by David Moody
Sanjeev pulled out the pistol. The guard fumbled at his holster. Elize observed the guard’s death like it was first-person-shooter game play. She looked down the sights, heard a sharp crack then saw muzzle-flash and smoke. A shot to the face. The guard was thrown against the wall. He slumped dead.
Sanjeev stepped over the dead man. The door was secured by a keypad entry system.
‘Kick it down.’
He shouldered the door. Hinges began to rip from the frame.
Ben hurried from the kitchen and stood over Elize.
‘Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said? The Ugandans are gone. The guards have fled. Everyone has bailed. This sector is about to fall. We have to leave right now.’
Elize didn’t respond.
Ben crouched in front of Daniel. He flipped open a pocket knife and cut the man’s ankles free. He grabbed Daniel and hauled him from the armchair. He stood him at the kitchen window.
‘Watch the road. If you see any infected, holler.’
Ben ran back to the living room. He threw equipment into his suitcase.
‘I’m leaving. Stay if you want. But I’m out of here.’
Elize didn’t look up from the screen.
Sanjeev’s POV: a pristine anteroom. Yellow haz-mat suits hung on a rack. Two men rushed Sanjeev. Slavs. One half out of a haz-mat suit, one wearing surgeon’s scrubs. Each felled by a shot to the chest.
‘Finish them,’ commanded Elize.
Headshots. Sanjeev tossed the pistol.
He stared through an observation window. Four beds, each curtained by polythene. The patients were strapped to iron bed-frames. He could see drips and bandages. Hard to make out detail through opaque plastic. Evidently they were locals in the grip of the strange infection. Tumourous growths protruded from flesh.
A man in a haz-mat suit checked a steel case open on a table. Glass vials packed in foam. Blood samples ready for transport. The man turned to face the window. He stared at Sanjeev. Sanjeev stared back.
‘That’s him. Teplov. Get in there. Finish it.’
BIOHAZARD LEVEL FOUR – STRICTY NO ENTRY.
A door framed with UV sterilisation lamps and rimmed with hermetic seals. Sanjeev threw himself against the door until frame-bolts began to tear from cinder block.
◆◆◆
Daniel stood at the kitchen window and watched the empty street. He looked down at the holdall near his feet. He glanced towards the living room and made sure he was unobserved. He crouched and unzipped the bag. He took out the carving knife and straightened up. He was about to slit the plastic ties which bound his wrists when he saw the first wave of infected townsfolk shuffling down the street. Rotted misshapen things.
‘Oh my God. They broke through southern barricade,’ he shouted. ‘They’re here, they’re outside.’
The tight-packed crowd advanced slowly down the street. A couple of infected stopped, turned and looked up as if they sensed Daniel’s presence. They stumbled through the abandoned gatehouse and headed down the path towards the apartment building.
◆◆◆
The living room.
‘Hey,’ said Ben, feverishly thumbing through a travel wallet. He held up a scrap of paper and waved it at Elize. ‘There’s only one chit. Yo, listen to me. The chits. The tickets for the plane. There’s only one.’
Elize remained transfixed by the screen.
Sanjeev’s POV. He advanced on Teplov. Teplov backed against the wall, his sweating, panicked face glimpsed through the Lexan visor of his respirator.
‘Do it. Do it now.’
Sanjeev looked down and gripped his watch. Trembling fingers fumbled for the light button.
‘Now, Sanjeev.’
Gunshot. Muzzle flash and smoke. Ben put a bullet through the laptop screen.
‘Fuck are you doing?’ shouted Elize. She reached behind her back for the pistol jammed in her waistband. Ben stepped up and aimed his smoking 9mm at her face.
‘Don’t you dare,’ he said. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’
Elize slowly raised her hands. Ben held up the paper.
‘Two of us. But only one ticket out.’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Is that right? You didn’t notice? When you signed for the gear, the paperwork? One ticket? Escaped your fucking attention?’
‘Two. There should be two. Look again.’
