Zombies: The Recent Dead (75 page)

Now, I know what that really means—to watch helplessly as forces beyond your control reshape and destroy everything you have ever known and believed in.

I think of all this now, as I watch the scattered dead walk through the darkened tree line and approach the fence that borders the farmhouse property. It occurs to me that what we have now is a kind of Fourth World—a group of (dead) people aligned with no political viewpoint or ideology, and whose needs have been honed down to the basic drive to feed. To feed on the rest of us . . . to feed on the living.

I turn away from the window—from the moonlight and the dark ground and the stumbling, staggering corpses—and walk out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind me as I head for the stairs. I am afraid to make a sound. The next sound I hear might be that of my own mind snapping.

“Have you checked all the rooms up there?” Coral looks up from fastening the rucksacks as I enter the downstairs living room. Her face is too pale, too thin. We haven’t eaten in three days and her hunger has now become a visible thing, a terrifying luminescence that shines from beneath her sallow skin.

I nod. “There’s nothing left up there. We have everything. Where’s the gun? I saw a few of them out there, coming out of the woods.”

She points towards the corner of the room, where the rifle is propped up against cushions on a dusty armchair. We do not have much ammunition left, and I doubt that we will be lucky enough to stumble on any before what we do have runs out completely. This is rural England not downtown Los Angeles. The best we can hope for is to find some old farmer’s shotgun in another of the abandoned properties we continually hop between like frogs on lily pads.

I cross the room and pick up the rifle. Ten years ago I had never held a gun, would not have known how to fire one. These days I am an efficient marksman. I have to be, to save on bullets. “Won’t be long,” I say, leaving the room and going back up the stairs.

Back at the window I see that the dead have already come closer to the fence. One of them is even attempting to climb, but having only one arm seems a hindrance to his progress. There are four of them in total—the one trying to climb over the fence and three others who stand watching him, their bodies limp and ragged.

I raise the rifle and take aim, enjoying its heft at my shoulder. The sight line is perfect; an unrestricted view from the high window. I caress the trigger, waiting until the right moment, when my heart seems to stop beating for a second to allow me to take the shot. I pull the trigger. The tallest one—who is wearing some kind of dark overalls—twitches backwards as the side of his head explodes in a shock of dark matter. He takes three tiny backward steps before hitting the ground.

The other two do not even glance in his direction. I take them down with a shot each, heads going up like watermelons stuffed with cherry bombs.

Then I shoot the one on the fence. He hangs there, trapped in the razor wire, what is left of his brains leaking out of the large wound in what remains of his forehead.

I pull the gun back inside and secure the window, pulling the shutters tight and testing that they are solid. Then I go back downstairs to my wife.

Coral is sitting in the same dusty armchair where previously she’d put the gun. She is weeping quietly, her narrow shoulders hitching. “We can’t keep doing this,” she says, between almost silent sobs. “We can’t go on.”

I go to her but am unable to offer the comfort she needs. We are beyond all that—the world has gone past such small intimacies, tiny shows of affection. Instead I kneel down in front of her, placing my hands on her thighs. “We
have
to go on. There’s nothing else to do. We’ve run out of food here, now. The choice is simple—we either stay here and die, or we move and put off dying for a few more weeks or months.”

The silence in the room feels like an invasion of some kind: it robs us of our ability to communicate at any effective level. We have become strangers, travelling companions, little more than a couple of empty shells shuffling along in search of something that no longer exists.

“I miss the baby,” she says, finally looking me in the eye. Her cheeks are wet. Her lips quiver. She has not mentioned the baby since she miscarried, and I was forced to lay the squawking undead thing to rest. I had hoped that she might have pushed all thoughts of the baby—no name, just “the baby”—from her mind to focus on the immediate business of survival. But no, if I am honest I have known all along that she could never forget what happened. I have watched her mind slowly crumple, like a deflating balloon, for months now, since it happened.

