The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion) (7 page)

My brain seemed to freeze into a loop of information that I had to process in order to understand what came next. I thought of everything that Gregory had told us, about the attack and how Shannon had been ripped apart and devoured by her boyfriend and his neighbours.

How he, himself had been attacked, bitten on the neck by Ben, but had managed to escape because his car was nearby and he had left the keys in the ignition.

              The Drone had filmed it all, and whoever was watching that film had done nothing to help. Nothing at all. A disturbing common factor. Mitch could be right, whoever was really alive outside of those who had ‘woken’ up dead potentially were not a friend to any survivors.

              “We need to get out of here,” was Seb’s reaction to the news.

              “And go where?” Mitch said sharply, “If the people from Thorncroft have woken up, what’s the bet others are waking up, Thorncroft is a tiny place…” he didn’t have to say any more than that. We all were blessed with pretty good imaginations.

              “Did the Drone follow him back here?” I asked Phoenix suddenly.

              Phoenix nodded his head “It was a long way behind Gregory’s car, but it will get here, if it follows the private road.”

              “Shit!” Mitch swiftly moved from where he was standing, “I better put Greg’s car in the garage!” He shot out of the office whilst Adag moved swiftly over to the window and pulled down all the blinds.

              Mitch got the car into the garage quickly enough and was soon back in the office with the rest of us. Seb and I looked at each at each other helplessly, not sure what to do next.

              “It might not find us,” Seb said, hope in his voice, but it was a forlorn hope. No sooner the words were out of his mouth we all heard it. The whir of a Drone’s blades and the battery powering it. It’s surprising how loud it sounded to our ears, but then the world was now a silent place and subconsciously we had all been straining our ears for anything out of the ordinary.

It was a low hum at first, continuous and steady, buzzing almost, making me think of bees in summer and then it became a bit like the low level noise you hear of a well-oiled electric lawn mower on a smooth grass turf.

That sound changed eventually to the familiar sound of the battery powering the Drone’s blades, the sound of a remote controlled helicopter in fact. It eventually got louder, and louder, and I was puzzled as to why it was so loud. It was as if it in the building and not outside of it.

              “The doors into the dining room are open, we didn’t shut them!” I said with the horrified reality as to why we could hear the blades so well “Oh God, Stevie…”

I started to move to the door, but Mitch shook his head, blocking my exit, “Stevie’s just asleep,” he whispered, “They will think he hasn’t woken up yet.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying at first, but Gregory did. He got up from his seat, unsteady, his skin was waxy and wet, he looked so ill, and his neck was leaking through the second layer of toweling.

              “I’ll stop it,” he said. We all pressed ourselves away from the sight of the door, which wasn’t easy as Seb’s wheelchair was cumbersome, thank God he wasn’t in Lewis.

Phoenix stepped aside from the door and Gregory stumbled out of the office. We heard his footsteps as he headed to the dining room. There was silence for what seemed forever, then we heard a thud, as if something had been hit, hard, another thud, then another, followed by a high pitched screeching noise, and then the crash as something dropped heavily to the ground.

              Then silence. We waited and then Gregory’s voice, “It’s down.”

Adag, then Seb and finally I was out of the door, followed Mitch. Stevie was still fast asleep on the sofa; whatever Adag had put into his orange juice was strong, thank God.

The Drone lay on the floor in several pieces. Gregory was holding one of Stevie’s exercise dumbbells, which he had used to bring the machine down with. He had managed to come in from behind its swiveling camera lens, which was focused on Stevie’s still body. He had struck it hard each time he said, the damn thing didn’t want to go down, but he had won in the end.

I noticed that Gregory’s eyes were dilated again and his tear ducts were now getting clogged with a greasy looking black goo, the stuff leaking from the wound in his neck had saturated the double folded towel around his neck. He sank down onto a chair, the metal weight sliding from his hand and onto the floor as Seb and Phoenix went to look at the shattered Drone on the floor.

I went and got more towels from the kitchen and with Adag changed the dressing on Gregory’s neck. I bought a black rubbish bag with me and we put the saturated towels into it. The flesh around it looked like it had been chewed on. I swallowed hard. That was what had happened. Gregory had told us. Ben had gone after him after…I refused to dwell on the thought.

Phoenix and Mitch had picked up the pieces of the Drone and taken them into Phoenix’s room. Phoenix said something about looking at the Hard Drive to see if there was information, he could extract from it other than the films and the photos it had been taking.

Seb went and closed the dining room doors; it was starting to get dark. He drew the curtains and as Adag tried to persuade an exhausted Gregory to sip some tea I went and made sure all the external doors were locked.

I came back into the dining room. Adag was watching Gregory who was shivering now. She had another duvet for him and he was wrapped up in it.

“I feel like shit,” he croaked. He looked like shit and I said as much. It got a smile out of him.

“Do you think anyone will come for the Drone?” I asked.

“More than likely,” Mitch’s voice was flat. He had lit another cigarette after he had left Phoenix with the remains of the Drone.

“What do you think they will do…with us if they do come?” I had to ask the question.

Mitch shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you think everyone; you know like the people at Ben’s place…” I stumbled on my words, but managed to blurt them out “They are like him, doing what he did…”

“That wasn’t Ben,” Gregory said from his chair, he wheezed as he spoke, “The body was Ben’s, but it wasn’t Ben who ripped Shannon apart, it wasn’t Ben.”

“A Zombie Apocalypse,” Seb spoke suddenly.

“Don’t be stupid Seb;” Adag said sharply, “We haven’t got time for your puerile jokes.”

“I’m not joking,” Seb snapped back, “I don’t know what else to call it, I mean Shannon is dead, more than dead in fact! There isn’t anything left of her to put in a coffin, so you tell me, what do you want to call it? A sunny day in Thorncroft town were Zombies bite your throat and then eat you?”

