by Chris Welsh
Chapter Eight. 11:45am
ZOMBIE PANINI.
There was, for all intent and purpose, a massive bloody mess. Human debris. How we hadn't noticed it sooner was a confounding mystery, but now that my eyes spied it I couldn't avert them. My other senses suffered accordingly. The sight brought with it a smell, that same gust of sickly sweet copper tones familiar to old coins. And, well, blood.
Between two of the long, rolling file cabinets full of personal information lay a woman. Mid-to-late 40's, mass of auburn hair atop her head, entirely placid. Face down on the ground with her feet pointing at us. Her long, flowery skirt folded in such a way that it hid everything unsavoury from view. Her legs had green, snaking veins that created a pattern of age under her skin.
Susan stomped down the aisle, but I grabbed her forearm and wordlessly reminded her what it could be, with a nod and a raise of my eyebrows. The lady on the ground wasn't moving, but that guaranteed nothing. Hair hid her face from view. Deep shades of crimson splattered the floor, sprinkled all over the files either side of her, as if there had been a small explosion involving a bottle of ketchup. It was impossible to tell what had happened here, even hazarding an educated guess would have been risky. Too many possibilities, from suicide to a zombie mauling to, well, a small explosion involving a certain red condiment.
The cabinets either side of her were unique in that they could be moved depending on what section needed accessing, operated by a large wheel on the end of each one. Fixed to runners on the floor similar to a tram and easily moved into place. All any operator needed to do was turn the wheel and it'd roll wherever they liked, provided 'wherever they liked' was a yard or so either left or right. They saved a minuscule amount of space and ensured the people doing the filing had a good forearm workout.
-
I twisted the wheel on the cabinet to the right of the body, creating room in the narrow corridor for either dealing with an attack, or for escaping. I held my favoured axe mid-way down the shaft, with the intention of swinging it cleanly should anything unfavourable arise. Stuart declined my spare axe, so I dropped it respectfully. He followed me down, pointing his trusty stun-gun in the correct direction.
We exchanged glances; mine asked him to take care with that thing. I'm not sure what his glance intended.
The cabinet was five yards in length, but felt at least a hundred as I crept towards the body. Dread disembowelled my confidence, I prepared for the worst. Each step was another degree of trepidation layered on like a spread of creamy butter. A thick, fearful froth bubbled between my ears.
A slab of shoulder lay on the floor next to the limb it came from, in a small circle of still-wet blood. Gnarled, nasty skin circled the wound, torn up in an unclean manner. The mouthful had been bitten, chewed and spat out to rot. A lone, long tooth stuck in the top of the meat like a birthday candle.
Stuart nudged the woman's leg with the tip of his cleaner boot, receiving no reaction in return. The limb rocked gently. I wanted her to be dead, outstandingly dead, so we didn't have to 'do' anything. Though anything other than a reanimated dead person I had to re-kill would be dandy.
Either side of us stood shelves of floor-to-ceiling files. We stood between letters E and J. Every employee whose surname fell alphabetically within those hallowed letters had a file that'd bore witness to what happened to the lady, and I wished one of them would slide out and tell us. Each manila folder hung in a green fold of card, held up on metal hooks. Mine was there somewhere, hopefully thin and devoid of information. I would have liked to read up on my more suspect co-workers but the time wasn't right.
Stuart crouched and placed two fingers on her wrinkly neck like some sort of medical expert. He pushed through her frizzy hair to get to her bare skin. A small, sad shake of the head confirmed that the lady was corpsed. Dead as a cooked steak. He placed a palm on her back and shook her torso, making her legs do a silly wobbling dance.
"Oh thank fuck for that," I said, inappropriately, as all the air stored in my lungs escaped as an almighty sigh of relief.
The cabinet rolled when I leant on it, exhausted by the atmospheric tension that hung in the air like strips of sticky, clinging fly paper, so instead I backed away, turning and catching Susan's eye. Her face was a perfect picture of flummoxed anxiety, thoughts wandering lost amid the hedge-maze of her mind. I asked if she was okay, but all she managed was a distracted 'Hm?' in my direction, wrenching her eyes off the body to stare into mine.
I felt content to drop it and never look at the filing cabinets again. So nonplussed by the existence of a corpse that wasn't walking around trying to harm me that it sloshed out of my head, leaving only dregs of dribbling unease. Each step away was a step into a pure, relaxing oxygen. My axing arm lolled carefree, my heart slowed to a healthy BPM. It would have been best to ignore the whole thing and move on quietly, but then something terrible happened.
