Year of the Zombie (Book 8): Scratch (5 page)

‘Well it is. Deal with
it.’

‘So how do we get rid of
them.’

‘We ask them to leave.’

‘Really?’

‘No, you fucking idiot,
not really.’

‘What then?’

‘Incapacitate them.’

‘How?’

‘Break their legs. Cut
them up.’

‘What is this, the
fucking Evil Dead?’

‘As close as we’re ever
going to get to it, yes.’

‘What about fire? We
could burn them.’

‘Good shout. Got
anything flammable?’

‘Stuff for the
barbecue.’

‘Where is it?’

‘What, the barbecue?’

‘No, you arsehole, the
lighter fuel.’

‘Everything’s in the
shed.’

‘Great. Where’s the
shed?’

‘Bottom of the garden.’

Jody peered down and
could just about make out the edge of the shed in the bottom right corner of
the garden. It was less than fifty metres away but it felt like miles. ‘Is it
locked?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good.’

Jody pulled the scarf
back up over her mouth. She started to jog along the grass but stopped when she
was distracted by movement. The two infected still banging against the patio
door hadn’t spotted them, but the rogue one had. He (had it been a he? She
thought so, but it was difficult to say with any authority) was heading
straight for her.

At speed.

Gary grabbed a garden fork
he’d left in a flowerbed overnight. The infected was focusing on Jody and she
looked past it towards her ex-husband for help, hoping he’d come to her rescue
(
that’d be a first
). Her lack of faith in Gary was well-placed. He was
frozen to the spot, feet rooted to the ground like the trees and shrubs he was
now doing his best to hide among. He threw the fork over to her like a javelin,
shouting ‘
here!
’ so she knew it was coming.

Not a bad effort. It
landed a metre or so in front of her feet.

The infected’s mode of
movement changed. It appeared almost insect-like now, on all fours and face up,
scuttling. And then it launched itself into the air. Jody grabbed the handle of
the garden fork and lifted its sharp tines skyward, just in the nick of time.
The creature landed on top of it and was skewered through the groin.

Jody dropped the fork
and stepped away.

The infected monster
still fought, still tried to scratch at her, but it was struggling to work out
why it could no longer get about with the same degree of freedom as before. It
was like having an inflexible extra leg, an unwanted extension. Such was its
angle that whenever it tried to take a step forward, the handle of the fork dug
into the ground and pivoted the whole body around, at the same time driving the
spikes deeper into its diseased flesh.

Gary was already in the
shed. Jody followed him into the cluttered little wooden building. She pulled
her scarf down to berate him. ‘This place is a fucking pigsty.’

‘You can stop nagging me
now,’ he said as he began to ferret through a mountain of crap. ‘We’re
divorced, remember? I’ve got Charlie to moan at me now.’

‘So I guess there’s
still plenty to moan about then?’

‘Shut up, Jody,’ he
said, and he passed two bottles of barbecue lighter fluid to her, carrying two
more himself.

‘Why so many?’

‘Because we have –
we
had
– a lot of barbecues. We’re not all bitter and twisted and
antisocial like you.’

‘I’m not antisocial.
Some of us have responsibilities.’

‘We both have
responsibilities, now let’s get this over with and get back inside.’

‘Fine. You got a match?’

He scavenged about on
another cobwebby shelf and found a barbecue lighter: a long, bizarre-looking
gas-fuelled thing like a cigarette lighter with a barrel. ‘This’ll do it.’

‘Hardly standard
zombie-killing kit, is it?’

He laughed at that. Was
he laughing with her or at her? She wasn’t sure. ‘Zombies,’ he repeated,
shaking his head.

‘Well what else are we
supposed to call them?’ she asked as she squeezed past him to get back outside.
‘They’re dead and they’re infected and they want to kill us. Therefore, they’re
zombies.’

‘You really could turn
anything into an argument.’

‘That’s because your
default setting is to pick holes in everything I say.’

He was about to correct
her, but she’d already gone. She was halfway up the garden, heading for the
impaled creature which was on its back now, unable to get up. She doused it
with lighter fluid then stepped back and watched with satisfaction as Gary lit
it up.
Typical bloke
, she thought,
always got to be in control of the
fire
.

Between them they then
drenched the figures at the window from behind with the flammable liquid, Jody
tried gesturing to the kids and Charlie to avert their gaze, but the frantic,
random movements of the infected corpses got in the way. The dumb things didn’t
notice the liquid splashing against their backs, didn’t react at all. They
didn’t react when Gary lit them up like scarecrows either. The one that still
had a head did eventually turn around, though, swivelling on leaden legs. It
came towards Jody but lost its footing as flames overwhelmed it. It picked
itself back up again, but Jody stood her ground, ready to repel its attack with
a melon-sized rock taken from a nearby overgrown rockery. She shifted position
awkwardly as she waited for it to reach her and she lifted the rock high, ready
to bring it crashing down on the back of the abhorrent thing’s head.

It didn’t get that far.

Consumed by billowing
flames, the monster dropped to its knees then fell flat. Jody watched the fire
for a while longer, hypnotised by the bright light and unexpectedly comforting
heat.

When she looked up, she
realised it was getting dark. It was spitting with rain, too.

When she looked up, she
realised she was alone. Gary was back inside with Charlie and the kids.
Her
kids.

***

The children were alternately scared and
excited. Being here was an adventure. Most importantly, they were with Dad. The
time they spent with him had been at a premium since he and Mum had had that
big falling out after the Christmas before last. Being with him now helped them
block out everything else that was happening.

