Thrive [Episode One]

by Lamb, Harrison J.

  THRIVE

  Harrison J. Lamb

  Copyright © 2018 by Harrison J. Lamb

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Visit the author’s website at:

  www.harrisonjlamb.com.

  Contents – Episode One

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Author’s Note

  E P I S O D E O N E

  Kill

  1.

  “What are you hoping for, Kingsley? A pity text?” He looked up at Sammy guiltily, holding the phone face-down in his lap to hide the screen.

  What am I hoping for? Good question; a sign that his relationship with Emma still had a chance? A sign that he was capable of living a normal life with her? Hoping for these things, maybe, but not expecting them.

  “Can we not talk about this right now?” he said.

  “Of course. Put the phone away.”

  Kingsley sighed. As he bent to tuck the phone into his backpack on the ground beside his camping chair, his eyes travelled over a news headline on his Twitter feed and absentmindedly read the words: Zombie Virus Rumours Confirmed By CDC.

  “The whole point of coming out here is to leave all those distractions behind,” Sammy said. “You need that more than anyone.”

  It was true. If there was one person here who desperately needed a weekend camping in the woods, away from the rest of the world, it was Kingsley. Usually, he would be the first to zip his belongings away in the bottom of his bag and embrace the solitude of the British countryside. What was better than escaping from the monotonies of everyday life that he spent so much time complaining about?

  This time, though, Kingsley was almost beginning to regret coming out here. The natural surroundings – rather than providing an alternative focus – only seemed to be giving him space to dwell on everything he had temporarily left behind him, back in Colchester.

  He watched Sammy whittle away at a stick with her Swiss pocket knife. She started to shave the end of the stick into a sharp point, and Kingsley realised that she was trying to make a spear.

  This nearly brought a smile to his lips. When the four of them used to piss about in the woods near their high school as teenagers, they would always try to make spears and bows and arrows out of branches. Then they would test their makeshift weapons, first against branch-limbed enemies and then, inevitably, turning on each other.

  Kingsley glanced around at each of them. James busied himself with setting up the tents. Eric lounged in his own camping chair next to Kingsley’s, drinking a beer and enjoying everything in the way only Eric could. And Sammy perched on a log, whittling like she also longed for those old days, even when her hair had been a brighter shade of red and made her an easy target for bullying.

  Kingsley stood. He needed to occupy himself. “I’m going to look for some firewood. Eric, you coming?”

  “Let me just finish my beer.” Eric gulped the last few dregs from his can, then followed Kingsley into the surrounding trees, snapping branches along the way to add to the firewood pile.

  Eric was strolling behind him, humming whatever tune was playing on the constant radio inside his head, when Kingsley asked, “You hear about that guy in America who cannibalised his pregnant wife? It was in the news. He ate their unborn baby. How fucked up is that?”

  Eric paused in his examination of a branch and stared at his friend with his eyebrows raised. “Since when do you pay attention to the news?”

  “I don’t, but everyone’s been talking about it. I can’t stop thinking about it for some reason. I guess stories about children dying just really get to my head.”

  “Huh. You’ve been silent all morning and now you’re making small talk? You hate small talk. What’s up with you, mate?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just… everything, you know?” Kingsley shrugged. “I need to get drunk already.”

  “Listen,” Eric said, holding his friend’s gaze. “There’s no point dwelling on shit you can never change. Only makes it harder for you to plan for the future, for the shit you can change. I know that sounds like one of those quotes middle-aged mums share on Facebook, but it’s true.”

  Kingsley knew that well enough. But it was so easy to forget every bit of inspirational advice you’d ever heard when you had accidentally taken a life.

  *

  The two men returned to the campsite, each with a stack of twigs and branches enfolded in their arms. Once they had a fire going and had begun heating some pre-made stew in a pot, Kingsley finally started to lose himself in the festivity. Admittedly, the booze helped. The four friends relaxed around the fire, chatting, laughing, drinking, eating, and James even pulled out his ukulele. The singing got increasingly tuneless with each drink.

  Soon they were all passed out in their tents.

  Kingsley only woke once in the middle of the night, hungover and delirious from sleep. Eric snored beside him on his own fold-up bed in the two-man tent. The camp was dead quiet apart from that.

  Kingsley fidgeted to get into a more comfortable position for his aching stomach, but a noise from beyond the tent made him pause. It took a second for his garbled mind to process, but it had sounded like someone crying out, far off in the surrounding woods. He wasn’t sure which direction the noise had come from.

  Had he imagined it? Could it have been an owl or a fox? He tried to think about what those animals sounded like.

  Then another noise came out of the stillness – the crunch of dry leaves, footsteps rushing through the forest somewhere off to Kingsley’s left – reinforcing his initial suspicion that there was somebody out there.

