The Shuffling Dead Box-set

by Ian Woodhead

  He managed a strangled laugh. “Got you that time, didn’t I?”

  Thom’s upper half sprawled out of the window, he wasn’t moving. Kevin tapped Thom’s head with the flat of his blade then jumped back. He still didn’t move.

  “I got you that time.” he repeated. He used the deep grass to wipe off the thick mess, coating the front of his boot. Events would have been so much different if Kevin had opted to wear his comfortable fabric trainers when he changed out of his school uniform tonight.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Kevin fell to his knees and threw up his last meal into his dad’s flower bed.

  The sound of moaning made him look up towards his bedroom window, he wiped his chin on the back of his hand then let out a small moan of his own. She’d managed to get into his bedroom, Claire’s hungry eyes viewed him as a dog looked at a rabbit, she slowly blinked before turning around and disappearing from view.

  He rushed over to the garden gate, unlatched it and ran out into the still deserted street, Kevin glanced behind him; he could see Claire through the kitchen window making her way towards the open front door, oh fucking hell! The bitch was following him.

  Yeah well, let her. It’s not like she’d be able to catch him. Kevin ran into the middle of the road and sprinted to the end of the street, he stopped and turned. Claire had reached the gate; she paused too then slipped out of the garden and lurched away in the opposite direction.

  Kevin turned onto Breaks Road and walked over to the white lines; he stopped in the middle and slowly turned in a tight circle. It felt like he was the last person on the estate still alive, nothing moved. The main road leading out of the estate was at the end of this street; he consoled himself knowing that in a few moments his nightmare would be over. He started to jog; there was no point in knackering himself out by going hell for leather. He passed an upturned pram in the middle of the road and turned away when he saw the lumpy mess spattered all over the tarmac, not wanting to dwell upon the horror that must have happened on this spot earlier tonight. Jesus, the whole of Breakspear had descended to hell.

  Without realising what he was doing, he backed away from the pram, his mind conjuring images of a zombie infant crawling towards him, clacking its jaws like a set of comedy teeth.

  “Is the situation not bad enough without you thinking up disturbing shite like that?” muttered Kevin.

  In a house, a few doors from where he stood, an upstairs light flicked on. His hope surged by the fact that he wasn’t the only person on the estate still alive. No dead person would turn on a bloody light, unless they leaned on it. He altered course and jogged towards the house, the feeling that he was still alone had left him.

  As he approached, a high pitched scream blasted out from the room. Kevin shuddered to a halt and fell to his knees, he couldn’t take any more of this; it was just too much.

  The screaming abruptly stopped and Kevin spared a single thought for the poor bastard who had just been got. He didn’t have a clue who lived there; unlike the rest of his family he had kept himself to himself. He guessed he’d feel a lot bloody worse if he actually knew who had lived at that house.

  It was bad enough when his sister turned into one of them and they hadn’t liked each other for years; it was like having a stranger living in the house. Kevin enjoyed being alone and yet for the first time in his life, he craved for company.

  The silence was broken when he heard frantic tapping on glass; he automatically looked over to that window before realising that the noise came from a window a few feet from where he was kneeling.

  Through tear-soaked eyes, he saw a round, pink blur pressed against the rear window of an estate car, parked on the other side of the road.

  Kevin heard the door open as he wiped his eyes; he got ready to run, just in case the figure turned out to be one of those things.

  He watched a young girl, possibly a year older than him approach. He didn’t have a clue who she was; he didn’t recognise her from school.

  “Oh, my God!” she gasped. “Are you really alive?”

  Kevin nodded.

  The girl sobbed and ran up to him; she wrapped her arms around him, hugged him tight and buried her face into his shoulder. Her brown hair smelt of strawberries.

  “I thought I was the only one left.”

  Kevin didn’t know whether he should hug her back or not, he’d never hugged a girl before. He decided to risk it.

