Journal of the Living

by John Moralee

  “What? You still don’t trust me?”

  “It’s hard to trust you whistled at those zombies. I don’t want you getting tempted to do something when I’m rescuing my friends. So, you’ve got a choice. I either tape your hands or I leave you behind. Do you want me to leave you in this garage when I leave?”

  “No,” he said sullenly, like a small child being chastised by an adult. “But at least tape my hands in front this time, puh-leeeease.”

  Hayley covered me as I taped his wrists together. Then I made him sit in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap. He started asking a lot of annoying questions about what we were going to do next. I wished I’d taped his mouth. Maybe I would if he didn’t shut up.

  I needed to re-open the garage doors – so Hayley took over the driving. She could barely reach the pedals – but she slowly backed the car off the pit while I got myself ready to open the garage doors. Ideally there would have been enough room for turning the van around – but the space was too tight. Hayley would have to drive out backwards as soon as I opened the door. I’d have to get into the van via the side door before the zombies got me. Timing would be crucial.

  First, I turned on my walkie-talkie. “Jason?”

  “Yeah?” he gasped. I could hear him throwing something. I could also hear angry zombies in the background.

  “We’re coming, Jason. Get ready at the main entrance, okay?”

  “Got … it. Hurry. Zombies are coming. They’re dozens coming down the corridor! I’m trapped!”

  “Just keep fighting another minute!”

  He was too busy to answer me. The walkie-talkie stayed on. The trouble at the school sounded bad.

  “Ready?” I called to Hayley.

  “Ready!” she said, revving the engine.

  I lifted up the garage doors. They clanked upwards. Sunlight poured into the garage – along with a dozen zombies. I ran around the side of the van as they poured through the opening. I dived in the back and slammed the door shut with only a second’s grace before the zombies slammed their bodies against the van, desperately trying to get to me.

  “Okay?” Hayley said.

  “Go!” I yelled.

  Hayley backed out at maximum acceleration, colliding with the mass of undead on the street. I felt the impact of the zombies slamming into the rear as the van emerged into the daylight. A couple of the undead crushed under the wheels – but other ones clung to the back and front, crawling over the van like insects. I poked my head up through the opening in the roof and unleashed a couple of crossbow bolts before ducking back inside. I shot two in the face – but I lost two bolts doing it. I’d run out really fast if I used my crossbow unnecessarily. It was stupid wasting them.

  For the moment we were free of the zombies – but we were driving backwards towards the school at forty miles per hour. Hayley was having a hard time steering in reverse. She caught a lamp post a glancing blow. The lamp post teetered over like a chopped tree as I felt the impact in my teeth. Through the front windscreen, I could see dozens of zombies pursuing us down the road. It looked like we were watching a marathon of the dirtiest people in the world.

  “We’re almost at the school,” Hayley said. “Want me to drive in backwards into the car park?”

  “No – keep going down the road – then stop and let me take over the driving.”

  We passed the school going fifty and continued for a fifty metres before Hayley stopped. In passing the school I had seen ten zombies crowded around the entrance that I’d have to take care of before Jason and Angela could escape. I swapped places with Hayley, handing her the crossbow. Then I did a quick U-turn before the zombies caught up with us. “Jason! We’re almost there! Be at the entrance! Get ready to bring Angela out!”

  Jason didn’t reply, which was a bad sign, but I hoped he’d heard. There were several zombies in my way as I headed back to the school – and I ploughed into every one of them, smashing and crunching their bones on the bumper and under the wheels. I left behind me a wake of mangled corpses. Billy sat next to me cheering as each zombie got hit by the front bumper.

  “Yeah – nail them! You got that sucker! Yeah! Squish them!”

