The Dead Walk The Earth II (12 page)

“Not all soldiers end up killing people, Chris. In fact, ninety percent of them never fire their weapons in anger. The infantry do all that stuff. I would’ve loved to have been in an infantry regiment but the army don’t allow chicks to serve in frontline units. I was Royal Logistics, so to answer your question, no; I never got to kill anyone.”

She fell silent for a moment.

“Not until all this shit started that is,” she said with a heavy tone of sorrow.

Christopher made to ask another question but she quickly cut in and changed the subject before he could probe into her secrets.

“Anyway, you should finish eating then try to get some sleep because you have a busy day tomorrow.”

He looked up with surprise and intrigue.

“Really? Busy doing what?”

She let out a laugh and rolled over to face him.

“You really didn’t think we were just going to sit here and get fat, did you?” She paused and watched his reaction. The expression on his face was quickly turning from confusion to dread. “As of tomorrow, we start your training.”

“What training?”

“Your end of the world training,” she smiled. “For months I have been saving your arse and pulling you from one disaster to the next but from now on, you’re going to learn how to look after yourself,
and
me if you have to. There’s two of us in this mess and we’ll begin by pounding you into some kind of shape that resembles a twenty-seven year old man instead of a useless blob. No matter how long it takes, Chris, you
will
learn to survive in this world. I can’t keep wiping your arse for you.”

“You really do make me feel like shit at times, Tina,” he said quietly as he stared down into his lap.

Her eyes narrowed as she watched him in the glow of the lamp. She could see that he was about to tumble into the same deep, self-defeating hole that he was so fond of and always used as an excuse to do nothing with his life.

“Oh really? Has all this come as a shock to you? When you look in the mirror, who do you see? Gerard-fucking-Butler dressed as a Spartan?” She huffed as she turned on to her back again and folded her hands across her chest. “You seriously need to grow up. You’re fat, unfit, and incapable of holding your own in a fight against anything living
or
dead. That’s the truth of it, Christopher, and you’d better face up to it. I’m not going to mince my words and smear it in honey for you to avoid stepping on your sensitivities. You’ve been wrapped up in cotton-wool your whole life and it’s time for that to change.”

She adjusted her position on the floor and closed her eyes for a moment. Growing up, she had never been the sort to hold off on speaking her mind but as she matured and joined the professional world where anything she said could have consequences, she had learned to control her tongue to a degree. Now was not the time for her to tiptoe with her words and her brother needed the truth spelling out for him.

“As of tomorrow, we begin rectifying all that. You’re on a diet from now on and we’ll be doing plenty of physical training, brother. You’ll be sick of the sight of those stairs once you’ve been up and down them a few thousand times.”

Christopher remained silent and staring down at his feet. He snorted back the tears and mucus that was threatening to flow from his eyes and nose.

“Go to sleep, Chris. It’s late.”

He stood up and walked across to the far side of the office and towards the bathroom. He paused at the door and looked back at the red and blue mound of his sister who was now wrapped up within her sleeping bag.

Why is she so cruel to me?
He wondered as his vision blurred with tears.
I can’t help being fat.
She knows it’s not my fault. It’s a disease.

Christopher seated himself down on top of the toilet inside the branch manager’s personal bathroom. It was a spacious room with a shower cubicle fitted into the far wall and a large sink facing the lavatory. The floor and walls were made from marble, or a material that was made to resemble marble, and the fittings and fixtures looked grand enough to have been taken from an expensive hotel room.

However, none of its grandeur was of any use to either of them. Water no longer flowed from the taps or the showerhead and the toilet could not be flushed. The light inside the room was provided by one of the camping lamps they had looted from the warehouse and the shower cubicle now had a portable shower-bag hanging from the ceiling. Water was not to be wasted but Tina had insisted that they do their best to keep a good level of hygiene whenever possible. She had lectured him on how important it was to keep clean in the field.

‘A debilitating infection, caused through lack of personal administration, is a self-inflicted wound,’
was how she had described it to him.

In place of a functioning toilet, they had installed a large bucket with a seat attached to the top of it. It was half filled with sand and a dozen bottles of bleach sat beside it for disinfecting after use. Christopher stared at the makeshift latrine for a moment and then looked up at the wall above it. Tina had written the house rules in big black letters over the tiles. They included things such as the washing of hands, the use of the bleach, and the consideration of others. The final commandment was double the thickness and size of the other letters and below it, connected to a self-adhesive hook, dangled a small plastic spade like the sort used by children at the beach.

‘YOU POOP, YOU SCOOP!’

All the rules and regulations that his sister was piling upon him were beginning to wear him down. She decided when they would eat, when they would sleep, and how they went to the bathroom. She had even gone to the length of checking him over to make sure he had been washing himself. He wondered how much longer it would be before she began stripping him down and scrubbing him herself.

Now she was telling him that he could not eat what he wanted anymore. That really affected him because it had been, and still was, his only real joy in life. Computer games and movies had been a welcome distraction from reality but he had always had to drag himself away from them at some point. Food, however, was his only true friend. It had comforted him throughout his twenty-seven years and it was always there for him. Now, his sister was trying to snatch it away from him.