  “My mum’s dead.” She peeled her face off his shoulder and nodded over to the house next to them. “We only came to drop off my Gran’s birthday present. Everything was normal, and then all of a sudden my dad dropped the paper he was reading and jumped on my mum.”

  She put her head back. The girl quietly sobbed.

  “What the hell is going…” the girl stopped in mid sentence, her body went rigid and she began to moan.

  “What’s wrong,” he said, fearing the worst. Kevin tried to release her grip but she wouldn’t let go.

  “There’s one behind you.”

  She finally let him go; then grabbed his hand and dragged him to the car. Kevin spun his head to see a woman with no arms staggering towards them.

  He was so focussed on her that he failed to notice the thudding sound of approaching boots until it was too late. The bayonet was snatched from Kevin’s grasp.

  “Give me that knife you fucking useless clown.”

  He watched, gob-smacked, as a gangly youth wearing a biker’s jacket and sporting a blonde crew cut ran forwards and pushed the blade through the woman’s eye. The youth then lifted his leg high and booted her to the floor.

  “How the fucking hell have you two managed to stay alive for so long?”

  He ran up to the corpse and pulled the bayonet out of her head, wiped both sides of the blade on the woman’s coat, and tucked it under his belt.

  “I mean, just how dangerous can this bitch be? She’s got no fucking arms and yet you still piss your pants and cringe away.”

  Kevin tried to place the boy’s face as he swaggered up to them; he’d seen him around the estate but didn’t know his name. He did know that the lad hung around with Ashton Naylor so obviously the bastard was going to be trouble.

  “Is this your girlfriend, big nose? She’s cute, far too pretty for an ugly cunt like you.”

  The boy pushed past him and tried to place his arm around her shoulder. She whimpered, ran behind him and got hold of Kevin’s hand.

  He had difficulty describing how her clinging to him made him feel; his mother had been the last female to hold his hand…when he was about nine.

  The tall lad sneered. “Suit yourself you weird bitch. I’m Darren by the way. I expect to hear you scream my name when the next dead freak wants to scoff you and your queer boyfriend.”

  He spun around and stormed away.

  “Good riddance,” muttered the girl.

  Kevin wished he knew what this girl was called. Why was he so scared to ask her name? He watched the tall boy getting further and further away and began to panic.

  “Wait on!” he shouted.

  The girl squeezed his hand; he felt the same way but Darren knew Ashton and that meant that the fucker was well hard. It may only be about half a mile to the edge of the estate, but Christ alone knew what could jump out on them between here and the edge. He was sure that he could swallow his pride for the next few minutes. The girl would understand his reasoning, he was sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to protect her, Darren had stolen his bayonet.

  Darren stopped and turned, “Are you addressing me?”

  “Do you not want to come with us?” he stammered. “We’re getting out of here.”

  The boy slowly grinned without humour and walked back up to Kevin. “Well then, why the fuck didn’t I think of doing that? I mean, here I am running about like some brainless turd just hoping that someone like you would show me the light.” He rapped his fist on Kevin’s forehead. “The estate’s been cut off, you fucking moron.”

  Darren sighed. “Wait on, I bet
this is the first time that you two scared little bunnies have dared to venture out of your hidey holes, isn’t it?”

  Kevin nodded; it seemed the safest thing to do.

  “Trust my luck to be saddled with a pair of little mice.” He muttered then grabbed hold of Kevin’s arm and pulled him out of the girl’s grasp. “You stay there, princess.” He bent down to Kevin’s level. “If you want to stay with me, you’d better pull your fucking weight. Are we clear on that?”

  Kevin nodded again.

  “I was with a couple of lads earlier and they pulled their weight, we made a good team until some army cunts in gasmasks put bullets through their brains.”

  Darren gave him back the bayonet

  “You’re gonna fuck up the next zombie we find. If you start blubbing or try to run away, I’ll ram your pig sticker up your fucking arse.”

