The Undead Day Eighteen

by RR Haywood

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes you,’ she says walking behind the girls heading towards the semi-detached house on the right side.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Just bloody keep watch and shout if anything moves.’

  I would smile at the exchange but I can no longer move my face due to the mud drying on my face.

  ‘Hose…garden,’ Clarence says going straight through the kitchen into the garden, ‘where’s Meredith?’

  ‘With me,’ Nick says chucking the cups and plates from the washing bowl onto the side with a clatter. He twists the tap letting it run for a few seconds before filling the bowl as Clarence pulls the hose free.

  ‘Crisps?’ Cookey asks holding a cupboard door open.

  ‘What they got?’ I ask.

  ‘Quavers.’

  ‘Cheese?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Go on then,’ I say as he throws a bag over to me.

  ‘Clarence, you want some Quavers?’ He calls out.

  ‘Yeah,’ he shouts back, ‘I’ll get washed first. They got anything else?’

  ‘Just Quavers.’

  ‘S’fine, Cookey,’ he says dumping his rifle and kit bag on the ground next to his axe and starting to undo his pistol belt.

  ‘Ah she’s happy now,’ Nick says standing back and watching Meredith drop to the floor with the bowl between her front legs and tongue going like the clappers into the clear water.

  ‘Quavers, Nick,’ Cookey asks holding a bag over, ‘like I need to ask,’ he adds muttering to himself.

  ‘Cheers,’ Nick says taking the packet and leaning back against the side.

  ‘Mo?’ Cookey asks, ‘Quavers?’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Blowers?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Roy?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Oh that’s so bloody nice!’

  Seven men armed to the teeth with assault rifles, axes, knives, pistols, a sword and a bow and arrow all eating Quavers with mud covered hands watching a huge bald man standing under a running hose in the garden of a semi-detached house after killing hundreds of zombies that used to be people. It doesn’t get weirder than this. Oh and a killer dog drinking water from a bowl. Weird as fuck.

  ‘You using the hose?’ Marcy calls out from over the fence.

  ‘Yep, very nice,’ Clarence says in ecstasy, ‘try it.’

  ‘Can you see through?’ She asks.

  I lean out to stare at the six foot high fence panels, ‘no,’ I shout, ‘can’t see anything.’

  ‘What are you eating?’

  ‘Quavers.’

  ‘Cheese?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are they nice?’

  ‘Really nice.’

  ‘Is Dave there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘Yes, Marcy.’

  ‘We’re going to strip down and wash under the hose.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Will you stop the others from trying to look?’

  ‘Okay. Alex that means you.’

  ‘Too tired, Dave.’

  ‘Any Quavers left?’ Blinky shouts.

  ‘Dunno,’ I shout back, ‘Cookey?’

  ‘Two bags, here,’ he goes to hand them over then stops with a grin, ‘Blinky you want me to bring them round?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No,’ Marcy, Paula and Charlie shout in chorus.

  ‘Worth a try,’ he says stepping out the back door, ‘incoming,’ he launches them over the fence, ‘you checked your cupboards?’

  ‘No,’ Blinky shouts, ‘I’ll do it now.’

  I look back to see Clarence now in his underpants scrubbing the mud from his body with a pile of filthy garments at his feet. ‘Having fun, mate?’

  ‘Yep. I’m done. Who’s next?’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Nick says dumping his kit next to Clarence’s.

  ‘We haven’t got any crisps,’ Blinky shouts, ‘just some health food shit.’

  ‘Ah well,’ I say as Nick starts stripping his clothes off, ‘don’t get the cigarettes wet.’

  ‘In my pocket, here,’ he chucks his trousers over so I can fish the battered packet out.

  ‘Who’s using the hose on your side now?’ Cookey asks.

  ‘I am,’ Charlie shouts back.

  Silence from our side.

  ‘Who’s doing it your side?’ Marcy asks.

  ‘I am,’ Nick shouts.

  Silence from their side until a low chorus of giggles comes floating over the fence making us all look round at each other shrugging and pulling puzzled faces.

