Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 2 | We Will Rise [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel]

by Meadows, Carl

  A magic item? I’m fucking telling you, there’s a fantasy nerd buried deep in this old soldier…. sorry Nate, Marine. First his Gollum references, now he’s talking about magic items? Did this gruff old monster while away his boring hours in the service with a secret cabal of D&D squaddies? Though, if he ever says, “I put on my robe and wizard hat,” I’m ending him. I’m all about the geek culture, but the moment he goes all Bloodninja… kaboom. No more Nate. That’s just too much weird, even for me.

  It seems my ability to digress is slowly returning. Back to it, Lockey.

  When Nate and I planned the hits on Bancroft’s fuel runs, I spoke about the next station they would have to raid if their chosen one ran dry. It meant running through the middle of town, and down the main dual-carriageway that runs through its centre. Up the far end of town, there are a couple of larger stations, attached to two of the town’s largest supermarkets. They were popular and likely have deep reserves, so that was the theory we were working to. We had to scout them to make sure they were even accessible, as remember me mentioning how I thought the supermarkets would be scenes from the ninth level of Hell?

  Well, we didn’t even get to find out.

  You know what’s really fucking weird, other than what I’m about to tell you? As we were leaving, Particles was all up in my shit, nearly tripping me over, bouncing round on his tiny legs all freaked out. He’s never like that when I leave, as he gets so much love from everyone when I’m out, especially Charlie. Those two are homeboys for life now and cute as all hell together.

  I kneeled down to calm him, scratching him behind his ears and under the chin, but he looked at me with those massive puggy eyes and I swear to God, it was like he was pulling his best pleading expression with me. Like he really didn’t want me to go.

  I put it down to him getting used to me being around after the funeral, when the two of us locked ourselves away for a time and he was my emotional support pug. Plus, when I’d returned from our store run the other day, he could clearly sense I was on edge, and spent that evening snuggled on my lap.

  We left, and I put it out of my mind as I put my game face on. Now I’m back, and after what we witnessed, I can’t help but think that Particles fucking knew something was coming. It was weird. I joked about him being our lucky pug when we found him, because he did stop us getting sideswiped by a runaway truck filled with the undead, and the little dude basically saved my ass by blowing a zombie’s head clean off when I was a certain goner. Weird it is Freya. Just fucking weird.

  Right, so we were travelling in the pickup towards the centre of town, following the road that passed by the court building where Shooty McFuckface tried to gun us down. It’s weird how long ago that seems, yet it was hardly any time at all, but after the Prius explosion that likely drew in a mass of undead, we reasoned any such mass had likely ambled apart over the weeks, drawn away by whatever little sounds captured their mindless attention.

  We couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “What the living fuck?” muttered Nate, slowing the pickup to a halt, but leaving the engine ticking over.

  His words were somewhat ironic. Stretching from the burnt-out wreck of our deceased Prius, right across all four lanes of the carriageway and up to the court building, there was a fucking sea of undead. There was nothing living about it at all.

  I’m not talking the couple of hundred that shuffled out of the shopping centre all those weeks ago that I played British Bulldog with. Shit no.

  “There’s got to be nigh on a thousand,” breathed Nate, answering my unspoken query as to the number. Military folk always seem to have a knack for estimating numbers. My estimate was in the region of, “a metric fuck ton,” which is less than, “oh my fucking God,” but considerably more than, “well, isn’t this a pickle?”

  Bear in mind this town’s population total was probably just over ten thousand, so we’re talking ten percent of the town’s population in this wall. How the hell did they all get here from all over town? The explosion of the Prius? Shit, there’s been gunfire galore since that day with our running battles with Bancroft’s crew. Gunfire echoes for some distance, and those storms of screaming lead and rattling rifles should have drawn the mass away from this location like flies to shit. It doesn’t make any sense.

