Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 1 | No More Heroes [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel]

by Meadows, Carl

  Then Particles leaped up on to a sill in full view of me and started barking.

  My man.

  Freya appeared at the window and opened it.

  “I’m coming up!”

  My eyes were already working out the route and I was up in no time, scampering up a drainpipe, then transferring across, holding to the open window. I slipped in through the window Dukes of Hazzard style, right into Freya’s embrace.

  “What’s going on?” she asked when she finally released me. I fussed over Particles who danced around in little circles at my feet, desperate for attention.

  “Everyone’s dead,” I said bluntly. “Don’t know how it started, but it seems to have started with Hope and Jericho and it’s gone nuts since then. Everyone is bitten and dying, or already undead.”

  Freya’s hand clamped to her mouth and she sat down on her bed. Particles, ever alert, bounced around at her feet until she picked him up, then both started to calm a little.

  Reaching under the bed, I pulled out the shotgun and a box of shells, popped one in each barrel, then stuffed a handful in the pockets of the hoody and pants. Enough to do the job that needed doing, with a few spares.

  I couldn’t climb back down the way I’d come with a shotgun and couldn’t afford for it to be dropped out the window to me in case I missed the catch and it broke. Nate had all the other weapons and the only way I was taking out a small battalion of these bastards safely was with my gun. So, I had to go down the stairs and do these fuckers in the kitchen.

  I was already dreading the cleaning.

  “Stay here,” I ordered. “I’ll let you know when it’s clear.”

  Freya just nodded and put a hand on my arm. “Be careful.”

  I gave Particles one final scratch around his ears, sucked in a deep breath and slipped out into the hallway.

  I checked on Top Knot’s room as I passed, making sure the door was still firmly closed. That would be one less problem to worry about that I could deal with at leisure later. Then I pressed on to the staircase. Jesus, the landing and top of the stairs was a crime scene. Blood and gore just everywhere.

  I lightly moved step by step to the top of the stairs, then stalked down one by one, shotgun up and ready. As I came around the bend where the foot of the staircase would become visible, I silently swore to myself. The writhing mass had separated and must have got to their feet in the time I’d been messing about outside and climbing up to Freya and Particles.

  My sphincter clamped so tight it would have its own six-pack by the evening, I edged down the stairs, looking for the first sign of the undead. I hate how quiet these things are. Hate it. They give you no audio clues at all unless they walk into something.

  Then Ariel moved into sight at the foot of the stairs, a ruined mess of torn flesh and bloodied rags.

  In that tiny staircase, the boom of the shotgun was like the rage of a god.

  Holy. Shit.

  Ariel’s head vanished, her body crumpling, and now all bets were off. My stealth mode was gone and I took a gamble, moving down another couple of stairs to try and get a clearer view of the kitchen. Theo’s scrotum face appeared in my vision and I flinched, reflexively unleashing the second barrel which didn’t hit him in the head. Instead it knocked him from his feet, his torso a pulverised ruin from the buckshot. Swiftly, I popped open the action, fumbled two more shells into the barrels and clicked it shut just as Jericho shuffled into view.

  This time I kept my calm, aimed, then squeezed the first trigger and transformed his skull into bloody fragments. The mess at the bottom of the stairs was horrific, with two headless corpses spilling out their innards and all kinds of trauma from the earlier zombie avalanche and the ruination of Grace and Theo.

  I inched down another couple of steps and found I had enough space to get into the kitchen proper before the next undead closed the gap, so I did just that. Springing over the pool of gore at the base of the stairs, I moved with my back to one wall to find five undead whirling towards me. Remembering Nate’s lesson, always take the closest one to you, I took a bead.

  That was Faith, her face and neck just a canvas of torn flesh and spilled crimson, like she was some psychotic project of a demented artist. I pulled the trigger with the barrel high in her chest, but the spread was enough to blast through the brain and she toppled. I was already popping the action open, fumbling two more shells into the barrels as the others closed.

