Great Bitten: Outbreak (7 page)

In the heat of the moment, you don’t think about the moral implications of your actions. I had already seen so many extreme and bizarre situations in the last 24 hours that I already felt emotionally numb to a lot of what I was seeing
and doing
[3]
.

It isn’t difficult to call forth aggression when there’s a
rancid man iridescent with unnatural rage intent on making you his next quick snack. I can’t remember how many times I plunged a knife in to that man’s eye sockets, pushing his forehead back so I could angle the knife up and into his brain. I can’t remember how many times I hacked at his neck, desperate to sever his spinal cord. I can’t remember cracking open his skull against the floor to make sure I could expose that rotting lump of jellied grey, crushing it under my foot as it oozed in to the floor.

I had a blissful few seconds of muffled
foggy silence, the storm of the apocalypse raging the other side of the world as I listened to the heaving of my own exhausted chest, before the noise of the house came crashing in on me as my mind left the tunnel of my inner consciousness and my ears popped, letting in the outside world.

Carla
was screaming. Rick was yelling at her to shut up, wrapping his arms around her and shaking her by her shoulders. They were both across the other side of the room. The kitchen and the edge of the dining room were splashed with red. Christ knows what I looked like. I’m pretty sure I’d try to run away from me too, and I was pretty impressed that they were even still in the house.

I shook my head and rubbed at my face with the palms of my hands, doing en-masse with blood what millions of women have probably done with mascara over the years before really realising what I was doing. I had just wiped off infected blood from my arm in the fear that it would get in to my own circulation, and here I was virtually licking the stuff. Bile rose in my throat and I was immediately heaving, the whisky burning as it worked its way involuntarily up my throat. I dashed back to the cursed sink, bringing up little but liquid as my body
convulsed and worked out what my brain had now convinced it to be poison. I gripped the edge of the sink for dear life, knuckles hard, riding the waves as bright sparks started popping across my vision. Pain pulsed in my temples and I felt sweat springing up on my forehead. Was this what the plague felt like? Was I about to change?

I was panting hard when I heard movement behind me. I looked over my shoulder to be greeted with the petrifying si
ght of Rick holding a hammer high with white knuckles and looking at me as if I were a predatory animal preparing to bite. Perhaps he thought I would be. Pretty brave and a damned sensible move on his part under the circumstances. I spat in to the sink and squared up to him. Damn, but he was a bit of a bottler when it came to the crunch. His hand was shaking and his pupils were dilated; if we’d been in a club I would have assumed he’d just snorted more than his fair share of coke. He looked anywhere but in to my eyes, which underlined my thoughts and made me feel less, but only just, of an asshole.

“Put that fucking thing down before you drop it and break your foot. I’m fine. He didn’t bite me, and I didn’t swallow any of it.”

“H…h…how can we know?”

“Be honest. Even if I was, could you do anything about it right now?”

Rick looked abjectly defeated. Carla was sobbing gently to herself and I couldn’t muster the heart to comfort her, not with her boyfriend being such a damp squib and with the front door being in pieces with who-knows-what wandering around outside. We couldn’t safely stay here tonight without destroying the stairs and I didn’t feel safe in that house any more, not that I’d exactly had high hopes for it being our solid bastion of defence and defiance against the impending apocalypse. With a sigh I grabbed for the hammer, yanking it out of Rick’s unrelenting hand and tossing it to one side. It landed on the hardwood floor with a brief clatter. I strode over to Carla and shook her by the shoulder. When that didn’t get her attention, I gave her a gentle pat on the cheek, more cupping it, not too keen on the Hollywood stereotype of slapping hysterical women to snap them back to their senses. She sniffed and finally made eye contact with me and I did not like what I saw. Her eyes were raw and the emotion in them wavering and unsure. It was unnerving to see my normally robust and capable sister reduced to this. Rick was still flustering around in the background. London started all over again. I took control.

“Where’s everything been stored? Where’s the rucksacks? I know you’ve got some. We’re loading the car and we’re getting to that boat tonight.”

“We can’t leave in the middle of the night, the marina will be locked up.”

