The Zombie Evolution (8 page)

The night moved on and was good fun; Mark seemed to have got the message and left Ashley alone, and made the sensible choice to stay at the other end of the table from me too. We all laughed, we joked, we drank, and we enjoyed ourselves. At around 1am, Ashley said she was going to walk to the nearby Subway to pick up something to eat, then come back and grab me so we could get a taxi home to conclude and eventful but generally enjoyable night, bar the earlier hiccup. I should never have let her walk on her own, but it being a five minute walk down a well-lit high street on a busy night I thought nothing of it, kissing her with an expectance to see her again very shortly. Ten minutes later, I got preemptive food envy and I realised I was hungry too, so said my goodbyes before heading in her direction to join her and pick up some food. On my travels, humming to myself cheerily, doing nothing to submerse my intoxicated state, I happened to peer down a shadowed side alley just off the high street, a couple of buildings before my fast food destination. I had to adjust my eyes to the light but stopped dead as I saw Mark, who had somehow skipped out of the bar undetected presumably to follow Ash as she headed out, where he had pulled her against her will into this alley and was holding her captive. He hadn’t actually done anything, yet anyway, but had his hand over her mouth to stop her shouting and was using his best moves to try and get her to reciprocate his feelings of sexual magnetism, persistently repeating “kiss me, no-one needs to know, just kiss me”.

I don’t lose it too often, and it takes a lot, but my switch was well and truly flicked when I saw them, darting down the alley and taking no thought in beating the fucking shit out of him. He pleaded and cried and swiped at me in attempt to get a lucky punch or two in, but I had seen red and there was nothing he could do to get me to let up. Ashley, not being one to condone violence, made an attempt to pull me away, but I didn’t stop for quite some time and eventually ended my brawl after I had managed to break his nose, his jaw, and cracked two of his ribs. 

A consequential court case for GBH was raised by Mark, but was fortunately dropped before conviction which I suspect had a lot to do with Phil, Jon and Derek. Although the boys made every attempt to make sure I knew they recognized what he did was completely wrong, they put it down to a drunken mistake of which we have all had many, and assumedly had worked hard on minimalizing the damage control of the aftermath. Unfortunately for me, or for him, whichever way you look at it, the bad blood was so thick that its sheer density stopped any potential water running under the bridge, resulting in a lot tension and hatred between us. Unsurprisingly, this meant we never, ever hung out again. If he was out, I wasn’t, and vice versa. I had no qualms with the boys seeing him as appreciated that they couldn’t throw away all their years of friendship for one, really stupid drunken mistake, but that mistake was too much for me and I fucking hated the cunt.

Derek, with the cat now well and truly out of the bag, turned to Jon and I, sheepishly bounding over as he rummaged his front pocket before pulling out his phone.

“What the fuck, didn’t we all throw our phones away?”

I pointlessly asked, clearly being aware this not to be the case.

Apparently, Mark had sent a text to the three of them before the entire mobile signal went in a bizarre, rather lucrative attempt to enrol them. The text read:

“Zombie attack! This day was always meant to come, and we are prepared to withstand the apocalypse! Head to my house in Aldershot to join the anti-zombie army. We will not surrender!”

What an utter bell-end.

Derek’s phone bleeped as his battery dropped to 1%. I grabbed it off him and rather hastily launched it into the bushes.

“Hey!”

He exclaimed.

“What the f-“

“We just thought he would have sent the text to loads of people”

Phil Interjected.

“We thought this would be a good way to see if anyone else is alive, any of our other friends maybe. Plus, he lives next to the military base. There might be guns in there, maybe even vehicles or soldiers that can help us get to the shore and get out of the UK”

I reluctantly admitted that he did have a point.

Derek scurried into the bushes, scanning the ground for his phone. It was extremely dark and I had thrown it quite far, so it wasn’t long before he returned slightly disgruntled and empty handed.

