Kirk grinned. “Nothing I’d enjoy more, boss.” He swaggered up to the zombie in the road and waited calmly in front of him. The dead man reached out with grasping hands, but Kirk threw himself into a delicate cartwheel and ended up behind his attacker. The other foragers cheered. Kirk kicked the zombie in the rump, sending him flopping forward onto his belly. The other foragers laughed.
Garfield sighed. Here we go.
Kirk waited for the dead man to get up off the ground, before leaping up and kicking him in the side of the head. He topped the move off by spinning around and backheeling the zombie in the chest and cracking some ribs with an audible clack. None of blows were effective – the only way to take down a zombie was to injure the brain – but Kirk seemed to find a type of sport in battering down his enemies before dispatching them skilfully.
“Just get on with it,” shouted Lemon, laughing heartily. “Or marry the guy and b-b-bugger off.”
Kirk looked back at his colleagues and chuckled. He gave them a quick bow as if to conclude his performance. A claw hammer appeared from his belt and he smashed it into the dead man’s forehead. It dropped the zombie immediately, but the body still twitched on the floor. Kirk gave the skull one last blow from his hammer and it was done. The dead man’s head crumbled like it was made of papier mache.
“You done?” asked Garfield.
Kirk came back over to them. “No, he is, though.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Men and their testosterone.”
“Okay, let’s load up,” said Garfield. “We’re wasting light.”
The foragers set about loading up the minivan. They opened up the hatchback and shoved their supplies into the boot. Then they squeezed themselves into the front and middle seats like sardines. Cat sat on David’s lap – the two of them had become husband and wife of sorts – but everyone else made do with what little space they could find, eleven people inside a vehicle designed for seven. It was lucky everyone was so skinny and malnourished, or else the vehicle’s chassis might have fallen out beneath them. We need a second vehicle.
Garfield sat up front with Kirk, who was the man at the wheel. Ideally there would have been a map between them, but the day of the smartphone and satnav had made paper plotting redundant. There were no maps to be found.
“You sure you don’t want to try the motorway?” Kirk asked him. “I think it would be best.”
“No,” Garfield said again. “Let’s just get on the same page, shall we? We’re taking the scenic route. ”
Kirk started the engine and put his hands on the steering wheel. “You’re the boss.”
“So they tell me.”
The minivan gave a whinnying grunt and crept forward. Kirk navigated down the main roads for a few miles, dodging burnt-out wrecks and small assemblies of the dead. Many of the houses they passed were black and charred, some merely ruins and foundations. For the first few months of infection, fires had consumed most of the country. At least the destruction the inferno had wrought had taken as many dead men as it had the living. It was almost like Mother Nature had been trying to even the odds. Not that it helped. The dead outnumber us a thousand to one.
Eventually the minivan came upon a cow gate bordering a field. There they stopped while Lemon hopped out and smashed the padlock with one of his many tools. Once the gate was open, Kirk put the van into first gear and drove onto the grass. Once he picked up a bit of speed, he moved into second and kept it there. The field was sodden and uneven from recent rain, and everyone cried out in misery as Kirk’s driving threw them about inside the confined space.
“Sorry, everyone,” said Kirk. “Not much I can do. Garf wants us to take the farmland and this is the farmland.”
Garfield narrowed his eyes at Kirk, but the younger man just smiled amiably. “Just slow it down,” he said, “and we’ll be fine.”
Kirk chuckled and dropped their speed by a few miles. The bumpiness was instantly less pronounced. They were able to drive on for almost ten minutes without complaint. As they travelled uphill, the ground became less sodden and Kirk was able to shift into third and fourth. We’re making good time, thought Garfield.
“Farmhouse coming up ahead,” Kirk said. “Want to check it out?”
Garfield spied the small cottage at the edge of the field and thought about it for a moment, weighing up the pros and cons. The plan was not to fill up on supplies before they got to where they were going, but it wouldn’t hurt to check out the odd little place here and there. Some farmhouses had the occasional shotgun stashed away in their pantries. It was worth checking out. “We’ll take a look,” he said. “Three man team; you, me, and Lemon; quick sweep for any food and supplies.”