Something that pulled me back into the world that had the corpse in it, through the mental block I built in my head that hid that knowledge from me. I crashed through those barriers like a runaway train carriage, billowing smoke and flames.
The rasping scream scattered the cold, silent air in the filing room, catapulting my morally ambiguous relief to a new spot a million miles away, to another planet or plane of existence. I spun on a heel, staring back to the corpse, only a woman stood there, still as an iceberg but with evil in her eyes.
Dried blood flaked the front of her white blouse, it caked in her hair. She lacked the lower part of her jaw, too – her cheeks flapped freely. I spied a small handgun on the floor. Bite marks tore up her arm below the wound, deep ones, akin to animal teeth rather than anything found in a human mouth. A chunk of neck flesh swung under her ear, the opposite side to where Stuart checked for life. Another bite on her right forearm was so deep there was bone visible through the hole.
-
She must have jumped to her feet with the speed of a muay thai master but hadn't moved an inch in five seconds; instead she hissed at us, her tongue swinging down from her destroyed throat. It slapped at her damaged neck, flicking dryly, tasting the air. Her eyes carried more intense menace than the upstairs versions; she shot glances at each of us, sizing us up perhaps, never blinking. I gripped my axe. Stuart joined me at the opening of the cabinets.
Our team work was impressive. She sprang with more agility than I thought possible, though still with the clumsiness inherent to the zombie disability. Her eyes locked on mine as she careened down the passage until her flailing arm caught on the cabinet, spinning her body. The dangling bit of neck snapped off and her leading foot caught it with an impressive volley, kicking it over our heads. Nelson yelp behind me, where he cowered from the front line action.
"Knock her back!" Stuart shouted, not able or willing to get close enough to attack with his stun gun. I caught her in the mushy part of her face with a jab of the heavy axe head, snapping her head back with a sickening crunch as she flailed and fell. I dislodged most of her top-row teeth.
The lashing tongue detached next as she stumbled back, hitting the hard ground with a wet splat. She joined it, her chest heaving. Neither me nor Stuart reacted quick enough to take advantage of her flat-out position.
Her body rose up awkwardly, chest first and perched on her arms as Stuart got his act together and readied his stun gun. He caught her as she whipped up in an impossible movement, jamming the electric prongs into her forehead. The screams were of agony as the current surged through her body, crisping her from the inside out, filling the room with the stench of putrid flesh.
Nelson and Susan grasped a handle each, on the moving shelves either side of the zombie. It/she silently convulsed on the floor, juddering and attacking the floor, trying to stand.
Stuart got in the way of the cabinets closing together, shaking like an elderly boxer and waiting to deliver another shock. I grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and dragged him out as our two companions worked the wheels like seasoned seadogs on old-timey vess
els.
Three turns of each handle ended the confrontation. The cabinets followed the runners, pushing together until they landed with a clang and the crunching of brittle bones. I didn't look, I didn't want to. The sounds served as enough. A slow, pained screech emanated from the monster's throat-hole as each rib broke and the remainders of its internal organs buckled under pressure, popping and emptying their contents all over the personnel records. It was impressive that they managed to close the shelves; I noticed the lock mechanism as they struggled with the last inch and flicked it, sealing the mess inside.
Nelson's handle slipped out of the squared hole it had sat in. "The end is square-shaped," he said, finding it unbelievably interesting. I told him to put it down.
A red pool formed under the locked cabinets, seeping and spreading pieces of bone and gristle. I sloped away before any of it got on my shoes. The crust of my last bloody debacle was dry enough to scrape off, last thing I wanted was further sullying.
"What in the name of all that is holy happened there?" said Susan, exasperated and weary.
"There was a gun, stuck beneath the cabinets now, mind. Best guess is she was attacked, bitten a bunch of times, escaped before they finished her off and found a quiet, dark hideaway in which to peacefully blow part of her face off. Unfortunately for us, her awful shot only did some DIY dentistry instead of killing her."
"Why did she have a gun?" Stuart asked. As a member of the building's security force, it must have irked him to learn someone sneaked a firearm in.
"It was Berol. She did all the filing. Nice lady, but old and fairly mental," Nelson said as if that explained it all. I guess it sort of did.
"Can we get the gun?" Susan asked.
I gave her an optimistic look.
"Absolutely. All you have to do is open the cabinets up, wade through the sticky human soup and pick it up. Wipe it down on your shirt or something, I'm sure it'll be fine."
She declined.
It felt correct, somehow, to have a small amount of silence for the lady. An odd feeling dug inside me, something about killing someone by utilising the space-saving mechanism on a complicated filing system didn't sit well. There's no adequate, in-built response for this sort of thing.