  “Hold on, Hayley,” I said, turning into the school’s entrance. I drove straight at the zombies blocking Jason’s way out. My speed was sixty – about the max the van could go. It slammed into three head-on, knocking them flying. Then I drove in a circle catching some more before stopped with the rear pointed at the entrance. I backed up, catching some more, running them over, clearing the entrance. I parked with the rear facing the school with a gap half the length of a car. Between us and the entrance. The entrance was clear for now. I scrambled over my seat into the back of the van, opening the doors. A zombie reared out of nowhere. (It must have been under the wheels.) I threw a machete into its forehead and kicked it backwards. I jumped out with my fire axe in both hands. Hayley covered me with the crossbow as I ran up to the doors. I pulled at them – but they were locked with the chain.

  “Jason?”

  “Ben? You’re here!”

  “Yeah. Open the doors!”

  “Can’t! I’m protecting Angela! I need you to do it!”

  I swore. There was a chain on the other side, padlocked to keep the zombies from breaking in. Now I had to do exactly that – while fending off the zombies around me that Hayley missed with her crossbow. I hacked away at the door, pausing only to chop the head off a white-haired zombie. The door was solid. The axe wasn’t denting it. It’d take me ten minutes to break it open. The zombies wouldn’t wait that long to get Jason. Drastic action was needed.

  “Jason! Get away from the entrance! I’m going to drive in!”

  I climbed back into the van and jumped into the driver’s seat. I drove forwards, braked, then reversed. I hit the entrance at sufficient speed to knock the door off its hinges, flattening it on the ground. Hayley opened the rear doors without me having to tell her. I could see Jason in the corridor fighting off six or seven zombies with a chair like he was a lion-tamer while simultaneously protecting Angela, who was lying unconscious on the trolley nearer the entrance.

  “About time!” Jason shouted. “Kind of need some help here!”

  With the van wedged in the entrance, no zombies could get at us from the outside, though they were climbing on the van, pounding their fists on the windscreen.

  I joined Hayley in helping Jason. I took over the fighting while Jason and his sister lifted Angela into the van.

  Once they had her in the back, I swung my axe a couple of times to give myself some space – then I retreated in a hurry.

  By some miracle, I got into the van just ahead of the zombies.

  Then I slammed the doors shut.

  I didn’t need to tell Jason to get us out of there.

  He was already driving the van forwards, pushing our way through a horde of the undead. There were so many bodies slamming on the windscreen it was dark inside the van until Jason shook them off with some sharp braking and accelerating. He wasted no time driving us out of that town into the countryside, where we eventually shook off the last few zombies.

  Nobody looked back at the town.

  We were just glad to escape alive.

  *

  Okay – I’ve just uploaded my last few blog entries now we’re on the road again, safe for the time being. We’re on our way to the camp. We should be there in about an hour – if nothing goes wrong.

  Angela’s still unconscious and looking very sick. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do. I feel helpless, watching her.

  Jason’s driving with his sister in the passenger seat. Billy’s in the back with me. He’s still talking. He wants me to let him join our group. He says he will be a valuable member of our group if I give him a chance to prove it. His mechanical skills will be useful to us, he says.

  I don’t know.

  Can I trust him?

  What should I do?

  ENTRY THIRTEEN

  I allowed Billy to
stay with us – but I took no chances. I kept him tied up and I blindfolded him before taking over the driving from Jason. Just because I wasn’t going to kill Billy for betraying us didn’t mean I trusted him. He had only helped us escape the town under duress. Frankly, I expected him to try something the moment his hands were untied. He seemed the type. But I was willing to let Billy have one more chance to prove himself useful. Of course, I didn’t want him to know our camp’s location, so he had to lie in the back for the last hour of the journey, not knowing which direction we were going. He looked uncomfortable, but it was the safest option.

