The Z Infection (34 page)

The noise subsided as a man at the
front raised his hand in the air.  He was wearing combat fatigues and was
carrying a fearsome looking club with several large nails protruding through
the end.  He must have been in his fifties and had medium length grey hair and
a pot belly.  Not exactly Alexander the Great, I thought, but I figured he must
be the leader of the group.

‘Where are you going friend?’ he
asked.

‘I’m heading west,’ I said.  ‘I’m
trying to find my wife.  I think she might have gone to Bath.’

There were a few murmurs in the
crowd.

‘Nothing in Bath anymore,’ said the
man, revealing a row of cracked teeth.  ‘It was evacuated yesterday.  So the
news said.  It was overrun.  There was a massacre.’

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but
it didn’t surprise me either.

‘Where were they evacuated to?’ I
asked.

‘South, I think,’ said the man.  ‘Big
evacuation going on at Bournemouth.  The navy are trying to save as many as
they can, but it’s hopeless.’

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. 
‘Don’t you know the infected are attracted to noise.’

‘Infected?’ said the man.  There was
a cackle of laughter from behind him.  ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

I shook my head.  ‘Not since late
last night.’

‘Oh?’ he said.  ‘They’re not infected
any longer.  So the government tell us.  They tell us now that they’re dead
people.’

‘Risen to take us all to hell with
them,’ said a voice from behind.

‘Dead?’ I asked.

He nodded.  ‘Only way to kill them is
to pierce their brain,’ he smiled.  ‘That’s what we intend to do to them.’

‘Well keep making all that noise and
you’ll get plenty of chances,’ I said.

‘That’s the whole idea,’ said a
woman.  ‘Attract them to us and kill them.’

‘It’s what the government told us to
do,’ said the man.  ‘We are the front line.  We have to fight them.’

I looked at them.  Some were just
children.  Many were quite old.  Too old to be fighting a mediaeval style
battle.  They would be exhausted in minutes.  It was suicide.

‘Look,’ I said.  ‘This is just
crazy.  This isn’t the place to be fighting a pitched battle.  They will come
in their thousands.  You are only a couple of hundred.’

‘We mean to do our bit,’ said the
man.  ‘You’re welcome to join us if you like.’

‘I prefer to live,’ I said.

There were more mutters and whispers
from the crowd. 

‘There is no living,’ said the man. 
‘Not while the dead roam the streets.  We could do with you.’

I was about to speak again, when
suddenly there was a shout from a woman in the crowd.  I turned to look in the
direction she was pointing and saw a group of infected.  There must have been
about twenty of them and they had been drawn to the noise.

‘Join us,’ said the man again. 

His eyes were wild, half mad.  I
wondered if he had been driven crazy by the events of the last few days.  I
looked at the others.  Many were afraid.  They looked exhausted and starving,
but they were prepared to fight.  I couldn’t cycle on and leave them, I
thought.  The plight was too desperate. 

I dismounted and a cheer went up as
someone from behind handed me a long pole with a sharpened piece of metal
firmly attached to the end.

The twenty or so infected had been
joined by another few and they walked towards us with their customary reckless disregard
for their own safety.  Someone threw a sharpened stick from the crowd.  It was
followed by a volley of missiles as more of them joined in.  Some of the
infected were hit by the projectiles, but they did little real damage.

As the first of the infected, a
woman, reached us, our leader rushed forward and swung his club at her head. 
The force was enough to make sure at least two of the nails went straight
through the side of her skull.  She stopped momentarily and for a second I
feared that she had survived the blow, but it was just a delayed reaction and
she slumped to her knees.

A cheer went up from our little army
and they charged at the rest of the dead, buoyed by their leader’s success. 
They cut and slashed at them and they fought back with their usual ferocity. 
It was butchery but it didn’t last long.  We were too many for the small group
and they were dispatched with ease.

Still we had casualties.  One young lad
received a nasty scratch on the arm and a woman was bitten on the shoulder. 
Neither would live.  They knew it themselves.  We all knew it.  Moments later
they were seized by convulsions.  They foamed at the mouth, writhed in agony
for a few minutes and finally expired.

‘Now they will come back to life, or
death,’ said the leader.  ‘Watch and you’ll see the rise.’

I had seen it before, but it still
fascinated me.  In minutes the two had gone from healthy adults to being dead,
to being, well, dead still, but somehow alive.

As they opened their eyes and began
to take in their surroundings their eyes came to see what was around them.  We
were their food now.

The leader gave a silent signal and
both were finished off with a ruthlessness that I found hard to comprehend. 
Those people had been our friends a moment before.  Now they were monsters, to
be killed without mercy.

‘More will come,’ I said.  ‘They will
come in numbers which you won’t be able to defeat.’

‘We are all ready to die,’ said the
leader.  ‘Every one of us.  Someone has to stand against them.’

‘I understand that,’ I said.  ‘I’m
not saying you shouldn’t fight, just don’t throw away your lives for no
reason.  There will be other fights you can win.’

Another shout went up from the
crowd.  More dead.  We looked to the edge of the park again.  This time there
were more of them.  Several dozen appeared, followed by a few dozen more, then
more.  And more.  And still more.

I caught my breath.  ‘There are
hundreds of them,’ I whispered.

There were a few despairing words
from some of the group.  The leader silenced them with a glower.

‘Anyone who doesn’t want to take part
is free to leave,’ he said.  ‘I choose to remain.’

He turned back to face the increasing
swarm.  There was no way he could win against those numbers.  He must have
known it.  But still he charged them swinging the club and slashing with the
knife until he entered the mass of bodies.  His followers paused, but only for
a moment, before they too charged into the mass.

