Great Bitten: Outbreak (5 page)

It was another club thronged with people. This was a CCTV feed of a club that could have been the same as the one I’d just seen. These things certainly didn’t seem to change from place to place. I couldn’t hear the music this time, and that meant I also couldn’t hear the screams, which was again just as well. The feed was also black and white. I tried to remember anything similar that I’d seen before. Gore movies like Saw and Hostel were gratuitous torture for the sake of entertainment. This was unbridled bestial and carnal delight in dismemberment. It was like a zombie version of the disturbing and unnecessary orgy rave scene in Zion in the second Matrix film. I said as much to Rick and pointed it out for him. He said he’d never seen any of the movies. I tried to explain how this was similar; there were scantily clad people writhing around each other, all sweaty and looking like they were pretty much all having sex with everyone else in the room. In this video replace the sweat with blood, and the fornication with a lusting for flesh. Hannibal Lecter would have had an absolute field day. It was the most macabrely fascinating thing I had ever seen, and watched it no less than eight times.
I tried picking up a different detail each time. I saw two women on their knees on the floor fighting over a leg that ended at the thigh. I saw another man bite in to a woman’s forehead – that could have been some kind of zombie mating ritual for all I knew. I saw another young woman literally pulled apart by a crowd of the things – arms, legs and head all ripped from their sockets as she screamed, blood pouring from every orifice. People were waving their arms and pushing each other out of the way as they tried to stampede out; infected that had been turned in other parts of the club were descending on the dance floor and pushing them back in. Others were crushed under foot as they fled with minor wounds; I saw more than one slender woman go under to never rise again – at least, if she hadn’t been infected before she died. I pondered briefly which was preferable: bleeding out and coming back as one of the infected, or being crushed to death and knowing that I wouldn’t come back to harm, infect or kill anyone else. I decided that for the time being, I’d rather be one of the infected – there hadn’t been any suggestions that a cure for this was on the horizon, but I’d rather still be around just in case one was developed. I was about to play it again, Rick hanging over my shoulder, when Carla slapped me in the back of the head and berated me for being a sicko. I switched back to search engines and promised to stop procrastinating.

I started more searches, Googling to find out how long it took people to turn, jotting down every speck of viable information I could glean from an internet bursting to the seams with frenzied posts and articles
about where the virus was at its fiercest, how many people were turning by the hour, and how quickly it was likely to spread through the country. Hours passed as I lost myself in the information highway traffic jam. I skipped past laughable articles mooting nuclear strike threats and citing Al Qaida as a possible source of the outbreak; sites that were somehow gaining search engine momentum above sites intended to help people, and brought my focus around to fan sites that had been discussing for years the best preparations against fictional apocalyptic catastrophes. The conspiracy theorists could have their moment, but not whilst we were struggling against something that was only in its infancy. More than once Carla again wandered past, probably to keep an eye on me and make sure I was still being constructive. But she did ask vague questions about what I had found so far. I grunted at her, imparting pieces of information which she’d pass on to Rick. The infection was not airborne, and they weren’t ruling out a mutated strain of ebola being the source. There was no vaccination or cure. The infected would turn based on the virility of the bite. A significant bite somewhere major could turn the victim in less than 10 seconds. Some people had been bitten as long as 12 hours before and had not yet turned. This included someone who had simply been scratched by the infected. He hoped he wouldn’t turn, but was starting to feel symptoms not unlike the flu, and had isolated himself from his family. He was tweeting his symptoms in case it would help the others, and held out very little hope for his long-term survival prospects. The cities were still no-go zones and some areas were also experiencing media blackouts, possibly as the government tried to stem the panic no doubt torrenting out of those areas. Highways agencies were struggling to enforce traffic restrictions and infections were being reported in rural areas, though mainly to the north. There had been dozens of train crashes around the country. So far none of these had been due to infections as far as could be ascertained. The majority appeared to be collisions with vehicles left on lines. Carla asked me why trains were still moving when transport had been cancelled. I suggested that they couldn’t just be left in the middle of nowhere, and that perhaps train drivers that also wanted to get home were starting to ignore the national orders. She asked me about town centres and I confirmed what she had perhaps already suspected. Despite the advice to keep away from public spaces, there was widespread looting nationwide which neither the police nor the military were attempting to contain. This was especially true in rural areas, which were receiving absolutely no attention from the emergency services, no matter what their cause or need was.