“Do you think a padlock is going to let any of the boat owners get between them and their salvation when that is happening
outside?” I pointed viciously at the door and Carla followed my finger in fear, as if expecting another corpse to come staggering in to her defenceless house. With timing appearing to be counterpoint to my neurotic prose, there was a thump against the thankfully-boarded patio doors. Apparently we were making too much noise.

“Get upstairs and get the rucksacks. Get together the food, the medicines and safe changes of clothes for all of us. Remember we’re not going on holiday here. Forget about weapons
I’ll sort those. Remember some toiletries too, we need to be able to keep clean. Don’t pack anything you’ve already got stored on the boat. Rick? Rick pick up that hammer and get your act together. We need to make sure nothing else surprises us coming in to this house.”

Shaken from his catatonic daze, Rick did as I asked. He followed me mutely, the sheep to my German Shepherd.
I looked him over and sensing my apprehension at his worthiness, he stooped to the ground and then hefted his hammer in a show of compliance. I supposed that would have to do. The mutilated body of Ass and whoever the hell had eaten him in the first place were starting to cause a stench that was nauseating, but with things the way they were there was neither sense in moving them nor the time to do so. Carla hurried up the stairs so fast it was like I was hustling her all the way with a cattle prod. Couldn’t really blame her; she did have to leap over the corpse of the stranger to get to the first few steps. I’d have been paranoid that an undead Carrie arm could have still made a grasping plunge for my ankle, pulling me towards bloodied red teeth and sentencing me to the same gruesome end as her hapless chubby neighbour. Maybe she was paranoid. No time left to pander to that though and anyone with a scrap of intelligence would have noticed the dire situation we were in before I had started my ranting, perhaps even before the cranial demolition of Ass. Ignoring corpses seeping with blackened viscous blood, Rick and I stood by the door, he with the aforementioned hammer and me with a hammer and a butcher’s knife from the kitchen. Britain might not have guns, but many of the middle-class houses probably had so many cooking utensils that they’d probably be able to make a good, a ha, stab at survival. There was another dull thud from the back of the house. The boards we’d put up at the back were sturdy. I didn’t see any reason why we should split our attentions and watch both ends of the building. With Carla safe upstairs, the front door was without a doubt our most vulnerable point.

Rick looked as nervous as I felt. Both of us were behind the door, waiting for something to come through it rather than stand in the threshold as a beacon for anything that might be walking past on the hunt for new snacks. It occurred to me then that lights in the downstairs of the house were on and could be acting as a
signal to anything and everyone in the vicinity that there was something open and available here. But turning the lights off? Fighting a zombie in the dark? That prospect filled me with all sorts of heebie jeebies. The door had been broken for what, five minutes at least now? The lights had been on throughout that time so it’s not as if they hadn’t had sufficient time to realise there was an opening to a new small fast food restaurant in the neighbourhood. I mouthed to Rick.

“The lights?” He shrugged his ignorance and I rolled my eyes. Pointing a
t the ceiling, I mouthed again ‘the lights?’ followed by a pathetic impression of a zombie. Realisation washed over his face and after a few seconds where he no doubt contemplated, as I had, the film-scene of undead combat in the dark, he leant back and flicked off the light switches for the hallway, the movement-sensitive driveway and the landing. There was a grunt from upstairs but thankfully Carla was on the same page as us and continued to pack things away without fuss.

I’m not sure how long she took to pack, but it felt like an eternity. With the lights off and the
natural light from outside now failing entirely, my ears were the only sense left with anything to do. I dismissed the thudding from upstairs and tried to listen more carefully at what was happening outside. There was a surprising amount of quiet, but in the distance I could hear car engines and sirens. That wasn’t odd; High Salvington wasn’t exactly by the town but in night the noise would carry from major routes and if the emergency services had reserved them for exclusive use then they’d be tearing up and down them like nobody’s business. But if they were the only vehicles on the routes, why on earth were they needing to use their sirens?

There were other noises too. Once or twice I heard faint screams and hoped against all hope they were movies, domestic fights or the wailing of a fox in the countryside.
There was no running and no urgency. The beams of car headlights scythed across the room seven times, lighting me and Rick up like ghostly effigies before moving on to whatever nameless destination the passengers of the car had carved out for their own survival. As I started to reach inflective breaking point on my sister’s packaging, she hustled down the stairs hefting one huge rucksack.

