Undead UK (Book 2): Hunting The Dead, page 2
The third floor contained a spacious studio that revealed Janice’s love of painting, though only the empty easels remained. The scavenger had taken the palette knives and paints, though not before scrawling Chad woz ere across the wall.
The garden contained an apple tree that was still growing well, so Breht picked as many apples as he could and filled his bag. Being such a valuable find, he rushed back to the front porch, took Janice’s handbag, tipping out the passport, and filled that with apples too. Satisfied that he’d got everything useful, he bolted all the doors, drew the curtains and retired to the upstairs studio, closing that door too.
It was his first chance that day to catch a break, and with the apples, he felt justified in taking the rest of the afternoon off. The interior doors of the house were all old fashioned and solid, each with a mortice lock and key. There was a sprung wood Pöang armchair in the room to relax in, and a padded workout mat on the floor to sleep on. There was also a small attic hatch with a built-in ladder to escape through.
Breht felt secure enough to take off his heavy leather trench coat, its arms, shoulders and upper back reinforced with hardened leather plates. He pulled off his Kevlar gloves and untied the leather thongs of his chainmail collar. Chewing contentedly on an apple, he gazed out of the window at the street.
It was an unusual summer for Britain, with the sun shining constantly for over a month now. Wearing all his protective gear had been a burden, and it was difficult to replenish all the water he’d sweated out, not to mention the salt loss. There was no sign that it was going to rain yet, and he was down to two bottles of water, boiled for purity. He needed to find a river or stream soon. His pack was heavy with loot and it was time to leave the city and head back out into the countryside. The railway bridge that spanned the road was nearby, so in the morning he’d follow the tracks out. Zombies tended to be territorial, lingering near the places they had died, so the streets were always blessed with their presence. On the occasions when they tended to migrate, which they seemed to do in groups, they would throng the roads and cross fields, for reasons that were better known only to themselves. Rail tracks, however, tended to be fenced or elevated on steep embankments. Breht found it was safer to travel along the tracks when moving between towns. They weren’t completely stress free, but it was easier to see trouble coming. During the day, at least.
Night time was the worst, even when in shelter. Breht had long since been aware that the undead had a way to sense heat. On days like today, their abilities were stunted, as if the sun was frying their brain, and it was easier for Breht to move undetected. On cold days, it was harder to stay hidden, and at night it was impossible. The undead seemed to home in on warm bodies, even if they were underground. Breht had found rabbit warrens that had been dug up by many frantic hands, the corpses of young rabbits ripped open and strewn across the grass. Foxes didn’t hunt like that, and neither did badgers, so Breht knew it was the undead. When darkness fell, this house was going to be besieged.
Breht wasn’t worried, though. The house was part of a long terrace – that was why he’d picked it – and if things got too bad, he could get through the attic hatch, smash through the tiles, and make his way along the roofs to escape. Securing his getaway was his number one priority in the night, especially in an urban area. Out in the countryside, things were a little more complicated, but at least there were fewer zombies to deal with.
Most times, anyway.
2
It turned out to be a fairly quiet night – by apocalypse standards. He had no idea when the first disturbance came, as he had no watch that worked, but he thought he might have slept for about an hour before the banging started at the front door. For the past year or so, Breht had become accustomed to snapping awake at the slightest sound, and he reached automatically for his sword. Every night he placed his things in a particular arrangement around him, so he could put his hand to them, no matter how dark it was. And he knew exactly how many footsteps away the attic ladder was. So he wasn’t alarmed, especially since this kind of disturbance was expected.
By the sound of it, there was only one zombie trying to get into the house, repeatedly walking into the locked door. That was no big deal. And if it did manage to break down the door, it still had to negotiate the assault course that Breht had prepared for it.
He’d placed the dining room table at the foot of the stairs, with the ripped sofa on top of it. He’d strung the clothes line between the bannister rails, criss-crossing the stairs at knee height. On the next floor he’d upended the beds against the top of the stairs, and selectively prised up several floorboards, leaving holes to trap clumsy feet. Finally, on the next set of stairs up to the studio, he’d placed kitchen pots and pans as an alarm system. Any zombie that made it that far would either find him ready or gone.
He went back to sleep, waking again when he heard a window smash. He listened intently, waiting for the sound of footsteps. None came. If it was one of the more agile zombies, it would have crashed through the window and scrambled through the rooms, seeking a way up. There were more zombies trying to get through the front door, probably trampling all over Janice’s corpse. Jostling with each other, one of them had likely put its elbow through the window without realising its opportunity to enter. For now, anyway. Breht turned over to sleep some more.
The next disturbance was a thump against a downstairs wall. One zombie at least had gotten into the house, and was now trying to find the stairs. Breht glanced up at his framed window, seeing how the pattern of stars had shifted as they wheeled across the night sky. He’d managed another two hours of sleep, and now it was just a matter of how much more sleep he’d be able to snatch before he had to act. For now, he judged he still had time for some more. Getting enough sleep had become as important as getting enough food. He couldn’t afford to be tired and careless during the day – that had happened once and it nearly cost him his life. Weary and on his last legs, he’d succumbed to temptation to take a nap in a hollow in a wood, assuming he was out of sight and that there were no zombies for miles. He’d woken to find one gnawing at his leg. His improvised armour saved him that day, but it was a mistake he didn’t want to repeat. He needed to be fanatical in his precautions, and for that he needed his body rested and his brain clear. Being less tired also meant being less vulnerable to illness, which was equally high on his priority list. He simply couldn’t afford to become ill. Listening carefully, he waited a moment, then dropped off to sleep again.
