Everybody was safe at the pier because it sat on big metal stilts above the sand and could only be accessed from a big long deck barred at one end by a fat metal gate. Sometimes dead people would come up to the gate and try to get inside, but it never worked. The gate was too big and strong. The dead people would eventually go away if everybody on the pier kept quiet enough. And if they didn’t go away, Garfield would go out and hit them. That always made her sad; to see the dead people hit. They looked so lonely at the gate, like all they wanted in the world was to be inside with the living people. But if we let them in they’ll try and hurt us.
At least there were no zombies around at the moment. When Garfield and the others left yesterday, all the dead people in the village had followed after them until they’d disappeared into the distance, at the point where the main road took them out of sight. Poppy had a feeling that Garfield probably hit the dead people when they were away from the village. He always tried to avoid hurting them near the pier – he said their smelly bodies would make people sick. One time at the pier, Poppy had gotten a poorly throat and it was terrible. She’d wanted so much to be better, but the pain and aching went on forever. There was no more medicine like her mummy used to give her to make the hurt go away quicker. Lots of things are gone. I miss my bed with the pink pony sheets and my fluffy dressing gown. I miss my parents, too.
Poppy’s mummy was gone now and so was her daddy. The only person she had to look after her was Garfield – and he was never there. No sooner would he return to the pier then he was off again. She understood why he had to go. He would always say to her, “I never chose this,” but she would still miss him when he was gone. Sometimes when he returned, he would bring food, or toys, or comic books for her. That almost made it worth not having him around, but not really. She liked having him near, even if he was grumpy all the time. Grumpy Garfield I call him, but really I think he’s brave.
Poppy shuffled around 180-degrees until she was facing away from the village and towards the sea beyond the pier. Some of the group sat at the edges of the deck, holding fishing rods out over the railings. There was a fishing tackle shop on the pier and almost every person in the group had a rod or two. Poppy liked some of the fish they caught, but there were so many different kinds that she never knew what she would get one day to the next. Sometimes they caught big fat fish with white meat that tasted good, but other times they would catch thin, ugly fish with red meat that tasted yucky. Her favourite food back home – back when she had a mummy and daddy – had been macaroni and cheese, with a glass of fizzy apple juice. She hadn’t tasted cheese in such a long time and all she ever drank was water. It made her sad to think about.
So she thought of something else.
She thought about getting older and becoming an adult. She could go foraging with Garfield and Kirk then (although she didn’t really like Kirk. He was always making fun of her). She wasn’t allowed to leave the pier because she was still just a kid, but from up on the rooftops of the various buildings she could see for miles around. She could see the hills and the roads, and an old railway that cut through them both. There was a whole world out there waiting to be explored – one she could barely even remember. She just wished she’d taken the time to appreciate the things she used to have, because now they were all gone forever.
She used to moan and complain about having to get up for school, but now she would give anything to be surrounded by other children her own age. She would love to sit and listen to old Mr Stead prattle on about the Ancient Romans and how they changed the world with their roads and sewers. There was so much she could have learned back then, but now her entire world was on this pier at the edge of the sea. I hate it.
Being stuck in one place made her feel panicky, like she couldn’t breathe. One day, when she was older, she would leave the pier and find all of the things she’d forgotten. She’d learn about all the things the world used to care about. Then, one day, she would teach it to kids the same way Mr Stead had once taught it to her. I’m going to teach them about how the Romans built the aqueducts and had lots of baths.
“You up on that roof again, lass? You’re going to break your bleedin’ neck one o’ these days, huh.”
Poppy looked down to see Alistair standing on the deck below. He had his hands on his hips and his fat belly was hanging over his belt the way it always did. Everyone else in the group was skinny, except for Alistair.
“What do you want?” Poppy asked him.
“What do I want? Nothing, lass, but it’s about time you started helping out around here instead of farting around on the rooftops all the time, huh.”
“I’m just a kid.”