Daniel stood in the kitchen doorway transfixed by the tableaux before him. Elize on the sofa. The shattered laptop. Ben standing over her with a smoking Glock.
A dull thud against the apartment front door. A scratching sound like dragging nails. He edged to the front door and peered through the spyhole. A grotesquely disfigured face staring back at him. A woman. Jet black eyeballs. Skin stretched and broken by grotesque tumours.
‘What’s out there?’ demanded Ben, keeping his eyes on Elize.
‘The woman from 12B. She’s infected.’
The creature sniffed the spyhole like it could smell Daniel inches away. He glimpsed movement in shadow on the other side of the hall. A couple more infected stumbled up the stairs.
Daniel turned to face Ben and Elize.
‘Listen,’ he said, pitching his voice calm and low like he was trying to pacify fractious children. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on with you two. I don’t understand the politics. But there are infected on the other side of this door and more will be joining them any second. We have to get out of here right now, otherwise we’ll be trapped.’
Ben ignored Daniel. He kept his gaze fixed on Elize.
‘I was going to get whacked when the job was done, is that right? Expendable asset, is that the deal?’
‘There are two tickets. Double check the wallet.’
‘Bitch, please.’
Ben blinked back tears. He was overwhelmed by anger and shame. He’d seen plenty of burn-out cases discreetly retired from the game over the years. Never thought it would happen to him. He let himself get old.
He shot Elize in the kneecap. She screamed and rolled on the floor. He pulled the pistol from her waistband.
He crossed to the front door, pushed Daniel aside and checked the spyhole. Three infected clawed at the door. He weighed the odds. He rocked on his toes like he was limbering for action.
He put a gun to Daniel’s head like it as an after-thought, like he was taking care of a last piece of business.
‘Sorry kid.’
‘Why?’ said Daniel, facing the moment of his death. ‘You said you would let me live.’
Ben gave an apologetic shrug.
‘I got to vanish. New name, new life. Can’t leave loose ends.’
‘You know why they want you shipped?’ shouted Elize. ‘Because you’re a fuck-up. Head in a bottle. You got nothing coming. Just the same downward spiral.’
The distraction was enough for Daniel to draw the carving knife from his waistband with bound hands and stab Ben deep in his side. Ben gasped and fell against the wall. Daniel drove the knife into his belly four times in quick succession. Ben grunted with each impact. He dropped the pistols, slid down the wall and slumped dead.
‘Give me his belt,’ said Elize.
Daniel cut the zip tie binding his wrists. He unbuckled the dead man’s belt and tugged it free. He handed it to Elize. She wrapped it round her thigh as a tourniquet. Shrieking through clenched teeth as she pulled the leather strap tight.
‘Morphine. Bedroom.’
Daniel retrieved a clutch of hypodermics. He gave her a needle. She bit the cap from a hypo and shot the dose into a bicep.
‘More.’
She shot three more needles. Her pupils shrank to pin-pricks as the opiate hit. She picked the headset off the floor.
‘Sanjeev? Sanjeev?’
‘Did he detonate the bomb?’ asked Daniel.
‘Guess I’ll never know.’
She tossed the headset.
‘How many of them out there?’ she asked.
‘Three. Plenty more in a minute or two. They smell
blood.’
‘Have to shoot our way out. Get me up.’
Daniel helped Elize to her feet. She swayed like a drunk. He handed her a pistol.
‘Madness,’ said Daniel. ‘Americans. Playing spy games as the world falls apart.’
‘Some folks are going to ride this shit out. The chosen few. They’ll hide in bunkers, or take to the sea. They’ll survive and inherit the world. I’m a patriot. I want it to be us.’
They edged towards the door. Elize hopped, dripping blood.
‘Got your inhaler?’ she asked.
‘Belongs to my ex. I don’t have asthma.’
‘Sly motherfucker.’
A heavy slam against the front door.
‘Damn,’ muttered Elize. ‘They really want a taste of me.’ She chambered her pistol. ‘Alright. Banzia, motherfuckers.’
Daniel checked the spyhole.
