Death Plague Omnibus [Four Zombie Novels] (7 page)

Darren stopped and turned. “Are you addressing me?”

“Do you not want to come with us?” Kevin stammered. “We’re getting out of here.”

The boy slowly grinned, humorlessly, and walked back up to Kevin. “Well, then, why the fuck didn’t I think of doing that? I mean, here I am running about like some brainless dog turd just hoping that someone like you would show me the light.” He rapped his fist on Kevin’s forehead. “The estate’s been cut off, you fucking moron.” Darren sighed. “Wait on, I bet this is the first time that you two scared little bunnies have dared to venture out of your hidey holes, isn’t it?”

Kevin nodded. It seemed the safest thing to do.

“Trust my luck to be saddled with a pair of little mice,” he muttered, then grabbed hold of Kevin’s arm and pulled him out of the girl’s grasp. “You stay there, princess.” He bent down to Kevin’s level. “If you want to stay with me, you’d better pull your fucking weight. Are we clear on that?”

Kevin nodded again.

“I was with a couple of lads earlier, and they pulled their weight; we made a good team until some Army dorks in gasmasks put bullets through their brains.”

Darren gave him back the bayonet

“You’re gonna fuck up the next zombie we find. If you start blubbing or try to run away, I’ll ram your pig sticker up your fucking arse.”

Chapter Seven

The group had all stopped running a few minutes ago. Ernest actually thought that his heart was going to explode. He looked at the young ones, noting that they were in a worse state than he was. Ironic, considering he was twice their age.

“How do you feel, old man?”

Ernest studied the young lad. He looked as though he had just completed a marathon. He grinned, his mouth widening when he saw Adrian hurriedly wiping the sweat off his forehead. “I think I’m doing okay—for an old man, that is. Should I not be worried about you, Adrian? I suspect this running about thing must be alien to you.”

The boy shrugged. “I’ll be okay. It’s just a matter of getting used to it, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I guess it must be,” Ernest replied. He despaired of the modern generation. Their over-reliance on technology had turned them all into slobs. Rigorous exercise would not interest any of them unless you could download it as an app for their stupid phones.

He pushed those irrelevant thoughts to the back of his mind and took a deep breath to prepare himself. “Adrian, you’ll be okay here?”

The boy nodded back. “Yeah, look where we stopped.”

They had all stopped in what Adrian had earlier named ‘the safe zone’. That meant any place away from low walls, corners of buildings, and parked vehicles, especially the bloody vehicles. The group had spotted a dozen of the ‘deadies’, another phrase coined by Adrian, hiding under cars. Any poor sod that got near them found a pair of arms reaching out, pulling them off balance, and dragging them under the car. They’d seen it happen a couple of times whilst travelling through Breakspear.

Ernest nodded once. Adrian nodded back, and so did Emily. Mrs. Watson just leaned across and pecked his cheek.

“Good luck, dear,” she whispered.

They’d picked her up about twenty minutes ago. Ernest saw the woman as they were running past the shops. Her back was flat against the mini-market’s metal shutters. Three of the deadies were shambling towards her; his group had been on the other side of the street, and Ernest privately thought that they wouldn’t be able to reach her in time.

There was only one of the buggers left standing when they reached the woman. Adrian took that one out with his weighted sock. It turned out that Mrs. Watson was more than capable of looking after herself, as her husband had found out when he went all funny just after ‘EastEnders’ had finished earlier on.

Ernest also discovered that she delivered Avon products in her spare time, and she promised him that when this was all over, she would be more than willing to slip him the odd free bottle of shampoo as long as he kept quiet about it. She was the only person in their little group who seemed to think that everything would be back to normal in the morning.

As agreed earlier, Ernest swapped his trusty pool cue for Adrian’s weighted sock. Their journey had not been without incident. After the fourth dead thing that he’d put down, Ernest had become rather proficient with his new weapon. He’d also managed not to vomit from the stomach-churning sound of the pool ball smashing into dead flesh.

“Make sure you look after it, Granddad,” whispered the lad.

You needed space to swing the cue, which was something Ernest would be desperately short of where he was about to go.

“Are you sure you don’t want backup?”

