The Undead Day Sixteen

by RR Haywood

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I call out, not bothering with the pleasantries seeing as this is a dream and the old, dying man doesn't actually exist.

  ‘Gone,’ he wheezes into the air, not bothering to turn or even glance in my direction.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Tunnels,’ he points off to the looming tunnel mouth just yards from his prone form.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Not safe here anymore,’ he finally turns his head to stare at me and for a second I wait for the recognition of it being someone I know, but it isn’t. It’s an old man getting ready to die in the squalor of an old tube station.

  ‘Oh,’ I can’t think of anything else to say, fighting the urge to offer help while remembering this is all made up shit and is meaningless. I’ve just got to ride it out until I can wake up.

  ‘I’m dying,’ he wheezes dramatically and somewhat predictably.

  ‘Looks like it,’ I reply.

  ‘Take me up top,’ he doesn't so much ask as demand.

  ‘Do what mate?’

  ‘Take me up top,’ he forces the words out while fighting off another coughing fit.

  ‘Top where?’

  ‘YOU BLOODY IDIOT,’ the bellowing voice startles me enough to step back, the power and depth thundering from the old bugger who descends into another round of coughing. ‘Up…top….outside…bloody outside you blithering fool.’

  ‘Er, right…’ I nod slowly, ‘yeah, that’s not really gonna happen mate.’

  ‘I want to feel the sun on my face.’

  ‘It’s night time,’ I shrug at him, ‘no sun.’

  He glances at the watch on his wrist. ‘It’s three thirty in the afternoon,’ he says in a voice that speaks of culture and education, ‘it is not night time, it is day time…’

  ‘You are covered in lice mate.’

  ‘Am I?’ He asks with another long and thorough scratch at his beard, ‘can’t say as I noticed.’

  ‘And this is a dream so…so no, I’m not carrying you anywhere as you don’t actually exist so…er…bollocks.’

  ‘Yours or mine?’ He glances up at me.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Blithering fool,’ he tuts, ‘your dream or my dream?’

  ‘Mine obviously.’

  ‘Why obviously? Just because you are there talking to me doesn’t mean it’s your dream…this could be my dream.’

  ‘What? Get off, it’s my dream….I’ve passed out in the munitions factory and I’m having weird dreams…I saw Paco and Chris a few minutes ago.’

  ‘And I am at home…well, not my home, but a care home. It’s a bloody awful place, run like a blasted concentration camp and, worst of all, they serve weak tea. And I can’t abide weak tea… We’re all dreaming young man,’ he adds wistfully, ‘so rather than standing here arguing who is having this blasted dream I suggest you take me up top.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘The lice? We’ve just established that one of us is dreaming…the lice therefore, are not real.’

  ‘Oh…shit.’ He’s right. This is a dream and as disgusting as he looks, I don’t really feel that I have much of a choice. With a sigh I step closer, grimacing at the stench coming off him. It’s an actual wall of stench that is so foul it has me gagging on the spot.

  ‘Stop your bloody malingering,’ he chastises me with a mean look, ‘young lad like you can hoist me up and carry me on your back. Here,’ he holds a hand up, ‘help me up.’

  Clasping the hand, I’m surprised at the strength in his grip as he clamps on tightly. Coughing, spluttering, wheezing and fighting for breath he gets free of the bedding and slowly gets to his feet while I bend over closer to give what support I can.

  ‘You’re naked,’ I observe quietly.

  ‘That I am,’ he replies proudly, ‘naked as the day I was born.’

  ‘Where are your clothes?’

  ‘Gave ‘em away,’ he wheezes, ‘I’m going out nuddy as a baby.’

  ‘Right…awesome…so I’m going to have a naked old man on my back, is that right?’

  ‘Sharper than a knife, aren’t you?’ He replies in a cutting tone, ‘turn round and crouch down.’

  ‘Oh for the love of god. ‘Tutting with disgust I do as bid, turning on the spot and dropping down to present my back to him.’

