, bloody stain behind. Undeterred she gets up and comes at me for a third time. I know I don’t have any choice and I also know that there are now eleven more corpses closing in on me fast. Judith was a short woman. I flash the blade level with my shoulders and take off the top third of her head like it’s a breakfast egg. She drops to her knees and falls forward.
I have carried the key to our house on a chain around my neck since the first day. With my hands tingling with nerves I pull it from under my shirt and shove it into the lock. I can hear dragging footsteps just behind me now. The lock is stiff and I have to use all my strength to turn the key but finally it moves. The latch clicks and I push the door open. I fall into the house and slam the door shut just as the closest body crashes into the other side.
I’m almost too afraid to speak.
‘Georgie?’ I shout, and the sound of my voice echoes around the silent house. I haven’t dared to talk out loud for weeks and the noise seems strange. It makes me feel exposed. ‘Georgie?’
Nothing. I take a couple of steps further down the hallway. Where is she? I need to know what happened here. Wait, what’s that? Just inside the dining room I can see Rufus, our dog. He’s lying on his back and it looks like he’s been dead for some time. Poor bugger, he probably starved to death. I take another step forward but then stop and look away. Something has attacked the dog. He’s been torn apart. There’s dried blood and pieces of him all over the place.
‘Georgie?’ I call out for a third time. I’m about to shout again when I hear it. Something’s moving in the kitchen and I pray that it’s her.
I look up and see a shadow shifting at the far end of the hallway. It has to be Georgie. She’s shuffling towards me and I know that any second I’ll see her. I want to run to meet her but I can’t because my feet are frozen to the ground with nerves. The shadow lurches forward again and she finally comes into view. The end of the hallway is dark and for a moment I can only see her silhouette but there’s no question it’s her. She slowly turns towards me, pivoting around awkwardly, then begins to trip down the hall in my direction. Every step she takes brings her closer to the light coming from the small window next to the front door, revealing her in more detail. I can see now that she’s naked and I find myself wondering what happened to make her lose her clothes. Another step and I can see that her once strong and beautiful hair is now lank and sparse. Another step and I see that her usually flawless, perfect skin has been eaten away by decay. Another step forward and I can clearly see what’s left of her face. Those sparkling eyes that I gazed into a thousand times are now dry and she looks at me without the slightest hint of recognition or emotion. I clear my throat and try to speak…
‘Georgie, are you…?’
She launches herself at me. Rather than recoil and fight I instead catch her and pull her closer. It feels good to hold her again. She’s weak and offers no resistance when I wrap my arms around her and hold her tight. I press my face next to hers, fighting to ignore the smell of her decay.
I don’t want to ever let her go. This was how I wanted it to be. It’s better this way. I had known all along that she would be dead. If she’d survived she would probably have left the house and I would never have been able to find her, but I’d have never stopped looking. We were meant to be together, Georgie and me. That’s what I kept telling her, even when she stopped wanting to listen.
#
I’ve been back home for a couple of hours now. Apart from the dust and mildew, the place looks pretty much the same as it always did. She didn’t change much after I left. We’re in the living room together now. It’s almost a year since I’ve been in here. Since we split up she didn’t like me coming around. She never usually let me get any further than the hall, even when I came to collect my things. She said she’d call the police if she had to but I always knew she wouldn’t. That was just what he told her to say.
I’ve dragged the coffee table across the door to stop her getting out and I’ve nailed a few planks of wood across it, just to be sure. She’s stopped attacking me now and it’s almost as if she’s got used to having me around again. I tried to put a bathrobe around her to keep her warm but she wouldn’t keep still long enough to let me. Even now she’s still moving around, walking round the edge of the room, tripping over and crashing into things. Silly girl! And with our neighbours watching too! Seems like most of the corpses from around the estate have dragged themselves over here to see what’s going on. I’ve counted more than twenty dead faces pressed against the window, looking in.
It was a shame we couldn’t have worked things out before she died. I know I spent too much time at work, but I did it all for her. I did it all for us. She said we’d grown apart and that I didn’t excite her anymore. She said I was boring and dull. She said she wanted more adventure and spontaneity and that, she said, was what Bryan gave her. I tried to make her see that he was too young for her and that he was just stringing her along, but she didn’t want to listen. And where is he now? Where is he with his bloody designer clothes, his city centre apartment and his flash car? I know exactly where he is – he’s out there on the streets, rotting with the rest of the masses. And where am I? I’m home. I’m back sitting in my armchair drinking my whiskey in my living room. I’m at home with my wife and this is where I’m going to stay. I’m going to die here and when I’ve gone Georgie and I will rot together. We’ll be here together until the very end of everything.
