Diaries of the Damned (8 page)
Leon stopped by the door and ushered Cindy and the boy whose nose he had broken into the building before entering himself. He had not been aware of how many of their initial group had fallen. The zombies picked off four of the boys relatively quickly after they left the main building. The girl they had rescued had run into a trap; her blood stained legs had attracted the wrong sort of crowd. Leon made to go and rescue her, but the science teacher grabbed his arm and pulled him inside.
“It’s too late,” he repeated, pulling Leon away from the doors and deeper into the building.
The last time Leon saw her, a small zombie had bitten down on the bloody flesh between her legs. The pack soon descended, but Leon was certain that her suffering was over before they ate her face. She would not be coming back from the
dead, that was obvious. The hungry mob stripped her carcass bare before Leon reached the first floor classroom where the other survivors were gathered.
“Daddy,” a
familiar voice cried out, speaking a word that Leon had not heard spoken in such a tone in several years.
He spun around, and felt his hear
t soar as Keisha ran into his arms. Her embrace was tighter than he had ever felt and Leon hugged with equal vigor. Both shed tears.
“Da
ddy, what are you doing here?” the sweet voice of his daughter sang out in his ears.
“I came for you,” h
e replied his voice muffled against her head.
The pair broke their embrace and Leon took a glance around. The second floor classrooms were set up for the more theoretical side of the classes. The laboratory areas were on the ground floor. There were seven people including the teacher who had managed to find shelter.
Leon looked out of the window. Judging by the number of zombies shuffling around the science block wearing lab coats and safety goggles, there had been many more when the crisis began.
It did not take long for a large crowd of zombies to congregate around the science building. With everybody up on the first floor they made no real attempt to enter the building, but still they hovered around. It was as if they could sense that fresh meat was in the immediate vicinity.
Leon found himself staring at them. He watched in near fascination as they ambled around, seemingly oblivious to one another. It struck him as strange, for when the need arose, they seemed to work as a rather efficient team.
“Wel
l, looks like we are stuck here,” Leon muttered after a few hours had passed and the crowd had done nothing but increase. He had not counted them head for head, but his guess would have been around two hundred. They meandered around the building, their mere presence reason enough to stay put.
“Give it time, they will grow tired. Their hunger will draw them away at the first sight or scent of anything living
,” the teacher, Richard Winston, answered. He had joined Leon in staring out of the window. The students, on the other hand, showed no interest in observing the end of the civilized world. Nobody spoke. They sat in silent reflection. Some picked at the bloodstains on their clothes while others just stared into space. The only one that showed any sign of life was Cindy.
“Yeah I know. I had a close encounter with a group at a Morrison’s in the city. They almost got me.” Leon did not mention the fact that he came close to giving himself to them, especially as his daughter was seated beside him.
“You mean these things are...everywhere?” Richard spoke up. His tone more of inquiry thank shock.
“Certainly all over the city,” Leon answered. “Every channel is broadcasting the same emergency warning message.” Leon wondered for the first time just how far-reaching the outbreak was.
“I feared as much.” The old teacher nodded his head as he spoke. “Come with me,” he whispered to Leon. “This is a conversation we don’t need to have in front of the children.”
Leon paused. They were all sixteen, some possibly even older than that; but seeing them all sitting there, he understood what the man meant. They were young and lacked the necessary life experience to comprehend what had happened.
The men walked out of the classroom and into the hall. Leon grabbed the boy by the shirt and pulled him out of the room with them. “You’re coming with us,” he growled as the young man began to protest.
There were four classrooms in the upper level of the building, which was a near perfect square, as were the rooms.
“Stay there; I don’t want you out of my sight,” Leon spat as he and Winston entered the classroom adjacent to the one they had just left.
“What’s his story?” Winston asked,
“I caught him and a group of other lads upstairs in the school. They beat and raped the poor girl trapped with them.” Leon skipped all forms of verbal nicety. They were both adults, and the situation was no longer one of parent and teacher.
“Jesus! How quick we are to br
eak down in the face of trouble,” Winston mused. “I know him. He’s a trouble maker, but never figured he would do anything like that,” he continued, “shame really.”
“I don’t think it will be the worst thing we will ever see. Not if these things really are everywhere. What do you know?” Leon asked eagerly, hoping to discover answers to the plethora of questions swimming in his head.
