Year of the Zombie (Book 2): The Plague Winter Read online

  For a while Eddie stood listening to the growls and whimpers from within the boy’s bedroom. The trample of feet. The sound of a mouth breathing wetly as it pressed against the other side of the door. He took the pistol and moved to open the door, but at the last second his nerve failed him, and he turned away to walk down the stairs.

  ***

  He staggered from cover-to-cover and between old cars that were rusting into dull shapes covered in grime and bird shit. Cracked windscreens. Glass shards amongst the drifts of dead leaves in the roads. Rust and dust and the gutters blocked by dried mud, thin sticks and leaves. Weeds growing through the cracks in the road. Drifting trash.

  He could never shake the feeling of being watched and hunted as he glanced up at the windows of silent houses where the guttering was slowly detaching from lichen-speckled walls, loosened by the shuddering gusts of wind and rain.

  He searched the houses and his heart was aching and loud. It took the best of him to brave those rooms; and aside from a few unexpected finds – a tin of chickpeas, which did nothing to raise his spirits, a can of lemonade and a packet of pretzels – there wasn’t much. Sam would be happy with the lemonade, at least.

  The houses were looted clean. Mould-stained curtains fluttering in the breeze past the teeth of smashed windows. Broken furniture and tattered things. Everything fraying, dwindling and fading. Empty cupboards and stinking crypt-rooms of old murder scenes, where the floors were covered in bones that cracked beneath his boots.

  How many people had passed through the village since the outbreak? Looters and refugees. Scavengers. Survivors. How many? He wondered how much of the land had been stripped clean and ransacked.

  ***

  He followed the road to the pub and stopped in the street, flanked by dark houses and trees. His shoulders slumped and he spat. One hand formed into a fist and tightened until it was bloodless. The grinding of his teeth as he clenched his jaw.

  The pub had been burnt to the ground and all that remained was ash and debris and nothing else. Eddie’s heart sank and the stiffness in his throat brought him close to tears.

  He picked through the ruins, stepping over charred rubble and scraps of metal with sharp edges. The smell of mould, plaster, and old drains. In the wreckage, things he recognised: the snapped legs of bar stools, broken tables reduced to limbs of damp wood; the remains of a pool table. Moss and weeds flourishing in the cracks and holes. Piles of rotting wall insulation.

  There was thunder in the distance, like the collisions of great ships. He felt his body temperature dropping. He waited for the rain and stood amongst the smashed glass, mortar dust and brick fragments. Wooden beams blackened by fire. When the wind gusted just right, he thought he could smell the ghost-fumes of whiskey and vodka. He kicked at rubble and ash, and searched until his back was sore from hunching over and his legs were aching. And then he sat in the ruins and picked up handfuls of dust and watched it fall through his fingers.

  He realised he was shaking his head. He spoke to the uncaring sky. It would be easy to give up and lie down in the ruins, and fade into the decaying landscape. The dust and ash and all things left to desolation.

  ‘It’s all nothing.’

  He squatted and wrapped his arms around his chest, rocking gently. A soft drizzle fell. He shivered in the rain. Blinked water from his eyes and tasted it around his mouth. His face was cold and bloodless, a dirty mask of creases and old lines.

  Tiredness heavy in his bones, he fell into a deep daydream and stared at his feet until something began to emerge from the wreckage to his left. At first he thought it was his mind playing tricks, but when he stood and turned he saw a pair of pale hands appear from underneath a lattice of broken wood. As though awoken by the rain. His mouth fell open. And then a snuffling form, raggedy and covered in ash and dust, emerged wheezing into the daylight and crouched on a slab of concrete with its head bowed and its hands curled into claws. It looked up and saw Eddie, and its face was little more than stretched and peeling skin across a tumescent skull; its eyes were bulbous and pained. A thin and genderless thing in the remains of a police uniform. It hissed at Eddie through a filthy mouth.

  Eddie raised the pistol.

