Death Plague Omnibus [Four Zombie Novels] (5 page)

The two old men had dragged most of the pieces back into the alleyway, but that pram, splattered with bits of baby, still lay on its side in the middle of the road. Both Rebecca and Daniel paid it no heed as they walked past. Dennis was hoping that Rebecca’s maternal instinct would compel her to investigate. It looked, as his wife had always stated, that the girl obviously didn’t have any.

It was just typical behaviour from Breakspear’s younger generation. They were so involved with their own sad and pointless lives that they just didn’t notice anything beyond their own blinkered vision. The feeling of community pride that had thrived on the Breakspear estate when he and Ethel moved here fifty years ago was long dead.

Dennis had zoomed in on the kid’s face to see if the fallen pram would draw out any reaction from Daniel. His sullen features remained unchanged, at least until they approached their own garden gate.

The change was as sudden as it was frightening. The light in Daniel’s eyes just went out, and his face lost all of its animation. Dennis had seen this effect happen before, lots of times. The most recent was when he’d watched his wife die. He was now looking at the face of a dead child.

His heart began to beat a little faster when Dennis realised just what was going to happen next. He moved a little closer to the window, eager not to miss this. Sure enough, the little boy suddenly lurched to a standstill just before they reached their gate. Rebecca must have thought her darling son was just being awkward, and proceeded to give him what for. How she failed to notice that the kid was now a walking corpse was beyond him.

The lass didn’t have the brains she was born with and Rebecca, like the rest of her family, weren’t born with that much in the first place. Daniel wrapped his arms around her neck and fastened his teeth round her jugular. Dennis found it unnerving how they always went for the neck first. The two old men had done the same with the young mother, but not with the baby. Dennis figured that they hadn’t perceived it to be that much of a threat.

His hot chocolate was now cool enough for him to take a sip. He winced as the vile liquid hit the back of his throat. My God, this one tasted worse than the last one. This was just ridiculous, what on Earth was he doing wrong? Why did it not taste like his wife’s hot chocolate? It’s not like he could ask her, now was it? Well, he could, but it was unlikely that Dennis would receive a coherent reply.

He grinned as he heard the slow, monotonous pounding on the cellar door. “And speak of the devil,” he murmured.

His loving wife had awakened from her not so eternal sleep. Trust Ethel to be late; she never was very prompt. Then again, the ropes he’d tied around her wrists and legs had been very tight. Maybe it just took her awhile to work herself free. That would be ironic; before he’d taken the decision to bludgeon her to death with his lump hammer, she couldn’t tie her own shoelaces without his help.

Dennis stood up and flicked through the channels one last time before turning off the TV. He supposed that he’d have to deal with Ethel before that noise drove him to distraction. He was at a loss as to how he was going to achieve this. Ethel was dead, and Ronald Spinks certainly was. The man had been rotting under a flowerbed for the best part of a decade. How do you kill something that’s already dead? It wasn’t the sort of question that usually got asked.

The banging stopped, then re-started as he approached the kitchen door. The sound seemed louder, and it had definitely become faster, almost frantic. Could she sense that he was closer?

He had a machete under the bed and a shotgun hidden in the base of the wardrobe. Dennis was positive that one of them should be able to put an end to her. He paused for a moment as a screaming man ran past the living room window. Light bulbs went off in his head. He’d just had an epiphany. It was madness out there. Residents were consuming or being consumed. There had been no sign of any police or ambulance or even the army. They must know what was going on. Dennis figured that they’d sealed off the whole housing estate. Why stop at re-killing Ethel and watching the fun from the spare bedroom window? He could realize his dream tonight.

He looked up at the framed portrait of Clint Eastwood hanging above the fireplace.

“The Rojos on one side of town, the Baxter’s on the other, and me right in the middle.”

The next few hours would prove to be very enjoyable. After all, it wasn’t like there was anything worth watching on the television.

Chapter Five

That shambling horde of undead rotting bastards had cornered him. There was no way he’d be able to get past the fuckers, not this time. He could feel the sweat dripping down his face. What was he going to do? They had him surrounded. Those things would eat him for sure if he didn’t find a way out. Bugger, he only had the baseball bat and the hockey stick left in his inventory.

Jacob Kingsley nervously tugged at his long goatee. This was a bloody quandary. He couldn’t even ask his clan mates for assistance. The fucking Internet had died an hour ago. He sighed, then paused the game instead. Playing this off-line just wasn’t the same; it sucked big monkey’s balls. Leaning towards the television to study the screen, he looked past the frozen snarling dead faces to see if he could find a path through them. Thank God the designers had opted for the slow, shambling zombies. Oh this was so annoying; there must be something he had missed.

