No Zombies Please We Are British (6 page)

Chapter 6

When Jack woke, the sky was no longer dark with the threat of a storm. The sky was cloudless, and a pale baby blue. The sun teasing of an appearance but not yet visible from his position.

He slid out of bed and stretched. The sleep had done him the world of good. Jack looked at his watch and gasped. It was almost eleven, which meant he had slept for thirteen hours straight. He looked around. After studying his blood-soaked clothes for a while, he decided that another man’s underwear was not such a bad idea. Dressing in the white bedroom, he found a pair of new briefs, still in the box, and a pair of black jeans that were only a little bit too big. The belt he found by the bed solved that problem, and a black, collared t-shirt completed the look. Socks were also not a problem, but shoes were a different story. Jack didn’t mind. His own were more comfortable anyway, and the blood that crusted over them had not yet leaked through to the inside.

Dressed, still feeling relaxed and ready for anything, Jack went downstairs. He paused half way down the final flight. He could hear snarls and growls coming from inside the kitchen. It only took a second for the rested and relaxed feeling to fall away.

Jack stared at the door, knowing it was George who made those noises. He had died, and was now back. Jack debated opening the door and putting the old man out of his misery. It was the least he deserved for his hospitality. Jack couldn’t do it.

Instead, Jack moved back to the second floor. The living room had a fireplace. A real, working, wood-burning fireplace. This included a full suite of tools, including a nasty looking fire iron. Jack lifted it from the rack. It was a heavy, old-school iron piece. The handle part of the same single lump of iron, twisted around to give it grip, before ending in a ball to add extra purchase. The business end was a fine point. Six inches or so behind the tip was a large barb that curled from the main shaft and added an extra dimension to the weapon.

Jack swung it in the room, and while it was heavy, he liked the feel of it in his hands.

Any lingering moments of rest and relaxation were blown away when Jack opened the front door and stepped out onto the street. It was early morning, but the freshly bled corpse of a young woman lay in the middle of the street. She was face down, the skin flayed from her body, the bones broken and roughly pushed to one side to allow whomever it was that was so hungry, to feast on her flesh.

The street was littered with the dead, and all seemed to turn at the scent of fresh meat. It didn’t take long before Jack got the chance to put his new weapon to the test. The woman came from his left, her mouth dripping with strands of meat. Half of her face was missing, the skin peeled away revealing oddly white teeth along her jaw.

Jack didn’t wait for the chance to ask her how the woman on the floor had tasted. He thrust the fire iron in front of him, and stabbed the snarling figure through the throat. Black blood jettisoned from the wound and as Jack pulled the iron free, yanking with two hands, the iron slid so far through the woman’s throat that the barb slid behind her neck. Jack pulled his weapon free in an explosion of cold flesh, blackened lumps of coagulated blood and bone. The head lolled backwards, gravity pulling the skull farther back, the flesh tearing more and more. The skull landed on the floor, followed a few moments later by the rest of the woman’s body.

Jack stared as the eyes turned towards him, the jaw still trying to chomp down on anything that came close to it.

There was no time to kill the thing because there were two more dead bearing down on him, and another cluster behind them.

Both sides of the street held equally unappealing options, but Jack knew he could not go back inside. He couldn’t hide. Closing his eyes for a second, he said what, for him at least, counted as a prayer. He opened his eyes and was already swinging his iron like a club. The skull of the first creature caved inwards, the force of the blow squeezing brain matter out through its nose. The speed of the swing carried on after it fell to the floor. It was then with a backhanded swing that Jack drove the sharp barb into the side of the second dead man’s head. The curl slid in through the temple and out through the eye socket. The skull tore as Jack pulled free, placing his foot on the thing’s chest to give himself extra leverage.

He was dripping with gore by the time he ran at the second group. Swinging the iron like a man possessed, he struck them down with a series of blows. Only one was a kill shot, but Jack didn’t care. The other five fell, and that gave him the window to escape, and that was all he was looking for.

Sprinting down the street, Jack refused to look at what was turning towards him. Jack put his head down and ran. He ran and swung at anybody or anything that came near him. He felt iron and flesh collide and the repeated shower of cold blood as it splattered against him. Everything moved in a blur. Jack had no idea where he was headed, or whom he took down, but by the time he looked up and found himself with enough room to breathe, his arms were numb, and his chest burned so bad he feared he would not be able to draw breath.

His fire iron was bent at the end, and the barb torn off at some point in time. It had been replaced by an ear, which had been impaled on the iron and forced farther down the shaft. Jack let the weapon fall from his hands as he leaned back against the small fence behind him. His hands hardly opened, cramped from holding onto the bar.

Looking around, Jack tried to understand where he was. The street was littered with cars, and a bus sat parked at the stop. The driver stared at Jack, his pale white face streaked with purple veins as he snapped and scratched at the window. Its throat was a mess of torn flesh and dried blood. There were others too, trapped on the upper level, seemingly unable to move down the stairs and out into the world.

Behind him was a children’s playground. Jack paused to catch his breath, but quickly turned away. The sight of so many tiny bodies was not something he wanted to dwell on. He saw people staring at him from inside the buildings. Mainly commercial properties. A Pakistani family watched from behind the walls of their shop. When Jack’s gaze made contact with them, they disappeared from view.

Others followed suit, hiding or pulling something across their field of vision as soon as they realized they had been spotted.

There was something else too. A tapping sound. Something that had something more behind it than the mindless thump of the hungry dead.

Jack looked around, but there was nobody on the street. Nobody alive, at least.