“No such thing anymore. You’re either useful or you’re not. No mummy and daddies to look after kiddies these days. You have to be useful, whether you’re nine years old or ninety.”
Poppy rolled her eyes. She’d never liked Alistair, not since she’d first met him. He was always nagging at her. “Garfield says I’m just a kid and I shouldn’t grow up too soon. I asked to go foraging with him, but he said no.”
Alistair sniffed a wad of snot back through his nose. His dirty brown hair fluttered in the breeze. “He should’ve let you go with him, if you ask me. Better than having you hanging around doing nothing like a chimp with a hairdryer, huh. The time for child’s play died along with everything else. You need to start making yourself useful.”
“I will…” said Poppy.
Alistair grinned and nodded.
“When Garfield tells me to.”
Alistair pointed his chubby finger up at her. “Now you look here, Poppy. Garfield ain’t here, and when he ain’t here you do as you’re told by your elders. I was at this pier long before Garfield, so don’t you believe I take orders from him. You need to start pulling your weight, girl, or else you’ll be gone. Got no time for freeloaders.”
“You can talk! If it wasn’t for all the food that Garfield brings back, you wouldn’t be able to stay so fat.”
Alistair went bright red. “You just wait until you come down from there. You’ll have my hand across the back of your legs.”
“Touch me and Garfield will beat you up.”
Alistair snorted. “We’ll see about that, young lady.”
“Yes, we will,” said Poppy with a sudden grin on her face. There was movement on the horizon at last. “Because he’s on his way back right now.” At last.
In the distance, Garfield and the foragers were coming down the main road. They dragged their wooden sleds behind them, carrying the things they’d found. Any luck and they would have some food. Even better and they might have found some books or toys.
Give me something to do around here, please!
As Poppy squinted into the distance, she noticed something unexpected. One of the forager’s sleds held no food or toys at all; it carried a man. Somebody was injured.
Oh no. I hope we can help them. I hate it when people die.
Poppy glanced down at the pier, to tell Alistair what she could see, but the fat man had already gone, so she hung down from the edge of the roof and dropped down to the wooden deck below. Her ankles stung as she hit the ground, but the pain soon left once she started running. She headed for the gate, wanting to be the first to greet Garfield when he returned.
But when she got there, she heard rattling and moaning. There were dead men at their door.
ANNA
Anna heard the moans followed by the rattling of the pier’s main gate. It was not unusual to find dead men on the pier’s walkway, but it was something that always needed dealing with. If enough of the dead gathered together then they might manage to bring the gate down beneath their sheer weight. Anna had seen what the collective strength of the dead could do several times over the last year. They’re like a force of nature when they group together.
Anna was tucked up in her sleeping bag, re-reading a paperback, when she saw members of the pier race by the window of the gift shop in which she lived. It wasn’t
a reason for great concern, but she put on her jacket and followed after them, wanting to see what the fuss was. She joined up with them at the gate where a dead man and woman were thudding against the iron bars. A light rain had begun falling and a wind whistled in from the sea. Seagulls circled in the air, as they always did around the dead.
“Why aren’t we staying out the way?” Anna frowned. When dead people arrived at the gate, the common thing to do was to lay low and wait for them to lope away. More often than not, they did so within the hour.
“We can’t afford to leave them at the gate,” Alistair informed her. “Garfield and the others are coming in. We have to clear the way.”
Anna studied the two zombies on the other side of the wrought iron bars and felt confused. The female was little more than a skeleton, with a waistline she probably would have killed for in life. Hell, I would kill for it. Her entire stomach had rotted away and the crusted remains of her lungs had fused to her spine. The man beside the dead woman was a boxer, still donning his ring shorts and gloves. Once upon a time it may have been comical to see the sportsman in full gear, but the people at the pier were all used to the oddities of the dead and long past paying any notice. Previously the gate had been host to a dead policeman, several old-aged-pensioners, a Chinese chef in full kitchen whites, and once they even had a ghoulish clown trying to get in at them. There was no humour to be found in the dead. The boxer was just another corpse with a story untold.
