March of the Dead (Killing the Dead Book 11)

by Richard Murray

  March of the Dead

  Killing the Dead: Season Two Book Five

  By Richard Murray

  Copyright 2017 Richard Murray

  All Rights Reserved

  All Characters are a work of Fiction.

  Any resemblance to real persons

  Living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Some scenes are based on real locations that

  have been altered for the purposes of the story.

  Chapter 1

  Like many such places that we’d visited in the past two months of our achingly slow journey, the village of Durisdeer was sickeningly picturesque. White painted homes, around sixty of them in total, made up the village proper along with a church complex that sat beside the village green.

  The overgrown grass that covered the green and the verge’s beside the road, was littered with the orange and brown fallen leaves of the previous autumn. With no one to tend to them, the roads and gardens were in a poor state.

  My companions, fools that they were, had barely glanced at the green as they perused the houses. Their minds already contemplating the riches they might hold. I couldn’t entirely fault them for that, I had to concede, as my own belly grumbled. It had been entirely too long since we’d found anywhere that hadn’t been stripped bare.

  “What do you think?” Georgia asked in a low voice as she pushed through the clustered people to stand beside me. She at least had noticed the same thing as I had and I gave a half-hearted shrug.

  “Recent.”

  She let out a soft sigh as I confirmed what she must have been thinking and she gripped the handle of her Hori Hori, that Japanese gardening trowel that was so very effective at killing the dead.

  “You think they’ll be nesting in one of these houses?”

  “One or more,” I said as I kicked at a weathered bone that lay at the very edge of the thick grass.

  It had become a frequent sight over the last couple of months. Wherever there were either undead or people, there’d be a pile of bones bearing the marks of the teeth that had gnawed on them. And where there were bones, there’d be them, the Ferals.

  “Worth mentioning to the others?” she asked with a quick glance back over her shoulder. Her lack of concern for the danger was somewhat appealing, much as her dismissal of our companions was.

  I squinted up at the blue sky above, noting the position of the sun and doing a quick assessment of how long we had until dark. With the arrival of the scorching summer, that time had become later and later giving us ample time to decide what to do.

  Whether it was another quirk of their evolution or a sign of some kind of animalistic intelligence, I didn’t know. But for some time, they had been hiding out during the day. Forming nests of sorts, grouping together in dark and cool places during the heat of the day and emerging during the cooler hours of the night to hunt new prey.

  Their slower, dumber cousins, hadn’t changed their behaviour in the same way and the summer sun had not been kind to them. In the last week alone we’d found several large groups that showed signs of advanced deterioration. Whatever had animated the dead had staved off the decomposition during the cold of winter but seemed to be struggling with the heat.

  Of course, the downside of that was the almost biblical plague of flies we had to contend with. They were everywhere, from the little gnat type to the large bluebottles and I barely noticed anymore how often I swatted at them as they landed on my exposed skin. Since many of them were born from the rotting flesh of the undead, I had little real desire to have them lingering on me. The hot item of the apocalypse had become insect repellent.

  “A few hours yet before it gets dark,” I said and kicked once again at the weathered piece of bone. It looked like a bit of vertebra.

  “If one of these idiots walks into a house and stumbles onto them though, all hell will break loose.”

  She ran one dirt-stained hand through greasy blonde hair that hung too far past her shoulders and was badly in need of a cut. Much like my own, I thought as I scratched at the thick, wiry hair that had engulfed my face.

  “So, we stay behind them.”

  I glanced at her and caught a look of frustration on her face before she quickly composed her features. She leant in close and lowered her voice conspiratorially.

  “If the undead get to kill them before we do, I’ll be pissed!”

  “As if I care,” I said and turned back to my contemplation of the bone in the grass. I gave it another nudge with the toe of my boot and held back a sigh.

  “You were supposed to be fun,” she said and I have a half-shrug without looking her way.

  If I ignored her long enough then she’d go away and pester whichever of the group who happened to be sharing her sleeping bag on a night. It changed frequently enough that I barely bothered to keep notice.

  I cared little who she slept with and even less about her frustration with my ‘lack of fun’ that she had taken issue with. I hadn’t asked her to come with me when I left the others. When I left her. And it was of no interest to me that I wasn’t fulfilling my part of the imagined partnership Georgia seemed to have concocted in her mind about us.

  The truth was, I wasn’t myself. There was something wrong with me and despite the bright summer days I travelled beneath a dark cloud that I couldn’t seem to shake. I ate when my body demanded fuel and slept when I was tired, but I took no pleasure in either activity. Even killing, my one true source of joy, had soured.

  It was fair to say that I was fundamentally not myself and even that roiling ball of darkness that sat in place of my soul was quiescent. It’s incessant demands for death and chaos had fallen silent and there was nothing there now. No urge, no need to kill. No desire for anything much really. It was quite disconcerting.

