The BIG Horror Pack 2

by Iain Rob Wright

  While Gretchen’s group were not against welcoming other survivors, there was still the risk of infection. While The Peeling seemed to have abated somewhat, with new infections becoming more and more rare, there was still the old fashioned illnesses of influenza, dysentery, and pleurisy – and more importantly, there were no longer any doctors to treat them. While the movies always made sure that the group of desperate survivors had a medic amongst them, Gretchen’s group had nothing of the sort. The members of the camp ranged from salesmen and factory workers to a professional dog walker – nobody who knew how to treat an illness.

  Pritchett called up to Gretchen and told her that her turn to keep watch was over. He also had a piping hot cup of soup waiting for her. Gretchen hopped down off the ambulance and took the mug from the man.

  He smiled at her warmly. “Everything A-okay?”

  Gretchen nodded. “Haven’t seen a thing. It’s starting to get bloody cold though. We’re going to have to find a way to keep ourselves warm once winter gets here.”

  Pritchett nodded. “I guess we could gather up all the spare duvets.”

  Gretchen nodded. “We’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  She walked away, heading away from the roadside and back towards the restaurant where most of the group tended to congregate during the evening. Pritchett would keep watch for the next six hours, but other than him, nobody else would be busy.

  As she suspected, almost every member of camp was situated in the eatery. Pendle and Groves had started a fire in a barrel in the centre of the room and had set up a couple of sea bass fillets on a makeshift spit. The smell of the fish made Gretchen’s mouth water.

  To prevent smoke, the group had opened up a skylight in the restaurant that seemed to do a good job of keeping the air circulating. Maybe in the winter they could set up more fires inside the buildings.

  “Hey, Grets,” said Pendle. He was a handsome young man with tanned skin passed down from his Spanish mother. His dark hair had grown out in recent weeks and the heat of the fire made beads of sweat form on the tips of his fringe.

  “Hey, Pendle. Smells good. I’m surprised we still have fish that is good to eat.”

  “Groves smoked most of the meat and fish early on. We’re just making a start on it all. The frozen sausages and burgers have all run out and the fries are running low. We’re going to have to go out and start searching for canned food soon.”

  Gretchen nodded. “I’ll start putting together a plan. There’s a supermarket nearby. Hopefully it wasn’t completely stripped clean in the early days.”

  Pendle sighed. They all remembered the early days. The chaotic time where rape and murder went unopposed and neighbours robbed one another with impunity. During the first tumultuous weeks of the infection, anarchy claimed as many lives as The Peeling itself. The Army had been called in to control the situation but, once the government fell, they soon became nothing more than a roving band of bullies, taking other people’s supplies at gun point. Then, even the Army seemed to disappear and disband.

  In the final few weeks, survivors had become more and more of a rarity. It had been several days since Gretchen’s camp had accepted anybody new – a guy name Logan was the last, a man who claimed to have been a Physics teacher. They took him in for his expertise, but so far he had done nothing but keep to himself.

  The survivors had all remained safe and well fed at the hotel since they’d gathered there four weeks ago, but a time was quickly coming where they would have to venture back out into the world – where rotting flesh lined the street and legions of rats tore holes in everything in sight. Gretchen shuddered at the thought.

  She shuddered even more when she thought of her own family lying out there someplace.

  When The Peeling had hit, Gretchen’s husband had caught it almost right away. He had come home with a flu that quickly became a burning, tingling sensation all over his body. Then a scrap of skin came away on his ankle. It was quickly over from that point.

  As the news report showed horrifying scenes of the flesh-eating virus, Gretchen was getting a first-hand view. Her husband was little more than a patchy skeleton by the time he died a week later. Gretchen’s mother-in-law had the children, but in the chaos that ensued during the riots and looting, something had happened to them. When Gretchen reached her mother-in-law’s home, they were all gone and there was no note. Gretchen had stayed there for days until somebody eventually set the neighbourhood on fire and forced everyone to flee. Gretchen had joined up with a roving group of ten survivors on the M4 motorway and eventually they had rested here at the hotel.

  Gretchen sipped at her soup and shivered as it warmed her cold body. What she would give to have her husband’s cuddling arms around her now. Had anybody been lucky enough to keep a hold of their spouse? Or their children?

  She took a seat alone at one of the tables and looked around at her new family. Amongst the group was Shandi, an African American business women from Tulsa who had been visiting the UK for a meeting. The women knew nothing of her country back home, or the people she knew there. There was Bryan, who was perhaps their most handy member of the camp. He was a skilled carpenter and had helped them construct barricades over the windows and create makeshift weapons. Daniel was a salesman from Alcester and mostly kept to himself. Something suggested the young man was mourning on some great loss. A bubbly girl named Sally had worked at a Marks and Spencer department store in Redditch prior to the infection and was the cheeriest of the group. Her disposition seemed to be one where the glass was half full. Danny was an old factory worker from Longbridge, who had worked twenty years at the Rover car plant until the layoffs many years before. He had been working a metal press since then. There were a dozen other faces in the room, but Gretchen felt too tired to look upon them all. What she really needed was to go to bed, but she hated being alone in her cold, featureless hotel room.

