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

  Natalie's mum and the other; a woman with dirty blond hair wearing a shirt that I guess used to be white, most of the buttons missing, gaping open almost exposing her breasts which distracts me for a second; jostle and shove against each other as they come through the door, both fighting to get to me first, I get a bit of extra power in my first strike by bouncing up off the bed and swinging down as I drop, the blonde's head crumples down into her neck, the hammer gets stuck and I have to stand on her face and pull, hard, three times before it comes free, Natalie's mum is already on me though and knocks me backwards onto the bed. There was a time when I imagined myself in a similar scenario with her but now I'm pushing her face away, trying to avoid her eager mouth where once I would have welcomed it. I swing the hammer across her face and her head snaps around violently to the side with a crack (Kelly’s accusing face swims in my head and refuses to be flushed away). I kick the body backwards away from me and launch myself across the room at her, slamming the hammer down into her two more times until I'm sure her brain is destroyed.

  Adrenaline is running through me now and I spring back up and quickly head back out to the landing, face covered with determination, sweat and blood; the man I knocked down the stairs is just reaching the top so I kick him, catch him under the chin, send him sprawling back down the stairs again, running down after him, leaping from the fifth step up, hammer raining down into his skull.

  Now I stop, iPod on pause again, listen for more, can't hear anything but my heartbeat pounding in my ears and my own heavy breathing and the crack of Kelly’s bones when I killed her.

  I decide to stay the night here, the adrenaline is wearing off and now I feel queasy and cold, shivering in my sweat soaked clothes. I barricade myself in Natalie's old room by dragging a set of drawers in front of the door and start searching through her belongings, trying to find a clue to her whereabouts, she doesn't seem to have been in the house when her parents were attacked but she does have clothes hung in the wardrobe and make-up on the dresser. I search her bags thoroughly but don't find anything useful other than the bag itself which I empty onto the floor and decide to keep. It's getting dark and I look out of the window over the city, it's black and silent, the complete opposite of the last time I was here....

  I'm 23, it's January 2003, there's a masked ball tonight at “Spiral City”, the upmarket nightclub in the centre of town; I've rented a tux, she's wearing a long black ball gown, no underwear, she looks hot as hell. I have a dark red shiny plastic eye mask, she an elaborate black and white Venetian face mask. The taxi takes too long to pick us up and we arrive later than planned, our friends are already there, already drinking, we need to catch up so I order two drinks; double vodka and lime, down one and immediately order another, hand it to Natalie. We stand with Natalie's friend Kathy, she's with her new boyfriend Kevin, we don't like him much; as we talk about bullshit that I'm not really listening to I catch Natalie's eye behind Kevin's back, she makes a “loser” sign with her fingers on her forehead and motions her eyes at Kevin, I laugh, pretend to be laughing at whatever Kevin just said, he looks confused. The double vodka and limes keep flowing and I miss an argument between Kathy and Natalie while I'm in the toilets puking, listening to someone crying in the cubicle next to me which makes me wonder if I've wandered into the women's toilets by mistake. As I come out, confirming the sign on the door is definitely a man as I leave, Natalie is in the middle of storming out of the room, Kathy is crying, I can't see Kevin. Natalie grabs my hand and I join her in storming out.

  “I hate my fucking friends sometimes!” she sounds like she might cry herself any second and I'm not sure if I should ask why she hates her friends or wait for her to continue with her rant, she continues before I can decide “I only wanted Kathy to come and dance with me but she said she didn't want to leave Kevin on his own!”

  “So what did you say?” I ask.

  “I told her fuck Kevin, come and dance! She's turned into a right boring cow since she's been seeing him.”

  “Ok, that explains the tears; you may have been a bit harsh.” I'm trying to be a peacekeeper; it's cold outside and I want to go to the bar and get a drink and this just seemed like the usual crazy unpredictable night out with Natalie so I wasn't too concerned.

