The Z Infection (26 page)

The bark ignited and a small flame
spread to the twigs.

‘Pass me the middle sized ones now,’
I said.

The children dutifully handed them
over, eyes filled with wonder that I had somehow created fire.  Before long it
was going very well indeed and we had real warmth from it.  I surrounded it
with large stones and we huddled around it, at the entrance to our shelter.

‘I wish we had some food,’ said Anna.

‘Me too,’ I said.  ‘Tomorrow, that
will have to be a priority.’

We snuggled in to each other, all
four of us, keeping the children between us for warmth.  I kept thinking that
this must have been what it was like for cavemen in the stone-age.  And a
thought crossed my mind that we might be heading back to those days once more.

I closed my eyes and tried to
convince myself that everything would work out in the end and we would soon be back,
living our old lives.  Soon, we were all asleep, exhausted by the events of the
day.

Thomas Buckle

20:00 hours, Saturday 16
^th
May, North Weald
Bassett

After my scare on the motorway I went
back to my original plan.  I had to carry on to the next junction, but as soon
as I arrived there I turned off and looked for an alternative route.  My
reasoning was simple.  Refugees were, in the main, going to try the most direct
route to safety.  That meant that large numbers would be congregating on
motorways.  That meant congestion and delays.  It also meant noise.  And noise
was the dinner bell for the infected.

I followed the road east,
occasionally seeing the odd infected person on the way.  When I got to the
outskirts of Chelmsford, Pancho gave his now familiar warning.  I could see in
the distance, a large group of them.  I turned off at the next road and drove
for another mile or two, before stopping to check my map.  This new road, I
discovered, would take me west, towards the M11 motorway.  I could see that the
road ran underneath it and led on into countryside and more rural areas.

I folded the map and carried on. 
Several miles later I passed by the village of North Weald Bassett.  There were
more infected there and didn’t dare to pause.  I carried on until I came to a
roundabout with a sign indicating to a golf club and North Weald airfield.  It
was beginning to get dark and I knew I would have to stop for the night.  It
would be far too dangerous to keep going.

I made the decision to head to the
golf club.  There would be a bar there, that was certain and I really fancied a
drink now.  I also imagined that it would be a comfortable place to spend the
night, rather than sleeping in the car, which had been my original idea.

I found the entrance to the club,
just a hundred metres or so from the roundabout.  I pulled into the car park,
scanning the parked vehicles and surroundings for any sign of life.  Or death.

There was one body lying next to a
car.  It was a man and he was dressed in ridiculously coloured golfing attire. 
I drove up close to him and could see that he had suffered several bites to his
arms and face.  These were the usual places the infected went for.  It was
where the exposed skin was to be found and the arm injuries were, more often
than not, defensive wounds.

He had another injury, I noticed as I
stopped the car next to his body.  His head.  Something very sharp had pierced
his forehead.  Was that the blow which killed him?  I didn’t know.

I stepped out of the car and grabbed
my home made spear.  Pancho jumped out too.  He was fairly relaxed and had a
sniff around the area before marking his territory.  If he was calm, so was I. 
We had the makings of a good team.

The clubhouse was at one end of the
car park.  Inside were changing rooms, showers and some vending machines,
selling chocolate and drinks.  I took my time going through the building,
checking all the rooms, making sure I had Pancho with me as I went.

On the other side of the car park
were some more buildings.  There was a bar, thankfully, and some sheds used to
keep all the machinery needed for the upkeep of the course.  Behind the larger
of the sheds, was a house.  It might have belonged to the club steward, or to
the groundskeeper I thought.

I checked it and found all the doors
and windows were locked.  It was a sizeable dwelling but it gave me a bad
feeling.  Even Pancho didn’t want to go too close to it, despite my cajoling. 
I took that as a bad sign and decided to leave well alone.  If there were
infected people inside, they could stay there.  I wanted nothing to do with
them.

