by P. R. Sharp
...Loopdeloop...
I had ringing in my ears, a throbbing in my shin and an invisible claw squeezing my shoulder bone. With the kitchen door shut firmly behind me, I crouched on one knee and pulled my jeans up to inspect my leg. There was a four inch gouge running up my shin bone, the torn flesh pale white and dark blue, slowly pooling with blood. It stung and sang like a siren, and I winced and held my breath as the blood percolated to the surface and dribbled down my pale shin. Moya jumped up onto my back and quickly sat, and in one smooth gesture, put her paw on my shoulder and licked my ear.
Upstairs, I went into the front bedroom to look out of the window, glancing at the bed that hadn't been slept in for two nights; the same bed that hadn't seen a lover in over a year and hadn't had fresh sheets for over a month. Instinctively, I raised both arms to pull the curtains back, and my left shoulder screamed in protest. Cars were nose to tail, blocking the intersection in four directions. Doors were open, bodies were strewn. Smoke billowed from several grills and one of the traffic lights blinked its one good red eye. From here, the cars looked like discarded toys and reminded me of when I was a child, playing with my battered collection of Corgis and Tonkas, lining them up in the largest traffic jam known to man; clogging up the shag-pile road systems of the landing carpet, but moving slowly and with deliberate persistence to my bedroom and the inevitable earthquake that would result in their unceremonious return to the toy box.
I ran...
...hobbled...
...into the lounge and switched on the TV, turning my cell phone on at the same time. To my surprise it was barely 7am. The events of last night were a thousand years away. Images of people leaning from their cars and throwing up in the street came bobbing up to the surface of my memory. The condensation inside the number thirty six bus blurring the chaos within. Sirens screaming to assist, only to get caught up in the endless, immobile traffic snarl.
My phone alerted me to a text message. The vibration made me jump and I dropped it.
Is that important? No,that'snotimportant. What'simportantisthedetail. Yes.Thedevil'sinthedetail. Stay on track.
I looked out of the window and saw movement in the cab of the police van. The dark figure sat at the steering wheel shifted its position; then the TV had warmed up enough for the volume to kick in, blasting out nothing but chaotic white noise. It made me jump and I juggled phone and TV remote whilst still looking out the window; muting the TV, quickly checking the text message to see it was from my friend Jonny B, and then returned my gaze to the police van. The dark figure sat at the steering wheel was leaning forward and looking right at me through the windscreen. I pulled the net curtains aside and frowned back at the female officer, her gender now obvious by the way her auburn hair fell about her deathly ashen cheeks. I realised that she must have had a front row seat to the nightmare of the previous evening. We stared at each other like this for several minutes, until she waved, and I waved back. It was very surreal, like two strangers making a tacit connection across a bloody theatre of war. Then, with gradual consciousness, the whole street came in to view, and my mind quickly processed the extent of last night’s inhuman revolution.
I estimated around fifty bodies lying in the road closest to my vantage point, with more lying on the pavement and even a few collapsed in gardens or across garden walls. At least five houses that I could see had their front doors wide open and one had a broken front window. Almost every car sat with one or more of its doors open.
The female police officer slowly got out of the cab and looked around. She looked up at me and shrugged. I remember smiling and shrugged back. She touched her head, shrugged again and raised both hands, using the international sign language for ’huh!’ I shook my head and she shook hers.
I settled against the window sill and watched her as she took out her telescopic baton and slowly moved around the police van. She was careful not to approach any of the fallen bodies, but at this point I didn't know why and at the time, I'll be honest, I didn't really care. I was just happy to see another person. She put her ear to the police van and tapped the side with her free hand; paused, then repeated the action. Then she moved to the rear of the transit and reached for the key chain that dangled from her belt. She opened the rear door, and was blocked from my view as the door swung open. I could see her boots, nothing more. She reappeared a couple of seconds later, backing away from the vehicle; the back of her legs made contact with the car positioned directly behind the transit and she side stepped into the middle of the road as another police officer emerged from the van’s interior. He arched his shoulders and neck as if stretching from an uncomfortable night’s sleep, then lashed out. The female officer span ninety degrees and jumped out of striking distance as another police officer fell from the van and slowly pushed himself up from the road. The WPC adopted a defensive stance, her telescopic baton raised to shoulder height, her free arm poised with clenched fist. She was obviously speaking to the other officers who seemed to tower above her, but the words were silent to me.
