The father continued to speak, "The hospital was under guard, but I even noticed on the way in that there were a few souls wandering around, and they didn't look drunk, I can tell you that. I was with my boy and I heard a load of screaming." He turned to stroke his son's face and began to shush him as the boy began to mutter while he remained unconscious. He wiped his own brow with his bloodied arm and wiped his tearstained face with the palm of his left hand. "I just took him out and carried him back to the car park. As I was getting to the car park, one of them jumped out and bit Toby on the finger, before I managed to push it away. Then I saw that a woman had three of the things on top of her. As you could imagine, especially in the sheltered car park, the screams were deafening. I didn't want to look, but I had to in case one of them decided to come our way. But thankfully it didn't happen. In a weird kinda way that woman probably saved us as I'm not sure I would have had the strength to fight three…four of the fuckers off."
At this point, the man broke down, but he fought hard to keep himself together and it worked for a while. He kissed the top of his son's head and I began to feel emotional about the whole ordeal that was unfolding. I looked at the man and his son and knew stories like this were in its thousands across the UK and it almost broke my heart.
"Where's your wife?" I asked. I didn't know he was married, as a lot of people didn't see the importance of marriage these days. But I assumed he had a partner of sorts.
He answered, "At home. We just came back from the hospital on Saturday night and once these idiots decided to let the public know that these pockets of violence had become widespread, I jumped into my car and went straight to the hospital before they decided to close the building off to contain the problem, and of course, keep those things from outside, getting in. I wasn't alone either; it was pandemonium in the hospital and even some of the staff had left once the news broke out. My son would have just been left there...to...to..." He broke down again and suddenly began to shake his son. "Toby, Toby." I knew this wasn't a good sign and correctly guessed that the boy had stopped breathing.
"How long has he been unconscious for?" I asked.
"I don't know," the man cried. "An hour. Maybe half an hour.
"What shall I do?" I began to panic. "Shall I stop the car?"
He never answered my questions, and it was no wonder when I caught a glimpse of him, as he was overcome with grief. I didn't know if stopping the car would be of any use. They had just come back from the hospital so there was nowhere else for me to take him. He initially wanted me to take him home so I assumed that whatever the outcome, his goal was to take his son back to his family home where his mother was waiting for him. I continued with the driving and had now reached the roundabout and turned right. Once I passed the Waterside Inn to my left, I heard this God-awful scream from behind me.
The scream had frightened the shit out of me. As I jumped, I automatically twisted my neck to see what was happening and had lost control of the car. I was suddenly thrown forward, hit my nose on the steering wheel and my head was thrown back against the cushioned-head restraint. I had collided with the metal fence that was situated outside the crematorium.
The car was still on its four wheels, but the vehicle had made it to the other side of the road and had hit the fence. Predictably, smoke poured upwards out of the engine, stopping me from seeing anything in front of me—although all there was to see was a mangled fence and a set of headstones.
Everything hushed around me and it took a while for my brain to register that I had been in a smash, and that I should have put on my seatbelt. I slowly lifted my head off from the head restraint, paranoid that I may have broken my neck, and slowly turned my head to the right and then to the left.
Convinced I hadn't received any serious neck injury, apart from a little soreness, I looked into the rear view mirror to see how much damage there was to my nose. It was bleeding a little but I was sure it wasn't broken, although I was surprised that the airbag never inflated considering the magnitude of the crash.
I released an elongated and relieved sigh and suddenly stopped exhaling when I heard a strange noise coming from behind me. I then realised the reason why I had crashed the car in the first instance. I had heard a scream from behind me coming from the father who had never introduced himself.
I leaned forward and twisted my body around so that I was sitting sideways and twisted my head to see what was happening in the back of the car. I remember my eyes widening once I saw what I saw, and I felt my stomach doing cartwheels, which was something I was beginning to be accustomed to, but if the vomiting process did take place, I knew there'd be little too bring up. I had no breakfast before jumping into my car and my last meal had been at five o'clock on Saturday evening, and even that was just a light chicken salad.
My eyes witnessed the six-year-old back to life—if that's what you want to call it, and sinking his little teeth into his father's neck. Blood poured out at a furious rate from the man and I could see scratches on the boy's face, as if his own father had tried to fight him off while he was being attacked, but now he was out of it. I then realised this had been going on while I was slightly unconscious and was semi-relieved that my own body hadn't been devoured while my body was in a coma-like state.
The sloppy noises coming from the devouring of the side of his neck was beginning to sicken me and my brain began to scream at me to get out, but my legs had other ideas as they were like stone. I didn't know whether it was fear that paralysed me or the lactic acid from the running I had participated in on this particular morning.
I couldn't go into detail about what part of the neck was being devoured before my eyes, as I have no anatomy knowledge, so whether the little boy was feasting on the man's trachea or even his meaty tongue, it was hard to know with all the blood that surrounded the wounds and the boy's face, and it was impossible to see how deep he had gone in. I placed my handle on the door ready to leave the vehicle, but was paranoid of two things: The first thing I was scared of was whether the noise of the door opening would arouse the thing. The other thing that worried me was if I could get the door open at all. I had noticed that it had caved in a little, and I wasn't certain the door would open in the first place, but I decided to give it a try.