  Our camp was in a large country estate once owned by a member of the Royal family. The estate had been bought by a footballer and his supermodel wife back in the 1990s. The media had loved them – until their tax-dodging schemes had been exposed. Then they’d become hate figures. They’d abandoned England after Day One to live on one of their private islands, leaving behind their luxurious mansion and fleet of Ferraris, which we had come across a few months earlier. The mansion would have been a great place to live – if it had not been razed to the ground by arsonists. The arsonists set fire to the cars for some reason too – just to trash the footballer’s property, I suspected. It had been weird coming across the ruins inside the forested estate. We’d considered camping there out on the open ground, miles from anything living or dead – but we had found a better place in the surrounding forest.

  When we drove up the gravel road towards the camp, Angela remained unconscious. Her condition was worrying. Our return should have been a happy time – but too many things had gone wrong for celebrations. Instead of unloading our van of food and medicines, I was bringing back a blindfolded prisoner and a mortally wounded companion. Not exactly the best of presents.

  We’d made our camp next to a stream of uncontaminated water providing us with fresh salmon for our meals. The camp was about a mile from the blackened ruin of the mansion, which could just been seen through the trees. The camp was protected from wandering undead by a fence of chicken wire wrapped around several trees, making an enclosure roughly a third of the size of a football field. There were two gates in the barricade for coming and going, allowing vehicles to pass through into the enclosure. I stopped and beeped the horn to let our friends know we were at the north gate. We’d been away a week – but it honestly felt like years. A camper van was on the other side of the barricade beneath some trees. Two people emerged from it. They were Sadie and Neal. Seeing them again, alive and well, made me feel like crying with joy. The pessimist within me had expected the camp to be deserted – but they had stayed and waited for us to return. I was really happy to see them – just like Hayley and Jason, who were in the back, looking after Angela.

  That morning Sadie was a slim figure dressed in a black polo-neck jumper and jeans. She was my age – but she looked more youthful, like a girl in her twenties. Her short black hair was fanned out behind her ears like a raven’s wings. A crossbow bobbed in her hands as she crossed the camp to the gate.

  Following her was an older man in his sixties. Looking like a posh landowner in a BBC costume drama, Neal was wearing a brown jacket and tweed trousers. He was a rangy man with silver-grey hair and a wolfish beard. His head was bandaged after a nasty fall a fortnight ago, which was the reason why he had stayed in the camp with Sadie. His injury had left him concussed and unable to walk – but he looked steady on his feet again. Neal had a rifle pointed in our general direction.

  For a horrible moment I thought my friends were going to shoot at us. Didn’t they recognise the van? I waved out of the window. Hayley poked her head out of the roof. They lowered their weapons only after they saw it was us. They hurried to the gate and opened it to let us drive in. I parked next to the camper van. Sadie and Neal were smiling – until they realised we were not returning after a successful mission.

  “What – who – what?” Sadie said as Jason and Hayley opened the van’s doors, revealing Angela and Billy. “Ben, what happened to Angela? And who is that?”

  “She’s been shot,” I said. “The bullet’s lodged inside her. The prisoner is called Billy. He helped us escape from a zombie nightmare – but he’s part of the gang responsible for Angela’s injury.”

  “Did he shoot her?” Neal said, poking Billy with his rifle.

  “No – another guy.” I explained very quickly. “Sadie, can you help Angela?”

  She stared at Angela, breathing deeply, frowning.

  “Get her inside,” she said. “I’ll have to examine her.”

  Neal and I carried Angela into the camper van. Angela moaned just like a zombie, her eyes flickering open just long enough to see where she was. She recognised her surroundings and smiled before closing her eyes again. Sadie gave orders to lay Angela on the table in the kitchenette. It was getting crowded in the camper van with everyone coming in behind us. Sadie told Hayley and Jason to stay outside while she examined the wound under the bright light of an angle-poised lamp powered by solar panels on the roof. The kids looked reluctant to leave – but they stepped outside, looking at me.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Jason said.

  “Keep an eye on Billy,” I said, giving them something to do. I closed the door and turned to look at Angela. Sadie was shining light on Angela’s raw-looking wound. “She’s been cut?”

