Zombie Survival: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Read online

  “Come on,” said Ted, “the bedroom. Now!”

  Dave offered Ted a sickly look. Then he nodded, and the two men turned and hurried back toward the bedroom.

  “What’s going on?” asked Jenny as Ted and Dave re-entered the bedroom and slammed the door closed.

  “The hall doorway’s fallen,” Ted replied, “they’re through onto the stairs. Won’t be long before they make their way up here.”

  “Oh Christ,” said Jenny, taking a step back against the wall, almost trying to sink into it.

  “Fallen?” said Shaun, a puzzled and furious expression on his face. He stepped forward, as though he wanted to confront someone, to attack someone, except he didn’t know who, “fallen? The doorway at the bottom of the stairs?”

  “Yes, Shaun,” Dave replied, “the doorway at the bottom of the stairs.”

  “The doorway that you said was strong? The doorway that you said wouldn’t fall?”

  Shaun stepped over to Ted. He placed a hand on Ted’s arm, seized a handful of his clothing, and pulled in a kind furious, though pointless action. Ted turned angrily around to Shaun, and brought the gun up in an instinctive action. He gazed at the hand that had seized his clothing. Then he gazed into Shaun’s face. Then he glanced, briefly, at the gun.

  “Careful, young man,” said Ted, a quiet but deadly tone to his voice, “you don’t want to be antagonising me. Not when we’re both stuck in the same room like this. Not when I’m holding a gun...”

  “Come on Shaun,” said Jenny, stepping forward and placing a hand on Shaun’s arm, carefully trying to coax him away from Ted, “...come on, man... we don’t want any more trouble than we’ve already got. Do we? Eh? Do we...?”

  Where before there had been an expression of rage on Shaun’s face, now there descended a look of total despair. His features crumpled, and in a second it seemed as though he was close to tears. His hand that had been clutching Ted’s clothes went limp, and then fell away like a dead creature. Shaun glanced wildly around for a moment, as though he was looking for somewhere to flee – but there was nowhere. Nowhere...

  “Alright, enough of this foolishness,” said Ted, “we’ve got to barricade the door, and we’ve got to do it now, and fast.”

  “Will that do any good?” asked Jenny, an almost reproachful tone to her voice, “...after all – if they can get through the stairway door when it was solid oak - ,”

  “Well, it’s better than doing nothing,” Ted replied, “if they decide to break through the door, then a barricade might not stop them, but it might buy us time.”

  Shaun snorted; a contemptuous sound, “time to do what? Time to live a few seconds longer before we’re torn limb from limb like that guy in the aeroplane?”

  “Oh Shaun – don’t - ,” said Jenny, putting one hand to her mouth.

  “Well?” Shaun persisted.

  “Time to survive,” Dave answered him, “...I guess... another half an hour, another few minutes, another few seconds... you know what we said before. The world’s changed, Shaun man. The old times, when you could look forward to years knowing that you’d survive, that you’d be okay - they’re gone. Now it’s just hours, half hours, minutes, seconds... it’s all that we’ve got. It’s all that we can even think about.”

  Shaun was silent in response to this. But again, that wild look came into his eyes, and he glanced around the room, looking for escape inside a trap that was all but total.

  Down stairs, there came a loud crash as something met with violence.

  “Come on,” said Ted, “there’s no more time to waste.”

  He hurried over to the wardrobe that stood in the corner of the room. He whipped open the doors, and then hastily emptied it. There wasn’t much inside it, just a few clothes and old shoes which he soon grabbed out and tossed to one side. Then he moved the wardrobe a little, testing its weight. It was certainly heavy, made from dark mahogany: it had been owned by his father, and his grandfather before him, built at a time when furniture was built to last. It would be strong enough as a barricade – but then, he’d thought exactly the same thing about the stairway door, and look what had happened. Well, it was inevitable that mistakes would be made. This was an extreme situation, and more than extreme – unusual. When you’re on uncertain territory, you could easily slip up because you didn’t know the rules of engagement. So you had to learn. Fast. And never – ever – underestimate the enemy.