I was far from happy. I mean, I really hated Mark, and once more I knew he hated me too. I beat the fuck out of him for goodness sake, so I bet in this scenario he wouldn’t think twice about throwing me to the blood-thirsty undead land walkers. Yet, as I felt pain with every advance, completely losing any ability of my destroyed foot, and my comrades striding forward intently with a clear plan in mind, I really had no choice in the matter. I either hopped off into the darkness of the night on my own in a strop, perhaps convincing Lance to come with me and ultimately lessening his chance of survival too, or sucked it up, swallowed my pride, and stuck with my friends, stuck with their plan. My only hope now was that Mark would let bygones be bygones in light of this whole ordeal, welcoming us in and helping us to survive until the end in whatever format it comes.

We continued our trek, which although shouldn’t take too long under normal circumstances consisted of nine tired legs and one injured one, so wasn’t the quickest of movements by any stretch of the imagination. We also took special care of where we were stepping, how loud we were being, and were constantly looking in every direction in order to spot any potential attacks. The darkness proved to be a detriment, meaning the shadows were playing havoc on our paranoid and imaginative minds, creating a dangerous mix with our food, water, and rest deprived bodies to cause increasingly severe hallucinations. It was one thing to keep telling yourself that nothing was there, nothing was waiting in the darkness, nothing was after us, but completely another to realise that anything could be a possibility. We had to be cautious of any shadow, because it could easily be a surfacing zombie who was dead set on making us a late night snack. Nothing could be taken for granted; we just had to be positive, realistic, and most importantly wary of our surroundings at all times. This danger was as real as it was persistent, a fact that we all knew far too well.

We hadn’t spoken for what seemed like a couple of hours now; the darkness had taken a gradual transition into the orange glow of street lights as we took to the main roads leading into town. The woodland still surrounded us, yet this area would have been a busy part of the outskirts filled with cars only a few days before. The light permitted a detailed scrutiny of each party, showing all our cuts and bruises, along with a clear depiction of each of our exhausted and ostensibly exasperated faces. Derek looked fed up; almost on the brink of collapse. His face had balanced an equal mix of angst, fatigue and determination, all rolled into one. We were all accustomed to long walks and none of us particular unfit, yet the events of the past few days had really started to take their toll, and with the adrenaline well and truly gone, tiredness was firmly settling in. I could see it in his face that he wanted to stop, the words to ask us to take a break on the edge of his sweat drenched lips, it really felt as though the stop was imminent. The pain in my ankle was agonising, playing a distinct part in my fatigue, so if Derek did ask us to stop, I would have found it hard to say no irrespective of what Jon, Lance and Phil said.

The roads were empty in terms of movement, populated only by the reverbed echoes of our heavy footsteps. It was not however empty of reminders to the situation we were still in the middle of; we made our way past overturned cars, small fires, puddles of blood, remains of people and clear remnants of struggles. These roads however suburban did nothing to subvert the thought of the zombie apocalypse, politely reminding us that the terror and turmoil was outstretched much further than we would care to think. We had only covered a few miles of the thousands that cover the UK, and the few that we had paced so far were nothing compared to the journey needed to get to the coast; a journey of which was a certain impossibility without a vehicle, and even then faced an extensive array of obstacles before ascertaining anything close to safety.

I started to think of Ashley in New York, praying the outbreak hadn’t got off the UK soil and made its way to anywhere else, especially not to her in the states. Although I knew she’d be worried sick, franticly trying to contact me or find out if I was ok, I daydreamed about her at peace, relaxing in the sun on a white-sanded beach with her toes taking solace in the coolness of the seawater as it washed up around her feet. The exhaustion, lack of blood, and lack of sustenance was starting to affect my sanity, so although I was fully aware it wasn’t real, I could see her. I could see her as clear as I could see anything else; she was standing in front of me with the wind gently blowing her long brown hair as it glistened in the sunlight. The wind caught her white, flowing dress causing it to ripple in the air as the soft waves engulfed her feet and frothed up against her legs, each drop of water like a tranquil diamond to give her a twinkling under glow. She looked exultant and blissful, the sun bouncing off her sunglasses creating a heavenly celestial effect. She looked so beautiful, she looked so divine, and all I wanted to do was run into her arms and hold her.

