Holiday of the Dead (5 page)

The tyres bit down and the car went straight again, grazing my side of the car on the rusting metal gate. ‘Slow down a little, for Christ’s sake,’ I shouted as my brother accelerated under the underpass and headed down the hill towards Appleby. I could see the speedo creeping up over fifty MPH.

At first Daz managed to swerve round the bodies walking over the road, but the combination of stupid speed and an ever increasing density of dead, meant we started to clip and hit them. One of the gypsy girls in bright day-glo green smashed over the bonnet and exploded the windscreen into a spider web of brain and broken glass. Daz wasn’t trying to avoid anyone now, he just drove straight at them. Both airbags went off like gunshots as impact after impact rocked the car. ‘We’re not going to make this,’ I shouted at Daz, my ears ringing. The car’s suspension bounced up and down wildly as we mounted and rode over the dead like they were sleeping policemen.

I could see the river, filled now with corpses of people, and what looked like half-devoured horses. If we could just get to the country roads we’d have a chance. It seemed the moment I thought this, the wheels of the car locked and we ground to a halt. ‘I can’t get it moving, the wheels are jammed up,’ Daz said, revving the engine into a high pitched squeal that abruptly died as it stalled. Looking into the wing mirrors it was obvious what had killed the car – the wheel arches looked rammed with the limbs and torsos of dead people. The bones and flesh had been churned up from below like the mud in a field and packed around the wheels and axle until it locked solid. We had to run now.

Reaching hands came for us as we ran for the pub on the corner, The Royal Oak. I was so scared, I managed to outrun Daz in the twenty five metre sprint to the beer garden wall. The crowds of dead were slow, but I expected to see one of them turn into Carl Lewis at any moment. There seemed to be hundreds of them drifting towards us from Appleby’s town centre, a slow moving tsunami of vacant faces and hungry mouths. The whole front row was gingery-haired Maldoons. This was fucked!

I vaulted the wall and tumbled into plastic chairs and a table. I was relieved to have any barrier against the dead, even if this one was only three foot high. Daz appeared beside me with a more elegant hurdle jump.

‘Don’t do it, Daz,’ I shouted as he was about to pull open the front double doors of the pub. I was alongside the side bay window; behind the orange poster for a local pub band, the expansive bar was in darkness. But the darkness was liquid, a jumbled, jostling, moaning and moving room. In that instant I saw the pub for what it was: a pressure cooker packed to the rafters with dead, hungry people.

‘Don’t open the door; they’re rammed in there.’

‘What, then?’ Daz said, his eyes wild as the dead closed in from every side and beginning to spill over the low wall. We were backed against the pub’s front wall, as good as dead.

‘We can get up,’ I said. My genius idea.

I followed Daz as he started shinning his way up the old iron drainpipe. Hands were grabbing at my calves, trainers and shoelaces as I gained height. I pulled my feet away, feeling the bolts holding the drainpipe into the limestone bricks give a little. Above me, Daz’s feet dangled precariously as he pulled himself over the lip of an overhang, and on to a section of roof covering one wing of the building. He made it, but sent a heavy grey slate bouncing off my shoulder. It hurt like a motherfucker and I nearly fell.

‘Ssssorry!’ Daz shouted down from somewhere above me.

I followed Daz’s route, the freezing wind this high up only adding to my vertigo. Trying to drag my body over the lip I could feel my arms weakening. Daz grabbed my left arm. It hurt like hell, but he saved my life.

So there we were, sat on the roof of a public house, freezing our asses off. This was nothing like the Simon Pegg film. What a rip! I would’ve laughed but figured I’d lose it if I did and start bawling my eyes out. I chanced a look down and couldn’t believe they were still coming. The dead drawn to us like a magnet, hundreds, maybe a thousand or more crushing themselves outside the pub, patiently waiting for their dinner. Were there no other living people they could bother? Another chill ripped through me at the thought.

I leaned back on the chimney, closed my eyes to rest for a minute when a new sound jerked my eyes open. I thought for a second one of the bodies had climbed up to join us.

‘SQUAWK!’ There it was again. The crow had found me. How could that be? The small, rational part of my brain knew it couldn’t be the same one from the field –that was impossible. But it was an impossible kind of day. The bird made the same noise again, shrill and awful.

‘Look at its eyes,’ said Daz. ‘The fucker is one of them.’

I looked more closely, as the bird started hopping aggressively down the ridge tiles towards the chimney pots where we sat. Its eyes gave it away, shrivelled and dry, like two raisins in its head. The crow was as dead as the crowds of people below us. It flew at my face, a mass of feathers and talons. I tried to grab it, to throw it away, but the constant flapping left me grasping thin air. I felt the flesh on my hands and forearms tearing open. White pain. My balance was shot, and I felt myself start to slip down the slates towards the edge. With one hand I tried to fend the crow off, and with the other I grabbed at anything to stop myself, trying to halt my slow slide into oblivion.

The bird made its scream again, snapping its beak onto my ear lobe and tearing it in half. Hot blood ran down my neck. ‘DAZ!’ I shouted out. I couldn’t see him for the blur of coal black feathers in front of me. Everything went black, and I braced myself for the fall. Would the drop break my neck before the hungry mouths got to me? Would it hurt?

