After we successfully negotiated the stile and maintained our progress down the tramway, a sense of emptiness filled the air. After everything we had just been through, after perilously brushing face-to-face with an insatiable biter, I could barely believe we had reached an empty section of the trail. It was reminiscent of the feeling we had when we reached the family homestead just days before; the cars were in the drive, toys were on the decking, and dishes were visibly stacked up in the kitchen, but no-one was home. It was like dashed hope twinned with frustration. Only this time around, there was hope.
We proceeded down the trail for a while longer, quietly forging on unscathed, lucky not to have yet encountered any more ambling undead. The now wintery leaves that had fallen in the previous season and provided a makeshift carpet throughout the trail were wet and hazardous. Their once crisp nature had long since been replaced. They masked a slurry laden slippery track underfoot and left behind an immobile army of bare woodland that enabled a clear line of sight for 500 yards ahead. But it also left us vulnerable to the equally sighted corpses that stalked the countryside, each of which carried a hunger and bloodlust as vivacious as the next. It wasn’t long before we walked into trouble again.
Despite thee visibility ahead, the haze of the early morning caught us out and three awakening corpses seemed to just appear on the horizon, aroused by an impending meal and stumbling desperately toward us from three different angles. To the left, a former hunk of a man now cast as a heavy, immovable force of rotting flesh lumbered forward, literally a dead weight. To the right, a stray waif of a corpse appeared drained of all colour and life as it raced nimbly in their direction. Straight ahead, the most tenacious of the oncoming pincer formation dragged its cumbersome and imperious limbs toward us with an angered, aggressive growl. In the distance, a fourth walker threatened to close in on too, salivating as its eyes narrowed.
What little progress we had made was blunted, the tapered trail ahead was cut-off from all sides – we were trapped, again. Only backtracking toward the road, at least half a mile back, would be a viable option. Even then, we could not guarantee safe passage back out of the situation. I lunged forward and planted the same knife into the head of the nimble waif with enough speed and force that it drove right through the centre of its skull. As the corpse fell to the ground in a heap, Jenny took my hand and we weaved our way through the muddy tangles of twigs, foliage and debris that blanketed the floor beneath the trees.
But the diversion took us far from the beaten track and into the undergrowth. Though we shared a strange inclination that someone had already trodden the ground before us – Jenny’s family? Her father? Fellow survivors? – and we passed a small grave-like mound of earth decorated with a wreath made of leaves, we felt completely without bearings and, ultimately, lost. I couldn’t help thinking I was suddenly completely out of my depth. The frenzied fear and veil of adrenaline had faded, leaving behind an inner core of anxiety and panic. We walked for another hour until we found sanctuary, of sorts.
And here we are, 24 hours later, surrounded by a handful of corpses 12 feet below us clambering at the sturdy wooden play structure we find ourselves camped in. We’re in the tree-house style cabin that you sometimes find in pub gardens or children’s play parks, offering just enough shelter from the elements to make it bearable and reprieve from the chase of the cadavers’ bloodlust on the ground. It’s just big enough for us to both sprawl out with our bags and blankets in a rough-and-ready style den, and only accessible by one of those chainwalk balancing acts that no corpse in this apocalypse, no matter how agitated or adept, could tackle. We are comparatively safe, if not cold and consumed by fear, as we head into our second night here.
From this ad-lib watchtower we will assess the situation again at first light, and hopefully find a way of getting back on track. For now, we need to try and pursue some much-needed semblance of sleep, if that’s really possible amidst the moaning, groaning and wrestled thoughts.
29th February 2016
I think we must be about a mile out of Porthreth now. From here on the play equipment watchtower I can just about see the school over the tops of the trees in the distance, while some of the natural geography is recognisable from my running days of yesteryear and I think we’ve drifted out amongst the woodland toward the next village along, Bridge Heath.
We haven’t drifted for two days though. We’ve been stuck here, freezing our bits off up on this exposed woodwork. While it may have been a great place to seek refuge from the deciduous undead all around us, and catch our breath from our sprinting travails through the woodland, it has also proved a tricky summit to escape from over the last 48 hours.
We draped our blankets over the edges of the cabin last night and kept huddled closely, quietly together, as we attempted to play down our presence up here and drive the walkers down below into a starved boredom. It’s taken about 14 hours, but they finally seem to have lost interest and assumed we’re no longer here. They can’t hear us, can’t see us, and have decided our fleshy morsels are no longer here. As a result, they have slowly and almost begrudgingly trudged off through the foliage in the pursuit of another smell on the afternoon air.
The blankets provided some shelter from the wind chill too, but not a lot. The cold snap continues and we’re now really starting to wonder if we were right in leaving the various (warm) buildings we’ve been in over the past few weeks. We were feeling the cold even then, but now we’re completely open to it. I think the adrenaline and core body heat from our running had belied the extent of the cold before but, unable to move up here and with only sleeping bags and extra layers for comfort, we’re really feeling it now. So are our surroundings; the grassy ground below is a bit of a whiteout and crunchy underfoot, the daffodils that remind us of brighter times are this morning frost-bitten, and even the draped fabrics have less of a ripple to them in the breeze, semi-rigid now with a thin layer of icy crunch.
