by Joe McKinney
#
Jas had always loved the noise his bike made. It was such a loud, ugly, brash, fuck off to everything. Now they were having to stay increasingly quiet to survive, and riding the bike allowed him to vent his frustrations. He felt like screaming most of the time, and this was just about the only way he still could.
Hollis, Harte and Gordon were where he’d left them, parked up overlooking the flats, engine off. They watched from a distance as he cruised the maze of narrow streets behind the grotesque building. It was a bizarre sight, strangely surreal. Often he would disappear, only to emerge again a few seconds later with a slowly marching crowd of bodies in his wake. Once he’d got enough of them following, he’d drive down the steep hill and the dead would trickle after him. And Gordon had been right: once they were down at the bottom, they struggled to get back up.
‘We’ll keep pushing them back,’ Hollis said, feeling increasingly confident and positive. ‘It’s perfect. All that space at the foot of the hill… we’ll build some kind of barrier. There are diggers down there from the demolition, and more cars than we’re ever going to need. We’ll clear this bloody place and make it our own. Stop those fucking things getting anywhere near us.’
Neither Harte nor Gordon said anything. They both agreed, but the idea of all that work didn’t appeal. For now they were happy to sit back and watch the bizarre, almost comical sight unfolding in front of them. The trickle of bodies had become a veritable torrent now, a river of death slowly flooding down the hill, pooling at the bottom.
#
Several hours later.
With the vast majority of the local corpses now forming a single vile decaying mass at the bottom of the hill, Hollis risked driving the van around to the flats. He parked in the shadows. Gordon opened the door to go inside the building and, almost immediately, the foetid remains of a demolition worker, still wearing his high-vis jacket and safety helmet, lunged at him from out of nowhere. Gordon fell back, the corpse on top of him. ‘You’re fucking useless, Gord,’ Jas said as he ripped off the dead man’s helmet then swung at his head with his crowbar, splitting his skull and sending him flying.
‘We’re going to have to check this whole place out,’ Hollis said. ‘Every room. Shouldn’t take long.’
Gordon held back, keen to let the others go first. They each armed themselves with makeshift weapons, then grouped at the main entrance. ‘We should split up,’ Jas suggested.
‘You never seen a horror film before?’ Harte joked. Jas remained stony-faced.
‘You come with me,’ he told him. ‘Hollis, you get Gordon.’
The building reminded Hollis of a three-cornered hat. He and Gordon went left while the other two went right.
Gordon’s initial nervousness seemed to reduce with each door they opened and every empty apartment they found. ‘We’re lucky to have come across this place,’ he said, chattering anxiously. Hollis shoved another door open and they quickly checked out the few rooms within the flat: an open-plan living area and kitchen, a dingy bathroom and two bedrooms. The decoration was old and tired, the entire place stripped bare save for a couple of piles of rubbish left by the former occupants.
‘Lucky?’ Hollis said when they were done. ‘How do you work that out?’
‘Because this place is in such a good position and it’s already been vacated. Imagine if it had still been full of families.’
‘Then we wouldn’t have given it a second glance,’ he answered, working hard and becoming increasingly annoyed that Gordon wasn’t. ‘We’d have just kept going. Maybe we should have anyway. Jas said he was working security at a mall that hadn’t been opened, imagine that. Still, I guess this’ll do for now.’
Gordon followed Hollis as he finished checking the flat then moved onto the next. Hollis opened the door, then paused. Not empty. Something here… He’d only taken two steps in when it came at him – another demolition worker corpse, staggering like a dead weight. Gordon squealed like a baby and ran for cover but Hollis wasn’t fazed. He grabbed the dead man by the lapels of his donkey jacket and swung him around, then forced him out of the door and out to the balcony. The body couldn’t match his speed or coordination, its dead feet scrambling on the ground for purchase. Too late. With a heave of effort, Hollis upended it. Gordon looked down, then looked away again. On the ground below, the dead thing’s head popped open like an overripe watermelon; a star-shaped puddle of bright red in all the dusty grey.
