The Undead Day Fifteen

by RR Haywood

  Orange hair stands proud and thick on top, to the sides and hanging down, like a giant afro. The blood smeared down his jaw and the thick make-up only serve to make the clown look mean and savage.

  It wears a white silk jumpsuit, several sizes too big with black splodges like a dairy cow, but that too is filthy and covered in blood. The shoes are there, big red shoes with the over sized toes. Not too big that it stops him moving but big enough to notice.

  The clown stands still, hands behind his back. Unmoving, he stares with an upright head and posture of erect intelligence. The smoky fog drifts in front and he appears in varying stages of visibility. Clowns don’t bother me one bit but, Sarah, my sister, was terrified of them. So was my mother. They could never go with my father and I to the circus but then I never minded that as it became like our special thing. Seeing this one now, half hidden through the fog and with that downturned, blood stained mouth, even I feel a chill running down my spine.

  ‘You are joking right?’ Roy snorts, ‘a clown?’

  ‘One word, Roy,’ Blowers growls, ‘don’t say one fucking word…’

  ‘Yeah but…’

  ‘Cookey is terrified of them,’ Blowers points out needlessly, ‘and I’ll be surely taking the piss out of him for years to come for this…but one word right now and you’ll be on your arse mate…’ Nick is already with Blowers, both of them staring at Roy

  ‘Easy,’ I warn, but feel a wave of pride at the loyalty, the bond and the love that runs so deep between the three of them, bringing them together.

  ‘I can’t be here…’ Cookey whimpers, ‘really…we’ve got to run…’

  ‘Lad,’ Clarence’s deep voice sounds from close by, the reassuring weight of his enormous hand resting on Cookey’s shoulder, ‘it’s got to go through me and Dave first, and that ain’t gonna happen, is it?’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Is it still there?’ I can hear he’s at risk of hyperventilating from the way he speaks. Dave reacts with a speed that still leaves me staggered. Pistol out, aimed, shot and back in the holster as the clown slumps down with the back of his head blown off.

  ‘No,’ Dave says bluntly.

  ‘See, lad,’ Clarence says, ‘he’s gone…can’t even see him now.’

  ‘Stay in the middle with Clarence for a bit, Dave you lead again…we need to keep moving.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Cookey takes a deep breath.

  ‘Don’t be, we’re a team,’ I say it quickly and get back to the matter at hand, ‘Roy, you see any more mate feel free to pick them off.’

  ‘More clowns?’ He asks as though it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.

  The laugh comes back again, louder, closer and similar to that clown from the Simpsons, but so evil we all freeze. Cookey starts up again, panting for breath and whimpering. Paula goes pale starts to shake.

  ‘Coulrophobia,’ she mutters, ‘fear of clowns.’

  ‘You too?’ I ask across the group.

  ‘Bit,’ she swallows, ‘but I’m fine.’

  Dave keeps leading us across a wide field, the grass firm underfoot despite the heavy rain from the storm yesterday. The laugh sounds out periodically and drifts from different directions. I keep thinking it will lose the impact if anything Cookey gets worse each time he hears it, probably with the image of that clown imprinted on his brain.

  ‘Hold,’ Dave calls the order, holding one hand up as he stops to stare into the fog. I can see him staring, staring hard as though trying to work something out. Clarence looks up and over, the others trying to keep a good look around.

  ‘What?’ I half whisper.

  ‘A car.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Car.’

  ‘So? Why have you stopped because of a car?’

  ‘A car parked in a field,’ Dave states, ‘not right.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I thread past the team and find Dave staring suspiciously at the rear end of a Honda just about in view through the mist. The way Dave squints you’d think the car was about to attack us.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I whisper properly this time, ‘it’s just a car.’

  ‘More cars,’ he replies dully, ‘car park.’

  He’s right. Staring out between the shifting clouds that roll and wisp, I catch the outlines of more cars, hardly visible and gone as soon as they appear.

  With no choice we start threading single file between the narrow lanes formed by the cars parked nose to tail with Dave and I in the lead, Cookey still looking ashen faced in the middle and Clarence bringing up the rear. Roy tucks his sword away, instead pulling his bow from his shoulder and nocking an arrow in preparation. In this confined space there is no room to swing weapons so we follow his lead, pushing our hand weapons away to draw the double barrelled sawn-off shotguns.

