Year of the Zombie [Anthology]

by David Moody

  ‘Ross,’ she said. ‘Help is on the way, okay? I managed to call somebody.’

  Only a snarl.

  ‘Do you know what’s happening? Do you remember fighting with me and falling on top of the anchor return? It was an accident.’

  Ross struggled towards her, yanking the anchor in his guts and dragging it several inches to the side. Congealed flesh, like bloody scrambled eggs, slopped out onto the deck. Ross’s bare feet paddled in it.

  ‘Ross, stop! Stay still or you’re going to…’

  It became too obvious to deny it anymore. Her husband should be dead. His torso was ripped almost in two and his blood had turned to porridge in his veins.

  His bloodshot eyes did not blink.

  This was all too unreal.

  ‘Am I the one who’s dead?’ she asked him. ‘Did you strangle me to death and this is… Hell, I suppose, although I don’t know what I would have done to deserve it. I’ve been a good wife, haven’t I? An okay person?’

  Ross managed to move a couple more inches across the deck towards her. The anchor tore a furrow beneath his bulging ribcage.

  ‘I was such a mess when we met,’ she said, talking as an alternative to panicking. ‘The bar you picked me up in… I was there most nights. I pretended like I’d been stood up, but really I was hanging around trying to meet rich men. Huh, not sure what that makes me. Maybe you knew that about me, but I fell in love with you anyway. The money never mattered in the end – not truly. Why has this happened, Ross? I don’t understand. After what my first-husband did…’

  Ross thrashed and snarled. The anchor tore around his body more, splitting his flesh apart like a razorblade through dough.

  ‘Ross, stop!’

  Then he was free.

  Emily squealed as her husband lunged at her and their bodies collided. Wet fluids and flaking scabs filled the air in a choking cloud. Ross grabbed her neck and tried to bite her.

  ‘Ross, get off me!’

  His teeth chattered together inches from her nose, hot, rancid breath gusting through the gaps between them. His weight was too much to bear. Emily fell backwards. Her arms were busy keeping Ross from biting her face. She had no way to protect the back of her skull from hitting the deck.

  Clunk!

  She saw stars.

  Ross bore down on her.

  She tried to put her hands up to protect herself, but she was dizzy. Her hands grasped clumsily. The fight was over.

  ‘Please, Ross...’

  Ross only snarled in reply. Opened his mouth wide.

  Emily closed her eyes.

  There was an almighty whump!

  She opened her eyes again to see Ross cartwheel away from her, a long shaft of polished wood lifting him off his feet and over the deck. The entire yacht rocked as another vessel collided with it, the boom of which had swept over the rear deck and knocked Ross into the air. The pilot of a small sailing boat began hastily throwing out ropes and securing them to hooks.

  As soon as the two vessels were tethered, the short man did a running hop onto the EMILY-DEVINE. Emily scrambled to her feet and took the stranger’s hand. He was an older man with unkempt grey hair spilling out over his ears.

  ‘Looks like I got here just in time,’ he said in a deep voice.

  Recognition made Emily’s eyes wide. ‘You’re the man I spoke to on the radio?’

  ‘Yes! I’m Alex. Your husband, what’s wrong with him? Why were you fighting with him?’

  ‘He’s hurt. I think h-he’s dead.’

  Alex looked at her like she had accused him of something. ‘Hitting him with the boom was the only thing I could think to do, but I don’t think it killed him.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I mean before you came. I think he’s a monster.’

  Alex reached out and grabbed her bare shoulder. His touch stung her and she realized her sunburn had worsened. ‘You must be in shock,’ he said ‘The Spanish Coast Guard will be here soon. I called them.’

  ‘You saw my husband attacking me? You’ll tell them?’

  ‘Of course. We will get all of this sorted out. We should go and check on him though.’

  A growl alerted them and they both turned to see Ross back up on his feet. His chest had caved on one side and a rib poked out like a porcupine’s quill.

  Alex shouted. ‘Sir, I beg you to remain calm. Help is on the way.’

  Ross ignored the request and sprinted across the deck, guts flapping like tassels on a dancer’s vest. This time, instead of trying to grab Emily, he went straight for Alex.