  Another infected scrambled out from beneath a pile of bones and rubble, retching in its throat. Ruined and hunched, naked and bruised, it turned towards Eddie with eyes excited by hunger.

  Eddie turned and staggered away; he fired the pistol blind over his shoulder and when he looked back the creatures were already chasing him.

  ***

  He ran despite the faltering of his legs, down an unknown road where the buildings slumped and sagged. There were yellowed bones in the drains. A name written in blood across a window. The rain fell against his face and slowed him, soaked him to the skin, as he struggled past the abandoned relics of a dead world.

  The infected followed.

  ***

  He opened the door to the hardware shop and slipped inside, quietly closing the door behind him. He threw the bolt and retreated from the plate glass front window into the shadows at the back of the shop, dripping rainwater.

  ‘Wankers,’ Eddie said, taking deep breaths to inflate his lungs. He blinked to push away the white flashes at the edges of his vision. His heart was wild. Adrenaline caused tremors in his limbs. His legs went from under him and he fell down and shuffled backwards on his arse until he was behind the counter with his back against the wall.

  He bowed his head to his chest. His buttocks and thighs ached. A sharp pain stabbing his knees. His chest tightening with each hurried breath.

  He looked around. The cash register and a chip and pin card machine sat on the counter, and underneath – to his delight and relief – was a bottle of supermarket brand scotch among stained scraps of cloth and piles of scrap paper. He grabbed the whiskey and hugged it to his shuddering chest. The seal was intact. He smiled, his throat choked with emotion. His hands were shaking as he ripped the seal away and unscrewed the cap. Then he tipped the bottle to his mouth and drank.

  ***

  He imagined there were people moving among the aisles, chattering and shuffling their feet. Saturday morning shoppers looking for a bargain. Eddie laughed to himself and took another swig. If the infected weren’t out in the street, he would have been almost content. He muttered a poem he’d learned as a child, and fell into a haze of memories from before the outbreak. The frivolous concerns of his old life.

  He shuffled onto his knees, holding the whiskey and the pistol, and peered over the rim of the counter.

  One of the infected was looking through the front window into the shop, its face pressed against the glass. Eddie ducked, his heart flinching, and hoped the shadows at the back of the shop were dense enough to hide him.

  The tortured cries of the infected echoed in the street. It sounded like the street was full of them. Where had they all come from?

  He waited for a while longer, and the day went on. The rain tapered to drizzle and the cries of the infected died away. He had to get back to Sam before dark, and this formed a knot of anxiety in his chest. Placing the whiskey bottle in his rucksack he checked the window at the front and saw it was empty then he rose into a pained crouch and crept along the aisle to the back of the shop, where he found a door that led outside into a yard infested with weeds. He breathed the fresh air, glad for the breeze and the soft rain against his face. The sky turned from dull white to grey, and everything was washed out as if viewed through failing eyes.

  Two ancient bicycles chained to a metal post, their chains rusted tight. A pile of concrete blocks. A Ford Fiesta mounted on bricks. With the pistol he swept the yard and when he was sure he was alone he moved to the back gate. He paused, and then opened the gate and the creaking of its hinges was muted in the rain. He winced and stepped onto a dirt track that ran behind the shop. The puddles were grey and there was the smell of animal rot. To his left and right, the track led to the streets. Beyond the track, directly opposite the backyard, was a ro
w of pine trees and past the trees the old church and its tower loomed very tall.

  Eddie turned towards one end of the track, when an infected man stepped around the corner at the entrance to the street. He was terribly thin, stooping with the burden of black tumours on his naked back. His hands scraping at each other and his wrists. The man saw Eddie and let out a breathless cry, then started down the track towards him on twisted legs that seemed to stab at the ground as he moved.

  Eddie raised the pistol then realised a gunshot would bring more infected.

  The infected man stumbled forward, mouth-breathing, his chest heaving, holding out his hands like he was offering something vital and precious.

