Undead at Heart (23 page)

James wandered a
little way down the road, trying to imagine the darkness and the mad race
through ranks of zombies. It all seemed like a dream now. But, in the distance,
he could see a sign of reality. A thick column of dark smoke rose on the
horizon, spreading out into a plateau of darkness. He turned on the spot,
noticing a few others from the group had joined him and were likewise staring
into the distance. He counted three more smoke columns and in his mind’s eye
saw many, many more of them sprouting all over the country; all over the world,
maybe.

He was still standing,
lost in thought, when he heard a shout from down the lane. He refocused on the
immediate and saw a small band approaching. It only took a moment to recognise
Nicola, Tony, Dave, Dan and Daz. He looked past them but couldn’t see Sam.

As they reached him,
he opened his mouth to ask, but Nicola shook her head and he closed it again.
He looked around at their faces, at Tony’s face, and saw his answer written
there. Another one had fallen. Another lost, another gone. James felt, for
perhaps the first time, the weight of his own losses. They threatened to
overcome him, but then Nicola had let out a cry and run past him towards the
Hut. Startled, James turned to watch her. As she ran towards the group still
gathered at the Hut, he saw the small figure of Alyssa run towards her in turn.

As James watched,
mother and daughter met in the middle of the street, and suddenly nothing else
mattered. Nicola swept her daughter up into a hug and turned around and around
with her in his arms. They were both talking and crying
,
their two voices mixed together in incomprehensible sobs and protestations of
love and prayers of thanks. James knew that his sadness and loss would probably
never leave him, and would revisit him in a thousand different ways to come,
but in this one moment of reconnection he knew that despite the columns of
rising smoke, life would go on. 

Tearing his gaze away
from Nicola, James glanced back at Tony, and saw tears running from his eyes
unchecked. He could see hurt and loss in the man’s eyes, but also a reflection
of his own feelings. In amongst the pain he could see possibilities. Tony’s
eyes met James’s, and the two shared a fractured smile. James realised that he
too was crying.

The moment was broken
by the sound of engines. Two army trucks came slowly into the village, and
stopped by the Hut. Scott and his colleagues walked up and started talking with
the important looking passenger in the front seat of the lead truck. With the
return of power, however that had happened, Scott must have been able to radio
in for reinforcements, and here they were. The hope of the villagers had been
realised.

Maybe, he thought,
just maybe it would all be all right.

Ignoring the arrival
of the army, Nicola came back towards James and Tony, with Alyssa holding tight
to her hand. Tony stepped forward and hugged Nicola, and then bent down to hug
Alyssa too.

As he straightened up
again, James heard a familiar electronic chirping sound which seemed strange
and alien after just twenty four hours silence. Tony reached into his pocket
and pulled out a mobile phone. He glanced at the screen, pressed a button with
his thumb. He moved to take the phone in both hands in the familiar
‘text-typing’ grip,
then
stopped. He looked up at
Nicola, around at the others, then back down at the phone. He shrugged and a
small smile crossed his lips. He turned and threw the phone over the hedge and
into the field. Then, taking Nicola’s hand, and with James and the others
following, he headed towards the trucks and whatever was going to happen next.

The alien invasion
lasted a bare twenty-four hours in the end. If anyone ever actually knew where
they came from, it was never made public. What was revealed was that it started
with the unannounced arrival of a base-ship in orbit on the late morning of the
first day. It quickly deployed smaller ships which travelled round the globe
and attacked every military base on the planet simultaneously. This was just a
way for them to land their ships in strategic locations and link them with a
standing wave of some kind which acted to disable any electrical or electronic
devices except those in their shielded ships and walkers.

It would seem, mused
many commentators, that their goal was to wipe out the human race, but to leave
as much of the infrastructure intact and operational as possible, by
temporarily disabling it rather than destroying it. At the same time, they used
the walkers to spread their virus, the ‘zombie plague’ as it became known.
No-one who was scooped into the walkers was able to tell what had happened
there. But the presumption was that the aliens passed on the plague through
their bite, the action which the zombies used to propagate it further.

Experts calculated
that, unchecked, the exponential spread of the virus would have consumed the
whole human race in less than three days. Then, all the aliens would have had
to do would have been take down their blanket of cloud and wait for the sun to
wipe the earth clean.

With all electronics
and electrics disabled, no realistic defence against the invasion could be
mounted,
nor
co-ordinated. But words had already been
sent to the right places.

At the moment of the
arrival of the base-ship, instructions had been passed to the crew on the
International Space-Station. Unaffected by the standing wave which blanketed
the surface, they were able, after the twenty-four hours which they had been
told to wait, to activate the space-borne defences which, even when everyone
was talking about them, were still officially denied.

According to the most
believable of rumours, it was a combination of nuclear warheads fired from
Chinese and Russian satellites, plus lasers and more warheads from those of the
USA which brought down the base-ship. The resultant feedback from the explosion
was enough to cause all of the landed ships and all of the walkers to explode.

No-one could adequately
explain just how such comparatively primitive weapons had been able to defeat
the invaders, but some of the wilder rumours mentioned technology harvested
from previous alien encounters. Nearly everyone mentioned Roswell. The
governments of the world refused to either confirm or deny anything.

