Death Plague Omnibus [Four Zombie Novels] (42 page)

"Tell me what I want to know, and I'll even let you go."

The man blinked. His lips lifted in what looked like a drunken smile. "Go fuck yourself," he slurred.

I brought my hand to my mouth and licked the blood from the skin. He dared to hold my gaze, not even flinching when I viciously back handed him. Adrian's chair toppled to the left as he and it crashed onto the floor. The man closed his eyes and rested the side of his head against the concrete.

I confess that the frustration got the better of me. My fault for actually letting my optimism get in the way of my own realism. Well, no more Mr nice guy. My dear sister was somewhere in this vast collection of broken buildings. This time I fully intended to find her; to be reunited with my only flesh and blood before whoever had ripped her out of my arms moved on yet again.

"You want to play rough? That's fine by me, Adrian." I dropped to my knees, grabbed what remained of his trousers, and ripped away the thin fabric, exposing his flaccid penis lying on his undamaged thigh. I nodded to myself, knowing exactly how to play this now. Adrian thought he'd won, and I was a fool for not realising my own fluids would give this pathetic specimen the equivalent of a good high.

"That warm blanket of bliss won't stay wrapped around your delicate frame forever. Your system isn't designed for such a rapid repair. Even now, I can see drops of sweat rising from your clammy pale skin."

Why not take advantage of my fuck up? For the moment, this goon's head was still dancing over multi-coloured clouds. It gave me time to improvise. I wrapped my thick fingers around his cock, gently squeezing, then releasing, coaxing in life, smiling when I found that not all of his blood had left his body. "You like that do you?"

Oh yeah, he liked that alright. Adrian probably thought that he was being seduced by some human slut, bought for a tin of beans. My temper rose. What if that cheap human slut was my sister? I had no idea what those slavers had done to her, but whatever it was, her fate wouldn't be a good one. My black mood served to bring on this man's final lesson.

Adrian's moan quickly swapped from delight to shock when I squeezed a little too tightly. "Glad that that I really do have your undivided attention, my young friend." I said, grinning as his eyelids snapped open, the glaze completely gone.

"Oh Jesus!" he stammered, his body as rigid as the chair he was still shackled to. "Please, no. Look, don't do that."

A violent shudder passed through his torso. I suspect that had more to do with the drugs than of what I gripped in my hand. "Isn't it strange how these situations progress? I wasn't lying when I said that I really did set out down one path with the plan that we both left this small room, me with my new info, and you with all of your pieces still attached to your spindly little body." I saw his falling chair had pushed the tennis ball close to Adrian's head, with its flattened appearance, with the rotten insides, now staining the floor. Crushing Adrian's skull was going to be my final act if he refused to give me what I wanted. Now, though, I had something more elaborate planned. "Your arrogance or possibly naiveté well and truly fucked up that particular destination."

I bit into my other hand, and while waiting to taste my blood again, I pulled on his shaft, tuning out his shrieks, watching quite fascinated as his organ stretched, the skin more elastic than I first guessed. Something had to give though, the flesh couldn't stretch forever.

As my blood flowed from the wound, the skin around the base of Adrian's penis ripped, and I squeezed tighter, I didn't want the flesh to roll up like a sock. With a jerk, I pulled backwards, ripping the organ off. Adrian howled out, bucking his body backwards and forwards, his hot blood gushed from the ragged wound and splattered over my clothing.

"Talk to me, Adrian. Tell me what I want to know or I really will let you bleed out. You know I can stop the bleeding. All it takes is for you to stop being so defiant." Yet his mouth remained tight shut, and his blazing eyes told me that he still wasn't going to talk to me. Seconds passed and my prey's mouth opened to only release harsh gasps. The dirty bastard even had the nerve to smile up at me as the light is those globes faded away, leaving me holding a fucking carcass.

There was nothing else I could do, nothing at all. Thanks to this stubborn piece of meat, the one lead that could have brought me to Danielle died with him. I dropped his severed penis on his face, watching it roll down his pale cheek, leaving behind a thin line of watery blood.

