Great Bitten: Outbreak (15 page)

“Well we brought those.” Rick answered through a mouthful of broth.

“Hell I heard that! Pete was saying. Two shotguns. That’ll be a help close quarters.” Apparently Lana became livelier when firearms came in to conversation. “Shame we haven’t got any sniper guns like that have in Call of Duty. Or those SWAT guys in America. That’d be all we need to stay safe.”

“What about the noise?”
Carla asked. “I thought everyone here was just keeping quiet. The lights out and all, there’s no need. We just sit tight and wait for help, right?”

“As if help is coming. Who’s running the show exactly? The government are doing news updates from whoever knows where.
Have you even seen
YouTube
? No one can leave the country. No one else is allowed in. What do they actually expect us to do?”

“Nothing. They expect us all to be quiet and die, from the looks of things.”

“Well they’re not getting that from us.”

There were a couple of high-fives shared as this banter circled. I soaked it in as I devoured my soup. Someone
handed me a cup full of water. I couldn’t help but down it. Right then, alongside the broth, it felt like Michelin-starred food alongside the world’s finest single malt. Everyone else looked just as pleased. Maybe we were all just happy to be alive.

Austin was walking around, acting like the Captain trying to motivate his troops. I noted he ignored us completely. Whether that was because of us or the company we kept
, his general disdain for me, or perhaps a mix of the two, I don’t really know. At that point I couldn’t care less how much of an ass he wanted to be or what his prejudices were. I was too busy eating.

It almost felt normal. Then I phased back in and people were still talking about zombies.
How depressing. People had moved on to survival stories. Carla was currently ploughing through mine. She was being pretty accurate so I left her to it. It didn’t look like anyone was getting seconds, so I didn’t ask. The broth hadn’t exactly been very filling, but I didn’t know how much there was to go around.

Pete came to join us. He sat down next to
Andrew and seemed much more natural when chatting. He was a weathered man. Even his skin seemed windswept, fishing on the end of the pier being something he had obviously long enjoyed doing. I was curious to get some real information on what we had missed. I wanted to know about the swarm we had seen in the centre of town, and the surprising noise from the more mobile zombies we had encountered on the way here. Pete was the authority on this. Everyone else had skirted the goings-on in the town. He had been in the middle of it for a lot of the day. Apparently he had been mixing looting with vigilante zombie-culling. I’m not sure how anyone would go about that, and immediately decided to keep on his good side until I found out how much of his story was true. Apparently many people in the town had ignored the state warnings to stay indoors and avoid areas of social congregation. As expected, and as was happening all over the country, people were swarming to shops to steal whatever they could lay their paws on. Sadly enough, this still mainly included electronics stores. I bet they hadn’t planned ahead and got enough solar power to keep their HD televisions going when the power went out. There were also the standard protests, with people demanding answers on what was going on. If the idiots had read the news brief, they would have known well enough to have kept indoors. Apparently, zombies from the train station descended on the town like a plague of locust. They had collected enough victims along the way. And with everyone packed in so close, with the virility of the bites turning people so quickly or people succumbing to their ghastly wounds, it took less than an hour for the town centre to turn in to a no-go zone.

My next question was about the speeds. And the sounds. I didn’t know why some were slow and others were quick. I was downright petrified by the ones that screamed at us. Even now, I couldn’t hear any others, and hadn’t heard any others. Nothing had been mentioned about it on the news. Okay, I may have
overlooked it as part of my research, but at that point I hadn’t even known some of them were audible. There were so many theories about that too but Pete returned the one that was most credible for me. If you got infected blood in to your system, but you weren’t fatally wounded, you were a quick one. So anyone bitten on the arm, the leg, just a small wound, would eventually succumb. Even a little bit of the infected blood would be enough to turn you. Slowly, but turn you. And then you’d be chasing down a three year old if it meant you’d get the sour iron taste of their flesh. They appeared to retain most basic motor skills they had from life. There was a complete lack of direction and an overwhelming desire to consume human flesh, but in general, they were rapid. They could run, they could jump. They could use their lungs. They could roar.

The slow ones? Easier to explain.
In death the virus appeared to keep the brain working. Very basic motor functions, but nothing that would be needed for life. Rigor mortis apparently continued to set in, which is why absolutely all of them moved slowly. And the silence? Have you ever seen a dead body breathing? Sure they made the occasionally wheezing noise when air escaped the lungs through compression.

The movies were right in general terms. Lana was the talker here. I thought I’d done enough research. As the conversation ploughed on it was clear she seen every film and read practically every book
the post-apocalyptic genre had to offer. You could disable or kill the quick ones the same way you could kill everyone else. But they would come back. And when they did, they’d still want your flesh. They wouldn’t be able to get it as quickly, but by every dire thing that walks this earth, they wouldn’t stop until they had it or they perished.

So the only guaranteed way to stop them all? Destroy the brain. Don’t risk a single shot; not that many in England would be able to a
ctually take a shot with a gun. The reason I’d been so lucky so far was apparently because I was virtually disintegrating the brain with a hammer.

“And by the way Warren, using a hammer? That’s insane. I mean, I thought about a baseball bat. Not too close, but not really guaranteed to be effective, you know?” Lana was becoming animated again. Pete, after spending a goodly amount of time expounding his newly acquired knowledge on the active undead, seemed happy to give her the spotlight wh
ere melee combat was concerned. I was considered mildly psychotic for using the hammer, but apparently my 100% success rate meant that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. No one else appeared to be willing to try it. Rick volunteered that he used a hammer too, but as he hadn’t actually registered any kills with it he was laughed down. Carla grinned at him and punched him playfully. He even blushed. Pete was the next big winner. He used a spade. Both Lana and Andrew had used axes. Anna went quiet. Apparently Dan had done all the heavy work.