  Chapter Seven

  They all stopped in what Adrian had earlier named ‘the safe zone’; that meant any place away from low walls, corners of buildings and parked vehicles, especially them. The group had spotted a dozen of the deadies, another phrase coined by Adrian, hiding under cars. Any poor sod that got near them found a pair of arms reaching out, pulling them off balance and dragging them under the car. They’d seen it happen a couple of times whilst travelling through Breakspear.

  Ernest nodded once; Adrian nodded back and so did Emily. MrsWatson just leaned across and pecked his cheek.

  “Good luck dear,” she whispered.

  They’d picked her up about twenty minutes ago. Ernest saw the woman as they were running past the shops; her back was flat against the mini-market’s metal shutters. Three of the deadies were shambling towards her, they were on the other side of the street and Ernest privately thought that they wouldn’t be able to reach her in time.

  There was only one of the buggers left standing when they reached the woman; Adrian took that one out with his weighted sock. It turned out that Mrs.Watson was more than capable of looking after herself, as her husband had found out when he went all funny just after ‘Eastenders’ had finished earlier on.

  Ernest also discovered that she delivered Avon products in her spare time and when this was all over, she was more than willing to slip him the odd free bottle of shampoo as long as he kept quiet about it. She was the only person in their little group who seemed to think that everything would be back to normal in the morning.

  As agreed earlier, Ernest swapped his trusty pool cue for Adrian’s weighted sock, he’d changed the sock a couple of times since they’d left the pub, it had received a lot of use.

  “Look after it granddad.” whispered the lad.

  You needed space to swing the cue, which was something he would be desperately short of where he was about to go.

  “Are you sure you don’t want back up?”

  Ernest shook his head and patted the lad on the shoulders. This was something he needed to do alone. They had already worked out that it started with the headaches. Accepting that his wife was one of them now had been bloody hard but, due to their situation, he’d hardly had a spare moment to dwell on it.

  They hadn’t come across Brenda so far, or Jeff for that matter, then again the estate was a bloody large one and Ernest knew that they weren’t the only group trying to keep alive on Breakspear tonight. He’d been hearing sporadic gunfire all night, not that it surprised him; it was well known that if you needed a gun in Bradford, you always went to Breakspear.

  They’d checked out Adrian’s house first as it had been the closest to the Horse and Jockey. The place stank like the grave and it was obvious that there had been a struggle going on here earlier, but now the place was deserted. Ernest’s expert eyes saw the damage a boot had done to the pebble-dashed wall outside the front window and judging by the fact that the window was wide open, it looked like someone in his family had got out. Adrian seemed more than relieved when Ernest relayed this information. Emily said she couldn’t care less about her pissed up dad and Mrs.Watson had already explained what had happened at her house. That just left Ernest.

  He wound the end of the sock around his fingers and took a deep breath, then pushed open his garden gate. The evidence of Darren’s not-so-secret party was all around him; he saw crushed lager cans thrown around the front garden and a couple of smashed beer bottles under the window. The house was in darkness but the door was wide open. Ernest wasn’t sure whether that was a good or bad sign. His house hadn’t been spared from the mayhem that had blighted the rest of the estate; he saw evidence of that too.

  Ropes of wet gore hung down from Brenda’s rose bushes in the middle of the front lawn, the ground around the flowers was soaked in blood. On the freshly dug earth running parallel to the path were a pair of bright orange trainers, the feet were still in them. Ernest had been planning to plant potatoes in that patch of dirt next Friday.

  He stopped by his door and looked behind him, wondering if he really should be doing this. What if his Brenda or Darren was in the house? What if they had become deadies, did he really have the strength to put an end to their suffering?

  “Oh Jesus, please forgive me for what I may have to do.”

  He placed his hand upon the door and pushed it open. Nothing jumped out on him, there were no bodies; the hallway was deserted. He leaned over the threshold, looked to the right and looked up the stairs; a young girl lay sprawled about halfway up the steps. It was difficult to judge whether she was still alive or had become one of them.

