The Dying & The Dead 1: Post Apocalyptic Survival (8 page)

“You
better be careful.”

Bethelyn
helped him to his feet. He could stand, but his whole upper body felt as if it
had been crushed by rocks.

“Let’s
get back to your house,” said Bethelyn, and supported him out into the cold.

***

“Don’t
you have any candles?” she said.

He
looked around his living room. Maybe his dad had put some somewhere for
emergencies, but he and his father had never talked about that kind of stuff.
Their conversations were always about what Ed was doing at school and how he
needed to make sure he was better than all the other kids so he could get a job
on the mainland someday.

“Golgoth’s
not a place you come to live,” said his dad in one of his depressed moods.
“It’s a place you come to die.”

“What
about you?” said Ed. “You came here with mum.”

“We
came here because she loves the sea. I thought it was a fad.”

Ed’s
dad had been stubborn, but the one thing he always gave way to without question
was the will of Ed’s mum. She was the kind of woman who could sweet talk even
the gruffest of people, and it was rare the person who wouldn’t go out of their
way to please her.

In his
living room, in the dark, Ed suddenly wished he’d had those sorts of
conversations with his dad. That they hadn’t just had the same old talks in
which his dad asked him questions and Ed put the bare minimum of thought into
his answer. He wished he’d appreciated the guy while he was still here, that
he’d thought for a damn second how the old man probably wanted more out of his
son than someone who just took without thinking to give.

“Don’t
think we have any candles,” said Ed. “Sorry.”

“Okay,
Dracula,” said Bethelyn. She held a roll of tape in her hand. “I’m going to
have to do this in the dark.”

“I’ll
help.”

Ed
tried to get to his feet. His legs were willing but as he shifted his upper
body, his muscles groaned with pain. The feeling must have shown on his face
because Bethelyn stepped over to him and gently pushed him back.

“No
way pal. You sit back.”

As
Bethelyn walked from window to window and covered the glass with duct tape,
April perched on the arm of Ed’s chair. She put her hand on his arm and
squeezed. Ed felt his muscles burn.

“Not
so hard,” he said.

“Sorry,”
said the girl.

He
felt a wave of annoyance crash through his mind, but he let it go as quick as
it came. It wasn’t the girl’s fault. It was his own for breaking a lifelong
habit and trying to play the hero.

Bethelyn
stretched the tape across the window in a lop-sided line and bit off the end.
Outside, Golgoth resembled the surface of a hostile alien planet. The storm
intensified to a level Ed had thought it impossible to achieve, especially for
an island like Golgoth which, although never warm, lived in a meteorological
twilight zone where extreme weather seemed to escape it.

The
girl stared at him.

“Thanks,
Ed,” she said.

He
could tell from the look in her eyes and the way she held her bear close to her
that she really meant it. He wasn’t going to admit it, but it felt good.
Despite the agony in his arms and shoulders, the feeling of getting gratitude
was a pleasant one.

“Don’t
worry about it.”

Bethelyn
walked back into the room and threw the duct tape down onto the coffee table in
the centre. Her sleeves were rolled up despite the refrigerator-level of chill
in the house. She huffed and blew a stray lock of her hair out of her face.

“I see
your theme is consistent in the rest of the place,” she said. “You’re going for
the depressed-alcoholic-recluse kind of vibe.”

He
shifted in his seat, careful not to move any of his muscles too quickly.

“I’m
not much of a homebody.”

“But
you never seemed to leave it.”

Ed
looked away.

“Look,”
said Bethelyn. “I can tell you’re hoping I’ll shut the hell up. So I will,
about that. But I just wanted to say that I’m grateful for your help. You
didn’t have to let us stay at your place.”

“I’m
sorry about your house.”

Bethelyn
paused for a second in thought. “My attitude towards crap like this is that
what’s done is done. It isn’t going to help anyone if I show how totally fuc-“

She
stopped talking, aware that her daughter listened to every word.  She thought
of a better word to say and corrected herself.

“…how
bloody annoyed I am. I could punch a wall and break my hand, and that would
show how angry I am, or I could try and think things through and actually do
something. And that’s what I’m gonna do. Big displays of emotion are for soap
operas. Getting down on your knees and screaming ‘noooooooooo’ into the sky.
People don’t do that in real life.”

“You’re
a better person than me then.”

“No,
I’m not. I’m a better people-person, but not a better person.”

