Burden of Survival: Killing the Dead : Season Two (4 page)

“You need to watch yourself young lady,” Annalise said. “We know you’re keeping secrets.”

“I can assure you I’m not,” I said. “Now please excuse me. I have business to attend to.”

Without waiting for another answer I gently steered Cass around the woman and walked towards the rear doors of the house. A quick glance behind as I went inside showed the bothersome woman to be standing where we’d left her, watching us.

“How does she know?” Cass whispered.

“Someone’s been talking but I couldn’t think who that would be,” I said. “I’m going to find out though.”

“She’ll raise it tomorrow. You know that right?”

“Yes more than likely.”

“Which means we’ll have to lie to them outright or tell them the truth.”

“That would lead to questions we daren’t have people asking,” I said with a sigh. “For now, let’s get you to Gabby. I have a thousand things to do today and that’s before I send someone to find out where the Coniston people are while I’m stuck here.”

“You don’t need to take me,” Cass said with sudden concern. “I know you’re busy.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “There’s nothing more important than you right this minute.”

Gabby wasn’t especially hard to find. She’d taken over one of the rooms of the house and used it as an improvised surgery. Anyone with medical complaints could visit her and she would use the limited medical knowledge she had about humans to try and help them.

I made a mental note to add medical textbooks to the list of items that were needed. She did a great job with what she had, but the training she’d received had been in dealing with animals. Sooner or later someone would come to her with a uniquely human complaint and her lack of knowledge could lead to death.

Her surgery was sparse with just a low desk covered with notes and scraps of paper. The veterinarian sat in an office chair, one hand pressed to her temple while the other held pieces of paper up to catch the faint light coming through the gaps in the boarded up window.

She turned towards us as we entered the room and with a few quiet words I explained the situation. Her eyes widened as much as mine no doubt had before she looked at Cass and opened her mouth to speak but no words seemed ready to come out.

“This will be the first baby born to our community,” I said. “We need things to go smoothly for Cass and her child, so what will you need?”

“Need? I don’t know,” Gabby said. “I’ve helped with birthing some of the animals on local farms but this is… well, it’s totally different.”

“Can you at least tell how far along she is?” I asked. “Maybe give us an idea of when the child will be born.”

“When was your last period?” Gabby asked Cass.

“Five weeks ago.”

“Have you taken a test?”

“Yeah,” she said with a faint blush rising to her cheeks. “We have a few testing kits in the inventory.”

“Okay,” Gabby said as she tapped thoughtfully on her lower lip. “Five weeks ago would be December twenty sixth, right?”

“As near as we can guess these days,” I agreed.

“Right, so add approximately thirty eight weeks and that gives us…” she reached for a pen and pad of papers and began scribbling down some numbers. “October the first.”

“That’s going to present some problems, but nothing we can’t handle,” I said with perhaps more confidence than I felt.

“Of course,” Gabby agreed. “I’ll start up a list of everything I can think of that we might need.”

“Thank you,” I said.

As I turned to Cass I plastered a wide smile onto my face to try and show a great deal more confidence than I felt. The logistics of what would be needed were almost mind numbing. A pregnancy alone would require a better diet than we currently had and that was without any medical needs.

“It’ll be fine,” I told her. “Now, perhaps you should go and have a word with Pat while I start gathering lists of things we’re going to need.”

“Yeah, I guess I should,” Cass said. “I hope he’ll take it well.”

“Knowing Pat he’ll be over the moon and you might get more than a few words out of him when you tell him.”

“Aye maybe,” she said with a laugh.

I said farewell to my friends and made as quick an exit as I could without leaving them questioning why. A baby! Of all the things that we had to deal with, that was the one I’d feared the most.

It was hard enough surviving amidst the chaos of the apocalypse but the added worry of a new born baby… well it was almost more than I could cope with. It was all becoming too much, too many dangers for my people, too many worries. I honestly wasn’t sure what to do other than burst into tears and hide away from it all.

“Help, help!”

My head snapped around to the sound of the cry for help and I saw one of the older children, a boy of around fourteen burst through the doors. He saw me and skidded to a stop face red with exertion and panic plain on his face.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s zombies on the island.”

Chapter 5

Ryan

With one final cut I pulled free the heart of the zombie and dropped it to the table beside its head. It didn’t look especially impressed or concerned at seeing its own heart and continued to chew on the cloth covering its mouth.

“That’s messed up,” Gregg said.

“It’s pretty much impossible,” I muttered as I slammed my knife down.

It didn’t seem to matter which internal organ was removed, the creature just kept moving. It had no need of lungs to breathe or heart to move the half congealed blood through its veins. The only thing it did seem to need was its brain.

Remove that and it died for a final time. It was irritating beyond measure that I couldn’t figure out why or what was doing it.

“So what now?” Jenny asked.

“Dispose of it like the rest,” I said as with one smooth motion I picked up my knife and slammed it down through the pitiful creatures’ eye and into its brain.

Something was animating the zombies and I wanted to know what that was, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity. My search for the answer hadn’t been going well and all I’d done is determine how resilient they were.

“We have another two shamblers’ down stairs in the cellar,” Gregg offered. “I could bring another one up.”

“No I think we’ve done all we can with these ones,” I said.

“What about the other?”

“What about it?”

“It’s creepy as hell and I don’t like the way it watches me, like it understands,” Gregg said.

My thoughts briefly travelled back to when we’d managed to catch it and how… energetic it had been. On subsequent visits it had lain still as though conserving its energy for when it was free. That was a display of intelligence that we were seeing more often from the slightly fresher looking zombies.

“Did you check the wound?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Gregg said as he nodded emphatically. “Like you thought it started to close up. Slower than it would on a living person but still…”

“It began healing,” I mused. “Something is separating the undead into two types. The shamblers that are stupid and slowly decaying, becoming less of a threat each day, unless they are in a large group.”