Predictably, my stomach rumbled, and with me now left with no clues as to where she could be, I had nowhere urgent left to go. It left me feeling like I'd abandoned her, and yet my changed body could not allow my thoughts to take hold. My body needed fuel.

I dropped down, wrapping my fingers over Adrian's left thigh. It had been such a long time since I ate warm flesh. Drooling, I lunged forward and sunk my teeth into his ankle. I refused to let my search terminate here. There were other humans hiding inside this rotting metropolis. I could smell them.

Chapter Two

My own path

Adrian tasted funny. Not like clown funny, just a bit weird. I couldn't swallow the meat. Gag reflex wouldn't allow me. I took out the chewed up lump that I'd bitten out of his leg, frowned, and rolled it between my fingers. It felt slimy, almost rotten, but without the rank odour.

I slowly got to my feet, feeling so very sick. It took me less than a minute to realise what was going on here. "You dirty fuckers," he snarled, folding over, and pressing both hands into my guts. Why hadn't I seen the warning signs, not the stupid crosses at on the edge of town, but the simple fact that none of the shambling dead were anywhere near this place. I stumbled over to the window and prised off the boards, resting my chin on the edge of the window as the warm breeze cooled down my brow. Oh Jesus, I felt like I was on fire.

These sly pieces of filth had found a method to keep the dead from their town. It must be something in their diet, some potion or herb tainting their flesh, making them poisonous to the zombies—and to me.

My head filled up with thick mist. I watched the sun's white disc tunnel down until only a single bright spot of light remained. My balance joined the rest of my body in rebellion, and I felt myself falling backwards. I didn't recall hitting the floor; my senses had already left for other realms before that happened.

***

  Whatever foul poison that the inhabitants infected me with didn't kill me, although I did find my eyelids, sticky with gunk, trying to open. I guess that if I had swallowed the meat, my body would have given up the ghost.

Congealed blood and bits of ripped off flesh from Adrian's genitals had turned the back of my head into a solid lump of black hair. I didn't care, I was alive. The Gods had allowed me to continue my existence.

Judging from the moon's pale light casting a wedge across the floor, several hours must have passed since I dug in to what I assumed would be a fulfilling meal. I still felt weak and most of my body ached, in particular, my guts. I just hoped that I was in the final stages of whatever had afflicted me. I found it unnerving how a brush with death could make me feel so agitated. I didn't want to feel like this anymore.

Does it annoy you to discover that I didn't die? I think we both know the answer to that little poser. Of course you're pissed off to still find me breathing; okay, so I'm not exactly up to full strength, but even in my weakened state, I'd still be able to find a way to get you on the floor, straddle your struggling body, and use my fingernails to rip a hole through your skin large enough to push my head inside. It's not the best way to die, you know, and just imagine looking down your torso to see my head dipping into your guts, feeling my teeth sawing through your soft insides and …

Let me start again, you got me a little excited. Look, I can't help what I am, okay? Sure, you see me as one of those nasty hunters, the ultimate nightmare. I feed upon the flesh of the living, just like the shambling dead, and yet I'm more like you than they are. We both know that before more of our species were wiped out, many hunters did indeed find a way to worm into your survivor camps, ripping through the population before being killed.

Would you believe me if I told you that I wasn't like the other hunters? Don't scoff, I know the evidence doesn't exactly support my claim but believe me, you wouldn't have lived for too long if our mutual now dead friend, Adrian, had found you.

This is a slave town, you see. This dirty degenerate is (was) a ranger. He was tasked in finding fresh human bodies, taking them back here, and selling them to the highest bidder. It’s how he and I crossed paths. Thing is, these captured slaves didn't do the usual slave stuff, you know, like working in mines, being a house keeper, or any of that quaint nonsense that happened in ages past. The males end up on the crosses outside the town, and the women are sold to the highest bidder.

Now you can see why I'm rather anxious to find my sister.

