Demise of the Living (19 page)

“
You’re shitting me,
right?” Thomas said, chasing after him. “He could be anybody. He
could be some psycho, happy to shoot us for a packet of
smokes.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” John
said, opening the door to the stairwell.

Thomas placed a firm hand
on John’s shoulder. “You’re not letting him in!”

“You’re not in charge,” John
said firmly.

“I’m not letting you!” Thomas
said through clenched teeth.

“What’s going on? I heard
shots,” Sharon said, coming out of the toilet.

“
There’s a guy in the
street,” John explained. “I was going to let him in.”

From up the stairs came
the thundering of feet and Colin came gliding down.

“
Come on!” Colin shouted
without stopping. “There’s a man out there!”

Within seconds the group
reached the lobby. It was darker in here than it had been. The
light of the day was being sucked into the ragged figures that
blocked the windows. Now that they had spotted movement behind the
glass, they started pawing and thumping at the windows.

“How’s he going to get past
that lot?” Sharon asked, looking at the crowd.

“More to the point, how do we
stop them getting in?” Thomas asked.

Colin picked up one of
the cheap chairs that visitors would sit in while waiting in
reception. Brandishing the chair, he said, “John, you knock the
fire door open. I’ll use this to push any back that try and get
through. As soon as he’s in, you pull the door shut. Okay?” He
turned to Sharon. “You run back upstairs and direct him
in.”

Sharon nodded and jogged to the
stairs.

Even over the moans of the
infected outside, they could hear the cracking sound of a gun being
fired.

A few of the besieging
creatures turned and started walking towards the source of the
noise, but most maintained their position around the glass
facade.

John took up position at the
emergency exit. The tinted pane of glass was smeared where the
infected had tried to scratch their way inside.

“Jesus!” John exclaimed.

“What is it?” Colin asked.

“
These poor bastards.
Look at the state of them.” John scrunched up his eyebrows and
shook his head. “They’re… they’re
gross
.” He tried to swallow down
his revulsion. “They're bloody and fucked up. And their eyes? Oh,
Christ, I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Thomas, can you take the door
instead of John?” Colin asked.

There was no reply.

“Thomas?” Colin looked round,
but the maintenance engineer was nowhere to be seen.

“
Fucking dick.” Colin
shook his head, then turned back to John. “John, it's me and you.
We can do this, okay?”

John nodded and stepped up to
the door.

A wide spray of blood exploded
across the window, accompanied by the sound of hail clattering
against metal.

One of the besieging wretches
slumped to the ground. There was a loud crack and a second
fell.

“This is it!” Colin said,
bouncing with the chair, readying himself for action.

The husk of a man by the
emergency door disappeared and in its place was a figure with a
long auburn beard and sunglasses.

John jumped in shock, then just
as quickly threw the door open. The man dived into the lobby,
shotgun in hand.

Colin thrust the chair out at
the opening.

“
Wait!” the bearded man
shouted.

The infected crowd was pushing
in and Colin looked around for an explanation to the man’s cry.

From behind his drooping
moustache, the man raised a shrill, two-tone whistle.

Something brushed past his leg
and was gone before Colin could spot what it was.

“
Go!” the new arrival
shouted. “Shut it!”

Colin shoved the crowd back
with all his strength, losing the chair to the pawing hands. With
the weight of the mob outside in his favour, John was able to slam
the door shut with ease.

Colin let out a sigh of relief.
He patted John on the arm. “Good work, man.”

“Good girl,” the new arrival
said.

Colin turned round to see the
man lying on the ground with an energetic pitbull rubbing its snout
against his beard.

“Need a hand getting up?” Colin
offered.

The man was an archetypal
biker: head to toe in black leathers, long red beard with streaks
of grey, and a skull and cross bones bandana.

He wrapped his gloved hand
around Colin’s and let the man help him to his feet.