  His first thought was, Why would someone be running through the woods in the dark? Then, as the footsteps receded into the night, he wondered again whether it had been a human or an animal. It had sounded too heavy-footed to be any of the small woodland creatures that inhabited the area. But a deer, maybe?

  Kingsley’s mind flitted back to the ominous news headline he had read on his phone earlier in the day. What had it said? Something about a zombie virus. Probably another pandemic scare, blown out of proportion through internet propaganda pieces that garnered hysteria.

  He looked once again at Eric, who was no longer snoring but continued to sleep like a corpse. Kingsley could not stop shivering, although it wasn’t cold in the tent on that late-summer night.

  2.

  Morning came with disorienting suddenness. Kingsley’s racing thoughts had kept him from sleep for the next hour after that interruption in the night, and when he finally did manage to doze off, it felt like only a matter of minutes before his eyes were opening again to a dawn-lit tent, the seal unzipped and Eric no longer in bed.

  Having pulled on a fresh shirt and jeans, Kingsley crawled out of the tent, running a hand through his hair and already getting irritated at the knots in his ashy blond curls. The first thing that hit him was the smell of porridge oats simmering over the fire. It only occurred to him then how hungry he was, his stomach growling like a feral dog at the suggestion of a meal.

  James was the only person there, tending to breakfast by the look of things. When he noticed Kingsley glancing around the camp with a question on his face, he started to explain. “Sammy and Eric went to pick some blackberries. I saw some growing yesterday while we
were looking for a good spot to set up the camp, and I thought they might go nicely with the porridge. So they went to pick some while I watch the food. Doesn't that sound delightful?”

  “Yeah, amazing. I could really do with some grub to perk me up right now. I’m tired as heck.”

  “Really?” James said. “You’ve been asleep for an hour longer than the rest of us.”

  “I have? Well, I remember waking up randomly in the middle of the night and it took me a while to get back to sleep because of…” Kingsley shook his head at the words coming from his mouth. “This is going to sound stupid, but I thought I heard someone walking in the woods and it spooked me out.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure it couldn't have just been a fox?”

  “Pretty sure,” Kingsley said. “The footsteps were too loud.”

  James frowned. “Why would anyone be…?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m almost certain I wasn’t imagining it.”

  Just then, they heard Sammy and Eric crunching through the forest litter towards the campsite. They turned and saw the two of them moving between the trees with little mounds of blackberries in their cupped hands.

  “Finally,” James said as they walked over to the fire and dropped some berries into the porridge. “We’re starving.”

  “Have a nice sleep, Kingsley?” asked Sammy.

  “Yeah, I—” His reply was interrupted by a distant but unmistakable sound – a scream, high-pitched and feminine.

  Kingsley felt abruptly cold. He knew he hadn’t imagined this one because all four of them turned their heads towards the noise.

  James gave Kingsley an anxious glance.

  Sammy was the first to speak. “What the hell? Was that from the road?”

  “Must have been,” Eric replied. “There’s no one else camping out here, at least I haven’t seen anyone.”

  “Shit. What if there’s been a car accident or something? Should we go and check, make sure no one is hurt?”

  “Kingsley was just telling me that he heard footsteps near the camp last night,” James added. “This is freaky.”

  “Yeah,” said Kingsley.

  “Let’s go take a look then.” Eric turned and started to lead the way to the road, going in the direction of the noise.

  *

  The area in which they were staying was a patchwork of farmland and wooded squares, and their own tents were set up near the edge of the largest of the wooded squares, close to a narrow country road that snaked into the A120. It didn’t take too long to reach the road from the camp.

  While they marched through the trees, they heard the same scream again, twice. And each time it was louder than the last.

  They were on the right track; whoever was making the noise was almost certainly on the road. This thought did not comfort Kingsley, though. With every step he took, the sense that something terrible was afoot grew more intense.

  The trees thinned out ahead of them, and the ground rose and thickened with grass. The barbed wire fence that separated private land from public was visible now – and beyond it, the thing they had dreaded.

  A grey finger of smoke coiled in the air. It plumed from the crumpled bonnet of a car that had pivoted into one of the fence posts. Kingsley halted mid-stride at the horrendous sight. He didn’t even mean to. His legs just stopped moving, as if there was a chain attached to him that had reached the end of its tether.

  The other three continued to jog towards the crash, cursing in astonishment, while Kingsley’s eyes drank up the carnage. The windscreen of the vehicle, which was a blue hatchback, was completely shattered. Crumbs of glass were scattered like hailstones all over the place. The driver’s seat was empty, but blood marked where someone had been.

  Seeing this, Kingsley suddenly found himself reliving the worst moment of his life.

  Speeding down a country road in his car, laughing. Emma laughing with him, then shrieking in thrill as they flew over a small rise, telling him to slow down through her giggles.

  Kingsley’s arms started to tingle.

  A bend ahead of them. His foot staying on the acceleration, both of them chuckling like maniacs as they neared the turn. A truck swivelling round the bend at the last moment, veering slightly into their lane. Squeezing the brake – too late.