"We aught to get the gun," Nelson said. "We need it."
"Nelson, be my guest. Seriously. You get the gun, you keep the gun. I'm laughing with my axe. It's very... " I paused, struggling for the word, "Axey."
I swung it slightly, to demonstrate. The second axe rested against a cabinet, jealous of the love I showered on my main axe.
"If you want it, please, head on in there."
He glanced at Susan's ill features then dropped the subject.
-
At the end of the room past filing cabinets filled with dusty folders, stood a door that took us to a small corridor which, Nelson promised, led to another corridor that led to another corridor that, in turn, led to the suspended section above the foyer. He knew the door was there, hidden next to an Acorn computer from the late eighties, back when computers had less power than the modern garden gnome. On the black screen a green pixel blinked in and out of existence but the keyboard did nothing.
"Only used for the filing system, that thing," Nelson said. "I doubt it even has Solitaire."
Cardigans of all colours and fabrics hung over the back of the chair parked under the desk, and three separate signs confirmed this as Berol's desk. Many pictures of cats and shockingly youthful boy-bands littered the place. I was peering into the disturbed brain of a would-be serial killer. A faded 'I Heart Ireland' poster was stapled – stapled, not tacked or taped – to the wall, on a slight angle. I was no longer surprised that she had a handgun stashed.
We headed along the first barren corridor. Stuart retook the lead and Nelson hung shiftily at the party's rear. I caught Susan's eye and mimicked an army commando, flashing nonsense symbols and directions with my fingers and animated eyebrows. She turned away, mentally deciding that she didn't want to deal with me.
The next hallway was silent, brightly lit and housed a whole bunch of plants, standing tall in terracotta pots. Adjoining offices sat behind glass walls that allowed us to glimpse inside. They were all empty and bland, as if the owners hadn't bothered to impress any personality or take a strike at individualism. The one photo I saw, on a desk, looked suspiciously like a stock photo. It was a family, all hugging and smiling, made up of differences races.
I heard the unmistakable scrape and clink of someone rummaging through coins and turned to find Nelson picking change from his pockets. He paused in front of a vending machine we had just silently passed, piling coins into the money slot.
'BEEP BEEP, BEEP. WHIRRRRR.'
"Nelson, what the fucking hell are you doing?" Susan admonished, her tone hushed.
"I'm getting a Snickers."
She opened her mouth to continue having a go at him, but Stuart beat her to the punch and asked if they had anything with no nuts in. I punched in the numbers for a Curly Wurly.
"Your options are Snickers, Curly Wurly, or something in a clear packet that looks like it belongs in a bird cage," I said.
"I don't have enough money for everyone," Nelson moaned, closing his hand when I reached for a fifty pence piece to hand Stuart. The tight bastard collected his treat, shoved mine into my hand and walked off in a huff. He stared at Stuart, carefully removing the wrapper of the Snickers bar and taking a big, sumptuous bite.
Stuart might have attacked him were it not for my quick and awesome actions. The shattering glass was satisfied and terrified me at the same time. I shuddered and smiled, axe in hand, also embedded in a row of snacks.
"Er, I wouldn't eat anything touching the blade, but go crazy on the rest," I said.
-
After enjoying a grand feast washed down by water from a favourably placed drinking fountain, we regrouped into the familiar line and moved along the corridor. The need for silence descended on us as we approached the next door that would take us along to the foyer. Pushing his way through the heavy door, Stuart halted. My breath froze as I readied my axe, one hand on the end and the other higher up, closer to the blade. Nelson had the spare and held it like an irate cat he'd grabbed by the scruff of its neck.
The light flickered intently in the hall with no set pattern. A smell fluttered in and out of my nose, a hint of something unsavoury. I cursed each and every figment of my imagination.
Stuart's alert eyes delved into each corner, staring deep into the shadows for any possible source of danger. Satisfied the only problem was the unstable lighting, he motioned us to follow.
Something immediately knocked me to the ground. A screaming, hissing monstrosity. A second later, it landed on me.
Note: Never, ever let Stuart take point.
I perched the corpse above me at arm's length as it thrashed at my face, fingers tipped with devilishly flaky fingernails. The stench of its breath conspired to melt eyes but I squeezed mine shut. I'd have closed my nose and ears if I could, retreated all the way back to the womb if presented with the option; anything to get from under a fiend that lunged like a drunken, horny teenager. I felt the cold steel of the axe head against my back where I'd rolled on top of it like an utter fucking moron.
A wet splat followed a 'pop' sound and the zombie became less aggressive in my hands. It still moved, got at me but seemed distracted, not giving its full attention.