The glove felt sticky. Colin
looked down to see the pinch marks and vitriol fluid left from the
zombies’ bites running from the gloves up the sleeve of the biker’s
jacket. On his feet now, the man was a good five or six inches
taller than Colin. Colin hoped this was exaggerated by the rugged
pair of biker boots the man wore.

“
I’m Colin. This is
John.”

The man was still breathing
heavily and timed his response to the heaving of his chest.

“Billy,” he puffed out.

The short stocky dog was
yapping happily round Billy’s feet.

“And his name?” Colin
asked.

“She’s called Blow,” Billy
replied. He waggled a finger in the direction of the street. “It’s
fucking intense out there.”

The stairwell door opened and
Sharon came into the lobby.

“
Everything okay down
here?” she asked.

“It’s all good, Sharon,” John
said.

“Where’s Thomas?” Sharon
asked.

“
Beats me. He disappeared
as soon as you went upstairs,” Colin said.

“Are you the lady from the
window?” Billy asked.

Sharon nodded.

“Then me and Blow owe you a big
thanks. I don’t know how much longer I’d have lasted out
there.”

“Well, I’m just glad you’re all
right,” Sharon said.

“How are things out there?”
John asked.

Before Billy could
answer, Sharon stepped in. “I think we should let our guest catch
his breath first. Then, if you don’t mind...?”

“Billy,” the biker offered.

“Billy, I’m sure we all have a
lot of questions we’d like to ask you,” Sharon said.

***

“I’d like to start by
introducing and welcoming Billy,” Sharon said.

The group had sat down in
exactly the same positions they had this morning, with Billy
slotting in between Colin and Mo. Sharon took this as a good sign;
it meant that there had been no sudden shift of politics. Nothing
major had blown up that could disrupt the equilibrium of the group.
And although there was a very definite power block aligned against
her, she knew that for the moment she was in charge.

“I’m sure we all have a lot of
questions for Billy,” she said.

“
I doubt I’ll be able to
answer many,” Billy said. He leaned back in his chair, his leathers
creaking. Since arriving, he had taken the time to clean himself
up, although he still smelt strongly of body odour. “What’s
happening out there?” Colin asked.

“
I can’t say I know much
more than you.” Billy said, shaking his head. “It’s seven shades of
hell out there. Saturday night everything was fine. Now, what, two
days later?”

“
Three days. Today’s
Tuesday,” John chipped in, trying to be helpful.

“Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,”
Billy counted on his fingers and carried on, “There’s no normal
people out there, or if there are, they’re few and far
between.”

“
What’s been happening?”
Sharon asked. “There’s nothing on the news. Is it something to do
with this flu we were hearing about?”

Billy shook his
head.“Ain’t no flu, lady. The flu doesn’t bring people back from
the dead.”

“I heard over the radio they
were dead,” Colin said.

John cut in, “But that’s just
impossible.”

"Impossible or not, I saw my
own son turn. He was bitten by one of the infected in his workshop.
He got the sweats and died not eight hours later. Two minutes after
he stopped breathing, he was up and coming at me.”

“
Surely they’re
not
dead
dead?” John said, immediately wishing he’d been more
eloquent.

“I’ve never shot a live person,
but I’m guessing they don’t chase after you with half their chest
missing,” Billy explained.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re
dead or just suffering from some infection,” Colin said. “If
they’re attacking you, you have the right to defend yourself.”

“What about the police or the
army?” Mo asked.

“I didn’t see a single soldier
out there. There were a few jets and choppers in the air and I did
bump into a handful of cops.”

“And what did the police have
to say?” Sharon asked.

“
They told me to bolt up
and sit tight. They were pretty badly shaken up. One of them even
gave me the boom stick there.” Billy nodded over his shoulder to
the shotgun propped up against the wall behind him. “Imagine that.
The Federales giving old Billy a gun and telling him to be on his
way.” He gave a chuckle.

“So did you have a plan to go
anywhere?” Thomas asked.

“I was planning to go to my
son’s place, up the coast,” Billy answered.