“The others, though fewer in number but with an almost feral cunning and better agility and coordination than their brethren. They are going to become the problem.”

“We’ve faced them before,” Gregg said.

I admired his confidence but I had a niggling doubt that we were seeing evolution in progress. The slower zombies had grown their numbers as they culled the weaker humans from the herd. They were now insufficient for the task of rooting out the survivors so another, hardier and more intelligent species of undead was rising in their place.

“Perhaps,” I said with a faint smile of what I hoped he’d take to be reassurance. It was hard to tell sometimes.

“So, what do you want to do about the others downstairs? Can I come back to camp yet?”

“Not quite yet I’m afraid,” I said as I pulled free my knife from the corpse on the table. “I have a theory I’d like to test with the zombie downstairs first.”

“What theory?”

I didn’t answer and instead just headed to the kitchen and the cellar door. The bite marks I’d seen on the zombies we’d killed earlier had been bothering me. Why would anyone take a bite from a zombie?

My suspicions, if I were correct, would raise a number of quite interesting questions that may bring a little challenge back to my life. A challenge that I was desperately in need of to stave off the growing feeling of general dissatisfaction.

Lily, for all her positive attributes, had an annoying habit of trying to bring civilization back to the world. I’d told her more than once that I couldn’t exist in any kind of society that arose from the ashes of the previous.

I was a killer and a damned good one. People meant nothing to me other than the pleasure I could gain from ending their lives and while I could do that anonymously in a nation of sixty million people, when those numbers were reduced to the hundreds or perhaps thousands… well, I wouldn’t be able to do what I did without being noticed.

To stay with her I’d adhered to the rules she’d made and I’d kept myself entertained with the hordes of undead and occasional death of people when it wouldn’t break her rules. The problem was we hadn’t met many new people for a while and the zombies were becoming less of a challenge and killing them provided little real pleasure.

Soon, much sooner than I hoped, I would need to kill someone. If that need went unanswered then my control would slip and something bad would happen. That would destroy my relationship with Lily and for some quite inexplicable reason, the thought of that brought some uncomfortable feelings to the fore.

I shook the darker thoughts aside as I descended the stairs. The one eyed zombie was there where we’d left it, laid upon a sturdy table and bound tightly. I crossed the dirty cellar floor to stand beside it, the light from my torch illuminating the cut I’d made in its shoulder several days ago.

Gregg was right, it was closing up. I glanced up to see it had turned its head and was staring right at me, its lone eye filled with hate. I couldn’t help but grin and for a moment I imagined that it realised I was mocking it.

The other two zombies we’d managed to subdue were the brainless type whose only response to my presence was to thrash around as though they had a chance of reaching me, bound as they were. I studied them thoughtfully for a moment before coming to a decision.

With swift strokes from my blade I severed the bonds holding the one eyed zombie to the table. It would take a few minutes to free itself from the blankets which gave me ample time to dash up the stairs and slam shut the door behind me.

“What’s going on?” Gregg asked.

“Nothing to worry about,” I said as I closed the heavy padlock with a solid click. “Best you don’t go down there again.”

“Why?”

“Just testing a theory but to do so meant I had to release the zombie,” I said with a grin at his look of shock. “As long as you keep the door locked you’ll be fine.”

“You can’t think I’m staying here with a loose bloody zombie in the cellar.”

“It will be fine,” I assured him. “Couple of days we can check on it.”

“Oh hell no,” Gregg said. “No way am I staying here with that thing loose.”

I shrugged. It mattered little if he stayed in the house, so long as he was close enough to keep an eye on our other project.

“Where’s Jenny?”

“Finishing up disposing of the remains.”

“Right, well I need to head back to the island. If you’re coming you should secure this place and grab her. You can come back tomorrow to check on that other thing.”

“Why am I the one who has to do this anyway?”

I grinned at his petulant tone. He’d grown ever more irritable as the winter progressed and when I’d first devised the idea of what we were doing here, he’d volunteered as much to get away from everyone else as to be of use.

“Guess you’re just lucky,” I said.

“Yeah right.”

He stamped around the kitchen a little as he gathered together the items he needed and then left by the back door. I left him to it. No doubt he’d complain to Jenny since she was the type of person who’d listen patiently to him and then he’d be in a better mood.

While I waited for them to finish up with their tasks I wandered through the abandoned dwelling. It had no doubt been well tended before the apocalypse began but since then it had fallen on hard times.

Dark mold was growing on damp patches by the skirting board, a sign of rising damp. The carpets were coated with mud and blood while the wallpaper in the hallway was torn as though raked by fingernails.

The group who had found the house had mentioned that it contained a couple of undead that they’d needed to clear out and I suspected those were the people who smiled out at me from the photos still hung on the walls.

If I’d chosen to look out the window then I would have seen the weeds growing in the garden, the lawn in need of cutting and scattered leaves from the trees that had gone unraked. It was a sight that would be repeated endlessly around the country as nature reclaimed the world now that humans were facing extinction.

Out little island refuge wasn’t the only place with survivors, Coniston after all had protected themselves well. Perhaps across the world other small groups were cowering away from the zombie hordes and hoping the world would return to normal.

It was an interesting thought and one to pursue later. Other communities meant people and where there was people, I would find be able to find someone to kill without violating Lily’s rules.

“We’re done,” Jenny called from the back door. “You should see this.”

I dismissed my thoughts for now, I would revisit them later though and perhaps take a look at some maps to see if I could find some likely places to find survivors. That thought raised a smile and my mood as I left the house to join the others in the back garden.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

Gregg looked up and grimaced as he gestured to what he’d been watching and I frowned at his expression. I crossed the garden to where he stood and looked over the wall.