  Ted glanced around at the others, who were standing in a sullen huddle by the doorway.

  “Somebody help me with this,” Ted called.

  Dave hurried over and then, between them, they began to manoeuvre the heavy wardrobe. Carefully, bit by bit, they walked it across the floor. At one point, Shaun came across, perhaps in attempt to help, but he just ended up getting in the way. Ted shooed him off, and then they continued their ungainly progress until they arrived at the door. Then they paused, gasping and sweating, trying to recover breath and energy before the final push. Then, with a final grunting effort, they manoeuvred the wardrobe into its resting place against the door. It wasn’t flush against the door – the door handle prevented that – but it was as close enough as they could get it. Then Ted and Dave stepped away, panting, and gazing at their handiwork.

  “We could have done with nailing something across the door,” said Dave between gasps for breath, “like we did with the windows...”

  Ted nodded, “yes, it would have been good. But we left the hammer and nails down stairs. So we’re pretty well screwed on that score.”

  Dave offered a brief chuff of laughter that contained little humour, “...don’t you mean nailed?”

  No one laughed at the feeble joke.

  “Come on,” said Ted, “let’s get on with it.”

  Next was the dresser. Ted took out the drawers to lighten it, and then the same act was performed. The dresser slotted up against the wardrobe, tightening it against the door. Then they pushed the bed across the room until it was tight up against the dresser. The only piece of substantial furniture that then remained was the cupboard that Ted kept the gun in, but that was screwed to the wall, and there was no way of taking it down. Like the hammer and the nails, the screwdrivers were downstairs.

  With the barricade completed, the four people paused for a moment, and gazed upon it. A door, a wardrobe, a dresser, and a bed was all that stood between them and certain death. Would the barricade hold? No, of course it wouldn’t: not if the dead found another battering ram and then kept on and on, like machines, like automatons, tirelessly battering, undaunted in their efforts, determined to break through and get at the soft, living meat beyond the barricade. There were hundreds out there, thousands, and survival against such numbers was all but impossible. All you could do was survive a little longer: an hour, half an hour, a minute, a second... and just hope that some miracle would deliver you, even if that miracle was nothing more than a quick and painless death.

  But none of them spoke aloud of this. They just stood there for a moment, gazing at the barricade, knowing that it was their final defence. When that had gone, then there would be nowhere left to run. When that had gone, then their seconds would all have ended.

  And, as they stood there in silence pondering these thoughts, there came a single sound from the landing outside.

  The sound a floorboard creaking.

  As a foot fell upon it...

  ELEVEN

  And so, the dead invaded the upper floor. It was not a sudden invasion, not brutal and crashing as it had been when they broke through the stairway door. Instead, it was a slow invasion, a careful infiltration, almost explorative. It was as though the dead, too, had gained new territory, and were unsure of it. They had to test it out, to feel it, to smell it, to taste it, to try and understand what new world it was that they had taken possession of. Perhaps, in their strange new life, they didn’t even know what stairs were, and so had to learn how to use them, step by step, riser by riser: stumbling, falling; crawling up that strange and jagged s
lope until they reached the summit of their relentless conquest. Perhaps, for them too, the world had changed and they had to not so much survive, as take possession of it, inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile, until the horizon was theirs...

  Ted, Dave, Shaun and Jenny stood silently in the bedroom for they knew not how long, listening with dreadful expectation to what was transpiring beyond the bedroom door. None of them spoke, or moved, and barely dared to breathe lest a single sound should alert those outside to their presence. Instead, they listened. They listened to the sound of footsteps on the landing outside, the slow, almost rhythmic creak of the floorboards as many paced this way and that. They heard the occasional fumble as cold hands groped against a wall, or as a body stumbled and fell, dumping itself to the carpet, before regaining its feet and staggering on. They heard doors banging again and again, as though they were being opened, crashed shut, and then opened, before being crashed shut again – in the same way as a child or an imbecile would play inquisitively, but fruitlessly with some object.