  ‘Ross, please, stop!’ she pleaded.

  But the fight had already begun.

  Alex didn’t panic. He threw a punch that connected with Ross’s unhinged lower jaw. It snapped his head back but didn’t stop him from advancing. He fell on top of the sailor and bit down on his neck with his ragged teeth.

  Alex bellowed and tried to wriggle free. ‘Get him off me!’

  Emily snapped out of her daze, and looked around for a way to help the man who had been trying to help her. There was nothing that wasn’t bolted down, so she leapt up the ladder and raced into the cabin. Inside she saw empty wine bottles and crystal flutes that had fallen to the boards and shattered. Anything bigger was part of the fixtures and bolted down.

  Alex continued shouting from below, begging for help.

  Ross’s snarls cut him off.

  ‘Damn it, damn it. Come on, Emily, think.’

  She yanked up the cushions that topped the long sofa on the right of the cabin and unlatched the storage bin beneath. Inside, she found extra blankets and some board games, but then she spotted something else. A bright orange flare gun sat inside a box with a glass lid. She unlocked it and pulled the handgun out. Hurried back to the lower deck where Alex was now on one knee, fighting desperately to keep Ross’s teeth from taking another chunk out of him.

  ‘Alex, get down!’ Emily shouted, fumbling with the chubby orange pistol in her hand.

  Alex glanced back at her. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, get down.’

  He saw the flare gun in her hands and seemed to understand. He let go of Ross and threw himself down on the deck, leaving himself defenceless. Emily hoped it would be as easy as simply squeezing the trigger, but that didn’t stop her from yelping when the pistol bucked in her fist like a squirming child.

  A fuzzy ball of light bloomed from the muzzle and zipped across the deck like a fairy. The fizzing projectile hit her husband in the throat, spinning him around and dropping him onto his hands and knees.

  He leapt back up and came after her.

  The flare continued to burn and crackle. The mottled flesh under Ross’s chin blackened and smoked. He didn’t care.

  ‘Please stop!’ Alex shouted from where he lay on the deck.

  ‘I told you,’ Emily said. ‘He’s dead. He’s a zombie.’

  But then Ross did the unexpected and flopped forwards onto his face. There he lay, twitching spasmodically.

  Alex clambered to his feet, rubbing his own neck as if the flare had hit him. ‘He is not a zombie. He’s just plain dead.’

  Emily didn’t understand. After all of the injuries Ross had sustained, why had he finally stopped now? Had he been running on adrenaline, but that adrenaline had now run out? She edged towards her husband’s body, wary that he would leap up again and attack her, but his twitching ceased and he was completely still. Full of fear, yet fuelled by concern, she reached out and rolled him over – but while his body turned freely, his head remained face down.

  There was a slick plop as his skull slipped free of his shoulders.

  Emily covered her mouth.

  The flare had burned through the already damaged flesh of Ross’s neck. The force of impact must have snapped his spine, yet not severed it completely until he’d hit the deck and jarred his skull.

  Husband decapitated at her feet, Emily let out a wail that could not be stopped. Alex tried his best to console her, hugging her tightly, but it was clear th
at he too was horrified.

  FOUR

  Emily covered Ross with a blanket from the bedroom cabin and joined Alex in the pilothouse where he was chattering urgently into the radio. When he saw her enter, he placed the microphone down as if he’d been caught doing something indiscrete, then quickly leaned forward and switched the radio off. ‘The Coast Guard isn’t far away,’ he explained. ‘They should be here around dusk. I’ve told them we’ve had a fatality, but didn’t go into the details. I’m not really sure what the details are, to be honest.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Emily admitted with a sigh. She took the seat next to the man, moving Ross’s laptop out of the way before she almost sat on it. She’d asked him not to bring it along – no work, she had said – but it didn’t surprise her that he had snuck it along anyway. ‘I think maybe he was sick or something. He attacked me yesterday and this morning, like a maniac, and it’s not his style to lose his cool. He’s been complaining of headaches the last couple days and feeling under the weather. I think he was ill.’

