Even Rich was unsure about his position. He had been happy when I first met him. He missed his wife and wasn't sure he'd ever see her again. But he felt a sense of purpose with his role in the community. He was seen as a guardian and a beacon of stability in the post-dead world.
"I can't believe Gordon treated me like that. How many people do you think heard him? What the fuck has security got to do with him anyway? He just spends his time in that massive house getting pissed. It's not a stroke of bad luck that the alcohol is rationed so slightly." Rich’s voice grated with bitterness.
We drifted between wrecked cars, Rich with one white-knuckled hand in a vice around the steering wheel. We weren't going any faster than twenty miles an hour. That was fast enough to keep beyond any of the sprinters, trusting we didn't happen past an elite athletics club, and slow enough for us to be able to jot down what we saw. We had been given a full and a couple of canisters of petrol to go with our supplies. We both had guns—a joyous rarity—and the day should have matched our moods.
It didn't take long to come to the road where we had found Isabelle. I directed Rich around the corner to the street that saw our destruction. It was easier to spot now—the fire of the explosion had caught, and the houses were so close together that the fire had not burned out until it reached the houses at each end of the road.
Now the street was lined with the wooden bones of the homes that had been there before. Ash drifted in a light wind. The scenery did not match the weather. Slow undead crawled between the gardens. I paid them no heed at first, then I realised that Toby or Tom could have been bitten before they died. That infection may have been enough for their bodies to continue after death, the momentum of the infection forcing their bodies through the tight prison of rigor mortis. I asked Rich to slow down and told him why. The car seemed clear of the threat of faster infected, and with the street free of abandoned cars, any remaining vehicles parked neatly on driveways or at the side of the road, if we did need to make a speeding exit it would not be difficult.
None of the dead we saw were people we knew. I didn't think that I would ever decide whether or not that was a good thing. Looking at the decaying and bitten bodies of those whose lives were now lost to the rot and ruin of undeath, I think believing someone was either true dead or out there surviving was a more heartening thought. And I was only looking for men I had known briefly; perhaps Isabelle, if she had somehow escaped.
I could tell from his demeanour that with every face he took in, every zombie he spotted, Rich was desperately looking for his lost wife. I tried to replace the face of a dead woman in an open bathrobe, chest cavity eaten to the bone and face half pecked away by wildlife, with the face of Carla. I couldn't manage that act of macabre creativity. It was too hard. I didn't want to see her as one of those things.
"How far up the road was the first house?" Rich asked as we approached the recon point that had caused so much disaster.
"About half way. There's nothing here though, is there? What's the point of looking? Why the fuck are we out here?"
"We're here because it's what we've been ordered to do. So seeing as we've got the fuel." Rich stole a sneaky sideways glance at me "I'm going to be taking us on a minor detour."
I arched an eyebrow at him. "How minor?"
I knew the answer before he gave it. His curiosity wasn't as timid as my own. He wanted to go and look for his wife. He wanted to either save her, or put her memory into the grave where it deserved to rest. I wasn't going to stop him. The route we had been given, we wouldn't even be going that far out of our way. I asked him how we were going to get there. In response, Rich rattled out a string of minor roads that had me lost within seconds. I was assured it was the best way of meeting Gordon's requirements of scouting for survivors, whilst scratching Rich's own itch. As it was highly unlikely that he would get this freedom or chance ever again, he was not going to let it go to waste.
* * *
I calculated that is had been about thirty-two days since I left London. Seeing how quickly we had collapsed as a society was astonishingly unsettling. In the developed world, we claimed civilisation beyond borders, despite what immigration control counter-claimed. I doubted that mankind would have collapsed to such deprave levels in such a short time in other environments. It is true we were doomed if we were isolated from international support. Hollywood had already alluded to that several times on the silver screen, and we were now proving them right.
Every small village we passed was a burning husk. Sure, there were signs of life here and there. I jotted it all down in a crude A5 'journalist' notebook that I had been passed as some sort of joke. Bedroom light left on. Small amount of smoke, possibly from a fire. Tyre tracks. Recent blood spatters. Lots of those.
The writing was the worst. Daubed over the front of houses, across road-facing garden walls and across the top of road bridges, we no longer had gang drawl daubed in between the artistic stripes of graffiti murals. We had 'Smith family' and the date they had passed by. I gave a silent salute to the Smith family, and hoped they were all still alive. We had 'Yolande, follow us to Grandma' and 'avoid Slough, all dead'. The Grandma sign was an interesting one. Either some kind of latter-day Hansel and Gretel luring someone to a safe place in the forest, or the family was genuinely safe and did not want to give away their potential location. Not that anywhere was guaranteed to be safe anymore. Even the community, with our high walls and our twenty-four-hour security couldn't keep the infected out.
I realised then, feeling more than a little stupid, that I had forgotten to ask Rich what happened yesterday. The community had been in so much tumult afterwards, and I had been dismissed so quickly by Gordon, that it had been frightened from my mind. Well there was no one around to listen in on our conversation now. I thought about how I should approach it; it seemed like such a sensitive subject. Then I did what I did best; I threw caution to the wind, and asked him in my usual blunt manner.