  ‘Closer you bloody fool,’ he snaps, ‘I’m not a blasted gymnast…that’s it…now hold steady.’ Bony hands grab my shoulders, pulling me back as he heaves himself up. His digits dig into my skin and I can feel the sharp nails cutting me. His rancid breath blasts past my ear and the greasy strands of his beard start tickling the back of my neck. As his hot, feverish, naked body presses against mine, the stench of shit and stale urine brings tears to my eyes and the thought of his encrusted penis rubbing against me makes my stomach flip over.

  ‘Hold my legs,’ he demands in a hoarse whisper that is way too close to my ear for comfort. My hands reach down and loop under his bare thighs that feel wet and sticky.

  ‘Hoist me up then.’ He continues giving orders as though this is entirely natural and I am his to do with as he pleases.

  Why am I doing this? I could just drop him and walk off. He isn’t real but a figment of my imagination. Except he feels real and that bloody smell is far too real. All of it is too real.

  ‘Which way?’ I gasp. Unfortunately, the way our bodies are designed means that air is blown out when we speak, which then means that air has to be pulled back in. Breathing in with his whole foulness so close is too much for me at the moment.

  ‘Are you sick?’ He barks when I bend forward to retch, strands of spittle drool from my mouth as I fight the urge to vomit.

  ‘Which way?’ I ask again through blurred eyes.

  ‘The way you bloody came in, you blithering fool,’ he chastises me with that same withering tone, ‘come on, I ain’t dying on your puny back you know.’

  ‘Puny back?’ I start walking, treading carefully through the flotsam and jetsam of the abandoned platform.

  ‘Down there,’ one of his hands reaches past my head to point towards the end of the platform and the set of steps leading up.

  He isn’t heavy so much as disgustingly fucking gross and I move fast, kicking stuff out of the way until I clamber up the steps and start down the platform.

  ‘Ah,’ he sighs with too much hot air going into my ear again, ‘I’ll miss this place.’

  ‘Here?’ I ask incredulously.

  ‘Not here, you bloody idiot,’ he snaps, ‘how anyone can actually like this place is beyond me and truth be told I was bloody glad to see the back of them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who he asks! The people that lived here you bumbling halfwit.’

  ‘Why did they leave?’ My god he stinks so bad, so so bad.

  ‘Why? Why do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, this is a fucking dream,’ I remind him harshly.

  ‘Those blasted creatures that’s why,’ he shakes his head in despair, brushing his beard against my neck and no doubt tumbling a thousand lice down my back at the same time.

  ‘The zombies?’

  ‘Yes the zombies…what else would I mean? The aliens? The mutant fishmen that crawled out from the sea…’

  ‘How…’ I cough up a lump of phlegm which gets ejected off to the side, ‘how long have you been here?’

  ‘What are you? A bloody policeman?’ He tries to shout but the action renders him into a coughing fit again, and being as close as he is, I can feel the rattle of his bones and the wheeze of his lungs as he fights to draw breath. Fear grips him, fear that this is it, the final few seconds and his hands dig tight into my shoulders while I feel his heart thudding erratically.

  ‘Hold on,’ I speak softly now, feeling a great sense of pity for a man that knows he is dying and has one last wish to see the sun. Moving faster, I start back down the corridor with the flaming torches towards the escalator.

  The voice that comes from the old man is whispered and weak, ‘a long time,
’ he says with regret and pain, ‘years, many years.’

  ‘Why? Why down here?’

  ‘Last place,’ he takes a ragged breath, ‘we barricaded and sealed off a section and came down here to live.’

  ‘Why here? There’s got to be loads of places they can get in.’

  ‘They got clever, they worked things out,’ he explains, ‘and those of us left just couldn’t find anywhere else. Nothing was left…tower blocks were useless, castles and old forts all fell…’

  ‘Forts?’

  ‘All of ‘em,’ he wheezes into my neck, ‘everything.’

  ‘Didn’t you fight back?’

  ‘With what?’ He snaps with a show of strength, ‘with who? Against so many? No, we ran and hid like rats down a sewer, getting filthy and diseased from the lack of sun and food.’