“Okay dokey,” said Kirk, turning the wheel slightly to take them directly towards the cottage.
The building was old grey brick with a red slate roof and a small porch over the front door. It looked entirely benign and as safe a place as existed nowadays, but each of the foragers knew that looks could be deceiving. The dead did not distinguish between nice places and bad. You could just as easily find a horde of them at a quaint farmhouse than you could at a rundown shopping mall or hospital.
Still, it’s a cute little farmhouse. I bet Poppy would like it here. All this space to run around and explore. The girl is always wanting to explore – she’s like a little blonde squirrel. Maybe someday she’ll get to live in a place like this. Or someplace beside a pond like the house she grew up in.
Kirk pulled the van to a stop outside the cottage and applied the handbrake. They all sat and waited for a minute, making sure that nothing came out of the nearby outhouses and sheds. Once the coast was clear, Garfield opened his door and stepped out onto the gravel, the stones crunching beneath his boots. Kirk stepped out, too, from the driver’s side, and slammed his door loudly. Garfield winced. “Do you want to bring the dead down on us? Try and be a little less obvious.”
Kirk huffed. “Sorry, boss. Wouldn’t it be best to attract them, though? Least that way we can see ‘em coming.”
“I’d rather them not come at all.”
“Fair enough. Lem, you ready?”
Lemon was coming out of the sliding door at the side of the van. He hopped down onto the gravel and nearly stumbled. His skin was pale. “I think I’m g-g-gunna throw up.”
Kirk laughed and punched him on the arm. “Man up, Lem.”
“It’s just because you’re not used to being in a vehicle,” said Cat stepping out behind him and rubbing him on the back. “Your tummy will settle down soon, hun.”
Lemon took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m okay. Shall I check out the front door?”
Garfield nodded.
Lemon sorted through his tools in the back of the minivan and then proceeded cautiously towards the cottage’s front porch. He held a steel pole in his hands that was bent and sharpened at one end, not unlike a crowbar. Lemon often referred to the tool as his ‘skeleton key’. At four foot long, it was almost as tall as he was.
“Get her opened up, Lem,” Kirk shouted.
“But be careful,” Garfield added.
Lemon shoved his skeleton key into the door’s wedge and yanked. The lock broke easily and the old oak door swung open in its frame.
The smell came at them immediately. It was not as ripe as the smells of their early foraging days when the dead had still been fresh and moist. It was the odour of long time decay and animal droppings. It was a smell every forager was used to. It meant there was death inside.
Lemon gripped his skeleton key at the bottom of the shaft like a baseball bat. He looked to Garfield for orders. “S-s-should we back out? Smells like this place could be a r-r-risk.”
Garfield was about to agree when Kirk let out a snigger. “Where’s the fun in life without a little risk?” He shoved past Lemon and headed inside the cottage, disappearing into the dank, dark hallway.
Garfield shook his head and grunted. He couldn’t leave Kirk to sweep the house alone. Foragers always backed each other u
p – even impetuous fools like Kirk. “Wait here,” he told Lemon. “Keep a watch with the others and be ready.”
Lemon nodded and stepped back from the porch. Garfield went inside.
The reception hallway was narrow and cluttered. An old-fashioned bureau sat off to one side, a framed family photo perched on top of it. The family in the picture looked hard and serious – tough farming stock that had probably owned the farm for generations. Garfield wondered what had happened to them, and if they were still inside the house. I’m sure I’m going to find out.
Garfield crept down the hallway and entered a kitchen on his left. The large room was chilly and had a musty, faintly sweet odour. The smell was not coming from the dead, though. It was coming from a bin in the corner. Flies swarmed around the lid, breeding and living in whatever filth had been left to decompose inside. Garfield pulled his shirt up over his nose and tried not to breathe more than he had to.