  They weren’t just strung out in a scattered mess in the manner we usually find crowds of undead. This was a wall of the undead, and if you’d handed them costumes and shields, they could have been lined up like the ranks of an undead Roman legion. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, a dense mass of motionless hate, just waiting. Not shuffling, nor ambling in their aimless way. They were an impassable barrier to the far side of town, like undead Spartans and their allies packing the narrow pass of Thermopylae, and they weren’t letting us Persian fuckers through to our promised land. They were a monstrous, ravenous wall of darkness. Just… waiting.

  “Do they usually do this kind of thing?” whispered Alicia, her eyes bright and wide, her disbelief equal to ours.

  “No,” murmured Nate. “No, they don’t.”

  “What do we do?” I asked. And then the weirdest thing of the whole fucking day happened.

  The moment I spoke, the spark of demonic life ignited in the undead, and hundreds of eyes snapped round, locking onto us. I say us, but it felt like me. Nate and Alicia had muttered in low tones and there was no reaction. The moment I’d opened my mouth, just as softly as my two compadres, every fucking head snapped round in our direction, and that tight mass of aberrations begin to ooze forward with that same purposeful stomp.

  I nearly shit my heart out of my arse.

  That movement is far more terrifying than their hateful looks my way. It’s been easy to laugh with dark humour at the brainless meander of the undead pockets we’ve encountered. I laughed like a maniac when I dodged and weaved through the lesser mass in the shopping centre when I was trying to flank Bancroft’s useless sniper, but I wouldn’t have raised even a titter if the undead had been moving like this on that day. They don’t run (thank fuck), and they don’t necessarily move much faster, but it’s all in the way they move, like they’ll walk through any obstacle that stands in their way to get where they’re going. Like they know where they need to be.

  And where they wanted to go was exactly where I was sitting.

  It wasn’t just the front rank, or a group splintering from the mass. It was the whole fucking horde.

  “Nate,” I urged. “Get us the fuck out of here, right fucking now.”

  “Aye,” he agreed, throwing the pickup into reverse and thundering back at speed, before whipping it round in a one-eighty and getting us the hell out of Dodge.

  I looked in my passenger side mirror and shivered, seeing the mass of undead still plunging forward, eyes locked to us as we sped off into the distance.

  “We’ll leave it for today, eh?” said Nate, not turning to look at me. His eyes remained focused on the road, but I heard the note of concern in his voice. He’s sharp as hell, and I’m fairly sure he picked up on the fact that the undead legion didn’t do diddly shit until I opened my mouth.

  I’m still freaked out by the whole experience. Particles is on my lap now, staring at this screen as I record the events, as though checking the validity of my words, making sure I haven’t missed anything.

  I don’t know what’s going on, Freya. Something has changed and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I am genuinely fucking scared.

  OCTOBER 7th, 2010

  THE HOME FRONT

  I woke up still unnerved by yesterday’s experience, and in truth, I hadn’t really slept much anyway, so I decided to hit pause on another venture out today and Particles seemed more relaxed because of it, though he still didn’t leave my side. Even when I went to take a piss, I came out of the bathroom to find him sitting doggedly (pun intended) outside the door, pulling sentry while I was at my most vulnerable. I’m not really sure what he could have managed in terms of defence though; he’s not exactly a
vicious attack dog. I mean, what was he going to do? Distract any potential enemy with his tiny brand of cuteness or majestic withering gaze? Still, it’s the thought that counts. Love my little guy.

  It’s about 5pm now, and I decided to spend today hanging about the house and learn some new skills. Norah is basically the font of all knowledge and sagely wisdom, so I thought I’d hang out with her, tending the garden, help her cook, learn some new skills, and all that jazz. That woman is amazing, and it really felt like I was hanging out with my grandma. At least, I assume that’s what hanging out with a grandma feels like. I never had the joy of grandparents, or parents, or siblings. Life was just one big battle for survival and safety from the get-go but hanging out with Norah, with her gentle demeanour and surprisingly wicked sense of humour, was just what I needed.