Adag couldn’t answer that. Instead, she headed for the kitchen saying she would make tea and toast for us all and could someone please check on Paul and the others to make sure they still asleep.

Mitch left the room, he didn’t look at Seb and Seb turned to me.

“What do you think?”

I didn’t know what to think, but I was looking at Gregory who had closed his eyes, his huge frame sunk into the recess of the chair. His skin was taking on a grey hue, his lips had a tinge of blue and his eyelashes were sticky with black goo. A thought entered my head just at that moment. A thought that so horrific I couldn’t believe it had entered my head in the first place.

Was it possible? Was what I was now thinking happening before our eyes?

I made the fateful decision to say something. I put my finger to my lips and motioned Seb to follow me into the office. He opened his mouth to be his usual belligerent self then decided against it when my hand swiftly signed the words, bad and danger. He followed me and I pushed the door partly shut, keeping an eye on Gregory and I said softly.

“The Gorilla was bitten by Ben,” I said, my hands fluttered as I found myself signing as well as speaking.

“So?” Seb said dismissively, “We know that, he told us.”

“What if he is infected with what Ben has been infected with,” there I had said it. I waited for Seb to tell me I was a stupid twat and swing his chair out of the office in disgust, but he didn’t. He stared at me mutely, the thought had not entered his head, I could tell by the expression on his face.

“It’s just a bad bite,” he said when he finally found his voice. Like me his hands fluttered out the words along with his speaking, that was a bad sign in itself, as he usually stopped himself from using it but as it was something that was a constant in the home, we did all tend to use it automatically, for some of us more sporadically than others.

“It’s not clotting,” I said, “At least not like a normal wound clots, and his blood is getting blacker, thicker in fact, his tear ducts are acting funny, when he cries, he’s leaking black goo, not tears, and have you seen the colour of his skin, it’s going grey… like those bodies on the ground.”

“Christ,” Seb was now seeing what I had seen.

“We need to quarantine him,” I hated having to say this but I couldn’t think of what else we could do, “Put him in a place where he can’t touch us, if I am wrong, then everything will be ok and you can call me a stupid cow, but if I’m not, he could turn into what Ben became…” the thought made my stomach boil but I had nothing left in it chuck up.

“And we all will be his very own smorgasbord,” Seb proved yet again he was still as irreverent and offensive as ever. I found this strangely comforting though part of me wanted to tell him he was a Dick.

Gregory was still breathing when we left the office though he was dozing on the chair, his head once again resting on his chest. I felt bad about thinking the worst of him, but instinct told me I was not wrong, I wanted to be wrong, but deep inside my primordial self I knew I was not wrong.

Adag, however, didn’t want to believe us. She called us both stupid and melodramatic, practically threw a tea towel at me, and told me to start washing up the dirty teacups. Gregory just had a bad wound to his neck she told us; he was going to be fine.

Luckily, for us, Mitch was on our side. That was a come uppence for the books, Seb said to me, staff agreeing with the inmates, but without Mitch pointing out it was better to be safe than sorry I don’t think Adag would have agreed to do what we did next.

              We put him in the Time Out Room, or the TOR space as it was usually called. Some of Thorncroft’s residents have challenging behaviour and at times they needed to be isolated from other residents, Cassidy often found himself in the TOR after a meltdown. The room was windowless, had only one door which was made from reinforced material and it was padded from floor to ceiling with a special memory foam that allowed a person in the room the space to move about without hurting themselves.

              “I think you are all being ridiculous,” Adag said glaring at the three of us, but Mitch stood his ground.

              “It’s just a precaution Adag, a sensible precaution; we don’t know what killed those people or what bought them back.”

              “Twice Dead,” I murmured and Adag gave me a sharp look, but said nothing.

Gregory was groggy and confused when Adag and Mitch helped him to his feet. He swayed and let out a groan of protest. They urged him to walk, being careful not to touch his bloody neck. Even though Adag didn’t want to believe that Gregory might be infected with what Ben and the others had been infected with, instinct made her draw away from the black thick liquid seeping under the thick towels around the big man’s neck.

              I had gone and got Phoenix and made him help me drag a mattress from one of the empty bedrooms into the TOR space along with pillows and another clean duvet. If Gregory knew which room he was being put into, he didn’t show any sign of it. He seemed glad to see the mattress and all, but collapsed on it with a mighty sigh. At Adag’s insistence, we left him a large bottle of water and some extra towels. We then locked the door.

              This simple action saved all our lives.

We ate our tea and toast in the kitchen. Adag didn’t have much to say and I couldn’t be asked to try and sooth her ruffled feathers. If I was wrong about the Gregory being infected with what Ben had, then I would apologise, but until then I wasn’t going to feel guilty about putting him in a comfortable room that was warm and well ventilated.

In the morning Jasmine, Eden, Stevie and Cassidy were still out for the count. Adag made the decision before we went to bed to sedate them further with injections of more tranquilizers.

She was concerned about giving Paul anything more, but he rarely came out of his room unless he was being pushed about in a wheelchair. She went to give him some food, and Seb transferred out of his wheelchair, which he put on charge, before getting into Lewis.

              When he bought Lewis into the dining room, I wrinkled my nose; I could smell petrol and oil. He had changed the wheels, they were solid I heard him tell Mitch, and not pneumatic. The main chair body of Lewis was higher that Seb’s other chair. The batteries that powered Lewis were also double sealed. There were solar panels on the back of the chair, but it was the two long cylinders in what had once been a place for two crutches that intrigued me. They were silver in colour and they had wires that disappeared under the seat, which was made of a heavy rubber. Lewis maneuvered surprising well for its size, it turned on its axis well, and though it took up more room than his other chair, it had retractable legs that could be electronically repositioned.