Don't Be Dead- Heartache After The Outbreak Read online

  Don’t Be Dead

  Heartache after the Outbreak

  By

  Paul Wilcock

  Don’t Be Dead – Heartache after the Outbreak © 2014 Paul Wilcock

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For Jamie and Charlie,

  two girls I hope never think I’m a dick.

  Contents

  Kelly

  Gemma

  Gemma ii

  Natalie

  Natalie ii

  Emma

  Emma ii

  Rachel

  Rachel ii

  Sarah

  Sarah ii

  Michelle

  Kelly

  I’m 27, its September 2006 and she’s nagging at me again, she does this every time, we should be enjoying our last moments together as best we can; in the movies this is where people declare their love for each other because they know deep down that they won’t get another chance, but here, in reality, in somebody else’s bedroom, the walls streaked with dried blood, parts of a body, chunks of leg I think, rotting in the corner, and the infected clawing at the door, she screams and blames and hates and she'll leave this world pissed off at me about something stupid.

  “I knew you’d get me killed you worthless piece of shit, you’ve managed to screw up everything ever since I met you, look at my arm, you bastard, look at my arm!”

  I’m looking at her arm and I admit, it’s pretty fucked up and she’s definitely infected and sooner or later will become the same as them; no emotion, no feeling, wanting to bite and claw and generally tear apart any living flesh they can get their hands on. I look around the room for a way out, too many infected outside the door, our weapons were lost in the struggle and the window is boarded up.

  “Listen Kelly, I know you’re upset so I’m going to stay as calm as a person can in the situation I find myself in right now but how the fuck was I supposed to know there’d be a bunch of infected locked in the kitchen?”

  Kelly gargles, chokes and coughs, trying to talk, spits blood on the floor and over her legs (I’ll miss those legs), then deliberately spits blood at me, I dodge to the side but some still lands on my trainers, Nike Air Force high tops, white with a red tick, now white with a red tick and a dirty red smear that probably won’t come out; this pisses me off more than it probably should, considering.

  She screams at me “There was a big padlock on the door! Who padlocks a door unless they’re keeping something locked inside?”

  She has a point, the bitch, but I won’t back down “They could have had a stockpile of food in there, locks keep people out too you know and we’ve been pretty desperate for food lately!”

  She’s looking at me like I’m scum so I focus on getting the window opened up and look for something to pry the boards from the window frame. The door’s starting to bow inwards from the weight against it and I’m worried that it won’t last much longer. I find a hammer, that I presume was used to board up the window in the first place, amongst the flesh chunks in the corner, as I’m rummaging through the body parts a cloud of angry flies rises into the air and around my head, some of them go into my mouth and that, combined with the smell, the fear and the feel of dead flesh in my hands, makes me vomit. I lurch away as fast as I can and start working on pulling out the nails.

  As each nail falls to the floor I’m distracted by two things, the danger of the door bursting open admitting eight infected to try and fend off, and the constant bitching and crying coming from Kelly. The door is my main concern so I grab the chest of drawers from against the wall, it’s not as heavy as I’d hoped, cheap flat pack furniture that’s already been emptied of all of its contents, presumably when the owners tried to pack up and flee. I drag it over against the door anyway hoping it buys me a few more minutes. Then I turn to Kelly; she looks like shit.

  The last thing she says to me is that I was a lousy boyfriend and that I’m a dick, then I swing the hammer at her temple as hard as I can, my eyes closed, cutting her off mid-insult. Thankfully I don’t see it happen but her head snaps to the side at a sharp and unnatural angle and the wet crunching noise that this creates makes me feel nauseous again for a second. I tell myself that I was doing her a favour, she would definitely have started turning soon and nobody wants that, better to have your head caved in. I go back to the window and start clawing the planks away from the frame with the back of the hammer, blood starts to run down the handle, inching towards my hand, but I’m not looking at the blood, I don’t want to see the blood. Then all of the planks are off but I can still hear splintering wood and it’s coming from behind me, but I’m not looking at that either so I smash the glass in front of me, covering my face with my free arm, the ground below seems a long way down and I’m really scared of breaking my legs and being helpless, just lying in the garden, legs made of jelly, waiting to be torn apart. I look for something softer to jump to or a way to climb down but there’s nothing and I can hear the chest of drawers scraping across the wooden floor behind me as the door is slowly forced open so I climb out and dangle from the sill.

