The Undead Day Twenty (40 page)

‘Ow,’ Paula says, literally kicked back to her senses. She looks up with wide eyes to see four arcs of fire jetting around and above her. Heat too. Heat and light and it stinks something awful.

‘Shit,’ Mo drops his cans and yanks his rifle round to focus on the door and the infected still coming in. Paula goes for his cans and takes up the weapons.

‘Light me,’ she growls at Marcy.

‘What?’ Marcy coughs, spraying blood while spraying fire.

‘LIGHT ME,’ Paula demands, maddened with rage and ready to kick spider arses, or set them on fire instead.

‘What?’ Marcy coughs, her eyes watering from the fumes. ‘I think I’m getting high…’

Paula lights herself by aiming her right can at one of Marcy’s flames. She lights her second and grins with sadistic pleasure from a face covered in small sore lumps made by spider bites.

‘ARSE IT,’ her flamethrowers go out. The contents exhausted. ‘MAGAZINE,’ she bellows, running across to grab fresh rounds from the shelving unit. Lids off, nozzles depressed and she lights the spray to join in.

A battle of two fronts is waged. Mo holds the door. Marcy and Paula hold the rest as they slowly set fire to Boots the Chemist.

Twenty-Four

Everything is okay. Everything will be fine. Breathe. Breathe in and breathe out. It will be today and that’s fine because everything is okay. Everything is fine.

She has the towels. She has the water. She has the gas stove ready to boil the water. She has pain medication. She has sterilised surgical scissors ready for cutting and that’s good because everything is okay. Everything will be fine.

She’s scared. Terrified even. The fear of having to do something alone and without any help. What if it goes wrong? It won’t go wrong. Everything is okay. Everything will be fine.

The fear comes again. The fear that brings the tears to her eyes and the deepest wish right now is to have her mum here. Her mum is dead. Everyone is dead. Her bottom lip trembles, the panic rises but she has to swallow it down.

‘Everything’s okay, everything’s okay, everything’s okay.’

The mantra helps soothe her nerves and eases the throb in her head that comes when she thinks about her mum and what it means to be a mother. Which is what she will become today.

She cradles her swollen belly and feels the life inside. The life of a child that she has grown from nothing to something. The life inside that today will come out and become part of this world in all its decaying broken filth.

The sob breaks from her mouth as the pain comes again. The contraction that signals the time is coming. She bends with a grunt to navigate past her stomach to feel between her legs for any signs of her waters breaking. They said she would know but what if she doesn’t know? Her body is going through so many changes right now she could miss anything. It’s dry. That’s good.

Her spot is chosen. The kitchen floor that has been scrubbed and made cleaner than any operating table. Every side, every cupboard door and handle, every surface, every edge and well, just about everything in the room has been anti-bacced once, twice and thrice. The kitchen is at the back which means any sounds she makes will be muffled from being heard at the front.

Throughout the morning she paces the house, breathing in, breathing out, leaning, sitting, pacing and breathing. The contractions come but the space between them doesn’t reduce. She checks between her legs periodically and keeps wondering into the kitchen to be absolutely sure her birthing area is ready.

As the day wears on so the contractions come marginally faster but the pace is painfully slow. She sweats from the heat and drinks water to replenish her fluids. She eats tinned fruit and sits on the toilet while tapping her feet nervously.

Her boyfriend is dead. He went out on the Friday night it happened to get Doritos and salsa dip. She was craving. She had to have them. She absolutely had to have them. She told him this. He laughed and teased until she threatened to waddle to the shop herself but he pulled his trainers on and kissed her on the belly and on the head before going out to the car.

He never came back. She waited and even tried calling him but her phone signal was gone. She mused for a while, paced about and started getting irritated because all she wanted was fucking cheesy snacks and salsa dip. He didn’t know what it was like to have cravings and a body that was doing weird things.

After an hour she called her mum on the landline but it rang out. Her mum never went out on Friday nights. She tried again. Tried her boyfriend. Tried her friends. The lines were either jammed, engaged or ringing out.

After two hours she turned the television on and caught the last few minutes of the news anchors sobbing at their desks from a world breaking apart. It was everywhere.

Now, twenty days on and she has done everything she can to be ready. Her baby will come today. The contractions have started.

She is scared. She wants her mum, her boyfriend, a friend, anyone. To do this alone is too much. She breathes and calms. She thinks and panics and so the day goes as the pains come closer together.