That was when his eyes returned to the bus. Sitting in the rear, her face pressed to the glass, was a woman. She stared at him, tapping away on the window. Every tap her hand made seemed to further agitate the creatures who were along with her for the ride.

Jack looked at her, and as soon as she realized he had seen her, a smile spread across her face. The relief that washed over her in the moment was so strong Jack could feel it.

He was stuck. He couldn’t turn away and leave her.

Bending down, he picked up his battle-hardened fire iron and walked towards the bus. The choice was a simple one. Take out the driver first. It was not as though he would have floored it and driven away with Jack as his new prisoner, but Jack didn’t want to get on the bus with that snarling mess still alive.

The driver was a large man in life, and the bloating brought on by the decay had seen him lodged behind the wheel. He strained and snarled as Jack approached, his head crashing against the glass window.

The closer Jack drew, the more agitated the thing became. The glass cracked and split under the pressure of the blows. Softened clumps of rotting flesh smeared the inside, and came close to obscuring the view completely.

Then, with a final strike, the undead bus driver threw his head through the window. Glass shards dug into its flesh, digging deep gouges as the creature shoved its head farther and farther. Jack watched it, a strange, cold fascination growing within him.

He then raised his iron and drove it through the man’s head. A single, fluid jab, in one ear and out the other.

What freaked Jack out the most was that from all of the dead he had laid to rest, none of them screamed, or gave any sign of pain. He knew they were dead. That had been a worryingly simple thing to get used to. Yet, their complete silence at the moment of death, not even a gasp as the blow came. That made him shiver.

Moving around the front of the bus, he held the iron at the ready. Adrenaline surging through his body, pushing away the fatigue and muscle ache. There was one other death-walker, but its attention was directed towards the window of the laundrette, which was the building hidden behind the bus. Numerous scared faces looked out at him.

Jack did the decent thing and caved the thing’s skull in from behind. He could not do anything to help the people trapped inside. There were three other undead figures making their way through from the laundrette’s back room.

“I’m sorry,” he mouthed to them.

He knew they couldn’t have heard him, unless they were part bat or some other weird shit, so he reasoned that the creatures must have growled at the same moment, for everybody turned around and screamed. They ran around like headless chickens, and before he even had the chance to consider smashing the windows to set them free, it was all over. They had barricaded the front door, but left the rear unguarded.

Turning his attention back to the bus, Jack climbed on board. The stench was atrocious. The odour of piss, shit, and vomit all rolled into one. The high temperature made the aroma all the more stomach-churning.

“Help me,” the woman wailed as she saw Jack appear. Above him, he heard the stomping of feet as the undead were driven wild by the temptations below them.

Jack saw why. There was a closed door that ran across the end of the stairwell. A means of keeping the upper deck off limits at certain times, or so he assumed. Not being a bus aficionado.

Then he realized there were way more death-walkers on the bus than he had realized. They filled the stairwell, and he saw the door straining beneath their weight.

“Please,” the women cried once more.

Jack raised a finger to his lips to shush her. Even that seemed to bring a fresh wave of tremors to the door. It looked fit to burst.

To her credit, the woman at the back of the bus understood the gesture and fell silent. She disappeared back between the seats, into the place she had no doubt been hiding since this whole thing started.

Moving slowly, afraid to as much as breathe, Jack inched himself deeper inside the bus. He could feel the weight of the undead pressing against the door, and as much as he tried not to do so, he could not help but imagine it bursting, and seeing the horde of death-walkers descending on him.

The door held, however, and Jack managed to move into the back of the bus. A few body parts lay scattered on the seats. Before he reached the rear, Jack found four other bodies, all of whom had been ripped apart in such a fashion that there would be no second chance at life for them.

The stench at the back of the bus changed. Fear was the primary ingredient, body odour and urine being the two underlying scents that created the heady fragrance.

“Hi, I’m Jack.” He smiled at the woman.

“Hi,” she replied, her voice timid and scared. The sound of their voices brought further crashing and banging from the upper level.

“We need to move, but keep it slow. These things can sense us,” Jack whispered, his words barely audible.

The woman nodded in response, her dirty blonde hair flicking over her shoulders.

They got up and moved together through the bus. Jack held his fire iron in front of him while the woman clutched a rather well-used looking backpack.

They got halfway towards the exit when the woman sneezed. It was a small, high-pitched noise, one she tried hard to cover, but it didn’t help. The sound sent the creatures into an absolute frenzy. The bus began to rock, and a few moments later, the door splintered and the undead filled the bus.

The woman screamed, and ran back to her hiding place. Jack also retreated, but not before delivering several skull-cleaving blows with his now most trusted ally.

The three bodies dropped and created enough of a barrier in the cramped conditions to buy Jack and his new friend a little time.

He looked around and saw the same faces staring at him from within the confines of their homes and businesses. All apart from those in the laundrette. They were busy being caught in the new in-between state of existence previously called death. They would be back soon enough, Jack was sure of it.

“Why won’t they help?” he cried out as he reached the back of the bus.

The first of the death-walkers had somehow stumbled over the pile of its slain brethren. It had fallen to the floor and seemed to show no desire to right itself, instead choosing to crawl along the floor.

“Stay down,” Jack said to the woman as he turned around.

He tightened his grip on the fire iron and swung for all he was worth. The window in the rear of the bus cracked but did not shatter. It took two more blows before the glass splintered and disappeared, crashing to the street like heavy raindrops.

Jack went to move, but the crawling dead man had a hand locked around his ankle. Stabbing down, Jack impaled the thing’s head on the end of his iron. The creature went limp and Jack was free.