Infected- The Beginning

by Perry Stevenson

  The second dog seemed most upset, as he came at me at full throttle, growling. Being so close, I missed his head with the shot, hitting him between the shoulder blades, and the dog collapsed at my feet with a four-inch gap in his spine, paralysing him instantly.

  I started to back away towards John, who was now changing the petrol cans over. A medium-sized mongrel with grey scraggy fur rounded the corner house, followed by a Jack Russell. Showing no signs of fear, the mongrel came straight at me with teeth bared, but the 2¼ ounces of BBs hit him in the chest, turning his fur into a bloody mess. As I took a step back from the recoil of the shotgun, the dog continued to come towards me under his own momentum, tumbling head over heels and eventually coming to a halt three feet from me. The Jack Russell barked at me twice but made a hasty retreat once he saw what had happened to his mate.

  “How’re we doing with the petrol, John?” I asked, still facing the green.

  “I’m halfway through the second can.”

  I continued to back up to John, until my back rested on the side of the car. The next two minutes seemed like a lifetime as I was so tense waiting for the next dog to appear from the green.

  “That’s it, Dad, let’s go,” said John, grabbing both containers.

  We headed back towards our barricade, looking behind us from time to time to make sure we were not being followed. We went through our side gate into the garden, where we had left the generator, and John filled its small petrol tank.

  “John, it might be a good idea not to create any noise just yet. Let’s wait until things settle down outside first.”

  “I agree – time for a break,” he replied.

  We both retired to the house, where Josephine welcomed us with a cup of tea.

  “You two have been ages,” Mary commented.

  “What time is it?” asked John.

  “Nearly six o’clock,” replied Josephine.

  “Perhaps we’ll try out the generator tomorrow. What do you think, John?” I asked.

  John hesitated for a few seconds, but then replied, “Yeah, I suppose so – let’s have something to eat, then”.

  After we had eaten and chatted for over an hour, Linda and Ruth came to see us, leaving their husbands to look after the children. It was agreed we all had enough supplies for at least a week, so there was no need to plan any more field trips. They left us while it was still light, just before 9.00 pm. I made us all a drink, for a change – I preferred my own tea, anyway. John tried the radio as usual, but again there was no further information. John and Josephine went to bed at 11.00 pm, and Mary and I followed half an hour later.

  Day Nine

  Tuesday 20 May 2014

  “James, are you getting up today? It’s nine-thirty, and Josephine has made you a cup of tea,” said Mary in a louder voice than usual. Then in the background I could hear John speaking: “Seems Dad has lazy-itis today, Mum”.

  “That’s nothing unusual,” came Mary’s reply.

  “James, everybody is waiting for you!” Mary added, even louder.

  “OK, OK, I get the message – I’m getting up now!”

  I got dressed and visited the bathroom before going downstairs where, on entering the living room, the eyes of the other three members of the household were looking at me. I collected my tea from the small side table.

  “So, who wants me?” I asked.

  “John wants you to help with the generator,” Mary began. “And Miles came over to ask if you would help to clear the rest of the bodies from the street, including the dogs, and burn them while the weather is still dry.”

  “I suppose that would give me something to do today,” I said. Mary never did like me to sit around all day.

  We finished our tea and the toast that Josephine had made with great difficulty.

  “I’ll talk to Miles and arrange a time for clearing the street. Hopefully John and I can get this generator working.”

  I picked up the semi-auto shotgun and headed for the front door.

  “Do you want to come, John?” I asked, turning to him.

  “Yes,” he replied, collecting the Ruger 10/22.

  We arrived at Miles’s front door, but he didn’t see us coming for a change, and I gave his front door a couple of knocks. While we were waiting, I noticed the silence – there didn’t seem to be any birds singing, until a robin sat on the fence and began to sing its solitary tune. For the first time, I noticed the pungent smell that seemed to hang in the air. Eventually Jeffrey opened the door.

  “Is your Dad there?” I asked.

  “Yeah – Dad!”

  Miles soon appeared.

  “Hi, James,” he said.

  “Understand you want to do a body clearance,” I remarked.

  “Yeah, there were so many vermin about this morning, it’s going to get very unhygienic very quickly – plus there is a very bad smell coming from the direction of the green.”

  “OK, so when do you want to do this?” asked John, more interested in getting the generator going first.

  “This afternoon would be good – say about two?” replied Miles.

  “That’s good – it’ll allow us to try out the generator first,” said John.

  “You do that. I’ll speak to the other blokes and organise some more help,” Miles continued.

  “We’ll see you later, then,” I said as John and I set off to our side gate and the shed.

  After getting the generator out of the shed, John had it up and running in half an hour. The main problem was how to connect it to the electricity supply in the house; we needed an electrician, or at least someone who knew what they were doing. Back in the house, we had another drink courtesy of Josephine.

  “You haven’t finished yet – the lights still don’t work,” said Mary, flicking a wall switch on and off.

  “Yeah, I know – we need an expert to wire it into the mains supply,” replied John.