Another figure emerged from the van; not a police officer this time, but the large male patient I had seen, dressed in olive green pyjamas. He was followed by another police officer. This one was painted from head to stomach in puke coloured matter, and I realised that all of the van’s occupants had some degree of vomit on them. The female officer was now moving backwards in my direction. She stepped over a fallen body and almost immediately, it grabbed her ankle. She tripped and fell back, swinging the baton at the other officers as they descended on her like a pride of lions. A few feet away, blue Corsa man was crawling across the tarmac towards them. I saw an eruption of blood as collectively, in a matter of minutes, they ripped her open. Her screams were like nothing I have ever heard; or ever want to hear again.
And as the lions settled around their fresh kill and savoured the warm flesh, others stirred. Bodies began to sit, to loosen and rise. Within a very short period, the street was filled with stumbling, hobbling, puke covered spectres, and I was a frozen husk; staring, holding my breath, as the world through my window went to hell.
2.3
Ace of Spades
JONNY B
'Planet Claire has pink air.
All the trees are red.
No one ever dies there.
No one has a head...'
B52's... Planet Claire
Jonny B killed his wife with a wok. He had no choice. He had returned home from his two-on-two-off late night caretaker’s job and found his mother-in-law dead on the sofa. At least, she looked dead. She was very old and frail, so this was not such a surprise. According to Jonny B, she would spend days at a time shuffling around the house in her dressing gown, long thin white hair about her face, humming Perry Como’s greatest hits and dangling an unlit cigarette from her mouth. He found her lying in a pool of vomit on the plush, red leather corner piece he and his wife had only recently purchased, less than three weeks before with no deposit and only 48 monthly payments to go. It still smelt brand new and selfishly, his first thought was that he was going to have to clean that shit up. He stood staring at her thin body for several seconds before the vomit stink became too much, so headed into the kitchen to open the back door. Carrier bags lay discarded on the kitchen table, their contents spilled out across the floor. He could smell vomit here, too; and that's when he ran into his wife.
She was stood with her back to him; he reached out his hand and touched her shoulder. She shivered and quickly turned. Her eyes were a milky yellow, the colour of ice-cream spit; her chin encrusted with dried vomit that resembled oat meal. Her breath, (if you can call it that ;) stank of puke and something mildly fruity he couldn't quite put his finger on. Jonny B only had a fraction of a second to react before his wife grabbed his arm and tried to bite him. He swivelled and brought his elbow up into her chin, sending her back into the kitchen sink unit. She went bonkers, (his words ;) and he pushed her out of the kitchen and into the lounge, where she skidded on the laminated flooring an
d crashed into the sofa. His mother-in-law rolled on to the floor and opened her eyes, her pale blue dressing gown saturated with vomit; it had the consistency of curdled egg, and dripped on to the flooring like some horrendous unguent. Jonny B felt warm urine trickle down the inside of his Nike track suit bottoms as both women hissed, struggled to their feet and came at him. That's when he grabbed the first thing to hand and lashed out with it. The heavy metal base of the wok smacked against his wife's forehead, splitting the skin, but she kept coming. He brought the wok down again and again until he heard her skull crack and she slumped through the kitchen door frame and fell heavily, chest first on to the table, sending supermarket own brand goods in all directions. He hit her again on the back of the skull and the impact forced blood and vomit out of her nose. She collapsed onto the sticky linoleum flooring and twitched for about ten seconds before evacuating her bowels through her tights in an offensive, rancid pool of green and rotting waste. He ran from the house as his puke encrusted mother-in-law, her spindly little legs shaking to hold up her weight, tried to catch him. He slammed the front door and jumped into his car. Trembling, he started the engine and wheel-spinned as he pulled away.