He began to weep. He was miserable and wanted the world to leave him alone. He missed his mother and he missed his bedroom at her house. There he was treated well and he wanted for nothing. He was allowed to sit playing his games all day and into the early hours of the morning. He never needed to worry about anything because his mother did it all for him. She washed his clothes for him and brought him his food. She was a great cook and she even prompted him when she thought he needed a shower. He did not have to think for himself or deal with the day-to-day hardships that the rest of the human race had to contend with.

Rivers were now pouring down his cheeks and cascading from his voluminous jowls. Even his t-shirt was beginning to become soaked through. His shoulders shook with each quivering sob as he fought hard to remain quiet so that Tina did not hear him and launch a fresh assault on his already delicate mind.

I hate her.

Deep down, he always had. When they were young, he had felt inferior and threatened by his sister. By the time he was eight years old he was grossly overweight and incapable of being anywhere near as active as she was. From his bedroom window, he used to watch her playing football with the boys from the estate or racing up and down the street on skateboards and bikes. She was accepted as one of them whereas he had been shunned. They had called him names and chased him into his house when he had tried to befriend them, but they had readily welcomed his sister into their ranks.

She was pretty but never bothered with the things that most girls were in to. She was not interested in dolls and make-up, and always preferred jeans filled with holes and stains as averse to frilly dresses and pretty shoes.

She was popular with everyone that she met. She was witty and outspoken and regardless of what she said or did, Tina always seemed to come out on top of things and could do no wrong in the eyes of the people around her.

While he sat in his room, lonely and rejected, she would disappear for hours on end climbing trees, building camps, and generally being one of the boys. It was always made worse with the fact that their father clearly favoured her more than him. She was a ‘chip off the old block’ as far as their father had been concerned. Tina was an adventurer like him and they did a lot together when she was growing up.

Christopher had barely notice when their father died. He was only thirteen at the time and felt nothing of the kind of grief that befell his sister when he passed. While Tina struggled to come to terms with the loss, Christopher was smothered all the more by his mother and that suited him just fine as he revelled in her loving warmth.

Growing up, he had never had a girlfriend either. He was shy and had no idea how to talk to them. There were many that he had fancied in school and such, but he had never plucked up the courage to approach them. The fact that he was always being told that he smelled bad by the girls as they looked at him with expressions of revulsion never helped his confidence or self-esteem. He slowly withdrew into his room and became a recluse. He found contentment in food, movies, and computer games. However, he had an abundance of virtual friends all over the world who he communicated with via the internet gaming forums and settled for that as his lot in life.

All that suddenly changed though when the dead began to walk. His mother contracted the flue and died a few days after the first government announcements about the spread of the plague. After seeing the effects of the virus on the news and the World Wide Web, he locked her in her room, unable to do the terrible thing that the world beyond his front door advised him to do and ensure that she did not come back.

Tina had arrived a few days later, her clothes tattered and soaked with blood. It was
she
who killed their mother. It was
she
who dragged him out from the safety of their home and into the dangerous world. It was
she
who forced him to scrounge for food and shelter, and it was
she
who forced him to run everywhere.

Now she was telling him that he had to train every day, even though they were safe and did not need to worry about what was happening outside. He hated running. He hated any kind of physical exercise and she was going to force him to endure pain and suffering while she shouted at him to keep going and treated him like a diseased dog. She was going to make him starve and suffer from the pains of hunger.

Fucking bitch
.

He wiped away the tears that had ceased to flow as his anger grew and his bitterness swelled within him. In their place came a rage he had never felt before. His temper flared and his skin became hot to the touch as he thought about how much he loathed his sister. His teeth began to grind as he simmered with anger.

“I’ll show you,” he whispered as he reached behind him and pulled the pistol from the back of his jeans. “Yeah, I’ll show you who’s tough,
sis
.”

He looked down at the dull black metal of the weapon as he held it in his hand. He stroked it lovingly with an affection that most people would reserve for a pet. It was a Glock-19. He had seen them in movies and had read about them on Wikipedia when researching the net for the weapons he was using during his online gaming. Out of the fifteen rounds that the magazine was capable of holding, he had six left. The pistol did not have a safety-catch so he had decided against keeping a round in the chamber for fear of it going off while tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

He hefted it in his palm as he admired its sleek shape and cold steel black finish. Standing up from the toilet, he stared back at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. For a fleeting moment, he saw
Gerard-fucking-Butler
and he smiled broadly, as he raised the pistol into the aim.

“You think you’re better than me, don’t you, Tina?” He huffed. “You think I can’t look after myself, don’t you? Well, I’ll show you. You’ll regret the things you said and I will show you how wrong you are about me, Tina.”

Holding the gun in one hand, then with two, he tried out a number of different stances and pulled various faces as he fantasised about being the strong tough man he had always wanted to be. Next, his eyes glazed slightly and with a half-cocked smile, he adopted the stance of an extremely casual and nonchalant character from a movie he had once seen as the hero coolly took on a band of bad guys that vastly outnumbered him. With assured death hanging over him, he lazily raised the Glock in his hand with a less than steady aim and pointed it towards the sink.

“You talking to me?” He asked as he began a conversation with the man staring back at him in the mirror.

“Well who the hell else are you talking to?”

He raised his free hand and pointed to his own chest.

“You talking to me?”

He paused for a moment and shook his head with a menacing glint in his eyes, the half-smile still creasing his lips.

“Well, I’m the only one here. So who the fuck do you think
you’re
talking to?”