"How did they get through the gates yesterday?"
I flinched at the look Rich gave me. The big man looked immediately sorry for it, and rushed out a flood of apologies, conflicted between keeping his eyes on the road and making sure I knew he was being genuine. His very demeanour proved the truth of his words. I kept telling him it was okay, and not to worry.
"Look, I just don't know what happened, Warren, and that's the truth of it. Gordon had ordered me to double check all the defences that morning. I was ordered to put two of the newer guys on the gate. Apparently, they were to start learning the ropes so that the community aren't so reliant on seeing one person in charge of our safety. I can understand that—it's a fragile world, and none of us are going to be around forever. But if I'm going to have other people on the special duties—and guarding the gate is one of those duties—then I wanted to be the one doing the choosing. I told Gordon that, but he was having none of it. What a tosser. He even pulled rank on me, told me that if I had just been a house guard before the outbreak, I should be used to taking orders from people richer than him. Fucking prick. So, I did what I was told, and I still have no fucking idea why. It's not like me, Warren, walking away from my post like that, and I felt a shiver down my spine before I was even a small way away from the controls. I'm not a control freak—far from it. I mean, if I was picking others for guard duty, you'd be on that list. I didn't like the way Gordon ordered me around. And then, when there was a breach, he had the gall to accuse me, to tell me that it was my fault? Who the fuck does he think he is?"
"He thinks he owns the place," I answered quietly.
Rich was panting, his anger spilling through into his driving. We were going quicker along the road now. By no means break-neck pace, but far too fast for us to either take note of the surroundings, or avoid anything unexpected that might come out at us. He kept his silence for a few seconds and then seemed to snap back into himself, glancing down at the speedo and pressing his foot on the brakes. The car started to slow down, and my heartbeat climbed down in pace wit
h the car.
"That's it isn't it, Warren? He's in charge. Him and Travis. What they say goes, and screw everyone else that gets in the way."
"That's the way I'm seeing it. Based on the visit I had from Rick the other day, Gordon and Travis are seeing that too. I don't think they're happy about it. Well Travis, I'm not so sure. But Gordon is most definitely gunning for me."
"Don't you think it's strange then? He sets me up for a fall over the gate, and he turns your brother against you,"
"He's not my brother."
"Your whatever he is against you. Certain as fuck he's not speaking to his missus anymore."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I've heard from more than a couple of sources that he's been caught with his finger in a few different pies recently, so to speak."
"Well that didn't take him very fucking long," I muttered. I was not going to tell Carla. Rick would be joining the undead quicker than a lightning flash if she found out he had been dicking around on her. "So Rick gets pally with Gordon and then suddenly tells me I'm rocking the boat. What did you do to piss him off?"
"I really don't know. But what I think is that we've been moved out of the way for a day, and I don't think we're going to like what we see when we get back."
"Is that why you want to try to find your wife? Thinking of moving on?"
"I don't know. I do. I mean... shit I know I need to find out whether or not she's alive. That's a basic fact. I don't know how I'm going to react if I find her... if she's not with us anymore. But beyond a doubt, I've got to know, you know? I can't go on with all this pointless bollocks if there's no reason to it. My reason right now is to find Becky. After that...I thought keeping people in the community was going to keep me going, but I'm not sure that it's going to be my decision to keep on leading that. So, how's the journalism going?"
I snorted, more at my own naive ideals than Rich's fair and simple question. Set up a paper for the community. Find out and collate everyone's story. The more I thought about it, the more I thought Travis was using me for a bit of dirty work, collecting details that he would never have been able to find out on his own. No one trusted the leaders—no one who wasn't in their little clique at any rate, and so far the only known members of that elite cult were Rick and Charles. Travis had been right though, the information I was getting in my interviews was useful to them. Without me, they wouldn't have got near some of the stories I was hearing.
"It's going, that's for sure," I said. "I don't know what I was even thinking of. Getting people's dirty dark little secrets from their survival stories and handing them all over to that slimy piece? As if he's going to do anything good with them. What a fucking idiot. I should have just kept it all to myself. I've rocked my own boat, that's for sure. I think they're starting to get worried about how much I can find out. I think they think I'm a threat."
"And you have got history on that?"
I was puzzled briefly, before I remembered the pier. "That? Oh come on; what happened between me and Austin hardly sets a precedent."
"Are you so sure about that?" The way Rich had countered my cocky statement immediately made me doubt its validity. He ploughed on, obviously sensing my hesitation. "You're a fucking legend in the community. Do not disregard the brevity of that statement. I am not fucking around with you."
I scratched my head. I was confused and stunned. Usually, when people called me a legend, it was hyphenated.
"Seriously, Warren. When people join here, they've been running on the road for their lives for however long. Back in the olden days, we'd go to the local, my wife, she always had a bath to unwind. How do you unwind when you've been killing to survive? You tell campfire stories. And you, my friend, have the stories to end them all. Most people expect me to be the epic undead killer. They get really disappointed when they find out I haven't really ventured outside the community since this all started. Most of them probably daydream about me crushing zombie skulls with one giant fist." He mimicked this along with a face that didn't look far from constipated, and I couldn't suppress a laugh. "But you? You have the story to end them all. You saw one of the first undead."