He didn't look back.
Gotta give him credit for that.
***
Jonny B made it to my place about four long hours after he caved his wife's head in with the wok. The fact that this journey would normally take about five minutes by car or around fifteen minutes on foot gives you some idea of the mayhem that stood between our places of residence and the speed at which the infection had spread. He told me about his journey home from work. How the traffic was stationary and how most of the cars were driverless. He told me about the strange atmosphere in his street and that he had to drive on the pavement to park outside his own house; and of course, he told me about the incident with the wok. I told him about the headless homeless man in the hospital grounds and the female doctor in the supermarket. We threw around the idea that they might be connected, but the conversation never got any further than conjecture.
He had arrived at my gated compound by foot on the morning of the third day, having abandoned his car up the hill, owing to the fact there were too many deserted vehicles and driving on the pavement this time around would have been impossible. He had seen several infected and avoided them by running as fast as his legs would allow. By the time he reached the gates, he was so out of breath he could only get my attention by banging on the metal work with his shoe. This attracted some unwanted company and by the time I unlocked the side gate, there were ten or more infected occupying the car park. I dragged him inside the compound and secured the gate, then practically booted him up the steps and into the kitchen, where I slammed the door shut and bolted it with such speed, I surprised us both.
"Upstairs", I winced, my grated shin tight against my clothing. Jonny B complied without a word until I offered him a beer and he recounted what had happened. We sat drinking the rest of my Special Brew; occasionally, one or both of us would get up and peer out of the sitting room window, checking that the car park infected had not somehow got into the compound. I recognised one poor sod as Mr. Cooper, the tenant with the broken window. Were the jagged lacerations on his face a result of going head first through the glass? Another was climbing out of the police cruiser in a slow, drunken swagger. He nudged the steering wheel, setting off the car horn. The others twitched and became restless for several minutes, before calming down, returning to a dazed state of awareness. The row of houses across the road backed onto the school sports field and there were a couple of dozen infected roaming the unkempt grass. Many of them were children. I asked Jonny B how many he had seen after leaving his car, he thought maybe fifteen, perhaps twenty, maybe more; he wasn't sure; (he spent an hour or so hiding behind a row of wheelie bins.) I didn't tell him about the WPC getting drawn medieval style in the street by her fellow officers and I felt the need for some weed, so I went into the bedroom to get my stash from the bedside cabinet, and when I came back into the lounge, Jonny B was gone.
Now, one thing you need to know about Jonny B is that he is not the world’s best drinker. By his own admission, he is under the table after half a glass of wine; so you can imagine what four cans of premium heavy lager had done to him. I thought he had just gone to the toilet, so left him to it. I had this mental image of Jonny B walking in to his home to discover his not-so-dead mother-in-law as Magic Moments by Mr. Como played over the scene. I scrolled through the TV channels until I found something local and rolled a joint. A camera’s point of view from a news helicopter was flying high above the city, capturing images that belonged in a blockbuster motion picture. Columns of smoke rose from several buildings, lines of traffic clogged the roads and people the size of ants moved with uncoordinated motion through the streets. I continued to roll my joint on automatic as the camera shakily zoomed into a gang of people attacking a lone individual. I called out for Jonny B to come and have a look, just as the camera pulled away and a title card for the news channel flashed up on the screen and the sound turned to a low pitch hum. Jonny B didn't answer. I got up and by force of habit, looked out of the window. Jonny B was outside.
The kitchen door was wide open and Jonny B was stood in the middle of the compound, staring at the infected in the car park, which now, were all stood by the palisade fencing, staring back at him. I grabbed the collar of his sweat shirt and pulled him back, just as a police helicopter screamed over head, a voice belting out from its public address system.