So what happened to your future, I hear you cry. Where are the flying cars, the robots, and all the other bullshits that you were promised? Well, you get monsters instead. Sorry about that. The dead decided to get back up and chomp on the living, who in turn died and then rose up, swelling the ranks and reducing the number of living humans; to make matters even worse for the shivering survivors, somewhere along the line, people like me appeared.

I'm really not helping myself to persuade you to like me here, am I? Look, as I said, I am what I am, I can't help being this way, and it wasn't exactly a lifestyle choice. People used to care about Tigers and Pandas, and they were both fierce predators. No wait, the pandas ate bamboo. Whatever, my point still stands. Even knowing a tiger would quite happily eat you, people still tried to save the bloody thing.

And listen, unlike our metaphorical Tiger, I wasn't like the other hunters, I chose my meals carefully; only people who were truly bad got past my lips. Oh, and there are a lot of them in this would. Then again, it's not that surprising, in a world of monsters, some humans found that in order to live they had to become a monster as well.

Would it help if I told you that Adrian ate puppies and kittens? Sliced off their fluffy little paws as they howled and screeched, munching them down with bread and gravy, their dying cries, music to his ear? There, you hate the bastard now. Well, it isn't true about that, but it is true about me only targeting the evil, though; really it is.

As for what happened to the world, it must be twenty years now since we woke up to find that our cosy cotton wool coated existence was gone forever. It started somewhere in the North of England, that much I do know. From there, it spread out like wildfire, infecting and changing vast areas of the country in a matter of days. People were waking up to find they shared beds with the corpses of wives and husbands, then screaming out in utter terror as the corpses embraced them before they fastened their teeth around their loved one's necks and tore out their jugulars.

  Our family lived in the outskirts of London. Back then, like the rest of our street, we were glued to the news updates on TV and online, all terrified as the infection moved closer and closer to the capital. It was like being on Death row, awaiting your execution; we all knew what would happen to us, the news reports were all very eager to show the shrinking population every detail of this transformation from human to zombie. To make it even worse, there was nowhere for us to go. Our so called foreign friends made damn sure none of us were getting out. The bastards had corralled us all in, shooting down any aircraft as well as shelling any ship that dared to leave port.

They left us all to die.

I was only fourteen at the time, and when the news first broke, it hooked me as well, but I didn't share any of the trepidation given off from the rest of my family; hell, this was better than playing online, this really was happening, right here. The excitement only turned to fear when it did reach the capital.

A bank of clouds had drifted in front of the moon, blocking out most of its light, and plunging this room into almost total darkness. My vision is so much keener than an ordinary human's now, but even so, I still had difficulty in seeing. I crawled away from Adrian's stiffening corpse, back towards the window. I wanted to get out of here, and continue my search, but right now I had trouble even crawling, let alone walking. I was in no fit state to go anywhere yet.

By the time the virus reached our street, we had eight people barricaded up in our house. My dad got it into his head that as long as none of us left the house, we'd all be fine, convinced that this mutation was passed only through physical contact.

Irony crashed into our household in a big way on that fateful morning. I was in my usual spot. I'd made myself a den in the corner of the living room with the sofa and a couple of broken up dining chairs. My collection of kitchen knives and the garden shovel lay hidden under my old Star Wars quilt. Nobody knew that I'd broken dad's specific rule not to leave the house but I didn't care. I knew how much damage you could do with a garden shovel; I'd used one to great effect on the Dead City Rising game.

I might have only been fourteen, but I believed that thanks to my diet of survival games, I could protect my family far better than my dad could. I'd even sharpened the edge of the shovel and tested it on a few empty coke cans in the cellar.

The others were all upstairs, I never saw them much during the day now, most of them preferring to stay on the next two levels. My family—mum, dad and my sister— stayed on the top floor, with our guests taking on the floor below. I had the downstairs rooms to myself, although dad checked every morning to ensure all the windows were locked and the two doors were bolted.

