Zombies: The Recent Dead (16 page)

“We’ll eat when we get to Tewton,” his dad said from up ahead.

“And I’m thirsty.”
No food, no drink
 . . . 
no people at all. Death; we could die out here
.

“When we get to Tewton, Jackie,” his dad said, more forcefully than before. He turned around and Jack could see how much he had changed, even over the last hour. The extraordinary had been presented to him, thrust in his face in the form of a gang of dead people, denying disbelief. Unimaginable, impossible, true.

“I expect those people just wanted help, Dad.” He knew it was crazy even as he said it—he
knew
they’d wanted more than that; he had seen the fresh blood—but maybe the idea would drain some of the strain from his dad’s face. And maybe a lie could hide the truth, and help hold back his mother’s pain, and bring Mandy back to them where she belonged, and perhaps they were only on a quiet walk in the country . . .

“Come on, son,” his father said, and Jack did not know whether he meant
move along
, or
give me a break
. Whatever, he hated the air of defeat in his voice.

My dad, failing
, he thought.
Pulling away from things already, falling down into himself. What about Mum? What about me?

Who’s going to protect us?

They had crossed one field and were nearing the edge of another when Jack suddenly recognized with their surroundings. To the left stood an old barn, doors rotted away and ivy making its home between the stones. The ivy was dead now, but still it clotted the building’s openings, as if holding something precious inside. To the right, at the far corner of the field, an old metal plough rusted down into the ground. He remembered playing war here, diving behind the plough while Jamie threw mud grenades his way,
ack
-
ack
-
acking
a stream of machine gun fire across the field, crawling through the rape crop and plowing their own paths towards and away from each other. Good times, and lost times, never to be revisited; he felt that now more than ever. Lost times.

“I know this place!” he said. “There’s a pond over there behind that hedge, with an island in the middle and everything!” He ran to the edge of the field, aiming for the gate where it stood half-open.

“Jack, wait!” his dad shouted, but Jack was away, cool breeze ruffling his hair and lifting some of the nervous sweat from his skin. The crinkle of shoots beneath his feet suddenly seemed louder and Jack wanted nothing more than to get out onto the road, leave these dead things behind, find a car or thumb a lift into Tewton where there would be help, where there had to be help, because if there wasn’t then where the hell
would
there be help?

Nowhere. There’s no help anywhere. The thought chilled him but he knew it was true, just as he had known that there were dead people around the corner of the field—

—just as he knew that there was something very, very wrong here as well. He could smell it already, a rich, warm tang to the air instead of the musty smell of death they had been living with all morning. A
fresh
smell. But he kept on running because he could not do anything else, even though he knew he should stay in the field, knew he
had
to stay in the field for his own good. He had played here with Jamie, they had shared good times here so it must be a good place.

Jack darted through the gate and out onto the pitted road.

The colors struck him first. Bright colors in a landscape so dull with death.

The car was a blazing yellow, a metal banana his mum would have called it, never lose that in a car park she would say. Inside the car sat a woman in a red dress, and inside the woman moved something else, a squirrel, its tail limp and heavy with her blood. The dress was not all red, he could see a white sleeve and a torn white flap hanging from the open door, touching the road.

Her face had been ripped off, her eyes torn out, her throat chewed away.

There was something else on the road next to the car, a mass of meat torn apart and spread across the tarmac. Jack saw the flash of bone and an eyeless head and a leg, still attached to the bulky torso by strands of stuff, but they did not truly register. What he did see and understand were the dozen small rodents chewing at the remnants of whatever it had been. Their tails were long and hairless, their bodies black and slick with the blood they wallowed in. They chewed slowly, but not thoughtfully, because there could not have been a single thought in their little dead minds.

“Dad,” Jack gasped, trying to shout but unable to find a breath.

More things lay further towards the pond, and for a terrible moment Jack thought it was another body that had been taken apart (because that’s what he saw, he knew that now, his mind had permitted understanding on the strict proviso that he—)

He turned and puked and fell to his knees in his own vomit, looking up to see his father standing at the gate and staring past him at the car.