  The sound of feet drumming over vehicles soon reaches us. There are solid bangs, followed by windscreens cracking from heavy bodies and the dull thud of vehicle roofs being walked on.

  We stay silent and listening, knowing we’re now at an awful disadvantage. Visibility is down to a few feet at best, the attacking undead have a height advantage, and with Meredith barking the whole time they can track our movements easily. The blast from a shotgun behind me makes me jump as Paula lets rip with both barrels into a female charging over the roof of the Mitsubishi next to her. Another shot from behind, Clarence fires once, aims and fires the second barrel before dropping to one knee.

  ‘Fire over me,’ he shouts to Jagger behind him. The young lad doesn't hesitate but fires two solid shots into the mass of undead coming at our rear. The first two are blown back by the awesome power of the weapon and several more are peppered with the scorching hot pellets.

  ‘Stagger your firing,’ I shout the order, suddenly fearful that we’ll all open up at once and then be re-loading while they attack.

  Dave tries to thread us through the lanes but its slow going, stopping to fire, re-load then up and move. Hunkered down, I brace myself to fire the shotgun into the face of a big, fat male scrabbling over the bonnet of the car next to me. The pellets burst through his face, decimating his features and thankfully his brain too. I drop down to reload, snapping the shotgun open to eject the two spent cartridges while fishing into my pocket for two more.

  The sneaky fuckers then go low, snaking across the bonnets, roofs and back ends, and the lower profile makes them not only harder to see but harder to hit. Then they switch and take running leaps at us but instead of diving over head first they sort of twist to come at us feet first. The choice then is to fire into their feet and legs, knowing we won’t get head shots or wait until they drop down amongst us. At this point it becomes frantic, dirty and nasty fighting. We fire when we can, grunting and shouting as we use the butts of our guns to batter them down before firing. The new method of attack gets faster, more do it as they realise they can get to us with apparent ease.

  Meredith saves each of us time and again with her lightning fast reactions. Dave keeps the front clear with relative ease and Clarence the back. But neither of them can get into the middle with the rest of us, such is the confines of the space, and I can see Dave contemplates going onto the vehicles too but that would leave his end unopposed.

  They come faster and harder so we return in kind until the bodies start mounting up. Behind Clarence the two young lads fight with determination, but their lack of experience in close quarter battles like this starts to show as they become overwhelmed. Jagger goes down under the weight of a heavy body. Mo Mo reacts to try and save him, gripping the corpse in her hair as he tries to roll her off. Leaving his back exposed, one slides over the bonnet and locks onto his shoulder, lunging as Cookey gets behind him and wraps an arm round the face of the undead. Even from where I am I can see the undead sink his teeth into Cookey’s forearm. He might be a joker but that lad can bloody fight. He heaves back, lifting the undead from his feet.

  ‘BLOWERS,’ he yells. Letting his own legs drop he plummets down while Blowers draws his knif
e and with heart-stopping precision, drives the point into the undead’s skull, just millimetres from Cookey’s arm.

  ‘FUCKING ARSE MONKEY BIT ME,’ Cookey pushes the body away and is on his feet with the flush of battle shining on his face. ‘Fucking clowns and fucking arse monkey twat mother fuckers….I’m FUCKING IMMUNE you CUNTS,’ he screams the last word in rage, wipes the blood from his bitten arm and gets right back into it.

  ‘Arse monkey?’ I shout down after firing both my barrels at the thing lurching towards me, ‘that’s a new one.’

  ‘Heard it once,’ Cookey yells, ‘and they are fucking arse monkeys.’

  ‘Fact,’ Nick adds.

  ‘I always say that,’ Blowers quips. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he yells towards me, the tone of his voice edged with panic, ‘we’re getting swarmed…’

  ‘Dave…move on…everyone grip the one in front...we’re gonna run for it…Now Dave…Go!’