  Skye and Pax were next to go before I needed a reload, which I did by moving around obstacles like the big dining table and kitchen island, keeping a barrier between me and the undead while I fumbled two more shells into the shotgun. I clicked it shut, took aim, then evaporated Grace’s head and then finally, with the second shell, I moved it round to Hope, the selfish bitch that had started all this fucking bedlam, not hesitating for a second as I permanently put her to rest.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed out, all relieved as I leaned on the island, head down and panting as my heart raced. Just Mr Potato Head upstairs to take care off at leisure, as well as….

  I cursed, turning just as Theo, his torso in ribbons, rose back to his feet and lunged at me. There were no shells in the gun. I’d gotten sloppy, not double tapping that son of a bitch after blasting him in the chest and in all the mayhem of Hell’s Kitchen, I’d forgotten about him.

  The shotgun was still in my hands and I managed to raise it between us as Theo’s snapping teeth bit down on to the barrel of the weapon. His forward momentum caught me off guard though, carrying me backwards, knocking the air out of my lungs as I slammed into the hard kitchen floor. I could feel the blood from his ruined body soaking my nice clean tracksuit as he oozed all over me while I desperately tried to keep his teeth from my face.

  He was heavy though and I was struggling with his weight, as my chest and shoulder were bruised as all hell from the previous day’s shooting, topped off with today’s unexpected shooting repeatedly punching those bruises. One side of me was weak and I desperately tried to keep the barrel of the shotgun between his teeth so he had no chance of biting me, all the while trying to figure out some escape for my desperate situation.

  It was the fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt all over again, only this time I didn’t have Particles and a loaded shotgun by my ear.

  The pressure suddenly relieved as Freya appeared above me. Grabbing a fistful of Theo’s wiry hair, she yanked back his head like Nate had shown the day before and with absolutely no hesitation, she rammed a long-bladed kitchen knife right into Testicle Face’s left eye. In the blink of an eye (pun intended) Theo went limp.

  Freya helped me to my feet and I looked down at myself, dripping in gore.

  “I think I might need to wash your clothes,” I said, eliciting a laugh from her. Killing that zombie seemed to have added something to her, like she’d banished some demon from within. She seemed… calmer.

  Particles ran round in circles on the kitchen top, where Freya had deposited him while retrieving the knife to save my ass. I scratched at his ear and he settled down.

  I popped two more shells from my pocket into the shotgun and blew out a breath.

  “Why don’t you put the kettle on,” I said. “While I go and take care of Zion.”

  Freya nodded, calmly filling up the kettle from the tap, surrounded by the ninth level of hell.

  Zion was already reanimated. There was no ceremony, no great moment of savouring it. I was too damn tired, so I just opened the door to find the glassy eyed shithead near the far wall.

  “Fuck you, Nigel,” I muttered.

  I took aim directly at his stupid fluffy head-potato, blasting it from existence so there was one less in the world, before quietly closing the door behind me.

  Freya and I were enjoying a nice cup of camomile tea when Nate rolled back through the gates. I watched him put the car back in position in front of them, then drive up to the lodge in the pickup. When he arrived at the glass doors, he stopped dead.

  I was sat on the kitchen island, my
legs dangling happily, covered in drying gore, the shotgun on the counter beside me as I sipped from a teacup held in two hands. Particles was sat in Freya’s lap, her hands still red from popping Theo’s eye and brain, as she also sipped at her camomile. Ruined corpses lay scattered all round the kitchen, oceans of blood ran free, with meaty boulders of flesh and brain covering almost every part of the tiled floor.

  We must have looked like a right pair of psychos, lounging about and having a tea party in Hell’s Kitchen.

  “There was a series of… incidents,” I said in greeting.

  Nate looked at us, eyes and jaw wide. “Incidents?”

  “In our defence, you left us unsupervised.”

  He shook his head in disbelief.

  “What the actual fuck, Erin?” he puffed. “I was only gone for two hours!”

  Particles gave Nate a disparaging look and I sniffed, turning to Freya.

  “Is there any sage left?” I said. “I’m sensing some negative energy in the room.”