“There’s two more. One for each of us. Why the fuck couldn’t I just throw all this in the car?”

“Because if something happens to the car, we’ll be left with absolutely nothing. That’s not a position I want to be put in right now. Go get the other bags with Rick and I’ll get the gun.”

“You come with me and get the bag, Rick’s better with the gun.”

“Not in that state he isn’t.”

“I’m better now Warren.
Carla’s right. You go and get the bags. I’ll load the gun and get the keys ready to run for the car. We don’t know what’s out there at the moment.”

Accepting
the choice in the realisation I wasn’t even confident on how to load the gun, I took the steps two at a time, pounding them ahead of my sister. At the landing I lost my bearings for a few seconds before stumbling through the door of the master bedroom. It looked like it had been burgled, but sat proudly on the bed were two bulging rucksacks, highlighted in the darkness of the room by the muted sulphur lights of the occasional streetlamps.

The streetlamps. Fuck. Who cared about porches when there were roadways of streetlamps to keep the dead interested and stumbling around
in rural circles until the power went completely out? I went and clutched at the sill and strained my eyes in to the street. Initially I was relieved, thinking there was nothing and no one out in the mute darkness. But then something I would have mistaken for an alcoholic stumbled in to the wash of the light about six houses down. I swore inwardly as it was followed by two more figures. Not a swarm, not a mass. But dangerous enough when we were in such a small group ourselves.

Checking the heft of the two bags, I gave
Carla what could sarcastically be called the lighter bag and led us back down to the hallway. Rick was waiting and about to charge out the door when I pulled him back, fingers to my lips. I tried to sign for car keys and he dangled them in front of me. I then thought how I could possibly make a sign for streetlamps and gave up before starting. I frowned, trying to silently put across my fear when I realised whispering would probably still do the trick. They hadn’t come again for us yet after all, and the other zombie probably only came to us because of that idiot Ass.

“The streetlamps are on.
They are out in the street. How quickly can we do this?”

Rick looked at the key. “I can open the boot from here. It’s an ignitionless car so we don’t need to fuck about with that. Sensory lock too so I don’t need to do the central locking. We just need to run.”

“Fuck the boot, we’ll chuck the bags in and run for it. This needs to be fast. Are we all ready?”

Carla
and Rick nodded. I raised my hands and counted down from three. When my fist closed, we charged out the door like an amateur swat team. Car doors were flung open and bags thrown in as we pulled doors closed as quickly as our thumping hearts and elasticised limbs would allow. Rick was in the driver’s seat, not too sure how he managed that as Carla stole shotgun and I was left in the back. As the headlights came on I’m guessing I was actually pretty glad of that. I cringed down in the seat as half a dozen of the undead were illuminated by the headlamps of the car. Their faces were angry and lips pulled back over their teeth in predatory snarls. None looked like they had been mauled. In fact, despairingly, all of them looked pretty fresh. One made a charge for the bonnet and Rick panicked.

“Floor it! Just fucking floor it! Get us out of here before they surround the car, you tool!”

Rick did as I asked and bodies rolled away as they were buffeted by the solid bonnet of the car. At low speeds their impact wasn’t crushing and the integrity of the car body didn’t seem to suffer too much. The windscreen wasn’t damaged, which was a blessing. The car kept going, and that was the most important thing at the moment. Wheezing, Rick pulled out of the street and down the road. We saw one or two stumbling bodies as we moved but so many houses were dark, lights doused and empty of life. Or at the very least not showing their hand if they did still contain living and breathing human beings. One or two of the undead tried to give chase but if they hadn’t been Usain Bolt when they were alive they certainly weren’t experiencing any kind of second wind athleticism in death. Bennington seemed like a lonely and desolate place as we made our way to where Carla’s boat was moored. Wickham was the next town along the coast and we could reach it without dissecting any of the blocked major routes and without going near the train station or the town. If zombies were in the quaint streets of hilly High Salvington, then the town was most likely a bloodied riot that I wasn’t going to go anywhere near.