I started to call her name over and over but she couldn’t hear me. Soon I was screaming at the top of my voice but still she didn’t react or indicate her awareness of my presence. I persisted to yell through a permanent smile prominently affixed on my face in hope she would
eventually
hear me. As I got significantly closer, my desperate beckoning became noticed as her head turned to face my direction, making my heart race with elated excitement. But as she seemed to catch me in her vision, her body locked facing in my direction, and her content smile dropped instantly. My toes dug into the sand to cease my approach as my smile followed suit, transitioning to an expression of anxious bafflement.

Did she not know it was me?

Didn’t she
recognise
me anymore? Surely it hasn’t been that long.

Slowly her hand moved from her side, moving up past her white dress which continued to flutter in the wind. Her fingers took grip of her sunglasses, and then unhurriedly pulled them down to reveal her eyes. The beautiful blue glistening eyes I expected to see where not that at all, but in fact white and soulless, with blood suddenly pouring out of them and streaming down her face. The blood acted like an acid, stripping her flesh from every surface it touched, leaving a decayed, rotten physique stained with signs of war and torment. Her stunning white dress stopped caressing the air, reducing itself to nothing but rags which tightly clung to what remained of her flesh, and as she opened her mouth, she revealed a series of jagged, rotten teeth amongst a jaw held together by veins and tendons alone.

The sunglasses fell to the ground, hitting the sand before being washed away in the waves, now red and thick with blood. Her arm freely rose upwards, pointing itself toward me in unison with its paralleled partner on the other side of her body. Her black, decayed teeth grated as she released a snarling growl, like a rabid pit bull, discharging a mouthful of foaming saliva to match. Finding grip with her feet, she aggressively bound toward me, kicking blood stained sand up in the air as she screamed a piercing siren from her mouth agape. The high, hot, beaming sun suddenly dropped like a lead weight with such velocity that the light removed itself as quick as its own speed, plummeting me into darkness, and as it did, I too plummeted back into reality. With that drop of the sun, I was back on the street lamp lit roads with my four accomplices, still venturing into the town. But the fall back into reality did not remove the zombie who had been hurtling itself toward me in my daydream, as I could still see it running at me from the bushes, still equipped with its devilish expression of cannibalistic hunger and a hurtful objective. This wasn’t a daydream at all, this was real.

The others had heard the commotion, fatigue aside springing into action to aid me as I lagged behind. The zombie launched itself out of its stride and up in the air toward me with its teeth chomping angrily at the air. With a lack of function in both my legs, my balance collapsed under the zombie’s strength as I fell backwards onto the concrete with my attacker now perched on top of me. The fear of being bitten and facing an inevitable doom was enough as a singularity, but the stench of the zombie’s rotting corpse breath further exacerbated an already terrifying situation. I managed to ascertain a strong grip on its wrists, keeping its swiping claws at bay and managing to hold it back far enough that it couldn’t sink its teeth into my flesh. It was strong and determined, writhing aggressively as it tried to get the better of me, but I managed to find hidden strength of my own, brought forward from a desperate attempt to escape a gory fate. For a moment, the beast stopped snapping its jaw and stared me down, producing power that I was finding increasingly difficult to contend with. It stared through me and seemed to flash a hint of the most sinister smile I had ever witnessed, as it overpowered my attempt to hold it back, pushing my arms downward against my chest. I was seconds away from it being close enough to bite me, which meant I was a goner. Its mouth opened slowly, dropping drool and other such horrible substances from inside its jaws onto my face as I desperately struggled to get away, and as it jerked forward to bite me I closed my eyes as tight as I could in hope that not seeing my attacker would somehow help me.