I cracked one eye open and saw confusion on the face of the thing as it tried to figure how it came to have the heel of a shoe embedded where its eye should be.
"Get it off!" I screamed to a fretting, one-shoed Susan who stood next to me waving her stun gun. "Don't shock the bastard! You'll get me!"
"Yes!" she screamed back, "That's why I haven't shocked the bastard!"
Despite the creature writhing at arm's length, I was concerned another prolonged jolt of electricity would burst my heart.
She yanked out the shoe, leaving a disgusting hole in its face through whi
ch a watery white slop dripped. On to my face. It tumbled towards me, sloshing through the air in ultra slow motion. Suddenly I knew what bukakke felt like.
Zombukakke.
I avoided the drops as if they were caustic acid or the spit of a plague victim but they still hit on my cheek with an obscene slop. I couldn't squirm enough to get the fucker off me.
"Thanks!" I said out of the corner of my screwed-up mouth, to Susan, who immediately threw up a river of vomit against the wall.
The zombie wasn't the strongest thing in the world but it had one hell of a grip; the hands clamped my shoulders which weakened my arms. Stuart dragged its leg and received with a freshly detached foot for his troubles. Next he grabbed the stump and ripped it off below the knee; it turned into a deplorable game of body Buckaroo.
Can every part of a zombie be removed before it devours a friend?
Ages eight and up!
I grabbed it by the throat and twisted, trying to shove it off but instead causing its head to pop off like a toothpaste cap. I panicked as the decapitated corpse spewed blood and giblets all over me from the fresh neck hole. Cold and thick, like gazpacho soup with soft croutons. The beast's grip loosened enough that I was able to kick it to one side and get to my feet where I promptly enjoyed a mini freak-out and screamed loud enough to cause a tsunami on the other side of the Earth. I took great pleasure in punting the head down the hall way and slapping my arms against the wall, making dents in the plaster.
"Come on, c'mon, really? Oh, god! Shit! Argh!" I yelled, along with a whole host of other such things. Swear words, made-up words, primal noises and yelps. I think I even shouted 'Fuckshaft', for some reason. Everything my body possessed, I let out, desperate to feel something close to normal again. At one point I bellowed a curse on 'whatever prick invented blood', though I'm not sure what station that thought train came from.
The head landed like a deflated basketball on the thin carpet that covered the hallway floor. The impact caused a dent in its skull, flattening it where it should curve. Its mouth still gnashed away, flicking the tip of its tongue over and over like a snake tasting the air.
Susan steadied herself and scooped it up from the floor, studying it intently, her fear drowned by curiosity.
"Did you know him?" Stuart asked, preparing to console her. I ended my tirade by scraping my hands across my face, pulling much of the terrible gunk off and wiping it on the wall in the shape of a frowny-face cartoon. A tantrum isn't the same when no one is paying any attention.
"I...don't think so? Hard to tell. Look at it; it's barely recognisable as human. The skin is flaking in my hands."
"You have noticed that it's still trying to bite you, haven't you?" I said. She looked at me like I was the idiot.
"I've got hold of it, it's okay. It won't get me."
"This one looks worse than the others. They've all looked like they've been dead a while, but this one looks dead, buried and forgotten about by all but the most guilt-ridden family member."
Stuart tugged a few hairs on its head, plucking them out of its jelly-like scalp.
"Except the suit he's wearing looks brand new," I said, kicking at the motionless body just to spite it. A lump of something sloppy dripped off my chin, a product of the neck-spewing, but thankfully no one mentioned it. They saw, definitely, but kept quiet for the sake of my dignity.
"In fact, so does the shirt. Looks like he was bitten on the hand. Must be how he was killed. First time round, I mean. Then he just...lurked in the hallway. Staying nice and clean until we turned up."
I waited for Susan, my moral compass, to give me a certain look and a sigh that suggested 'if you must'. Then I did what any sane, healthy person covered in blood would do.
I had off with his clothes.
Wholesale thievery - everything except his shoes (too small), tie (too formal), and underwear (too weird) became mine. Relatively gore-free, all things considered. Especially compared to the blood soaked jacket of Stuart's.
I'm not a proud man; I'll take the shirt off a dead man's decapitated husk if I have to, though my negative karma was instantly repaid as I showed my faded, cartoon boxer shorts to my companions as I changed. Susan averted her eyes but Stuart let out a brief laugh, aiming at what remained of my dignity and tactically destroying it.
Susan examined the head as I tightened real leather belt around my waist.
"It looks like whatever is turning people into these terrible things is also - nice jacket Wes, fits you. Robbing git - causing them to decompose," posited Susan.