We’re cold to the core – I even questioned whether it was affecting my mental state earlier, after seeing what looked like a survivor running in the distance. But Jenny saw it too, sprinting away from the woodland towards the village, presumably from a hungry pack of walkers. All manner of questions have been running through our heads. Who was it? Was it Jenny’s father? Was it somebody we know? Who or what were they running from?
Whoever it was, they demonstrated an impressive turn of pace – especially considering today’s slippery terra firma – and looked almost as if they knew what they were doing, rather than being part of a frenetic chase. Within seconds, he or she had disappeared from sight again, blended into the vista of thickset woodland.
It’s been otherwise quiet. Our entrapment aloft this bitter, leafy vantage point has afforded a lot of time to sleep and think things over. At the forefront of those thoughts has been one corpse in particular. Not ‘Dog, not Andrew White, not Jane the councillor or any of the merciless monsters that we’ve had to slay along the way, but something altogether more unnerving. It didn’t really register at the time, with the adrenaline pumping, the blood spraying and the breath I was catching, but overnight a series of flashbacks brought it back to me – there’s a silent, stalking cadaver out there like no other.
I can remember it now, so clearly that I can’t believe I didn’t think about it sooner. There was a corpse just standing there, watching. Staring longingly through the wooded hillside, the corpse stood still, fixed on the target in its sights. It was an empty gaze, though somehow less vacant than the others – less primordial. In its vision were Jenny and I, a pair of survivors carefully treading our way through the muddied, leafy winter track.
It didn’t pounce uncontrollably like all of the others we’ve encountered. It resisted, showing some kind of intentional restraint that no other corpse out there possesses. During all of the fighting, the frantic bloodshed, the minutes that we were caught in the moment and completely vulnerable, the running off into the hillside for safety, it just tracked us. Stood still in
the distance, the silent and stealthy corpse simply twitched and observed from afar, its gaze unabated and its thirst seemingly managed.
Though I didn’t realise at first, I had subliminally noticed it watching us both in combat and in retreat; from the corner of my eye I had seen it stand and gaze as we fled. Further flashbacks told me this morning that it had slowly trudged through the flora and fauna in our direction, always there in the outermost edge of my peripheral vision as I looked back to check Jenny’s progress behind me.
I can’t believe it didn’t register with me before now. What the hell was that? It was definitely part of the corpse brigade, somehow dark and bloodied, with disfigured facial contours and other bedraggled features. But why didn’t it lurch instinctively and irrepressibly toward us? Why did it stalk and spasm rather than attack? It’s wholly unnerving and completely fear inducing. Did it follow us here? Was it able to? Is it lurking somewhere down there in the thicket? Are there more like that?
The thought that there might somehow be a breed of ‘intelligent’ or perceptive corpses hunting out there adds a whole new level of fear to this apocalypse. Fear that we cannot allow to paralyse us today – we're keen to get going and move on. We've had too many diversions and distractions along the way so far that have waylaid us for several days at a time, sometimes by choice but more often not. We don't want this to be another one; stuck for days on end in a random part of the woods that we have no bearings in. As soon as we’re confident we can climb down and negotiate the crispy earth beneath us, we need to get moving, get back on the tramway, and get back on track.
1st March 2016
The zombie that doesn't attack – I've seen it again, we both did. We stood not thirty feet from it, and it didn't move. It twitched and snarled and motioned to move, but the attack never came. The drooling corpse took maybe one step forward, but nothing more. It just stood and stared, it's head tilting to one side as it surveyed the prey before it and seemed to longingly analyse our weight, our smell, our being.
That's when it hit me, when I realised who it was. The jaundiced, disfigured features and a torso now bereft of any healthy weight masked the realisation. I think I know who it is, who it was, but I haven't told Jenny just yet and I won't know for sure until that thing is put out of it's misery. The big question is, why the hell won't it attack us?
We can't begin to understand this apocalypse or its inception, but we know the rules: You get bitten or scratched, you become one of them – and then you uncontrollably hunt anything in sight yourself; and so the process keeps repeating. Bite, turn, attack, repeat. But this apparently restrained cadaver breaks all of those rules. It re-writes the pages of fear with whole new chapters and verse.
We're only just coming to terms with what's happened to the world, to the people around us, and – closer to home – to the people that we've become. We don't need another game-changer. If that's what's this creature is, of course. Maybe it's something else, maybe there's another reason it didn't attack. Perhaps it was bogged down or unable to move. Yet again, all we have are questions – and fear.
Now add injury to that list. Jenny has a strained ankle that’s caused us to stop in our tracks for a couple of hours, and hopefully no longer. We made a lot of progress today, and I have a feeling we’re now not that far from the military base.
It’s been an arduous trek, made painstakingly slower since a blanket of cold covered the ground beneath us. Once we disembarked the frosty play equipment that we’d called home for the last couple of days, we began trying to retrace our steps back to the trail and had to meticulously plant each and every footstep on the old tramway. Not only were we having to tread carefully for fear of an icy accident, but every wet leaf and sludge of mud, and every snap of a crunchy twig creates noise enough to alert any dormant corpse; our footfall needs to be a delicate motion that lightly glides across the glacial-like ground. That’s not easy in dense woodland.