Carla and Rick
were both keeping busy in their own way. I heard the loft steps squeaking as they were unfurled from months of slumber so that one of them, probably Rick, could check that the loft was a viable sleeping option if it became necessary. I’d already read more than a dozen tweets where others had already done the same, moving most of their practical goods in to loft spaces and destroying any stairs. I heard boxes moving around and the house became steadily darker as makeshift blinds were put up over windows. Carla was doing research of her own here and there, and a few Romero films were aired as she did some genre-stereotyping to try to at least make her home basically defensible without disturbing the neighbours.

As my hand began to grasp and
knead at my tight neck muscles a thumping at the front door jolted me out of my research reverie. Carla ran past me and I called at her to stop.

“You can’t just answer it! Calm down! Look through the peephole first. We’ve got no idea what might be out there.”

She cocked a mildly disgusted eyebrow at me, as if to say “I’m not an idiot, dickhead” and strode towards the door. There was a pause before she exclaimed out loud and hurriedly fumbled with the lock and the chain. I was irritated to be disturbed so abruptly, and scraped my chair back forcefully so that it fell to the dining room floor. I ignored it in my hurry to get to the front door to make sure my sister wasn’t doing something fatally idiotic, and was late enough to see her ushering in a slow lumbering man who was wheezing so hard he seemed to be at borderline collapse. I stood to one side as she guided him to the living room, putting him carefully in a seat and heading straight for the whisky that I’d had to wheedle for earlier in the day. I wasn’t exactly livid, but I was fourteen flavours of fucked off, my brain still teraflopping with all the data I’d been trying to process and my worst case scenario gene going overdrive. I put my hands on my hips much as I imagined Carla felt like doing and asked quite simply,

“Who the hell is this?”

“I could ask the same of you, if only you didn’t look so much like Carla. Clearly she was in the deep end of the pool when manners were dished out. I’m her next door neighbour and trust me, you don’t want me to leave the house quite yet.”

“Leave? I’ll bloody kick you out myself!”

“Stop being an arsehole Warren. Alan’s a good neighbour and he’s not stupid, unlike some men in this room I could mention. What’s happened Alan? Is everything okay?”

“You mean aside from everything going on in the news?
Dandy Carly, just dandy.” Alan, or Ass, as I’d decided to snidely call him in my head to satisfy my inner child at hearing his pet name for my sister, sipped at his over-generous whisky with a shaking hand. He had more than a paunch, and his thin white hair had long since declared a formal retreat from his head, leaving a shiny pate that was glowing red with exertion. 

“I saw one. They’re here
Carla, they’ve made it to Bennington. Have you got food? Can you secure the house?”

“Whoa there
calm down Alan. What do you mean they’ve made it here? They locked down London, I can’t see how they’ve made it to here already?”

“How many people do you think got out of London before they started shutting people in? And do you really think they could stem every minor route out of that place? It’s a rat’s nest, there’ll be thousands of people getting out of the city and we’ve got no idea how many of them might be coming down with that plague.”

Carla threw me a sidelong accusatory glance which Alan was far too sharp to miss. He threw the glass aside in shock, almost climbing in to the back of the chair in a panicked attempt to get away from me. “He’s one of them isn’t he? You’ve got to turn him in, for fuck’s sake Carla he’ll kill us all!”

She scooted forward, her hands on each arm of the chair as she shushed him, tryin
g to ease his panic as Rick thundered down the stairs to see what the commotion was about.

