Plague Of The Revenants

by Chilvers, Edward

  “I don’t think so Mr Blake.”

  “Maybe a week or so in solitary would make you think again?”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong, Mr Blake.”

  “You’ve done plenty wrong you nasty little cunt, that’s why you’re in here, remember? That’s why you’re jerking off to pictures of the weather girls in the Sunday magazines instead of being out there in a real world getting some real pussy of your own. There’s some really nice pussy out there at the moment, Grant, did you know that? All the girls are wearing these really low cut outfits and every one of them is gagging for it in ways you can only imagine.”

  Blake liked to provoke people. He was never violent himself, rather he was a master of manipulation. A quiet word from him could see inmates at one another’s throats, could turn guards against one another, could insight riots. He picked on everyone to a certain extent but he was especially hard on me. I suppose he relished the challenge.

  Nobody knows what started the outbreak, only that it was pinpointed to a remote part of Siberia. Maybe it was an ancient plague unearthed by the retreating ice caps, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe it was the wrath of God visited on a corrupt and wicked world. Everybody had a theory. In those early days when the infection was isolated and faraway it was easy for the so called armchair experts to sit in the comfort of their studios and discuss the what ifs and whys. To begin with it was just something that didn’t affect us and was likely as not never going to. To begin with the general consensus which got reported on the news was that it was the result of some sort of designer drug driving people crazy and making them attack others. Later on it was declared a strange, rabies like virus. That is to say: people were bitten, died, and then somehow they came back again. The most sensible consensus, to me at least (and I had become very rational by then) was that it was some kind of parasite transmitted through blood and saliva that killed its host then took over its brain and brought it back again. Once you were bitten it was the end for you. You would undergo a brief period of death before the parasite re-established control over your brain and rose you up to live again in an uncontrollable desire for human flesh. How soon it took you to turn depended on how badly you were bitten, although even the slightest scratch from a tooth of one of the infected was invariably fatal in the end. There was no cure. I don’t think the governments ever got close before they too were wiped out. I remember the first time I saw a revenant on the television news report. It’s slow and shuffling walk, dead eyes, head tilted lopsidedly to one side and the low moan from the mouth from which speech would once have come. All the same I could not believe it would present so much of a challenge, could not believe it was right now toppling governments and leading to some of the biggest unrest the world had ever seen, could not believe anybody could be slow enough not to outrun them. This was before I discovered how quickly they could in fact move at close quarters, before I came to respect their sheer weight of numbers. I knew nothing back then, of course I didn’t. Soon the infection spread from Siberia to Moscow and from there to Eastern Europe. Every country in the world closed its borders but it was too late. Three weeks later the infection spread to France. A week later the first case was reported in Hastings. The army was sent in to close the place down. It was still too late. When it reached London we knew the country was fucked. Mass panic set in. People started rioting on the streets which had the effect of spreading the virus still further. Religious nut-jobs put signs around their necks and paraded around saying it was the ‘end of times.’ They were right, talked the most sense of anyone involved with the outbreak so far. When we went into the yard for exercise we could smell the fires and roasted flesh from where the government was desperately attempting to burn the bodies. Once we heard angry shouting and chanting outside the prison walls. We thought it must be the revenants come to claim us at last. It turned out it was just desperate people, begging to be let in. For myself I wished the revenants luck. I wanted them to destroy society. I did not at that point see the opportunity the catastrophe would present to me, just hoped I would live long enough to see everything crumble. The world could go to hell for all I cared. Some of the prisoners crowed at how safe we all were here behind bars but I knew it could not last. Worrying voices began to be heard and as the crisis went on their views started to gain more and more momentum. News was infrequent and unreliable. It was impossible to tell how bad things really were. Of course nobody told us lags anything. Towards the end we noticed fewer and fewer prison guards and we stopped being let out of our cells. Sometimes we would go days without being fed and would be reduced to drinking toilet water. It was clear the entire outside infrastructure was breaking down. I became frustrated. I was not afraid to die but I was not prepared to go down without a fight. I wondered if we might be abandoned completely by the guards and left to starve to death, locked in our cells. Blake somehow managed to get himself a gun and he armed the other guards as well. It was clear he was forming the prison into his own personal microstate with himself as the supreme ruler. Stanger still how some of the prisoners started to go missing, the weaker ones mostly; or the ones who were sick in the head; the nonces and the psychotic serial killers and those with the lowest IQs. I was sure Blake had something to do with it, but he was not quite the master yet.