“We . . . we can’t talk about that. Things are different now. There was no baby.” I stand up and back away, appalled by my own lack of humanity, my utter inability to even discuss that terrible evening. “I’ll get the other water bottles.”

I leave her there in the darkness, clasping at her face with hands that have become talons. In the kitchen I pick up the two plastic bottles of well water and stuff them into the third small rucksack. Then I walk back through the house to the living room, where Coral is now standing in the shadows by the big boarded-up window, staring at the drapes.

“We need to go now,” I say, not without compassion.

She turns to face me. Her tears have all dried up. She walks to my side, her face taut and filled with hate. We walk together to the front door, where I tug loose the timbers and open the door. I go first, scanning the area outside, and Coral follows me in silence, her eyes burning holes into my back.

We walk to the edge of the property, open the gate, and take the small road through the trees, passing within a few yards of the dead folk I shot earlier. A large crow is perched on the chest of one of the fallen corpses. It looks up as we pass by, and then lowers its beak into the mass of decayed flesh and bone to continue its scant meal.

Coral walks at my side, a constant companion through the darkness. She says nothing and I am glad of the breakdown in communication. There is no longer room for sentiment in this world. We must all be hard as stone, cold as a rifle barrel.

I hear no sounds of life as we continue along the road, the trees on either side of us stirring in a slight breeze. Dark clusters of leaves wave in the night, branches heave and creak, and somewhere deep inside the wood a bough breaks, falling to the ground with a soft thud.

The only light out here is that of the moon and the stars. The electricity supply failed years ago, and the only sources of power that remain now are from privately-operated generators. Soon there will be no one left to run them; the dead already outnumber the living, and it cannot be long until they dominate the planet.

I think again of those developing countries all those years ago, and the committees I sat on, the fund-raisers I organized to help them—starving people living in tumble-down shacks, entire families surviving for days on a handful of rice.

What of this Fourth World nation? What will happen when
their
food runs out, when there is nobody left alive for them to kill and eat? Will they simply rot down to nothing, the process accelerated because they have nothing to consume? What will the world be like when there are no living people left on its surface, when the only feet who tread this land are those of the long dead?

I glance again at Coral, but she is staring straight ahead, her eyes narrowed and her mouth a grim line in her face. Her hair is long and greasy, her teeth rotten and her breath stale. If I did not know her and simply caught sight of her out here, I would assume that she was one of them—one of the dead. Is this how I look as well?

When I think of what we have now become, I am filled with a sense of depression that seems almost pleasurable. At least it is some kind of emotional response. Previously I had thought myself incapable of even this small thing.

Coral takes a folded map from her back pocket and lifts it up to her face, where she can study its lines and symbols. Her pace slows while she examines the map, and I watch the trees for movement. I am uneasy that we have not yet encountered any of the dead. The fact that four of them were hanging around at the fence must mean that there are more nearby.

“There’s a small community of some sort about three miles down the road. There might be some canned stuff in a cupboard someone forgot, or a stash in one of the houses.” Her voice is hard, like stones rubbing up against each another in a shallow ditch.

“It’s worth a try. If we don’t find food soon, we’re going to die.”

“Is that all you care about? Survival at any cost?” The tone of her voice does not change—the question is asked in the same way she spoke about the town or village. “Existing no matter how much of you has already died?”

“To be honest, I don’t even care about that anymore. It’s just something to do, a target to aim for. We have two options . . . die now or die later. As soon as I stop seeing the point of dying later, I’ll sit down on the ground and swallow a bullet from this rifle.” I say all this without feeling. It is simply how it is, the way we have to be now. It is what we are.

She says no more on the subject. I can tell that she is angry but does not have the energy to rage against me and my stupid, ill-thought-out philosophy.

The trees are like dark shapes cut out of night by a child. They make a jagged black outline across the slightly lighter sky. The stars are tiny splatters against this backdrop, spilled paint from the same child’s art box. At one time I would have thought the sight beautiful, but now it is just another thing that I can see. None of these sights makes any kind of genuine impression upon me. I watch them without truly seeing them.