  PART 4

  KING SHIT OF TURD MOUNTAIN

  16th Entry

  REFLECTION

  I really wish I’d had the presence of mind to lure those fucking zombies out of the big glass doors and on to the grass. Life would have been far less arduous.

  After we’d removed the headless bodies of our spiritual zombies, the kitchen was like some modern art piece from the mind of a depraved serial killer. There was fucking blood everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Dotted throughout the congealing horror was a veritable archipelago of bone and brain, even an eyeball or two, the latter of which I made Nate clean up. Jesus, I’m almost sick at the thought. I couldn’t bear to even look at the dreadful things, all the wiry nerves still attached, the squishy orb just staring at me in eerie accusation. Shudder.

  I like to think of myself as pretty hard-ass. Hell, I’d just wiped out a lodge full of yoga zombies single-handed, save that last one when Freya got all Buffy with the knife and saved my butt.

  In fact, yeah, I am a hard-ass. I don’t dwell or freeze when shit hits the fan, I act without hesitation. I might act like a massive retard and do something that will make Nate bite chunks from the pickup tyres in pure fury, or potentially inflict me with a life-changing injury, but I still act. Blood, bone, brain, gore; I can handle it all.

  But the one thing that really makes my innards twist is any form of eye injury. The cosmic apocalypse joke is on me, right? The eye is the simplest way to the brain in a pinch and I’m dreading the moment I have to plunge a blade, or a screwdriver, into an eyeball. I’ll be screaming at a frequency only dogs can hear when I have to do that shit. Eye injuries are the worst. Just horrifying.

  Ommetaphobia aside, it took us the whole day to clean the kitchen of all the horror. Once the corpses were hauled out, and the eyes and large chunks of shredded yogi (terrible idea for a breakfast cereal) were bagged and removed, that just left all the vile little blobs of tenderised slaughter dotting an ocean of blood. Cleaning that up was no fun. At all.

  Nate had to go to some of the nearby farms to collect any bleach he could find. Freya and I couldn’t locate a fucking drop of it. What the fuck did these hippies clean with? Piss and vinegar? Dirty bastards.

  When he returned with the cleaning supplies, Nate set to the back-breaking task of digging a grave for over fifty bodies. You know, for a pensioner, that guy has some serious endurance. He dug a hole a good six feet deep and only God knows how long and wide, then dragged every single one of those ruined corpses into the hole and piled all the spoil back on top. It was dark by the time he finished patting the last of the soil on all those ragged cadavers and he looked shot to shit when he came into the newly sterilised kitchen.

  I hate the smell of bleach. It clings to the nose and throat, so we had to leave the big glass doors open all day to air it. By the time our labour was done, right about the same time as Nate finished up, both Freya and I were equally shattered.

  I thought she was weak when I first met her, but hell, I misjudged her. She threw up a few times—like I did—when cleaning up the kitchen, but every time she spat it out, swilled her mouth with water, then got straight back on her knees to scrub at patches of gore. Even after that back breaking labour and multiple vomit stops, still the bitch managed to look like she’d just stepped off the cover of Vogue. Honestly, the only thing that could mar that woman’s beauty is being hit in the face with a truck. It’s maddening.

  I’m writing this now the following morning, sipping at a green tea in the quiet. Freya and Nate are both still out for the count, and I’ve got a rare bit of time for myself. Now that we’ve got a place we can sort of call home, and a moment of peace for reflection, I feel like I should tell you a bit about myself.

  Well, where to start? I remember stating in my early entries how I grew up in the care system, so maybe that’s where I should begin?

  My parents were fucking assholes, let’s get that out there straight off the bat. I was taken from them when I was six and barely remember them, but I remember the drugs and the drinking, from both those pieces of shit. I remember my dad beating seven shades of shit out of my mum and then crying apologies, with the stupid bitch soothing him, telling that son of a bitch it would be okay even as her blood dried on his knuckles.