  Alex looked at her, examining her face. ‘He was in pretty bad shape when I got here. What happened to him? You said he got impaled by the anchor?’

  She nodded. ‘Happened when he first attacked me. I broke his nose with a lamp, but everything else that happened was by accident. You have to believe me.’

  ‘I do. I…’ He stopped mid-sentence and grabbed his forehead. ‘Sorry, I have a sudden headache myself. Power of suggestion, huh?’

  She looked at Alex and saw that his eyes were bleary and red. The bite mark on his shoulder was glistening beneath the edge of his t-shirt. ‘Thank you for saving me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you got hurt.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not sure your husband knew what he was doing. He seemed delirious. Good thing I got here when I did. I’m sorry for your loss, miss.’

  ‘Ross was a good man. Not always on the surface – he was so driven – but I loved him.’

  Alex smiled, but said nothing.

  With a sigh, Emily opened Ross’s laptop and switched it on. From hibernation, it came to life almost immediately. A photograph of her and Ross in Madrid popped filled the screen and she looked at it fondly. They had asked a waiter to take it while they stood in front of the Grande Basilica. They had only been married three months at that point and the smile on her face was genuine – she had been truly joyous that day – and many of the days since. Only lately had things begun to sour.

  Ross’s emails popped up automatically on screen.

  She was unsurprised to see messages from a list of paramours, but it still hurt seeing their explicit taunts. Even though Ross was dead, her stomach turned at the thought of him sleeping with another woman. Had he always been so obvious about it? She felt stupid for not learning of his infidelity sooner. The amount of opportunities she’d had to check his phone, his computer, so why hadn’t she done so until now?

  He’d probably been laughing behind her back this whole time.

  Emily ground her teeth.

  Her first husband, James, she’d naively married at seventeen. He’d started hitting her soon afterwards, and had almost put her off men for good. After this, the task was nigh on complete. Ross had promised to never be anything like James, and in truth he hadn’t been, but it turned out that he was just as damaging in his own way. Now Emily had been married twice, and widowed twice. Both men had died shortly after attacking her.

  Maybe she was cursed.

  Or maybe it was justice.

  ‘Were you two married long?’ Alex asked. He was looking at her curiously, hands fidgeting in his lap.

  ‘Three years nearly,’ said Emily.

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘No, thank God. Having to explain something like this… I was pregnant once, but I lost the baby.’

  Alex sighed. ‘That must have been very hard for you and Ross.’

  She shook her head. ‘It was before Ross. I was married before, when I was a teenager. He used to hurt me. Pushed my down the stairs one time, when I was…’ She couldn’t complete the sentence.

  Alex’s face screwed up in disgust. ‘When you were carrying! Jesus, I hope they locked the guy up for a thousand years.’

  ‘They didn’t have to,’ she said. ‘I covered it up, said I tripped. He was actually kind to me afterwards – for all of six months. The next time he went for me, it all came flooding back. I thought about my unborn baby and who he might have been. I lost control.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about this,’ said Alex, shifting uncomfortably in the pilot’s seat.

  ‘No, it’s okay. It keeps my mind off panicking. My first husband was a jealous type – about the silliest little things. He needed help, really, but he always said he would overcome it on his own. Well, he didn’t. The last night he attacked me, I’d been out to dinner with my cousins. I made the mistake of getting stuck in traffic and getting home twenty minutes late. That was all it took for him to work himself up. He was waiting in the kitchen for me when I got home, like he was my father. At first I was afraid but, once he started hitting me, I just lost it. I grabbed a knife out of the block and buried it in his neck. When the police found me I was wandering the streets, almost catatonic. I spent eighteen months in a clinic. Took me a long time to get my life back on track after that, but when I met Ross it got a whole lot easier.’

  ‘You loved him?’

  She nodded. ‘I did.’

  ‘Then I am doubly-sorry. If it is any comfort, you seem much stronger than the woman they sent to that clinic. You will get through this. Just tell them what happened and I am sure they will understand.’

  ‘Thank you. So what’s your story? Do you just go around the high seas rescuing people in need? Are you married?’

