Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (20 page)

The porch was wide and littered with
worn sofa chairs, wooden crates and old bicycle parts. The back door had a weary old screen door fixed in front of it with tears in the sagging gauze. A rusted spring mechanism held the door closed. I pulled it back slowly, expecting the worst, but the spring had lost all its tension. It gave way without a sound and I pulled the screen door all the way open.

I pressed my ear against the back door and listened. It was just a
plain hollow slab with a rectangle of painted beading. The paint was peeling. I stood silently for a few seconds but heard nothing.

My instincts told me to wait. I remembered something about caution being the better part of valor, but the fact was that I expected the entire street to be over-run with convulsing undead at any moment.

I couldn’t wait.

It was do or die….

I held the Glock ready, then took two steps back and launched my foot at the door in a side kick that had all my strength behind it. The door blew inwards and the noise was like a sudden loud explosion.

I went through the opening without hesitating.

And tripped over a dead body.

Even in the darkness I knew it was a body, and I knew it was dead. My foot socked into it and I fell face-first on
top of cold stinking flesh. The gun flew from my hand. I heard it skitter away across the floor.

The body must have been stretched out on its back. My fingers dug into rubbery resistance, and then my hand groped over facial features and long greasy hair. I felt a sudden surge of nausea rise up into the back of my throat. My fingers came away covered in oozing slime and I felt my skin crawl. I scrambled away from the corpse and then
went stone cold when I felt the barrel of a gun suddenly thrust hard down against the top of my head.

“
Stay on your knees,” a man’s voice said tensely from out of the darkness. I froze. I heard heavy rasping breathing, and then the voice ghosted out of the night again, this time dripping with undisguised relish. “You’re fucked.”

I turned my head a little and caught the shape of the man in the corner of my eye. He was holding a
flashlight, the glow from the bulb muted by wads of tissue paper so that the light it gave off was like a child’s bedroom nightlight. I couldn’t see him clearly until he stepped past me and pushed the back door closed. I heard the scrape of an iron bar, and then the sound of it being set between steel brackets. The man turned quickly back to face me and suddenly I could see past the glow of the flashlight.

He was ghastly.

He was a small, wiry man, maybe seventy – maybe even older. He was shirtless, and the skin of his chest was wrinkled and sagging, the flesh on his arms hung in loose folds. The man’s face was drawn, the skin pallid. He leered at me and I realized he had no teeth. There was spittle dribbling down his chin.

He was wearing the decapitated head of a dead man, tied by rope and knotted under his chin. The dead man’s head had long wiry black hair, the eye sockets empty, the mouth open and its purple swollen tongue protruding obscenely.

The gunman was wearing the dead man’s head like some kind of grotesque Easter bonnet.

“Get up,” the old man said. He was wheezing – the sound of his
breath being choked by bad lungs. I got to my feet.

“Start
walkin’,” the old man said. He jabbed the barrel of the gun between my shoulder blades. “There’s a candle in the living room. Walk towards the light… and do it slow like.”

I went in a careful shuffle. The house was dark, but I could see the faintest glow bouncing off internal walls.
We went through a dilapidated kitchen with carefully packed cardboard boxes lined up along the worn linoleum floor. The house stank of decay and urine. I reached a doorway and turned left then right until I stepped into a large room with timber floorboards. The room was completely empty. No furniture, no paintings or photos on the wall.

No windows.

The candle was set on a three-foot high steel stand in the middle of the floor. I went towards it and when I was standing beside the flickering glow, the man called from somewhere behind me.

“Stop right there. Turn around.”

I turned.

He was hovering in the shadows on the edge of the room, his shape blu
rred by the darkness. He switched the flashlight off and there was a long silence.

“Take off the jacket, and the t-shirt,” the old man’s words ghosted out of the gloom. I hesitated, and he barked the order again, his voice
snapping.

I peeled o
ff the leather jacket and let it fall to the floor. Then I pulled off the t-shirt and tossed it aside. I stood there, bare-chested, and he stepped out from the darkness towards me, with the gun in his hand pointed between my eyes.

He was a skeletal figure, his face lined and deeply creased like old wood. The hair of his beard had fallen out in tufts leaving clods of white
strands that were stained dirty brown around the corners of his mouth and down his chin. He looked me up and down carefully, and the decapitated head, strapped to his chin like a hideous helmet, bobbed and swayed precariously.

The man was wearing nothing but a pair of dirty underpants. He had scrawny
white hairless legs, and a bizarre mat of grey hair that trailed down the hollow curve of his chest to the base of his stomach.

“Who are you?” he pointed a finger at me.

“I’m one of the people you shot at on the road outside,” I said.

He looked suddenly astonished. His eyes widened.

“You murdered my friend,” I said.

The old man’s head nodded like it was being jerked at the end of a puppeteer’s string – as if he was recalling a fond memory. “The fat one.”

“His name was Clinton. Clinton Harrigan.” I had to grit my teeth and fight back the impulse to charge across the space that separated us. “He was a good man. A kind man – and you shot him dead.”

The old man’s eyes rolled from side to side, and he cackled with delight so that I could see the broken rotting black stumps of his teeth. He danced away from me
in some kind of mad jig, then spun back and thrust one of his hands down inside the sagging elastic band of his underpants. His eyes went wide and rolled up into the top of his skull.

He was insane.

The old man sighed, and then licked his lips. “How much do you weigh?” he asked, and his voice was breathless and slurred. “One eighty? One ninety?”

