I spot a few familiar faces on the street, neighbours from a past that seems a thousand years removed. Nobody that I really cared about though. Ignoring them, I crawl up the three flights of stairs – as I pass a giant arse which was spray-painted on the wall, I slap it for luck and grin fleetingly at the memory of happier times – and limp along the landing, then step inside what used to be my home and shut the door on the outside world.
The flat smells musty. The heating hasn’t been turned on for months and none of the windows are open. Most of the doors are closed – a habit of Mum’s, she couldn’t bear an open door – so the rooms are stuffy.
I do a tour of the flat, making sure I’m alone. No bloodstains anywhere, which is a promising sign. No zombies lying in any dark corners either, which is even better. Maybe Mum made it out after all. Perhaps Dad came for her after I split from him at school, took her somewhere safe. They could be living the high life on some paradise island now.
‘Yeah,’ I sneer at myself. ‘Dream on!’
I get a pang in my chest where my heart should be when I look into their bedroom. Some of Mum’s clothes are laid across the bed, three different sets. She was obviously choosing what to wear that night when the world went to hell. I can picture her standing here, staring at the clothes, trying to decide. Then . . .
What? Killed by a zombie? Turned into one of the living dead? Taken off to some mystical Shangri-La by her racist, wife-beating knight in shining armour?
I don’t know. All I know for sure is that she never made a final choice. The clothes stayed here, strewn across the bed, never to be worn again.
‘I miss you, Mum,’ I moan and wait for tears to come. But of course they don’t. They can’t. So in the end I close the door and go to check my own room.
It looks smaller than I remembered, dark and poky. I turn on the light, but that just makes it seem even more claustrophobic, full of ominous shadows. I gaze round. My bed looks the same as it always did, crumpled black sheets, the indent of my head on the pillow. No bookshelves or posters. I didn’t believe in cluttering up my room. I liked my space, me.
I spot my iPod lying on the table next to my bed. I pick it up and smile softly. I left it charging the morning I set off to school for the last time, so it’s warm to the touch. I scroll through a couple of my playlists, select a song at random and stick my headphones on. I yelp and immediately turn down the volume. It’s easy to forget how good my sense of hearing is. Back then I used to set the volume up almost to maximum. If I did that now, I’d deafen myself.
I let the song play to its end, then lay down the iPod and step out of the room. I’d been looking forward to settling in here again, lying on my old bed and staring at the patch of ceiling which I knew so well. But now that I’ve seen it, I’ve gone off the idea. Instead I head back to Mum and Dad’s room, sweep the clothes from the bed (I never was overly sentimental), lie back and cross my legs.
‘Night night,’ I murmur after a few minutes, then turn on my side. I can’t sleep, not since I was killed, but there’s no harm in pretending every once in a while, is there?
NINE
I spend several days in the flat, maybe even a couple of weeks. Hard to tell for sure — one monotonous day blends into another and I lose track after a while. I only leave three times, to feed. On each occasion, being new to the whole brain-eating game, I track other zombies. They shuffle around the streets, sniffing like pigs in search of truffles. Often they go for hours without finding anything, but in the end they usually manage to track down an old corpse with some scraps of brain still left in its head.
I expected the zombies to fight over the meagre morsels, but they feed politely, taking turns, waiting patiently while others gorge themselves. Sometimes they get a bit overeager and try to butt in, but always pull back if the feasting creature growls warningly at them.
I hate having to feed on the dried-up, rubbery bits of brain, but it’s eat or lose my mental faculties completely. I keep looking for animals, but I still haven’t seen any, apart from the birds and rats. I’ve eaten the brains of a few dead crows and rodents, and even caught a live rat once — I think it must have been sick or lame, because it couldn’t run very fast. But they haven’t made any real difference. Too small. I’d need to tuck into a dog or cat’s brain to find out if it could do the job that a human’s does for me.