Ernest shook his head and patted the lad on the shoulders. This was something he needed to do alone. They had already worked out that it started with the headaches. Accepting that his wife was likely one of them now had been bloody hard, but due to their situation, he’d hardly had a spare moment to dwell on it.

“Remember what I said, do not follow me inside. If something does happen to me, just get the hell out of here.”

He needed to know for sure what had happened to Brenda. He feared that she, like most of the other residents, had turned into a monster. The others had already shared their ideas and views, although nobody had a clear idea about what had happened, but they all shared the same theory that the headaches were the start of it. That meant his wife and Jess must have turned as well.

Ernest just hoped to God that they were wrong, and she was with another group trying to stay alive just like he was. Brenda got headaches all the time; it might not have been the onset of this disease. It didn’t worry him that they hadn’t found her yet. The estate was massive, and he knew that other groups were trying to stay alive on Breakspear tonight.

He had heard sporadic gunfire all night. It seemed that some of the local gangs had dug out their toys. Those idiots must have thought that all their birthdays had come at once. It was an open secret that if you needed a gun in Bradford, the best place to come was to Breakspear.

Their group had already checked out Adrian’s house. He’d explained that he didn’t live too far from the Horse and Jockey. It made sense to check out his place first. The boy had stayed with the girl while Ernest had searched through every room. The permanent stench of a slaughterhouse hung in every room, and there were bits of flesh everywhere. The state of the kitchen had been a shock to his hardened stomach. It looked as though a dozen people had swallowed grenades before having a big group hug, whilst standing on a worktop.

He found no living person in the house, but his expert eyes did see the damage that a boot had done to the pebble-dashed wall just above the living room window. Judging by the fact that the window above was wide open, it looked as though somebody in Adrian’s family had managed to escape. The lad was relieved when he relayed that information, although Ernest kept what he’d seen in the kitchen to himself.

Emily had flatly refused to go back to her home, saying that she lived with just her dad, and she couldn’t give a fuck what happened to that drunken bastard. A subtle warning glance from Adrian told Ernest everything he needed to know.

Mrs. Watson had already explained what had happened at her house. That just left Ernest.

He slowly wound the end of the sock tight around his fingers, took another deep breath, and then pushed open his garden gate. The evidence of Darren’s not-so-secret party was all around him. He saw crushed lager cans thrown around the front garden and a couple of smashed beer bottles under the window. The house was in darkness, but the door was wide open. Ernest wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad sign. His house hadn’t been spared from the mayhem that had blighted the rest of the estate. He saw evidence of that too.

The front porch lights shone on the ropes of wet gore that hung down from Brenda’s rose bushes in the middle of the front lawn, and the ground around the flowers was soaked in blood. On the freshly dug earth running parallel to the path were a pair of bright orange trainers with the feet still in them. Ernest had been planning to plant potatoes in that patch of dirt next Friday.

He stopped by his door and looked behind him, wondering if he really should be doing this. What if his Brenda or Darren was in the house? What if they had become deadies? Did he really have the strength to put an end to their suffering?

“Oh Jesus, please forgive me for what I may have to do.”

He placed his hand upon the door and pushed it open. Nothing jumped out on him, and there were no bodies. The hallway was deserted. He leaned over the threshold, looked to the right and up the stairs where he saw a young girl lying sprawled about halfway up the steps. It was difficult to judge whether she was still alive or had become one of them.

There was no way of knowing whether his kitchen contained any of those horrors as the door was shut. He could nip round the back and peek through the window, but he knew that Darren had turned the yard and the back garden into a junk yard for his bikes, so there were way too many concealed areas back there. Ernest stepped to the side and peered through the living room window. He saw two bodies lying beside the sofa, but he didn’t know either of them. He stepped into the hallway and checked to make sure the living room door was shut tight. He started to swing the weighted sock around his head before he coughed loudly.

Just as he thought, the girl lifted her head, fixed him with a pair of blank eyes, and began to groan. As she moved he saw that her stomach had been ripped open; it had only been her body pressed against the stairs keeping her guts from bursting out. Her insides spilled out and splattered down the stairs, and his carpet now resembled a gutter from an abattoir. The girl hadn’t even noticed that she had just lost half of her body weight and continued to moan. He knew her noise would attract the attention of any others in the house, so Ernest ran up, ducked to avoid her grasping fingers, and smashed the sock into her temple. Her moaning stopped, and the girl fell back down.