They cut and slashed through the
dead, cutting them down in droves at first, until the numbers began to tell on
them.  I began to hear screams, as the living tired and succumbed to the dead. 
It was brutality beyond imagination as, one by one, the group were picked off
and killed.  The last man standing was the leader.  I saw him dragged to the
ground by a withered hand and disappear under a mountain of bodies as they each
seized their share of the meal.

I turned to the handful who had
chosen not to fight.

‘If you want to live, then I suggest
you run.’

Every one of them did, abandoning
their weapons and fleeing for their lives as line upon line of the dead marched
towards us.

I was the last to leave the field.  I
had seen enough.  The dead couldn’t be stopped like this, not in a face off. 
There were too many of them.  But I had been given an idea by what I had seen
and I was determined to try it out.

Anna Hasker

20:25 hours, Sunday 17
^th
May, Loch Leven,
Kinross-shire

Once I had Mike on board with the
plan, I knew it would be a winner.  He was competent when he put his mind to a
task, he just didn’t have a huge amount of confidence in his own abilities.

There had been twenty-five of us on
the island.  With the arrival of Tom and Laura we had another two.  We also had
another advantage now.  We had an aircraft.

I laid out my plans for the future. 
If we were to survive there, we needed several things.  Shelter and warmth was
imperative.  I had already talked Mike into the construction of homes and had
left him to the finer details.  There was enough dead wood on the island to
last for a considerable time and we could make other plans when that started to
run out.

The other things we would need were
weapons, food and water.  We were surrounded by water, that wasn’t a problem
and as long as we boiled it before use it should be okay.  Weapons and food
were a bigger problem.  Without weapons we were vulnerable, but without food we
would weaken quickly.  But without weapons we would find it difficult to fight
for the food we needed.

It was Dave who came up with the
solution.  He knew the area quite well.  There were numerous farmhouses in the
area and every one of them, he assured me, would have a gun cabinet with at
least a couple of weapons.  Most farmers would have a shotgun and a rifle to
deal with vermin.  It was just a case of finding them. 

I made the suggestion that we get as
many as we could and left Dave to work out the finer points of the enterprise. 
Food was my priority.

I gathered ten of the fittest people
we had and laid out my idea.  We would row across to the mainland in the boat
and divide into three groups.  One group, of just two people, would create a
diversion.  They would make as much noise as they could, to draw as many of the
infected away from the area we were going to operate in. 

Once it was clear, the rest of us
would go in.  A team of four would clear a house and allow the others to take
whatever food we could find from it, while they moved to the house next door. 
We would concentrate on recovering dried and tinned food and anything else
which wouldn’t go off.  We would carry on like this until we had cleared an
area.  All the food would then be transported back to the island.  It would be
dangerous and it would rely on us avoiding contact with the infected as much as
possible.  Any that were found would be put down on the spot.  The idea was
that we would get enough food to last us, to give us time to concentrate on
building houses and defences.

Once we had all agreed that the plan
was viable I asked for volunteers for each particular task.  Mike said he would
lead the strike team, as he called it.  I think he was happier, now that the
decision had been made.  He selected the two older men and a young woman called
Kate to assist him.  I decided to take part as the leader of the scavenging
group.  Laura, our new found pilot, and two other women volunteered to help
with that, while the two youngest men in the group would be the bait.

It was settled.  We would leave just
before dawn.

Dave had worked out his own plan.  He
had a rough idea of the farms that surrounded the loch and he had made a mental
note of each of them.  He was convinced that he would be able to visit at least
ten of them in the time we were going to be in the town.  He was well prepared,
with two good sized rucksacks to carry his plunder in.  He had also recruited
Tom, one of our other new arrivals and his dog.

‘Tom says the dog can smell the
infected,’ Dave said.

I raised an eyebrow.  ‘If that’s the
case he’ll be an amazing asset to us.’

We spent the night under the stars
again.  Lying there, looking up at the cosmos, it was hard to believe that much
had changed.  It hadn’t really, not in the great scheme of things.  We were
just another species facing extinction.  I couldn’t help but think, if there
were other life forms out there, in the Galaxy, would they miss us once we were
gone?

It was unlikely.

Claire Samson

06:45 hours, Monday 18
^th
May, Central
London

I had a headache when I finally woke
up.  I had fallen asleep on the sofa, while the two men got steadily drunk on
the bottle of whisky.  When they had finished it one of them switched on the
television.  The Prime Minister had been on, only he wasn’t the Prime Minister,
or hadn’t been.  He had talked about the current situation and said that the
infected were actually dead and there was no cure for them.  It seemed crazy
and the two of them argued drunkenly about it.  They were still arguing when I
fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes I had to think
for a moment.  What had happened?  I remembered I had gone downstairs to
collect the last bag of compost for the roof garden.  I had heard a noise
outside and had pushed the door open, just a fraction, to investigate.

The next thing I remembered was I had
been punched in the face.  It was all a blur after that.  I remembered being
dragged upstairs and through the door of the flat.  It was all hazy, but it was
coming back to me in bits and pieces.

Now the two men were both asleep.  I
tried to move but my arms and legs were bound together.  They must have trussed
me up when I was asleep.  I looked around the room.  There was no sign of
Xiaofan anywhere.

I tried to roll onto one side, but it
was hopeless.  I must have stayed like that for another hour, before the leader
woke up.  He stretched and yawned and rubbed his head.  He must have had a
stinking hangover.  I pretended I was asleep.