She twisted her face into a concentrated squint, getting in as close as she dared to inspect the one remaining eye. "It's cloudy, yellow, like there's a film over it. It hasn't blinked yet." she said. "I don't think it can focus."
The zombie head took objection to her words and spat its own tongue out, slapping her in the face like a wet cloth. It was like a cough, accidental, but in the absence of lungs to blast air it simply tossed its own appendage. She emitted a brief squeak and reflexively threw the offending head away. It landed and cracked clean in two. The inside had the consistency of canteen broth, mushy and wet with meaty islands floating on top. Almost almost appetising.
"Eww eww eww eww ewwewweww," Susan said, shaking her fingers from side to side as if trying to dislodge the experience from her brain with the generated wind. "Oh, oh I wish that hadn't happened. Oh God. Oh."
Her mouth filled again with bile, puffing her cheeks like a greedy hamster. It never left her mouth; instead she swallowed it and let out a prolonged 'Urgh' sound. Stuart joined in the chorus, spouting his disapproving and almost bringing up his own insides in protestation of the swallowing.
"That was disgusting," he said.
Speaking of...
"Where's Nelson gone?" I asked, noticing our nefarious tagnut had vanished. "Why do people keep sneaking off?"
"He was here a minute ago," muttered Stuart, as he scanned the corridor, "I think. Did he go back to the filing room? Or for a second Snickers?"
We backtracked and Stuart gave the record's room door a kick. Susan followed him inside.
"Urgh!" she said again, clamping her hand over her mouth as she exited the room, pushing past me and my nice new threads. Stuart ventured in, covering his own nose with his sleeve. There was a virulent stench in the room that hadn't been there before.
"It looks like that fat bastard has legged it off somewhere," he said, muffled by the material. "And he's opened up those filing cabinets. Must have rescued the gun."
"What's it like in there?" I asked.
"It's not a fun time," Stuart said with a certain understated resonance; he'd gone down to double check for the firearm. Susan clutched her stomach and scrunched up her face.
I decided I had to see it. A strange nagging urge in the back of my mind implored me to get an eyeful of the turmoil a crushed horror created. I stepped into view and spotted Stuart sliding about in the mess.
"Gun's gone," he confirmed. "So if there was one, Nelson rescued it. No footprints either though so he must have shimmied along the shelves like a fat ninja."
"He isn't the shimmying type, is he? Deceiving prick," I said. "Any other doors in here? Apart from the blocked one and the one we used?"
Stuart investigated while Susan dragged Berol's cardigan chair out into the hall and sat on it, holding her hand to her mouth. Some people can't cope seeing a small lake's worth of blood seeping from a flattened human.
After a brief recon of the room's darker corners, Stu confirmed the lack of alternative escape routes, but added that it doesn't help us. Nelson had buggered off either way. He possibly knew something about this room we didn't. The boy seemed to know a lot about the building that he wasn't keen to share.
We took time from our busy schedule to talk things over, in the hallway with the bits of zombie scattered around, our furthest point of progress. I felt odd wearing the dead man's clothes whilst he lay in pieces yards away, mostly naked and missing one leg and a head, but I pushed h
im out of my mind, deleting all pertinent information.
"That door," Stuart pointed to the end of the corridor, past the halves of zombie head, "It'll take us to the main foyer area. Well, upstairs, above where Susan's desk is."
"Near the coffee shop that does the brioche things!" Susan confirmed, daring to mention food. Lunchtime approached and I'd skipped my usual morning foods, thanks to our shenanigans. The chocolate hadn't filled the hole. The idea of something savoury filled my stomach with rumbles. I'd kill a man for a hearty sandwich.
I didn't say thing out loud.
"If we take the stairs down we'll be at the main entrance. We skip three floors of offices this way, which is great. It's like...going up a ladder in Snakes and Ladders. If we get ourselves outside maybe we'll find someone who knows what's going on."
As unlikely as that was, it was still the best plan. We knew the car park bit and surrounding area were deserted, which wasn't as good as 'full of healthy, safe people' but was a million times better compared to 'an army of the dead strolling around'. I couldn't wait to swap zombies around every corner for a silent, open space.
We pulled ourselves together. I buttoned up my new suit jacket, rescued my axe from the floor and we headed off.
"Hold up!" I said, lifting my open-palmed hand in the air, the international sign for 'hold up', "That fat motherlover took my other axe!"
Susan pushed me onwards with a shake of her head.
"Why does he need a gun AND an axe? The selfish dickhole!"
I was furious. She didn't care. She still had a coin-sized bit of human bone stuck to her stiletto.
