Dead Stop (3 page)

Difference was, they couldn’t see the ghosts, and I could. And being able to see a ghost ahead, I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t run right through him. It was the sensible thing to do, mainly to not blow my cover as a perfectly sane human being, but I could not do it—my instincts forced me to swerve around the ghost.

The laughter of the other kids, the muttered insults involving disparaging terms for the disabled, that was fine. They just thought I couldn’t run straight, just another way I was shit at sport. I could handle that.

What I couldn’t handle was this medieval ghost, this long dead yokel who had presumably been wandering this ground bewildered for centuries, noticing me avoiding him.

‘Ye cunte-beten chirl! Wol I cutten youre balan of!’ he shouted as I dodged past. His words were incoherent, but I thought I recognised at least one word in there, and his surprise and outrage was clear enough.

Struck with fear, I kept running, past third base and then back to the batting position. There was a muted, mocking cheer, but
oh, shit
I hadn’t been caught out yet, so I needed to keep going.

Where was that
fucking
ball? I hadn’t hit it that hard.

‘I caughte youre moder by the queynte.’

What was that about my mother?

As I ran towards the ghost for a second time, I saw with growing horror that he was beginning to pull himself up out of the ground, as if my observation of him was connecting him to the world as it was, rather than the world as he remembered it.

‘Ye saucefleem shit! What kynde heer shape have ye!’

Well, the rest was garbled but I knew what a ‘shit’ was.

A couple of years later I’d learn about how the observation of a phenomenon can actually change it, which didn’t make the fact that it happened—and would keep happening in the future—any more pleasant, but was kind of interesting.

Thank you for that, Mr Heisenberg. You may not have intended your theories to cover the undead, but they do.

In that moment, I could barely think, a ghost was staggering towards me babbling swearwords like a very drunk, very angry Chaucer, and then I was stumped out and I ran like fuck, away from the field and straight out of the school gates, medieval swears following behind me along with the more modern curses of my teammates.

It wasn’t the best school day.

‘N
OW
,’
SNAPPED
M
ELISSA,
and I thrust myself through the gap where the window had been. I tried not to think about nearby zombies as I dangled, balancing half-in and half-out of the window, a couple of metres off the ground.

My hands scrabbled against the prefab outer wall, and I shuffled myself around so that I was kind of lying on my back, and my fingers could reach the gutter above me. The wall I was leaning on was only a few inches thick, so I was pivoting with pretty much my whole body weight resting on a tiny part of my spine.

It was agony, and by comparison the cuts I was sustaining from fragments of glass and wood splinters as I shuffled around were nothing.

I could hear a low moaning nearby. My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the darkness, and hanging like this was making me nauseous and blurry-eyed.

From inside the window, currently blocked by my own body, I could hear a muffled crash.

Feet kicking aimlessly, trying to use the ceiling inside to push myself, I wriggled out of the window as fast as I could, pulling myself up and out towards the roof, not sure whether the zombies outside or the one indoors would get me first.

F
IRST CONTACT WITH
a ghost wanting to talk to me was the worst, which is not to say that my second, third and so on contacts were a picnic.

Eventually I did try and hold down conversations with some of them, but all I got was incoherent bitterness and circular rambling, petty complaints preserved and looped in a timeless state outside of life.

If that sounds cod-profound, I apologise, but I’ve had a long time not telling people any of this, during which I’ve had plenty of opportunity to perfect the phrasing in my mind.

Anyway, through school and then college and then work I became more aware of the spirit world and its quirks, but even more eager to stay away from it. I learned to avoid not just cemeteries and old buildings, but anywhere that’s been densely populated for any amount of time at all.

Staying away from the dead meant staying away from the living, so I found myself a dull IT niche that allowed me to work from home in my nice boring newtown box of a house where no one had even really lived, never mind died.

I breathed, I ate, I slept. I avoided ghosts, and tried to ignore them when I couldn’t avoid them altogether.

I
T’S A TRUTH
universally acknowledged that most people wish they went to the gym more, as Jane Austen would doubtless have said if she’d been a fatty with a desk job. I was no exception, although in my case ‘more’ meant ‘at all.’ It was therefore a surprise even to me that I managed to lever myself out of the window and on to the relative safety of the diner roof.

It was a flat roof, an expanse of dark grey tiles stuck together with tar. It had been raining, and shallow puddles revealed where the roof was beginning to sink. Specks of grit in the roof surface glittered, reflecting the light from the ‘Diner’ sign shining down on us.

Catching my breath, I gingerly worked my way around the roof, peeking over the edge; holding back, so that, hopefully, anything I saw wouldn’t see me before I had a chance to duck down again.

‘They like the light,’ said Melissa, crossing the dodgy looking patches of rooftop with the lack of concern you’d expect from someone who didn’t actually weigh anything. ‘Maybe their eyes fail first?’