The snarling faces splattered all over the game box got his bloody goat when he’d first purchased Dead City Rising for his 360. Since when did zombies snarl? Everybody knew that was wrong. Still, apart from that major oversight, it was a pretty decent game. Fucking hard too. Jacob had heard a rumor that someone in the States had actually clocked it on insane mode. Personally, he thought that rumor was a big pile of steaming poo. He couldn’t even finish the game on medium, and Jacob knew that his gaming skills were bloody good. They ought to be. Playing computer and console games was all he did in his spare time.

Dead City Rising 2 was supposed to be coming out next month, just in time for his twentieth birthday. Of course, he would be buying it himself. Probably the only present he was going to get this year anyway.

It would be nice to have a party, too—like that would ever happen. Who on earth would he invite? There was nobody who liked him on the estate, which was cool as he didn’t like anybody either. Speaking of parties, he knew that the house over the road was having one tonight; not that he’d been invited, and not that he gave a fuck either. Just what did he have in common with the average brain dead scummy chav bastard that infested the streets of Breakspear, apart from fuck all?

Jacob switched off the television and decided to find out what had happened to his Internet connection. He hoped to Christ that those bastards hadn’t cut him off. If they had, there would be seven levels of hell to pay. It’s not as if he owed the company any money.

While he was checking the wires downstairs, it might be a good idea to grab something to eat. Jacob had forgotten the last time he’d eaten anything more filling than a packet of crisps. Maybe he could convince his mum to make him a sandwich. She was still in; he had heard her moving about a few minutes ago.

Jacob wondered why she was still in the house. She ought to be down at the Horse and Jockey by this time, propping up the bar. It’s what she did on a Friday. What the hell was he talking about? She was in that place every fucking night. He remembered having his eighteenth birthday in that dump. God, that was embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as finding out that every scumbag on the estate called his own mum ‘Scary Mary’.

He slid his chair back and gave Bub a salute. The poster of zombie Bub from the original Day of the Dead movie directly above him saluted back. Apparently, Dead City Rising 2 was going to have sprinting zombies in the game. He hoped to Christ that the rumor was wrong. It would completely ruin the game. Everybody knew that zombies did not run. It was like the first commandment or something.

He reached into his back pocket and brought out his phone. If Mum was home, then no doubt the fat bitch would be guzzling her way through the bottles of White Lightning cider at the side of the telly. She would be too fucked to stand up, never mind make him a sandwich. Fuck it, he’d just order out instead; the diet could wait until tomorrow.

There was no signal on his phone. Oh bollocks! That’s just what he wanted to see. He'd have to go downstairs anyway to use the house phone, if he could find the bloody thing. Christ knows where his mum would have put it this time. Buying the messiest woman in the known universe a cordless phone for Christmas wasn’t one of his better ideas. Jacob opened his bedroom door and wandered down the stairs.

When Jacob was a kid, his dream was to wake up one day to find that someone had swapped his parents during the night. He’d open his eyes to find himself in a luxurious house, clean and tidy and full of toys, and best of all, his parents spoke to him like he was a normal human being. What was he talking about? He still had that dream. To have a mother that didn’t drink herself to oblivion or leave the house looking like a bomb site every day would be so cool. Jacob stepped over a pair of her dirty knickers draped over a pile of old newspapers.

His other dream as a kid was to find out that he really was adopted, and his real parents turned up one day to take him away from all this. Looking back, he guessed they were just two variations of the same desire. Jacob had always wondered if there was a grain of truth to his fantasy. He wasn’t a bit like his two parents. Unlike those dirty slobs, he kept his bedroom immaculate. Then again, he did spend most of his free time in there.

The eighteenth birthday party disaster had put to rest any notions of him accompanying his mum to the pub every night.

Somehow, Jacob managed to get to the foot of the steps without breaking his neck. He cringed when he saw his mother’s buttery fingerprints coating the door handle. He took a step back, lifted up his foot and booted the door open. Jacob shook his head in dismay before wandering into the living room.

Mary Kingsley wasn’t sitting in her favourite chair, nor had she opened any bottles of cider. Scary Mary was kneeling down in front of the television, holding their pet cat’s legs in both hands with her face buried deep in its open, bloody stomach.

“What the fuck are you doing?” screamed Jacob.

Mary dropped the dead cat and lifted her vast bulk off the carpet, frothy scarlet gore dripping off her jowls. She let out a single bubbly groan and took a single shambling step towards her son.

He took one look at those dead eyes set into her fat face, and it clicked. “Oh my fucking God,” gasped Jacob. “My mum is a fucking zombie!”

Jacob stumbled out of the living room and charged up the stairs. His racing mind rushed through the first level on Dead City Rising. He remembered whacking a big fat zombie woman in the underground train station. He’d thrown a fire extinguisher at her head. Oh bloody hell. There must be something similar he could use to dispatch his mum.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and opened the curtains so he could check the outside. He just had to see if the rest of the estate was in the same situation; he had time. Jacob knew from experience that although a zombie’s sense of smell was far superior to a human’s, height confused them. Even with the steps right in front of her; it would take her fucking ages to reach him.