A crash to my right and there were blue skies above me again. I was still alive, still on the roof. Daz had dived over the top of me and was rolling around with the crow in his hands. One of my brother’s eyes was a bloody, red hole. No more than ten centimetres from the roof edge, he held it by the neck. The noise was immense – then cut off instantly when Daz bit the head off the damn bird. Alice Cooper, eat your heart out! He threw the thing away with the contempt it deserved.

‘We’ll be okay,’ I said, shuffling my way across the roof to help him. His eye was a gory mess, and his cheeks had been torn so deep I could see his teeth. ‘We’ll get you to a doctor.’

‘What doctors? There’s nobody left, just those dead people,’ Daz said. He sounded slurred, sleepy. He looked very pale.

Something caught my eye above us. I wanted it to be a helicopter, a daring rescue with a winch, and medics, medicine and machine guns, but it wasn’t. A black ball of movement separated into individual dots. I knew what it was, a flock of death. They didn’t fly like normal birds, there was something stuttering and uneven in their wings. A little rigor perhaps? They arched over the distant tree tops, swooping a little and following the river. Below me the heads of the massed dead turned a little I thought. Somehow they knew what was coming – reinforcements from the air. I watched the flock, willed them to pass me by. Their noise was a battle cry. They turned.

‘SQUAWK.’ 

THE END

JENNIFER

By

Iain McKinnon

It was quiet in the flat but there were still screams and the occasional gunshot from outside. He pulled his only weapon, an old pocket knife, out from the corpse’s head and wiped it on the dead man’s shirt. The blood was dark and stodgy but it wiped off easily enough. Bill flipped the knife shut, slipped it back into its sheath and clipped it to his belt.

He picked up his coat from where he’d left it over the back of a dining room chair and slipped it back on. The fabric rippled as he pushed his arms into the sleeves making a faint hissing sound. He walked into the hallway and faltered by the door. The summer sun cut a warm golden slash across the door from the dining room windows.

With a composing sigh Bill turned round. He didn’t want to leave the flat. It wasn’t the security that drew him back. He wasn’t scared to walk into the turmoil outside.

The moment he left this place it would be consigned to a memory. Bill didn’t want this place to be just a memory but already the joy he’d felt here had faded away. He should have savoured the time. In a pitiable act to recapture some of the memories he walked back into the bedroom to see her one last time.

She lay on the bed. Her soft blond hair was tussled and lay slightly across her face.

Bill knelt down and brushed the hair aside with the back of his hand. Her skin felt cold now and slightly hard. It was shocking. The palpable contrast between her warm soft living skin and this bitter empty husk. He knew she was dead but she still held a look of sweet innocence.

Bill drew in a breath through his nostrils catching a faint whiff of the shampoo in her hair and fabric softener in her clothes.

This little girl had been so full of life so boisterous and energetic. And that life had flicked off like a switch never to be turned back on.

The tiny white blouse, price tag dangling from the sleeve, and the grey pleated skirt still in its protective wrap of cellophane. All ready for the start of a school term that would never come.

More screams and the screeching of car tyres drifted in from the street. The noise distracted him for a moment.

Ultimately it was a hollow act looking in on her, all he’d succeeded in doing was polluting his happy memories.

Outside, Bill thought, there were a million more tragedies unfolding. What was this one when weighed against the suffering and turmoil of the world outside?

He bounded down the stairs to the ground floor and opened the shared access door. A wave of heat hit him. The car parked on the road opposite the flat was on fire.

Bill took a step back in surprise. He put an arm over his face to shield himself from the blaze and quickly edged passed the crackling wreck.

This was a new world Bill thought as he looked around. This was a normal street in a normal town only normality had evaporated.

Broken glass, loose bricks even a dead body lying on the pavement. These were all normal now. This was a new normality, a new world – a world where Bill could write the rules.

No more household bills, no more tax, no more did he have to pretend to fit into the normal world. No longer did he have to feel suppressed or repressed.

He found he had lost all sense of fear.

Bill’s pace quickened like a weight had been lifted from him and a smile rose on his lips. Now he could relax and be himself. He held his head up proudly. He no longer felt oppressed, or meek or insignificant. For the first time in his life he could do exactly what he wanted. There was nothing left to tie him down.

The pivotal moment, when Bill knew the world had changed, had come when he’d seen a policeman and a bystander clubbing a youth to death outside his home.

The garbled news items he’d been listening to hadn’t made sense but what he could tell was this was happening everywhere.

A middle-aged woman, legs bent under herself, lay sprawled across his path. She wasn’t moving. Her hand still grasped a suitcase by its handle. The locks were popped and the suitcase had fallen open or been prised open. A few garments still clung to the sides of the case the remainder, Bill guessed, stolen or caught by the wind.

With a skip Bill jumped over the corpse and continued walking down the rubble-strewn road.

Sirens wailed and screeching round a corner hurtled a police car its lights flashing. Bill was proud of his composure. He didn’t jump, he didn’t panic he wasn’t startled by it. He’d been nervous at first. He’d been unsure of the freedoms the new normality afforded. But if Bill had been nervous, so had the police and everyone else in this city.

A man came running straight at him. He was young in his early twenties with a colourful blue logo top and a light fashionable jacket. His skin was flushed and as he ran he looked over his shoulder.

The young man was the first of many. Not far behind him came a stream of people. The younger, fitter ones. People on their own, with no one to worry about, or the ones who didn’t care enough to worry. They were the ones at the vanguard of the rout.

A business woman, or at least that’s what Bill took her for, wearing a matching pinstriped skirt and jacket with a red blouse stopped a few feet away.