  We got to talking and I inevitably asked about kids. The fact she was living on her farm alone when the world died always stuck in my mind, and I wondered if she was ever visited by her kids or grandkids.

  “No,” she answered, a little hint of regret evident in the way she said it. “Sadly, that was never in the stars for me and my Bill.” She tapped her midriff with the soiled trowel she was using to turn over some earth. “Something wasn’t wired up right inside me. We tried and tried, both got tested, and turned out it was me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it with every fibre of my being. She would have been a great mother, and an even better grandma.

  “It is what is, flower,” she replied with a shrug. She calls everyone “flower.” It’s her thing. I kinda like it. “No sense being bound in the chains of things we can’t change.”

  “Didn’t you try IVF or whatever? Or adoption?”

  She shook her head. “IVF treatment was relatively new at the time and has only in the last few years been made available on the NHS. It was far too expensive for us, so we tried adoption, but we got so disheartened by the miles of red tape and hoops we had to jump through, Bill and I finally gave up. We were disappointed late in the process on three occasions, and those three times took up a total of five years of our life in agonised waiting and stress. After the third, we just couldn’t face starting the process all over again.”

  I don’t know why, but this made me really fucking angry. Not at her, Freya, just to clear that up, but the system. It took all of two minutes for the police and social services to come and drag my six-year old self away, but shit, if I’d been adopted by someone like Norah and her husband, I’d have been in seventh heaven. How is it that obviously good people can’t give a single child a loving home, but the system can stack us all up in group homes where we’re left to go near feral, or bounce from foster home to foster home, where some of those people are doing it just for the money?

  Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of truly amazing people fostering kids who have hearts of gold, that genuinely care for the kids that pass through their lives, as they try to pick them up from the floor and teach them self-reliance, strength, self-respect, and good old honest values.

  But there are those who use it as an income stream, and they were the ones I always found myself thrust into before inevitably bouncing back to group homes. Some of those people were fucking Victorian in their methods. Children should be seen and not heard, speak only when spoken to, and all that dated bullshit. Hell, I even got a slap or two on occasion as I’m not exactly famed for my patient restraint. My smart mouth was reddened by many an open-handed slap in my time. They were always clever with it though, and never did anything that would leave a real mark. If you complained, you were just the “problem child” with a history of lies, deceit and incivility.

  That Norah and Bill couldn’t get a child of their own seemed criminal, and a complete failure of not just two amazing, loving people who just wanted a child to care for, but a failure of that kid who could have had a home, and a chance at a new, normal life.

  “We just got on with our lives,” continued Norah. “We had a good life together, me and my Bill. Strong and stable, working for each other all the time, and we always talked. That’s the key to any real relationship, flower; communication.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I shrugged.

  “That’s just because you haven’t met the right man yet.” She gave me a wink. “If it’s men you’re into.”

  I laughed. “It is, though I think my problem is I keep finding boys, not men.”

  “They exist, flower. You just to have to pan through the dirt to find the gold.”

  “Unless it’s fool’s gold,” I snorted.

  I hate that I sounded bitter, thinking back on it. I’ve said earlier on that I never really got the “love” thing, except when I was viewing it through a window, an observer on the outside looking in. Honestly, it’s never really bothered me, but with the world mostly dead or undead, I realise the pool I can choose from has vastly decreased. There aren’t that many fish left in the proverbial sea these days.

  “Well,” said Norah, “let me give you these two pieces of advice when that opportunity does come along, in how to judge its worth. Firstly, your relationship should be a sanctuary, not a battlefield. Whenever you find yourselves faced with adversity, you should remember one simple rule; it isn’t you against them, it’s the two of you against the problem.”

  See? Sagely wisdom from my adoptive grandma.

  “And the second?”