I counted to three and then suddenly lifted the handle and side-kicked the door open; it fortunately swung open and I fell out of the vehicle and landed on my knees, with my palms outstretched for additional protection. I rapidly got to my feet and tried to shut the door, but then I realised that I wasn't thinking straight. I re-opened the door and took the keys out of the ignition and then shut the door once again. I walked around to the boot of the car, lifted up a piece of carpet where normally the spare tyre was usually kept in most cars and grabbed the tyre iron that sat next to the spare wheel. As soon as I shut the boot of the car, I then pressed the button of the key fob and locked the car altogether, leaving father and son to dwell in a cocoon of metal that would be their home for the time being, if not forever.
I walked to the side of the car to have one last look in. The father was still lying still and the poor young soul had stopped eating and was now slapping on the glass to get at me. The boy seemed to have a zest to get out of the vehicle as he slammed his palms on the glass and projectile vomited black blood—at least, I thought it was blood—over the inside of the glass. The thick gunk seemed to take an age to slide down the pane of the glass and I had decided that it was time to go. I knew where I was, and had maybe a mile or so before I could get home. It was time to leave.
***
I ran along the terribly long Barrhead Road and once I got to the Crookston area, I turned left and ran down another stretch of road and noticed that the desolate streets seem to be coming to life, in more ways than one. I could see up ahead three of the things stumbling around up ahead. I thought I could easily outrun and dodge them and was correct with my prediction.
They hopelessly tried to claw at me as I ran past, but my speed seemed to have frustrated them when I heard an almost prehistoric growl from one of them as if I had pissed them off to a certain degree.
As I past Lidl, I saw a woman from my left coming out of her house, screaming. She was dressed in a cream robe; blood was splattered over that robe and she held onto her right arm. She fell over and I cowardly crossed the road and looked over to see the poor woman being surrounded by a man and three children who had all turned. They all knelt down by her, as she weakly tried to fight them off and I looked away once I heard those horrendous screams coming from the woman as she was being torn to shreds by her own family—I presumed.
I turned left at the next junction onto Brockburn Road, and had to eventually stop as I felt a sharp pain in the right side of my chest. This time, instead of bending over and placing my hands on my knees, I decided to walk through the pain. To my right was a row of houses where curtains twitched as I walked by, with the residents probably wondering if I had some kind of death wish. To my left was Crookston Castle; a castle that dated back to the 12th century—and that's pretty much all I know about the place.
As I continued my arduous walk, knowing I was only half a mile from home, I came to the brow of a hill and as soon as I cleared the hill, my feet stopped walking and my heart almost stopped at what I saw.
My clammy right hand gripped the tyre iron even tighter when I clapped eyes on at least a dozen of the things around the large roundabout—a place I needed to pass to get to the small bridge that led to the street where my house was situated. They were about fifty yards away from me and I stood motionless, wondering what the hell to do next.
The only way I could get around these things was to draw them out and make them move away from the bridge that I used to walk my daughter across when I used to take her to Crookston Primary School. I then suddenly thought of my daughter, Kelly, and reached my hand into my pocket and felt my heart drop when the pocket was empty and the phone had gone. I blamed the disappearance of the phone on the crash, but I wasn't annoyed because I had lost hundreds of pounds of ebooks I had downloaded over the years, or the fact that there was about five hundred pounds worth of music on it. My overall concern was the communication cut off from my daughters as I had no landline anymore at home, as I felt there was no point. I always used my mobile phone for outgoing calls, and the only incoming calls I received on my landline phone were from sales representatives selling all kinds of shit I was never going to buy, especially when they usually called at the time I was about to sit down and eat my dinner. It was for that reason I had decided to abandon my landline phone.
Shrugging off the disappearance of my mobile phone, I squatted down and began to think about what I was going to do next. Still squatting, I began to tap the tyre iron on the tarmac. At first it started out as a gentle tap, but as their ears weren't picking up the noise, my tapping increased and it became louder.
The first one to turn and face me was a woman. She was dressed in yellow joggies, wearing flip-flops on her feet and had only a bright green shirt on her back. With witnessing some of the way people were dressed, whether it was pyjamas, a robe or flip flops, I came to the conclusion with it being Sunday morning, before they turned into these things, the public were hoping for a lazy, slouchy day, doing jobs around the house or lounging around and watching TV in order to relax their brain and mentally prepare themselves for work the next morning.
If my plan didn't work, I would have to run back the way I came, but the tapping had already produced results, as the group all had now began to walk towards me and there seemed to be an eagerness in their steps as human flesh was on show for them.
The woman continued to lead the way with the others obediently behind her, and as she got nearer I could see that her face looked reasonably fine, apart from the ashen look and sunken eyes. There didn't seem to be any mutilation on her body and it baffled me how she had turned into one of them in the first place, and then I saw a huge scratch on the left side of her neck. The only thing I could think of was that she had been attacked, fought them off and ran or hid somewhere, unaware that she was minutes or hours away herself from turning.
A lot of the small snippets of reports I had seen, before I hastily jumped into my car to find my daughter, claimed that infection was 'possible' if scratched but reanimation was almost imminent if bitten. I think they were pretty unsure themselves, and guest speakers on the TV channels that were actually working had done little to clear things up. If a scientist was being interviewed, it was a virus. If a religious leader was being interviewed, it was an act of God who had finally had enough of the selfish and destructive human race experiment he had created.
I waited a few more seconds until the flip flop-wearing female was a matter of yards away from me, and once she was close, I ran my heavy thighs around the group, all slowly heading in my direction like pins to a magnet, but I managed to bypass them without using the tyre iron once. I looked behind me, and although the twelve things were stumbling towards me, the small bridge was in sight and I was nearly home. Unfortunately, it never ended there, as another nasty surprise was waiting for me.
***