Class Four: Those Who Survive (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Fuck’s sake, why do people leave next to no toilet roll?” Dee grumbled to herself. She squatted above the bucket which had resonated with her ablutions. She looked around the cubicle to see if she could find any discarded sheets to complete the job.

BANG-BANG-BANG

Dee held her breath, before shouting, “Oi, fuck off! I’m having a dump in here. There’s plenty of others, you know.”

“Mind you, if you find any bog roll can you chuck some over?”

Silence.

BANG-BANG-BANG

“Seriously, use another one.”

The door exploded in a flash of cordite, pellets, and shards of desiccated wood. Dee was slammed against the back wall. Her head struck the bottom of the cistern, making her chin crack against her breastbone. Her buttocks sank into the metal bucket which was buried inside the bowl.

The world felt like it had caved in. Dee struggled to lift her head. She could feel a ridge of bruising already rising on the back of her skull. There was a loud buzzing, which was not helping the freshly manifested headache in the slightest. She managed to look up to a figure which seemed shrouded in the gloom.

“Hello Dee,” a gentle woman’s voice cooed. “It took me a while, but I remembered in the end.”

The figure stepped into her visual spectrum, the smoking shotgun barrel appeared first. A small hand gripped it halfway down. Sylvia followed shortly after; she raised the gun and aimed at Dee’s face.

“Wait…” Dee mustered through a fat lip and a few broken teeth. She raised a hand towards the woman.

“I can’t believe I didn’t remember that it was you that broke into our new home. That it was
you
that shot and killed my husband. My Donald,” Sylvia said calmly.

Dee tried to push herself up, but was firmly entrenched within the bucket. She could feel a drip-dripping from the back of her hair onto the toilet seat.

Feeble hands slipped off the edge of the bucket rim, and she raised her hands in defence. “It was after that other place. I was…I was still in shock. I didn’t…didn’t
mean
to. He was a deader, though, he was—”

Pieces of porcelain, bone, and a jet of blood sprayed over the confines of the toilet. Sylvia thumbed the release; the expended shells landed and rolled along the floor, coming to a rest against the toe of Dee’s scuffed boot. A gasping and desperate slurping was the chorus to the shotgun verse.

A howling came shortly afterwards as Dee clutched her leg; cold fingers pried into the ruin of it, disappearing into the tattered remnants of her kneecap. The skin and muscle had been shorn away by the blast; chewed up veins spat blood into the air.

Sylvia slowly reached into her trouser pocket and pulled out two more shotgun shells. “He was my husband, Dee. He was my Donald. We were doing fine on our own, thank you very much. I read to him, he even helped me with my puzzles. He was perfect. Just like he used to be.”

The first shell dropped in. Dee tried to stem the bleeding. Making a ring with her fingers above the remains of her knee, she squeezed. “FUCK,” she bellowed. Gritting her teeth merely dislodged another molar.

“Then
you
came along, and in a few seconds, you took away everything that I had left in the world. Everything that I loved and treasured. My Donald was no angel, but he was still mine. He was all I had. You had no right to take him from me, to kill him.”

The second shell slid into place. Sylvia cracked the breech shut. Content that it had closed properly, she lifted the barrels up to Dee’s chest.

“Plea…pl…please
Sylvia
…” Dee coughed. “…I didn’t mean…”

Sylvia placed the hot barrels’ point against Dee’s skin, a few inches below the base of her throat. “Don’t worry, dear, I’ll let you come back. You deserve to be dead, to live in purgatory for what you’ve done.”

Both barrels catapulted Dee back the last few feet against the wall; her head once again smacked into the base of the cistern. A loud crack heralded broken vertebrae. A large smoke-filled crater took up most of where her chest used to be. The smell of burnt meat and flash-boiled blood filled the air. In a wide arc around where she sat was a pool of liquefied flesh and bone.

Dee’s body sunk into the bucket further. Her legs tucked up against her body. As they rose, the bottom half of her destroyed leg hung on by tendrils of skin, before the earth called dibs and it dropped to the floor, oozing blood onto the white tiled floor.

“What have you done?”

Sylvia span around and looked into Andy’s distraught face. “You
knew
. You
knew
what she did, and yet you covered for her. When I was lying in that bed after you brought me back here, I couldn’t remember what happened. I
asked
you, and you said that my Donald had died. It didn’t feel right, but I couldn’t remember, so I took you at your word.”

Andy was still looking at the crumpled body in the toilet. “She was all over the place that day. She went into that shop to try and redeem herself, that’s what she said. Before I knew it she had shot him. You came tumbling down the stairs. Dee…she…she nearly shot you there and then. We got you back here, to look after you.”

