Authors: Jack Lewis
10
A voice cried out from inside the
house, but the volume was blunted by the door behind us. I got up and opened
it.
“Kyle!” said Justin.
I ran inside the house, Faizel
following me. There were so many rooms upstairs that it was hard to locate
Justin at first, but we eventually found him in what looked like the master
bedroom.
There was a king sized bed, one of
the biggest I’d ever seen, and a large built-in wardrobe full of dozens of
shade variations of the same suit on one side and an array of party dresses on
the other. On one end of the room there was an ensuite bathroom. Justin stood
next to a pastel green wall with a wooden dado rail running along it,
terminating in a door-shaped opening that didn’t belong there.
“Check this out,” said Justin.
The door was painted the same shade
of green as the wall, and the handle was disguised under the dado rail. This
was a door that was not meant to be found.
The commotion brought Alice and Ben
into the room, the kid rubbing his sleepy eyes. Dan followed them and a sour
whiskey aroma trailed in with him. His cheeks were tinged red.
Faizel ran his hand along the side of
the door. “Clever,” he said.
Justin stepped inside the room beyond
the door. “You gotta see this, Kyle. I can’t believe it.”
Me, Faizel and Dan walked into the
room. When I followed them, my jaw almost dislocated from shock.
It was a windowless room only
slightly larger than a shoe cupboard. A dark brown rack was fastened to one of
the walls, and dozens of shotguns and rifles hung off it. Underneath each gun
was a box with the relevant ammo calibre written on a white label.
My blood pulsed so fast I thought I
was going to faint.
“Holy shit!” said Dan, and laughed.
He walked over to the rack, picked up a shotgun. It was a pump action, double
barrelled death stick. It looked too big in his hands, and he held it in the
air like Rambo.
“How good is this?” said Justin. He
ran his finger along the handle of a bolt-action rifle. Most of them gleamed
like they’d never been used.
For a minute, I was at a loss. Over
the last sixteen years the world had shit on me at every available opportunity.
Tonight, though, it seemed like Karma was finally rocking in my favour. Guns
were rare in Britain, because pre-outbreak you needed a gun license. I had a
revolver once, but since firing the six bullets in the chamber, I hadn’t found
any more ammo. Now we had enough firepower to take down an army.
I turned to Faizel. “We need to take
this stuff down straight away,” I said. “If something happens, and we need to
go, I’m not leaving it behind.”
“I’ll help, “said Faizel, and stepped
into the room.
I nodded. “Good. Dan, since you’re
already in love, you can take down the shotguns. But for God’s sake don’t load
any of them.”
Alice took a step forward. “I want to
help,” she said.
“Don’t you need to look after Ben?”
She looked at the bump on my forehead
from where she’d hit me. “I think I owe you a little help.”
I put my hand to my chin. “Okay. Me,
you, Dan and Faizel will take down the guns and whatever else is in that room.
Justin, you keep an eye on Ben.”
Justin frowned. He stepped into the
doorframe, a rifle slung over his shoulder. “Why me?”
“Just do it.”
He tutted, put the rifle on the floor
and walked over to Ben. He leant down to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s go downstairs buddy.”
Ben looked over to his mother. His
eyes always looked like they were going to start leaking tears down his young
face. Alice smiled at him.
”I’d rather they stayed up here,” she
said.
I nodded. “No problem.”
Justin and Ben sat on the edge of the
bed. Ben wouldn’t take his eyes off his mother.
“Okay everyone,” I said. “It’s our
lucky day. Let’s take stock of what we have and then get it downstairs.”
Alice stepped into the room, and as
she walked past me I got a whiff of what I was sure was men’s deodorant.
Anything beat the smell of grime the wilds gave you, I guessed. I followed her.
The minute I stepped into the room, I
heard a snapping sound and the door started to shut behind us. I span round and
stuck out my hand, but it was too late. The door slid into place with a thud.
The door obviously had some kind of mechanism that made it shut automatically.
This didn’t make sense. How had
Justin opened it? Or had it already been open when he found it? If so, why
hadn’t the automatic mechanism already shut it? Maybe it was triggered when you
stepped into the room.
Dan turned round. He had a shotgun in
each hand. “What was that?”
“Doors shut,” I said, looking for the
handle. “Can’t find where to open it though.”