Jack looked again, and he realized that although the thing further along the road had once been a person—he could see their head, like a shop dummy’s that had been stepped on and covered in shit and set on fire so the eyes melted and rolled out to leave black pits—there was no blood at all, no wetness there. Nothing chewed on these sad remains.

Dead already when the car ran them over. Standing there in the road, dead already, letting themselves be hit so that the driver—he had been tall, good looking, the girl in his passenger seat small and mouse-like and scared into a gibbering, snotty wreck—would get out and go to see what he had done. Opening himself up to attack from the side, things darting from the ditches and downing him and falling on him quickly . . . and quietly. No sound apart from the girl’s screams as she saw what was happening, and then her scream had changed in tone.

When they’d had their fill, they dragged themselves away to leave the remains to smaller dead things.

“Oh God, Dad!” Jack said, because he did not want to know any more. Why the hell should he? How the hell did he know what he knew already?

His dad reached down and scooped him up into his arms, pressing his son’s face into his shoulder so he did not have to look any more. Jack raised his eyes and saw his mother walk slowly from the field, and she was trying not to look as well. She stared straight at Jack’s face, her gaze unwavering, her lips tensed with the effort of not succumbing to human curiosity and subjecting herself to a sight that would live with her forever.

But of course she looked, and her liquid scream hurt Jack as much as anything ever had. He loved his mum because she loved him, he knew how much she loved him. His parents had bought him a microscope for Christmas and she’d pricked her finger with a needle so that he could look at her blood, that’s how much she loved him. He hated to hear her scared, hated to see her in pain. Her fear and agony were all his own.

His father turned and ushered his mum down the road, away from the open banana car with its bright red mess, away from the bloody dead things eating up what was left. Jack, facing back over his dad’s shoulder, watched the scene until it disappeared around a bend in the road. He listened to his father’s labored breathing and his mother’s panicked gasps. He looked at the pale green hedges, where even now hints of rot were showing through. And he wanted to go home.

“Are you scared, Jack?” Mandy had asked.

“No,” he said truthfully.

“Not of me,” she smiled. “Not of Mum and Dad and what’s happening, that’ll sort itself out. I mean
ever
. Are you ever scared, of things. The dark, spiders, death, war, clowns? Ever, ever, ever?”

Jack went to shake his head, but then he thought of things that did frighten him a little. Not outright petrified, just disturbed, that’s how he sometimes felt. Maybe that’s what Mandy meant.

“Well,” he said, “there’s this thing on telly. It’s
Planet of the Apes
, the TV show, not the film. There’s a bit at the beginning with the gorilla army man, Urko, his face is on the screen and sometimes it looks so big that it’s
bigger
than the screen, it’s really in the room, you know? Well . . . I hide behind my hands.”

“But do you peek?”

“No!”

“I’ve seen that program,” Mandy said, even though Jack was pretty sure she had not. “I’ve seen it, and you know what? There’s nothing at all to be scared of. I’ll tell you why: the bit that scares you is made up of a whole bunch of bits that won’t. A man in a suit; a camera trick; an actor; a nasty voice. And that man in the suit goes home at night, has a cup of tea, picks his nose and goes to the toilet. Now that’s not very scary, is it?”

Even though he felt ill Jack giggled and shook his head. “No!” He wondered whether the next time he watched that opening sequence, he’d be as scared as before. He figured maybe he would, but in a subtly different way. A grown-up way.

“Fear’s made up of a load of things,” she said, “and if you know those things . . . if you can
name
them . . . you’re most of the way to accepting your fear.”

“But what if you don’t know what it is? What if you can’t say what’s scaring you?”

His sister looked up at the ceiling and tried to smile, but she could not. “I’ve tried it, over the last few days,” she whispered. “I’ve named you, and Mum, and Dad, and the woods, and what happened, and you . . . out there in the woods, alone . . . and loneliness itself. But it doesn’t work.” She looked down at Jack again, looked straight into his eyes. “If that happens then it
should
be scaring you. Real fear is like intense pain. It’s there to warn you something’s truly wrong.”