“Nothing for sure. Just the observations of an old man who has studied science his entire life,” Winston spoke not to boast.
Leon nodded, acknowledging Winston’s background and reasoning.
“I’m listening,” Leon answered as he slipped on to one of the stools tucked beneath the desk.
Richard Winston took a deep breath, removed and cleaned his glasses, and then settled them back onto his nose before continuing. “This whole thing started with the flu. People got sick; very sick, very fast, and then they died. The say that the first ones to rise were the ones that died from the fever, right?” Leon nodded, his mind already starting to make possible connections. “Isn’t it funny, that people got sick for two days, and then died? Now, two days after the first ones started to turn, or so I figure judging by what I saw on the news this morning, the flu just disappears; nobody seems to be getting sick anymore.” The old man held his tongue, allowing Leon enough time to either catch up, or clarify his thoughts.
“I don’t follow, how do you know people aren’t getting sick?” Leon asked, puzzled.
“None of this is certain. All I can tell you is, on Monday, I had a class of eighteen kids. The next day all but five of them were home sick, and a further two went home sick Tuesday afternoon. Now, here we are with ten people, and there is not as much as a sniffle between us.”
Leon cast his mind to the people had had met in the school. None of those had so much as a watery eye, either. “So what are you saying?” Leon queried.
Below them came the ever increasingly familiar cry of a human in excruciating pain. Both men ran to look out of the window. It overlooked the playing fields, where they saw a group of four zombies surround a student that had evidently been hiding in the tall grasses that bordered the school grounds. They wondered for a moment what had startled him out of hiding, until they saw the nearly legless zombie come creeping out of the field; its remaining lower limb hung on by a thread, a meaty stump was all that remained of the other.
“What I’m trying to say is; I believe there is a link between the flu and the zombies. You told me once before you are a medical man; a paramedic, correct?” The old man surprised Leon by demonstrating his sharp mind, no doubt a small attempt to show that his brain still operated at a sane level.
“Yes, that’s right,
” Leon answered, staring at the creeping zombie. It had reached the fallen student, whose eviscerated body was torn open from its groin to its throat. The zombie, seemingly disinterested in its own condition, started chewing on the arm of the boy, tearing large chunks of rare flesh straight from the bone.
How did it get out here in that condition?
Leon wondered, making a note to ask Winston’s thoughts on the matter.
“Then tell me,
how often have you seen a bout of flu so virulent that it kills people so quickly, only to have it disappear within forty-eight hours? Think about it, Leon. Doesn’t that seem rather strange to you?”
Richard believed in what he said, and Leon, when he ran through things in his own head, could see why. The man made a very good point. “You
really believe that this was...an attack?” Leon asked. However convincing it all sounded in his head, saying it aloud was an altogether different story.
“Yes, albeit unintentionally. I do not think the living dead we
re the plan. The virus however, …just think about it for a second. You are at war, you drop in a virus that wipes out the majority of the population within forty-eight hours, and then disappears, not even leaving a trace. You can just waltz right in and clean up Dodge,” Richard stopped. Something had caught his attention, but he did not know what.
“So this was an attack...
but why Norwich of all the damned places?” Leon offered up a counterpoint, but he also found his subconscious focusing on something else.
“It is probably everywhere,
” Richard offered, his gaze moving away from his conversational partner to stare out of the window. The zombies had eaten their fill of the boy, and left, leaving him to flop around on his back on the turf, unable to roll himself over. His arms and legs were no longer attached; they lay on the ground around him, eaten to varying degrees.
“No, that’s just the thing,” Leon answered. “We spent yesterday running a taxi service for people with the virus, they were collected and brought to hospitals out of the city, one crew was even sent out of the county at the end of the afternoon. The infection started here.” Leon turned to look out of the window. He understood what it was that held his attention now. It was a steady, deep hum, like a heavy vehicle. Both men stared, and it was Leon who saw it first, with the connection being the legless zombie that just crawled from the field.
“Well, one thing is for sure, if you took people out of the county, the zombies have damned sure spread out now,” Richard offered, as he too saw the source of his intrigue.
“Yeah well, at l
east it looks like we are saved,” Leon offered as the large combine harvester crested the hill of the field.
“For now...” Richard added with a somewhat ominous tone.