“There’s only two of them,” said Anna, bemused. “Garfield can handle two zombies easily enough.”
“He has somebody injured with him,” Alistair said.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw him,” said little Poppy who was standing in the gap between the Sea Grill restaurant and the pier’s block of toilets. She looked lost in her oversized cardigan.
Anna took the child to one side. “Was it Garfield who was hurt?”
Poppy shook her head. Two long blonde plaits swung back and forth behind her and Anna suddenly resented her own lank brown locks. “No, it was somebody else,” said the girl. “I couldn’t see who.”
Did they find a survivor out there, or did one of the foragers get hurt?
“Okay,” Anna said. “Let’s do this quickly and by the book.” Everyone got to work quickly, all of them knowing the drill after having performed it so many times before. It was just another daily chore – no different than ironing used to be, or washing the car. Alistair went up to the gate, donning a thick pair of neoprene fishing gloves. He worked the key in the padlock and began to loosen the chain that bound the gate’s half-sections together. The two dead people snapped and grabbed at his hands, but Alistair was quick enough and calm enough to avoid them.
Anna picked up a large sledgehammer, which the group always kept propped up beside the gate, and hefted it over her shoulder. Fellow campmates, old man Bob and Jimmy, took up two great fishing nets and fanned them open. Jimmy used to be a forager, but twisted his knee by jumping down from the second level of a supermarket to escape a group of zombies. Now he had to remain at camp, but always sought to make himself useful. Old man Bob was…old. Chris and Samantha were also present, but stood back so that they would not get in the other men’s way.
Alistair yanked the chain and opened the gate wide.
The dead people stumbled down the deck, arms outstretched and decaying jaws snapping. Bob and Jimmy threw the nets down over their heads, trapping them in place as they fought clumsily to free themselves. Anna brought the sledgehammer down on the boxer’s skull first, caving in his head like an overripe melon. Some juices exploded from the skull, but it was mostly just dry, flaky flesh, long ago rotten, that remained.
The boxer fell to the floor and stopped moving. Anna raised the sledgehammer once again, and this time brought it down on the dead woman’s head. Her skull split open the same way the boxer’s had. Now both of them lay on the deck benignly, their threat extinguished, their skulls obliterated. Anna looked down at the boxer and sighed. Out for the count.
Without comment, Chris and Samantha grabbed the two dead bodies and dragged them down the pier towards the strip of walled pavement that separated the beach from the road. There they left the bodies in a pile, ready to be taken away by Garfield’s next foraging party. Before the sun turns them into viral breeding grounds, Anna thought with a grimace.
Chris went and stood by the gate, ready to close it once everyone was inside. The shy man was wearing his favourite red wellies. They made him stand out like a children’s entertainer, which was a stark contrast to his personality. Anna wondered if the wellies meant something to the man, but she never asked. Samantha stood beside him, the only survivor at the pier that still had the fashion sense to wear a skirt and heels on occasion. Thankfully, today she was wearing black jeans and Ugg boots. She still wore enough jewellery and bracelets to weigh-down a horse, though. Despite her love of nice things, the twenty-year old was headstrong and brave and reminded Anna a lot of herself. She just gets on with it.
Two hundred yards distant, Garfield and the foragers were getting nearer. They dragged their sleds behind them and managed a brief wave as they saw the gates of the pier laying open to greet them. Anna put the sledgehammer back down against the wall of the toilet block and was just in time to catch Poppy by the arm as the girl made to run off. “Where do you think you’re going, princess?”
Poppy skidded on her heels and moped at Anna. “I want to go see Garfield. He’s only down the road.”
“So it will only take him a few minutes to get here, won’t it? You can wait like everybody else.”
Poppy huffed. “You have to let me out sometime. I’m not a prisoner.”