‘God in heaven. There are more of them. Five. And more headed up the stairs. We can’t go out there.’
‘We don’t have a choice.’
‘Hold on,’ said Daniel. He helped Elize prop herself on the arm of the sofa. ‘I have an idea.’
He swept the table clear. He grabbed his cricket bat, stood on the table and began to pound the ceiling. He brought down a cascade of plaster, turned himself ghost-white with dust.
A shallow roof void. Beams and ply wood. He pounded plywood until it splintered and buckled. He tossed the bat and clawed with his hands. He ripped a hole, tore chunks of wood and scraps of tar-sheet. Sunlight shafted through the aperture.
‘The apartments in this street are built side-by-side. We can move rooftop-to-rooftop.’
He hauled himself up and out. He leant back through the hole and held out a hand.
‘Come on.’
Elize limped to the centre of the room and grasped his hand. He strained to lift her. No good. She released her grip. She shook her head.
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
She limped across the room to Ben’s body and tugged a scrap of paper from the breast pocket of his shirt. She stuffed the paper into Daniel’s outstretched hand.
‘C-17 transport. Leaves Aden International in an hour. It’s the last ride out of here. This chit will get you through the cordon and on the plane.’
‘I can’t leave you.’
‘That’s exactly what you’re going to do. You got that pistol?’
‘Yes.’
‘You got an hour to reach the airport. Get going.’
A moment’s hesitation, then Daniel was gone.
Elize slid down the wall and sat next to Ben. Hypos lay scattered on the floor. She gave herself another shot in the arm. Fists pounded the door. The locks wouldn’t hold much longer. She checked the Glock was chambered. She looked round the shitty apartment. Motes of dust danced in sunlight shafting through the hole in the roof. An amplified voice from outside. Allāhu akbar. Final call to prayer for thousands of faithful barricaded in the mosque.
She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes against the world.
‘Fuck it. Let the roaches have their turn.’
She listened as the muezzin called on an absent god. His voice rose over the ruined city and was lost in empty sky.
THE PLAGUE WINTER
Rich Hawkins
When Eddie opened the door and stepped back, a spindly shape with too many teeth emerged from the house and crawled out into the rain. It was a woman in the filthy remnants of a summer dress, her blackened mouth gasping and her face slack and drooping upon her skull.
He stepped back until he was beyond the reach of her claws and corruption. She wheezed past sore lips and halted on her hands and knees, trembling and raw upon the tarmac of the car park. She looked up at Eddie as he raised the pistol, and her eyes were bloodshot and wild in their bone sockets. Skin shockingly pale. She reached for him, her mouth pleading.
Crack of the gunshot and the pistol bucked in his hand. The bullet caught the woman just below her left eye and exited through the back of her head. She uttered a strained gurgle from her throat, and died crawling towards him, one hand scraping at the ground while the other pawed at the hole in her face.
Eddie stepped away.
The silence in the rain. Soft patter upon his shoulders and hood. He pulled the tied cloth down from his nose and mouth and took in a breath that felt like the best he’d ever tasted. His hands trembled. The weight of his old bones. He moved one arm in its socket and his old joints were like rusted hinges and knots. When he looked at the woman and her ruined form, anger swelled behind his eyes and teeth. The back of his mouth watered with nausea. The taking of a life never got easier. Never would. And it would never end. Pestilence was in the land, and the plague would abide. The country belonged to the infected and the scavengers.
Smell of gunpowder in the damp air. He touched his face and then checked his clothes for the woman’s blood, but he was clean. He slumped and watched the woman for a while as the rain fell and the wind pulled at him from the surrounding fields.
◆◆◆
The gunshot would bring visitors and he had to finish before they arrived. He moved to the doorway and stepped inside the house with the pistol awkward in his hands. Air pulled through the cloth over his mouth. All he could hear was his heart as he stood in the kitchen and eyed the doorway to the hallway and the stairs beyond. Rainwater dripped from his coat. If there were any infected upstairs they’d have descended to meet him by now.
