Blog of the Dead (Book 1): Sophie (30 page)

‘Ready?’ I asked him. He nodded and lit the rag. I opened the French doors, ‘Over here, you dumb zombie fucks!’ I shouted, trying to get as many as possible away from the Mazda. ‘Come and get us.’ Sure enough, zombies staggered towards the door and Sam threw the petrol bomb outside. It exploded with a whoosh, engulfing zombies whose dried bodies sparked up like kindling. Sam took another petrol bomb from Misfit and quickly lit it. He tossed it out the door and took the other one off Misfit just as Trent and Eddie staggered into the kitchen. Trent held a knife. Mine. I recognised a scratch on the handle.

‘Give me that.’ Kay shoved the handle of her axe through her belt and grabbed the lighter from Sam. She lit the rag of the petrol bomb she held and threw it towards Trent and Eddie. They both jumped out of the way, and the bottle hit the kitchen table, igniting all its contents, as well as the table itself.

The flames had died down outside. ‘Come on!’ I said and headed out the door. The others followed.

‘Sophie, the keys,’ said Misfit. I turned and saw him holding the doors closed against Trent and Eddie. Trent banged a fist against the glass and unleashed a tirade of threats, while Eddie tried to push the handles down with his sausage fingers to open the doors. I could see that Misfit wouldn’t be able to hold out against Eddie for long. I raced back, slid the key in the lock and turned it. Misfit took a step back and we both stood and watched Trent and Eddie – a look of murder in their bulging eyes – as they banged on the toughened glass. Fire raged behind them. With every door and window in the house locked, they had no way out of the burning building and no water to put out the flames.

‘Come on, Misfit,’ I said. We jumped over the still burning bodies of blackened zombies on our way to the Mazda. There were still many zombies around the car. I bashed one with the corner of my laptop, while Kay chopped with her axe and Stewart sliced with his sword. Soon the way had been cleared enough for Charlotte to safely open the car door, and we all tumbled inside.

Everyone sat in silence for a while. Charlotte in the driver’s seat, Misfit in the passenger seat, Stewart squashed between the two, sitting on the handbrake, and me, Kay and Sam in the back, the holdall with the weapons at my feet. Sam clutched the last petrol bomb to his chest.

‘Fuck,’ I said after a moment, and everyone nodded and murmured in agreement. Zombies banged on the windows.

‘We’d better move,’ said Kay.

‘Keys?’ said Charlotte.

‘Hotwire,’ said Sam, putting his arms around me.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Misfit, and he shuffled awkwardly over Stewart to sit alongside Charlotte in the driver’s seat.

‘Misfit,’ I said.

‘Hmmm?’ he turned to look at me.

I sat forward in my seat, my laptop on my lap, and Sam’s arms slipped from me. ‘Thank you,’ I said, reaching over the back of the seat and placing a hand on his tattooed arm. I gave it a little squeeze and he smiled at me – a sort of half smile, but it was the first I’d seen him do. He turned to the dashboard and I sat back in my seat. I rested my chin on Sam’s shoulder and watched Trent and Eddie’s terrified, choking faces. Smoke began to erase them but I could still see the palms of their hands as they slammed against the glass. I felt nothing.

As soon as the engine started, Charlotte backed the Mazda out of the drive, mowing down zombies, and we drove away from the burning building.

21st June, 10am
Happy birthday to me.

Whatever.

The escape from the house in Sandgate happened almost three weeks ago now. It took me that long to blog all the events of that insane day – Charlotte thrown to the zombies, me almost raped, Caine shot, Eddie and Trent trapped in a burning building. And Misfit playing hero. It makes me sick when I think,
What if Misfit hadn’t of saved me
? I can’t. I just can’t think about it.

We’re safe … well, we’re alive. We have a new home. We’ve taken over two static caravans next to a Martello tower that had been in the process of being renovated before the outbreak. It’s not a bad spot, on the cliff edge, right at the top of Wear Bay Road, Folkestone. There’s a chest height chain link fence. This is reinforced by a tall metal fence, its posts held firm in breeze blocks – just like the one around the petrol station that we pinched and used as a barrier in Rendezvous Street when we tried to secure the town centre last year. The fence encompasses the two caravans, the Martello tower, a huge rusted anchor, a small digger and a thriving veg patch. The latter suggesting that someone had been living here recently, but nobody has come by in the last three weeks to claim the place. The caravans are shielded from the road and the cliff top fields next to it by tall, overgrown hedges that grow on the other side of the fence. We have an amazing view across the channel to France. I sometimes wonder if there’s anyone alive over there looking back at us.