Faizel put his hands to his chin. He
stroked his goatee and stared at the door. He put his hand to it and traced his
way along where the edges had been, but it was almost as if it had disappeared.
What the hell was this place?
“There’s no handle,” he said. “But
here’s a keyhole.”
“Where’s the key?” said Alice, her
voice level.
I thought she would be worried about
Ben, but she seemed calmer than I was. My heart hammered and my hands were
fidgety. I didn’t like being shut in, and I had the irrational idea that the
air supply would start to thin out.
Faizel moved away from the door.
“Hopefully the key will be somewhere in here, because there’s no other way to
open it.”
Dan dropped his shotguns to the
floor. His face was bright red and his head was covered in sweat. He clenched
and unclenched his fists. He pounded on the door as hard as he could, but the
material absorbed the noise.
“Justin!” he shouted, then pounded
some more. “Open the door you moron!”
Shuffling sounds came from the
bedroom, but no movement was made to open the door. We could still hear what
was going on outside, but any noise we made was absorbed by the walls. The
realisation of where we were hit me in the guts.
“This is a panic room,” I said.
Alice arched her eyebrows. “Thought
that was an American thing?”
I shook my head. “It’s a money thing,
doesn’t matter where you’re from if you can pay for it.”
Dan pounded on the door again.
“Justin! Open the door you little shit!” he shouted, his voice straining.
I put my hand on his shoulder and
pulled him away. He threw me off.
“Fuck this.”
He took a step back, breathed in, then
kicked at the door with all the force he could give. When his foot hit the wood
he screamed in agony. “Jesus Christ, my knee!”
Alice shook her head. “Get control of
yourself.”
“Fuck off,” said Dan, between painful
moans. “How can we hear them, but they can’t hear us?”
Faizel pointed at the ceiling where a
black speaker was fastened on a frame. “Hi-tech.”
Alice looked at Dan in disgust. She
rolled up her sleeves, and for a minute I thought she was going to start
beating him. She looked like she could take him in a fight. She had to have
been tough if she was married to a man like Torben Tusk.
“Let’s not mess about. If there’s a
key in here, let’s find it. Otherwise I’m all for loading up a shotgun and
shooting our way out,” she said.
Faizel looked at the guns. “Firing
one in here will burst our ear drums.”
“I know. I’m kidding. Let’s get out
of here.”
Her can-do attitude impressed me,
though something was off about it. After all, a locked door separated her from
her son, and he was being looked after by someone she had only met the night
before. Most people would be panicking.
“Aren’t you worried about Ben?” I
said.
She tilted her head back, scrunched
up her face. “Worry isn’t going to unlock the door.” She crouched down next to
Dan, leaned in close to him. “I suggest you get off your arse and help us, or
I’ll make sure you get one of these too,” she said, and pointed at the swollen
plum underneath her eye.
Aside from the gun rack and boxes of
bullets, there didn’t seem to be much in the room. If this was indeed a panic
room, then surely there would be more to it? I couldn’t imagine a rich guy, the
kind who had a Jacuzzi on his balcony, would build a panic room without fitting
it with some degree of comfort.
Then I realised. The walls. The door
to this place had blended right into the walls, so what was stopping there
being another interconnected door?
I walked across the room and ran my
hands along the wall until my fingers dug into a ridge. I gripped it and
pulled. A bolt clicked, something hissed and the wall came apart, revealing
another room.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?” said
Dan, the pain in his knee dulled by the anaesthetic of surprise.
Darkness covered the room beyond so
that we couldn’t see what was inside, but we didn’t need sight to tell us that
it wasn’t good. A smell drifted out of the shadows and tore at my nostrils. I
put my hand to my mouth and covered it to stop the smell seeping inside of me.
It was the smell of death.
11
The rancid smell intensified every
inch closer I got to the room. I hoped it was something innocent like a rat that
had crawled in and died, but my luck wasn’t likely to go that way. I stuck my
hand out into the darkness and felt the wall, running my hand along it until I
found a light switch. I flipped it and the room lit up. Thank God for emergency
generators.
I saw what caused the smell of decay.
It was two dead bodies, a man and a woman who were deep into the
decomposition process, their bloated skin turning to sludge and slipping away to
reveal bones. Their skeletal arms overlapped, as though they had held hands in
death. I stumbled, felt bile rise in my throat.
Dan got up, shoved his way to the
doorframe. When he got there, he immediately took a few steps back. “Holy
shit.”