Sylvia wiped a hand across her face. Droplets of sticky blood smeared across her pale skin. “I DIDN’T WANT TO BE LOOKED AFTER. Not by you. Or
her.
I wanted my Donald. He was the only thing I ever wanted, and
you two
took him away from me. That’s why I did this.” Sylvia grabbed her left sleeve and yanked it up, revealing a four inch scar running inside her forearm. It looked like someone had sewn a skewer under her skin.

“LOOK AT IT! This is what I did, this is what you two made me do. I didn’t want to come here. I wanted to be left alone with my Donald. You’re as bad as her, aren’t you?”

Sylvia levelled the gun at Andy, who raised his hands and edged out onto the factory floor. “Please Sylvia…please d—”

CLICK

Sylvia smiled slyly. “Bang.”

Andy, who had shielded his face with his arms, lowered them slowly. “Hang on, that’s one of the guns from the armoury. How did you get it? There’s always a guard stationed there?”

Sylvia started to reload. “There were no guards there a minute ago, I saw your girlfriend come in here so thought I’d pay her a little visit. Make her into one of them.”

A thud announced Dee’s rebirth as she landed on one good knee and one ragged stub. The partially-filled bucket hit the side of the Formica cubicle with a loud clang. Unable to walk, her arms worked their way out in front of her broken body and started trying to pull her toward the humans. She looked like a cross between Sadako and a snail with a metal shell.

Her head hung against her body, the neck a mass of broken bone. Hands slapped against the bloody floor trying to gain some purchase on the slick tiles.

The rapier slid from Andy’s belt as blood-drenched hands ran up his legs. He turned Dee’s head to one side with a boot and ran the blade through her temple. Dead hands patted the floor before the human zombie snail fell to one side, life extinguished.

Andy looked over to the corner of the factory where the armoury was. He couldn’t see anyone. “But, how can there be…”

Heavy booted feet stomped down the stairs. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, The Gaffer stormed across the floor towards the main entrance. “Andy, you’re with me. We have guests, and not the kind who bring biscuits and tea round with them.”

Andy looked at Sylvia one last time. she seemed at peace, nonchalantly reloading the shotgun. “Gaffer, someone’s taken out the armoury gu—”

“Mate, we’ve been royally fucked. A snake in our midst. Tom Thompson mentioned something the other day, but had no idea how they did it.” The Gaffer pushed the main door open with the end of the parking meter.

“Fuck me,” Andy uttered; mental checkpoints failed in their duty.

They were met with a wall of grey faces. Dead eyes locked onto them, jaws agape. Some chattered teeth in anticipation of a meal, others let out a deep moan to signal to their chums that a midnight snack was indeed served. “Very possibly, Andy, I think we’ve all been fucked. Rouse who you can. We will need as many people as possible…”

Andy nodded and turned back into the factory. “…even then, it might not be enough,” The Gaffer finished, before he marched out of the double doors and stood before the undead flood.

The doors seemed to recoil in terror at the sight that greeted them and closed slowly behind The Gaffer. A semi-circle of zombies surrounded him. For as far as he could see, there were gore-covered faces; most were damaged in some way or other. Patches of skin had been torn off, eyes hung slack from sockets like pocket watches resting, mouths shorn of lips displayed rows of cracked, yellowing pegs of ivory and slabs of exposed gum.

The moaning was interrupted by a loud huffing and the sound of displaced air, metal slapping dead skin and cracking bones. A wild swing cleared a ten foot swathe in front of him. Row two surged towards him, some tripping over their broken brethren and smacking into the concrete.

The Gaffer was a small crustacean in an ocean of groping hands and vacant stares. Those at the back, sensing a wait, strolled past the entrance in search of other means of reaching the building and the buffet within.

A backhand volley took out another row of the dead. A small knee- high wall of crumpled, deflated carcasses formed a small, but completely ineffective, barrier between those without a pulse and the one with a quickening one.

“C’mon, you dead fucks! You can do better than this,” The Gaffer bellowed. An overhead smash on the skull of a sneaky bastard trying to claw up his leg sent an explosion of rippled worms of brain and jigsaw pieces of skull in a wide arc.

Adopting the disposition of a spinning top, he whirled into the centre of the swarm. Broken bodies were cast aside as if they were animals meeting a tornado. His momentum came to a gradual halt. He looked back to see a trail of destruction leading from the doors and towards the gates, where the undead still ambled through.

The zombies paid their losses no heed. No sooner had a gap been created than they surged back into the void. They walked over their fallen kin, desperate to bring down the walking meat lollipop and feast.

He fended them off with short, abrupt swipes and jabs. His brain filled his tiring limbs with endorphins, trying to jack him up to superhuman means.