‘Don’t know how I’d cope without you here to help,’ Hollis said sarcastically, wiping his hands clean on the back of his jeans as he walked towards the neighbouring flat.
The next door along was blocked. Hollis waited for Gordon to show some initiative, but he wasn’t showing any. ‘What?’ he grumbled.
‘Your turn,’ Hollis said. ‘Come on, break a sweat.’
Gordon pushed the door but it wouldn’t open. He looked to Hollis for help, but Hollis just looked back at the door. This one was his. Gordon took a step back, then shoulder-charged. The door flew open, and he flew through. Hollis was about to follow him inside when he came flying back out the other way, a girl holding him by the neck. She slammed him up against the wall opposite, almost tipping him over the balcony like Hollis had the body from the previous apartment, and he whimpered. Hollis tried to pull her off him. He hadn’t seen a corpse as vicious as this one before.
‘Fuck off!’ she screamed. She let Gordon go and he slid to the ground. Hollis just looked at her, shocked. The last thing he’d expected to find in this ruin was another survivor.
‘I thought you were one of them.’
‘I though you were one of them,’ she replied, breathless.
‘What, a corpse that knocks the door?’
‘Piss off,’ she said.
‘You on your own here?’
She shook her head and gestured for them to follow. They did. Hollis stopped in the doorway and looked around, amazed. There were more faces looking back at him than he’d seen since this nightmare had begun. A girl cradling a doll, another smoking a fag, a kid drinking from a can of lager, a prim and proper housewife sitting in a moth-eaten armchair, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, a guy with a straggly beard in a bus driver’s uniform, and a balding, overweight bloke who came marching over to him, hand outstretched. ‘The cavalry’s here then?’ he said, hopefully.
‘Hardly.’
‘Got any idea—?’
‘What’s happened? No. You?’
‘Bloody hell,’ Gordon said, peering cautiously around the doorframe.
‘That guy on the bike, he with you?’ the fat man asked.
‘Yep. You saw him?’ Hollis replied.
‘We saw what he did. Smart move.’
‘But you didn’t think to let us know you were here? Maybe come out and help?’
‘Sorry… didn’t want to get in the way.’
‘Are there more of you?’
‘This is us, unfortunately,’ the girl who’d attacked Gordon said, regaining her composure.
‘You picked a good place for a hideout,’ Hollis told her. ‘That’s why we’re here. We’re planning on fortifying the place.’
‘Be our guest,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the party.’
THE HUMAN CONDITION
Part i – GOING UP
Barry Bushell sat at the dressing table in his wide, palatial executive hotel suite and fixed his make-up. He wondered whether this was just a fad, just a phase he was going through, or if he’d spend the rest of his life dressing as a woman. He wasn’t gay and he wasn’t transsexual. This wasn’t something he’d always wanted to do. He wasn’t a drag queen or lady-boy in training. Barry Bushell was just a typical, red-blooded, heterosexual man who happened to have recently discovered that he felt comfortable wearing women’s clothes. And when the rest of the world lay dead and decaying in the streets a couple of hundred feet below him, why the hell shouldn’t he wear whatever he damn well wanted?
The last seven days had been the strangest of
Barry’s life so far. Every aspect of his world had been irrevocably changed. If he was honest, his problems had started long before last Tuesday. A few months ago he’d been happy and settled and had a long-term plan. He’d moved into his girlfriend Tina’s flat with her and, for a while, life had been good. Better than good, in fact. But their relationship had abruptly ended on what had, until recently, been the worst day of his life. Out of the blue Barry lost his job when the company he worked for went into administration and its CEO went to jail. Penniless and distraught, Barry had returned home unexpectedly early to find his brother Dennis in bed with Tina. She’d proceeded to tell him that Dennis was better in bed than he was and that their relationship was over. By three o’clock that afternoon he’d lost his lover, his brother, his job and his home. That nightmare day had, of course, seemed like the best Christmas ever in comparison with last Tuesday when Barry had helplessly watched the entire population of the city (and, he later presumed, the world) drop dead. After the cruel and unexpected blows that life had dealt him recently, there was a part of him that found some solace in the sudden isolation and quiet. His anger with the rest of the world somehow made the pain easier to deal with. He blamed the inexplicable chaos for his sudden ‘gender-realignment’ (as he had labelled his drastic change in appearance). And now here he was, alone. As far as he could tell, the last man on Earth. Almost certainly the last man on Earth wearing a dress, anyway.