  “Can’t you do that?”

  “No, not without possibly blowing the house up.”

  “I don’t know, you two are useless!” Mary replied.

  John and I looked at each other but said nothing.

  “How did that fellow with the young boy do it round the corner, then?” Mary continued.

  “Good thinking, Mary – we can have a look,” I said. “John, bring our tools. Mary, we’ll see you later.”

  After taking note of how David had wired his generator in, we noticed it was exactly the same model as ours. We commandeered it for use by one of our other neighbours. By 1.00 pm we had finished and had tested it out. The lights worked fine, and so did the television and satellite unit.

  We then sat for an hour or so watching the TV screen as Mary scanned the hundred-plus channels, all of us hoping for something other than interference.

  “John, we have to go,” I said, looking through the living room window. “There’s quiet a congregation outside.”

  “We’d better take the guns and some ammo, and we’re late,” John replied, collecting four 25-round Ruger magazines. I put the full cartridge belt on and added another 20 or so cartridges in my jacket pockets.

  “Take the shotgun with you, John, and I’ll get our new wheelbarrow,” I said.

  As John went out of the front door I went out the back, soon to join the waiting body clearance party with the wheelbarrow. Approaching the party, I started to take note of Miles’s success in getting our group together. My son-in-law Brian and his son Jack, my other son-in-law Tom, Miles and his oldest son Jeffrey, Mat and Bill were also with us, and of course John holding the two firearms. We had four wheelbarrows between us.

  “Nice of you to turn up, James,” said Miles jokingly.

  “Trouble with the electrical supply,” I replied.

  “We can hear it – do you think it’s a good idea, seeing what happened to David and his famil
y?” replied Miles.

  “I left Mary scanning the satellite TV channels – no luck so far, but hopefully she will come across one that’s actually working, and I can turn the generator off later. By the way, we have a spare generator if anybody wants it.”

  Of course, nearly everybody replied at once that they needed one.

  “Let’s see how this one goes first,” I said to no one in particular.

  We left our close, forming four groups, each with its own wheelbarrow, and one riding shotgun, so to speak, with Jack, our youngest member, being surplus, going with his father. As we approached the green, the crows took to the air sounding their alarm call, and rats ran in all directions through the uncut grass.

  John and I, with Mat and Bill, started with the bodies scattered over the green, including the dog carcases lying in the road opposite. Miles and Jeffrey took the other end of Connor Way with Brian, Tom and Jack. Most of the bodies, whether animal or human, had been badly mutilated by the vermin, and we found ourselves also picking up small body parts and unintentionally reuniting them with their owners once we had heaved the main corpses into the wheelbarrows.

  After an hour, we had cleared the green and the surrounding area, creating a pile of neatly stacked corpses in the middle, and there were just two dog carcases left near the main road.

  “John and I will collect the last two dogs by the bus stop,” I said to Mat, “and perhaps you can give Brian and Miles some help as they have further to go.”

  “OK, see you shortly,” Mat replied.

  Interestingly enough, these dogs did not appear to have been shot, although they had been badly mutilated by the scavenging vermin so it was hard to tell. In fact, the medium-sized black-and-white dog appeared to have a broken leg. I decided they must have been run over by a car. We put both dogs in the wheelbarrow and were about to head for our pile of corpses, which was approaching five feet in height and four yards across, when we heard a diesel engine. Looking towards Chelmsford, a long-wheelbase Land Rover was approaching us, followed by a van.

  John and I stopped what we were doing and watched the vehicles as they carefully negotiated the various corpses lying in the main road. Collecting our firearms, we walked to the bus stop and waited for the convoy to arrive. As they approached, we could see that the van was being followed by two MPVs. The Land Rover pulled into the bus stop next to us, and the passenger wound down the window and started to speak.

  “Hello! God, it’s nice to see other people have survived!” said a middle-aged woman with black hair in an East End accent.

  “Hello – have you come from London?” I asked.

  “Yes, West Ham,” she replied. “We thought things would be better in the countryside, so we’re heading for my uncle’s smallholding in Suffolk, with our neighbours, friends and a couple of people we picked up on the way.”

  “Are there many normal people left in London?” I asked.

  “No. Thousands of infected are walking the streets. They’re starting to eat the dead, and in some cases their own pets and other animals, if they can catch them. Most of the food stores have been cleared out, and there are only a few people left hiding in their homes, but once discovered by the infected they don’t last long because of the overwhelming numbers. We had to make an early exit when they discovered where we were.”

  “We’ve taken out three or four hundred between us, but it hasn’t been as bad as you describe,” I replied.

  The man behind the steering wheel then spoke.

  “I see you have guns, mate – where did you get them?”

  It took all of five seconds for me to realise it would be a good idea to keep the source of our guns to ourselves. Miles and Jeffrey had now joined us, and Miles spoke as I was about to reply.

  “You need to find yourselves a Yellow Pages when you get to Suffolk and find out where the gun shops are,” he said.