  Two weeks after the revenant plague first hit the shores of Britain we prisoners were herded outside into the yard and from there into vans, minibuses and lorries. As we drove through the gates we were passed by long black cars I recognised as ministerial vehicles. The great and good now came to cower behind the thick walls of the prison protected by the army’s ring of steel. As we travelled to the town that day I looked out of the bus window and saw some terrible scenes. The highways were packed with traffic. The army cleared a path as best it could in order to let us through. Cars rushed past us, completely out of control, their occupants fleeing in a panic. We saw many of those same cars smash themselves up against trees or buildings. Houses were boarded up. Entire streets had been cordoned off. Cars and furniture formed barricades which were set on fire in a bid to deter the undead. It did not work of course. Nothing did. To see the revenants up close was as nothing I had ever seen before. The television could not do them justice. They shuffled and hobbled after us as we drove past, clawing with outstretched arms, their teeth chomping up and down in anticipation of their feast. Many of them had visible tears on their bodies, such as from their throats or arms from where they had been bitten. The most pitiful sight of all was that of those who had recently been bitten but were yet to turn running after the buses beseeching us for help. Their skin was already pale and washed in a cold sweat and their tongues lolled out to contrast obscenely with their infected, bloodshot eyes.

  We had no idea where we were being taken. I wondered if it was to become decoys as the survivors were evacuated from the towns. Leastways I didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out alive, especially not with Blake in charge. And yet the warden was pacing up and down the bus, gazing intently out of the window and he was actually smiling, as if he relished the chaos and was welcoming a new opportunity.

  Eventually the convoy of vehicles pulled up outside a large football stadium guarded by what remained of the armed forces. We were let in through thick metal gates and the vehicles pulled up on a piece of waste ground in the stadium’s shadow. We were herded outside at gunpoint and lined up. I glanced beyond the fence and saw revenants already beginning to converge at the sight of us, rattling the chain links of the fencing as they sought to break through to us. Blake stepped out in front of us and held a megaphone to his leering lips. “Alright you cunts!” He exclaimed gleefully. “It’s time to get your hands dirty. So far you’ve been lucky. You’ve been able to sit in your comfy cells and listen to all this shit going on via the radios which means you should all be expects on our friends over here by now.” He gestured towards the revenants beyond the perimeter fencing. “But this ends now, do you understand me? The government, or what rema
ins of it, has decided you’re all going to make yourselves useful. After all, why should good, honest people put their lives at risk fighting the worst plague we’ve ever seen in our history when we’ve got a whole other kind of living cancer putting their feet up in the warm?” He gestured towards one of the turnstiles which had been marked out in bright red paint. “Though that tunnel you’ll find hats, gloves, jackets and spades. You’re all to take one each and get to work. You’re going to be digging, and after that you’re going to be burning. You’re going to do this until you’re either dead or I tell you to stop. And don’t start getting the wrong idea my little heroes. There’s going to be no reprieve for good service here. You’re just as dead as the poor fuckers you’re going to be burying. The only question is how long will you get to live and will the Almighty pull off a miracle in the nick of time to see you rammed safely back into your own little pits of hell?”

  The bodies came in trucks. The diggers made deep holes in the stadium over forty feet deep. We took the bodies and covered them up with a thin layer of dirt then moved on to the next ones. Sometimes, often in fact, the bodies were not completely put down, would turn and snap like a rattlesnake into the arm or even the throat of one of the prisoners. When that happened a guard would charge down the line and the prisoner would be cut down in a hail of bullets. We were worked eighteen hours per day. Those who did not work hard enough disappeared in the middle of the night. You didn’t need three guesses to work out what had happened to them. Here in the confines of this stadium Blake ruled the roost. He was the supreme tyrant, the dictator, the living God amongst us all. Blake was in his element. He was loving the chaos and the destruction and I saw him take down revenants with gusto. “Come along you little fuckers!” He roared triumphantly. “Let’s see what you can do!”

  We slept on waste ground just outside the stadium which in turn was surrounded by a flimsy wire fence. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter, but they were only half there to protect us. The guards were shitting themselves as well, and here only because they were isolated and had nowhere else to go. It was absurd to continue burying bodies in the stadium when things were as bad as this but somewhere somebody was still clinging on to the semblance of the old bureaucracy. The revenants pressed up against the metal fencing as we tried to sleep. We all knew it was only a matter of time. At night we heard the screams and moans of the revenants attacking the ever decreasing band of survivors. Sometimes we would see survivors dashing up to the railings and rattling them hard, begging to be let in. I remember thinking it must truly have come to something if the living actually sought refuge in a hellhole such as this. The guards started to desert, vanishing off into the night. Some of the prisoners refused to work and embraced the welcome death of the machine guns. Only Blake seemed above it, Blake and myself. I knew I had nothing to live for, had given up completely and it was going to take more than the end of the world as we knew it to get me to start caring now. We weren’t expected to live, us prisoners, it was not figured into the equation. Some of the other inmates talked of escape, but escape to what? There was nothing out there except the undead, nothing except burned out buildings and crashed cars, the stench of death and the darkest despair. Back in the cells all I had done was listen to the radio. I had heard the reports from other countries that were hit first and I knew that once things got to this stage it was all over.