I said nothing, but I felt a sudden cold chill of impending doom.
The man waved the gun in my face and then the madness in his eyes seemed to recede. They turned hard as stone. He glowered at me.

“Pick up the candle,” he snapped. “Go down the hall. At the end, turn left.”

I took the candle off its stand and for the flash of a split-second I considered turning on the old man and smashing my fist in his face. But he was insane – not stupid. He kept himself out of reach, and I knew I wouldn’t be fast enough to whirl round on him before he could kill me.

I went down the hall. The candle flame flickered and huge distorted shadows played and leaped across the dark walls. At the end of the hall was another passageway. I turned left, and the floor beneath my feet felt suddenly sticky.

The crazy old man jabbed me in the back with the gun. “At the end of the hall is a door. Open it and go down the stairs.”

The door was like something from a medieval dungeon. It was made of solid timber with huge iron-strap hinges. There was a heav
y black metal ring for a handle. I pulled the door open and a nauseous brew of ripe rotting smells washed over me from a basement.

A descending set of stone stairs stretched out befo
re me. They were well lit with candle light. The steps were rough stone, like they had been fashioned without care, hewn from solid rock.

“Move,” the old man hissed.

I went down the steps slowly, my fear rising as I descended. I heard the old man pull the door firmly shut behind us.

It was an underground cavern, torn from the rock beneath the house. The walls were ragged, the floor covered in hard crusted dirt. The whole area was lit up by hundreds of candles, like a macabre altar. The flickering light leaped up the walls and cast everything in it with a golden glow and deep menacing shadows.

There was an old table set in one corner, and on it I saw some kind of a jacket. There were sewing needles and reels of cotton. There were plastic buckets under the table.

Beside the table was a long
cement trough, streaked and stained with blood, and above it – suspended from their ankles on huge iron hooks – hung three dead bodies.

“What the fuck…?” I gasped. T
he words were wrenched impulsively, and were numbed with my incredulous horror. I felt my eyes widen with shock.

There were two women’s bodies, and between them hung the corp
se of a man. Each body had its wrists slashed. The women had their throats cut. The man’s head had been hacked from its neck.

They were
all naked, dripping the last drops of their blood into the trough. The corpses had been cut behind the Achilles tendon, and meat hooks buried into each ankle to take the weight. Their legs were spread apart, with their feet wider apart than their shoulders. The women’s throats had been cut from ear to ear, slicing through the neck and larynx, and severing the internal and external carotid arteries that carried blood from the heart to the head and brain.

One of the women had been skinned.
Her stomach was deeply gouged where a knife had been inserted above the breast bone and then sliced down through the connecting tissue and muscle to peel long ragged flaps of flesh away from the corpse.

On a
blood-stained bench beside the hanging bodies were several knives and a canvas sheet where the flesh had been stretched out and laid flat.

“Meet the family,” the old man said. He nudged the closest corpse and it swayed like a slaughter yard carcass. “This is Ellie, my daughter, and at the other end, that’s my wife, Marjory.” He waved the gun around airily like a baton. “And that no-account son-bitch in the middle, that’s
Jethro, the daughter’s boyfriend.”

I backed away, stumbled in shock and disbelief. I felt the gorge of nausea rising in the back of my throat,
scalding like acid. I clutched at the sewing bench and bent at the waist, heaving and retching painfully over my shoes and the dirt floor.

The old man sniggered.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stared numbly. My eyes were swimming and unfocussed. I shook my head to clear my senses and then realized the jacket on the bench was made of cured human flesh. The front and back of the hideous garment had been completed, and one sleeve attached with crude ragged stitches.

“They’re your family?”

The old man shrugged.

I felt another dizzying bout of nausea
rise up into my throat but I jammed down on the reflex and took short quick breaths, my mouth wide open, like a man who had run a marathon.

“You’re insane
,” I choked, turning in outrage. “You’re completely fucking insane!”

The old man turned his head quizzically and then frowned, almost like he
didn’t understand. The dead man’s head he was wearing slipped down over his forehead and he pushed it back up with the tip of a gnarled, stained finger.

“I’m not
insane,” he said, offended. “I’m crazy. Crazy like a fox.”

The gun in his hand
became steady. He kept it pointed in the center of my chest. “The undead won’t be able to sense me,” he said softly. “Not if I’m wearing dead flesh. Once the clothes are complete, I’ll be able to walk amongst them without being seen.” He tapped his nose as if he were sharing some secret with me.

“You’re mad...” I said again, this time more surely but he seemed not to notice. There was an evangelical
blaze in his eyes like he was possessed.

“I wanted the fat one,” the old man looked suddenly pained with disappointment. “He would have been enough to make the pants with flesh left over,” he said, lamenting the fact that he had murdered Clinton
Harrigan but not been able to retrieve the body. “That was a waste – like the other one in the back room who tried to break in last week. Had to shoot him of course, but I couldn’t get the body down here. He was too heavy.”

I leaned
against the sewing bench. My head was spinning in a whirlpool of disbelief and horror.

“The man you murdered was my friend,” I said.

The old man shrugged. “I needed the skin,” he countered, and his tone was cold with the reasoning of insanity.

Slowly I felt the horror gradually uncoiling in my gut, becoming something darker. It rose, gathering size and strength and taking form until I could feel myself shaking with murderous rage. I felt my hands bunch into fists and a red mist of fury seemed to glaze over my eyes.

The old man was ten feet away. He was standing near the hanging corpse of one of the women. He crouched down to his haunches and dipped his hand into the blood-filled trough.