Undead at Heart (16 page)

 When the first
rucksack was full, Dave passed it to Tony. “Take this down and come back for
the next one.”

Tony didn’t argue at
being ordered around in this way, he just complied. He hoisted the rucksack
onto his back and headed downstairs. There was a hairy moment when he leant too
far forward and the weight of his pack nearly sent him tumbling, but he grabbed
the banister and kept going.

He walked through the
kitchen where the other guys were still packing food into the rucksacks they’d
found in the lounge. He left the pack he’d brought and headed back inside.

He had just reached
the landing again when he heard a shout from downstairs. There was a loud
crashing, more shouts, and then a huge shape was bounding up the stairs towards
him. It was a large man, travelling on all fours like a giant dog. His head was
lolling from side to side and Tony could see it was because half of his neck
was missing.

Tony screamed.

Nicola turned as she
heard the noise from downstairs. She realised immediately what it was and
started to struggle from the pile of debris that she had built around her legs.
Her ‘sword’ was leaning against the door frame and she grabbed it, just as Tony
screamed. She watched as a huge shape leapt at him. He took a step backwards
and fell, full length, onto his back, knocking the wind out of his lungs and
cutting off his scream.

The large zombie
landed on the other side of Tony, turned, snarled and charged at her and Dave.
Dave had dropped the rucksack he’d been holding and reached for his pickaxe. He
misjudged, however, and knocked it to the floor. As he bent to retrieve it, the
zombie leapt again, straight towards Nicola.

She swung with her
blade, bracing her feet for the impact. It sank into the side of the creature,
stopping it mid-leap and knocking it against the wall. It kicked out at Dave as
it fell and he was knocked sprawling onto the floor of the main bedroom. As the
creature hit the floor, the blade, stuck deep in its side, was pulled from her
grip. As she lunged after it, she realised that she recognised the face of the
creature which, even as she looked at it, was scrambling to its feet to re-launch
its attack.

“Stan?” she asked,
incredulous, unable to control her instinctive reaction to reach out to this
man she recognised

The thing that had
once been Stan grabbed her arm and pulled her towards him. She let out a yell
and tried to pull away, be he was too strong. It cocked its head, baring its
teeth, seeming to take a slow meticulous pleasure in what it was about to do.
It was almost as if it remembered her enough to make this a very special
occasion.

She frantically tried
to pull back, but to no avail, as Zombie Stan reeled her in, his mouth aiming
for her throat. Just as he was about to sink his teeth into the tasty morsel
that he had found, his head flew sideways and collided with the wall, and his
arms let her drop.

“There,” said Tony,
with an air of finality. He had regained his feet and clapped the creature on
the side of the head with the flat of his axe, crushing part of its head. He
stared down at it with an air of triumph, and looked completely surprised when
it started to get back to its feet, snarling even louder.

It took a step towards
Nicola, who had retreated back into the box room, and then Dave’s pick-axe
swung through the open doorway from the main bedroom and the pointed pick part
disappeared through the zombie’s face, carried on through and came out of the
back of its head.

Dave planted his
weight and pulled, yanking the zombie which had replaced his closest friend and
pulled it through into the bedroom. Sunlight was streaming through the windows
and when it hit the creature, it started to emit a gurgling scream. Its skin
started to bubble and slide from its bones.

With a cry, Dave
pulled the axe from its head, moved behind it, and with a foot planted in the
middle of its back, sent it crashing through the windows, tumbling to the yard
outside.

Nicola and Tony, who
had made their way into the room in time to see this, could hear screaming from
outside, but it soon stopped. Nicola imagined this was when the huge shape
which had fallen from the house became nothing more than a steaming puddle of
goo.

She could hear shouts
and footsteps from below, the others coming to see if they were okay. For the
moment, she couldn’t care about them. Dave, having ejected the monster, had
stopped in the middle of the room, staring at the empty space where the window
had been. Nicola was vaguely aware of Tony slipping from the room to assure the
others they were okay. She stepped forward and turned Dave towards her. He
looked stricken.

“It’s okay, honey.
It’s okay,” she crooned, reaching up to stroke his face.

He let the pickaxe
fall from his hand and it hit the floor with a thump. “It was… It was….” he
murmured.

“I know, honey. I
know. But it wasn’t him. He was already gone. That was just
some
thing
.”

He finally looked up,
into her eyes. She could see him pleading with her.

“It wasn’t him.” She
was more definite now. “He was gone. That was just the thing that wanted to
kill us all, and you saved us.”

She was nodding at
him, over and over, trying to convince him. “You saved
me
,” she said
softly, and then she was kissing him.

It started as a soft,
comforting kiss, but quickly became more. The tension and the stress travelled
through both of them, culminating in a fierce mashing of lips and scraping of teeth.
It was animalistic and intense and neither of them was aware of Tony coming
back into the room. He stopped and watched them for a moment, then left without
saying anything or making a sound.

They came out of the
bedroom only seconds after Tony left them. He had waded into the box room and
was carrying on packing and sorting, finding things they needed. They didn’t
say anything about what had happened, and he didn’t tell them he’d seen them,
he just carried on with the task. They took the objects he passed them and
continued filling rucksacks.

When Alan and Andy had
come rushing upstairs to check on him, Nicola and Dave, Tony had told them that
they were all okay. He said what had happened, and they told him that it had
come up through a trap-door in the cupboard under the stairs. No-one had
checked there. Daz had slammed the door and was waiting for the others to come
back down so they could go down and check, but they reckoned that if there had
been more, they would probably already know.

