The Dust: The Zombie Apocalypse in Ireland

by Jonathan Lynch

  Eric

  I feel silly writing this in the first place, but the hope that you might actually find this letter and read it is all that is keeping me going. The moment we got here Eric I was separated from your grandmother and at the time of writing this, (it is my third night here) I still haven’t seen her and the doctors won’t tell me anything either. I made friends with a lovely girl in the bed next to me who’s expecting twins, and she said that she heard that the elderly people were being… killed in the most humane way possible. I’m sorry to put to it you so bluntly Eric, but I refuse to believe that I just don’t, and you shouldn’t either. We are being looked after really well and we are getting the best of food too, which is why I can’t understand why they would be killing people. The staff are so friendly and calm despite everything that’s going on outside. The only thing I find a bit strange is how well set up the place is despite it being done in such a hurry. The main reason I wrote you this letter was to tell you that me and our little baby are doing ok and that I know you will be too. But just before I decided to write this the ward sister, or matron, or whatever she’s called has told us to pack up our things as quickly as possible because we are being evacuated from the building. She didn’t say where we were going, she just said we hadn’t much time and it was a security issue. I tried asking her again about your grandmother but all she did was frown and shake her head. I just wish I could tell you more or even let you know where we are going I really do. Ok, I really have to go now, but before I do, I want you to know that me and our little baby miss you, and we know we will see you again very soon. We will get through this and we will have the little family we dreamed of Eric. I just know we will.

  All my love

  Lauren xxxxxx

  I folded the letter over and kissed it. The paper smelled like Lauren. I wiped away the tears running down my cheeks and then put the letter in my pocket with the other pieces of paper from the chart. I picked up the bat and rose from the bed. I felt good with it in my hands. It was smooth and lightweight, yet capable of great damage with a longer reach. My hammer had served me well but it was no match for my new weapon. I left it on the bed and was about to leave the ward when I heard the now all familiar groaning come from behind me in the darkness.

  Chapter 9

  I shone my torch around the ward but I couldn’t see anything. I stood motionless and listened for the sounds again. The leather grip on the bat crunched in my hand. The growling came again and I followed the sound with my torch to the very end of the room and to a bed with a curtain pulled around it. The orb from my torch penetrated the flimsy fabric enough to reveal a silhouette of somebody sitting in the bed. The groaning came again, followed by the sound of metal on metal. I rested my bat on my shoulder and stood waiting. The thing in the bed spat blood onto the curtain. It knew I was there shining my light on it and it wanted to break free and tear me apart.

  I knew it was dead and restrained. It couldn’t get me and I had no need to get it – but I felt myself being drawn to the bed. I took the pillowcase from Lauren’s bed and wrapped it around my hand. I tiptoed across the floor to the end of the room. My heart began to beat hard again in my chest, and my breath wheezed through my lungs. I had gotten what I came for – well not exactly - but I had gotten something. Lauren was no longer here, and by the sounds of it my grandmother was dead. I didn’t need to be in this place anymore. I should have been heading back to the safety of the garage, and thinking about my next move.

  But what if it was Lauren behind that curtain?

  My heart knew that it wasn’t, but my head was telling me to check nonetheless. When I got close to the curtain I lifted a piece of it up that wasn’t covered with blood with the end of my bat. When it was high enough I gripped it in my covered hand and walked backwards until the fabric became taut. The zombie, as if sensing what I was going to do, fell silent in the bed. It only took one hard pull for the curtain rail to collapse.

  The thing in the bed was hideous. Her face was burned and covered with lacerations and scabs. Her yellow eyes hung in their sockets without any lids, while thick green goo dripped from the both of them. The same green fluid wept from the nipples of her huge exposed breasts. The bed was heavily soiled and stank so bad that I wondered how I didn’t smell it earlier. The girl had been bound at the wrists and ankles with thick leather straps and handcuffs. Whoever had bound her had wanted to make sure that she couldn’t escape.

  But the worst sight of all was her inflated stomach. It looked like a veiny beach ball that had been dipped in red and purple paint. The whole bed rocked and dented the wall behind it. I put my forearm over my nose and backed away on legs that felt like straw beneath me.

  I left the ward and closed the door behind me. I had broken out all over in a cold sweat. I turned my torch off, put it back inside my tool belt, and rested the bat by my side. All I could think about was that thing in the bed behind me that was still going wild. I wondered what had happened to her and how? It could so easily have been Lauren. The poor girl was still pregnant, and she had been abandoned. Or maybe that’s what Lauren meant in her letter as to why they had to evacuate. Maybe the centre had become infected and the ones who were had been left behind. The place was probably full of girls like that one tied to beds in different places.

  But the baby inside her had to be dead too. There was no way it could have lived after its mother had turned. It wasn’t possible. It was probably rotting away on the inside the way its mother was on the outside. The thoughts of it all made me feel queasy. I gathered myself and decided to get out of the building before I came across something worse that wasn’t tied up.

  Chapter 10

  I had made it back to the garage without encountering any more of the dead. As soon as I locked the door behind me I sat down on the sofa and read Lauren’s note over and over. I tried my best to make out the writings on the chart sheets but I still couldn’t. The more I tried the more it drained me. I eventually gave up and lay down on the sofa.