  “Love is not a chain that can hold a relationship together on its own. It isn’t an all-powerful, binding force like you read in books, or depicted in movies. Love isn’t a chain, but a rope, made from hundreds of tiny threads, all bound up and entwined over the years by the two of you, to create that strength through patience and partnership. All the little things are far more important than any grand display of romance or act of love.” Norah quirked a little smile of remembrance then. “My Bill had a wonderful saying that came from his father, when his dad was teaching him about the values of being a man. He’d say the greatest way to teach any child about love and respect was by the manner the parents treated each other. I always liked that.”

  I like that as well, and it rang true for me. Shit, my parents were junkies, and my dad was a raging abusive cock-rot. It was Dean and Maria who showed me how love really works. Both had incredibly stressful jobs in the police and nursing, jobs that were criminally underpaid considering the amazing and difficult tasks they had to do every single day.

  But all that stress, all that drama and horror they’d experience on a daily basis, only strengthened them. Bearing in mind as well they’re both black, and both were racially abused regularly in the stressful situations that made up their life.

  Yet they never turned to hate. Instead, they used each other for strength. Maria said something to me once, when I asked how she and Dean managed to do it.

  “Relationships aren’t fifty-fifty, Erin; they’re one hundred percent all the time, from both people. And in those times when one can’t bear all the weight, the other carries their share for a while. Most importantly of all is that you never ever keep score.”

  I feel better after today. Norah has this aura of calm around her, and Maria is the same. To make sure we’re all keeping healthy, Maria is constantly issuing everyone personalised vitamin supplements from the pharmacy hauls we’ve had, keeping all of us topped up in Vitamin C, calcium, cod liver oil, omega 3, blah blah blah. Both are amazing caregivers, incredibly strong-willed women, and I don’t think I could ask for two better role models to aspire to. Nate might be the powerhouse, the great wall that surrounds us and keeps us safe and protected from the violence beyond the gate, but Maria and Norah have quickly become the foundations that our little community is built on.

  I find myself more and more thankful every day about the people that have become my new family. It’s forced me to think about the others, and how I should really get to know the likes of Isaac, Mark, and Alicia better on a personal level. Charlie’s easy to hang with, as I can drop down to a nine-year old’s level in a blink. For
most of my life, I’ve been experimenting with the theory that adolescence won’t actually end until my thirties anyway.

  Nate, Mark, and Alicia all went out together today, heading for that builder’s yard to acquire an appropriate vehicle to bring back a load of bricks and other useful materials. We need lumber, tools, cement, a proper cement mixer to save Mark having to mix it all by hand, bricks, and all other kinds of stuff. I let Mark deal with that. I should make him a cape with a big H on it for Handyman and make him wear some underpants over his work trousers; the level of knowledge and ability in that dude is staggering. Genuine superpower-level stuff.

  Ooh, shit, I forgot! I had a few games of Mario Kart with Charlie this afternoon, and as we were shooting the shit in our childish glee, he happened to mention it’s his birthday at the end of the month. He’s ten on the 27th, and that’s the big “double figure” landmark that kids get their swagger on for. With it being only a few days away from Halloween as well, we should damn well throw a shindig for the kid. He’s got no other kids around to join in the party, so I’m going to recruit the closest thing to a child here to party plan.

  That would be me, should you be wondering.

  I have an evil plan beginning to hatch that Nate will genuinely hate me for, which means now I have to do it. Tomfoolery for the win.

  I’m aiming to bring that back, Freya. Tomfoolery. It’s just such a stupid word, I love it more each time I say it.

  Everything’s been such a deluge of misery and grief of late, so it’s time to Lockey-fy the lodge and throw a party to put a smile on this awesome kid’s face.

  For clarity, Freya, that time I was talking about Charlie, if you were wondering, though I admit I am a big kid at heart. But shit, this plan is so evil to Nate, it will make the whole thing even funnier. I mean, I can always accuse him of wanting to ruin Charlie’s first apocalypse birthday, and his tenth no less, if he doesn’t play along.