  “But I'm right, Kathy's always with Kevin lately and Kevin's a fucking boring loser, don't tell me you don't agree!”

  “Oh I agree,” I say “so where is Kevin anyway?”

  “He ran out crying; fucking baby!”

  “Jesus Christ, you said all this in front of Kevin too! Holy shit! I can't believe I missed this!” she turns to me, slaps my face.

  “Be more supportive! I think I've just lost my best friend.” While I'm still trying to process being slapped in public a new song starts inside, Love Song by Mark Oh.

  “I love this song, come and dance!” She pulls me inside and we dance like loons, doing crazy moves and generally looking like idiots but she's cheering up again and I smile and watch her dancing and everything slows down and it's just her, the pounding bass and the flashing lights and nothing else exists and I want this feeling to last forever but it only lasts another 56 seconds and then the song blends into another one that I haven't heard before and we stop dancing and leave.

  We walk the streets for a while talking, she's calmer now, starting to sober up, it’s a clear night but not too cold, no moon, but I can see the big dipper and I point it out, she nods. Taxis pass by but we don't flag any of them down, neither of us wanting the night to be over yet; then she notices something and pulls me by the hand again, I follow, always happy to be led into whatever trouble she's going to get us into.

  “Do you want to see something cool?” She's asking, a smile on her face, twinkle in her eye; I'm hoping she means her breasts but girls never think their breasts are cool so it seems unlikely. She pulls me to the entrance of a hotel, I think she’s going to kiss me but she tells me to wait behind a low wall near the doorway as she runs around the side of the building and disappears, around thirty seconds later there's a loud scream for help. I start to stand, not sure if she's really in trouble; she screams again. The man working reception slowly rises from his chair and walks to the door, when he hears the second scream he runs around the side of the hotel. Natalie appears from the other side, standing on some bins and jumping over the fence, she grabs my hand again and we run into the hotel and call the lift. As the doors to the lift close behind us we glimpse the receptionist walking back towards the door with a confused look on his face, he doesn't see us though and Natalie has hit the button for the top floor and as the lift makes its way slowly upwards she kisses me hard on the mouth, her fingers stroking through the hair on the back of my head as she holds me close, she pulls away quickly as the doors open on floor six, “Going up?” I ask a business man, dressed for the office, on his way to an important meeting or off to catch a flight somewhere, whatever his reason he's having a much less interesting night than us and he wants to go down anyway so the doors close again and we continue climbing.

  We reach the top floor without any more distractions and I follow Natalie to room 97, it's sealed with police tape “CRIME SCENE, DO NOT ENTER” Natalie kicks the door, the sudden noise deafening in the silent hotel, “What the fuck?” falls from my mouth; I wasn't expecting that. I look up and down the corridor nervously, she kicks the door again, it still doesn't open, I'm getting twitchy, scared that someone will come to investigate the loud noises so as she raises her leg for a third kick I give it one of my own and the door crashes backwards into the wall. We duck inside, under the tape, and quickly close the door.

  “I heard about this on the news yesterday, some guy killed his wife in here, stabbed her 16 times and then jumped from the balcony.” she says it matter of factly like it’s no big deal. I spot a large bloodstain over by the bed. “Holy shit!” I head over to the stain and hear the clinking of bottles behind me, Natalie raiding the mini bar. She takes all that she can carry out onto the balcony. I touch th
e stain, its dry; I'm not sure if I'm disappointed by that. I wander out onto the balcony, sit on a chair by Natalie, take a bottle of vodka from the pile that she's dumped on the floor and take a swig. We sit drinking, looking out over the city, still alive with people and noise even though it's getting so late that it’s almost early now. There's another hotel opposite this one, around a block away, four stories higher, we can see people moving around in some of the rooms, going about their lives unaware that we're watching, a man working late on his computer, another pacing the floor talking animatedly on the phone, a naked man getting a beer, we only notice him when he’s lit up momentarily by the light from inside the fridge; a couple just getting in from a night out, all over each other, they are dressed similar to myself and Natalie, from this distance they could be mistaken for us, I get a weird feeling like I'm watching myself somehow.