  We run down the narrow lane, our pace building as we gather speed and momentum until we breach the end and find ourselves in a wide section used for the vehicles to drive in and out. Dave takes us hard left, then hard right into another narrow lane. The pace is hard going, we are unable to see anything from the front or the sides but we can hear them growling, hissing, roaring and running over the cars to our sides, behind and in front. Meredith is off, charging ahead of Dave and she uses her heightened senses to find them in the fog, constantly tracking our progress and running back into view to check we’re still following.

  ‘Getting a stitch,’ Nick shouts, ‘really fucking hurts.’

  ‘Too much coffee,’ Dave yells, ‘ignore it.’

  ‘I can’t fucking ignore it,’ Nick gasps.

  ‘You will ignore it,’ Dave orders leaving no room for discussion. We breach the end of this lane and once again find ourselves in a wider avenue between the vehicles. This time Dave takes us hard left and we stay in the wider section, forming into a tight group with Clarence at the rear and Meredith running from the fog to take down those that try a frontal charge.

  A shape looms from the fog, an old fashioned caravan lying on its side and half crumpled in. The tow bar at the front is all buckled and twisted. We just about squeeze round it and head on before finding another one on its roof, then more of them scattered about in all manner of positions.

  ‘Circus,’ Paula snaps the single word out, ‘cars in a field, caravans…and that clown…got to be a circus…’

  ‘No…’ Cookey says it like he means it, with emotion and feeling, like just by saying the word no he can refuse to let it be.

  A wooden kiosk smashed to bits but still recognisable lies in our path, clear evidence of Paula’s suggestion. The fact that it has Johnny Jumbos Circus written in garish red coloured letters also helps us work it out.

  ‘Johnny Jumbo!’ I remark with panting breath, ‘my dad used to take me.’

  Bits of the big top, the huge canvas tent used to house the actual circus, start to become evident. Patches of material emerge, broad striped and unmistakable in appearance. Thick metal poles lie about with the torn and ripped material hanging on. The storm was so powerful that something as flimsy as a big top circus tent wouldn’t last five minutes. Ropes lie tangled amongst the vehicles, which have smashed from the big poles. Several undead lie crushed under another caravan, one of them still alive and gnashing his teeth as we run past. Wooden pew style benches indicate we must be getting closer to the central area.

  We can almost track the storms power by the increasingly heavy objects we find littering the ground. A long, broad sided truck lies on its side, the frame all twisted and buckled and the huge wheels looking even bigger so high from the ground.

  The undead keep track but don’t attack. They know we’ll run out of energy at some point and must have realised we’re down to shotguns and hand weapons. We’ve fought big hordes before and walked away but we’ve no idea how many are out there. There could be just a handful making a lot of noise, twenty or thirty. Or, there could be hundreds all left here from the circus. Judging by the amount of vehicles we’ve seen, the size and quantity of those pews and the size of the area, I’m guessing this was a big turnout at maximum capacity.

  More broad striped canvas material appears, more poles too but all of it attached in torn and shredded lines that lead back to where the main area was. With the debris stacked up so much we have no choice but to keep going. It reminds me of a string of those cheap coloured flags, the way the material is stretched out. Bodies litter the ground, mangled from being ruined in some way by the storm.

  What we find next is staggering. Half the big top still stands. Ripped, torn, sagging and at an angle but still upright. The thing is massive, it must have been big when it was whole but even the remaining section is a gargantuan structure that must have taken whole teams to erect.

  ‘Get inside,’ I gasp the instruction. Dave is one step ahead of me and already heading towards it. Over, under and through the tangled broken section. It’s hard going as the canvas is slippery to run on and the poles, rope and broken stuff snag our bags, ankles and feet as we trip, slip and run.

  Dave searches for an opening, and being unable to find one he simply pulls a knife and makes one. He slices neatly down the thick material to create a door which he pushes into first. Meredith bounds after him, looming from the fog she makes it her mission to get inside and check the ground for us.

  One by one we push through the ripped material, forcing our way through the debris and dark interior until we’re clear of the side and moving into the open middle section. I take gasping breaths, panting hard. Dave, Lani and Roy look like they’ve only just warmed up and seem hardly out of breath. Clarence is ready to drop, his big face all red and flushed with sweat pouring off it.