“You
hate us being here,” said April, staring at Ed.

“No I
don’t,” he said.

Bethelyn
took a seat on the spare chair.

“Come
on, Ed. You’ve barely spoken to me before and I’ve lived next to you for years.
Not even the end of the world forced you to knock on my door. I’m grateful for
what you’re doing, but you don’t have to pretend around me. I’m not easily
offended.”

“I
know.”

“Well
thanks, anyway. That’s all I wanted to say. You’re a better guy than you
think.”

The
pounding in Ed’s shoulders spread through his neck, over his face and settled
in his head. It felt like something was squeezing his brain, and the pain grew
until all the blood in his body had rushed to his skull and started to swell
against it. A particularly bad wave rushed through him, and he closed his eyes
and tried to ride it out.

“What’s
wrong?” said Bethelyn.

He put
his fingers to his temple. “My head’s throbbing” he said.

Another
wave of pain crashed through him, and he saw fuzzy dots in front of him. He
held tight onto the arms of his chair, scared he was going to pass out.

“I
didn’t want to complain, given how crappy you must be feeling, but I’ve had a
bad head myself. Think me and the madam are going to get some sleep,” said
Bethelyn.

She
took her daughter upstairs and left Ed alone in the dark room, his muscles
aching and his head throbbing. He shut his eyes and listened to the sounds of
the natural disaster outside and the wind as it blew through the cavities of
his old house. Despite the pain his body was tired, and slowly his brain began
to relax.

Something
banged so hard upstairs that his ceiling shook.
Not my roof too,
he
thought.
Two houses in one day?
Surely nobody is that unlucky
.
Then a voice shouted to him.

“Ed!”

It was
Bethelyn’s voice, and there was a twist of panic in it that he never expected
from her. He stood up from the chair but felt his stomach lurched with
something akin to sea sickness. No sooner was he on his feet that his legs felt
so light that he didn’t have control of them. They buckled underneath him, and
he fell forward and almost cracked his head on the coffee table as his body met
the floor.

He was
led on the carpet now. His arms and legs felt completely numb, as though they
were phantom limbs that didn’t belong to him anymore.

“Get
the hell up here Ed,” shouted a voice upstairs, but the sound of it faded.

He
tried to move but his vision was fading and his body shutting down. He pushed
against the feeling but knew it wouldn’t budge. Whatever it was, whatever was
happening upstairs, he couldn’t get there.

As his
vision became fuzzier and his head lighter, he knew it was useless to fight. He
was fading into nothing, and the world around him was fading too. He
surrendered to the numbness and felt the fingers of darkness close his eyelids.

5

Ed

A
spray of water woke him up. His eyes flickered as daylight hit them, and he
felt a breeze blowing on his skin. For a second it mixed with his
semi-conscious mind and took him back twenty years, to his older brother
sneaking through in the window of their shared bedroom at midnight, of getting
a waft of weed as James climbed clumsily into his bed opposite Ed’s. Pretending
to be asleep while his brother whispered his name, no doubt excited to tell him
what he’d been up to when mum and dad thought he was in bed.

Just
as quick as he’d come back, James was dead again, and Ed saw a spray of glass
on the living room floor from where the window had smashed. Bethelyn’s tape job
had kept the shards bigger than they would have been.

Pain
twisted in his temple as though wound in there by a sadist with a screwdriver.
He closed his eyes and tried his old hangover trick, which never worked, of
simply wishing the pain and nausea away. He pushed himself off the carpet and
sat up. He ran a hand through his hair and felt the grease that slicked his
locks. Something in the house stunk in the same way as a pub toilet an hour
before closing. He looked down at his pants and quickly realised it was him.

What
the hell?
He
hadn’t done that in years. Not since James and dad had taken him to the Dirty Feathers
for his sixteenth birthday and convinced the landlord, Des, to serve him a few
lagers. The night ended with James supporting Ed all the way home, tolerating
the drunk Ed’s swaying with a patience that every big brother probably learned
to develop.

Ed
blinked, and again James was gone.

Nobody
knew if James was dead, of course. Not officially. His boat had hit a storm too
big for the vessel to break through, and none of the crew had ever come ashore.
No sane person could look at the freezing sea, imagine the group of men sinking
beneath it, and hope that fate had taken pity on them. Ed had never seen the
body, but he’d let himself grieve because that was the only way he could cope.
Everyone talked about hope as though it was shining light that anyone could
follow, but sometimes that light led you into dark tunnels.

