“Let’s get out of here.” Jas, on the bike, sighed wearily as he climbed back onto the saddle of his machine. Webb moved toward him. “Piss off,” he spat. “You’re not getting on here like that. Look at the state of you. You’re covered in all kinds of shit.”
Webb looked down at his blood- and pus-soaked leathers. Gore dripped onto the ground around him. With his face screwed up in a grimace he bent down and picked a piece of scalp—complete with a clump of lank brown hair—out of a crease in his trousers at the top of his boot. He tossed it away in disgust.
“You’re not coming in here either,” Hollis snapped, looking him up and down. “Hold onto the back of the van.”
Too tired to argue, Webb picked up his trusty baseball bat from where he’d dropped it at the roadside, then climbed wearily up onto the footplate at the back of the van. Jas pulled up alongside him and shouted over the roar of the bike.
“And when we get back you make sure you wash yourself down before you take one step inside. I don’t want to be stepping through your shit all night, okay?”
Webb didn’t respond. He wasn’t interested in anything Jas or any of the others had to say. He tightened his grip on the van roof bars as they began to move away, then looked back over his shoulder, watching the smoke rise up from the burning crowds. One of the dead, its clothes and hair aflame, broke free and staggered after the van like the last firework on bonfire night, eventually dropping to the ground when its remaining muscles had burned away to nothing.
Is that the best you can do? Webb thought. Is that all you’ve got left?
2
Cold, tired and angry, Webb stormed up to the third floor and headed straight for the communal flat where most of the small group spent much of their time. He barged into the living room, almost tripping over Anita, who was asleep on the floor.
“You left me!” he yelled when he found her. “You bloody well left me!”
Sitting on a threadbare sofa in the corner of the room, Lorna barely lifted her eyes from her magazine. Anita groaned at him to shut up.
“Yeah,” Lorna mumbled, her voice devoid of any sincerity, “really sorry about that, Webb.”
“You stupid bitch,” he continued, her apparent lack of concern only increasing his anger, “I could have been killed.”
“Now there’s a thought.”
“Didn’t you even notice I wasn’t there? Didn’t you realize the seat next to you was empty?”
Lorna sighed and finally lowered her magazine.
“Sorry Webb,” she said, her voice now overly sincere. “Truth was I did notice that you hadn’t made it back. Problem was I was trying to drive a van filled with cans of petrol through a crowd of dead bodies. I could either turn back to get you and risk being blown to kingdom come, or just keep going. We both managed to get home in one piece, didn’t we? I’d say I made the right decision.”
“Bitch. You wouldn’t be so cocky if it was you that had been left behind. If I’d been in the van—”
“Two things to say to that,” she interrupted, pointing her finger at him. “One, I wouldn’t have gone mooching around for fags when I’d been given a job to do. And two, you can’t drive.”
“You always have to bring that up, don’t you? You’ve got a problem because I—”
“No, you’ve got the problem. I couldn’t care less if you could drive two cars at the same time. I just think you need to start—”
“Will you two shut up arguing?” Caron demanded as she entered the room carrying a pile of recently looted clothing. “You’re like a couple of kids. For crying out loud, look out of the window will you? The whole world’s dead and all you want to do is fight with each other.”
“We don’t have to look out the window, Caron.” Lorna sighed. “We’ve just been outside, remember?”
“And we’re all very grateful,” Caron replied calmly, refusing to allow herself to be drawn into the same pointless argument they had on a regular basis. “Thank you, both of you. Now will you please stop fighting and start trying to get on with each other?”
“Yes, Mom,” Webb mumbled.
Insensitive prick, Lorna thought. Caron had been a mother up until just over a month ago; until the day she’d spent almost an hour trying to resuscitate her seventeen-year-old son Matthew, oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world outside her front door had died too. Still, she thought, at least Caron was trying to come to terms with what’s happened, which was more than could be said for some of the others. She glanced over at Ellie, who was sitting in an armchair beside the door, cradling a plastic doll—a replacement for her seven-month-old daughter who had died in her arms on the first morning of the nightmare. Everyone knew it was wrong, yet Lorna couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Webb watched her too, scowling at the way she talked to the damn thing, and how she kept checking it was warm enough, planting kisses on its cold plastic cheek. Fucking nutter.
Caron dumped the pile of clothes over the arm of the sofa and gazed out the window. This was one of the rare apartments in the block which was still fully glazed. Most of the others had either been smashed by vandals or boarded up in the weeks leading up to the infection. She still couldn’t believe she’d ended up here. She’d driven past these flats hundreds of times before the world had fallen apart, and they’d always seemed to her to be the last place on the planet she’d ever want to live. Three grotesque concrete constructions that had both dominated and blighted the local landscape for years; dated, two-winged buildings which had once housed literally hundreds of underprivileged families. The decision to pull them down had finally been made by the housing authority more than a year ago, but—no doubt as a result of delays caused by pointless local government bureaucracy, bickering and red tape—they’d only demolished one and a half of them before everything had been reduced to ruin.
As quickly and angrily as he’d entered, Webb left the room, muttering and cursing under his breath, slamming the door behind him. The sound echoed around the flat like a gunshot. Ellie held her doll closer and soothed her. Lorna shook her head and continued to read her magazine. Caron cringed at the noise and looked out over the dead world outside—beyond the ever-shifting (and, it seemed, ever-growing) sea of bodies on the other side of the blockade of cars and rubble at the foot of the hill, and stared farther into the distance. She seemed to find herself doing this at least ten times every day, pretty much every time she looked out of the window in fact. Moving just her eyes she traced her route home along suburban roads which were now barely recognizable. From her hilltop position she could see Wilmington Avenue, and from there she counted the rooftops until her eyes settled upon number thirty-two. Her house. Her pride and joy. Her precious home which she’d tended for years and where her dead son still lay on his back in the middle of the kitchen floor. At least that was where she hoped he was. She didn’t allow herself to think about the alternatives. She couldn’t cope with the thought of her boy endlessly dragging himself along the streets like the rest of those vile creatures out there.
“So how was it today?” she asked, her breath misting up the cold glass in front of her face. She wiped it clear.
“Same as usual,” Lorna grunted, still flicking through her magazine.