It wasn’t until many weeks later that
I discovered that Pancho was really unsure of infected children.  The younger
they were, the worse he was.  He steadfastly refused to go anywhere near them. 
They unsettled him in some way.  It was strange.  I saw him, on a few
occasions, take down an infected adult with real courage, but children freaked
him out.  I’ll never be able to say for sure, but my guess is that there were
children in that house, perhaps locked inside by loving parents who didn’t have
the stomach to end it for them.

Back at the building which housed the
clubhouse bar, I made myself at home.  I had a sleeping bag with me and I
arranged some of the seats into a bed.  In a small kitchen I found that the gas
stove was still working and I fired it up and cooked some chicken I found in
one of the fridges.  It was a basic meal.  Fried chicken breasts with some
salad which had seen better days, but was still edible.

Pancho had his evening meal with me,
scoffing a whole tin of dog meat in record time and licking his lips when he
had finished.  When I had eaten my fill I gave him the last bits of the chicken
and he devoured that too.  I soon found that there wasn’t much he wouldn’t eat,
which was just as well.

We then settled down for the night –
me in my sleeping bag, Pancho at the foot of our makeshift bed, snoring lightly
as I flicked through my map and sipped a bottle of beer by the light of some
candles I had found.

It was a comfortable night and I
slept soundly, knowing my canine friend was always alert to danger.  It wasn’t
until it was light that I woke, suddenly disturbed by the sound of an engine. 
But something about it didn’t sound quite right.  It wasn’t a car.  It was an
aeroplane.

Kareef Hadad

08:00 hours, Sunday 17
^th
May, West London

I knew there was no point staying at
the house any longer.  We had decided to sleep there for the night, because we
were exhausted, but I could never have stayed for any longer.  There were too
many memories there.  I was demoralised and had been ready to give up.  But
Sophie had talked me round, telling me there was a good chance my family were
safe and had escaped.  I owed it to them to survive and to find them.

That Sunday morning we were going to
set off walking at first, until I saw my neighbour’s car in the driveway of his
house.  We walked around and found the door of the vehicle lying ajar.  There
was a pool of dried blood on the ground, at the rear of the vehicle, as if
someone had been taken by surprise as they were loading the boot.

In the rear we saw suitcases full of
clothes, spare fuel cans and food.  There were children’s toys too.  That was
always the hardest part, especially in the early days, before we were inured to
the horror what was happening.

Sophie began emptying the boot.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. 

I was more than just taken aback.  It
made me angry.  These were the possessions of my neighbour.  He and his family
had been good friends.  We had barbeques together in the summer.  Our children
went to the same school and were friends.  Our wives went on spa breaks
together.  It was a desecration.

‘We need the car,’ she said.  ‘We
don’t need all that crap in the boot.’

‘It’s not crap,’ I said, my anger
building.  ‘Those are possessions of…’

‘Of the dead.’  She finished my
sentence.

She stopped what she was doing for a
moment.

‘I know you don’t like it,’ she
said.  ‘I know you feel it’s disrespectful.  But these people are long gone. 
If it was you and your possessions were lying useless in a car, would you care
if someone took them or got rid of them if it gave them a chance to live?’

I couldn’t answer her.  It felt
wrong, but I knew it had to be done.  I decided to leave her to it and see if
there was anything of value in the house.  I walked through the open front door
and checked the downstairs rooms.  His house was roughly the same size as my
own, with a similar layout.  There was nothing there that would have been of
any use to us and I decided against looking upstairs.  The thought of what I might
find there was too much for me.

When I came back outside Sophie was
grinning broadly.

‘Guess what I found,’ she said.

I shrugged.  I didn’t care.

‘A rifle,’ she said.

I was about to say something, when I
suddenly remembered that my neighbour had a firearms licence.  He used to shoot
vermin on a friends farm some weekends and occasionally hunted deer and was
invited to shoot birds on an estate owned by his boss.

Sophie pulled the weapon from the
back seat of the car. 

‘Do you think it’s loaded,’ she asked.

I didn’t know, but I knew enough
about guns that you should never point them at anyone, whether they were loaded
or not.

