Ridgetown: A zombie apocalypse novel (15 page)

Mark looked at Allister and gave him a hugely over exaggerated smile, tilting his head to one side and held his hand out towards him. Allister responded with an equally over the top smile, tilted his head to the other side and took hold of Mark's outstretched hand. The two of them turned their backs on Luke and Helen and started to skip down the road together towards the church, swinging their interlocked hands as they did. Helen let out a loud sigh.

"How long are they going to play on that for?"

Luke found it hard to look Helen in the eyes, still clearly feeling self-conscious.

"I don't know. If we're lucky..." He set off walking in their direction mid sentence, Helen began to follow, "...Maybe they'll have stopped by next month."

When they had reached the wall, Helen had felt apprehensive. As they approached the pub she had felt sick, reminded of how close she had come to not surviving the onslaught. Now, in the daylight and without a zombie in sight, it seemed like a totally different place.

Compared to the pub, which looked quite uninviting with its boarded up windows and doors, the church had huge stained glass windows that lit up, reflecting the sunlight. She had barely noticed them in the dying light the previous day but now they shone like a beacon, something that she found confusing.

"Shouldn't the windows on the church be boarded up as well?"

Mercifully, Mark and Allister had stopped holding hands and had given up trying to embarrass Luke and Helen.

"We've not really seen a need, to be honest. When you get up to the church, you'll see that the windows only start at head height. They let a lot of light inside and they look nice. The area looks depressing enough as it is, if we can add a bit of colour then we will do."

"When we get back, I'll introduce you to Cass, she's keen on making Ridgetown as aesthetically pleasing as possible. She's like a breath of fresh air sometimes. She likes to grow plants and flowers and stuff as well as fruit and vegetables. She makes figures out of scrap and carves sculptures out of wood. Some of them are pretty crap, but that's not the point. She does little things like that to remind us of who we are. We're not just faceless survivors, we're people. It's not enough just to exist, we need to live as well."

Mark's little speech caught Helen unprepared. She hadn't expected such deep philosophy from asking about boarding up some windows. It surprised her that he thought so deeply about their situation. She supposed she had fallen into that trap herself. Days of surviving had blended into weeks, into months, routine taking over. Not stopping to smell the roses once in a while.

They entered the play area and climbed the wall, negotiating the walkway onto the roof of the pub and into the room on the top floor Helen had sent the distress call from. She hadn't really paid any attention to the room last time she was in it but it was nothing spectacular. At the back of the room were the two backpacks of supplies that she and Mark and had brought yesterday, expecting to resupply the safe house with them. Allister picked up hers and they went back onto the walkway, this time crossing the gap across the road to the roof of the church. Helen definitely wasn't a fan of that.

The walkway across the road was made up from the same erratic collection of materials as the rest of the walkway and relied heavily on the overhanging trees for support. Rather than make a solid structure that could be brittle, Mark and the others had designed the bridge as more of a floating platform. The trees that surrounded the street had clearly been there for longer than most of the buildings, thick branches protruded from sturdy trunks that had grown over thirty feet in height.

Metal wires had been fastened around the thickest branches and stretched out like webs coming from the trees, supporting the walkway from above as securely as possible. There was a small gap at the beginning and end of the walkway where it was connected to each building with ropes and cables pulled tight to keep it anchored. The gaps offered slight movement so that a strong wind or movement from the trees wouldn't pull it loose. They had trialed a single rigid platform but any kind of twisting compromised its stability,

As soon as Helen stepped on the walkway, she felt it move. Although it was simply adjusting to her weight, she was convinced it was going to break leaving her to fall the twenty something feet to the concrete below. She grabbed the railing that had been fashioned out of scaffolding and felt relief at the solidity of it. It had been fastened all the way across and felt sturdy, although she wasn't sure how confident she would have been to put all her weight on it.

Mark's insistence that they cross the bridge one at a time had not helped Helen's struggling confidence. She wasn't normally afraid of heights but the sheer basicness of the bridge made her question its safety. It seemed to have been thought out pretty well but doubted anyone from the group had had much bridge building experience before.

She crossed slowly and cautiously but thankfully without comment from Mark or Allister. Mark reassured her that everyone is a bit apprehensive when they first cross it but faith in its build quality comes with crossing it a few times. He did however again suggest that she not put too much weight on it, instantly backpedaling as he thought she might have taken it as an unintended slight on her weight.

"Obviously I'm not saying you're fat, the three of us have never had any issues with it. Not that I'm comparing you to us. You don't look like a man, no one's said you do." The stream of words began to turn into nonsense as he struggled to vocalise what he meant. "Basically, we don't know how much weight it can manage. So we keep trips as light as possible to look after its longevity."

Helen had enjoyed watching him get uncomfortable. She hadn't for a moment taken offence to anything he had said but the startled look when he thought she was insulted was too good to waste.

He muttered to himself as he walked off. "That's all I was trying to say."

From the outside, the church building itself had looked pretty standard. No major modifications, beside the walkway around the roof and the entrance on top that could only be seen from the back. Even the front doors were mildly reinforced on the outside compared to the inside. From inside, the church looked ready to withstand a siege.

The central area had been cleared out of all seating and the ornate wood had been used to reinforce the doors at the front as well as the lower parts of the windows. The interior was still well lit by the large amount of window that hadn't been covered as well as lights that hung from the tall ceiling. The altar at the front hadn't been touched, Helen wondered whether it was a sign of respect or just unrequired space due to the large area where all the seating used to be. Along the wall to the right of the altar were shelves of food, mainly tinned food and large bags of long life food such as dried pasta. There was also a large collection of bottled water stacked up like it was in a storeroom of a warehouse.