The only thing of interest in the kitchen was a large carving fork on the centre island, which Garfield wrapped in an old tea towel and secured to his left triceps with a couple of elastic bands from a drawer. It could come in useful. The weapon he was currently carrying was a claw hammer, not unlike the one that Kirk favoured. Blunt force trauma was much more effective against zombies than stabbing. Plus the hammer always came back for a second and third blow, whereas knives sometimes got stuck in bone.
There was a thud from somewhere else in the house. Garfield headed cautiously back out into the hallway. He was pretty sure the noise had come from up ahead, so he followed the hallway to its conclusion and gently slid through the door at the end and entered the room beyond.
The smell overwhelmed. The sickly sweet odour of the recently dead had given way to the earthy, spicy smell of the long rotten. When Garfield moved further into the old-fashioned parlour he saw the reason it smelled so badly. Dear God.
Kirk was standing still, shaking his head and blinking slowly, uncharacteristically forlorn. “Just when you think you’re used to it all,” he said glumly, “then you find something like this.”
Garfield studied the three swinging bodies and wondered if they belonged to the family in the photo. His guess was that they did. An old man and woman wriggled from thick nooses around their necks strung over an oak beam crossing the centre of the ceiling. They’d obviously been infected and had hanged themselves in hope of not coming back. The caked shit down their inner thighs showed they’d been alive when they’d taken the noose. Not everyone understood that it did no good to commit suicide when infected. If you were bitten, you came back.
The dead old man and woman reached out for Kirk, trying to grab a hold of him with their gnarled fingers, but he was too focused on the third hanging body to pay them any attention. Garfield turned his attention to the swinging child and immediately thought of Poppy. While he’d been able to rescue one little girl, there were innumerable children who’d been doomed to fates such as this.
The little girl was about Poppy’s age. She had long brown hair all the way to her waist, but much of it had slid away from her scalp and was hanging loosely down her bony shoulders or on the floor beneath her dangling feet. She, too, reached out her hands for Kirk, trying to draw him closer, trying to taste him with her snapping jaws.
After a while, Kirk turned away to leave. “You do the honours,” he said to Garfield, then went back out into the hallway.”
Garfield swallowed back his sadness and dealt with the family as quickly as he could. He wanted to get out of there. He didn’t like the way the dead family looked at him so hungrily and he couldn’t bear the stink that filled the room. Three clean strikes from his hammer and it was over. Garfield dropped the tool on the floor afterwards. He did not want to keep it.
Back outside, he was surprised to find not ten other men waiting, but eleven. There was a stranger amongst them. The newcomer had been shoved down onto his knees by Cat and wore muddy jeans and a brown leather jacket. The smile on his face was handsome.
“We found this guy skulking about the sheds,” said Cat. Like her name suggested, the proud look on her face made her look like a feline who had caught a mouse. “He surrendered quickly enough.”
“How’s it going?” said the stranger.
“Who the hell are you?” asked Garfield, taken aback. “And where did you come from?”
The stranger grinned widely. “Why, you can call me Sally if you’re a mate. Call me what you want if you’re not.” The man had an Australian accent.
Lemon chuckled. “Sally’s a bird’s name.”
“A name is what you make it, cobber. My name might be Sally, but I’m no less a man than you, I can promise yer.”
“Where did you come from?” Garfield asked again.
Remaining on his knees, the man pointed. “From inside that yonder shed. Bloody freezing it was, but safe enough.”
“Why didn’t you go inside the house?”
“Not my place to go breaking into people’s houses and using their dunnies. I live off the land; not trespassing.”
“You do know everybody is dead, right?” said Kirk incredulously. “You can go wherever you like.”
“Yer, I do know that, fella. Still doesn’t make me king of the world, now, does it?”
Garfield glanced around at the nearby fields and the main road about a hundred metres away beyond a row of high hedges. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin as he took in the sight of the man. The Australian was amiable enough, but that in itself was sending up alarm bells. For someone to be so cheery after surviving out here alone was unnatural. The dead family inside the cottage added to Garfield’s unease. “Are you alone, Sally?” he asked.