In some ways the three
adults were more scared than the kids. Emotions, grudges and regrets had been
put to one side and temporarily forgotten; conveniently shelved until normality
returned.
If
normality returned. But cabin fever was setting in, and the
atmosphere frequently became fractious. ‘You don’t really need to stay here,
you know,’ Gary said, watching his ex-wife across the kitchen table.

‘What, you think I’m
going to leave my kids with you? No bloody way.’

‘I’ll be here too,’
Charlie said (and immediately wished she hadn’t).

‘No, thanks,’ Jody
snapped. ‘No offence, love, but I hardly know you. Like I said, I’m not going
anywhere.’

‘Great,’ Gary said, and
he shoved his chair back and fetched himself another beer.

‘Is that a good idea
with everything that’s going on?’ Charlie asked.

‘Fucking great,’ he said
as he stormed out of the room. ‘Now I’ve got both of you moaning at me.’

They watched him leave.
‘Sorry,’ Jody said to Charlie. ‘That was my fault.’

‘Not a problem,’ she
said, and it was clear it wasn’t. ‘As it happens, I’m with you. If it was my
kids I wouldn’t want to go anywhere either.’

‘We can’t stay here
indefinitely, though.’

‘You can. At least until
things have calmed down again, anyway.’

‘I think
he’d
have
something to say about that,’ she said, gesturing at the door through which
Gary had just disappeared.

‘Leave him to me.’

‘With pleasure,’ Jody
said instinctively. She stopped herself. ‘Sorry. My bad. It’s just that he’s
caused me so much shit over the last eighteen months, so much hurt... it’s hard
to change my tune just like that, you know?’

‘I know. If it’s any
consolation, it’s been as hard on him from what I’ve seen. He acts the big man,
but I’ve seen him in tears over those kids on more than one occasion.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure you
have...’

‘Anyway, no more
arguments, you’re staying here until this whole sorry mess gets sorted,
agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

The conversation
faltered, and for a while the silence weighed heavy on the room. ‘So what do we
do?’ Jody eventually asked. ‘Do we all just sit here and wait?’

‘Don’t see we have much
of an option,’ Charlie replied. ‘Way I see it we should—’

More screams. Upstairs
this time. Jody thundered up to the bedrooms, but Gary was there before her.
Holly was standing on the landing, soaked through. ‘Nightmare,’ he explained.
‘She wet the bed.’

‘Oh, sweetheart. It’s
okay.’

Jody instinctively
reached out for her daughter but Gary blocked her. ‘I’ve got this,’ he said as
he picked up his little girl. She buried her face in his chest, still crying.

And Jody could only look
on helpless as he carried Holly into the bedroom he and Charlie shared and shut
the door behind him.

***

When Jody next opened her eyes, the unfamiliar
house looked more unfamiliar still. The morning light was cold and grey and it
felt as if it was being filtered... blocked somehow. After Holly’s nightmare
and Gary’s response last night she’d been left feeling unequivocally redundant
and had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, head down on a wicker placemat
which had covered half her face with indentations and lines. It had hurt being
shut out. She struggled with seeing Gary with her children and had to remind
herself constantly that they were his kids too. The connection between him and
her had been irreparably broken, yet the bond between him and the children was
as strong as it had ever been. It made her feel like an intruder. This place
where she’d only spent hours, they’d spent days. She was a visitor here, but
this house was a part of her children’s lives. It hurt far more than she
thought it would have. It bothered her more than anything else that was
happening.

The light down here this
morning was weird, though.

The back of the house
was clear. She got up and checked. The garden looked completely normal, save
for the surreal remnants of yesterday’s battle: three charred corpses, one all
but headless, another still impaled on the garden fork. In her fitful sleep
last night, when she’d been flickering between the conscious and unconscious,
she’d dreamt they were still coming for her, all crispy skin, burned away
muscle and shrivelled up hair. But the infected hadn’t moved, thankfully, and
no more had arrived.

She drank a glass of
ice-cold water as she walked through the downstairs of the sprawling house. At
the front of the building was a dining room in the middle of renovations. The
paper was half-stripped from the walls and a large chimney breast had been
knocked out and was in the process of being re-plastered. At first she was
distracted trying to imagine what the room would look like when it was
finished, but such thoughts were immediately forgotten when she saw a crowd of
dead faces gathered at the window. She slowly retraced her footsteps out,
praying they hadn’t seen her. She counted six of them up against the glass,
blocking most of the light. Clawing. Salivating. Drooling.

No need to panic, she
thought. It was no surprise really. After what had happened in the back garden
yesterday, this was only to be expected. It was good in a perverse way, she
thought, because by drawing those horrific sick things out into the light, it
made them easier for the authorities to round up and get rid of when they
finally made it to here.

Jody climbed the stairs.
She needed to pee and to shower so she could start to feel human again. Maybe
then she’d check the news and see if progress was continuing to be made or
whether the human race was still teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. With
a bit of luck, she thought, she might be out of here with the kids and on the
way home by the end of today. Funny how the thought of prising the children
away from their dad – prolonged goodbyes, tears and tantrums, them not
wanting to leave him and him not wanting to let them go – made her feel
more anxious than the chaos outside. At least she had Charlie here to help. She
seemed a sensible girl (save for the fact she’d shacked up with Gary).

Jody paused at the top
of the stairs and fiddled with the venetian blinds. She had trouble getting
them to open – the unfamiliarity of being in someone else’s house. She
immediately wished she hadn’t bothered.

The crowd outside this
house wasn’t any worse than it had appeared from downstairs, but there were
other small pockets of infection around other houses. One house in particular
she noticed, across the road and down a little way, appeared to have been
completely surrounded. If there were ‘normal’ people trapped in there, she
thought, they had little chance of getting out. Every exit was blocked.
Infection and disease at every door and window.