Anna smiled. “No, you’re not. But you’re alive, and you have this place to thank for it. You shouldn’t be in such a hurry to leave.”
Poppy sulked. Anna ignored her. The girl liked to act hard-done by. That was how she managed to wind Garfield around her little finger all the time. I’m not such a pushover, though.
“The zombies are all gone,” Poppy argued. “These two were the first we’ve seen in ages. They’ve all gone off someplace to die.”
If only that were true, thought Anna. “They’re still everywhere, Poppy. The only reason we’re safe here is because it’s far away from anywhere else. If you go running around out there you’ll attract attention, and it could land us all in a lot of trouble. You need to grow a little more before you earn the responsibility to leave the pier.”
Poppy folded her arms in a grump, but she knew better than to argue. The girl stood silently while they waited for Garfield to return. All she needs is some consistency. A few rules never hurt a child.
The foragers rounded a burnt-out Mini Cooper sitting in the middle of the road just beyond the pier, and then started up the decked walkway. Three other foragers accompanied Garfield, but that concerned Anna – because he’d left with four.
“Where’s Marty?” she asked Garfield as he came up the walkway with Kirk, Lemon, and Squirrel.
Garfield’s expression was grim – but then it most often was. He avoided making eye contact with Anna, which was a bad sign. “Marty got bit.”
No more explanation was needed. Everyone knew that if you got bitten on a forage, you didn’t come back. Knowing Garfield, they probably buried poor Marty where he fell and moved on without a word. It was just the way of things – nobody’s fault.
Poppy broke free of Anna’s grasp and rushed down the deck to meet Garfield halfway down the walkway. Anna sighed. The girl had defied her, but only by a little. Probably okay to let it go.
“I was worried about you,” Poppy gushed, wrapping her arms tightly around Garfield’s waist.
“You’re always worried about me, Popcorn. But don’t I always come back?”
“You do.”
“Who’s he?” Anna pointed to the stranger on the sledge. The man had copper-coloured hair just like Garfield’s, and was soaked in blood. The other sleds were load
ed with what looked like toilet paper. They’ll be no shortage of something to wipe our arses with, but food would have been better.
Garfield glanced down at the injured man and then shrugged his shoulders. “Found the guy close to death in a container. Don’t hold much hope of him making it through the next couple hours, to be honest. Poor sod was shot.”
Anna folded her arms. “Shot?” There were very few guns about, which made anybody who had them inordinately dangerous.
“I was hoping you’d have a go at fixing him up, Anna. You’d have a better chance than anyone else.”
Anna kept her arms folded tight. “I was a vet, not a doctor.”
“Still makes you the best hope this guy’s got.”
Whether she liked it or not, it was true. She sighed. “Bring him into the diner.”
The pier’s American-style diner was one of the largest spaces and was used as a communal area, as well as the place where they stored all the rainwater they collected and supplies that the foragers found. Rene was in charge of allocation, and right now Anna needed boiled water. Stat!
When Rene saw the injured man, his eyes went wide and he quickly came over to help. The man did not speak, but his body language made it clear he was ready for immediate orders. Anna nodded at him and smiled. Rene had been her trusted friend since the beginning and the only person she could rely on.
“Rene, I need boiled water and the sharpest knife you can find. I also need a latex glove filled with one part salt and five parts water – and bring me all the hand sanitizer from the kitchen. Anna knew they had all of those things, because she’d gathered them herself. The things she lacked, however, included proper surgical equipment, painkillers, and medicine of any kind (she had once tried to grow penicillin from some stale bread, but it was long gone now). There were no hospitals in the area and those further afield were hot zones of infection. The dead were everywhere inside hospitals and getting medicine would cost more lives than it saved. She and Rene had once entered a local Doctor’s clinic, hoping to find bandages and antibiotics. What they found was a waiting room full of dead people. That was the last time they ever searched for medicine.
The BIG Horror Pack 2 Page 33