The Australian nodded. “I am. Bit of a lone wolf, you might say. Never stay in the same place too long.”
“Why is that?”
“Because them dead buggers tend to come and eat everyone after a while.”
“So you were with a group?” asked Kirk.
“For a time, yer. Was holed-up in a bar where I used to work. Place in Bristol called Tuckers, ever been?”
Everybody shook their heads.
Sally blew air into his cheeks and let it out. “Ah, well, shame that. I take it you fellas must have a camp around here someplace. There’s too many of you to last long on the road. Plus it looks like most of you have had a bath in the last year, which is more than I have.”
“We have a camp,” said Lemon.
Garfield put a hand up to stop him from saying any more. It would not do to give away the location of the pier to a stranger. “We have a camp,” Garfield said, “but it’s not around here. We’re heading up north for supplies. What were you doing here?”
“Just staying alive. I stick to farms and the countryside because there’s less o’ them dead buggers about. You can find the odd veggie growing wild in some places, too. I just wish I could find me a field full of tinnys.”
Lemon looked confused. “Tinnys?”
“Larger, mate.”
“Oh.”
Kirk looked at Garfield and rubbed at his nose to cover his mouth. He whispered, “What do you want to do with him? I say we leave him here and keep on.”
Garfield’s first thought was to agree. He didn’t have a good feeling about the Australian; but it didn’t feel right to just leave him out on his own either. “What are your plans, Sally?”
“Well, I’d quite like to stand up, if that’s okay? The gravel is killing my knees.” Garfield nodded to Cat who helped Sally to his feet. “Strewth, that’s better,” he said. “Now, as for my plans…” He shrugged. “I told you, just staying alive. I don’t think much beyond that most days.”
“You can join up with us if you want,” said Garfield, regretting it as soon as he said it.
“For real?”
Kirk didn’t miss a step and followed Garfield’s lead for a change. He was less cocky since coming out of the farmhouse. “As long as you tow the line and don’t give us no reason to dump you, cobber.”
&
nbsp; “I would be most grateful to join you good men.”
Cat cleared her throat.
“Oh, pardon my manners. I would be most grateful to join you good men and Sheilas.”
“That’s lovely,” said David, “but I would just like to point out that it was hard enough with eleven of us in the minivan. Now you want to add another body? I don’t mind Cat on my lap, but that’s my limit.”
“He has a good point,” said Squirrel, who folded his arms and became grumpy. “I can’t take any more elbows and knees in my ribs inside that bloody coffin.”
Sally had a big grin on his face. “I think I might have just the thing for you fellas.”
Garfield was wary. “What?”
“Check behind that shed over there.”
Garfield looked across at the old rickety shed and wondered what the Australian was talking about. It was full of old, rotten hay. “You best not be planning anything stupid,” he said.
Sally chuckled. “Just go check it out. I promise yer’ll like it.”
Garfield slid a chef’s knife from the band on his left thigh and crept towards the shed. He walked with a little extra bend in his knees, ready to spring at the first sign of an ambush, but he made it to the shed without any cause for alarm. He stepped around the side carefully, stopping every couple of feet and listening for any movement behind the shed. Zombies were easy to hear, shuffling around and clicking as their joints wore down, but the living could still lie in wait silently. The Australian said he was alone, but that didn’t mean he was.
Garfield took the corner of the shed and stepped out into the open with his knife held high. He was surprised by what he saw, but also very pleased.
“You found it yet, cobber?” Sally shouted from the front of the cottage.
Garfield stared at the old horsebox trailer and nodded. It was wide enough to hold a single stallion. Or four men and a good load of supplies. “Yes, I’ve found it,” he shouted back to the others. “It’s just what we need.”
But the price for the horsebox was taking along a stranger named Sally. Whether or not that would turn out for the best remained to be seen.
Savage: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel Page 13