  Eddie lowered the gun and fled.

  ***

  In the shadow of the church he moved through the graveyard, between headstones and Christian signs, stumbling and tripping, too afraid to look back. Graves decorated with imitation flowers. The names of the dead all around him and the cries of the infected echoed in the dying light.

  Exhaustion pulled at him. Gravity thickened. The rain was upon him, the stones and the footpath he hurried along. There was a crawling shape among the graves that turned towards him and shrieked. He quickened his pace.

  The vicar was sitting on a wooden bench, languid and skeletal, his head bowed to his chest and his hands entwined in a semblance of prayer. And as Eddie stumbled past, the vicar looked up with a slick-red face and it was only close-up that Eddie could see the writhing feelers emerging through the ragged holes in the man’s black clerical shirt.

  ***

  He fled through gardens until exhaustion brought him down and he knelt on a lawn in the rain and stared at the ground while thoughts of using the pistol occurred to him. The cries of the infected were closing in, and he didn’t have the strength to keep running. They would find him here and slaughter him upon the cold ground and the last thing he’d see would be the mad faces of the monsters.

  His chest was so tight that he thought his ribcage was collapsing. A deep sob in his throat. He spoke Sam’s name and repeated it to the rain. He spoke other names, of those he loved, who were long gone. All gone, like so much dust at the end of the world.

  He looked to the end of the garden, where a large doghouse stood on the lawn. Something for a Doberman or an Irish wolfhound, maybe. Big dog.

  Eddie crawled to the doghouse and paused at the entrance. Peered inside, where nothing lurked or waited for him in the dark. He dragged himself inside and curled up on the foul-smelling grass like a lost animal that had found sanctuary from beasts and hunters.

  The pistol gripped in both hands, he waited.

  ***

  The infected were in the garden, lurking among the overgrown grass and foliage while they wheezed through mouths deformed by vicious teeth. Shrieking calls and saliva-wet grunts, like some kind of proto-language.

  Eddie began to cry. He kept the pistol close. He went deep inside his mind, because he didn’t want to be aware of the monsters’ claws when they found him. There was no bravery in facing a violent death. He went to a place in his mind where the sky was perfect blue and a lush meadow foamed around him. And then Ruth was there and she was older than the age at which she died, and they sat together under a sun so pale that it was white and blinding.

  ***

  Old memories and lost voices, the faces of long-departed friends. The bodies in the burning pits. The machinery of the universe. When the dead came to pay him their respects, they asked when he would come with them.

  ***

  The rain fell softly. The garden was silent, but Eddie didn’t trust it. He breathed into his hands to warm them. His body temperature was dropping with the onset of dusk. The patch of daylight through the opening was steadily darkening.

  He stiffened at footfalls on the grass and his hand found the pistol, and he felt sick that he’d have to use it again. He tried to listen past the pounding of his heart. His legs were going numb and one arm was aching with pins and needles.

  Someone was standing outside the doghouse.

  He thought he could hear the visitor breathing through some sort of restriction. A vague shadow darkened the opening. Eddie thumbed the pistol’s safety off.

  Come on, bastard. Hurry up.

  And then the shadow pulled away and the sound of damp footfalls receded into the rain.

  When Eddie emerged from his hiding place, it was almost dark and the garden and the tall trees were all shadow.

  ***

  Eddie left the village in the bleak dusk as the rain hit the ground like falling stones. Into the fields, glancing around, keeping watch; startled at each sound that came out of the trees or from ditches bristling with stinging nettles, thistles and swarming briars. He staggered faster as darkness fell. Shadows all about him like unwelcome companions. Animal cries from the woods and the hidden places. There would be no moon over the fields tonight and he kept thinking he would lose his way. He was brittle and hollow-boned, breathless and frantic. God, he felt older than ever and weak in his heart.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam. I’m sorry.’