“Alan
he’s fine, he’s been here most of the day. He got out of London before it all started kicking off. He’s seen some of… them. But they haven’t touched him.”

“This morning you say?”
Ass eyed me with a wary look somewhere between fear and morbid curiosity. “You got out of London? Without getting hurt? They didn’t even scratch you?”

I nodded,
not trusting myself to voice those soft memories so soon in front of a total stranger at a time when I needed to sound calm, collected and very much in charge. Besides, Ass looked charged, his adrenalin and the calming effects of the alcohol the only things damming the torrent of words just waiting to spew from his mouth.

“If
Carla’s not taken your head off yet I suppose you must be okay.” He took a long slurp from the tumbler, and I grimaced at the ghastly sound. Alan made a face not far off mine; if you don’t like whisky, don’t drink it. What a waste, though I couldn’t really begrudge him the need to soften the edges if he’d just come across anything like what I’d seen so far online. And if any of them had made it to Bennington already… we had to make sure our plans were fluid, just in case.

“
They’re at the train station. I was waiting for my daughter, she was on a train already coming down from the Midlands and I thought they’d still let it finish the journey. I lost contact with her after Clapham Junction, so I don’t want to think about what’s happened to that train. But… oh god Carla it was horrible.” He dropped his face in to his hands and sobbed, great wracking heaves that set off ripples across his massive stomach. His shoulders shook as he worked the shock out of his body. Carla looked quizzically at me and I waved my arms around, not sure what she was expecting me to do. She mouthed at me, something along the lines of ‘say something’ though I had no idea what she was expecting of me, when Ass looked up with bloodshot eyes and a resigned grin.

“The entire train was riddled with them. Every single person that fell out of that train was a zombie. I’ve never run so fast in my life. I’ve never run so far in my life. I got back to my car and came straight here, I
had to get back to my wife and well if one train is like it,” his voice cracked and broke “how many others?”

Carla
cradled her face in her hand, a frown creasing her brow and a tear squeezing its way down her cheek. “Trudy will be fine, Alan. She’s a clever girl, she’ll be okay.”

Ass
laughed outright at that. “Bless you for the comfort Carla, but I’ve seen the news, and after seeing that train, I’m not so sure. Did you listen to me? The train was full. It must have been standing room only. And every. Single. Person. On. That. Train. Was. Dead.”

Each and every word was punctuated, a verbal poke in the chest that had us both rocking on our heels, bordering between speechlessness and helplessness.
Ass didn’t give us a break. “I watched the ones that were still moving – you know, the dead people - fall out of the train and it was right off the screen of a horror movie. There were bloody handprints smeared across the windows and the doors. Some of the bodies that fell out were just… hunks of flesh. They fell off the train and got stuck in the gap to the platform. They got trampled and forgotten as those zombies stampeded - and that’s the only right word Carla, stampeded - off that train and headed straight for anything living and breathing they could get their vicious claws on. They,” Ass stopped, gasping for air and finishing the rest of his whisky in a swift throw, coughing and thumping at his chest as septuagenarian phlegm shifted under the coating of alcohol. “There was an old boy at the station. I was waiting with him. He was waiting for his daughter too, though she was a few years older than my Trudy he said. He had a walking stick with him. He couldn’t have run away from a three-legged donkey even if he’d wanted to. One of those things leapt on him as I back-pedalled it. Literally threw himself on to him. You know the way the cartoons make dogs eat steak, ragging it side to side? It was like that, except for it was someone’s throat! If my Trudy was on a train with those things, I’m not going to see her again. I’m never going to see anyone I love ever again. That’s why I had to come here.

I don’t want to die
Carla, but I want to try and save some people. I’ve got guns. The police are going to come knocking for them, if those broadcasters are telling the truth. They’ve got their own bloody weapons so I want you to have them. You can defend yourself. You’re the same age as Trudy and you’ve been a good friend to us. It’s the right thing to do.”