The rest of the time I hole up in the flat, recovering. My wounds don’t heal, but the dull ache fades from my bones and my thick, jelly-like blood combines with the green moss to form thin, wispy scabs around the scrapes. After a few days, I’m good as new (well, as close to it as a zombie can ever be), but I make no move to leave. I can’t think of anywhere better to go.
I turned on the lights the first night, when I got tired of lying on the bed, but they attracted curious zombies, so I’ve sat in the dark since then. A few zombies wander in every so often – I’ve left the front door open, since one of them nearly broke it down when it heard someone at home and couldn’t get in – but they slip out once they’ve satisfied themselves that my brain’s of no use to them.
I check the TV every day but it produces nothing but static. The radio, on the other hand, is still going strong. I never used to listen to the radio –
so
twentieth century! – but Mum always had it playing in the background when she was cooking, ironing, etc.
There are far less channels than before. One for official state news, which plays all the time, run by whatever remains of our government and civil service, plus a few independents which broadcast sporadically.
The state reporters give the impression that the military have everything in hand, that they’re restoring order, people shouldn’t panic, it’s all going to work out fine. The independents give more of a sense of the chaos that the world is experiencing. Some of them are critical of the soldiers, claiming they’ve been opening fire wildly in certain areas, killing the living as well as the dead. A few drop dark hints that the military staged the zombie coup and are eliminating anyone they don’t approve of.
I don’t pay too much attention to the politics of specific broadcasters. I’m not interested in any particular pundit’s opinion. I just want to get to grips with as many cold, hard facts as I can. By switching between the various channels, and filtering out the positive spin of the state channel and the manic gloom of the independents, I fill in a lot of the blanks and get up to speed with what’s been going on in the world since my heart was ripped out all those months ago.
Zombies launched simultaneous attacks in most major cities. New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney, Berlin, Johannesburg and scores more, torn apart by the living dead, ruined graveyards of the grand cities they used to be.
The undead spread swiftly. They were almost impossible to stop. Armies everywhere opposed them, but all it needed was for one zombie to infect a couple of soldiers, and soon they were fighting among themselves, forced to break ranks and retreat. Estimates of the numbers lost to the hordes of the walking dead vary wildly, but most reporters agree that it’s probably somewhere between four and five billion.
I have to repeat that slowly to myself the first time I hear it, and even then I can’t really comprehend it. Four or five
billion
, most of the world’s population, slaughtered or reduced to the status of reanimated corpses. How’s this planet ever supposed to recover from that?
Nobody knows where the zombies came from, how the disease manifested itself so swiftly, so globally. And, in truth, nobody’s overly concerned. Right now their first priority is survival.
When the attacks started, many small islands were spared. Survivors flocked to those on planes and boats. At first the residents accepted everyone. But then a few islands fell when boats docked or planes set down and zombies streamed out of them, having sneaked aboard. After that, the locals in other places began implementing security checks and setting up quarantine zones, opening fire on anyone who tried to bypass the process.
On the mainland continents, millions of people who can’t get to the islands have established fortresses wherever they can. In some cases they’ve barricaded themselves into apartment complexes, prisons, schools or shopping malls.
Even though their forces have been severely depleted, the armies of the world are the sole governors of society now. Most politicians were wiped out in the first wave of attacks, and those who survived no longer have any real clout. It’s martial law wherever you turn.
The troops in the UK have been busy reclaiming lost ground from the zombies. They’ve converted a series of towns and villages across the country into fortified barracks, building huge walls around them, including areas of open fields within the fortifications so that they can cultivate the land and live off what they grow.
The reporters on the state channel are proud of the army’s sterling work and every news bulletin includes reports from some of the reclaimed towns, focusing on the resilience of the people living and working there, their struggle to survive, the way they’re doing all that they can to rebuild normal lives for themselves.
The independents are more scathing. They say that residents are treated like cattle, forced to do whatever the soldiers tell them. If they resist, aerial units are sent to blow holes in their defences, to let zombies stream through freely.