  I had no possible ways of finding out where Lauren had been taken to, or if she was even still alive. I had the idea of trying out the local police station to see if any of them were alive, and barricaded in just like I was here. Maybe they knew something or had some sort of information as to what was happening? If anyone had the best chance of staying alive it would be the ones who were trained for combat and who had access to weapons. Well, in theory that sounded plausible but I had seen what had happened to the soldiers first hand on the streets.

  But even if my idea had some credibility, the nearest station from the garage was a good thirty minute walk, and getting there would be another huge risk. I had been fortunate in getting to the medical centre and back, but my chances of making a second trip outside unscathed weren’t so good. The two zombies that I had run in to hadn’t been much trouble, but if I ran into a group of them the next time and got boxed in – then I would be in big trouble.

  But I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing for too long either. My stomach rumbled for food, and I was bound to become weaker from lack of nourishment and dehydration over the coming days.

  If I had to go back out there it was going to have to be while I was still strong enough to have my wits about me and avoid the dead. I got up from the sofa and went out to the garage. The moon spilling in from the barred window high above my head filled the work area in a calming grey. The night was warm but the garage was cool. I stepped out of my overalls and draped them across the hood of the BMW. My stomach called out to me again for food, so I began pacing around the floor to try and walk the hunger off me. I would have given anything for a chargrilled steak, or some fried chicken and chips, despite me seeing enough cooked meat on the streets to last me a fucking lifetime.

  I went to the far corner of the garage and stopped when I came to the IBC. I scolded myself for not remembering it; I used to use it every other day when the garage was active. We used it to clean off cars that got a bit grubby while we worked on them, or to
clean up the welds we did on exhausts. The container was hooked up to a flexible hose, and there was a few hundred litres of water still inside it.

  The water inside was most likely dirty, but all I had to do was find some sort of pot to put it in and then I could boil it using one of the gas welding torches that were lying around. If I used the gas wisely I could have drinking water for a long time. That was the fluids taken care of for now. But I still needed food. I would still have to go back outside. But I also knew that I could survive in here a lot longer now that I had water.

  Take that you zombie bastards!

  I had begun to feel a little better in myself when I heard the deafening scream coming from outside.

  It sounded human.

  Chapter 11

  I couldn’t see anybody on the front street through the window, dead or alive. The outside was gloomy but looked undisturbed. I pressed my face against the glass and waited for signs of any life or the owner of the scream. My stomach swirled with butterflies, and my quick breaths began to fog up the window. I wiped away the mist and then froze when I saw two figures running down the street.

  They were coming at me so fast that it didn’t take me long to see that the two of them were women. The first one, who was a couple of yards in front, was the taller of the two. They were both dressed identically in high top trainers, combat trousers and camouflage jackets. They looked like army, but they were both unarmed and running for their lives.

  The trailing girl didn’t see the zombie coming out of the darkness. It latched onto her neck and dragged her down to the ground where she was swarmed by the rats and another two of the dead. She screamed at her friend for help but it was too late. Within seconds I heard the sounds of bones being broken and flesh and fibres being ripped apart. I bit my lip and shook my head at the scene.

  The girl in front stopped dead in her tracks and spun around facing her doomed companion. But all she could do was stare. She was frozen to the spot. She didn’t even notice the zombies approaching from her side. I banged on the window to get the girls attention but she didn’t even flinch. I bolted from the window and went to the garage’s front door and unlocked it.

  I swung it open and stepped out into the electric night.

  ‘Hey you! Over here!’ I screamed at the girl.

  She looked at me and frowned.

  I pointed to the zombies who were closing the gap between them and her. ‘Come on move it or else you’re dead. Hurry!’

  The girl followed my finger and then bolted towards me. She moved fast and easily outran the zombies - but they weren’t giving up. I put one foot back inside the garage and gripped the handle on the door. The closer the girl got to me the louder her sobbing became. She took one last look at her friend before she ran past me and tumbled onto the dirt floor. I pulled the door shut and slid the deadbolt into its receiver. The zombies began to pound on the steel door as I snapped the padlock closed. I gave it a tug to make sure it was closed and then turned to the girl.

  ‘They just… they just ripped her apart right in front of me’ she said gasping. ‘I could have helped her but I froze. I just fucking froze’.

  She began to sob again. I hung my head and didn’t speak. I was trembling myself. I looked at the girl and wiped the sweat from my soaking forehead.

  I felt every bit of her pain.

  Chapter 12

  Her name was Janet. That was all she was all she was telling for now. I knew that she was still in shock by her earlier events, and still cautious about her surroundings so I didn’t press her for any more information. I went and sat on the hood of the BMW. Janet took a stool from under a work bench and sat facing me. Eventually, the dead gave up hammering on the door, but I could still here them milling around outside. After a long time of silence and Janet sizing me and her surroundings up, she spoke.

  ‘So what’s your deal then?’