  ‘You should have fought back.’

  ‘Old men and women, mothers with children? You expect them to fight and charge into battle and die like everyone else did.’

  ‘Not everyone who fought back died,’ I point out.

  ‘Didn’t they? Then where are they? Where are the saviours of our species come to cast light upon our sorrowful eyes.’

  ‘Very dramatic.’

  ‘They died…or they gave up…or more likely they gave up and then died,’ the old man speaks the bitter words so harshly they set him of coughing again and this time it goes on for minutes while his lungs fight a desperate battle of their own to draw air.

  At the escalator I pause, not knowing if I am meant to ascend or go somewhere else. Common sense dictates the surface will be up but its pitch black up there and not somewhere I fancy going. But again, between the coughs, a trembling arm reaches out to indicate we need to go up.

  Climbing broken escalators with an old dying man having a coughing fit in the dark isn’t as easy as you might think. Halfway up my thighs are burning and my own chest is heaving from the exertion. I’m having to keep a tight grip on his legs to stop him slipping off so I can’t use my hands to pull me along on the railing either.

  I stumble forward into the darkness and feel warm, wet liquid spraying the back of my neck. He coughs harder and I’m guessing it’s blood mixed with phlegm and spit being sprayed out. A few times his whole body tenses and shakes from the exertion of the coughs that refuse to stop. Eventually they ease off, dying down to the odd spasm and we walk in near silence for a few minutes until he recovers breath to talk.

  ‘There was hope,’ his voice comes out weak and strained, barely a whisper uttered into the darkness, ‘when it first happened. Oh don’t get me wrong, millions were dying and being turned and a few were fighting back here and there but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Rumours…stories and…’ he takes another few ragged breaths, ‘just whispers really but we heard of a group in the south who were not only fighting back but winning…inflicting huge losses on the other side…trained and armed they were and moved about in an old army truck wreaking havoc. We heard about it, many did…and we all said that if they come our way we’d join them…some even left to head south trying to find them…we kept seeing the turned ones leaving and they headed south too so we figured there was truth in it…’

  ‘What happened?’ My voice seems unnaturally loud after his muted tones, ‘and am I going the right way?’

  ‘Yes you are you blasted fool, where else is there to go?’ He groans at my evident ineptitude.

  ‘So what happened?’ I press when he doesn't continue.

  ‘Impatient as well as stupid,’ he tuts, ‘nothing happened, the rumours stopped…and hope stopped too, the survivors began to realise there was no help coming so they descended into the usual human fall back positions of squabbling killing and stealing.’

  ‘What happened to the group? The ones who were fighting back?’

  ‘I just bloody told you! I don’t know…the rumours stopped, the stories stopped…’

  ‘There must have been a reason?’

  ‘Of course there was a blasted reason you halfwit but damned if I know what it is…hurry up I can feel death’s icy hand gripping my heart.’

  ‘Alright Shakespeare,’ I snort, ‘doth thy icy hand clasp at thy heart doth it?’

  ‘Don’t mock your elders, you impudent sod,’ he smacks the side of my head with a solid thump that makes him start coughing again.

  I speed up, stretching my stride out as I barrel down the pitch dark corridor and like before, I start seeing the first hints of the darkness lifting.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ I say once the coughing fit passes but I can feel his grip is weaker now and his breath too shallow and rapid.

  ‘What isn’t?’ He asks almost slurring the words from fatigue.

  ‘All this shit, about there being a group that could have saved everyone but they stopped so the whole wide world just gave up because they did…it’s not going to work.’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re on about you crazy, blasted halfwit, jabbering on about god only knows what…’

  ‘I was that group,’ I inform him and give an audible groan when we reach the base of another inert escalator. ‘I led that group to be precise,’ I inform him while my own breathing gets harder, ‘for over two weeks…we cut thousands down…more than that…’

  ‘That was years ago,’ he whispers.

  ‘Not to me it isn’t…it’s now…my dream you see.’