All this banter and my brain was suddenly brought back round to the serious questions we were
avoiding facing. I hadn’t asked about Thomas. She didn’t look too upset. Perhaps that was a good sign. I don’t think she’d be having a joke at breakfast if he was in a critical condition, so I decided to leave that particular piece of delicate handling to the ladies. There was chattering all around us, but it stilled to nothing when Austin wandered back in to the centre of the room, putting on a little swagger to catch our attention. There was no air of nicety this time. Everyone sensed that the casual start to the morning was over. Andrew had already pointed out that not all the men were present. There was always someone watching out. How much of a watch? And why? What news did people have?

“Right everyone, we’ve been listening out on the radio and I’m sorry to say there’s nothing promising. The major news sites, well the UK ones anyway, haven’t been updated. Foreign sites are somehow reporting that London is lost despite not having a
ny credible feet on the ground. We can’t trust anything coming from those. It might be sensationalism.”

“But what if they’re reporting from in the UK? Or taking it from social media?”

“You’re assuming the sources are correct. Facebook? Could be kids talking bull. Twitter? Don’t even get me started on that bollocks. Pretty much everywhere we can see is corroborating Pete over there.” Pete gave the room a wave. “Everyone that’s being bitten is turning in to one of those things. If you’re bitten and don’t die, you’re a quickie.” I suppressed a childish snort. “They’re the ones that are doing the most damage. The ones that die? Well, they’re the creepy quiet things that are taking everyone by surprise. They’re just as deadly so don’t take them for granted. But they’re slow. If you see them coming, you don’t need to panic. At the moment, we’ve mostly got slow ones in our front garden, so to speak. Some of us have been unfortunate enough to encounter the quicker zombies, but perhaps fortunate enough to live to tell the tale.

The last valid update from the government is what we have to stick to. The emergency services are doing everything they can. Stay indoors and stay safe. We seem to have a lucky spot. The gates are holding and even though the restaurant has broken, its dead customers have decided to look for their next meal elsewhere. What we were first hoping – that we’d get passed by a ship taking people to safety – doesn’t appear to be happening. I’
m not really surprised if I’m being really honest with you, but Lana is still checking the telescopes daily to see if there’s anything we can risk signalling.

We have five newcomers. We welcome Warren, Rick and
Carla, who are all active and much needed hands to our defence efforts. We also welcome Anna and her son Thomas. Thomas is in the care of Mary, who’s coping well with all the ailments we’re managing to throw her way. Anna will be helping care for her son, so will join the other parents in making sure we all stay sanitised.

This leads me on to the next bit. And perhaps the part we were all waiting for. The
chores where we’ve been on watch and manning the scopes, whilst not exactly nice on the eyes, has been easy enough. We’re running out of things. We still have fresh running water, and we have rudimentary food. We’re managing to fish, but we need more than that. And Mary needs medical supplies. We don’t have basics. We need bandages, antiseptics, and ethanol.”

“Wait a minute,” I broke in. Over a dozen pairs of eyes swivelled to focus on me and I suddenly felt self-conscious about my knee-jerk observations. Austin gestured for me to stand up, which I did.

“This is Warren. Single-handedly taken down I don’t know how many of those things with – wait for it – a hammer!” There were a few guffaws followed by a ripple of applause. “I think we can do better than that, that kind of effort, but now isn’t really the time. You got something to say, Warren?”

“Yeah I do. I
t’s about the tap water. When I had to deal with them in my home, the first thing I did was rinse off the blood. So what’s happening to the blood after that? I don’t know what happens to the water in the mains system. I’m wondering if any of this is happening because we’re washing infected blood in to our own drinking water. What do people think?”

There was a
lot of muttering and murmuring, some nodding between each other. Austin screwed up his face as if he were literally chewing the words over and not at all liking what he tasted. “You know I hadn’t thought about that. But wouldn’t it take weeks or something for it to all go through? And they must filter it. If we’re the only animals on the planet stupid enough to piss in our own drinking water, we must have ways of getting the impurities out.”

“Impurities, yes. But this? No one even knows what this is. I say we veto tap water. I mean, nothing bad has happened yet, but what if something makes its way round in to the system? We’re all gone, for a glass of water.”

“So you want to add what drinking water to this scavenge we need to do?”

“Yes. It’s the only guaranteed way to be safe, unless you can think of something else?”

“Well,” Austin rubbed the back of his head. “Now you’ve mentioned it, and we’ve all heard it, I don’t see how any of us can actually forget it. So water it is. Though the amount that adds to our weight we’ll either need to do two runs or go mob-handed.”

“No. We don’t send all our practical weight in to one fight. Even if it takes three or four trips.”

“And what makes you the buck shot all of a sudden?”

“It’s big shot. And it’s common sense. If you send all your men in
one supply run and they all die, then what? Who’s defending? Who’s doing runs in the future? What if a group comes past and they have more men and better weapons, and they decide they want the pier?”

“What is this? The Walking Dead? Life doesn’t work like that. No one’s going to try to
‘take the pier’.” Doughy waved around his arms for effect, as if I were being childish.

“Can you really be sure of that?” my tone was both incredulous and condescending. But
Austin was a class one chump if he thought sending the Thin Red Line out in to Bennington to collect goodies was a brilliant idea. And defence? Who was he fooling? “Of course people are going to want it. I know how desperate I felt when I was running for shelter. This pier is perfect. And let’s be honest - because you’re not being honest with people. I managed to break through that gate on my own. Admit it. And you think you have defence?”

Austin went beet red and every eye turned from him to me, and then back on their apparent leader. “If I hadn’t of wanted you in here you cocky little bastard, then you wouldn’t be in here.”