I know it’s what she would have wanted.
SKIN
He calls himself Skin, though his name is actually Scott Weaver. He’d never admit it, but despite all the bravado and bullshit, he’s scared as hell
. Skin is what he used to beg his friends to call him. It’s the name he used on forums and in chatrooms, the tag he left scrawled onto the sides of buildings and bus shelters. Skin is sixteen and, like many other similarly alienated and disenchanted adolescents, he has a grudge against the rest of the world because he’s convinced the rest of the world has it in for him. His frustrations have been building and his problems festering for months now, and each day he has felt himself getting closer and closer to breaking point. Three weeks and two days ago, however, much of that pressure was inexplicably released. Three weeks and two days ago, the rest of the world died.
In the long hours he’d subsequently spent alone, Skin often thought back to how it began. It was a Tuesday morning, and his parents had been giving him hell because he’d only just come back in from being out all Monday night. He didn’t know what their problem was. He’d been out with a few friends and they’d lost track of time, so what? They’d had a few drinks, so what? They’d done some drugs (nothing heavy, but his parents didn’t need to know that), so what? His dad had gone on and on about how this was the time of his life where he needed to be putting more effort in, not less, then he and Dad had started yelling and swearing at each other and that had made Mom cry, and that had made Dad even angrier. Christ, they didn’t ever see his point of view. More to the point, they didn’t want to. They judged him by the way he dressed, the music he listened to and the people he hung around with, nothing else. His dad hadn’t spoken to him for almost a month when he’d had his first piercings. Fuck, if only they’d known about the stuff he’d had done in the summer just gone…
He’d been trapped in the kitchen with them both, trying to find a way out of the argument without letting them win, when it happened. One minute they were both in full flow – Dad screaming at him for being a bloody waste of space, Mom crying into her tea and yelling at Dad to stop yelling – the next they were dead. Both of them. Facedown on the kitchen floor.
The death of his parents (and, apparently, the rest of the world) was the moment it all finally began to make sense. Until then Skin’s life had been increasingly fucking miserable, and the tedium showed no sign of relenting. He’d flunked his exams and left school, only to then be forced to enrol for re-takes at college. And his girlfriend had left him. They’d been together on and off for eight months when Dawn ended it. She said that he’d bullied her into having sex. She’d said that he kept asking her to do things she didn’t feel comfortable doing. It was her fault, the fucking tease. She was the one who dressed like a fucking whore all the time. Jesus, she was the one who’d been sat there in a fucking corset, tight black mini-skirt, torn fishnets and knee-high PVC boots when she’d told him that she didn’t want to be with him anymore. He’d lost his virginity to her pretty early on in their brief relationship and his imagination had run away with him since then. He’d already discovered that he’d been the only virgin in the relationship and that had made him feel like he had something to prove, or that he had some catching up to do. Skin had always imagined that first sex would have been this incredible event, the undisputed highlight of his young life so far, but the reality had been bitterly disappointing. Instead of endless hours of uninterrupted dirty passion, he’d had to settle for a fifteen minute fumble in Dawn’s bedroom while her mom went to the chip shop. And half of those fifteen minutes were spent trying to get the bloody condom on.
In the three weeks between Skin splitting up with Dawn and the end of the world, he began to hate her with a passion. He still saw her regularly because as soon as she’d finished with him, she started sleeping her way around his friends, doing more with each of them (if the rumours were to be believed) than she ever had with him.
After everyone had died he’d been terrified for a while (well, who wouldn’t have been?) but his fear was short-lived. As the hours passed and his personal safety and apparent immunity to whatever had happened seemed more certain, his confidence soared. He put as much distance as possible between himself and his parents’ safe and predictable upper-middle-class home and began to enjoy his new and wholly unexpected freedom. He was king of the world. He could do what he wanted, when he wanted. After a couple of days the bodies had risen, but even that hadn’t dampened the sudden euphoria he’d felt at having survived when absolutely everyone else had died. The zombie apocalypse was, as he’d always imagined it would be, incredibly fucking cool.
Skin was invincible. Without doing anything, he’d won.