I’m not convinced by the wilder reports, but in this zombie-plagued new world, who knows for sure? I keep an open mind, filing everything away.
The army’s ultimate aim is to push the zombies back, section them off, then wipe them out. But that will take time. At the moment they’re not equipped to engage in a full-on war with the undead. As stern generals keep explaining, their current focus must be on the three Rs — Reclaim, Recruit, Recover. Reclaim towns, recruit more survivors, recover their strength.
Then
they can let rip.
It’s terrifying at first, thinking of humanity reduced to this, living off scraps, penned into grimy hovels, under constant siege by their former colleagues and relatives, knowing that all it takes is a single breach – one lone zombie in the mix – for everything they’ve worked so hard for to come crashing down around them.
But after a while, I get used to it. This is the norm now. You can only be shocked by a thing for so long before it starts to lose its impact. Yeah, the world’s a dark, terrible place, and it’s horrible listening to stories of children eating their parents or mothers chowing down on their young. But, y’know, when all’s said and done, you’ve got to get on with things.
I only keep following the news after the first few days because of one particular story. The army has been making rescue attempts recently. Lots of people are trapped in cities, even after so many months, lying low at night, foraging for food and drink in the daytime while the zombies are at rest.
The military announce a city a few days ahead of a planned mission, telling the people who are listening to get ready. Then, on the morning of the rescue, they declare a meeting point and fly in at an appointed time, usually the middle of the day when the sun is at its strongest. They aren’t always able to rescue everyone who turns up, and sometimes zombies attack, cutting the evacuation short. But they’ve extracted hundreds of refugees and escorted them to secure settlements, and have vowed to carry on.
Things would be a lot easier if the phones worked, but as I found out early on when I tested ours, they’re even deader than the zombies. All of the landlines are down and all of the mobile networks too. The internet is screwed as well. The only way the army can contact trapped survivors is through the news on the radio, but that’s a one-way means of communication.
According to the reports, there have been a few rescues in London already. As the capital, it’s been granted priority status. They did trial runs in some of the smaller cities first, but now they’re hitting London regularly, a different part every time, so as to keep one step ahead of the zombies.
The walking dead aren’t as senseless as they appear. They seem to remember lots of functions, such as how to open doors or operate lifts. They’ve adapted — if they see a car passing a certain spot at a certain time more than once, they can anticipate its reappearance and lie in wait for it.
But they don’t seem to understand most of what is said to them. They react to certain tones of voice, recognising a variety of commands, the way a baby or a dog can. But they’re not able to listen to a broadcast and pitch up at a scheduled meeting place in advance.
If the living are to win this war, it will only be because they can out-think their opponents. In every other respect the zombies are a superior force, far greater in number, able to fight without tiring, not needing food or drink to continue. They don’t have any weapons, but their bodies are deadly enough, diseased missiles that are much more effective than a bomb dropped in the middle of a confined group of people.
There have been two missions to London while I’ve been listening, one in the north, one in the west. Both pick-up points were out of my way, so I stayed put and let them pass. But it’s only a matter of time before they come to the East End or the City, and I’m determined to go along when a rescue is announced.
There have been no reports of revitaliseds on any of the radio programmes. The world doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of zombies like me. I’m not sure how the soldiers will react when I turn up, but I’ve got to try to tell them about the possible threat which revitaliseds pose.
I’ve been thinking about Rage a lot, the way he killed Dr Cerveris, his contempt for the living. If he survived and made it out of the complex, maybe he looks upon the zombies as his allies. It might amuse him to betray humanity. Perhaps there are others like him who’ve been mistreated by the living, wanting to get revenge and see them brought low.
I don’t know if the soldiers will give me a chance to explain, if they’ll offer me shelter in return for my help or shoot me the instant they set eyes on me. I suspect it might be the latter. But I’ve got to at least try to help, because I was one of the living once, and if I don’t cling to that memory and honour it, all that’s left for me is the monstrous, lonely, sub-existence of the dead.