Ridgetown: A zombie apocalypse novel (2 page)

He brought up the search function and typed 'problems connecting to server'. The search listed over one thousand results and Luke groaned to himself. He looked round the room for a chair and spotted one near the doorframe he had entered by. If he was going to be here for a while, he might as well get comfy. He dragged the chair over and sat down in front of the monitor, frowning when he realised it had returned to the original options screen. He'd only been a couple of seconds and couldn't imagine the computer timing him out after such a short period of time.

He scrolled down and selected the help option again. As he started to type his query again, the cursor stopped mid sentence and started to delete what he had written.

"What the..?" He said out loud.

The computer returned Luke to the options screen. He began to scroll down the options again but halfway down the cursor stopped moving and returned to the top of the screen. He tried wiggling the mouse but it didn't move. He tried tapping buttons but the computer had now become completely unresponsive. Luke became suspicious and stood up, leaning over the back of the computer and studying the wires leading out of it. A bright red lead stood out from the rest, vanishing under the far side of the desk.

Before he could see where it went, a woman's voice came out of a speaker in the corner of the room that Luke hadn't even noticed. "Get off the computer and get out of the building."

Luke wondered whether the voice was a recording and he'd tripped some kind of automated security system. Maybe he needed some kind of login details before he accessed any files. He decided to give it another try. He tapped away at the keyboard but nothing happened.

"Hey, fatty. I told you to get out!" The voice sounded more irritated than authoritarian this time.

Luke was shocked and didn't know how to respond. He stood up and looked around for a camera. If this was a real person, they might be able to help but from their initial introduction, Luke didn't think they were very friendly.

"Hello? Are you talking to me?" He tried to sound confident but he wasn't sure how well it came across. He felt like he was talking to God.

"Yeah, get your fat ass out of the building or I'm going to
make
you get out."

Luke had never been good at thinking on his feet, now was no different. His mind went blank and he didn't know what to say. He didn't want to leave yet. He couldn't leave yet, not without fixing the Internet connection.

"Erm, I've come to fix the Internet connection for me and my friends. I won't be long."

"You've got ten seconds to leave of your own accord."

It wasn't exactly the response Luke was looking for so he tried again.

"Why don't you come out and speak to me face to face. I can't go back and tell my friends I couldn't fix the connection because the building threw me out, can I?"

There was a few seconds pause that Luke took as a good sign. He stared at the speaker, waiting for a reply. Maybe they were thinking about his proposal. He waited for a door to open and reveal the source of the mystery voice.

A deafening alarm started to shriek throughout the building. Luke decided immediately that they had decided against his proposal. He ran back towards the entrance of the building where he saw two zombies slowly lurching through the open gate. They spotted Luke and started to speed up into an awkward pursuit. Fear shot through his body and he ran back inside to try to compromise with the speaker.

Helen stared at her laptop, watching the stranger run back into the building. The feed's grainy footage showed shadows forming at the entrance telling her that the alarm was working in attracting zombies to deal with her problem. She changed cameras to the main plant room where she saw the stranger spinning round looking for something. Whether he was looking for a weapon, another way out, or something to block the doors, she didn't know. However, she
did
know that he wouldn't find any of them.

When Helen and the others had left the transmission building, they had prepared it for exactly this kind of situation. They had control of all the software and could keep an eye on the building with cameras. They turned it into a kill box with only one way in and out as well as a way to attract unwanted attention once a threat was inside. The stranger she was watching now seemed to have an idea of where he was going. If he had tried any of the other doors, he would have found them locked.

She watched the stranger frantically running round the room and waiving his arms, obviously unsure where the camera was. He shouted towards the ceiling. "Hey, erm, lady. Could you shut off the alarm and we can talk this through?"

Helen felt a pang of guilt as she watched but immediately shook it out of her, telling herself that the person on the screen would probably do the exact same thing if their positions were switched. The world had changed a lot since the dead started rising again but Helen had been most shocked at the speed humans had turned on each other. She had seen people fighting over supplies and coming to blows instead of working together. She had experienced first hand people, who she thought were friends, stealing from their neighbours and pretending they couldn't hear her screams when she needed them. She'd seen curtains twitching on that first night but no one willing to actually help. She had quickly come to realise that she couldn't count on other people so the only person she trusted anymore was herself.

"Please! Miss! I'm not trying to harm you. Keep the substation, I'll tell my friends we can't use it."

Helen saw the first zombie stumble into the view of the camera in the entrance. The man in the main room must have heard its moan because his head darted round towards the doorway. He hurried round the room looking high and low for something before disappearing behind the pumps next to the ventilation pipes.

The pipes were quite big, big enough for him to hide behind but they were constructed from flimsy aluminium that wouldn't hold the zombies back for long.

"Is there just one man in there?"

Helen turned in her chair to find Dennis stood behind her. The pang of guilt returned for a moment, wondering how long he'd been stood there and if he had been judging her. Again, it quickly disappeared, replaced with a firm resolve that she was doing what needed to be done.

Dennis was a lot older than Helen, she guessed he was in his mid-to-late fifties. He seemed physically fit but his face betrayed his age with its wrinkles and his hair was a dark grey colour, kept short in an effort to make it look less grey. Helen hadn't known Dennis before any of this and she hadn't found out much about him in the short time she had known him but he had come to her aid when she needed him. It didn't mean she trusted him, she didn't trust anyone, but he had gained her respect.

"I think so. I haven't seen anyone else on the cameras and he doesn't seem to be shouting for anyone."

"Is it too late for us to help him?" The inflection in the tone of Dennis' voice hinted that he was disappointed at Helen's decision not to let the stranger go. It made Helen feel lousy, like a scalded child being told that their parents weren't angry with them, just disappointed.