  “Yeah, I tried to get the bullet out last night,” I said. “But it had gone too deep. I didn’t know how to get to it. I stitched her up as well as I could. What’s your opinion?”

  “She really needs a sterile hospital and a team if surgeons,” Angela said. “But since we don’t have that, I’ll have to do something. I assisted on a fifty-something abdominal surgeries – but I never had to cut someone open before. We’ll need sterilised instruments. Neal – boil some water. Ben – get the alcohol out of my medical bag. My instruments are inside. Bleach them.”

  We quickly turned the kitchenette into an operating room. Sadie tested Angela’s blood pressure, shaking her head. “She’ll need more blood once I start cutting. Anyone know her blood type?”

  “She never told me,” I said.

  “Neal?” Sadie said.

  “No. I don’t know either.”

  “Okay – we’ll need some O for a transfusion because that’s the universal donor group. I’m O – but I can’t give blood and operate.”

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t compatible. Neither was Neal. The kids didn’t know their blood types – so we couldn’t risk using theirs.

  That left Billy. I went out to the van and removed his blindfold. He blinked in the sunlight.

  It turned out he was Type O, which could be used for anyone, unlike the rarer types. It felt like a miracle. I hated to imagine what we would have done if I had not brought him with us.

  “Do you have hepatitis?” Sadie asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you HIV positive?”

  “No! I got no diseases.”

  I untied him and Sadie soon had him hooked up to a drip that fed his blood into Angela while Sadie prepared for the surgery. Neal and I assisted, handing Sadie her instruments and irrigating Angela’s open wound. The operation was the most harrowing thing I’d seen since Day One. Mercifully Angela was too weak to wake up screaming when Sadie started cutting deep into her to get to the bullet. Sadie’s gloved hands disappeared into Angela like some kind of sick magic trick. The stench of excrement filled the air. I was relieved when Sadie found the bullet and dropped it into a cereal bowl. The dirty, shiny metal thing was tiny. It was amazing how something so small could do so much damage. I hoped the operation would be over soon – but getting the bullet out was only half of the job. The bullet had perforated Angela’s bowel. The whole area had to been thoroughly cleaned and stitched up. It took over an hour. It was the bloodiest, worst thing I had witnessed. And I had seen a man’s entrails slop out of his body.

  Afterwards Sadie looked exhausted. Billy didn’t look so good either. He was pale after giving his blood an
d watching the operation. He had vomited once during the op, begging me to blindfold him again so he didn’t have to watch. Now he rubbed his tattooed arm near the needle. “Are you guys done with my blood now?”

  “No,” Sadie said. “We need you to stay hooked up. She needs more blood.”

  “Aw, come on! For how long am I expected to sit here, getting drained?”

  Normally Sadie was calm and collected – but she snapped.

  “Until I say so!”

  “Jeez! I feel light-headed. My head’s fuzzy. You’re draining me like a vampire. I’m getting hungry, too. I haven’t eaten nothing in days. This is against my human rights.”

  “We’ll get you something to eat,” I said. “Now shut up, Billy. Just sit there, being quiet.”

  “Hey! I’m helping your girlfriend, aren’t I? You should be grateful and appreciate me. My blood’s saved her life. I’m like a hero.”

  “A hero? We wouldn’t have needed your blood if you had not ambushed us.” My hand tightened into a fist. Sadie noticed. She shook her head. I calmed down. Billy was pushing my buttons.

  “I’d just like some gratitude,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t have to come here. And I haven’t complained about the way you’ve treated me like a prisoner of war.”

  He had done nothing but complain. I wished I had gagged him.

  “We are grateful,” Sadie said, returning to her usual temperament. “You are doing a good thing, Billy. We just need some more blood to make her stronger, okay?”

  She was talking to him softly like he was a little boy in need of comfort. It worked.

  “Yeah, okay,” Billy said. “Just remember I helped. I don’t want to be tied up no more.”