  Kingsley heard the ringing of the collision in his ears.

  His car slamming into the truck’s left headlight at over forty miles per hour. Spinning, the airbag pressing him into the seat... a silence as powerful as death.

  They say that memories become distorted over time, small details rewritten in the mind with each recollection, until they are inaccurate to the reality. But the memory of that accident was something more than a recorded piece of data in Kingsley’s brain. It was as if every image, smell, sound and feeling from the memory had become part of his flesh. He could relive the moment and physically feel the jolt of the collision, smell the seared rubber of the tyres.

  Kingsley felt certain that if he turned his head to the left right now, he would be able to see Emma slumped in the passenger seat of his car, a shard of glass lodged in her stomach.

  Right where their unborn child was.

  He asked himself again how he had come away from that accident with nothing but a concussion. Why did Emma have to be the one to lose the child they had tried for so long to make? Why did she have to carry around that scar on her stomach as a reminder of her loss when he was the one who had been driving too fast?

  A loud gasp brought Kingsley’s attention back to the present.

  “Stop! What are you doing?” Sammy was yelling.

  3.

  Eric, James and Sammy were investigating the wreckage to see the extent of the damage. Sammy had stepped over the low barbed wire fence and circled the crashed hatchback to look at the other side.

  When she gasped and started to yell, Eric and James jumped the fence and ran to join her, startled at the urgency in her voice.

  But what they saw when they got there startled them even more.

  The source of the screams they had heard from the woods was immediately clear; a dark-haired woman lay motionless on the ground next to the open driver’s door of the car. Her pale face gaped, unseeing, at the sky while a man crouched over her and tore into her belly with his teeth. She had clearly been the one they heard screaming. But she wasn’t screaming anymore, and it didn’t look like she was breathing either.

  They all froze in utter disbelief.

  The man was a rugged sight, with a beard like a dead cat and a tattered white shirt. Completely engrossed in mutilating the woman, he didn’t even glance at the three of them.

  Eric snapped out of his stupor as a chunk of stomach tissue was ripped from the woman. He lunged forward and swung a kick at the man’s forehead.

  The kick threw the man off the woman’s body and onto his back. It was then that they glimpsed his eyes for the first time. They looked like two grey-blue marbles in their sunken sockets, translucent and red-rimmed like he had cataracts or something.

  The man didn’t appear to be hurt by Eric’s kick. He lay there in the road for a few seconds, then simply picked himself back up off the ground, his facial expression unchanged.

  The man resumed his attack – this time targeting Eric.

  Eric looked physically shaken for the first time in years. It was probably only the adrenaline coursing through his body that enabled him to dodge the man’s lunging arms. The man stumbled, then turned to face Eric again, blood dribbling from a fresh cut on his forehead where the kick had landed. He didn’t seem to be pained by it.

  James was spurred into action by the troubled expression on his friend’s usually calm and calculating face. He flung his arms around the man’s neck from behind, trying to restrain him.

  James misjudged the man’s strength, though. He gripped James’ wrists with iron hands and twisted his head down at an unnatural angle, cartilage audibly popping in his neck. Then he op
ened his mouth and snapped at James’ left arm.

  His teeth – still coated in a film of blood from the woman on the ground – struck James’ lower wrist near the elbow. The man bit down through his flesh. James howled in agony, his arm locked in the man’s mouth.

  Eric wasted no time now that his friend was being attacked. He raised a leg, brought his heel crashing down on the side of the man’s knee. The man lost balance and fell, releasing James from his jaws.

  Eric drew in a deep breath as the insane man squirmed on his back and started to rise once again. He kicked the man back down, exasperated – then he raised his leg again and stomped on the head, letting out a furious roar.

  Silence followed, the only sound Eric’s heavy breathing as he watched blood pool around the man’s skull, finally still.

  Sammy had stopped screaming, but now tears poured down her face and she began to sob mutedly, her shoulders rocking.

  After a long moment, Eric began to mumble to himself. "That wasn’t... that man can’t have been..." Kingsley couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Eric at a loss for words.

  James just stood there in the middle of the road, clutching his wounded arm and gawking at the deep red craters in his skin. The colour had drained from his face.

  *

  “That might get infected,” Kingsley said. He was staring at James’ wrist. “Looks like he bit you pretty hard. You’re gonna have to get it cleaned, and you’ll probably need to be put on antibiotics.”

  “That bloke wasn’t normal,” Eric said, almost whispering. “He was like a... a zombie. Sounds crazy, I know, but he just kept coming back.”

  Kingsley frowned. It was obvious that something had been wrong with the man – he had been trying to eat a woman’s stomach, after all. But the way that Eric was acting right now was also strange. He would normally have devised some kind of plan in his head to deal with the situation by now. Something about the man had disturbed him. Disturbed them all.