  And they heard hands on the bedroom door behind their barricade: soft hands, fumbling, tapping, as though feeling the wood for any messages it might impart. Did they know that their prey was trapped in here? Were they deliberately taunting them, tormenting them, suggesting an attack when no attack was forthcoming? It was a damnable possibility. Who knew with these things? Who knew the depths of their intelligence, their capacity for psychological cruelty? They had, after all, once been human.

  But as time passed, and when no attack came, the four people in the room gradually relaxed. Or, if it wasn’t exactly relaxation, then it was a kind of acceptance: a sickly acknowledgment of the status quo. They were trapped, those outside had no immediate intention of breaking into the room – seconds could, for the time being, become minutes, and who knew – maybe half an hour or two would be permitted them.

  Before the attack came.

  Before the end came.

  Before the barricade fell, and with it all hope of any future in any measure of time.

  So for now, they broke their tight circle by the door. Shaun and Jenny sat down on the floor by the wall – as far from the window, and from the door as they could possibly get. Dave went over to the window, leaned against the frame, and gazed down at a world beyond that was no longer his. And Ted sat down on the chair that had stood by the dresser until the dresser had been requisitioned for the barricade. He rested the gun against one knee, and folded his arms across his chest. And then he waited... either for a miracle... or for death...

  * * *

  Night. The light had failed slowly outside, the sun burning up the horizon with a red and fiery glow, the tops of the countless pine trees standing sharply against the inferno. The shadows deepened, and the dead walked through those shadows. Their faces darkened; their endless swaying forms like nightmares in the descending dusk. And, as the sky cleared of clouds, and night fully claimed the air, the eyes of the dead gleamed with reflected starlight.

  Dave still stood by the window. His head and his shoulders were silhouetted black against the final salmon-pink glow of the dying sun. Suddenly, he looked back into the room. Ted wasn’t sure whether Dave was looking at him, or perhaps looking at Shaun and Jenny who were still huddled on the floor next to the wall, and had both fallen into a fitful, snuffling sleep.

  “Those two look to be well away,” Dave said at last. His voice was low, more whispered than spoken. Even so, it sounded too loud to Ted. Even the softest whisper could alert the dead to their presence here, but then... Ted was pretty sure that the dead knew that they were here anyway. They’d come when they were good and ready. They’d break through the barricade as though it was made of paper. And then, at last, there would be a final reckoning.

  “Yes,” Ted whispered back, breaking his own self-imposed rule of silence, “it certainly sounds like it.”

  Dave chuffed a harsh and unamused laugh, “lucky bastards... I don’t think that I could sleep now if you gave me a feather bed and handful of Nytol. I’m not sure that I’ll ever sleep again after all this.”

  “You will,” Ted returned, “...you’ll sleep. We all have to sleep eventually. Nature’s way of sparing our sanity I suppose...”

  Ted tailed off. Sparing their sanity? There certainly didn’t seem to be much of sanity in this situation. Instead, it seemed like a nightmare which, some small and desperate part of Ted was convinced, would be over soon. That he’d just wake up in his bed and his bed would not be shoved against the door, but in its rightful position, and these three young people were not in his house, had never crashed into his post box with their car, and indeed might never have existed at all...

  But that was the stuff of fantasy, of course. This was all real, and had to be treated as such. In a situation such as this, the moment that you started to think that it was all a dream, the moment that you denied reality, the moment that you weakened, could well be the moment that you died.

  Dave looked away from Ted and back outside. For a moment he was nothing but a silent silhouette stood there before the starlit sky. A moment of complete silence and stillness passed. Then Dave said:

  “You know, Ted – you handled that gun rather well. Like... when you shot that pilot... It was only one shot, and you pulled it off. You did it. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you were a bit of an expert with that there peashooter.”

  Ted was silent for a moment. He deliberated. Did he really want to tell this strange young man about his life? Well, why not? He might as well tell someone. Particularly when it seemed that there might not be much more of it left.

  “Yes...” Ted said at last, “...after a couple of years in the army, you get to learn how to handle a gun.”