The stars had moved considerably when he woke again, this time because of the heavy thud of a sofa falling off a table. This was one determined zombie, because the other zombies were still battering against the front door. There followed a thump, then a crash, then a thump, then another crash, as the zombie kept tripping over the clothes line. It was making good time, though, and it wasn’t long before it was pushing over the beds at the top of the stairs. Breht pulled on his boots. He’d been sleeping in his coat, so he simply needed to grab his bag and sword.
There was a clatter and a scrape, which sounded like the zombie moving along the landing. Then there was a crash.
The zombie had encountered the missing floor boards, and put its foot through the ceiling of the room below. Maybe it had fallen through completely. Breht tuned his ears. No, he could still hear scraping and groaning. The zombie was exerting itself to get out of the trap and resume its advance. So far, it didn’t seem to be successful. Breht waited a few minutes, then decided he could sleep lightly for a little longer. The pots and pans would wake him when necessary.
As it happened, that was the last disturbance of the night, and Breht woke to dawn’s light streaming in through the window.
He could still hear scraping on the floor below, but there was no mob of undead in the front garden. The few who were there had dispersed when touched by the first rays of the sun.
Opening the studio door, Breht saw the undisturbed pots and pans, and the zombie stuck with its leg through the floor. Detecting his presence, the zombie became more agitated, attempting to walk towards him, seemingly unaware that one leg was unable to join in the endeavour. Breht calmly decapitated it, then wiped his sword on its T-shirt. It didn’t appear to be wearing any jewellery, so Breht stepped over it and descended, untying the clothes line and including it in his stash. In the garden he picked some more apples, then entered the alley outside the back gate. It was clear, as was the side street it led to, so he made his way cautiously to the railway bridge.
*
Morning was always a good time. It was a sign he’d survived another night. Considering he’d survived over six hundred nights, he thought it might become routine, but dawn’s fresh light was always like the arrival of the cavalry to a beleaguered garrison. Even on grey days when the sky was the colour of the undead themselves, the creeping in of the light raised his spirits and signalled the end of another siege.
Winter was a time to dread for that. It was hard enough with the cold that numbed the bones, and the difficulty of finding food. But what was really difficult was the length of the nights. With the undead detecting him so much quicker, some nights seemed to go on forever, the persistent groans and scrapes increasing in volume by the hour as the masses gathered. When his spirits were low, his hunger nagging at him and the chill lowering his will to fight, time slowed to a crawl, torturing his meagre reserves of patience. On those days, even the morning mist was welcome as an indicator that the darkness wasn’t infinite. He didn’t need some clichéd motivational poster then to know that each day was truly a victory. Carpe Diem had become an existential imperative.
Facing east with the sun on his face, therefore, was a moment to savour, when the smell of dew on the leaves overcame even the putrid stink of the city. On both sides of the track, vegetation was free from the regular weed-killer sprays that used to tame nature’s intrusion on the rail network. The steep embankments were rich in blackberry-bearing brambles that sloped down to the backyards of the terraced worker’s houses that stretched in rows along streets formed by the industrial revolution. Small factory lots lay abandoned among the houses, fork-lift trucks silent, flat roof skylights turning green. Swallows swooped through clouds of insects and falcons hovered on the heat draughts, waiting to dive on rodents that showed themselves crossing the tracks. A flock of crows took off up ahead, squawking at Breht’s trespass, and he halted, filling his mouth with the blackberries in his hand and drawing his sword.
Bodies lay in the long grass that obscured the tracks.
Breht approached cautiously. If it hadn’t been for the crows, Breht would have taken the bodies for dormant zombies. He’d seen many like that, looking from afar like corpses, but rising the moment they were triggered by sound or movement. These bodies didn’t move, however, and the crows had been feeding on them.
Recently dead – that was the natural conclusion, else they would have been skeletons by now. Breht pushed the grass aside with his sword, checking the bodies out. There were three of them: bloated, rotting, their clothes faded and torn. And they’d gone down with headshots.
Not clinical headshots, though. Each head had been shattered by multiple hits that had literally torn them apart, making their faces unrecognisable. Maggots crawled around the insides of what was left of the skulls, and flies covered the bodies. The corpses couldn’t have been there for more than a couple of days. A few more and there wouldn’t be much left to pick at.
Breht was intrigued by the gunshot wounds. Guns were relatively easy for survivors to obtain after the apocalypse, with assault rifles being issued to soldiers and police during the national emergency. Ammunition, on the other hand, was finite. Even used sparingly, there really wouldn’t be much left after two years, rendering most guns useless, and little better than clubs.