  I’m falling and my stomach lurches making me feel nauseous yet again and it feels like a long drop even though I land a lot faster than expected. My legs aren’t ready for the impact and fold up underneath me, my knees slam into my chin and I fall onto my back and it really hurts and I want to just lie there for a while but I can’t and I really don’t want to see an infected face looking down at me from the bedroom window so I force myself up, but I fall back down to my knees and half crawl, half stagger for a few metres until I can pull myself up against a greenhouse that no longer has any glass; just a metal frame that’s rusted and sharp against my hand. Now I’m up and running back to the car, it’s an Opel Manta, flame red, 0-60 in eight seconds, it feels longer.

  I head for home, my thoughts keep wandering back to Kelly’s last words, “lousy boyfriend”, maybe she’s right, to be honest I didn’t love her, didn’t even like her a lot of the time and I’m pretty sure she felt the same, but neither of us wanted to be alone in the world. Like I am now.

  The days are passing slowly now, the house feels bigger than it did before; empty. I have nothing to fill my time, my mind keeps thinking, turning things over, going back to Kelly’s face at the end. I’ve never had to end a relationship by smashing a girl’s brains out with a hammer before. I usually try not to think of the past, there’s no point, every memory of before the infection reminds you of someone you’ve lost or something that you can’t do anymore, but now, all I seem to be able to do is wallow in misery and dredge through my previous relationships and how they ended and what they thought of me, did they all think I was a dick? I try drowning out my memories with my iPod but every song seems to be a love song and it doesn’t help.

  Looking back at my past relationships, from before the infection, when I didn’t have the added stress of surviving the end of the world to complicate matters, Natalie, Gemma, Emma and Sarah, they were the main ones, the ones that left an impression, or a mental scar in some cases. I try to recall how they ended, was it because I was a lousy boyfriend? Thinking about it now, with the benefit of hindsight I probably did screw up a few times but I don’t know if my ex’s would agree with Kelly. I make a mental list of each of them in my head and try to remember what went wrong, whose fault it was, but it’s fuzzy, all feels like such a long time ago, it always seemed to be me that was dumped and upset but I don�
��t know if that was because I was a lousy boyfriend, I always assumed it was a problem with them rather than me. I never really got a proper explanation from them even the ones that I stayed in touch with after. Maybe I should ask and find out, maybe visiting the scenes of the relationships would trigger some missing memories; maybe I’m more bored than I first thought.

  So, with my current lack of food, lack of girlfriend, lack of anything even remotely interesting to do and the increase in infected incidents over the past few weeks I think it might finally be time to move on. The last few months have actually been pretty decent, apart from the whole “world over-run by infected cannibals” thing obviously, but I guess I knew it couldn’t last forever and it doesn’t look like anyone’s coming up with a cure any time soon, although I probably wouldn’t know about it even if they had, I’ve been hiding from the world for too long, time to get back out there and see what’s going on, plus I’m getting really horny. I almost convince myself that this is a good idea but I don’t quite believe it.

  Nobody really knew the facts about the outbreak, the media and internet went down so fast only a few conflicting reports made it out, the rest got passed on by word of mouth but you couldn’t guarantee that any of it was actually true. Most people stuck to rules based on films but that was stupid, you can’t base your survival on other people’s fiction. I kept myself to myself and avoided all contact with everyone, living and infected, unless absolutely necessary. We didn’t even know how it spread for the first few months, there were rumours that just a touch on bare skin could transmit the disease through your pores, turning the outbreak into a deadly game of tag, it was hard to discount it because anyone that got touched invariably got scratched, bitten and generally ripped apart shortly after; still, not letting them touch me seemed sensible so I stuck with it and invested in a nice pair of calf skin gloves for the times when I may need to touch them.