  “Why don’t you just piss off,” came an angry voice from the other side of the restaurant.

  “We can’t keep burying our heads in the sand. We need to have an open discussion about this.”

  “I don’t see the point in freaking everybody out about something we don’t even understand.”

  Gretchen sighed and got up. She went over to the two camp members who were fighting. It was Colin and David. Both were mid-forties men, but while Colin wore a dirty old suit and had once worked at a bank, David had been unemployed most of his life and was generally a lazy and abrasive chap.

  “What is it?” Gretchen asked them.

  Colin smiled at her, but it was clear that he was exasperated. “I’m just suggested that we bite the bullet and talk about those lights in the sky. They must mean something.”

  David rolled his eyes. “They could be a million different things. What’s the point in stressing over them? They haven’t done nothing since they showed up.”

  Colin rolled his eyes back at the other man. “It seems quite apparent to me that they are descending. They are much bigger than they were when they first appeared.”

  “No they ain’t.”

  Gretchen waved a hand. “No, Colin is right. I think they are getting closer to us…to Earth or whatever.”

  David shook his head. “Fuck sake. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m a bit worried,” said Sally. “They have to mean something. What if they’re missiles? Maybe another country doesn’t want The Peeling spreading over to them and they’re going to nuke us off the planet.”

  There was a frightened muttering as the others in the room listened in. The talk of being bombed was a fear many of them had and it had been discussed before.

  Gretchen shook her head. “Missiles don’t take days and days to fall; nor do they advertise their presence with great blinking lights.”

  “What then?” came a voice. “What do you think they are?”

  “Probably just some environmental anomaly caused by all the methane.”

  “The what?” said David.

  �
��The methane gas…from all of the bodies. There must be millions of dead just rotting in the streets. That amount of damage to the ozone layer…”

  There was a collective sigh. Missiles, people couldn’t deal with, but global warming… They hadn’t cared about global warming before the world crumbled, so they most certainly didn’t care about it now.”

  “She’s right,” said David. “I bet that’s all it is. No need to worry about it.”

  Everybody filtered back to what they were doing. Colin approached Gretchen and spoke quietly. “Do you really believe that? About the methane gas?”

  “Not really, but there’s no point in speculating on anything worse.”

  “I suppose not. If you were to speculate, though; what would your guess be?”

  Gretchen sighed, shrugged her shoulders. “The only thing that worries me is that those lights showing up right after the world’s most devastating plague is too much to be a coincidence.”

  With that Gretchen decided that even the cold silence of her hotel room was better than the tense atmosphere of the restaurant. People were starting to get tetchy, and it would only get worse.

  Back in her room, Gretchen picked up a paperback she had snatched from the hotel’s lounge: Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. She had already read it twice and enjoyed the surreal Discworld and how it reminded her of the petty, care-free world she had once lived in.

  After two pages she was fast asleep.

  ***

  She awoke sometime later to what felt and sounded like an earthquake. A glass of water fell off the room’s desk and soaked the carpet. The empty hangers in the closet rattled.

  Gretchen checked her watch: 3:13 AM.

  She leapt off the bed and headed over to the window. She was on the second floor and could see clear across the car park. Pritchett was standing on top of the ambulance, still keeping watch. He had his hands on his head, obviously flustered by something.

  “What the hell was that?” Gretchen asked herself. The rumbling had stopped almost as soon as it had started, but there was an electricity lingering in the air that put her right on edge.

  She slipped out of her room and headed down the corridor. En route she met up with Pendle who was barefoot and hurrying in the same direction.

  “What’s going on, Gretchen?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  The two of them headed down the carpeted staircase into the lobby below. There everybody was gathered. There everybody was demanding an explanation.

  “Was it an earthquake?” Someone asked.

  “In England? All we ever get here is farty little tremors.”

  “Maybe it’s the global warming. Maybe our climate is changing.”

  “Earthquakes have nothing to do with the weather. It’s about fault lines and plate tectonics,” said Colin knowledgably.

  “Let’s just everybody calm down,” said Gretchen. “We don’t know anything yet, so let’s just stay calm until we do.”

  Everybody muttered, but the shouting voices quietened down.

  “So what do we do?” asked Colin.

  “We go and check with Pritchett. He’s the guy on watch. I’m sure he saw whatever happened.”

  “I ain’t going out there,” said David in his dirty boxer shorts.

  “Stay here then,” said Gretchen.

  She started heading for the lobby’s large entrance doors and found that a majority of the group were following her. She had learned weeks ago that people felt safest when they were acting as a herd. That was probably a rational reason for why the ordinary law-abiding citizens of the UK had taken to looting and rioting in the early days.

  Outside in the courtyard, the cold immediately struck Gretchen. Even through her sweater, she felt it biting at her skin and nipples.

  Up ahead, across the car park, was the ambulance they used as a lookout. Pritchett was still standing on top of it. He saw them approaching and waved his arms.

  “You guys aren’t going to believe this,” he said, with both a twinge of excitement and fear in his voice.

  “What is it? Do you see what caused the tremors?”