  Even my new companions, irritating buffoons one and all, had not quite irked me enough to draw my dagger and lay waste to their inane lives. And to be fair, killing them would be a kindness. They were woefully inadequate at the whole apocalypse thing. The majority of their time had been spent in hiding and I doubted that any of them had done more than run from the undead, let alone had to face the living.

  Mark, the leader of the little group, was a young man with a narrow face and thin-rimmed spectacles that sat atop a patrician’s nose. He had the air of one who had been born to wealth and the arrogance to assume that he had the right to lead by dint of birth. I’d have killed him on the first day once upon a time. Now, I had been with the group for six weeks and not killed a single one of them. Frankly, it was almost depressing.

  Not that I could suffer from such an ailment. That was for the normal people. Those with emotions. Those who cared for others, like the friend who was lost to the undead or those that you left behind because you crossed a line and broke a promise you’d made.

  I kicked at the bone again, harder this time and it landed several feet away in a thick clump of grass. I exhaled a soft sigh and stuffed swatted once more at the flies that hovered around the area. Many of them seemed attracted to us and I could only assume it was due to the sticky sweat that coated each of us. I’d begun to long for the freezing cold of the winter.

  “Ryan!” I glanced back at the sound of my name and cocked an eyebrow.

  Alison, a preppy college student before the fall of the world. She was, from what I could tell, anti-everything. She’d marched with groups for anything from animal rights to protesting the bankers that caused the financial meltdown a few years back.

  Her pale blonde hair had lost the green that once coloured it and while she wore the same t-shirt and jeans as the rest of us, she always tried to choose a shirt that had a slogan on
it that encapsulated her message. Much as she’d kept the numerous bracelets and rings that jangled overly loudly at the most inopportune time. She also seemed intent on ‘cheering me up.’ I could almost muster the energy to want to kill her for that alone.

  “What?” I asked when she didn’t respond.

  “We’re splitting up to search the houses. You’re with me!”

  I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to jump up and down in delight or cheer, but when I just stared at her, she took that as assent and smiled cheerily. My fingers twitched towards my knife hilt.

  “Georgia’s going with Mark,” she said and giggled as though she’d said something amusing. No doubt her words had a double meaning that other people would get. I clamped down on the urge to sigh. “Abi and Lisa are another group and Nathan and Johnny are the last.”

  Did she expect me to care? Or to comment? I couldn’t understand why she was telling me who was grouped together. It had no real meaning to me and certainly didn’t affect my life in any meaningful way. Other than a slight annoyance that I had been paired with little miss sunshine.

  “Which house do you think we should start with?” she asked as she twirled on the spot, pointing at houses with her index finger while her thumb was raised as though she were aiming at each in turn.

  “I really don’t care.”

  “Of course, you do!” she said. “Come on, be engaged. Things are bad now but they’re getting better. You’ll see!”

  “Just choose a house.”

  “No! You choose. I insist.” She looked at me expectantly with a wide grin on her face, oblivious to the handful of disease-carrying flies crawling over her sweat soaked hair.

  It would be a gift to humanity to remove her from the gene pool. But that would be for someone else to do. Someone who cared enough to draw his knife and plunge it into her. That certainly wasn’t me.

  “That one,” I said and nodded towards a single storey dwelling off towards the end of the road.

  “Alrighty then!” she said and clapped happily as though I’d performed some trick. If she patted me on the head I really would kill her.

  She led the way to the house, almost skipping and I shook my head at her back. The group had found us wandering through a forest to the south, near Hadrian’s wall and several miles east of Carlisle.

  We’d been slowly making our way south. Since my former group of companions had been determined to travel north when I’d left them, it seemed like the best idea to go in the opposite direction.

  It had taken some time to make it that far. The undead had blanketed the countryside around Carlisle and you could barely go a dozen steps before bumping into a zombie. Slow ones admittedly, but in such numbers that they couldn’t be fought and to be fair, even back then the lethargy had cloaked me.

  Georgia had taken charge and led us through the massed undead only to get lost in a large forest. By chance, we’d stumbled on our current group's campfire and like the innocent fools they were, they’d invited us to join them straight away. There’d been nine of them then.

  They were travelling north before a horde of zombies that was larger than any I’d previously encountered. As near as I could tell when I caught a glimpse of them, some hundred thousand or more of the damned things were moving together, northwards. So many of them that they stretched from east to west as far as I could see and I had little doubt we could find a way around them.

  Instead, we had been forced north at a painstakingly slow pace. Three of the group had been lost in the weeks to follow, one by -genuine- accident and two had become ‘sick.’ Georgia had taken on the role of healer for the group and had pronounced with some conviction that they had eaten something that disagreed with them. I didn’t doubt her for a minute.

  And so, two months after leaving my previous group, I found myself barely twenty miles north of Dumfries and a day or so ahead of a horde of zombies that we had yet to find a way around, despite being sixty miles east of where we had first learned of them.

  Being forced north and east was bad enough, but to make it worse the numbers of the undead were growing as they pulled more of their kind from the surrounding towns and villages they passed through. Not all of them, but enough to keep adding to their number and stretching them out further across the land. The only real bonus was that they seemed to be, by and large, the dumb shamblers.