  ***

  Sick with fear, Eddie reached the house as the darkness caught him and he pounded on the door and shouted for Sam to let him inside. There had been sounds behind him, like discordant voices and the suggestion of footsteps through bracken and soft dirt. Perhaps it had been his imagination or the trampling of wild animals; he just wanted to get inside, so he could rest in the comparative safety of the house.

  The door opened and Sam stood past the threshold with the knife in his hand. The boy was in tears, his face moon-pallid and fearful. ‘I thought you weren’t coming home, Grandad. I thought something had happened to you.’

  Eddie fell into the house and told Sam to close the door, slam the door; shut away the dark.

  ***

  The windows were shut tight and the doors were locked. Eddie had changed into dry clothes and downed a coffee laced with whiskey. They ate dinner in the frail light of birthday candles. Macaroni cheese from a tin, with crackers. Afterwards they went into the living room and played chess. Sam was getting good. Eddie could barely keep his eyes open.

  ‘Are you feeling better now, Grandad?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you’ve got some whiskey. I watched you put it in your coffee.’

  Eddie paused with the mouth of the flask near his lips. He smiled through an aching mouth. ‘Yes. I feel better.’

  Sam moved his rook and took one of Eddie’s pawns. Then he looked at him. ‘I’m glad you feel better.’

  ***

  Eddie put Sam to bed and read The Gruffalo to him. Sam fell asleep telling him about his favourite football players. Then Eddie kissed him on the forehead and tucked the blankets around his shoulders. He went downstairs and sat in his armchair. He drank, watched the front door, and kept the pistol close at hand on the arm rest.

  He closed his eyes and slept.

  ***

  During the night, Eddie woke and watched Sam creep into the living room in his pyjamas and dressing gown. Eddie pretended to be asleep, as in the pale light of a candle Sam put a blanket over his legs to keep him warm.

  ***

  In dreams, Eddie returned to that day at the end of summer when he had woken on the kitchen floor of his council house to the rise and fall and wail of sirens; like those that would’ve signalled the four-minute warning during the Cold War, to herald an impending nuclear strike.

  Eddie couldn’t remember passing out. He climbed to his feet and winced at a headache that was like tiny hands pounding on the inside of his skull. On the electric cooker, a frying pan held a congealed raw egg and two strips of bacon within a layer of vegetable oil. Next to that was a pot of cold baked beans.

  The cooker was switched off at the wall; the dials for the hobs were at their highest setting. ‘Jesus.’ His voice was hoarse and dry. He rubbed his itchy eyes. When he swallowed, it felt like gravel scraping down his throat. He drank a glass of water and
downed two paracetamol. Put on his shoes with some difficulty and almost fell over. Then he drank another glass of water and winced at the turmoil in his stomach.

  He had left the front door unlocked, and he stumbled outside to the front garden, squinting at the daylight. The sound of the siren scared him, and last night’s ale was slowly rising to his throat. He stood in the garden as the breeze stiffened the hairs on his bare arms, and looked out at the road, where a car had stopped over the white lines in the middle of the tarmac. There was someone in the driver’s seat with their head laid back, facing away from him.

  The siren echoed through chambered streets and above the city. On a nearby road, a car exhaust backfired, and he flinched when a sound that must have been fireworks came from down the street. He could smell ash and burning oil, hot tar and plastic.

  A thin plume of smoke rising from beyond the silent houses on the other side of the road. Someone was shouting from the block of council flats a few streets away. Why were people letting off fireworks this early on a Sunday morning?

  The siren slowed, faltered and then died. The silence that followed made him feel exposed and vulnerable. But vulnerable to what?

  He stepped towards the car and was about to knock on the window when the person in the driver’s seat turned their head. Eddie halted and put his hands to his mouth. And then he fled from the awful face he’d seen.

  ***

  At the dining table they ate a breakfast of biscuits and stale breadsticks. Eddie slurped coffee with powdered milk and sugar, still aching from the day before. His thoughts drifted to the bottle of scotch in the living room.