The road is long and straight. We might reach the end or we might not, it matters little in the scheme of things. But we must continue. Forward motion is all we have, all we live for. There is nothing else. I do not even care about the community Coral saw on the map. We will either get there or we won’t, and there will be a forgotten few cans of food or there won’t.

It matters not.

I see them as we approach a rusted, abandoned flatbed truck lying in a ditch. There are four or five of them, milling about in the middle of the road, walking in small circles like bored shoppers waiting at the back of a lengthy queue. We keep walking. There is no point in running. The only way is forward. I feel Coral tense at my side and hear the sharp intake of breath as she counts them. I unsling the rifle from my shoulder with practiced ease—an almost graceful movement that probably makes me look like I have handled firearms my entire life.

“This could get messy,” she says, slipping the baseball bat from her pack. She picked it up in a sports shop in an out-of-town shopping center almost two months ago. It is already stained dark with blood.

I think what hurts Coral most is going against her natural instincts. She is a giver, a helper, and this new selfish mode of existence is something she finds it impossible to reconcile with her old identity as someone who could never stop giving. Back before the world began to die, it was she who convinced me to give my time to charitable causes, to find ways to help my fellow man—serving in late-night soup kitchens, advising in cramped offices for poorly funded causes. She won me over with her caring manner, and all the love she had to give scared the hell out of me and made me feel small in a world grown so large with troubles.

If she could, I think Coral would set up a charity for the dead. Bring-and-buy sales, sit-ins at the local council offices—equal rights for the undead. Instead, she is forced to bring the ones she meets to extinction with her baseball bat, or with the gun that I now bring around and point at the group in the road. Coral loathes herself for having become such a proficient assassin.

“Try not to let them suffer,” she whispers, as she always does. Part of her problem is that she still sees them as human. She cannot divorce the living from the dead, and this, I fear, will be her undoing. It might also be mine.

As soon as they see us, the dead people begin to move in our direction. None of them are too fresh, so their progress is slow and bewildered, like the movements of a group of ailing senior citizens in line for a free dinner. One of them, I notice, is sitting on the ground, and when he fails to stand I realize why. He has no legs, just a torso, and he pulls himself along on his hands, mouth open in a hungry leer.

I shoot him first, for purely aesthetic reasons. Then, striding forward like a gunslinger from some old Western movie, I begin to take the rest of them down, shot after shot after shot . . . They make strange sounds in their throats, as if they are attempting to speak—half-words, near-sentences that might in fact be nothing of the kind. I aim for the heads—nobody knows why the brains are the only sure targets—and watch as shattered bone dances white in the air, mixed with a red so dark it is almost black.

A female is the last of the bunch, looming towards us with skeletal arms outstretched and claw-like hands clutching. Slow-moving, yet lethal if she is allowed within touching distance, the female opens her mouth and hisses like a snake. Her face is mostly mottled skull, with barely any flesh left to cling to its sharp angles. Coral steps in and swings the bat, almost taking off the female’s head with a single blow. The skull leans so far sideways on the decayed strings of neck muscle that one cheek touches an exposed shoulder blade. Coral swings again, this time completing the job. The skull parts with the ropy gristle, tumbling to the ground where the female’s left foot, in mid-step, kicks it like a football. The body takes one more stride before going down like a sack of dried offal.

Coral is crying. She always cries when she kills. It is her charitable nature, the part of her old self that she is unwilling to lose. Unlike me, she prefers to remain human, and sees these tears as purification, a cleansing of her soul after committing such indecent acts to prolong our tedious survival.

“Come on,” I say, worried that there are more of them lurking in the trees. They are mostly slow and very dumb—dim-witted and not even possessing enough intelligence to carry out a coordinated attack. But in enough numbers they can be dangerous. If enough of them attack at once, it is easy to be overpowered, and they will take you down and eat you. If they leave enough of you to get back up and walk, you will become one of them.