The thing had emerged
from the cellar, crashed through the door of the cupboard and knocked Andy off
his feet as he walked from the lounge to the kitchen. He’d then headed straight
upstairs, as if he had a particular reason to be there.

Satisfied everything
was okay, the others had gone back down to help Daz, and that was when Tony had
walked in and seen Dave and Nicola.

He didn’t know what to
do. More importantly he could feel himself reacting inside but didn’t know what
to make of what he was feeling. All he knew was that he hadn’t liked watching
them. He wasn’t
embarrassed,
it just wasn’t something
he wanted to see.

He backed out silently
and went back to the box room to sort things out, thoughts spinning round his
mind like bluebirds around a dazed cartoon character’s head.

With the three of them
working on the things in the room, it didn’t take them long to fill the 5
rucksacks they found. Tony did find a sixth at the bottom of a pile, but when
he put in a camping lantern it fell through where the bottom should have been
and the glass smashed on the floor. He swore much more loudly and vehemently
than the damage required. They had, after all, already packed four of the
things successfully.

They had mostly been packing
in silence, Tony still mulling over his thoughts, but Nicola had spoken once to
comment on the fact that they were lucky to have found a family of hoarders.
Tony grunted a response and the silence fell again.

Dave was doing the
duties of ferrying the full packs downstairs again, leaving Nicola and Tony
alone from time to time, but Tony had nothing to say to her and she seemed lost
in her own thoughts. She didn’t seem to be as set on finding her daughter, and
he did wonder idly, as he tried to understand his own inner conflict, what she
was thinking about. He guessed she was worried what she would find when they
got to the shed where Dave had left her, and part of her didn’t want to have to
face the awful possibility.

How could she kiss him
after he abandoned her daughter? Tony suddenly wondered. Just as quickly he
dismissed the thought and went back to his rummaging. He had shifted and sifted
most of the things in the room, but he just wanted to check for any last thing
that they might need.

That was when he found
the shotgun.

He had been moving
things off the narrow bed which had been pushed under the window. Things had
been piled high on it, and he’d had to clear the floor in front to get to it.
Lying under a pile of old coats, the last thing before the mattress, was the
gun. Next to it was a box of cartridges.

He couldn’t think why
it was stashed away up here. It looked very suspicious. He would have thought
,
if it was for farming purposes – culling badgers or
whatever – that it would be somewhere within reach. It felt… hidden.

Whatever the reason,
he was glad he had found it. He lifted it up, surprised at how heavy it felt
and how cold the metal was on such a warm day. He turned with it in his hands
and heard Nicola give a gasp. She knew, as he did, that they had just found the
single most useful thing that they could. She held out her hands to take it
from him, but he pretended not to notice and held onto it. He turned back and
grabbed the box of shells, and then started to make his way back out of the
room. As he passed Nicola he pointed with the butt of the gun to the last of
the rucksacks which was on the floor, leaning against her legs, he asked, “Can
you manage that on your own?” But he didn’t wait for the answer and headed off
downstairs.

Nicola followed Tony
downstairs, unsure quite what was going on. Something had obviously happened to
him when the zombie had attacked, but she wasn’t sure what. Maybe it was the
scream and the falling over backwards. He could be ashamed of himself. But he
had stood up and smacked that zombie with his axe – the blunt side, okay, but
he had still saved her life. Maybe he had discovered something about himself in
that moment of heroism and it was a new-found determination she could feel.
Whatever it was, she knew she should ask him, but she couldn’t find the words
and her mind was whirling too much to search for them.

Why had she kissed
him? That was what she kept asking herself. If there was anyone in the group
that she should hate, it should be Dave. He had taken her girl – when there was
a threat, admittedly, but one which never became anything more – and he had
locked her up and abandoned her. She ought to want nothing more than for him to
lead her to the shed and then never clap eyes on him again.

But, somehow, she
couldn’t criticise him for what he had done. She could understand exactly why
he had done what he did, and knew that she would have done the same in that
situation. And when she had seen the look on his face after he had had to kick
the undead version of his best friend through the window, she had just wanted
to make it better for him. He looked so torn, so anguished, so full of emotion,
so human.
So unlike Rob.

She had just wanted to
soothe and comfort him, but then she had been kissing him. It wasn’t a decision
she had taken, it was just something that happened. It had been nice. There had
been a lot of other feelings mixed up in that kiss, but it had been nice. It
was the first kiss she had had since Rob and she realised how much she missed
the feeling of another’s lips on hers.

But even as she was
kissing him, her hands pulling his head hard against hers, she had known that
she didn’t really want to be doing this. And now it had happened, she didn’t
think she wanted to do it again. She didn’t know why, but instead of feeling
something new open up inside her, it had just left her feeling awkward.

They had broken their
kiss and she had been unable to look at him, simply turning and returning to
where Tony had already re-started the job that she should have been doing.

And now she was
standing in the doorway to the box room, with Tony already downstairs, and she
still wasn’t moving. She couldn’t understand it. She had woken up knowing what
she needed to do and how she was going to achieve it. But as she had started
rummaging through the belongings of other people who were only recently, dead,
she had felt her purpose leaking away. Her mind just kept filling again, as she
had known it would, with the sight of the field full of dismembered sheep. In
her mind’s eye, each limb, each pool of blood, each splintered bone was
Alyssa’s. Her daughter’s face appeared in her mind with a thousand different
expressions of pain, horror and anguish; and every eye in every face accused
her.