  Pritchett nodded. “Hell, yes. And if you look up you will all get a great big clue as to what it was.”

  Gretchen, along with everybody else, craned their necks and glanced upwards.

  The blinking green lights were gone. After days of looming over them all, they had disappeared.

  Or maybe the opposite is true.

  Pritchett spoke excitedly. “The lights just suddenly plummeted out of the sky as though somebody flipped a switch. All of them just shot right down to the earth and then…boom!”

  “Did any of them land near us?” someone shouted.

  Pritchett nodded. “One landed right over in the woods across the ring road.”

  People began to panic. “Oh, God. What the hell is it? It’s something bad, isn’t it?”

  “A bomb, I reckon.”

  “Terrorists.”

  “Aliens.”

  Gretchen had to laugh at the last suggestion she heard shouted out. Aliens. It was absurd; yet somehow her laughter contained no mirth.

  “We should check it out,” said Colin. “We should know what we’re up against.”

  “What do you mean?” asked David. “What we’re up against?”

  “I mean we should just take a look. Who knows maybe it could have even been a supply drop from the government.”

  One so heavy that it shook the earth. Somehow I don’t think so, thought Gretchen.

  Without any further consultation, Gretchen headed towards the edge of the car park, over the shrubs that bordered it, and onto the ring road. Cars lay crumpled up against each other in a long line, but it was easy to navigate around them, or even climb up over the bonnets when need be.

  Pendle caught up with her; Pritchett and Colin were not far behind. Everybody else loitered in the car park; their herd mentality only going so far until they felt that it might endanger them.

  “This can’t be anything good, can it?” asked Pendle. “I mean, whatever it was shook me right out of my bed. What can hit the ground with that much force?”

  “Guess we’re going to find out.”

  As they crossed the ring road and headed for the woodland that bordered it on the far side, they passed by decaying bodies in abandoned cars. Most were bony corpses, stricken by The Peeling, but some were the victims of crime. They passed a man stabbed in the heart with a pair of scissors. Who had done it and why would be just another of the countless unknown stories that littered the landscape. Every corpse had a story to tell, but no way to tell it.

  Gretchen closed her eyes as she walked past the carnage. Her nose still picked up the stench of old death but at least her eyes could shut off. She shuffled along, letting her feet find the way.

  “Watch your step,” said Pendle, seeming to know that she was walking with her eyes closed.

  Gretchen opened her eyes in time to see the approaching curb and the embankment beyond. She stepped up and over it and began to descend down into the woodland.

  “Where about did it hit?” Pendle asked Pritchett.

  “Over there,” the man pointed.

  They headed east through the woods, following Pritchett’s excited directions.

  Gretchen couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to be brighter up ahead, as if the moonlight were shining on something, or if something was shining by itself. The air also seemed lest crisp and chilly. The atmosphere was becoming muggy.

  “I think I see something up ahead,” said Colin. “Are you sure this is a good idea? Perhaps we should wait until morning.”

  Gretchen carried on walking. “If we’re in danger now, we’ll be in danger tomorrow. If we’ve learned anything these last few months, it’s that waiting around with our heads buried in the sand doesn’t work.”

  “I agree,” said Pendle. “We need to know what the score is.”

  After several more yards, Gretchen became positive that there was light coming
from up ahead. It was no brighter than the light from the full moon, but it was blinking and had a greenish hue.

  “What is that?” asked Pritchett, his excitement had waned and he now spoke in a hushed whisper.

  “I don’t know.” Gretchen stepped over a clump of weeds and sidled up beside an old oak tree. She flinched as something landed on her shoulder, but sighed with relief when she realised it was just a crisp autumn leaf falling from the branches above.

  The sound of rustling made her flinch again. This time she looked to her left and saw a movement in the bushes.

  Then an identical rustling spun her around to face the bushes in the opposite direction.

  Pritchett was spinning around on the spot, looking everywhere. “What’s going on?”

  “Something’s moving,” said Colin.

  “Not just one thing,” Gretchen said. “I saw at least two things.”

  “Maybe just deer?”

  “Maybe.”

  More movement in the bushes. This time from all around them.

  “I think we should get out of here,” said Pritchett. “I think we’re surround-” Something seized Pritchett and dragged him back into the bushes. He disappeared so fast that it was as if his body had been attached to a bungee.

  Gretchen shouted. “Run!”

  Nobody argued and they all started sprinting back the way they had come. They leapt over roots and sidestepped tree trunks as they floundered in the darkness. Pritchett’s screams rang out behind them but not for long.

  Behind them the bushes rustled. A deep, ominous growl filled the forest.

  “What the hell is happening?” Pendle shouted between huffs and puffs.

  “I don’t know,” said Colin. “We need to get back to the hotel and put some thought into this.”

  “Let’s just concentrate on not dying first,” said Gretchen.

  They spotted the road between the trees, several yards ahead.

  “There’s the road,” said Pendle. “We can make it.”

  As soon as he said the words, Pendle caught his ankle on a half-buried tree root and went tumbling into the mud. Gretchen stopped to help him. But it was too late.