  I don’t know who put the social services on to them, but it was bittersweet. On one hand, I was torn away from all that I knew at a young age, but on the other, I lived in fear of my father’s rage, so it was undoubtedly the right thing to do. I took a slap now and again when I got under his feet and despite me being a tiny dot, that shitball didn’t pull his blow. Open-handed or not, it knocks a six-year old senseless. I don’t recall that mother fucker ever crying an apology to me though.

  I never saw them again, and I’m utterly blasé about their fate. I honestly don’t give two shits if they’re dead and gone. My father was a savage and my mother put him above me every single time. My early childhood was just screaming and fear.

  Naturally, this led to me being something of a handful. I mean, shit, I had issues coming out my arse. Trust, abandonment, loneliness; you name it, I had it. I dealt with it by building walls around me and painting those walls with the snarky bitch I am today, with a mouth as fast as my feet.

  I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I’m no dipshit. I’m actually way smarter than I let on. Now, I’m no particle physicist and when I say smart, I don’t mean academic smart. If you ask me to do long division in my head, my expression will go blank and I’ll likely go catatonic, drool still hanging out my mouth an hour later, as my brain has ceased to function.

  But reading was an escape for me, bouncing around between foster homes and group homes. I’d read anything as it was all an escape, whether it was reading some trashy romance novel, literary classics, pulp noir detective novels, comic books, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, thrillers… anything and everything. The evidence of my extensive reading is clearly evident to you, my dear reader, by my spectacular understanding and mangling of the English language for my own twisted purpose.

  I’m also people smart. I don’t trust easily, but I’m generally good at reading people. Obviously, I’m not flawless, given my recent underestimation of Freya, but in my defence, my first impression was of the group as a whole and anyone who paid eight grand to sing Kum Ba Yah for a month had to be a bit of a fruit loop at first glance.

  Sweeping generalisation duly thrown out the window. As of now, I love that girl. Whoever that footballer was who divorced her had no fucking clue what a superstar he had. She’s just bloody lovely in every way—inside and out—and I’m doubly impressed by the way she’s handled this whole clusterfuck.

  I’d like to see a footballer rip back a zombie’s head and plunge a kitchen knife into its eye without a shred of hesitation. If they’re so much as nudged by another player, that bunch of tarts roll fifteen times on the ground, waving their arms in the air and screaming to high heaven like a sniper’s just put a high velocity round through their kneeca
p.

  I’m pretty confident every professional footballer is dead. Fuckers have everything done for them and just aren’t equipped to survive the end of the world.

  Tangent.

  Anyway, my smart mouth is both my sword and my shield, and I don’t know many adults who enjoy being outsmarted by a ten-year old with a grasp of sarcasm way ahead of their time. Abstract concepts usually start getting grasped at around eleven or twelve I read somewhere, but I was snapping back at nine.

  I was a problem, let’s leave it like that.

  On top of reading, I discovered parkour from my endless fascination with YouTube and became obsessed with it. It was just so mesmerising, watching these men and women do breathtaking things, so elegant and strong, their movements so aesthetically graceful and fluid.

  My life was so unbearably mundane, constantly moving about, always moving schools, never putting down roots. Reading let me escape in a quiet corner, but I wanted something that would set my heart racing and fell in love with extreme sports. BMX, skateboarding, base jumping, free diving, parkour… my heart would race just watching that shit on a screen and I wanted some of it. The closest I’d ever come to an extreme sport was trying to furiously finish my homework as the teacher was walking round the class collecting it from everyone. Whoo, what a rush.

  My apparent absence of fear was both a blessing and curse during my early years. I’d try something way too advanced and bang the shit out of myself, ending up in A&E so many times I got to know some of the staff by name.

  Naturally, being a free spirit as I was, I ended up in the wrong crowd. Fast forward to fifteen, I was pretty nimble and accomplished by this time, and I’d also started training in MMA, because boobs are way too interesting for teenage boys and in the circles I lived in, boundary issues were the norm. A broken instep, a kick in the balls so hard they’d have three Adam’s apples, and a fearless headbutt to the nose soon dissuaded anyone getting too touchy feely without my consent.