  Natalie runs inside, opens and closes cupboards, rustles around in the back room somewhere; this crime scene is beyond contaminated. She returns with a pair of binoculars and watches the couple as they start to strip each other, kissing and touching, I'm watching Natalie though, the expression on her face, keep glancing back to the couple, I want to touch her, at first I think she must be getting turned on by the scene, but her face looks sad.

  “Are you okay? You look sad?”

  “Nobody’s okay.” She says it quietly, the couple are fucking now, on the bed, on top of the sheets, her on top.

  When I look back at Natalie she's climbing onto the railings, standing where the man who killed his wife stood 72 hours earlier, she wavers in the wind, arms stretched up to the sky like she might fly rather than fall; her head turns, our eyes meet, she looks a lot more sober than I feel, she says “the police are here” in the same flat, emotionless voice, I don't understand.

  “What?”

  She says it again “the police are here.”

  I get up, look over the balcony, see two police cars parked in the street, officers running inside.

  “Are they here for us?” I ask the question but I don't know why I'd think Natalie might know the answer, she jumps back down from the balcony and starts barricading the door, dragging the bed across the room in front of it, piling as much as she can on top of the bed to help weigh it down; I doubt that lamps and ashtrays and books will make much of a difference but it looks the part as far as barricades go. I survey the room, this crime scene was definitely fucked. The police try to open the door, can’t, shout through the door, we don’t answer. After half an hour they seem to give up so we continue drinking, watching the couple fuck some more, I put the stereo on, Laura Brannigan - Self Control, Natalie reappears on the balcony wearing one of the dead woman's dresses that had been left in the wardrobe and we dance and drink and kiss and the night is lit up flashing red and blue as more police arrive and the police that abseil down from the roof above startle us and we’re knocked to the ground and handcuffed and Natalie is laughing.

  I’m 27, it’s October 2006, I'm smiling but feel sad as I remember the beginning of the end of our relationship, after we were arrested we had to prove that we were not connected to the woman's murder in any way and narrowly avoided jail time thanks to mine and Natalie's parents hiring very expensive but very good lawyers. Needless to say, I was forbidden to see Natalie any more but we still worked together so it was impossible for them to enforce and we met secretly and it made the relationship even more exciting and intense for a while and we fucked in the lift and in the stationary cupboard and in the car park but her parents were smarter than we thought, and arranged a new job for Natalie with a relative in America that was too good for her to pass up. I understood, she was never the kind of girl to be trapped by a relationship, if something better came along she was gone, she always did/took/got what she wanted so I didn’t try to change her mind, I let her go without a fight and regretted it every day for four months.

  Morning comes too soon and I stretch and then wince as a sharp pain shoots through my shoulder, I must have pulled it during the killing last night. I drag myself out of bed and look out of the window at the city again, still quiet, still dead. Tinned grapefruit for breakfast and a handful of mixed nuts, washed down with the grapefruit juice. I keep stretching my arms and shoulders trying to work out the kink but it still hurts, I'll need to try and stay out of trouble for a few days.