A lover of pulp horror films (the bloodier the better) and comics, Skin revelled in the filth, disease and decay. As the bodies around him became more active, he actually became more self-assured because he knew he was better than them. As the potential dangers increased, so his excitement and adrenalin levels rose also. He looted shops, taking food, booze, cigarettes, magazines, music and whatever else he damn well wanted. And, in a long-considered and calculated gesture of defiance, he built a base for himself right in the middle of the school he’d just left. He spent days tearing the place apart, ripping the heart out of the place that had caused him and countless hundreds of other kids untold amounts of grief over the years. He’d pissed on the headteacher’s corpse. He’d even squatted down and taken a shit in the middle of the classroom where he’d been humiliated and yelled at by his Nazi-like Maths teacher Mr Miller during his last term there. And where was Miller now, he asked himself? Dead, just like the rest of them. Sitting in Miller’s classroom with his feet on his desk, swigging scotch, Skin laughed out loud at the irony of it all. And they’d said he’d never amount to anything…
The bodies began to get annoying. The damn things just wouldn’t leave him alone. He convinced himself he was the focus of some bizarre kind of hero-worship from the dead, but he knew that wasn’t really the case. The merest sight of him would cause a herd of the bloody things to come after him incessantly. And he noticed they’d started to become more violent too, scrapping with each other as they jostled for position. He guessed it wouldn’t take much for them to start on him if he gave them half a chance. Skin made a conscious decision to keep out of sight and lie low for a while but, before disappearing from view, he went out looting again. He rode into town on his bike, following the bus route he remembered, heading for one particular shop. He and his friends had spent hours looking in the window on wasted Saturday afternoons, but they’d never made it inside. The shop sold hunting and fishing equipment. He didn’t know what he wanted or what he needed, but he took as much from the shelves as he could carry: knives, pistols, rifles and anything else which looked vaguely useful and suitably dangerous. He packed it all onto the bike and rode back to school.
Skin was in charge now. He was unstoppable. He made the decisions and he made the rules, and after a while he decided that hiding away didn’t suit a man in his position. He began to move through the bodies with contempt, only running when he absolutely had to. Already knowing he was vastly superior to the decomposing morons all around him, his guns and knives made him feel all-conquering. He carried weapons all the time. He hadn’t had to use them yet, but he was ready.
Food became a problem. He’d had some supplies but they’d dwindled down to nothing. With a rucksack slung over his shoulders and a rifle in hand, he walked to the local shopping precinct, half a mile from school. He’d spent many afternoons hanging out there with friends when he should have been in lessons. Missing school hadn’t done him any harm, had it?
He crept through the supermarket, collecting whatever food he could find that was still edible. Most stuff had gone off, and the place stank so bad that he almost threw up. He needed to rest and catch his breath before he made the trip back to school and he walked further into the building, eventually emerging from a back entrance. A metal staircase led up to a boarded-up, graffiti-covered flat above the shop. Skin climbed the stairs and forced his way inside. He rested for a while in a damp living room with a mouldy carpet and peeling wallpaper, passing the time with cigarettes and alcohol he’d taken from the store below.
A narrow veranda ran across the front of the flat. Skin stepped outside and looked out over the whole of the dead precinct below him. A large, roughly elliptical collection of run-down shops centred around an oval-shaped patch of muddy grass, it didn’t look very different now to how it always had done. There were a few bodies still lying on the ground, but other than that the place looked as grey, lifeless and terminally dull as it always had. Even those bodies which continued to incessantly drag themselves around looked strangely familiar: as slow, vacant and pointless as they’d been before they died. Skin baulked at the idea of ever allowing himself to become like that.
Standing up there, in full view yet untouchable, he felt like some kind of ancient tribal chief looking down on his rotting subjects. Maybe this was his opportunity to show them just how powerful he was? He grabbed his rifle and rummaged around in his rucksack for ammunition. He loaded and took aim.
Can I do this? Of course you can.
Should I do it? Why not, who’s going to stop you? You’re Skin: no one tells you what to do anymore.
Does it matter? Don’t be fucking stupid. Of course it doesn’t matter. Damn things are dead already.
Skin lined up a single, bedraggled figure in his sights. He squeezed the trigger slightly and took up the slack. Then he cleared his throat and held his breath as he readied himself to fire. The end of the rifle seemed to be waving about uncontrollably. He wedged the butt deeper into his shoulder, shuffled his feet and re-balanced himself, then located the figure in his sights again. Then he pulled the trigger and fired. The gunshot cracked in his ear, rendering him temporarily deaf on one side, and the force of the shot almost threw him over. He dropped the rifle and rubbed the sore patch on his shoulder where the recoil had dug in. He shook his head clear, then looked out over the precinct. There wasn’t much to see at first, primarily because the noise had caused all of the bodies to stagger towards the supermarket, but after a few seconds he managed to locate the one he’d been aiming at. He’d hit it. Christ, what a shot! Half the damn thing’s head had been blown away. More importantly, the fucking thing had finally stopped moving.