"....when you will receive further instructions... I repeat... This is a civil defence announcement... Please stay in your homes... A twenty four hour curfew is in effect... This curfew will remain for seventy two hours... Remain calm... A biological incident has occurred... Local emergency services are dealing with the problem... Evacuation measures are in place and will commence in seventy two hours when you will receive further instructions... I repeat... This is a civil defence announcement... "
The message trailed off as the helicopter continued over the neighbourhood and eventually out of sight, though the words could still be heard. I saw some people along the way exit their homes, clearly as confused and scared as we were. Infected vaulted over the garden walls and attacked them before they had a chance to retreat into their halls. Jonny B had sobered up and looked at me with big baby eyes. "What the hell is going on?" He implored. I shrugged. I didn’t possess the language to explain any of this. The car park infected were extremely disturbed by the helicopter and were either head butting the palisade fencing or striking it with their arms and upper body. For the second time that day, I basically booted Jonny B up the steps to the kitchen and bolted the door. I told him to leave the door alone, that if he opened it again without my permission, I would kick him down the steps and lock it behind him. I told him about the WPC getting her guts ripped out; I figured then was as good a time as any. He collapsed to his knees in front of the cooker and began to sob. I think the shock of splitting his wife’s skull open with a wok had finally hit him.
I eventually got Jonny B upstairs where he fell into a deep, beer infused sleep on the sofa with Moya curled up next to him. I flicked through the dead terrestrial TV channels and eventually found an early episode of Stargate SG1 on cable, then I sat in my arm chair and smoked my joint. The heady weed mixed with the Special Brew and hit my brain at once, and the image of Captain Samantha Carter became a pleasant diversion. The police helicopter made another sweep of the district; the cold, monotonous message, thumping from the PA had become surreal and drum like. I nodded off for what seemed like hours but it was actually only minutes; and in my slightly stoned, waking moments, Colonel Jack O'Neill was leaning over Kawalsky in his hospital bed and saying "...That’s right Dorothy, it was all a dream..."
If only.
***
"Strawberry yoghurt!"
"What?" "Strawberry yoghurt," said Jonny B, as he stretched his legs. I shrugged, needing more information regarding this random stat
ement, and he explained that it was the something mildly fruity he could smell on his wife's breath. I wanted to know whether the mother-in-law had gone shopping too, or had she stayed at home? Jonny B didn't know. I wondered whether the wife had been infected in the supermarket and then infected the mother-in-law; or had they both been infected at the same time. Jonny B didn't know. Or maybe, the shopping was delivered and they had been infected by the driver, or perhaps a neighbour. Again, Jonny B didn't know. I couldn't expect him to know, really; but I was mashed and thinking aloud, my thoughts trying to find a rational reason for this madness.
I was all too aware that Jonny B had been in very close proximity with the virus, even more so than me; and this realisation was eating away inside me like a cancer. I wanted to know if he felt ill. He said no.
Was he sure?
He was sure.
I decided that I would take him at his word, but at the first sign of infection, I would eject him from my home without a second thought. I didn't yet know enough about the virus to categorise it into its various phases, and he did seem refreshed after his sleep and very aware of what had happened.
Would he be?
I mean; would he really be that aware if he had some malicious pathogen restructuring his brain? Was it like the alien strain in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, camouflaged in plain sight? At what point would he transform into a reanimated corpse and try to eat my brain? I figured that I had smoked too much weed, or maybe not enough.
And I was hungry.
***
Trying to attain some resemblance of normality, I was busy making sausage sandwiches and Jonny B was attempting to roll a spliff. We both worked silently in the kitchen; me chopping onions, Jonny B sat on one of the high stools at the breakfast counter. Moya was sat next to the kitchen door, occasionally whining or letting out a stifled growl. I kept telling her to be quiet and she would stop for a minute or so, and then start up again. I looked through the net curtains into the car park. The infected were still there, but fewer in numbers. Four or five had wandered towards the car park entrance and were standing like statues, swaying gently in the warmth of a pleasant, sunny afternoon. Another was skulking by the abandoned police cruiser and the rest were roaming with a desultory demeanour. Moya pawed at the door, letting me know that she needed a piss. I told her that she would have to wait and she curled up for a sulk.