  We’d had little chance to rest and even less chance to find supplies. We had been forced to avoid any place that had zombies since we couldn’t risk taking the time to kill them and then loot. So instead we bypassed them and found smaller places that had few enough zombies that we could finish them quickly and then do a quick search of the homes. It didn’t help that on a night we needed to be somewhere safe and secure.

  “Door’s open,” Alison said. “That a good or bad thing?”

  “Could be either,” I replied absently. The stench of death covered everywhere these days and it seemed pointless to try and judge whether zombies were nearby that odour alone. We’d become too used to it to even notice a change.

  The door frame had several old bloody fingerprints on the chipped paint and a dark stain on the whitewashed wall beside it. That could mean something had tried to get in or had brushed against the wall on the way out.

  She pushed the door open and lifted her heavy wrench in one white-knuckled hand as she stepped inside. I drew my own combat knife and followed after her. Not so very long ago I would have led the way myself and killed anything in there before she could even raise her weapon. What is wrong with me?

  It was to do with her I was sure of that but as always, I shied away from that thought and tried to focus my mind on the task at hand. Not an easy thing to do for some reason.

  “Living room, clear,” Alison said and I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I’d been barely paying attention.

  “Dining room, clear.”

  These idiots had watched one too many war films and thought they knew what they were doing. Saying ‘clear’ after sticking your head through a doorway didn’t mean much. As evidenced by the fact that she missed the zombie in the living room.

  Understandable really, it had been lying on the floor behind the couch and had only roused itself at the sound of her voice. She should have checked though and since my survival was dependent on them doing their jobs properly, I was mildly annoyed.

  The zombie was one of the slower, dumber variety. It had been in the house for some time and had survived better than many of the others. It’s flesh largely intact though a little bloated and doughy looking. It’s grey tinged skin had a single bite mark on the left arm but otherwise was intact.

  “Kitchen, clear,” Alison said, totally oblivious to the threat that was making its slow, crawling way towards her.

  I contemplated warning her that it was moving along the hall towards her. Its milky eyes fixed towards the spot where she’d been when she last spoke. When she said, “Bathroom… disgusting, but clear.” It shifted direction towards where the sound of her voice had come from. It was unaware of me and I followed it slowly, curious if nothing else.

  Either she’d notice and kill it or be bitten. If she survived then they’d have angry words for me and I would perhaps be asked to leave the group. I didn’t expect violence from them and if they tried, I would just kill them all. At least I hoped I would. The way I was at that moment, I couldn’t say I would be that bothered if they did kill me. Survival had lost some of its meaning and while I suspected the reason, I couldn’t fully understand why.

  She was just another person. Someone I had used to keep myself safe and the promise I’d made her had been a means to an end. What should it matter that I broke it when I killed the people back at the Sanctuary. When I’d murdered my brother. While they hadn’t technically killed Pat, they had been the cause of his death and for that, I could argue that they were not innocent. Couldn’t I?

  “Bedrooms... Ah! What the fuck!”

  The zombie had caught up with her and had one ha
nd clamped on her ankle as she rained down ineffectual blows from her wrench. A sharp crack sounded as she broke one of its ribs and I rolled my eyes. Someone needed to teach them how to fight.

  “Help me you prick!”

  She kicked out at the zombie, her free leg stamping down on the arm that held her and I exhaled a soft sigh. She was absolutely useless. I stepped forward and sank my blade up to the hilt in its skull. It went limp and I pressed one foot against its spine to brace myself as I pulled my knife. It came out with a horrendous sucking sound that almost brought a grin to my face as Alison cringed.

  “What the hell was that?” she demanded as she yanked her ankle free from the now lifeless hand.

  “You missed it,” I said with a shrug. “You should have checked the room properly.”

  She shook her head and stared at me, disbelief clouding her features as she sought the words she needed.

  “Look, I don’t know the full story but you need to get over it. We’ve all lost people.”

  “What?”

  “I get it,” she said. “You’re depressed as fuck because you lost someone.”

  Depressed? Me?

  “Boyfriend, girlfriend or whatever. It happens and it sucks ass but you have to get over it.” She sucked in a deep breath of warm, foul smelling air and coughed. “Yuk, that tastes like crap!”

  I wiped the knife on the zombies clothing as I thought about what she’d said. Was I depressed? How could I be? That would require being able to feel something, anything, for people and that wasn’t me. Was it? I was the cold-blooded killer. I was the one others were afraid of. I brought death to the living and dead alike. I did not get depressed.

  “You want to talk about it?” Alison pressed as my hand tightened its grip on the knife hilt. “I’m sure you’ll feel better if you talk. You know, get it out. Was it your wife?”

  “No,” I said as I rose to my feet. “We weren’t married.”

  “It was a woman then? Hey, come on then man, it sucks but there’s other people out there still. That Georgia chick clearly likes you and life’s way too sho…”