She seemed to be right. Under the glare of the diner’s rotating neon sign, a number of zombies were milling around, stumbling across the car park outside the diner. There were at least a dozen, and while they shambled about in all directions, they didn’t seem to stray too far from the single solitary car, which presumably belonged to the owner of the diner. Even if I could get back into the diner—the periodic crashing from below seemed to suggest that wasn’t a good idea—and somehow find the keys, there was no way I was getting to the car safely.

It seemed like Melissa’s plan was still my best option.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Where do we go from here?’

SOMEHOW, HALF MY
life passed like this and I found that I hadn’t lived much, but neither had I really spent any of the money I’d earned. Heading towards thirty-five, my biblical half-way marker, I could afford to do something indulgent, if only I could think of something I actually wanted.

What I wanted, I realised, was to get away from this crammed little island layered with history and generation after generation of dead bastards, and go somewhere open and under-populated with scattered towns that had only been around for a century or so. A wilderness, but one I could drive through.

America seemed the place, a road trip the thing. Which is how I found myself driving down the long back roads of the United States, bothered only by the occasional accident victim haunting the roadside and the dead fatties lurking in the booths and toilet cubicles of the diners where they had gobbled down their last, fatal burger.

It wasn’t perfect, but I could go for hours without seeing anyone dead or alive, sometimes. It was relaxing. It was nice. I felt away from myself and my usual problems.

Until my car broke down and I walked along a deserted road to that rest stop in the shadow of the tall trees, as night fell, walked into the empty diner where I called for a tow, got some food and sat down to eat.

You know the rest.

M
ELISSA DRIFTED ACROSS
the roof and pointed to a string of lights in between the trees.

‘That’s a private road connecting the highway to the facility. Well lit, direct. Considering how many zombies I saw wandering up that road, I suggest we avoid it altogether.’ Her tone was businesslike, and remarkably calm considering the grotesque situation we were in.

And the fact she was dead.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘What do you suggest instead?’

Melissa pointed slightly to the left of where she had before, to the impenetrable darkness of the woods.

‘Drop off the back by the bins, get into darkness as soon as you can,’ she said. ‘Keep away from well-lit areas for as long as possible.’

A wilderness trek through the woods in pitch darkness, with the ravenous dead wandering around somewhere, as well as... god knows; this being America, probably wolves or bears or something.

This was just getting better with every moment.

CHAPTER THREE

A
MERICAN READERS MAY
find it hard to appreciate how difficult it is to get truly, dangerously lost in Britain.

Yes, there are moors and dales where if you get stuck overnight in bad weather you can freeze to death, and if you walk up a mountain in the dark there’s always ways to do yourself an injury that will kill you before you’re found.

That’s a rough time in a dangerous place, a really bad few hours. In terms of properly, actually getting lost in the wilderness for days on end, the Isles I grew up on are too damn small for that, and there are very few places you can’t get out of by just walking in a straight line for a day.

So, for the benefit of British readers, let me explain that America really does have wildernesses, places you can get lost in for days and weeks, where you can get lost and never be found.

I knew that when I booked my trip. Christ, it was part of the appeal of the country, for someone like me who has damn good reason to steer clear of areas where many people have lived and died.

But... I hadn’t intended to get lost myself. I wanted to stick to the roads, sleep in motels with proper beds and a shower or bath, and live like a human being while getting away from it all.

I like modern life. If I ever get around to buying that remote island of mine, you can be sure I would get the plumbers and electricians in to sort it all out before beginning my hermitage. I’m not a savage.

I don’t
camp
.

Which is all to say that, while I ran into the woods knowing some of the risks—that I could trip on a branch, bleed out and be found as a skeleton decades later, unmolested by zombies but still very much dead—I also knew that there were plenty of risks I was dangerously unaware of, and certainly wasn’t prepared to deal with.

My new spectral buddy, with her close-cut suit and neatly manicured fingernails, didn’t strike me as someone with a bounty of outdoorsy survivor knowledge to share. Melissa had plenty of incentive to keep saving my life so that I could end hers, but that didn’t mean she was going to be any use helping me survive in the wild.

It was worth a try, though.

‘H
OW WELL DO
you know these woods?’ I asked, carefully testing my footing with each step. I couldn’t see a damn thing in the dark, so I was being as tentative as possible, not that it would be much use if I stood on a sinkhole or poacher’s trap or just fell over a tree root and broke my leg.

‘I’ve never been out here,’ said Melissa. Her ghostly body was glowing lightly, but didn’t project any light outwards—I could see her perfectly, but couldn’t use her light to see my surroundings any better. They remained a whole lot of pitch black.

‘I thought you worked here,’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you ever come out here for a walk, get some exercise?’

‘We had a gym,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I know a lot of ways on and off the site, and I can tell you a couple of places nearby our security guys were interested in, but I don’t know these woods at all.’

‘Some bloody use you are,’ I said, stumbling slightly but righting myself before I fell.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, not seeming to take offence. ‘I’ll warn you if you’re about to walk into anything.’

‘You can see in this light?’