  The rest of our neighbours had now joined us, and the people in the MPVs had got out and were talking to Mat and Brian, sharing their experiences of the week.

  The driver of the Land Rover had also joined us by the bus stop.

  “It’s nice to have a break after the slow progress we’ve been making and the sights we’ve seen,” he said. “By the way, what is that engine I can hear?”

  “It’s our generator,” I replied. “In fact, we need to turn it off, as noise seems to attract the infected. I left my wife searching the satellite TV channels.”

  “We’ve had no contact with the outside world for days now – have you heard anything?” the Land Rover man asked.

  “There have been radio broadcasts on the BBC World Service at ten o’clock every night, but in the last few days it’s just been the same message repeated,” I replied.

  We continued to chat for another half hour before Jack suddenly received our full attention.

  “Sorry for interrupting, guys, but we have incoming infected!” he said loudly.

  “Where?” his father asked, looking along the main road towards Chelmsford.

  “From the village hall,” Jack replied.

  The van belonging to our new acquaintances was partially blocking our view, but by moving slightly to our right we could see into the car park at the village hall across the main road. There were about 30 infected heading in our direction.

  “There are another twenty of them coming across the cricket pitch directly opposite us,” Mat warned.

  Fortunately, the large grassed area was surrounded by a four-foot-high fence which ran for at least a hundred yards, covering the full length of the green in front of us with only three small gates to allow access.

  “You’d better go,” I said to the Land Rover driver.

  He and his passenger climbed back into the vehicle as the people from the MPVs piled into theirs. John and I moved forward between the Land Rover and the van and took up a position in the main road. I then waved at them to move off. The Land Rover’s engine burst into life but the vehicle didn’t move. Instead the driver’s window was wound down.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got to see this!” said the man.

  Great, I thought, we have an audience. Miles and Jeffrey had joined us in the road, while on the other side of the van were Brian, Mat, Bill and Jack, standing in front of the MPVs. Jack was the first to fire at the infected outside the village hall, while they were still more than 70 yards away. We saw small puffs of dust as the .22 bullets took lumps out of the building behind the infected. He had missed.

  “Jack, wait for them to get closer,” Brian advised. Jack stopped firing on the command from his father.

  “Aren’t you going to shoot them yet?” was the comment from the Land Rover.

  “No – my son will fire first with the rifle and if any of them manage to reach the road I’ll shoot them with the shotgun,” I replied.

  “So why is that?”

  “Basically, a shotgun is a short-range weapon depending on what shot size you’re using,” I said.

  “What do you mean by shot size?”

  “You need to get yourself a book on shotguns and cartridges,” I said, irritated. This was not the time to go into detail.

  John opened up with the Ruger as the infected had reached the 50-yard mark, followed by our other Ruger users, including Jack. Unfortunately, one of the small gates in the fence to the green was directly in front of us, and the first infected to reach it pushed it open, the others following his lead. John had run out of ammo and started to change his magazine as the last five from the cricket pitch passed through the gate. They were only 20 yards from me when I fired the first 3.5-inch magnum, taking down two of them as they tried to go through the gate together. The remaining three spread out as they got closer to us. I took out another two as they stepped into the road, and the last of them less than four yards from me, and far too close for comfort when I fired. The 2¼ ounces of lead hit him in the Ada
m’s apple with an explosion of blood and flesh in all directions, and his head fell backwards, only remaining on his shoulders by the skin at the nape of his neck, exposing his shattered spine as he collapsed to the ground. Our other three groups had easily taken care of the infected from the direction of the village hall.

  “Jesus Christ, man! The shotgun sure does make a mess of things. I think I’m going to throw up,” the man in the Land Rover said, gagging.

  “You get used to it eventually,” said John.

  “We’ll be on our way now, and try to find ourselves some weapons,” the driver said, regaining his composure.

  “May see you again one day,” I said.

  He then waved to the others and slowly pulled away, with the van and two MPVs close behind.

  “OK, James – time to finish up. We only have a few bodies to collect,” said Miles.

  “OK. John and I will dump these last two dog corpses on the pile, and go in search of some petrol to light the fire with.”

  Fifteen minutes later, John was dowsing the pile in petrol as Miles, Brian and Mat added the last of the bodies to the now six-foot-high cremation pyre. Brian supplied the light and we watched in silence as the flames took hold. We had to move further back from the blazing corpses as the heat started to build and the crackling and hissing of the fatty tissue intensified, sending 20-foot flames into the air. We watched in awe as the fire reached its peak for half an hour before the flames began to die down.

  “That’s it, then – we can come back in an hour or two,” said Bill.

  “I’ll agree to that. It’s time for something to eat and drink,” commented Mat.

  “Dad, let’s check on Mum’s progress with the TV,” said John. “And we must turn off the generator, before we get invaded by another crowd of infected.”

  “OK, guys let’s go. We’ll see you later,” I said.

  We all walked back through the barricade together, feeling even more weary than usual after our gruesome work. At least it was not all doom and gloom, as meeting other survivors, especially from London, was encouraging.