He pulled down his hood and ran one finger over a worktop and it came away black with dust. The linoleum sticky with old stains. In one corner of the floor there was a puddle of some kind of mucus that smelled like rotten eggs.
Everything covered in dust. Rain fell against the window above a sink filled with dirty plates and bowls growing colonies of mould. Dead insects upturned in the windowsills. A clock ticked soundlessly upon a wall speckled with black rot. Eddie noted the time because he didn’t want to be caught out in the fields in the dark, and the prospect of spending a night in the house appealed only to the vague suicidal tendencies he’d been feeling since winter had arrived.
He listened to the house and the creaks between the walls. In the cupboards he found two tins of tomato soup and one of oxtail, a Mars bar, a packet of dried pasta and a tin of baby carrots, all of which he placed in the rucksack over his shoulder.
Deeper into the house, where the rooms smelled of old murder and bone marrow. The solemn daylight revealed the old things of a lost world. Skeletal remains piled in one corner like an offering. Blood-encrusted rags and bandages. Bookcases of tattered books. In the rooms where the curtains were drawn, he used his torch to pick through the darkness to the sound of the incessant rain on the roof. In a desk drawer he found packs of batteries, some birthday candles and a box of matches. They all went into the bag.
Eddie made sure not to look at the photos on the walls and high shelves and behind the glass doors of cabinets. It didn’t matter who had lived here. To think too much about the dead was to let his guard down, which would likely end with a bite or a scratch from some ravenous thing. And that would be that.
He climbed the stairway into the darkness and when he reached the landing he opened the curtains and flinched from the grey daylight. He opened the door to the master bedroom and in the dark inside he saw the thing that squirmed in the bed. He raised the pistol and froze. The torchlight revealed what remained of a man. The bed clothes damp with blood and other fluids. A putrid stink.
The man was emaciated and hairless, his pale skin glistening, and he extended a dripping hand towards Eddie. His face opened into a vertical slit and the skin peeled back to reveal teeth, slick-red cilia and the horror of a grinning skull all wet and sopping.
Eddie backed against the wall as red tendrils rose from under the stained blankets and climbed to almost the height of the ceiling, dancing and swaying like underwater plants. The tips of the tendrils opened and bloomed, flowering into pale suckers with purple innards and little teeth
. Eddie didn’t react until they were almost upon him then fired the pistol once and hoped the bullet had found the man before he fled the room and slammed the door shut. He hunched over on the landing, spitting a bad taste from his mouth, his heart lurching and frail.
When the scratching began upon the other side of the door, he turned away and stumbled down the stairs then fled into the rain.
◆◆◆
In the eighteen months since the start of the outbreak Eddie understood that no one was coming to help and the realisation was always followed with a knot of despair that hardened in his chest.
The house receded behind him. It was one of the few isolated cottages in the area, and the last one to be looted. After today he would have to look for supplies in the nearby villages, and that filled him with a dread that constricted his heart. He was too old for this. Too tired and sore with his blackened heart dwindling like a deflated balloon and his liver swollen and scarred from years of self-medicating with whiskey. He remembered the warnings from his doctor and her concerned face across the desk as she admonished him about his drinking. She had handed him leaflets filled with frightening words and medical jargon, but once he got home he had dropped them on the table and promised to read them later, but he never did and they went out with the recycling at the end of the week.
If he lived to see Sam into early adulthood, that would be enough, and his job would be done.
He walked on, struggling over slopes and rises, wiping specks of rain from his eyes. One step then the next as he navigated wet ground and overgrown pastures. Black streams trickling into frothing ditches. He could feel the rust inside him and the microbes and germs on his skin. The bacteria toiling in his gut.
Distant towns and villages like apparitions in the downpour. Thunder crackled in a sky the colour of base metals. Slouched like a sickly wanderer, Eddie watched the fields and the trees. The rain tasted of ash. The roads were flooded, so he kept to the fields and was careful not to get stuck in the boggy ground, where the mud pulled at his boots. The land was carnivorous; it would drag him down and devour him, then spit his bones out for the crows.