What really drew Helen's attention was the mass of electrical equipment at the far end of the church. It looked like a pop-up Internet cafe had crash landed into the church. A couple of tables had been grouped together and five separate computer stations had been set up, all next to each other around the pentagonal surface. Each computer looked different, clearly collected from separate locations. All of them were mainly black which helped them visually blend together a bit better but the eclectic mix was something Helen had come to expect. The monitors were back to back, meaning that the people sat at the computers would all be facing each other. Towers had been put under the table and all the wires met in the centre of the tables where a gap allowed them all to feed up to their hardware from their respective towers. There were more towers on a separate desk against the far wall. They were lined up neatly and all the wiring was hidden behind them, cable tied together. Generic screensavers danced across the monitors and chairs surrounding the table sat vacant. Helen wondered how busy it would have been if she had let them keep their Internet access.

"Quite the setup you guys have here." Helen was impressed and didn't mind them knowing it.

"None of this would be here without Luke. He really got stuck in and got everything up and running. We all try to help as much as we can but we'd probably have stopped at a single computer if it hadn't been for him."

"I don't think I did that much."

Luke attempted to play down the praise that Mark was giving him but Mark continued.

"Sure you did. You went out and learnt this stuff when you reached the limit of your knowledge. It's a really great achievement and you should be proud. Tell Helen about how you've set it up. What is it you call it? The shadow system or something?"

Luke looked embarrassed, "I've actually thought about calling it something like Legion."

Helen raised an eyebrow, "As in
we are legion, we are many
? Don't you think that's a bit...." She looked around the church, "blasphemous?".

"I don't mean it to be, I just think it's a good name to describe what I'm trying to build. Let's go down and I'll show you."

The four of them lowered themselves down the rope ladder that led to ground level, Helen's fear of heights no longer being a factor which she found strange considering it was the same height as the bridge. Maybe it was the fact that the rope ladder was a single, purpose built thing or maybe it was the idea of safety from zombies that the church offered. Allister and Mark removed their backpacks and headed over to the racks of shelving, Luke led Helen to the computers.

"Our idea is to get online and create a virtual space that people can access and share information about the zombies. I've got this image in my head of what it would be like."

"The main page is going to be a map of the area that people can update themselves. We'll be able to add things like safe houses, unsafe buildings, sightings of roaming hordes or these
special
zombies. People will be able to see where they can go for a rest if they are passing through or where they can find us if they'd like to join the community. We'll share any new information about whatever's causing this and plans to make new areas safe."

Helen noticed that he started to speed up as he was talking, something he had done when he was talking about his drone idea. It seemed to be a trait he had when he was talking about something he was passionate about.

"The main thing is to set up an online communications network. We'll be able to stay in contact with each other as well as people nearby and miles away. People can give each other advance warnings about roaming hordes or friendly and unfriendly survivors. We could even coordinate raids or attacks on large groups of zombies."

"When I went out to the tower the other day, imagine if I'd been able to speak to you about it first. I could have asked permission or arranged to meet up so we could trade gear or you could help with any issues I had."

"That's assuming I wanted to help." Helen pointed out. "What happens if some group of thieves pretends to be a couple of helpless children and lures you out somewhere? Or uses your site to scout you out? Or fills it with incorrect information?"

Luke shook his head while smiling.

"I really thought we were getting you round to our way of thinking. There's always going to be that danger, but we can't just sit by and not help people because we're scared of a few bad apples."

"There aren't just 'bad apples' out there! There are monsters worse than those dead things wandering round! People who wouldn't just let you die so they could survive, they'd actually feed you to those things for fun! I sometimes think you guys are living in a cartoon world! These people aren't going to be nice to you just because you're trying to help them!"

Allister and Mark showed interest in the raised voice but quickly went back to lifting boxes over the other side of the church.

"
You
were."

The comment caught Helen off guard.

"Things could have gone very differently the other day. I'm not going to go on about it because I don't think that's fair, but I do get the impression that you look for the bad in people whereas simply looking for the good in people could itself create a different outcome."

Helen thought about Luke hidden in the air vent hanging from the ceiling. "Your team would have found you if we hadn't turned up, you'd contacted them and they weren't that far behind us. I've every faith that they would have made it in time to rescue you and they're more than capable of handling a few zombies."

"I'm not necessarily on about the zombies."

"What do you mean?" Helen asked.

Luke looked past Helen and shouted to Mark, "Hey Mark. What did I put in the message I sent to you guys from the air vent?"

"You told us to come and rescue you because some nut-job woman was trying to kill you."

Helen scowled at Luke for referring to her as a nut-job, he laughed nervously.

"Yeah but what specifically did I say about these guys?"

Mark hesitated and looked between Luke and Helen as if making sure he had permission to say what came next.

"You said, don't kill them."

Helen was shocked.

She had seen first hand how Mark and the others could handle themselves against zombies but hadn't even considered them killing living people.

"I didn't think you guys..."

Mark had walked over, ready to follow up his comment.

"Look, we're not murderers or dangerous or anything like that. But, we had no idea who you were. We weren't just going to stand by whilst you killed one of our own. We're more than a community, we're a family. We'd die for each other, some people have. But that also means we'll kill for each other to protect ourselves."

Allister joined them, "We'll never provoke anyone or start anything, but if anyone attacks us we'll hit back. And to be fair, we had pretty good reason to believe you were hostile."

"So why didn't you come in guns blazing?" Helen asked.

"Just like Luke said. He'd told us not to kill you and we trusted his judgment."