Then, in the afternoon, she hears them. She hears the feet running outside and in a minute of mistaken hope that help has come she rushes to the window to pull the curtain back. Her hand clamping over her mouth prevents the scream of fright coming out at the street thick with those things. All of them running towards the town centre. So many. So so many. Men and women. Old and young. Elderly and children. All of them possessed by whatever the thing inside them is. All of them focussed on one task as they move with military precision.

The cramps come harder. The pains radiate through her body. She staggers back from the window as the tops of her thighs grow wet from the waters coming out. Shock hits. Her heart rate thunders. Her breath comes fast and shallow as her body and mind go into shock.

She gets into the kitchen, to her refuge, to her birthing area and lies down in the chosen spot surrounded by towels. She weeps. She weeps from pain and fear. She weeps silently for the horror of the things outside after near on twenty days with only glimpses of them in the distance.

There she stays. Silent and terrified as the cramps come and the natural stages of her body dictate the transition towards the birth.

She doesn’t know anything about her neighbour from the top of her street going into his shed to shove his finger at the big spider in the corner. She doesn’t know when that spider bites into that finger. Nor does she know when that spider rampages to infect the other spiders that rampage to infect the other spiders. She doesn’t know that house by house the hundreds of arachnids become infected with a virus that drives them in one direction.

She only knows that she is lying on her back with her knees bent and her legs open while sobbing and trying to breathe through the contractions. She freezes at the sight of that wolf spider running across her ceiling and she remains frozen in absolute terror when the hundreds behind him run across.

She hears the scuttling claws and catches sight of more running across walls and across her kitchen worktops. She doesn’t know they are infected. She doesn’t know they are driven to go in one direction and do nothing other than that. All she knows is for a few minutes her kitchen and birthing space is thick with spiders and the panic rises until she’s ready to scream.

Then they’re gone and it’s like it never happened. Five minutes later she convinces herself it was a delusion brought on by fear and panic. That makes her focus on breathing again. Breathe in. Breathe out. Cope. Deal with it. This is happening and everything is okay. There were no spiders. It was a trick of the mind.

Still those contractions come slowly and it takes hours for the pace to quicken. She sweats constantly, unaware of her body dehydrating rapidly in the intense heat. She focusses solely on the pain and the contractions.

The afternoon gives way to evening. The heat grows worse. She hears the running feet many times outside but there is nothing she can do and so as the breathing becomes panting so the urge to push starts to build.

Twenty-Five

Blowers and Maddox fire as they run through commercial zones into the abyss of residential rural England where every front garden has either rose bushes or old sofas the council refused to come and collect.

It’s dark now. Night is here. Not that they notice because they have to run and run and keep running. Hundreds of infected came after them. Far more than they realised and even with them stopping to fire thirty rounds at a time each they still don’t drop enough to even hope to stand and fight but by drawing them on, Blowers knows they are giving the others a better chance.

‘On,’ he gasps, ejecting his used magazine to ram a new one home. Maddox complies because right now it suits him to run. It is the correct course of action to ensure his survival and his own survival is the primary objective. The thing he was waiting for is here. The night is his ally and a tool to be used. He can slip away when the time is right and disappear into the darkness while the confusion is highest. If he gets it right, Blowers will think he was taken and killed which will prevent any risk of Dave coming after him. This attack is a disaster for the others but a blessing for him.

They run hard through street after street. Blowers keeps his mind clear. He knows he can run for miles and that’s exactly what he intends to do. He plans to run and draw the horde on and away enough so he can go back and join the others.

‘Next corner,’ Blowers says between sucking air in, ‘we’ll stop and fire then sprint away…’

Maddox doesn’t reply. Not because he can’t speak but because he doesn’t like Blowers. He hates him. He detests the way the idiot switches between playing at corporal to being everyone’s mate. He thinks he is something special, something unique because he has a smidge of authority and can tell a few other idiots which way to face when they point their guns.

Maddox started the day believing he would be at the top table with the leaders and would show them his ability to think tactically and strategize. Instead, he’s been running about with stupid people all day. The insecurity over Lenski has been niggling too. The loss of his crews. The death of Darius. Finding out he is immune but being refused any more information. All of those things and of course the self-generated isolation.

‘Now,’ Blowers comes to a stop, turns and fires. Maddox does so too but his movements are not as sharp as Blowers. He slows a bit more gradually, turns a bit slower and fires when he is ready instead of when he is told.