  I leave by the front door to avoid creeping past the house full of infected two doors down again and get in the car. A few seconds after the engine starts I start to see activity, bodies lurching out of alleyways, more stumbling over each other out of the smashed in doorways of Natalie's parent's neighbours. I pull away and head for the hotel hoping that Natalie remembered our siege against the cops as well as I did and had somehow made it there, safely barricaded in a room on the top floor, keeping out the infected rather than cops this time. The city centre is surprisingly car free, most cars made it at least to the outskirts before getting stuck in traffic, not realising that the reason they weren't moving any further was that the drivers of the cars at the front of the traffic jam were already dead or infected and were now just blocking the road. As I pull around the corner where the cinema stands (Now Showing – Land of the Dead) I see a pair of headlights coming towards me, another car, a Suberu Imprezza, 0-60 in 4.6 seconds, the driver is beeping the horn over and over again as the man in the passenger seat shouts and hollers out of the window; were they beeping and shouting at me? I’m forced to swerve to the side, two wheels mounting the curb as the car races past and disappears around the bend, still beeping and shouting, what the fuck? I'm looking out of the rear window, twisted in my seat, trying to figure out what just happened, a noise behind me snaps my head back around to the passenger window and the face of three infected pressed against the glass, gnashing their teeth, smearing blood and spit and some kind of thick black ooze across the surface. Turning and looking forward I can see more staggering into the street, drawn by the noise, dozens of them starting to come out onto the road. I'm still two blocks from the hotel so I floor it and swerve through the growing crowds until there are too many to avoid and I have to plough into a group of around fifteen or so and spring from the car to run the last twenty metres to the hotel.

  The doors are open but the stairwell is barricaded from the other side of the door so I can't go that way, I run back to the lift, prise the doors apart, glance over my shoulder and see four or five infected about to reach the entrance. I push the lift doors closed behind me and look up. The service hatch is open and I jump and grab the edge of the hatch, hoping to pull myself up. Pain shoots through my shoulder and I drop back to the ground, shit, how am I going to get through the hatch and then climb nine stories up a ladder? The infected have reached the lift and start banging and clawing at the doors, I'm trapped in here, try to jump for the hatch again but holy fuck that hurts and there's no way I'm going to get up there that way so I sit on the floor and listen to my iPod; first up, David Bowie – Modern Love, Bowie one of those artists that I only seem to like one or two songs from each album but the ones I like I really like, I still rate the soundtrack to Labyrinth as his strongest most consistent album and make sure to put that on next. I really need a plan. Nothing comes to mind. The day drags by and my iPod battery runs down and I have to wind the charger with my left hand which feels awkward and takes me longer than usual and annoys me and then I try to sleep but the floor is really hard and cold under my sleeping bag and I have to lay diagonally across the lift to be able to stretch out properly and even then my head is kind of wedged in the corner of the lift and the walls are hard and cold too and that gives me a headache so I have to adjust my position and sleep curled up on my side but I can't sleep on my right side because it hurts my shoulder so I have to sleep on my left side all night which makes my left knee, hip and shoulder hurt when I wake up which is roughly every twenty minutes and I really need a plan now, like really.

  It seems quiet outside the door and I wonder if the infected that had gathered have shambled awa
y again, bored of waiting, so I crack the door open and peek through the gap but they are still there and there's actually a lot more of them now, probably thirty, crammed into the hotel lobby, they probably don't even know why they are there any more. One of them spots me and grabs at the gap in the doors and it makes me jump because I hadn't seen it, off to the side of the lift, sneaky bastard. I push the door open a little wider, pull him in through the gap and do a left handed blow to his skull with my hammer, caving it in, he falls into the lift, sprawls across the floor. Slowly, out in the lobby, heads turn to face me and I look at the corpse on the floor and back at the room of infected and back to the corpse and I have an idea. Finally.

  I keep the doors open just enough that the infected can only funnel in one at a time, stuck in a bottleneck; as they enter I smack them across the head and throw their bodies into a pile, after twelve or thirteen it's getting hard to move in the lift and I stand on the bodies and keep swinging and the bodies start to pile up in layers and as they climb over the fallen to get to me I can manoeuvre them into position and slay them so that they stack up, building a corpse pyramid towards the hatchway. As the pile grows and the lift fills with bodies the gap in the doors is blocked by corpses and I'm safe to climb through the hatch into the shaft. The ladder disappears up into darkness above me and I climb, slowly, one rung at a time, using one hand, already tired from the slaying; I think I've killed more today than I have since the start of the outbreak and I have a feeling that both of my arms will be completely useless in the morning so I'm praying that it's safe at the top of the ladder.