Faizel shook his head. “Doesn’t look
like they’ve been dead too long.”
Dan coughed, lifted his sleeve to his
mouth to block the smell. “They don’t look fresh to me buddy.”
“The fact that they’re still
decomposing tells us that they died relatively recently. Certainly within the
last month or two, I’d guess. Although the room was pretty air tight, so maybe
that could have slowed things down.”
I scratched my chin. “Why didn’t they
turn?”
Faizel looked closely at the bodies,
then shrugged his shoulders.
Unlike other unpleasant odours, the
smell of death was something your senses never adjusted to. It was supposed to
stay as a horrible smell because if there was death in the air, your body
wanted to warn you to stay the hell away from it. In the Wilds, the decaying
smell of the infected was carried away by the wind and diluted by the open air.
In this enclosed space we weren’t given such a luxury.
I breathed through my mouth to try
and stop the smell. To my right, Alice’s face had drained white. She darted her
head back toward the door, her face twisted with worry.
“Sorry you have to see this,” I said.
She folded her arms and grimaced. “I
don’t give a shit about them,” she said, nodding at the bodies. “I need to get
out there to my son.”
Every so often we heard Justin and
Ben laughing and talking. It told us that they were okay, but it was probably
killing Alice to be locked in here. Whatever she was feeling, she hid it well.
Maybe she’d been taking lessons from Faizel.
“The key must be in there somewhere,”
I said. “So let’s get to it.”
Dan backed away from the room. “No
way am I going in there.”
Faizel flashed an angry look at his
friend. It was gone in a second, but it had been there. “We all have to pitch
in.”
Dan slunk down to the floor, kept his
back against the door. “I’ll pitch in on things that don’t involve rotting
bodies.”
It amazed me that someone who had
lived through sixteen years of the apocalypse, someone who had completed
numerous scouting trips that involved spending days in the Wilds, could be so
squeamish about dead bodies. Maybe it was the fact that these particular dead
bodies hadn’t risen from the dead; infected were one thing, but a death without
the de-humanising reanimation was different.
We had wasted enough time in here.
Both rooms were small, and the air supply was starting to get diluted with the
putrid smell so that every breath felt like I was filling my lungs with death.
I moved into the room, stepped over
the dead bodies. It was hard to tell what they’d looked like from the
decomposition, but it was a man and a woman, and they seemed old. The man had a
brass bracelet around his wrist which had stayed untouched, the microbes that
feasted on death choosing to eat around the metal rather than through it.
On the right side of the room there
was a worktop counter. Above it were four TV monitors and a console that was
used to control them. On top of the worktop there was a thick book, a pen, a
champagne bottle and two glasses. On the other side of the room were two shelves,
empty, and a mini-fridge – also empty.
Faizel stepped over the bodies and
stopped in front of the TV screens.
“If the backup generator is working,
the monitors should also be running.”
The console that controlled them was
simple. On, off. Record. Rewind. I pressed the on button and the monitors
fizzed to life.
“There’s Ben!” said Alice, excitement
undercutting her voice.
The pixels came to life on the
screen, and for a second it took me back to before the outbreak, of nights
watching TV with Clara and killing time before going to bed, not realising how
precious that time was because we thought we had enough of it to spare. It
occurred to me that I’d gone over a decade without turning on a television or
using a computer.
On the monitor, Justin and Ben sat on
the bed waiting for us. They seemed okay for now, but I knew that the
separation was getting to Alice. We needed a key, but in such a small room
there weren’t many places it could be kept. It must have been with one of the
bodies on the floor.
Faizel picked up the book that was on
the worktop. It was thick and the edges of the pages were warped as though
something had been spilled on them and then had been left to dry.
“You might want to read this, Kyle.”
I glanced at the open page.
August 16
th
, 2031
There’s always a strange calm that
comes over you when you come to a decision, and today I made one that is final.
“This was written two weeks
ago. Seems to be his diary,” I said, looking down at the dead man on the floor.
Faizel nodded. “Read out the last
entry please, Kyle.”
‘
All my life I’ve been in
business. Fourteen hour days. Missed birthdays, broken promises, crying
children. It was all to build a better life for us. Look where that got me.
We’re rich, alright, but now that the end is here, there’s nothing to spend the
money on, and I’m left regretting my life and wishing I’d spent more time with
the kids and less time with spreadsheets. Valerie won’t have that regret. She
is a good mother.