He
walked out of the living room and stretched a foot onto the stairs, but even
the slight movement made him dizzy. How long had he been out for? He’d hurt
himself in Bethelyn’s house when the roof crashed, but surely not this badly?

“Beth?”

Silence
met him at the top of the stairs. He gripped the edge of his bedroom door and
let it support him as he staggered into the room. What he saw locked his legs
in place.

They
could have been asleep if it weren’t for the fact their eyes were wide open.
April lay on the bed with her arms above her head and stretched along the bed.
Her chest rose and fell, but there was a stillness to her that you usually only
found in photographs. Her skin was grey like concrete dried in the sun.

Bethelyn
was on the floor next to the bed. She lay on her stomach with her face buried
in the carpet. Ed crossed the room and stood over her, but he couldn’t speak
and didn’t dare touch her. He hoped he was wrong, but he had an idea what had
happened. His stomach twisted.

They
could have been asleep.
They weren’t asleep
. The same thing happened to
him, after all. He hadn’t just fallen asleep naturally, yet some stretched out,
indeterminate time had passed and he had woken from it. It could have been
something to do with his injury. It could have been something, anything else,
but that was wishful thinking. The woman on his bedroom floor made it clear
that, no matter how empty it made him feel, this was exactly what he thought.

He
left the bedroom, climbed downstairs, passed through his living room and
stopped in his kitchen. Three knives hung from a metal rack and swung slowly in
the breeze. He tapped his finger along them and settled on the longest one. The
blade was wide, jagged, and there was enough handle to keep his hand away from
anything he chose to use it on. His dad used to cut pork shoulders with it. He
gripped the knife in one hand and leaned on the plastic-coated kitchen counter
with his other.

When
he thought of using it his throat dried up. What should he do about them?
Should he just kill them? He’d seen the early stages of the outbreak on
television. Shaky-cam films of infected as they walked through cities in
disorganised waves, their minds distracted by the still-alive hunks of flesh
that ran in all directions around them, screaming and shoving each other into harm’s
way.

The
public information newscasts had told him what to expect from infection. It had
told him that you caught it through a bite or scratch. That once you got it you
fell into a coma and then you awoke as one of them. How then, was Ed still
human enough to consider the question? What’s more, how the hell had he caught
the infection? He hadn’t been bitted and neither had Bethelyn or April.

He
thought again of having to go up there. There was a dim image in his mind of
what he needed to do, but he didn’t dare cast light on it. Instead there was
another answer, and he decided it lay outside of his house.

A walk
across the living room and out of the hallway later, he stood outside his house
and felt the tickle of a cool wind. The sky was light grey with cracks where
the blue shone through, and it seemed as though the bulk of the storm had gone and
left the rear-guard in its place.

He
walked up a cobble street which twisted through Golgoth and connected each
house. Further up, beyond a stone wall which had collapsed seven years ago and
was never fixed, he came to Gordon Rigby’s house. Rigby was an old-timer, an ex-headmaster
who had retired to Golgoth and let his mind grow as old as the island’s eroding
cliffs. He was a man who loved order but was slowly losing the ability to
achieve it. His fingers tugged on lots of webs, and Gordon had involved himself
in almost every social hobby and past time on the island. His brown hair, which
despite his age refused to grey, and jacket and waistcoat combination were
often seen at domino games and pub quizzes, at knitting circles and scouting
trips. He was also heavily involved in the town council, and ran it in the
manner of a school classroom.

Ed
stood outside Gordon’s house, and he saw signs of the order that Gordon
struggled to keep. Through his living room window he saw a wooden table set
against a wall with a chess set on it, but even from outside the house he could
see that the pieces were arranged so incorrectly that even Ed, who was asked to
leave after-school chess club, could have done better.

“What
am I doing?” said Ed to himself, hoping that someone else would answer.

He’d
never gotten on with Gordon. They didn’t hate each other, but there was no
fondness. Still, the old man was useful. He knew ‘man things’, those little
bits of knowledge that men over fifty somehow acquired but didn’t give any
clues as to how. Gordon was one of only two people on Golgoth who had keys to
the town hall and the survival stash Bethelyn had mentioned earlier, and he
might have had a slight clue of what the hell they were supposed to do.