  Dave turned around to look at Ted. Dave’s head was in silhouette, so his features were obscured, but Ted could sense the surprise on his face – could almost see it despite the complete darkness that masked it.

  “Army...?” said Dave, and the surprise was unmistakeable in his voice, “army eh...?”

  “Yes,” Ted returned, “five years all told. But that was a long, long, time ago. Early nineteen eighties to be precise. Saw a piece of action in the Falklands war...”

  And then, it happened to him again. He’d lost track of the number of times it had happened over the years. Too many, that was for sure. Far too many. And this time, it was more powerful than it had ever been before, because suddenly, in a second, in a heartbeat, in a single breath, he was there. There. The sharp, huge wind was tugging at him, and the bleak, ragged moorland terrain was stretching all about him. He was kneeling in a hollow, could feel the harsh ground jagging into his knee, and could smell, almost taste, the sharp tang of the Atlantic Ocean in the air. He was holding something heavy in his hands, and he knew that it was a gun, but one far larger, heavier, and more deadly than the one he would lock in a cupboard in a farmhouse thirty-odd years later. This was a soldier’s gun, a gun that was meant to kill men rather than rats and pheasants.

  And men were close at hand, men who were the enemy, men who meant to kill him, which meant that he would have to kill them first.

  They had been on patrol one morning. Their scouts had said that there were no Argentinean forces in the area. But maybe their scouts had been mistaken, or maybe the Argentineans had moved rapidly into the area without their scouts knowing. Whatever the truth of it, they had been surprised, coming under sudden, heavy, and sustained gunfire: a furious battle from which retreat was, for the moment, impossible. They had become encircled, and many of his comrades had already fallen. And there was just him now, Private Ted Hanaghan, crouched in a foxhole, his gun at the ready, preparing himself for death. But before he died, he would fight. He’d claw and shoot and kick and bite each moment of life that might be left to him: each half hour, each minute, and each second. Pure survival, nothing more and nothing less.

  But there was one other with him: crouching in the foxhole, his own gun at the ready, his own handful of courage clutched
in his heart. Private Tommy Landsdowne. Ted’s comrade, and his best mate through basic training, through the military exercises in Wales, and now here, in the real thing, in the heart of the ruck with the shit really going down. Crouched in a foxhole with the enemy to all sides – but still smiling his strange, vicious, sometimes scary smile, as though they were down at the Hare and Hounds about to launch into one of Tommy’s notorious drinking games, rather than staring death in the face.

  And now, Tommy turned his smile on Ted. “Well...” said Tommy Landsdowne, “...looks like this is it old mate. Been nice knowing you and all. But it’s time to go split some Argie heads before they split ours. It’s time - ,”

  But his sentence was cut short by the brutal blast of gunfire. Both men crouched low in the foxhole, trying their best to merge and become as one with the rocks and grasses as the gunfire raged above them. When it was over, Ted looked up, in time to see the silhouettes of three Argentinean soldiers appear over the brow of the bank above them. His reactions were instantaneous, and he raised his gun, sighted, pulled the trigger, and gunfire raged into the air. Tommy did likewise, and the soldiers were cut down like corn before the scythe. Who were those soldiers, what were their names, did they have families – such thoughts were irrelevant now, just chaff on the wind. They were The Enemy, and it was kill or be killed out here on the Falklands ragged terrain.

  “Better bug out,” Tommy called desperately over to Ted, “there’ll be more where that lot came from.”

  “We’re fucking encircled though,” Ted returned through gritted teeth, his smoking gun held before him.

  “So what?” Tommy returned with a nonchalant shrug, “who cares about a bunch of Argie fuckers on our tail. We’ll fight our way out just like we always do. Come on, Hanaghan, I know you’re usually a wimp but show some balls this time can’t you?”

  Ted offered his mate a savage grin. Under other circumstances, he might have offered him more than a grin for a smart quip like that – but these weren’t other circumstances. This was do or die. This was kill or be killed. This was survival.