  So I told her everything from the day that shit started to go wrong for me, right up to the time I opened the garage door for her. As I had progressed through my story I saw Janet loosening up. She had a small concealed axe strapped to her thigh with Velcro that her fingers would hover over every so often. When I finished speaking there was another long silence.

  ‘We were holed up in a camping supply store in town. Myself, Suzanne and a few others. Suzanne was the girl –’ Janet cocked her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the street, and blinked away tears. Her voice was soft and frightened.

  ‘I met her by pure luck. I was hiding in the lane behind the store when I saw Suzanne taking a leak in a bush. There was a guy keeping watch with a flare gun while he held the back door open for her. When they saw me coming the guy pointed the gun at me – he must have thought I was a zombie at first. I don’t know if a flare gun can kill a person, but I screamed as loud as I could that I was human and began waving my arms.’

  Janet laughed to herself, but I could see it wasn’t a happy laugh. ‘My screams alerted two zombies. They must have been hiding very close to me because as soon as I shouted they were on me. I barely made it into the store alive. I ran as fast as I could, but those fuckers were fast too. I could hear them growling right in my ear all the way behind me. Suzanne threw some bricks at the fuckers that slowed them down. She saved my life, and all I could do was watch her die.’

  Janet put her hand over her mouth and breathed through her fingers. She kept her eyes on her knees, which gave me a chance to study her. She was a little smaller than me in height, roughly my age if I had to guess, and with a curvaceous, yet strong looking physique. Her facial features were a little hard, but she was still a very attractive woman. Her long black hair was tied in a ponytail that glistened with grease against the moonlight spilling over her.

  I felt my face begin to burn with embarrassment. I cleared my throat and tried to keep my nerves from showing in my voice.

  ‘So what happened that you had to leave the store? You said that there were a few more of you too?’

  ‘The guy that was holding the door open for Suzanne when I first met her was her boss – Gerrard. He owned the store. When I got inside and everything calmed down, I was introduced to a young married couple, Miles and Jean. They lived in the apartment above the store. And there was a detective there too called Kevin.’

  Janet’s shoulders sagged. ‘They were nice people’, she said looking down at her hands. ‘They had been there only a few days but had become really close. Even though I was an outsider I wasn’t treated like one. They welcomed me with open arms – literally. They all told me about themselves, and how they all ended up in the store.’

  I watched plumes of Janet’s breath waft up into the air. The garage had grown quite cold all of a sudden. I pressed my chest into my knees and wrapped my arms around my shins. The bonnet of the BMW popped under me that gave both of us a start. Janet smiled and then unhooked her axe from her leg, and put it on the floor between her feet. ‘Fat lot of good this was,’ she muttered. She looked at me and spoke again.

  ‘The store was a good safe house. We had everything we needed. Sleeping bags, thermal clothing, torches, first aid kits, batteries, portable gas burners, protein bars, bottled water, tools, and weapons. But the best thing of all we had was Mile’s scotch. I was never a scotch drinker until the world ended, but that shit tasted really good at night before bed.’

  We both smiled.

  ‘We were all drinking the scotch before lights out a few nights ago. We had our sleeping bags set up in a circle, and we were passing the bottle around, filling our cups, and telling stories. It was nice ye know.’

  I nodded back at her noticing the sadness in her face.

  ‘I was really tired, and ready to turn in when the bottle made its way around to Kevin. He took a larger measure than the rest of us and then told us that he was going outside the following morning. He said that he was going to go back to his station to try and see if any of his old pals were still alive and had any answers. He said that he’d come back and rescue us, with
or without them, once he got his hands on some firepower.’

  ‘Did he make it?’ I asked leaning forward. Kevin’s plan had been similar to mine. It filled me with a little hope.

  ‘No’ Janet replied. ‘At first we all thought that it was just the booze talking. He was fed up, and he said that he wanted some answers. I mean we all felt that way. But like I said, we had a good thing in the camping store, and it was a good place to be to ride things out.’

  ‘So what happened then?’ I asked.

  Janet’s shook her head. ‘Well, we all tried to talk him out of it obviously. But he wouldn’t hear of it. When I woke up the next morning Kevin was gone. He had made Miles open the front door for him, and had promised that he would be back. But we all knew that all he had really done was commit suicide. A little piece of me thinks that he had just wanted to commit suicide all along but didn’t want to tell us.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I muttered. I felt a little bit better about not going through with my own trip to the police station.

  Janet nodded. She looked deep into my eyes with a piercing stare. ‘Later that night Miles and Jean went out to the lane to relieve themselves. Gerrard was doing his usual armed lookout. Myself and Suzanne were boiling water for some tea in the store. Miles was only out there about a minute when we heard him scream and then Jean.’

  Janet shifted uneasily on her stool. She tucked her hands under her thighs and shivered before speaking again.

  ‘When myself and Suzanne got to the back door Jean was as good as dead. A zombie had its arms around her waist and was biting into the back of her neck. Miles was –’ Janet trailed off. She bit her bottom lip and took a deep breath before speaking again in a tone I could barely hear.

  ‘Miles was pressed up against the wall, a big beast of a zombie was eating into his forearm, and there was a rat dangling from between his legs. The rat was eating his – thing.’