I’m too exhausted to tell any of the others that it’s my birthday. None of them know me well enough or have known me long enough to know my birth date. Not even Sam. I’m twenty today. My teenage years are gone. I’ll probably regret not marking the occasion. I’ll never be a teenager again. And I’ll never live a normal life again.

29th June, 2.20pm
When we first got here – opening up a section of the tall metal fence so that we could drive the Mazda through and park it next to the caravans – there was a bit of an awkward moment. The others had staggered off to investigate the first caravan while Misfit hung back by the Mazda, shifting from one foot to the other and looking like a guy on a first date, unsure whether to kiss the girl after he’d walked her home. ‘What’s up?’ I said to him, my hand resting on the open door of the caravan.

‘Um …’ He looked to the left and to the right as though trying to find some inspiration.

Of course, I knew what was up. He’d just spent however many weeks as part of a gang that had terrorised me and my friends, thrown one of them to the zombies and would have done fuck knows what else had they not been stopped. But Misfit never did anything to us directly. He always stayed out of it, remained on the periphery, and never laughed at Caine’s antics like Trent and Eddie had. And Misfit had played the biggest part in stopping them. He killed Caine. He held the French doors shut, trapping Trent and Eddie in the burning building. Misfit was a fucking hero in my book. I let my hand drop from the glass door and walked over to him. ‘Look,’ I began. ‘I don’t know how you ended up with those guys. I don’t really want to know. We all do what we have to do to survive these days, right?’ Misfit didn’t attempt to say anything so I carried on. ‘I appreciate what you did for me … for all of us back there. I haven’t spoken to the others yet, but I’m sure they’ll agree with me, you’ve got a place here, with us, if you want it?’ I raised my eyebrows in a now-it’s-your-turn-to-speak manner.

‘Sophie …’

‘Yeah?’

‘Caine … he was my dad.’

‘Whahhh?’

‘Not my real dad. My step dad. Since I was five. Don’t say anything to the others, Sophie,’ said Misfit, his dark eyes pleading. ‘I’m not exactly proud …’

‘No. No of course not. Shit. Nice role model.’

‘I’m not like him,’ snapped Misfit.

‘No. Sorry. I know your nothing like him. But having him to look up to while you were growing up …’

‘I never looked up to him. I hated him. He treated my mum like shit. I never understood why she stayed with the drunk, lazy, abusive wanker. She was all right, my mum.’ Misfit bowed his head so that I couldn’t see his face.

‘Look,’ I said, shuffling from one foot to the other – my turn to feel like the one trying to decide whether to kiss the boy after he’d walked me home. I settled for placing my right hand on Misfit’s shoulder. He looked at me and I could see his red rimmed eyes. ‘I won’t breathe a word to the others. I promise. But you’ll stay with us?’

‘Will they ever accept me …’ asked Misfit, nodding over my shoulder, towards the caravan where I could hear the others chatting though I couldn’t make out any of the words, ‘after … after everything that’s happened?’

‘What happened with Caine and the other two would’ve happened whether you were there or not. It only ended because you were there to end it,’ I said. But I knew the others might be a little wary of him at first. Well, he had pointed a shotgun at all our heads, but I hoped that they’d see past that …

‘Thanks,’ said Misfit. He didn’t smile or anything, just played with the ring in his lower lip with his right forefinger and thumb.

‘So, you’ll stay with us?’

‘Yeah.’

And I was glad. Caine held me and the others hostage for about a month, but now I knew he’d been holding Misfit hostage – metaphorically speaking – for most of the boy’s life. I wondered what was inside Misfit, ready to come out now he’d been freed …

July

5th July, 4.25pm
The weeks have been rolling by since we moved into our little hideout by the sea. When the sun shines, it almost feels like we’re on holiday (one of those holidays where you have to stay on the compound or run the risk of being kidnapped or robbed or, in our case, eaten). I feel safe enough here. Me and Sam share a double room in one of the caravans, with Kay and Charlotte on two singles in the twin room next door. Stewart has the double room in the other caravan, while Misfit got lumbered with the child-sized bunk in the smallest room of all.