I had gotten into the habit of waiting for dad to bugger off back upstairs before taking my shovel out into the back garden to practice my moves. We had a six foot fence around our property. No rotting dead thing would be able to get through that. As I unlocked the door, rehearsing my new moves in my mind, a shadow passed the frosted window. I gasped and jumped back, the shovel falling from my numb hands, when the back door swung open giving me my first real close up view of a dead thing. I lay there, unable to move, warm piss soaking through my trousers as this vile abomination moved its worm infested head down.

Oh God! How could this even by happening to me? It must have been in the ground for fucking years. I saw a mound of black soil directly in front of dad’s rosebushes and started to laugh hysterically. No wonder those bastards grow so well!

A sudden violent shudder sped through its slimy body, spraying me with small pieces of rotting flesh. It was only when one of these chunks hit my top lip and dropped into my open mouth that I found the strength to actually move.

My reaction came way too late, though, and the hesitation cost me my life, or at least, that's what I believed.

That foul creature, still coated in the moist dirt from under our garden, just collapsed its legs like a fold up table, its head and shoulders smacking against my legs. I wasn't a weak boy, and this thing weighed no more than a large, wet bag of sticks, yet even as I scrambled back, my fingers sinking into its spongy flesh, this thing still managed to open its jaws, sink its teeth into my thigh, and pull its head back, the flesh stretching and tearing as it struggled to rip away my meat.

What a wakeup call! No amount of previously experienced pain could compare to the agony that detonated through my body. I cried out, I howled for my mum as this bastard thing started to lower its head again.

Primal instinct took over, even though what was left of my rational self had given up all hope. Of course it had; once bitten, you died and rose up to join their ranks. There really was no magical cure. My instinct obviously hadn't been reading the same manual.

I reached out, my hands finding the shovel just as it opened its mouth again. I lifted the shovel and thrust it forward, the edge biting through its rotting cheeks. It didn't take too much pressure to push it forward. The blade easily cut through the blackened flesh and bones, slicing its head in two. The corpse fell forward, but I managed to get my arms up to stop the body from hitting my face. I pushed it to the side, my stomach heaving when it smashed onto the hard tiles and slime, stinking of decay, splashed against my cheek.

The house was still quiet, nobody had heard my calls. I lay there quietly weeping, watching next door's cat balance along the fence as it tried to sneak closer to a large crow that had taken an interest in the hole that this zombie had clawed out of.

Why the hell had none of my family or any of the lodgers run down the stairs? There was something else as well, but it didn't twig until much later. The pain in my leg had calmed down, it now just felt like I'd banged it against the bed. I guess at that time I put the lack of pain down to shock, that my body was doping me up with some natural drugs so I could focus on getting away from the door. I still hadn't shit it and I then saw why the crow was taking a great deal of interest in that hole. The bloody thing wasn't quite empty. I watched, still frozen in horror as another pair of hands reached up from the hole, its fingers curling around the loose soil on the top of the mound.

I moaned softly, crawling forward to close that door. As the mechanism clicked shut, I took the chance to try to get to my feet. I needed to find out where the rest of my family was, even if it was to say goodbye. The numbness was spreading, even after a couple of minutes; I could no longer feel my lower leg.

The door leading out of the kitchen seemed so far away. I feared that I'd end up dropping to the floor any moment. My fingers reached for the door frame, knowing that this really was the end for me. My vision was going grey. I was getting to the end of my existence. Tears welled up, knowing that I should have crawled out into the garden and let that other thing that was climbing out of that hole consume me. The pain wouldn't have lasted that long. Now, I knew full well that within minutes my corpse would reanimate, and I'd start to climb those stairs, my lust for warm meat knowing no bounds.

At this precise time, my recollection got a little bit confusing. I remember managing to reach the bottom step before all my strength vanished and I fell to the floor like a sack of dropped potatoes. An inhuman wailing started up from the floor directly above me, followed by multiple screams. I saw a lot of legs at the top of the stairs. In my spaced out condition, as well as only seeing greys, it felt like I was watching some old 40's horror movie. People whom I vaguely knew were embracing each other, only these were no loving cuddles. Heads dipped, teeth flashed, and skin was torn open.