Five days ago, many of the bodies in the streets had risen. At first Barry had gone back down to ground level to try and find out what was happening, only to quickly return to his comfortable hide-out as soon as he realised that things had worsened, not improved. The people down there were dead. Although they were moving, there wasn’t the slightest spark of life left within them. Their sudden reanimation was as impossible to explain as their equally sudden demise days earlier. Barry climbed all the way back up to the top floor of the twenty-eight storey, five star, city-centre hotel and barricaded himself in the Presidential Suite. It was the best place he could find to hide. Within the hotel’s three hundred or so bedrooms, its many kitchens, function rooms, dining rooms, bars, restaurants and sports facilities, he’d been able to find pretty much everything he needed to survive, and a vast wardrobe of women’s clothing, make-up and accessories to boot. He’d even found a pair of size eleven stiletto shoes.
Barry stood up, smoothed the creases out of his dark blue dress, and looked himself up and down in the full-length mirror to his right. God I look good, he thought, pretty damn convincing save for the slight trace of a five o’clock shadow. His first experiments with make-up last week had been over-the-top, leaving him looking like a drag queen, but now he was definitely getting the hang of it. He wore a long straight blonde wig which he’d taken from a shop-window dummy, but he hoped in time his own hair would grow to a sufficient length for him to be able to style it. He’d started painting his fingernails and he was finally getting the hang of walking in heels. That had been the hardest part of all but it had been worth the effort. The knee-high leather boots he’d found in a bedroom on the seventh floor went perfectly with this outfit.
Am I just confused, Barry wondered in a frequent moment of self-doubt, or have I gone completely fucking insane? Whatever the answer, he was relatively happy, all things considered. He could do whatever he wanted now. He was in charge. If he wanted to wear a dress then he’d wear a dress. If he wanted to walk around naked, then he could do that too.
It was starting to get late. This was the part of day he really didn’t like, when he found it hardest being alone and when he started to think about everything that had happened and all he’d lost. His sudden change of outfit had been deliberately timed to give him a much needed confidence boost to help him get through the dark and lonely hours until morning. As much as he was comfortable in his own company, there were times when he wished this eternal isolation would end. He lit lamps in all the windows of the suite, praying that someone out there would see them, but at the same time also hoping no one would. He had to let the world know where he was, but in doing so he left himself feeling exposed. But he had to do it, he continually told himself. He would be safer with other people.
Barry walked around the perimeter of the vast suite (which covered almost the entire top floor of the building) lighting candles, lamps and torches in every available window. He kept himself busy. So busy, in fact, that he was unaware of a sudden flurry of movement and confusion outside. For the first time in a week, other survivors had entered this part of the city.
#
‘You’re a fucking idiot, Nick,’ Elizabeth Ferry screamed. ‘I said keep out of the city, not drive right through the bloody city centre. Fancy a little late night shopping did you?’
‘Shut up,’ Nick Wilcox yelled back. ‘If it hadn’t been for the fucking noise you two make with your constant bloody arguing, I wouldn’t have taken the wrong turn in the first place.’
‘Don’t bring me into this,’ Doreen Phillips said, listening in as usual. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh, it’s never got anything to do with you, has it?’ Ted Hamilton said from the seat directly behind her. ‘Of course it’s your fault, Doreen. You’re a bloody troublemaker.’
Doreen turned around and glared at Ted who was, as usual, filling his face with food. ‘And you’re a greedy fat bastard who should—’
‘For crying out loud,’ Elizabeth said, interrupting her. ‘Just give it a rest.’