‘No worries,’ he said with a shrug when he saw his room. ‘I’ve suffered worse. And I’m talking before Z-day.’ But I imagine he has to sleep with his legs bent up. It can’t be comfortable. Actually, I try not to think about it or I’d feel sorry for him. I wonder if he ever felt sorry for the five of us, forced to sleep in one bedroom back when Caine held us prisoner. I try not to think about that either.

The caravans are old, but they’re not in bad condition. Everything is beige – the walls, the sofas, the curtains, the carpet, the kitchen cupboards. And that’s how my mind tends to feel if I spend too much time inside – beige. The beige only differs in texture and, in the case of the sofa, different shades that form a pattern.

The caravans aren’t connected to the mains. But we do have a couple of generators. They’re noisy and unreliable, so we only run them for short periods of time. I can charge my laptop, and we can have overhead light for a short while in the evenings. And we can use the oven. Though when the weather’s good we sometimes cook outside on a fire. We don’t have many CDs for the stereo, just what was left here by the owner – Cher and Brian Adams – and there’s obviously no TV or radio, so, now the evenings are warm and we don’t need the heaters on, we can get along quite well with minimal power.

Electricity will fail soon anyway. Then it won’t matter that I can’t charge the laptop – there’ll be no one online to read the updates. But I’m probably blogging to thin air now. I just do it to keep busy.

Another reason we don’t run the generators that much is the noise invites the zombies. It’s not a problem if we attract a few. The double fence is secure enough to withstand a little bashing from decomposing hands. And the zombies tend to wander away once we turn the generators off, as long as we stay out of sight. But, the thing is, rotting walking corpses really spoil the sea view.

13th July, 5.10pm
So, it’s Friday 13
^th
. Has it been an unlucky day?

But forget today for now, I’m still trying to catch up with what’s been happening over the last six weeks, since we arrived at the caravans. For the first few days we survived off the limited supplies the last occupant left behind – tinned beans, tinned tuna, stale crackers ... the usual post apocalyptic delights – and the small amount of veg we could gather from the veg patch. We let the stocks run low. Nobody voiced it, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing – after weeks of suffering Caine’s abuse, we just wanted to rest, recover and hide from what was left of the ravaged world.

On our fourth day here, I sat on a blanket on the grass outside our caravan, next to the still glowing embers of the previous night’s fire. I could only feel their heat if I placed my hand directly above them, almost touching them. The sun peeked out from pink and orange clouds on the horizon, and the air smelt of dew damp grass, fresh sea salt and smoke from the dying fire. I could almost imagine that I was at a festival somewhere, chilling out after a night of drugs, booze and music.

Sam sat cross legged on the blanket next to me, his eyelids heavy. I lay my head on his shoulder and he wrapped his arm around me and kissed the top of my head. I watched Misfit across the embers, teaching Stewart how to carve little blocks of wood into shapes. I think you call it whittling. The four of us had been outside all night. Kay and Charlotte had gone to bed while it was still dark. But I’d been enjoying gazing at the stars too much to go inside, and Sam wouldn’t go in without me.

Stewart held up his latest whittled creation. It looked a little like a totem pole. His technique had improved over the night and he looked proud, grinning like he’d invented a cure for zombieism. ‘Cool,’ I said, smiling encouragingly.

Earlier the previous evening, while the rest of us had been chilling out by the fire after dinner, Stewart wouldn’t sit still. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, he fiddled with pebbles he found on the ground beside the blanket he sat on, tossing them in the air, catching them, then throwing them over the fence. He stood up, he sat down. He huffed and he sighed. I guessed that he couldn’t cope with sitting beside a camp fire with no guitar to play. He’d had to leave his guitar back at the house when we made our escape.

Misfit sat a little further back from the fire than the rest of us. He stood up and sloped off round the back of the caravans where we chop firewood. I thought he just wanted to be alone, like he often did, but he came back a couple of minutes later with two thin blocks of wood. He sat down next to Stewart and shoved one piece of wood and a small, pointed knife into his hands. ‘Clear your mind,’ he said to Stewart. He crossed his legs and took another small knife from his belt. ‘Let the wood talk to you. It knows what it wants to be. All you have to do is connect with the wood and let out what is already in there.’ Stewart looked at Misfit, puzzled. A sheepish expression crossed Misfit’s face. ‘Oh, I know. It’s dumb, right? Don’t worry about it. I’m talking crap …’ He went to take the wood and knife from Stewart.