"There are only two zombies so far. But even if we left now, I don't know how long he could fight them off. He doesn't look like much of a survivor."

"We have to try Helen, he didn't look very dangerous and he mentioned friends. We're all survivors whether we look like it or not." Helen was intentionally avoiding his eyeline by staring at the floor, making Dennis feel like he was talking to her fringe. "We need all the help we can get and we're only going to do that by making friends."

Helen felt like she was back at school being told off by a teacher. A few times, she had wondered whether Dennis had been a teacher before any of this. At first she thought he had been in the army because of how he took charge of situations and seemed to command respect, but there was an empathy there that didn't quite have a military feel.

"I'll get Scott to drive, you get some weapons."

Helen looked directly at him, "I'm not going as well?" What was meant to come out as a statement, came out as a question.

Dennis smiled, "Of course you are. You've tried to kill the man, the least you can do is apologise."

Helen was shocked at the idea of going to rescue someone she had just sprung a trap for, especially at the idea of apologising to him. Despite this, she knew that Dennis was serious about trying to save him and she supposed it made sense. She strode across the landing of the house to the second bedroom where they kept their makeshift weapons. Being in charge of getting weapons, she wanted to make sure they were prepared. Even though this was now a rescue mission, Helen still didn't trust this mystery man and she wanted to make sure that they were ready incase this man's 'friends' didn't turn out to be friendly at all.

She clicked the button to transmit again and sighed very loudly, "Try to stay alive, we're coming."

Scott was eager to get out on the roads again. It sounded strange that he wanted to be outside rather than being in the relative safety of the house. Although it had proved quite safe, whenever Scott spent any extended period inside the house, he began to feel restless, nearly claustrophobic. At least when he was outside, he got an idea of what the situation was like and how bad the area had got.

The house was well barricaded, he couldn't deny that, but it worried him that anything could be happening outside and he wouldn't know about it apart from what they saw on the cameras. There could be streets filled with zombies but it could look like they were pretty clear from the cameras. By being outside, he also felt free to escape to wherever he wanted, not tied down to one place he had to defend.

Scott had always thought of himself as an outside type of person. He loved playing outside when he was a kid, going for walks with his parents and going camping with his friends when he was older. As he grew up, that passion for being outside turned into a sense of exploration. He travelled whenever he could and loved to hike and climb mountains. He never really considered himself a loner, he had some great friends, but he definitely had no problem with only having himself for company.

When things started to change and the population of the country was suddenly eating each other, things he had learnt whilst camping and hiking suddenly turned into essential survival skills. He'd found himself climbing whatever he could to get out of the reach of extended arms. He'd hidden in an abandoned farm building and slept in the rafters of an old shed, securing himself on a beam using some old rope he had scavenged, something he had done a couple of times whilst rock climbing.

These things had kept him alive on his own and he couldn't help but feel that being on his own was something else that had kept him alive. He didn't currently have a partner and his father had died a couple of years ago, his mum a year before that. He had a few relatives that he wasn't too close to, same with friends and colleagues from work. He obviously tried contacting people when things started to go wrong but didn't have any luck. Quickly, he had to concentrate on surviving rather than trying to track down other people.

He'd met Helen and Dennis when they had spent a night in the old barn. He awoke to their hushed voices. They hadn't seen him, he didn't really blame them because he'd chosen the darkest corner to hide in and he was quite high up. They had seemed pretty approachable the moment he'd noticed them but he stayed quiet and listened to them for half an hour before announcing his presence. Helen had become aggressive but Dennis had been more open and invited Scott to join them for something to eat. More than an invite, they needed Scott's help to start a fire, something that was easy for Scott but was proving impossible for Dennis and Helen who only had a broken lighter between them.

Dennis had offered to share some of their food, much to Helen's displeasure. Scott had politely refused and got out some of his own. They scavenged together the next day and used the barn as a place to stay for the night again, climbing hay bales to use as elevated beds. That pattern continued for a couple of days and when Dennis and Helen decided to move on and look for somewhere warmer to stay, Dennis had asked Scott if he wanted to join them. Helen hadn't sounded enthusiastic about him joining them but her lack of hostility had been as good as a blessing. That had been a couple of months ago and they had bonded as a trio with Scott realising how much he did actually enjoy company when he had it as well as how much safer he felt.

He grabbed the keys to the truck and headed upstairs to check the cameras for any activity around the building.

The substation wasn't far from the house, they could walk there reasonably quickly but they didn't know how many zombies would have been attracted by the alarm so they needed to be prepared for anything. The house was the last in a block of terraced houses that bordered fields leading up to a canal. It was quite unassuming and out of the way, making it perfect for them to hide relatively under the radar of any hostile groups roaming the area.

The road that the house was on ended abruptly and became a dirt road that led to more fields. It looked like the surrounding area was going to be used for housing development, something that was never going to happen in this new world. The surrounding fields allowed them to see relatively far into the distance in that direction allowing them to assess whether it was a good direction to head if they had to quickly evacuate.

They had two vehicles outside, a small Japanese hatchback and a larger pick-up truck. They loaded into the truck, Scott and Helen getting in the front while Dennis sat in the back. Helen always offered to ride in the back but Dennis insisted on her going in the front, she couldn't tell if it was an act of chivalry or simply that he preferred to ride in the back.

Scott had welded two seats onto the back of the pickup so that two people could strap themselves in safely should they need to drive quickly or over rugged terrain. It also meant they could unclip themselves and exit the vehicle without having to compromise opening the driver or passenger door.