  We get through one by one until it’s my turn and I strip off before standing under the gorgeously cold water running down my head and shoulders sending shivers down my spine. The heat is taken away with the mud and my body starts cooling down as the ground runs filthy from the mud and gore washed away.

  Flitcombe is next then we go for Stenbury but a seed has been planted and this hose appears to be giving water to it. My intentions were clear. Attack and kill as many as possible but now I’m not so sure that’s the right thing to be doing.

  Reginald said the intelligence within the infection is increasing so fast that within a short space of time we’ll be fighting an enemy that can outthink every move we make. So what do we do?

  Do we use this time to kill as many as possible or something else? What else? A cure. How? That would mean London and finding the people we need but we’ve already been to the hospital where Doc Roberts worked. We saw the devastation first hand. There won’t be anything left.

  The urgency starts humming in my gut again. That pull to get going and keep moving. I drop the hose down and nod for someone else to take a go while I grab my bag and start sorting out new clothes to wear.

  Cull the numbers. Yes, that’s the best way forward. Kill as many as possible and keep going to give everyone else a chance at survival. Is that my motivation? For the good of mankind or for my own personal desire at getting back at them for what they have done? Both I guess.

  The scale we’re operating on is too small. Too tiny. We are playing at being soldiers fighting a child-like enemy that pretty soon will become more intelligent than us and with millions of soldiers to use. Fuck me, we could have planes and tanks and it wouldn’t be enough. We could detonate a nuclear bomb in London but that wouldn’t stop the other forty million spread about the rest of the country.

  We should do something else. We should take what we have, with us being immune and work out what to do with it. Yes, that’s the way forward instead. We leg it and stay low trying to find experts and scientists who know about this sort of thing. Yep. That’s a plan. We leave and sneak into London.

  Argh no. No no no. That’s not right either. It’s common sense and it’s a logical plan but something in my gut is telling me to keep attacking them and take the fight to it. To the infection. Spank it up and down the country while we still can. Cull and kill. Slaughter them in every way possible and don’t stop until the last one drops dead. Find guns. Big guns. Bigger guns. Find an army. Build an army. Keep going and do not stop.

  Right. Common sense and logic is saying we bug out and find experts. My heart is telling me to fuck ‘em up with sheer overwhelming violence. Which one? A battle of mind over heart. Clinical thought processes over passion. Passion is what makes us human. Passion is what drives us. Passion and heart and feeling love and hate. Those are the things that have either propelled mankind or held us back.

  Logic and find experts to use what we have. Heart and fucking kick the shit out of them. Logic. Heart.

  My left hand is logic. My right hand is my heart. What the hell am I doing? They both look the same. So, in this hand I have intelligence and a logical decision making process that is telling me to deal with the overall picture of an infection that is attacking the human species and thereby rendering the same species obsolete. We will be eradicated and made extinct. Got it.
That’s the left hand.

  The right hand is violence. We fight and kill. We show the infection what it is to be human by having that drive and will to live. We make a stand and by doing that we send a message to every other survivor to stop hiding and get out and fight while they still can.

  Left hand logic.

  Right hand passion.

  Cock it.

  I don’t know. I clench my hands into fists then splay the fingers. Which one?

  ‘Left or right?’ I mutter, ‘Dave, left or right?’

  ‘Left or right what, Mr Howie?’

  ‘Left hand logic. Right hand passion. Which one? Choose.’

  He stares at me suddenly clean and dressed in new clothes. They all are. ‘When did you get in here?’ I ask Marcy and the girls standing at the back of the house watching me.

  ‘Few minutes,’ she says.

  ‘Oh. So…’ I ask the group as a whole, ‘left hand logic…right hand passion…which one?’ I hold my hands up opening and closing them into fists.

  Mo looks down at his own hands copying me by bunching them into hard fists, ‘right,’ he says firmly.

  ‘Mo,’ I nod at him sensing his need for vengeance.

  ‘Logic over passion,’ Paula says, ‘left.’

  ‘Paula,’ I nod at her respecting her way of thinking.

  Marcy stares at me with a slight tilt to her head as though she’s trying to work something out. A wry smile crosses her features and she walks slowly towards me watching me closely.