The
handle of Gordon’s front door turned and his black door opened with Ed’s push.
Nobody bothered locking their doors on Golgoth. Even before the outbreak there
were those on the island who never bothered with security. Ed was something of
an outcast in that regard.

“Gordon?”

Ed
footsteps thudded on wooden flooring. Gordon’s house had been stripped back to
the bare essentials over the years. Dust lined the edges of the wooden panels
on the floor, and his walls were free from any plaster or paper so that the
original stonework of the cottage was bare. It gave the place a cold feel that
seemed designed to repel visitors.

This
was backed up by a smell that, as soon as he breathed it in, clung onto the
hairs in Ed’s nostrils. It was the smell of darkness, of something wrong. That
was the only way he could describe it. An aroma of wet earth and the things
buried in it, of dark bogs and rotten food and every other pungent smell that
his mind could conjure up. When Ed took a step forward it was almost like
stepping through a mist, and he felt the aroma latch onto his clothes.

“Jesus
Christ,” he said, and coughed into his sleeve.

He
stepped into the living room and saw a gathering of flies by the window, but it
was only when he was in the centre of the room that he saw the dead cat. It lay
pathetically on the floor, body ripped at the belly and pipe-like intensities
strewn on the ground. Its eyelids were open and its eyes stared at the ceiling.
Ed took a step back and heard a crunch, and when he looked to the floor he saw
a pile of dead flies squashed underneath his feet.

He
felt something bubble in his stomach and begin an ascent up into his throat,
burning a trail through his body as it went. He ran out of the house and into
the street. He bent over and waited for the vomit to come, but it wouldn’t.

You’re
pathetic,
said
a voice.

It was
a voice he heard a lot. It belonged to his father, though it hadn’t been used
in years. Despite how much he missed the old man, Ed knew that he’d fed him
enough insults and put downs to give him a complex that’d last years. Ed had
never measured up, never been the son that he should have been.

It had
always been so. As his childhood years passed and Ed’s body grew, he felt
himself shrink. It was weird seeing his father drawing lines on the living room
wall to mark Ed’s height, but knowing at the same time that he was never going
to measure up.

You
bastard.
This
time the voice was Ed’s.

You
screwed me up, but when James and I needed you, you left us. And even now I
can’t bring myself to hate you.

Ed
straightened up and was grateful for the tickle of cold on his face as the
temperature outdoors met his skin. He put his hand to his face and covered his
eyes. He had to think. Where was Gordon? What had he even wanted him for? It
wasn’t as if the old man could have done much to help. It was just shock that
carried him down here. That, and trying to avoid what he knew he was going to
have to do at home.

As if
summoned by his thoughts, a scream shattered the silence. Ed looked up, his
eyes scanning the street before him and stopping at his house. Another scream,
this time leaving no doubt as to where it came from.

The
path blurred by, and Ed’s thoughts ran as fast as his legs did. In seconds he
found himself running up the narrow stairs of his house. Every inch closer to
his bedroom, his pulse pounded and his breathing grew heavier. He stood at the
top of the stairs with his knife in his hand, sounds rushing by too quickly to
process. There was a rumbling sound, as if someone was fighting.

He
walked into the bedroom and stopped in the doorway. He almost dropped the knife
in shock. Bethelyn was awake, but she was on the floor. Her daughter was on top
of her, eyes ablaze with a hunger Ed had never seen before. April strained at
her mum and tried to overpower the arms of the older woman. She gnashed her
white teeth and tried to bite her mother’s fingers.

Adrenaline
shot into Ed’s system and brought him out of paralytic shock. He covered the
distance in three paces, took hold of April by the back of her dress and pulled
her away from her mum. The girl’s head twisted faster than it should and her
stare snapped on him. He saw now that the blood had left her face and her eyes
were the colour of puddle water. She climbed to her feet and walked toward him.
She gripped the knife tighter in his hand, felt the metal cold against his
skin. His temples throbbed.

“Give
me the knife,” said Bethelyn, getting to her feet.

April
moved closer.

Ed
took a step back, closer to Bethelyn. He put his free arm on her and tried to
push her away, hoping to get her out of the room.

“Look
away,” he told her.

April’s
teeth made a clacking sound as she gnashed them and she screwed her nose up,
baring her canines. She walked closer.

Bethelyn
knocked his arm away.