“That is pretty much it as far as my story goes,” said Leon. We managed to attract the attention of the farmer. The science building had a flat roof, so Richard and I went up and started signaling. The farmer had been chasing zombies out of his field all afternoon. He had been coming to check the school for any survivors. He took us back to his farm where we stayed for about a week.” We would still be there if that damned storm hadn’t hit... Anyway, we had to leave after the zombies got in. Only Richard, Cindy, Keisha and I got away. The rest fell behind on the outskirts of town. We came across a huge group of them... a herd is what they are calling it. There must have been three maybe four hundred of them at the edge of the city,” Leon paused, taking a moment to calm himself. He had hardly stopped during his narrative.
Paul was glad for the respite, for his wrist ached from taking notes.
“Where are Richard and Cindy now?” Jessica inquired. She sat upright, listening intently to the tale as it unfolded. There was a sense of urgency in her eyes, an air of expectancy.
“Cindy was on another plane. They separated us when we arrived at the airport. A military convoy came through the housing estate we had holed up in. We had hung white banners from the two upper windows. They arrived all guns blazing, clearing the streets, and whisked us away just before dawn
,” Leon answered. He lowered his head as if in prayer, taking a moment before answering the second part of the question.
“Richard didn’t make it. He got bit one evening while he was having a smoke. He almost got away
, but the damned thing nipped the tip of his finger off. He begged me to do it,” Leon added, as if their silence at his minute paused in narrative was some form of holy condemnation.
“Do what?” Jessica questioned.
“Kill him,” Paul answered for the man, whose eyes had started to fill with tears as he recalled the memory. “You killed him so that he wouldn’t come back as one of them,” Paul revealed to Jessica, while leaving Leon the chance to continue. Paul had a strange fluttering in his gut that told him there was more Leon wanted to divulge.
“
Yes, but it was strange,” Leon paused, trying to find the correct words. “All of the things I have seen, the change is almost instant. One of those things bites you, and it is game over. Not with Richard, he took two full days to turn.”
”Two days? Did he get sick?” Jessica interrupted.
“Yes, but not in the way you think. He fought it; his body fought against the...whatever it is that causes people to change. The bite was not too bad, and so it gave him the chance to fight it. You know what that means, right?” Leon hinted, hoping they would answer the question with the same confidence he did the night Richard posed it to him.
“There might be a cure,
” Jessica whispered, half talking to herself.
“Exactly,” Leon let out a relieved breath. He had not mentioned Richard’s death to anybody. Not even the military, which had thoroughly interrogated him after his rescue. They seemed especially interested in his relationship with the two young girls with whom he cohabitated.
“Do you really think it is possible?” Paul challenged. “I mean, I spent a long time surrounded by those damned things, and all I saw were brainless monsters. There didn’t seem to be anything left that could be saved.” Paul was aware how cold he sounded, but after killing nonstop for two weeks, a new attitude toward life and redemption was a pre-requisite.
“I like to think so. I mean, I’m not a scientist, but medically, it could be plausible, especially if it is true
that it was a biological attack,” Leon added, as if any of them were likely to forget such a controversial theory.
While the two men were chatting, Jessica got to her feet. Her legs were shaky and she was still lightheaded from the blood loss, but when the men moved to help her, she waved them away. “I need to give the captain an update on the flight; ma
ybe find out where we are going,” she stuttered unconvincingly and walked away.
“I don’t buy it, man. I as good as lived among those things. They are mindles
s fools, slaves to their hunger,” Paul reaffirmed. A cure of being undead just did not sit with him, at least a cure that was not death…again, that was.
“You’re wrong, man,” a new voice spoke up from further down the cabin. A young man, not long out of his teens, stood up. “They are not mindless. At
least, not all in the same way.”
“What do you mean?” Paul appealed, stealing the words from Leon’s mouth.
The young man walked toward him with a profound limp, but looked as though he had survived relatively well; he had a healthy color to him.
“What I mean is...
well, you said they are mindless animals, slaves to their hunger. You’re right, but they are all different. Some of them have a hunger for something else entirely.” He looked around for the best place to sit. He chose the row of seats in front of Leon, diagonally across from Paul, and Jessica, who returned close behind him.
“Tell me everything,” Paul solicited, eagerly flipping to a fresh page.
“Ok, but please, don’t judge me…”