  ‘Shit,’ Nick mutters quietly and I can see why. The inside looks surprisingly okay. Pews at the good half are mostly still in position. Some are knocked over but that must be from the panicked crowds rushing to get out when the infection hit. There are several bodies but not that many. Those that we see have broken necks and again look like they’ve been trampled underfoot. A young girl with blonde hair lies next to us. Her deathly face is painted like a tiger and although I look away quickly, I still see a huge boot print clear on her face from where someone trod on her to get away. Why didn’t they just pick her up? Human nature sucks arse sometimes.

  But, there’s no fog in here. We can see to the far end. It’s gloomy and dull from the lack of sunlight coming through but our eyes soon adjust.

  Above the central performance area are wires and nets, trapeze, tightropes and swings that seem really bloody high up, there must have been loads of them if only half the big top is left and this is way bigger than I remember as a child.

  We aim for the central area, a strategic placing as it gives us a complete view of the perimeter. Originally a large oval shape with high edged boards like a football field, it’s now half oval and I can see the ground is expertly laid with solid wooden flooring.

  ‘Nick, how’s your stitch?’ I ask as we mount the boards.

  ‘S’fine,’ he grumbles.

  ‘Everyone okay? Any injuries?’

  ‘I got bit,’ Cookey announces, ‘on the arm,’ he holds it up to show everyone, ‘by a zombie but I didn’t catch zombie ‘cos guess what?’

  ‘You’re immune?’ Blowers asks lightly.

  Cookey shoots him a mock suspicion glance, ‘have I mentioned it already then?’

  ‘Just once or twice mate, is it alright?’ Blowers nods at Cookey’s bleeding forearm, prompting Cookey to inspect the wound a bit more closely. ‘Looks worse than it feels,’ he replies poking at the edges, ‘it’s congealing fast though.’

  Jagger and Mo Mo crowd round him, staring intently at the wound then back up at Cookey with worried looks.

  ‘How’d it happen?’ Mo Mo asks.

  ‘Saving your life mate,’ Cookey gives a slow nod, ‘yeah you know, big bad motherfucker was about to bite you so…’
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  ‘Me?’ Mo Mo asks.

  ‘Oh he was close mate, like this close,’ Cookey holds his thumb and forefinger apart by an inch, ‘but I stepped in and took one for the team…which I think relieves me of all brew making punishment for…like…forever?’ He looks at Dave hopefully.

  ‘You could have stabbed him in the neck,’ Dave intones without looking back, ‘or grabbed his hair and pulled him backwards, or snapped his neck like I told you…or…’

  ‘Fine,’ Cookey huffs, ‘almost get my arm bitten off and that’s the thanks I get.’

  ‘Clean the wound and dress it,’ Dave adds, ‘no, come here and let me do it. You won’t do it properly.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Paula interjects, ‘Cookey, you did well to save Mo Mo,’ She notices how crestfallen Cookey looks.

  ‘Nah, I might be infected,’ Cookey gives her a slight smile, ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘You said your immune,’ Jagger snaps, ‘how’s can you be infected then?’

  ‘Get water and catch your breath,’ I cut in, ‘we can talk about it later…what the fuck is that noise?’

  I turn round scowling at the squeaking sound coming from somewhere behind me. With my eyes now adjusted I can see a shadowy exit from the oval performance area that must be used by the performers to come and go unseen by the crowd. An intermittent squeak coming from that direction. Squeak. Silence. Squeak. Silence.

  ‘Could be the structure,’ Roy whispers, ‘it can’t be stable.’

  I look up and stare across the remaining poles and framework, noting that nothing appears to be moving or shaking. Despite half the big top being in ruins, the remaining section looks remarkably intact.

  ‘Cooooooooooookeeeeeeyyyyyyyyy…..’ Long and drawn out, mournful yet with a playful edge the voice comes from the gloom, the same direction as the squeak. We freeze, quickly checking shotguns are loaded and hand weapons ready. Dave drops his hand to Meredith’s collar, holding the growling animal in place.

  ‘Cooooooooooookeeeeeeyyyyyyyy…..’ Same again, slow and mournful yet still playful followed by a harsh laugh like the one we heard earlier.