The two rifles fire with bursts. Infected drop but more come. Sixty bullets are sent down the road in a matter of seconds and they score a handful of kills. Blowers pauses for a second, changing magazine while trying to see how many are left. Too many. Far too many. That’s a good thing though. He smiles grim and determined. More here is less back there attacking his mates. Divide the enemy and whittle them down. It’s a valid tactic.

‘Come on…’ his voice snaps off at the empty space next to him. He spins trying to see where he went but there’s no sign. ‘MADDOX?’ he shouts and casts a worried look at the horde charging down the street. ‘YOU FUCKING CUNT…’ Blowers runs on. Fuming, seething and knowing without doubt that if he saw the prick now he’d shoot him dead without blinking. Sulking is one thing, being difficult is another but cowardice in the face of the enemy is unforgivable. There is no choice now. There is nothing else he can do but run. ‘COWARD…HEAR ME? YOU’RE A COWARD…’

Maddox sprints hard. He saw the mouth to the alley as he turned when Blowers said to stop and fire. He duly fired and also knew that Blowers would change his magazine and do the same thing he’s already done each time they’ve stopped and try to count his kills to see how many are left. That’s when he went. Right then. He sprinted to the alley and the years of experience at running through estates show true. He changes his magazine as he goes, simply discarding the used one on the floor. The opportunity isn’t as perfect as he hoped. Ideally he wanted them to think he had been killed but you can’t always have the best of everything. He’ll find a car, a fast one and head down to the fort. He’ll get in quietly and see if Lenski wants to come with him. He knows he can get to the fort while these idiots are still here fighting. Lilly will ask him why and he already knows he will tell her he pissed Howie off so much he was sent back. The people from the equestrian centre will vouch for seeing him. The plans form as he runs. Get a car. Get to Lenski then go. Find somewhere far away and start again.

‘YOU FUCKING COWARD…’

His lip twitches at hearing Blowers’ raging into the night. He knew he would feel guilty at leaving him. Maddox is many things but he is very intelligent and he expected the rush of guilt but he also knew he would be able to ignore it. What they do is down to them. He is not one of them. Their way is not his way.

Blowers saves his breath for running. Maddox thinks he has a right to do as he pleases because he had a hard life. Everyone had a hard life. Cookey and Nick had hard lives. Marcy was broke. Paula was in a job she hated. Clarence felt abandoned and lonely after leaving the army. Roy was a social reject due to his mental health. Dave found work in a supermarket for fuck’s sake. The hardest most dangerous man in the whole country stacked shelves in Tesco. Blowers was no exception. He joined the Marines and had his life planned out, then in the final week of training, he broke his leg. At the time, it was thought the injury was bad enough to end his military career so he was forced to leave but not once did he look back and feel someone owed him something. He was so close to earning the green beret of the commandos. The
green lid,
but that’s what life is. It’s hard and brutal but you get on with it. Even his life before the Marines was shit and he doesn’t look back at that and think he is owed anything. That’s not how his mind works. He grew up on the edge of an estate like the one Maddox and Mo come from. His mum had a succession of boyfriends, too many, far too many and she fell in love with each one as they moved in, took over then moved out a few months later. He can’t remember how many times he was given a pack of sweets and told to
go wait outside
.

He found boxing, or rather, boxing found him. He was angry. He had a temper and was quick to fight. Too many different men in his house made him hostile to affection and weary of everyone. He got into a few scraps at school, was suspended, let back in, suspended again, let back in and on it went until he bust the jaw of another kid during lunchbreak. The other kid was the son of his mother’s latest boyfriend and was bragging at how his dad
fucked
Blowers mum.

The police officer that dealt with the incident took Blowers to the local boxing club and made him promise he would complete a month of training in lieu of being prosecuted. Blowers didn’t know the other kid wasn’t making a complaint after being told not to by his father.

Blowers found a new home and one he was welcomed at. He was good too. He trained hard and had enough respect to listen and learn. He fought in competitions and won. He grew tough and bigger and soon the men in his house avoided him as much as he avoided them. It was the hard eyes that did it. The thousand yard stare he perfected in the ring to show his opponent he was not afraid.

Now he runs on his own to lead hundreds of chemically pumped infected humans away from his mates and his family. He runs on his own to draw them away and buy time.