I hope I always know
, Jack thought.
I hope I always know what I’m afraid of
.

Mandy began singing softly. Jack slept.

“Oh no! Dad, it’s on fire!”

They had left the scene of devastation and towards the farm they’d spotted earlier, intending to find something to eat. It went unspoken that they did not expect to discover anyone alive at the farm. Jack only hoped they would not find anyone dead, either.

They paused in the lane, which was so infrequently used that grass and dock leaves grew in profusion along its central hump. Insipid green grass and yellowed dock now, though here and there tufts of rebellious life still poked through. The puddled wheel ruts held the occasional dead thing swimming feebly.

Jack’s dad raised his binoculars, took a long look at the farm and lowered them again. “It’s not burning. Something is, but it’s not the farm. A bonfire, I think. I think the farmer’s there, and he’s started a bonfire in his yard.”

“I wonder what he could be burning,” Jack’s mother said. She was pale and tired, her left arm tucked between the buttons of her shirt to try to ease the blood loss. Jack wanted to cry every time he looked at her, but he could see tears in her eyes as well, and he did not want to give her cause to shed any more.

“We’ll go and find out.”

“Dad, it might be dangerous. There might be . . . those people there. Those things.”
Dead things
, Jack thought, but the idea of dead things walking still seemed too ridiculous to voice.

“We need food, Jack,” his dad said, glancing at his mother as he said it. “And a drink. And some bandages for your mum, if we can find some. We need help.”

“I’m scared, why can’t we just go on to Tewton?”

“And when we get there, and there are people moving around in the streets, will you want to hold back then? In case they’re the dead things we’ve seen?”

Jack did not answer but he shook his head, because he knew his dad was right.

“I’ll go on ahead slightly,” his dad said, “I’ve got the gun. That’ll stop anything that comes at us. Jack, you help your mum.”

Didn’t stop the other people
, Jack thought.
And you couldn’t shoot at Mrs. Haswell, could you Dad? Couldn’t shoot at someone you knew
.

“Don’t go too fast,” his mum said quietly. “Gray, I can’t walk too fast. I feel faint, but if I walk slowly I can keep my head clear.”

He nodded then started off, holding the shotgun across his stomach now instead of dipped over his elbow. Jack and his mother held back for a while and watched him go, Jack thinking how small and scared he looked against the frightening landscape.

“You all right, Mum?”

She nodded but did not turn her head. “Come on, let’s follow your Dad. In ten minutes we’ll be having a nice warm cup of tea and some bread in the farmer’s kitchen.”

“But what’s he burning? Why the bonfire?”

His mother did not answer, or could not. Perhaps she was using all her energy to walk. Jack did the only thing he could and stayed along beside her.

The lane crossed a B-road and then curved around to the farmyard, bounded on both sides by high hedges. There was no sign of any traffic, no hint that anyone had come this way recently. Jack looked to his left where the road rose slowly up out of the valley. In the distance he saw something walk from one side to the other, slowly, as if unafraid of being run down. It may have been a deer, but Jack could not be sure.

“Look,” his mum said quietly. “Oh Jackie, look.”

There was an area of tended plants at the entrance to the farm lane, rose bushes pointing skeletal thorns skyward and clematis smothered in pink buds turning brown. But it was not this his mother was pointing at with a finger covered in blood; it was the birds. There were maybe thirty of them, sparrows from what Jack could make out, though they could just as easily have been siskins that had lost their color. They flapped uselessly at the air, heads jerking with the effort, eyes like small black stones. They did not make a sound, and that is perhaps why his father had not seen them as he walked by. Or maybe he had seen them and chosen to ignore the sight. Their wings were obviously weak, their muscles wasting. They did not give in. Even as Jack and his mother passed by they continued to flap uselessly at air that no longer wished to support them.