But whoever had shot these three zombies had indulged in an orgy of excess, the trigger held down as the magazine emptied. In fact, considering how close together the bodies were, Breht deduced that there were multiple shooters, each firing on full automatic simultaneously.
That was a lot of ammo. The shooters were either crazy, or confident that they could get more. If it was the latter, there had to be a well stocked settlement nearby.
Breht waved off the flies and searched the bodies, looking for anything useful. The first strange thing he found was a pocketful of bullets. They were in the jeans pocket of one of the corpses, and Breht examined the rounds carefully. They weren’t like anything he’d seen before. They weren’t the standard 5.56mm rounds that the army and police used. More like the old 7.62mm NATO rounds. But the cartridges were too short for that, and furthermore, these rounds were crude, with slightly raised primers and soft-nosed bullets that appeared to be made of alloy rather than lead.
They looked home-made, which begged the question: what was a zombie doing with home-made bullets in its pockets?
The range of answers that prompted grew more intriguing when Breht checked the zombie’s footwear. Months of shuffling about in all weathers tended to wear shoes out, and most zombies had flapping soles or the remnants of uppers twisted round their ankle. These shoes, however, while badly scuffed, had been re-soled with tyre treads that were barely worn.
One of the zombie’s arms lay trapped underneath its body, and Breht pulled it out. The hand that emerged was discoloured and bloated, but still intact, with a large silver signet ring on one of the fingers. The rest of the fingers caught Breht’s interest, however. He’d yet to encounter a zombie whose fingernails weren’t torn to shreds or misshapen. These fingernails, though, were trimmed.
Breht had to conclude that, at the time of death, this person hadn’t been a zombie at all. Looking at all of them, he realised that their clothes, while dirty, weren’t stained with the kinds of fluids that the undead seemed to ooze from every orifice.
Three men, for that is what they once were, had been murdered here; executed by close range automatic fire.
Were there rival survivor groups who were killing each other? Fighting over scarce supplies? Breht wasn’t sure, but the ability of humans to maintain their feuds even when surrounded by the undead was familiar enough to him. The occasional twinge from the old bullet wound in his chest was enough to remind him of that.
Taking a few steps from the bodies, Breht searched the undergrowth for spent cartridges. The generous expenditure of ammunition should have yielded a few samples at least, but a painstaking search revealed nothing. Whoever had done this had carefully retrieved every cartridge from the ground. But then failed to search the bodies.
Breht wasn’t sure what to make of such a careless application of discipline, but the casual nature of the murder didn’t bode well. Squinting up the track, he wondered if he should turn around. If these guys had stumbled into someone else’s self-declared territory, it probably wasn’t a good idea for him to do the same. There were no gang markings, however – no totems or warnings about stepping on someone’s turf.
A ridge in the distance indicated that he was nearly out of the city. He didn’t fancy going back the way he’d come and risking a detour along the roads on the basis of mere speculation.
He just needed to be more careful, that was all.
From the holster on his right leg, he pulled out a sawn-off shotgun with a cut-down butt, checking that both barrels were loaded and slipping the safety catch off. With the sun moving round to the south and casting long shadows from the trees on the embankment, Breht moved off the track and into the shade, proceeding cautiously.
*
With the sun beating down and baking him in his leather carapace, the sound of running water was always welcome. Crouched below the parapet of the railway bridge, Breht peered over at the slow flowing waters of the River Soar. The blissful sound came from the long curved weir that arced across the width of the river. On the other side of the weir, a wide lagoon formed, the shallow waters decorated with floating algae blooms.
On the west bank, a modern estate had been built that was in sharp contrast to the dull terraced houses further back. Large apartment complexes rose up in the centre, looking like superstructures that had been ripped from cruise liners, with balconies and roof gardens. From one of the windows, a tattered bed sheet hung, with the barely decipherable words, Help, written on it. No doubt, some unfortunate soul had been besieged there soon after the outbreak, hoping to be spotted by a rescue team or something. It was highly unlikely that anyone had answered his plea – Breht had once been part of a rescue team that in the end had to rescue itself – so whoever occupied the flat had either fled or died. Or both.
God knows how many people sat it out in their homes, waiting for their food and water supplies to run out, before venturing into the streets. Most would have ended up as zombies themselves.
As it was, Breht could only see one zombie walking up and down the road. Maybe it was he who’d hung the sheet out. He was beyond help now.
The estate hadn’t been finished, and around its perimeter, a building site remained, excavators and dump trucks abandoned. The doors to the worker cabins were open, and Breht noticed that the supplies of wood and bricks had been taken. The site had been picked clean, leaving only weeds and concrete foundations. Breht had a pretty good idea where it had all been taken.
On the east bank of the river stood a football stadium, its partial roof gleaming white. Like the nearby estate, it appeared to be new, with steel stanchions poised like spider’s legs around the oval perimeter, reaching up from the roof and angling down to form pillars on the ground. The VIP suites and hospitality areas shone with glass above the ticket stands, and the materials taken from the building site now formed a barricade along the front of the entrance and club shop. The letters, LCFC, were emblazoned in white across the glass, alongside the large emblem of a fox: Leicester City Football Club.