"Not necessarily true," I pointed out.
"But you saw one in the early hours of the morning?"
I nodded the affirmative.
"Then it has to be true. The outbreak didn't really warm up before then. Talk about catching a lucky break. Then, not only did you cycle to get out of the locked-down capital city..."
"It wasn't actually locked down when I left." I felt compelled to keep the story on the straight and narrow, but I did add with a mutter "And there was no fucking way I was getting on a train."
Rich chuckled, happy to keep monstering away with his fairy story. "Whatever. Not only did you cycle and see a plane come out of the sky, you got your sister prepped to defend the house before you even got there."
"Then we had to leave the house because we opened the door to a zombie eating the next door neighbour."
"Better than nothing. You decided a pier was the best way to go when you lived on a coast. You mean you couldn't have tried to at least steal a little boat from somewhere, then take it from there? Then you rebel against the leader of the pier because it turns out he wants to bone your sister."
I was starting to get a little pissed off with the direction this was headed, but bit my tongue to see if Rich would get to a point. "The band you're with turn on you at the orders of aforementioned leader—does that sound familiar in any way—and you kill them by throwing them to the zombies, so you can make a distraction to escape. Then when you finally do get to the pier, your sister has been kidnapped by the same said douche bag leader, a helicopter somehow crashes into the pier, and you survive. What do you do then? Find the guy and get your revenge by having him thrown out of the safe haven he was hiding in.
"Do you have any idea how people react to that story?"
"Dubiously?" I tried.
"Too fucking right. And then, when we have to tell them it's true and where to find your sister so she can back up the story, we now have to add on that you were in our first scavenging runs, saved a little girl from an infected house, and were one of the few survivors of a gas explosion."
I think I was blushing. "When you put it like that, I'm starting to think I should just put my fucking feet up and peel potatoes. That sounds exhausting."
"You know what the best bit is?"
I shook my head. If this was the way people talked about me when newbies came to the community, I must seem like a right pretentious knob.
"The best bit is, you're human," Rich said. "You've made mistakes. Lots of them, depending on who you talk to. People that wouldn't have left the house, people that would have still tried to hijack a boat. Others that would have killed Austin as soon as they could and taken over the pier. But, you didn't. You've been normal. You're one of us, and despite everything you've been through, somehow, you're alive."
"What does that say, apart from I steal all the fucking luck?"
"It gives people hope, Warren. It's not just the rich guys and the nutters that are going to survive this. There's a place in post-humanity for the most fundamentally normal."
"I've done a lot of things that aren't normal."
"How many people have you killed because you liked it?"
I put my head in my hands and wiped at my eyes. I felt suddenly tired and unhappy with being questioned like this. Rich, however, did not relent.
"You didn't enjoy killing any of them, did you? The humans? Because you have killed people that are alive."
"I...yes I had to. They were going to kill me, Rich. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to die."
I don't know if Rich knew the full story. That Andy had only acted out of fear for the safety of his wife. He had only been acting to secure their own future. Was that anymore selfish than me wanting to keep myself and Carla alive?
"Do you think Austin killed, intentionally or not, all of those people on that
pier for some greater good? At any point, was he acting out of benevolent kindness, or was he just looking to put himself in the best position for survival?"
I didn't give a full answer to that. I had primarily acted through desire for survival. I couldn't take the moral high-ground here. That wasn't the Warren that Rich needed to see right now, though. "Austin was disturbed. I can't think of a better way to describe it. And don't you think lots of people are going to use this as an excuse to act out all the depraved little fantasies they couldn't get away with before? Even if it is just throwing a brick through a car window, you're going to be more likely to try it now, because you're just not going to be taken down on it. I saw a body back in Worthing that I don't even want to describe. It had been so violently tortured, and I'm pretty sure that was before the person was killed. They ended up infected, too. I mean, how many sick fucks have been let off the leash because there's no one guarding the loop anymore? Austin was just one of those."
"And statistically speaking, how many of those do you think we could end up with in the community? In general terms. I used to like Gordon. Now I don't trust him as far as I could throw him, and Travis just creeps me the fuck out. He's always... sneering."
"Judging."
"Weighing you up. As if he's considering your worth as a mate or a meal, and when he finds you wanting of both, he just mentally discards you."
"That was pretty deep."
Rich looked sheepish for a brief second. "Well I have my moments. Hey, look, we're here."
I hooked my head out the window to see a residential street much like every other we had passed. This was a reasonably new development, the kind the big companies tended to throw up in a couple of months. Gardens the size of postage stamps, and walls all mundane red brick. The houses were supposedly detached, but the walls were so close together that you would barely be able to squeeze a shit out in the gap between them. At first I thought the roads were the same, but then I realised there were small differences here and there. There were no cars, for example. Houses all had open doors, with few exceptions. The houses with closed doors had their windows daubed with red crosses. I didn't need to think hard to guess what lurked behind those walls. The citizens here had the same idea as the community, but had acted it out far in advance of our own thinking. That prospect gave me a buzz and I couldn't wait to pass it on to Rich.
Great Bitten (Book 2): Survival Page 17