  ‘Left or right?’ I ask her.

  ‘Me?’ She says as though the answer is obvious, ‘right. I’ll always choose passion.’

  ‘Hmmm, this is isn’t actually helping.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Funny thing is,’ she says coming to a stop in front of me and reaching out to take my hands, ‘is that hands can do this,’ she pushers her fingers through mine interlocking and drawing my hands together, ‘see? My right goes to your left and your left is with my right…but…they also do this,’ she pulls her fingers from between mine and presses my hands together in prayer and gently pushes my fingers so my hands interlock themselves, ‘passion and logic can become passion with logic.’

  ‘Cor blimey,’ I say staring at my own hands, ‘that’s clever. Right fuck it. Move out, we’re gonna go spank some zombies.’

  ‘Or just completely ignore what I just said.’

  Fifteen

  ‘Reginald, how far to Flitcombe? What do we know about it? How many can we expect and what’s the best point to attack them from?’

  ‘Mr Howie,’ he says looking up from the monitor with a start.

  ‘And where will they be expecting us to attack from?’

  ‘Oh gosh…’

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Right here, Mr Howie.’

  ‘Flitcombe. How far? What do we know and…’

  ‘I heard the questions,’ she says politely climbing up into the back of Roy’s van and heading to the maps folded on the desk, ‘let me see.’

  ‘So we’re ignoring the whole logic discussion then?’ Marcy asks walking across the road towards the back of Roy’s mud smeared van.

  ‘Nope, not at all,’ I say with a grin, ‘so, how far to Flitcombe?’

  ‘About ten miles?’ Charlie asks Reginald who looks from her to me and down to the map.

  ‘I er, gosh I would say yes, about ten miles.’

  ‘Ten miles. Got it. How big is it?’

  ‘Got a plan?’ Clarence asks moving in beside me.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘A plan is always better than no plan,’ he says.

  ‘I said that,’ Dave says.

  ‘Oh did you?’ Clarence says winking at Mo, ‘don’t think I heard you, Dave.’

  ‘I said that.’

  ‘How big is it?’ I ask again.

  ‘About the same size as Foxwood,’ Charlie says.

  ‘Foxwood? The one with the duck pond right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct,’ she says.

  ‘Howie,’ Paula says in a warning tone, ‘I know that voice. What are you planning?’

  ‘And Stenbury? How far to Stenbury?’

  ‘Gosh I would say about thirty miles,’ Reginald says tracing his finger over the map on his desk.

  ‘And Stenbury’s big right?’

  ‘Stenbury is the main town for this rural area. It is substantially larger than the small villages we have seen thus far and therefore it will have a greater population and not forgetting of course,’ he says blinking at me, ‘that the infection will be drawing more in while we go through the aforesaid villages.’

  ‘How many can we expect?’

  ‘At Stenbury or Flitcombe?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I would hazard that Flitcombe will see numbers the same as this god forsaken place, perhaps a few more given the closeness to the greater population zone.’

  ‘Few hundred then?’

  ‘Mr Howie I am not confident in making accurate predictions of this nature.’

  ‘Answer the question to the best of your ability. Can we expect a few hundred? More? Less?’

  ‘How many were here?’ He asks.

  ‘Couple of hundred?’ I say looking at everyone gathered near me, ‘about right?’

  ‘Maybe a bit more,’ Clarence says using his height advantage to peer over at the corpses lying on the green.

  ‘Dave?’

  ‘More than three less than four.’

  ‘Between three and four hundred then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Reginald?’

  ‘Gosh, right…well that is a considerable number. Indeed it is. For a small place and the other player knowing you will win which in turn tells us the other player is willing to sacrifice those pieces. Hmmm, I would say we can expect perhaps a slightly larger number at Flitcombe…’

  ‘Okay, so maybe four to five hundred?’

  ‘Mr Howie I cannot specify to the degree you require. There are too many variables. For instance, look at this map,’ he holds it up towards me, ‘every grey section represents an area where human beings occupy and you can see just how many there are. We do not know how many still held infected persons…’

  ‘Charlie,’ Clarence says leaning into the van, ‘check the guide books and see if they give a population of Stenbury.’