  The best decision I made in the early days was stockpiling wind up USB chargers, I found I could trade those for pretty much anything else I needed as time went on and a cure still hadn’t been found. People were desperate to keep their mobile phones working even though the networks had been down for months. I guess they were clinging to the hope that one day they’d suddenly get a signal and a text would come through from their loved ones letting them know that they were okay. Fools. I used the chargers to keep my iPod running, the only thing that kept me sane, luckily I already had over two thousand songs and even some videos I’d downloaded from YouTube before the internet and power went down, unfortunately those cats stop being so cute once you’ve seen them a couple of hundred times though.

  I lived in a small village, it emptied really fast either from people getting infected or just packing up and leaving, nobody even knew anywhere that was definitely safe to go to, I guess the only place they knew wasn’t safe was right here, so they may as well go somewhere else and wait for it all to go away. I stayed here, last man standing, cruising round the streets in stolen cars, pretending I was the Road Warrior himself, patrolling the apocalyptic wasteland. I even cut off one of the sleeves on my leather jacket to look like Mad Max but I regretted it once the weather turned and it started getting colder. Kelly had laughed when I first stripped off for her, my pale white body and one heavily tanned arm, I don’t want to think about Kelly but I’m suddenly lost in my memory of that night….

  I’m 26, it’s January 2006, it’s cold but hasn’t snowed yet this winter, I hope it doesn’t snow at all this year, I hate the snow, even though it makes the infected easier to handle as they get stuck in the drifts and slip on ice, staying out of reach was a cinch but snow made me cold and wet and I’d always hated it since I was a kid; if it was warmer and drier I wouldn’t mind it, like sand, you wake up one morning and you’ve got a beach outside, that’s more like it. I’m out driving around, as usual, checking the streets are still clear and safe, I see movement as I pass an alley and my stomach lurches, adrenaline floods my system and I stop the car. I’m in the red Ferrari Testerossa tonight, 0-60 in 5.2 seconds. I’d managed to build up quite a collection of classic cars, cars that I never dreamed I’d ever own, I keep them all in a nearby warehouse, fuelled up and ready to take out whenever I feel like it. The Ferrari reminds me of simpler times, on holiday as a child, playing Outrun in the arcades, eating fresh donuts on the promenade, posing for photos with small monkeys; a loud crash from the alleyway brings me back to the present. I grab the axe from the passenger seat and peer around the corner, holding my breath, all quiet, nothing moving. I remember to breathe again and creep down the alley, ready to slam anything that moves with an axe to the face. I reach an open door towards the end of the alley, from what I can tell it must be the back entrance to Burger Boy, one of my favourite haunts from before. I flick my iPod to It’s Burger Time by Nostalgesia but keep the volume low so I can still hear if anything moves. I take one last look around, check that nothing is sneaking up on me from behind while I’m sneaking in through the door; all clear. Slowly, I inch the door further open and duck inside, a shadow moves across the room, near the fridges out by the tills, glass crunches and something metallic squeaks. The restaurant stinks of rotting meat, I can’t be sure if its burger meat or bodies though and even though I’m hoping it’s the burger meat, part of me wants the burger meat to still be edible; it’s a long time since I had a burger.

  Cautiously I edge across the room, keeping low, out of sight, moving towards the noise. The door behind the counter opens and then closes, I didn’t see anyone go through it, what the hell’s going on? It’d better not be infected dogs or rats; I wish I hadn’t pictured infected dogs and rats leaping at me just then, now I was starting to really freak out. The area in front of the fridges is clear, just broken glass and empty cans littering the floor. I skirt around it, not wanting to make any noise, and reach the door; the door that the rats and dogs are waiting behind. I move closer and freeze, iPod put on pause, listening intently for any sounds……… Footsteps, running footsteps, then the door sends me sprawling and Kelly lands on top of me, I register the fact that she’s pretty and smells of coconut then I focus on what she was running from as two infected Burger Boy employees shamble through the door. I push Kelly off me as she simultaneously pulls herself up using the counter and then scramble to my feet. I hit play, pump up the volume and raise my axe; it’s burger time! The first one through the door is an old man, maybe the Manager from how he’s dressed, dark blue suit, yellow tie, nice shoes, he’s skinny and hunched, reaching out with gnarled and twisted hands; his body crumples easily under the force of my axe swing and I step back to size up the next one. A teenage boy, probably worked on the till or flipped the burgers, he’s still got his awful Burger Boy uniform on which makes him look like a dick. He stumbles over the old man’s body and I slam the axe into the back of his head, I swing a few more times to make sure, enjoying the irony of turning their heads to hamburger meat. That was nice and easy so I’m feeling pretty relieved and happy, I hate looking like an idiot in front of pretty girls; a contented sigh even escapes my lips as I straighten out my clothes. I turn around and take a look at Kelly, I can tell she thinks I’m pretty cool right now and decide to make the most of it. We talk for a while about who we are, where we’re from, what the fuck is going on, the usual survivor stories, she was looking for food but didn’t find any so I ask her if she wants to come back to my place because I’m pretty well stocked right now.