With the restoration
of power and communications, civilization reasserted itself relatively quickly.
The official death-toll was calculated at nearly 1 billion in the end. It would
have been more, said the experts, but with so many military bases being located
away from population centres, the plague did not have much chance to move out
of rural areas and into the more densely-populated cities.

The world licked its
wounds and considered
itself
lucky.

James returned to live
on his parents’ farm, and Bert sold his house and moved in with him. He was too
old to find a new wife, he would say, but not too old to show a young man a
thing or two.

Alan and Charlotte
could not return to their pub, but with Andy and Sandra they bought out and
renovated the derelict Outdoor Pursuits Centre, Dave, Dan and Daz did the
refit.

Debbie, Ryan and Heidi
were all just happy to get home

Nicola returned to her
life and her job with a new lightness and optimism. She allowed Alyssa to play
whatever she wanted in the car, especially as the girl seemed to have gone off
Bohemian Rhapsody.

Tony did not return to
his job,
nor
to any of the red-headed women from his
past. Three weeks after the invasion, he and Nicola went out for dinner. Later
they decided to mark the day of the invasion as their first date.

This book was originally
written during
NaNoWriMo
2010, something which I
would never have undertaken – nor completed – without the encouragement and
fellow-suffering of my wife, Kath, so immense thanks to her for that and so
much more.

Thanks also to Elaine
Borthwick who joined us on that month of intensive writing. It wouldn’t have
happened without you too.

Thanks also need to go
to those who have read and commented on this book, and its cover. That means
you, Daniel Carpenter, Jackie Summers, Cat Randle, Sarah Hilary, Simon Crump,
Samuel
Newcombe
,
Micheál
Ó
Coinn
, Rachel
Kendell
, Cathy
Bryant, Lorraine Harvey, Nettie Thomson, Susan Howe, Amanda Huggins, Sarah
Logan, Sue
Hornby
, and Mike Harris.

Huge thanks should
also go to all the various people who have helped and encouraged me in my
writing over the years. You are far too numerous to mention, but you know who
you are.

Finally, huge thanks
to Mum and Dad, without whom none of this would ever have happened, and keep
happening.

Calum Kerr is a
writer, editor and lecturer living in the South of England with his wife, Kath
(also a writer), his stepson, Milo, and a menagerie of animals.

He is the Director of
National Flash-Fiction Day and his flash-fictions have been published in a wide
variety of journals, magazines, e-
zines
and blogs. He
has published two collections,
31
and
Braking Distance
, and has 4
new pamphlets of flash-fictions coming out in early 2013.

More information about
him, his writing, and everything else he gets up to can be found at
www.calumkerr.co.uk
.

Judith

For Mum,
Duncan, Lorraine and the twins.

She filled in the last answer on the crossword with a small noise of
satisfaction, rose from her chair, and took her mug through the kitchen to wash
it. She glanced at the clock – two-forty – time to think about getting ready to
pick the twins up from school.

But just as she finished drying her hands the back door flew open and
the twins rushed in.

“Grandma, Grandma. We’ve come to get you! You have to get out. Daddy
says... We have to...” Both twins were shouting all kinds of things, their
voices overlapping and hurting her ears.

She stepped back and tried to understand what was going on, “What? Slow
down. You’ve come to get me? Why? What’s going on? Slow down and tell me what’s
going on. Why aren’t you in school? Where’s Mummy and Daddy?”

“Here, Mum,” Her eldest son, Duncan, was standing in the doorway. He
was out of breath, but that didn’t bother her. The
fact that
his suit was ripped and blood was running from a cut in his forehead were
much more important. She grabbed the wet cloth from the sink and passed it to
him.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know, Mum. I was just driving along, I was just about to ring
and tell you not to pick the kids up as I was back early, and then I saw this
crowd blocking the road. I slowed down to see what was going on, and they
turned on me. They surrounded the car and smashed the window then grabbed and
scratched me.”

“What? Who were they?”

Duncan shook his head. “This is going to sound crazy. They looked like
zombies! I had to run them
down,
it was the only way
to escape. I got to the school, ran in, got the kids, went home for Lorraine –
she’s in the car keeping lookout - and then came here. You have to get your things
and we have to get out now.
Heald
Green’s overrun!”

Judith looked at him, then down at the twins, and her lips tightened.

“No. We’re not going anywhere.”

She reached over to the pegboard and grabbed the key for the garage and
then pushed past him and headed outside. She unlocked the garage door and swung
it up and over, then headed into the far corner. She shifted the Christmas
decorations, and the wheelbarrow, and three sets of steps, and then she pulled
out a large bundle of blankets.

“What are you doing, Mum?” Duncan asked from behind her.

She said nothing, just laid the bundle on the floor and
unwrapped
it. It contained three assault rifles. She passed
two to her son and then stood, cradling the third.

“Get Lorraine to come in and give one of those to her. There’s more
ammunition in the chest of drawers over there, third drawer down. And for God’s
sake be careful with it.”

She squatted down in front of the kids who had been huddled behind
their dad. “You need to go upstairs to the back bedroom. Take your books and do
your reading. And don’t come down until I tell you, okay?” The twins nodded,
scared and biddable. They ran back into the house.

Judith walked down the side of the house towards the front and met
Duncan and Lorraine coming towards her.

“They’re coming,” Duncan said.

“Well, then,” Judith said. She checked her rifle was ready for business
then led them out into the road. “Let’s not keep them waiting.”