Despite such efforts, we made a lot of early headway and not only found our way back to the path, but actually started to advance a long way down it. It was a mess. We’ve seen body parts, blood bogs, tendons and entrails caught in low-lying branches, and even mini landslides in the earth, presumably where corpses have stumbled and slid down the hillside or survivors have actively jumped down to avoid them. The ground itself seems to tell a thousand stories, and we’ve only traversed a small amount of it in the grand scheme of things.
But our progress was curtailed when Jenny turned her ankle. We inadvertently found ourselves heading in the direction of what would prove to be seemingly non-aggressive corpse. About a 25 feet expanse of trees and brittle brambles stood between us when we caught sight of it, and our intimidating stand-off felt like minutes but probably only lasted a few seconds – just long enough for the grisly looking biter to consider the meal stood rigidly in its vision. Though relatively passive and twitching constantly, one particular tic sent Jenny into a flap and she bolted, leaving me little choice but to join her. We ran and ran, and ran – until Jenny caught an awkward bounce off one of those earth landslides and tumbled to the ground.
Thankfully we were in a stretch of the tramway without immediate danger, and limped a few steps further to a cave-like clearing in the valley, where rainwater trickles down the rocky surface and the trees afford a small hideaway from the open trail. We’re staying here for a couple of hours to catch our breath and allow Jenny’s ankle to rest up. I’m not sure how bad it really is, but she seems to be in a lot of pain and unable to place much weight on it. That’s yet to be put to the test by an onrushing corpse though, only then will we find out how bad it is. Hopefully that’s not something we’ll have to discover anytime soon.
2nd March 2016
Dear diary
Well, here we are, almost. 46 days since the zombie apocalypse went from silver screen fiction to unrelenting blood thirsty reality, and we have finally reached what we hope will be our salvation.
The last few days have been tough. Two weeks ago I was forced to make my first kill, days later I would have to repeat that chilling, life-changing feat, and since then the reluctant, ruthless slashing spree has intensified. In the last 48 hours we’ve come face-to-face with more of the undead corpses than ever before, we’ve seen and done things we never ever thought possible, and we’ve succumbed to the increasingly harsh winter elements of 2016 with sickness and injury.
Jenny’s latest challenge is a swollen, heavily bandaged ankle. She can weight-bear, but not for long spells, while I have fallen sick overnight myself. Over-tired, weak and anxious, the resulting over-active and aggressive stomach acids are wreaking havoc with my insides.
I guess I should be thankful that my innards are still inside me and not splayed throughout these woods or inside the rotting entrails of the undead that we so fear, but it’s not much comfort right now. I’ve never coped well with sickness. I had always thought that vomiting was the worst pre-apocalypse feeling or sensation – the gut wrenching, uncontrollable heaves, the starvation of breath and near choking, and the vicious cycle of the pungent stench and the further sick it induces all over again. Every time sickness came to dictate my insides, it was a stark reminder of why I hated it so much.
But that was nothing. At least we had the scant warmth and comfort of our sickbed, we had the toilet or a vessel to discard vomit in, and we could take a hot shower and scrub the feeling of engrained unpleasantness away afterwards. Sickness and dehydration while hiding from the marauding undead – and during exposure to one of the most unforgiving cold snaps I can recall – is another thing altogether. There’s no escaping the vomit, nowhere for it to go. There’s no time or place to curl up and ride out the physical suffering. The putrid, acidic stench of sick only builds upon the already acrid and barely tolerable air of rotting flesh and congealed blood. And there’s little or no family around to share the pain with and offer sympathy and dry biscuits.
We had to keep moving in-between my heaves and rest breaks for Jenny’s ankle, whi
ch only made both worse. Despite that, we’ve made slow and steady progress to the gates of the military base. We’ve staked the place out for a few hours from a quiet little area in the woodland, from where I’m writing to you now, reader. The wireless dongle continues to keep us connected.
But we can’t stay out here for much longer, and we want to be in before nightfall, so we’re going to make our move shortly.
There’s a sturdy looking perimeter fence as far as the eye can see from here, with a heavy set of gates for us to (hopefully) find a way through yet. Beyond, it looks like everything I pictured it to be; solid, reinforced, expansive and adaptable. We have hope again and freedom, perhaps. But let’s get inside first.
3rd March 2016
Four incinerator flare gas towers loom large over the military base, giving it a sturdy, industrial look that reinforces its forces nature. Two of which appear to have been converted into temporary watchtowers, adding to the sense of security around the installation that’s already established by the octagonal perimeter fence, it's cliff top location, and the building's solid concrete construction.
A large runway stretches as far into the distance as the naked eye can see, perhaps a mile or more in length, though at first glance it looks to have been a long time out of use – no aircraft appear to call the base home. Barren, largely green fields surround the base to three sides, while the woodlands that we have come to know so well mark a steep descent from the gated front of the site to the valley below.
The Pestilence Collection [Books 1-3] Page 12