‘Don’t play with it,’ I said.  ‘It’s
not a toy.’

She laid it back on the seat.

‘Sorry,’ she said.  ‘Do you know how
to fire it?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said.  ‘And I
have no intention of learning either.  Just leave it where it is and let’s get
out of here.’

We completed the repacking of the car
in silence.  Sophie had gone through all the cases and had selected clothing
she thought might be suitable.  Everything else was discarded.  The extra fuel
cans were a valuable resource.  They felt like they were full and would give us
a much greater range.  The food was also kept.  We didn’t have very much and
had eaten only sparingly in the last two days, so we were grateful for the
additional stores.

Once we were ready I took a last look
at my home.  I promised myself I would return to it one day.  Of course I never
have.  It’s not that I didn’t want to.  It’s just that circumstances have dictated
another path for me.

We drove out of the area by one of
the back roads and headed west.  Every now and then we had to double back on
ourselves as we encountered the infected.  Often there were only one or two,
occasionally there would be a dozen or so and one time we saw a swarm of a few hundred. 
That made us think that they were spreading out from the city in greater
numbers.

Our route took us past Wembley and
out to West Drayton.  From there we were forced south after almost running into
another large group which were heading from the Slough area.  We dodged past
Heathrow Airport and could see that it was completely overrun by them.  There
were thousands of them roaming around inside the perimeter fence.

We kept going and found ourselves
outside the town of Staines, where we stopped and I checked a map which Sophie
had found in the glove compartment. 

‘What do you think?’ she asked. 

The last news broadcast had told us
the government was operating from Windsor Castle.  I, somewhat naively, thought
they would let us in if we turned up, but Sophie almost immediately discounted
the idea.

‘If you think they’ll open the gates
of Windsor and welcome us in, you’re more stupid than you look.’

It was to the point.  That was
something I was to find out about her over the coming weeks.  She was direct. 
She said what she thought.  I wasn’t used to that.  I had been used to my wife,
who was more submissive I suppose, but I got used to the way that Sophie talked
and expressed herself really quickly.

‘What do you think then?’ I asked.

She looked at the map.

‘Ever been on a roller coaster?’ she
asked.

Was she completely crazy?  We were
being hunted by the dead and she wanted to go to a theme park.

‘I think we are getting enough thrill
rides as it is,’ I retorted.

‘I’m kidding,’ she said, pointing at
the map, just south of where we were.  ‘I don’t mean we should go there for
fun, but there might be other survivors there.  And there will be food.  Junk,
admittedly, but think of it.  Hot dogs.’

‘I don’t eat pork,’ I said.

‘Okay, burgers,’ she said.  ‘And
don’t give me that halal crap.  I know you’re not that religious.’

There was some merit to the plan. 
The chances of survivors being there were as good as anywhere else.  And if
there weren’t any we could eat and rest for a few hours, before moving on.  We
made an agreement that if there were any infected at all, we would leave and
look for something else.

It was an eerie sight.  The place,
which would normally have been full of happy people, was now deserted.  At
least of the living.  There were dead bodies at the entrance gates.  They
looked like they were a mixture of infected and uninfected, but it was
difficult to tell.

Inside the park there were more. 
Clouds of flies rose from bloated corpses as we passed them and we had to cover
our mouths from the foul reek.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.  ‘I’m not hungry
anymore and I have really bad feeling about this place.’

We were about to turn around to
leave, when Sophie stopped.

‘Do you hear that?’ she asked.

I strained my ears.  I could hear
something, then it stopped.  We stayed still for a few moments and there it was
again.  It was like a train on a track.

‘One of the rides is working,’ she
said.  ‘There must be people here.’

We listened for a few more minutes. 
It was definitely one of the rides.  I had been to enough theme parks to
recognise the sound.  Sophie ran off in the direction of the noise before I
could stop her.  I went after her, partly because I didn’t want any harm to
come to her and partly because I didn’t want to be left alone.  The park was
making me uneasy.  Why on earth, when the world was falling apart, would people
be riding roller coasters?  They must have been mad.