“Rest in peace, little lady,” he whispered.

Ernest stepped over the body and climbed up a couple of steps. All the doors upstairs were shut, and the house was still silent. Again, he wondered if he was making the right decision here. Perhaps it was better not to know what had happened to Brenda. Ernest took a deep breath. No, he had to do everything in his power to ensure that she was put out of her misery. He looked down at the bloodied heap of teenager at the foot of his steps and wondered if her parents would feel the same way.

Those thoughts would have to wait; he needed to keep his wits about him. If he let his mind wander, he wouldn’t leave this house; not alive anyway. Ernest went back down to the hallway, wondering which one of them outside would vote to dispatch him if the unthinkable happened to him.

He opened the front door a little wider and placed Darren’s boots against it to stop the door from swinging shut. Ernest needed to be sure that his exit was clear, just in case. If those two lying on the floor really were a pair of deadies, then as soon as he opened the door they should both react. He’d have to check the kitchen too. Ernest knew that he needed to remove all threats from downstairs before he went up those stairs. Although he knew that if they did trap him, escaping from an upstairs window wouldn’t present much of a challenge, but why take the risk?

After counting slowly to three, he grabbed the handle and eased open the door. His eyes adjusted to the darkness fairly quickly, another skill that he still retained from his previous dishonest career. The bodies didn’t move, but just to be sure, Ernest coughed. Not one moan emerged from the pair. He let out a sigh of relief and placed his hand on the door. Somebody else’s hand fell on his. It seized his fingers and pulled them upwards. He squealed and tried to jump back; the door swung shut to reveal a pretty girl staring back at him and attempting to pull his fingers up to her waiting mouth.

Ernest couldn’t get loose, oh Christ! It was as if his fingers were wedged in a vice. The girl began to moan, and from the corner of his eye he saw another one stand up from behind the sofa. Ernest brought the sock down on her head. She jolted but didn’t go down, and there wasn’t enough bloody room to hit her temple. The other thing was now right behind him and was moaning too. He dropped the sock, formed his fingers into a point and snapped his arm forward, thrusting his digits into the girl’s eye. Her moans immediately stopped, and she slid down the wall. Ernest felt sick as his fingers slipped out of that warm, wet hole he’d made.

He dropped to both knees and dove for the sock, but it was stuck under the lad’s trainer. He looked up and watched it bend over, drooling like a teething baby and reaching down to grab him. Ernest knew that if those grasping fingers got a hold of him, he was finished. He threw himself down and rolled to the side. There was no fucking way that he was going to allow one of Darren’s brain-dead friends to eat him in his own house.

His ashtray was on the table across the room. He got back on his knees and crawled towards it. It wasn’t ideal, but he couldn’t think of anything else close by that he could use to defend himself. He knew without turning around that the thing was coming after him. Ernest reached up and grabbed the ashtray, throwing the contents into the lad’s face, then jumped to his feet and ran at him, smashing the improvised weapon into his mouth. He … it … staggered back and fell over the arm of the sofa. Ernest reached down and snatched up his sock and swung it around his head, waiting for the dead boy to get back on his feet.

“Come on then, you bastard,” he snarled.

The sound of his voice seemed to spur it on. The boy slowly stood up and shambled towards him. Ernest waited for him to get a little closer before he stepped forward and smacked him in the temple.

“Fuck you,” he muttered as the body joined the other two on the carpet.

He wiped the sweat off his forehead and resisted the urge to collapse onto his sofa. He clenched his fist hard enough to draw blood, hoping the pain would stop the shakes. Oh Jesus, just how close had he been to joining those filthy things? One mistake would be all it took.

He left the living room, knowing that it would be unlikely that he’d ever go in there again. Ernest stared in revulsion at the sticky mark he left on the door handle as he clicked the door shut. It looked as though he’d just dipped his hand into a large pot of jam. He wiped as much of it as he could onto the sock, reminding himself to turn it inside out before he gave it back to Adrian.

There was no choice, he had to check out the kitchen. He’d been hoping to leave it and head upstairs; after all, the door was shut tight, and he’d seen no evidence that the buggers were opening handles yet, but he needed another weapon.