Jacob looked out the window and grinned like a lunatic. The zombie apocalypse had arrived. Oh God, this was just brilliant. He watched a lurching woman with no arms turning in a circle as an old man kept dancing forward, slicing into her with a long knife, then dancing back out of her reach. A bit further down near the main road, there was another zombie on the ground. One lad had his boot on the zombie’s arse while another bloke kept smashing what looked like a snooker cue over the zombie’s head. He had to get outside and join in.

His mum had managed to find the stairs, but she had yet to figure out how to climb them.

“What’s wrong, you dumb bitch?” he taunted, “Are the stairs a bit too hard for you to work out? Come on, you stupid fat fuck, get me if you can.”

He decided to kill her with Dad’s old lava lamp. The glass would shatter, obviously, but the base was mega heavy. Hell, he didn’t even have to move from the top step to do it.

“You wait there, Mum, I’m gonna get you a nice surprise,” he said before rushing into his parents’ bedroom. He hated going in there, not because he respected their privacy or anything. It just smelled bad, like a cross between sweaty socks and rotting bacon grease.

The stench in here tonight was even worse than normal, Jesus! What the hell had she been doing? Jacob held his nose and scanned the dingy room for the lamp. This was just disgusting. He’d seen tidier landfill sites. He heard his mother groaning away at the bottom of the stairs. Despite his mocking, he was a little surprised that she was still down there and waiting for him. Jacob thought that once she could no longer see him, she’d go back into the living room to finish off the cat.

At last his eyes caught sight of the lamp buried under a couple of bulging black bin liners under the window. His parents’ bed was the only thing in there that was relatively free of detritus. He couldn’t even see the carpet. There had been evidence of a tidy up, by which he meant all the rubbish had been pushed to the edges of the room, but that would have been in the distant past. Torn supermarket carrier bags spilling their contents of old newspapers and puzzle magazines competed for space with discarded clothes and DVDs.

He figured out what the spicy new stench was when he located several piles of dried cat shit layered between a horse racing pullout and an old TV listings magazine. Jacob stood on the head of a broken vacuum cleaner and dove onto the bed. There was no way he was standing on that carpet.

As he bounced across the bed, Jacob weighed up the pros and cons between going it alone or joining a group. Judging by how his zombie mum was acting, these buggers were the slow type. He smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. He’d be so fucked if they were sprinters.

“Up yours, Dawn of the Dead remake.”

Racking up a decent kill count shouldn’t be that much of a problem. God, he so wished that he could get hold of a shotgun. That thought made him smile, considering that he lived in one of the roughest housing estates in the North of England. It wouldn’t be that hard to find an empty house with a couple of weapons hidden under the floorboards.

He stood still in the middle of his parents’ bedroom, thinking about this. In Dead City Rising, they always hid the weapons under the floorboards. He supposed that was the advantage of it being a British game. If it was American, finding guns and spare ammo would be easier. Jacob had never been to the States, but from what he’d read, you could pick up assault weapons over the counter in any shop. He grinned. How cool would it be to go to Tesco, buy a packet of doughnuts, a can of Pepsi, and stop off at the gun aisle to grab an AK47 and enough banana clips to fill a trolley?

That was decided then, his first priority once he’d fucked his mum over would be to find a gun.

As more unfortunate souls joined the ranks of the dead, their swelling numbers would present a major predicament. He had no desire to go the same way as his game character, thank you very much.

Joining the nearest band of survivors would probably be his best chance of surviving the apocalypse. The social barriers that prevented him from interacting with the rest of the people on Breakspear would now be gone. Everybody would work together in order to defeat the common adversary. Any group would, of course, welcome Jacob with open arms. Everyone on the estate knew that he was the resident zombie expert. For the first time in his life he would be accepted and loved. They’d love him even more if he was armed to the fucking teeth.

Jacob kneeled down at the edge of the bed and pushed his arm through the black metal railings on the footboard, reaching towards the lava lamp. As soon as he’d finished taking out his zombie mum, Jacob could get on with enjoying his new life. His future had never looked so bright.

The boy squealed when a hand snaked out from under the bed and fastened around his wrist. He tried to pull away, but only succeeded in dragging the owner of the appendage out.

“Oh God no, Dad, let go please!”

His father regarded him with dead eyes, then opened his mouth and like a cobra, darted forward. The searing pain exploded through Jacob’s body when the man bit into his bicep. He reared back with a lump of his son’s arm still in his mouth; only then did he release Jacob.

The boy fell back clutching his damaged arm, moaning and sobbing, gazing in disbelief as his scarlet life fluid spurted through the cracks in his fingers. He was so fucked. This was so not fair! Jacob didn’t want to become a fucking zombie! He looked up, whimpering when he discovered that his mother had found her way up the stairs. He sobbed one last time as the dead woman lurched up to the edge of the bed and fell onto  him with her mouth wide open.