  I remember the first one I killed. It was brought in buried beneath the others and unloaded from the dumper truck. We came forward with our shovels, myself and another prisoner named Royce who I had been paired up with. We started reaching down, picking them up on either side and throwing them into the pit. Unfortunately for Royce he was on the head end, didn’t see the ravenous jaws snap up towards him until it was too late and after that the piercing scream as the thing buried its teeth into his arm, the spurt of blood. I jumped back, raised my shovel and swung it towards the revenant without hesitation, sharp end first. The blade of my spade connected hard with the revenant’s scalp, slicing it clean in half. The creature’s jaws froze and it died without another sound. Meanwhile Royce’s scream were clear for all to hear. I bent down beside him and ripped a piece off my t-shirt to use as a tourniquet, started to wrap it around his wound. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Or perhaps not,” came a voice behind me. The shot whizzed past my neck, severing the hairs, and smashed into the dead centre of Royce’s forehead. I leapt up, spun around to face Blake. “Nicely done, Grant,” said the warden with a thin smile. “Except next time try not to get too sentimental over the bitten, eh? I’ve never seen it end well yet.”

  So it went on for over a week. I could see it was hopeless and was sure the government must have seen it too, presuming the government still existed at that point. Somebody must have been coordinating the lorries which still drew up outside the stadium full of bodies. There were more bodies than we could cope with and no more space to bury them. Those who tried to point this out were shot. I could see at once the law was now entirely in the hands of Blake. Of the one hundred and fifty inmates who had started out just forty now remained. Even the guards had been virtually enslaved as Blake asserted his dominance over the whole affair. I wondered why he stayed here, why he didn’t just take off by himself. I supposed it was because there were no more safe havens, or perhaps he was simply biding his time.

  Soon I could sense a mounting unease amongst the guards. They were talking amongst themselves, ignoring both the bodies and ourselves. I started hearing words like ‘swarm.’ After ten days I started noticing even more ominous signs. Survivors no longer came up clamouring to be let in. The aggressive shouts of the pursuing revenants from outside were replaced with a low and steady moan as they patrolled the streets without stimulus. The trucks pulled up less frequently. Discipline broke down. It was now not only prisoners that went missing in the night and what is more us inmates were increasingly left to our own devices and not being worked so hard.

  One morning we woke up to find the fences groaning with the weight of a multitude of the undead bearing down on top of it.

  “This is the endgame, Grant,” said Blake, coming up to me and laying a comradely hand on my shoulder. “There won’t be any more trucks coming through; I’ve been radioing headquarters for two days now. Nothing.”

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked him.

  “As for you, you’ll serve your sentence as it was supposed to be served,” replied Blake with a thin smile.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were sentenced to die in captivity,” purred the warden. “And die in captivity is exactly what you’re going to do. Whether you turn and become one of them, well that may be up to you. Depends how quickly you can finish yourself off.”

  I started to question him more but at that moment Blake raised the butt of his rifle and rammed it hard into the bridge of my nose, shattering it across my face. Stars appeared before my eyes and I fell to the floor. I don’t know if I lost consciousness but certainly I missed something because the next thing I knew there was a flashing explosion followed by screaming and the shuffling of undead feet. I looked up to see both guard and inmate fleeing in panic from the revenants, who had somehow managed to breach the fences which now lay flat on the ground and were pouring through the gaps and into the waste-ground. They were coming in at all ends. The prisoners dropped their shovels and ran, not realising they were surrounded. The guards fired off their weapons but it was all a drop in the ocean. I charged to the top of the stands but knew it could only be a delaying tactic. I realised at once what had happened. Blake had opened the gates and allowed them in, creating just the distraction he needed to make his own escape and indeed over it all I heard the purr of an engine and I looked down to see the unmistakable outline of Blake sat at the wheel of one of the dumper trucks. As I watched he accelerated away, through the revenants, running them over without hesitation. There were not so many of them of course. Most had already pou
red into the stadium and I saw at once what had happened. I leapt to my feet straight away, although my head screamed at me, drew upon a survival instinct I didn’t know I still possessed and ran with the others, away from the revenants and back inside the stadium. I ran and as I ran I thought and planned. I sprinted ahead to the end of the stadium, turned and looked around. There was no way out. The revenants were coming in at all angles. At that moment a revenant staggered towards me, its drooling mouth fixated upon my flesh. I ripped one of the plastic chairs from its hinges and parried the beast away as best I could. The revenant staggered back and I took the opportunity to throw out my foot and sending it flying back down the stone steps. One down, nine hundred and ninety nine more to go. I looked around and realised straight away that the only way was up. I rushed up to the metal pillar at the front of the stand and leapt on to it then started climbing up with all my strength. I felt the icy grip of a revenant upon my bare heel and I kicked out for all I worse worth and slid about a foot down. Turning around I saw a multitude of revenants converging upon me. I tried desperately to focus, seized on my energy reserves and shot upwards once more towards the roof. Once there it was an agonising struggle to find leverage on the roof and afterwards I pulled myself up, took in my breath and surveyed the terrible scene below. The revenants had poured into the stadium so that no more ground could be seen. As I watched I saw my fellow prisoners dashing this way and that before realising they were surrounded. I saw men I had lived with for years seized and torn apart and yet there was nothing I could do to help them. Their piercing screams for help carried over to my vantage point even over the moans of the undead hordes. For the revenants it was just one mass bundle for human flesh. It is small mercy, I thought to myself, that there will be nothing left of my comrades for them to turn.