  ‘My dream the blithering idiot says, my dream.That’s an assumption not a fact, an ideal not a reality…I can’t abide this filthy, darkened place,’ he spits, ‘I’m glad to be dying…you hear that my boy? Glad to be leaving this cursed and wretched land so full of darkness and…’

  ‘Take it easy Shakespeare, you’ll set yourself off again.’

  ‘Do you know the last time I saw the sun?’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘Don’t be flippant, you blasted fool,’ he snaps with some energy back in his voice, and despite the circumstances, I can’t help but smile. ‘Yars ago,’ he adds in a whisper, ‘became too sick to walk myself and none of those sick buggers would carry me.’

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Sick, yes sick…what do you think living in the darkness does to you…’ the words hiss out with a wheeze that I’ve already come to recognise as the precursor to a fit and one that is much worse than the others.

  I can feel him dying on my back. Literally dying as he struggles to breathe air into his body. Each breath taken in irritates whatever infection is inside him and he can’t help the reflex action of dry coughing over and over with such heaving intensity it shakes his whole frame.

  We get to the top and instead of waiting for instructions I head down the corridor towards the light. It becomes a race of life and death. To get this old man outside into the sun before that final breath is expunged from his body or his heart gives out from the fitting coughs.

  ‘Hang on,’ I gasp and hoist him up higher before breaking into a steady jog. The coughing gets worse as the once tight fingers on my shoulders start losing grip and his body starts sliding down my back. I drop down to a crouch, giving him less space to fall as there’s no way of stopping him falling off.

  On the floor he rolls side to side writhing in panic as the coughs just keep coming. His frail frame is such a pale, grey pallor, like there’s no blood flow to his skin. Instead, it sprays frothy and bright red from his thin lips, dripping into his beard and coating his hands. His eyes flicker open, searching for the light ahead of us with such desperation that I don’t hesitate but gather him up in my arms and start walking again. The coughing disrupts my gait and my arms ache from the heavy pressure of his body heaving and shaking.

  The light gets stronger, blinding almost in its purity and strength. Sweat prickles my forehead to drip down onto the naked man I carry in my arms but there it is, the latticed gate pulled close across the entrance with a huge padlock and a thick chain holding it shut.

  Realising we’re sealed inside, I flounder about trying to work o
ut a way of positioning his body so he might see a glimpse of the sky through the gaps in the metal strips of the gate. His hand thumps the side of my head again and again with nasty little knocks that make me almost drop him to the ground.

  ‘THE BLOODY KEY YOU BLITHERING IDIOT,’ he thunders with a voice of power snatched between the gasps for air and once again descends into coughs. On the wall, well out of reach from the gate, is a hook screwed into the old grout between the tiles, and a large key is hanging from it.

  I have to put him down but I do so gently, then scrabble to get the key and work to undo the padlock, unclasping the looped metal bar and de-threading the chain to wrench the gate open. It takes time as someone has put a lot of effort into looping the chain round the frame to keep it as secure as possible and by the time I turn round to pick him back up he’s already dead.

  Lifeless. Eyes open and staring into nowhere. The chest that was heaving doesn't move, nor do the arms that thrashed with the spasms that took over his body. A great shame settles on me, that this was somehow my fault. Gently I lift him back up and step out through the gate and into the bright sunlight of a ruined street where I lay him to rest on the old paving thick with weeds growing through the cracks.

  Death. Final and resolute. Without doubt as to its intentions or motive. Simply to take life and never give it back. He is just one old man that passed away in a coughing fit, but it’s more than that. It’s what he represents. The final throes of a humanity that has given up and made a choice to dwell in the blackness of tunnels rather than fight back.

  This is all a cheap shot. I know that, but it doesn't take away the emotion of the moment at seeing his lifeless body so pale and weak lying naked on a pavement.

  Choices. That’s all we are, a stream of decisions and choices. Of choosing what to do, where to go and the self-justification that we’re making the right choice. They went into the darkness to escape the undead because they lost hope. Too weak to fight back, too ill-equipped to make a stand, so they took courage from the snatched whispers of a group doing that for them.