“I thought you said your son
was dead,” Liz said.

“
My other son. I’ve got
three. The other one’s overseas at the moment. Anyway, that went to
pot half a mile up the road there when my bike’s reserve tank ran
dry. Thought I’d be okay to scrounge fuel, but most of the cars out
there are dry.”

“Why are they empty so soon?”
Sharon asked.

“The pumps were running dry by
the end of last week with the flu scare,” John said. “I waited in
line for an hour after work on Friday to get a tankful.”

Billy went on, “I don’t
know if they were all empty, I just know the ones I tried were and
the one I did find with fuel creeped me out. There was a dead woman
in the front seat—well, kinda dead—who kept trying to take chunks
out of me through the glass.” He paused for a moment. “Well, that
aside, before I could even start siphoning off, there were a dozen
of those ghouls on me. I tried to circle back round, but it was way
too busy. Then thankfully I found myself here.”

“Well, you might not be
too thankful when you find out the details of our situation,”
Sharon said. “Having looted the vending machines and the desks, we
have roughly three days’ worth of food. Slightly less now you’ve
arrived.” She gave a nod to Billy. “The bad news is, it’s mainly
confectionery. The few sandwiches that will pass as proper food
need to be eaten soon, before they spoil.”

“
Three days’ worth of
food?” John asked. “Is that enough?”

“
You can survive for
weeks without food,” Thomas said. He looked John up and down, then
added, “Well, some of us could last longer.”

“Fresh water is the priority,”
Colin said.

“No, we’re fine for that,” Mo
said

Sharon showed him a
puzzled look. She asked, “How so? The water might go off any
minute.”

“There’s a delivery of bottled
water for the coolers down in the loading bay,” Mo explained.

“How many?” Colin asked.

“Half a dozen five gallon
bottles,” Mo answered.

“
You need two litres of
water per day,” Colin said. “So how many litres are there per
gallon?”

“Just over twenty,” John
said.

“How’d you get to that so
quickly?” Colin asked.

“Working out mileages on
expense forms,” John replied.

“So how many days supply is
that, John?” Sharon asked.

John put his pen to paper and
started scribbling out the numbers.

“The ten of us...” John said,
tapping out a head count with his pen, “and that’s thirty gallons
of water. Um… at two litres per day, we got six and a bit
days.”

“
Ten of us?” Billy said.
“What about my dog?”

The brown and white animal was
curled up on the floor next to Billy’s feet, sleeping off the
excitement of this afternoon.

“How much does a dog need?”
John asked.

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “I
stick out a couple of fresh bowls a day.”

“That’s not that much, I
suppose,” John said, chewing at the end of the pen.

“Remember, we’re not counting
the water coolers already in the building,” Mo said.

“And we can just keep filling
those up from the mains for as long as we have pressure,” Colin
added.

“
So we’ve got at least a
week’s worth of water,” Sharon surmised. “We’ll need to keep the
unopened bottles in reserve in case the main water does get cut
off.”

“We can set up some kind of
rainwater catcher in case it rains,” Mo offered.

“Is it just me, or is everyone
here happy with a week’s worth of supplies?” Thomas asked.

“Well, what would you have us
do, Thomas?” Sharon asked.

“You’ve just told us we’ll be
fine without food for four weeks,” Colin said.

“You can survive for four weeks
without food, but it’s not going to be pleasant. We need to go and
stock up,” Thomas said.

“What? That’s just idiotic,”
Sharon replied.

“We’ve only got enough food for
today before we start gorging ourselves on chocolates,” Thomas
argued. “We’ll go stir crazy in here without proper food to
eat.”

“
You heard the
announcements on TV:
Stay
indoors
,” Sharon said. “Besides, have you
looked out the window today? I very much doubt the supermarkets are
open.”

“I’d advise against popping
down to the shops,” Billy said. “Those things don’t move fast, but
the streets are heaving with them.”