Doreen stopped talking, folded her arms and slumped into her seat like a scolded child.
‘Just keep going, Nick,’ John Proctor said from three seats back. His voice remained comparatively calm. ‘We’re here now and shouting at each other isn’t going to help. Just keep driving.’
Nick took one hand off the steering wheel for a second, just long enough to wipe his face and rub his eyes. He’d been driving for hours and he was struggling but he wasn’t about to let the others know. They annoyed him beyond belief. He’d only found five other survivors since all of this began. Why did it have to be this five? This small, volatile, and dysfunctional group had been together for just three days, discovering each other by chance as they’d each individually wandered through the ruins of the world. Elizabeth and John Proctor had met first, Elizabeth having walked into the church where he used to preach, just as he was tearing off his dog-collar and walking out. A cleric of some thirty years standing, his already wavering faith had been shattered by the unstoppable infection which had raged across the surface of the planet and killed millions. If this God of ours is so all-powerful, loving and forgiving, he’d asked Elizabeth, then how could the fucker have let this happen? John’s sudden loss of faith had been as powerful and life-changing as his initial discovery of the church in his early days at college. Elizabeth had, in all seriousness, suggested that the plague might be some kind of divine retribution – a great flood for our times. Did she think he was a 21st century Noah? He told her in no uncertain terms that she was out of her fucking mind if she believed any of that crap.
Ted Hamilton, a plumber, part-time football coach and full-time compulsive comfort eater, had been on the roof of an office block working on a corroded pipe when the infection struck. He’d had an incredible view of the destruction from up there, but that was where he’d stayed, too afraid to come down. He’d sat on the roof for hours until he saw Doreen Phillips walking down the high street, shopping bags in hand, stepping gingerly over and around the mass of tangled bodies which covered the ground. Together they’d wandered aimlessly in search of help which never came. Their constant shouting and noise had, however, eventually attracted the attention of Paul Jones, a sullen and quiet man who preferred to keep himself to himself but who had recognised the importance of sticking together, no matter who these people were or how stupid they appeared.
Paul had suggested establishing a base from which they could explore the dead land around them and, perhaps, find more survivors. As obvious and sensible as his pla
n had been, it also proved to be unnecessary because as they struggled to establish themselves in a guest house on the edge of a small town, more survivors had found them. Three days ago the eerie silence of the first post-infection Friday morning had been shattered by the unexpected arrival of a fifty-three-seater coach driven by Nick Wilcox. Nick – who had previously driven coaches for a living, usually taking bus loads of pensioners around various parts of the south coast – had ploughed through the town with a nervous disregard for anything and everything, destroying any corpses that got in his way. Paul and Ted ran out into the road and flagged him down and it was only Elizabeth’s quick reactions (fortunately Nick had picked her and John up a day earlier) which stopped him from gleefully running them both down.
The motley collection of survivors made the coach their temporary travelling home. It was relatively strong and comfortable with room inside for them, their belongings, and enough supplies to last for a couple of weeks. And the coach had a huge advantage over everywhere else they’d previously tried to shelter because it moved. When things got ugly or there were too many bodies around for comfort, they just started the engine and drove somewhere else.
‘Keep going, Nick,’ John said again, his calm and deceptively relaxed tone helping diffuse the tension. ‘Get us onto a major road, then follow it back out of the city.’
‘Problem is I can’t see the bloody road, never mind follow it.’ Even with the headlights on full-beam, Nick could see very little. The streets were teeming with movement, the dead continually swarming around the vehicle.
‘Does anyone know where we are?’ Elizabeth asked hopefully. ‘Anyone been here before?’
No one answered.
‘We could just stop,’ Ted eventually suggested, his mouth still full of food. ‘We’ve done it before. Sit still and shut up and they’ll leave us alone after a while.’
‘Come on, Ted,’ Elizabeth said, ‘there’s got to be a better way. They’ll take hours to go, you know that as well as I do, and there are hundreds of them around here. We’ve never seen them in these kinds of numbers.’