We’ve decided to die. We’ve hidden in
here for 72 hours now, and the man is still hanging around the village. For a
while I watched him. Saw him glancing up and the farmhouse from time to time.
There’s something about him that sickens me.
He’s going to come here. He’s going
to take us away in his van, like he did all the rest. I’ve got enough guns here
to kill him a thousand times over, but I can’t shoot for shit. I bought them
all when the outbreak started, but things went to pot before I could even learn
to shoot. Another thing I didn’t get time to do.
The man’s name is Whittaker. He
comes and he collects people. Sometimes living, sometimes dead. We don’t see
him for weeks because he visits every village in the area, but he always comes
back. We think he does it in rotation.
I’ve decided that Valerie and I will
die tonight. There’s nothing left for us now that the world is like this. I’ve
taken all the pills from the medicine cabinet and we’ll swallow them down with
a glass of champagne that I saved for our retirement.
We’ve locked the door and swallowed
the key, just in case we turn after death. I doubt you still have cognitive
function when you become one of them, but I won’t take any chances. I don’t
want us to get out of here and eat someone, like the rest of the creatures.
If somebody gets here, and you
are reading this, you are welcome to the guns. And I hope to God we haven’t
hurt you, that we aren’t one of them.
For God’s sake, be careful. Stay away
from Whittaker.
I snapped the book shut and tried to
imagine the lonely hours they’d spent in here, too scared to leave the tiny
room because of this man, Whittaker. I tried to imagine the desperation in
their minds that made suicide seem like the only way out, but I couldn’t. Even
at my lowest, I’d always wanted to survive.
“Poor bastards,” said Alice, shaking
her head.
Maggots had burrowed into their flesh
and begun eating the dead tissue. The rot hadn’t spread through them
completely, and large parts of their bodies were still whole. Their
stomachs swelled, and their skin stretched tightly around like a drum and
threatened to explode. I couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t turned after
death.
“We need to cut the key out,” said
Faizel.
From the other room, Dan called out.
“I’ll sit this one out.”
“You sit everything out,” said Alice.
“Maybe you should have waited outside, and Ben could have looked after you
.”
“Looks like we’ve got to do it. But
the diary doesn’t say who actually swallowed it; it says ‘we’.” I said.
I didn’t feel like getting on the
floor and cutting through corpse’s stomachs, but there was no choice. Back
outside the pub, I’m sure Faizel hadn’t wanted to kill the dog, but he’d still
done it.
Something banged outside the room. It
hadn’t come from the bedroom, but it was definitely somewhere inside the house.
Dan stood up against the door, turned round.
“What was that?” I said.
He pressed his ear to the door.
“Something’s in the house.”
Alice’s eyes widened. She ran to the
door, pounded on it. “Ben! Justin!”
I put my hand on her shoulder, gently
pulled her away. “They can’t hear us,” I said.
I tried to keep calm, but the truth
was that my heart drilled inside me and my chest felt like a vice was crushing
it. We had to get out of this room. I needed to bury the feeling because they
needed someone strong. Maybe one day I’d get chance to dredge up my own
feelings, but for now I couldn’t afford to have any.
Outside, there were footsteps walking
up the stairs.
Adrenaline rushed through me,
electrifying my whole body. I slipped my knife from my belt and knelt down next
to the decaying man. I choked back the rancid fumes, tried to stop thinking of
the corpse as a human being.
Think of it as a rabbit. You’ve gutted hundreds
of them, why should this be different?
Alice thudded on the door and called
out for her son. “Fuck this,” she said. She walked over to the dead woman and
knelt by her. She looked up. “Give me something sharp.”
Faizel handed her his axe. Alice drew
it back and then plunged it into the woman’s stomach. There was a squelch as
the blade tore through flesh, and then a hiss of sickening gas leaked out from
her belly.
I stabbed my knife into the man and
cut with enough precision as I could muster, leaning my head back to escape the
smell. I carved a big enough opening to slip my hand inside.
“Someone’s in the room,” said Dan.
For the first time, I heard something other than sarcasm in his tone.
Faizel grabbed hold of the monitor,
twisted it in his direction. “Cut faster,” he said.
I looked at the monitor. There was a
man in the bedroom with Justin and Ben. He wore a black jacket that reached his
waist, and a white lab coat trailed underneath it.