  The Ferrari seems to turn her on even more and I keep glancing over at her as I drive her home, flashing a smile, raising an eyebrow. Kelly is blonde, pouty lips painted red, sultry eyes, nice tits, killer legs, she has that cheerleader look you see in the teen romance movies, to look at her you wouldn’t think she’d survive everything that’s happened to the world, but here she is, on her own and still looking smoking hot. She’s smiling back at me and my legs turn to jelly,

  “How about some music?” I say, my voice wobbling slightly, Christ I feel like a teenager with a crush, I nee
d to get it together and keep the tough guy thing going. I turn on the iPod, now connected to the car stereo, Bonnie Tyler – Holding Out for a Hero, unfortunately it doesn’t help solidify my legs.

  I’m looking at Kelly’s legs when a fat man suddenly lurches in front of the car, he splatters all over the windscreen but not before putting a hefty dent in the bonnet and causing the car to pull to the right, crashing through the window of Mrs Peterson’s arts and crafts shop. The Ferrari is totalled, I cracked my head on the steering wheel from the impact with that stupid fat fuck and it hurts like hell. I ask Kelly if she’s okay, don’t really register her response, my head is spinning, or the room is spinning, possibly both. I force the door open as far as it will go and fall from the car, sprawling into the pile of wool that’s tumbled from the shelves. It’s soft and warm and I’m tired and thinking this would be a nice place to sleep, but Kelly will have to stop pulling at my arm because it’s ruining it and starting to get annoying but she keeps on pulling and then I start to hear her and my mind snaps back into focus and I stand, half fall, stand again as Kelly supports me. I grab the axe and we back out of the store away from Mrs Peterson who’s shuffling towards us much like she did before she got infected but now getting caught up in the wreckage and piles of wool and fabric.

  The sound of the impact has carried down the whole street and as we move away from the twisted metal of my beautiful Ferrari I see movement here and there in buildings and bushes and cars that initially looked empty, there were more infected around here than I thought and they all seem to be coming out to see what’s going on, too many for me to take on with an axe and a headache. We run down the street as best we can, Kelly still supporting my weight, helping keep me upright, the infected are slowly moving out towards us; all of the infected I’ve seen so far have only been able to move slowly, I haven’t heard of any running or moving fast in any way from any other people that I’ve met along the way either so as long as we can get some distance between us they should lose interest and forget what they were chasing. I spot a child’s bike laying in a yard and tell Kelly to grab it, she leaves me on my knees, takes the axe and goes for the bike. It’s too small to sit on and peddle but she can ride it standing so I sit on the seat and hold her waist, it feels good and my mind flashes to us in bed, naked, me holding her waist just like this while I fuck her from behind. After a while we switch and I peddle while she holds my waist and I hope she isn’t picturing fucking me from behind because I’m not into that kind of thing. I take us back to my place where we eat, share a bath and fuck and Kelly stays but it’s only good for a couple of weeks and then supplies start running low and the eating, bathing and fucking all happens less and less but the bitching and moaning and fighting happens more and more. In the real world we’d have never been together in the first place, girls like her seemed to look down on me like I was nothing and I thought they were stuck up bitches, and now here we are living together and trying to be a happy couple.