  ‘Me? No, no, I never married. The sea is my wife. Thirty years a carpenter, I retired four years ago to live on the Blessed Betty. I’m living my dream for whatever years I have left.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I-’ He stopped speaking and winced. ‘Ouch! Another headache. I should really get this wound on my neck covered up. I shall pop back to my boat and get it seen to. Will you be okay?’

  She nodded and waved a hand. ‘I’ll be fine. Will stay right here.’

  Alex got up unsteadily and moved away from the controls. ‘I’ll be back soon. Just stay calm.’

  Then he left.

  Emily slid into the pilot’s seat and perched Ross’s laptop on top of the console. She took another few moments to enjoy the Madrid photograph, and then went to close it. As she reached out though, she spotted a file at the bottom left of the screen just above the taskbar. It was a video named: PRIVATE.

  Was it a nudie flick from one of Ross’s paramours?

  Porn?

  She didn’t know why, but she found herself stroking the track pad and double-clicking the file to open it.

  The video began to play. It was not what she expected.

  FIVE

  The video hadn’t been taken by a woman, but by a man. The narrator’s voice sounded familiar, and Emily thought it might be Tom Gladstone, Ross’s Director of Acquisitions – the guy who travelled around the world for her husband trying to find the best deals on tractors, ploughs, threshers etc. It looked like he had made some kind of video report for Ross and emailed it over.

  The video opened on the interior of some kind of far eastern factory. White-coated employees milled about on either side of a long walkway, with dark-hair and light brown skin. Chinese, possibly?

  ‘So this is the place I was telling you about,’ came the voice of whom Emily was now certain was Tom Gladstone. ‘They are already in full operation here, but haven’t yet found a European franchisee. We make the right offer and we could be rolling this stuff out as early as next year. Our company will make a killing.’

  Emily narrowed her eyes and concentrated. Tom started walking down the long walkway, panning the camera left and right. Every now and then a white-coated employee would realize they we
re on film and bow reverently. They were attending industrial mixers, each of the large vats filled with straw-coloured liquid.

  ‘The fertilizer is like nothing I’ve seen before, Ross. Mr Sai gave me a demonstration this morning and it blew my mind. His chief scientist applied a dose of the solution to a row of hydrangeas. Ross, these plants were at death’s door, their petals shrivelled and brown. Within an hour, the bushes were blooming with bright pink flowers again. The dead leaves fell off and new ones grew in their place. It was like a miracle – except it was science, and for sale. I told Mr Sai that I needed a demonstration on a harvestable crop, and he agreed to do so tomorrow, but in the meantime he’s assured me that the formula works on all species of plant life. It promotes incredible growth and vitality. Crop failures will be a thing of the past. Every season will give a bountiful harvest, regardless of drought or anything else. Ross, I cannot stress this enough, but you have to authorize me to make whatever offer we can afford. As soon as we get the ball rolling, Mr Sai will allow me to bring back a sample. We have to be onboard with this.’

  The video ended.

  Emily leant back in her seat and chewed her lower lip. What had Ross been working on? Had he already signed the deal of a lifetime? Or would he now never get the chance? She hated herself for it, but the thought briefly crossed her mind that, with her husband dead, she might end up with a controlling interest in his company. So, was this miracle fertilizer already under the purview of what might become her company? Or had the deal died with Ross?

  Emily leaned forward, fingered the track pad and left the cursor hovering over the video file. After a couple of seconds the meta data popped up. The file had last been modified a couple of weeks ago, but what did that mean? Was that the date it was copied to the desktop? Then she saw the creation date: three weeks ago. Surely the deal would have been signed within that time. She went into her late husband’s emails again and started being even nosier. She let herself off the hook a little, because she knew the main reason she was snooping was to keep her mind occupied. Now that the panic and shock of the situation was subsiding, a rising tide of emotion kept threatening to burst its levees at any moment. Sporadic pressure beyond her eyes sought to bring tears, and a mild dizziness tried to dislodge her thoughts and send them spiralling into madness. Her life had flipped upside down in a single day, and it was hard to see how it would ever settle again once it righted itself. Would she get over Ross’s death, or would it break her? She feared ever having to sit in front of a doctor again arguing for her sanity.