  There was no way of knowing whether his kitchen contained any of those horrors as the door was shut, he could nip round the back and peek through the window but he knew that Darren had turned the yard and the back garden into a junk yard for his bikes, there were way too many concealed areas in there. Ernest stepped to the side and peered through the living room window, he saw two bodies lying beside the sofa, and he didn’t know either of them. He stepped into the hallway, checked to make sure the living room door was shut tight then started to swing the weighted sock around his head. He coughed loudly.

  Just as he thought, the girl lifted her head, fixed him with a pair of dead eyes and began to groan. As she moved he saw that her stomach had been ripped open, it had only been her body pressed against the stairs keeping her guts from bursting out. Her insides spilled out and splattered down the stairs, his carpet now resembled a gutter from an abattoir. The girl hadn’t even noticed that she had just lost half of her body weight and continued to moan. He knew her noise would attract the attention of any others in the house so Ernest ran up, ducked to avoid her grasping fingers, and smashed the sock into her temple. Her moaning stopped and the girl fell back down.

  “Rest in peace little lady.” he whispered.

  Ernest stepped over the body and climbed up a couple of steps, all the doors upstairs were shut, the house was still silent. Again he wondered if he was making the right decision here, perhaps it was better not to know what had happened to Brenda. Ernest took a deep breath, no, he had to do everything in his power to ensure that she was put out of her misery; he looked down at the bloodied heap of teenager at the foot of his steps and wondered if her parents would feel the same way.

  Those thoughts would have to wait, he needed to keep his wits about him; if he let his mind wander he wouldn’t leave this house, not alive anyway. Ernest went back down to the hallway wondering which one of them outside would vote to dispatch him if the unthinkable happened to him.

  He opened the front door a little wider and placed Darren’s boots against it to stop the door from swinging shut. Ernest needed to be sure that his exit was clear, just in case. If those two lying on the floor really were a pair of deadies then as soon as he opened the door they should both react. He’d have to check the kitchen too; Ernest knew that he needed to remove all threats from downstairs before he went up those stairs. Although he knew that if they did trap him, escaping from an upstairs window wouldn’t present much of a challenge, but why take the risk?

  After counting slowly to three
, he grabbed the handle and eased open the door. His eyes adjusted to the darkness fairly quickly, another skill that he still retained from his previous dishonest career. The bodies didn’t move, but just to be sure, Ernest coughed. Not one moan emerged from the pair. He let out a sigh of relief and placed his hand on the door; somebody else’s hand fell on his. It seized his fingers and pulled them upwards. He squealed and tried to jump back, the door swung shut to reveal a pretty girl staring back at him and attempting to pull his fingers up to her waiting mouth.

  Ernest couldn’t get loose, oh Christ! It was as if his fingers were wedged in a vice. The girl began to moan and from the corner of his eye, he saw another one stand up from behind the sofa. Ernest brought the sock down on her head, she jolted but didn’t go down, and there wasn’t enough bloody room to hit her temple. The other thing was now right behind him, and was moaning too. He dropped the sock, formed his fingers into a point and snapped his arm forward, thrusting his digits into the girl’s eye. Her moans immediately stopped, she slid down the wall and Ernest felt sick as his fingers slipped out of that warm, wet hole he’d made.

  He dropped to both knees and dived for the sock, but it was stuck under the lad’s trainer. He looked up and watched it bend over, drooling like a teething baby and reaching down to grab him. Ernest knew that if those grasping fingers got a hold of him, he was finished. He threw himself down and rolled to the side. There was no fucking way that he was going to allow one of Darren’s brain-dead friends to eat him in his own house.

  His ashtray was on the table across the room. He got back on his knees and crawled towards it, it wasn’t ideal but he couldn’t think of anything else close by that he could use to defend himself. He knew without turning around that the thing was coming after him. Ernest reached up and grabbed the ashtray, throwing the contents into the lad’s face then he jumped to his feet and ran at him, smashing the improvised weapon into his mouth. He … it … staggered back and fell over the arm of the sofa, Ernest reached down and snatched up his sock and swung it around his head waiting for the dead boy to get back on his feet.