  ‘So let’s say we had three hundred and fifty here,’ I say, ‘and we’re looking at four hundred and fifty at Flitcombe…how many is that?’

  ‘Eight hundred,’ Paula says.

  ‘Eight hundred sacrificed, plus the few we’ve already done before we got here. So call it a thousand? Everyone happy with that?’

  ‘I’d say a few more,’ Clarence says, ‘more like twelve hundred.’

  ‘Okay, call it twelve hundred. That’s one thousand two hundred host bodies the infection is prepared to sacrifice to get us into Stenbury. How can we use that figure to represent the numbers they have in Stenbury?’

  ‘Christ, Howie,’ Paula says rubbing her face and thinking, ‘say it used ten percent of its total force? Clarence, Dave? Would an army do that?’

  ‘This isn’t an army,’ Clarence says flatly.

  ‘Okay well let’s say it used ten percent of its total mass which would be twelve thousand…so bloody hell! That’s over ten thousand…’

  ‘So we could be looking at ten thousand in Stenbury?’

  ‘Fucking ten thousand,’ Paula says again, ‘ten thousand people to kill…’

  ‘What’s ten thousand divided by thirteen?’

  ‘Er…about seven hundred and er…oh Christ…seven hundred and sixty nine or…yeah about that.’

  ‘Okay, we’ve each got seven hundred and sixty nine to kill. Dave, you happy with that?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Howie.’

  ‘Whoa hang on,’ Paula says, ‘I’m guessing at the ten percent thing. What if it’s used five percent? That could be over twenty thousand people.’

  ‘So fourteen hundred each th
en?’ Blowers says, ‘is that right?’

  ‘We’ve got to get those numbers down,’ Paula says.

  ‘Population of Stenbury,’ Charlie says holding a tour guide open, ‘as of two years ago at the time of this publication…was twenty three thousand.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Paula says.

  ‘Too many,’ Marcy says shaking her head, ‘that’s too many.’

  ‘Plus the others it’s pulling in from the other towns and villages,’ Reginald says.

  ‘No hang on,’ Clarence says folding his arms and looking massive, ‘there wouldn’t have been twenty three thousand er…of the er….the infected people in that…’

  ‘Zombies,’ I interrupt him, ‘just say zombies.’

  ‘I’m not saying that word,’ he says stiffly.

  ‘Why not? Say it. Zombies.’

  ‘They’re not…they are not those. Those are made up in films. These are real. Anyway, there wouldn’t have been twenty three thousand people there. How many people would have lived here? Maybe a few thousand? We didn’t have a few thousand waiting for us.’

  ‘No they’ve all buggered off to Stenbury that’s why,’ Roy says.

  ‘No no, you’re missing the point,’ Clarence says, ‘the point is that many would have been killed. Some more would have run off or are hiding.’

  ‘Yes. Hiding in Stenbury,’ Roy says.

  ‘No, Roy…’

  ‘Either way,’ I say watching Clarence getting flushed in the face and pre-empting an argument, ‘that’s a lot.’

  ‘Fifty million,’ Dave says in his flat tone.

  ‘Where are they then?’ Clarence says staring round.

  ‘In Stenbury,’ Roy says.

  ‘Okay. Moving on from that but we can all agree Flitcombe is going to have a few hundred and Stenbury is likely….I said likely…to have several thousand or possibly in excess of ten thousand…sound fair?’

  ‘Who you asking?’ Paula asks, ‘if you’re asking me then I’d say no that’s not fair. They’ve got more than ten thousand and we’ve got fourteen.’

  ‘Don’t count me,’ Reginald says.

  ‘Thirteen,’ Paula says, ‘against ten thousand…’

  ‘Fuck ‘em, we’ll win,’ Cookey says with a grin that sets most of the rest of us off smiling.

  ‘Too many,’ Marcy says more firmly, ‘you’ve got pick your fights and this one is too big…even for you.’

  ‘We can’t even sneak in and lay traps,’ Paula says, ‘the whole place will be crawling with infected.’