Chapter Six

“I came "here" to get "there." Do I have any fucking clue what "there" is? Hell the fuck no. I'm just trying to live in a world of the dead.”

-The Walking Dead Vol. 26

Aaron squirmed in his seat beside his oldest friend and reached for the shopping bag between the two boys. Fred snatched it away with a grin on his tanned face and tossed the hair from his eyes. Aaron had always been jealous of the other boy’s ability to look like a movie star even when committing to something entirely mundane.

Like riding the bus home after a morning of browsing their favourite gaming store.

Aaron squirmed in his seat with excitement, since Fred had promised that he would give him a go at the game as soon as they got to the street he lived on — the gaming company had released a statement that the game, being AR, was almost pointless to play indoors, and was best played in crowded areas with friends.

“Just try it here, quickly, see what the fuss is about. I just wanna look through it once. Just once,” Aaron said, grinning back at his best friend before catching sight of his goofy reflection in the bus window behind Fred, which made his mouth snap shut immediately.

“Dude,” Fred said with a laugh, having seen exactly what had happened. “Your smile is fine. You’ve gotta chill out! Alright, you can peek through it now on the bus, but we can’t play it or we’ll probably freak people out.”

“Haha,” Aaron voiced, looking down, “yeah, it probably would.” He looked around at the other people on the bus; it was less crowded than it usually was when he took it in the evening to his shift at the restaurant. There were a couple of old people, a woman with too many shopping bags, and a smattering of student-aged people, which was common enough on a bus that went right past the university campus.

Fred pulled it out, and turned the shiny box around in his hands, the corner of his mouth upturned with muted excitement, and causing a dimple in his cheek that Aaron couldn’t help but stare at.

It always made him feel self-conscious when he caught himself staring, and he looked away.

“Damn, it’s tiny!” Fred laughed as he managed to get the box open and squeaked the polystyrene out and onto his lap. He plucked the tiny headset out. Greenish with a white biohazard symbol emblazoned on the side. It looked like one of those pairs of magnets Aaron used to toss into the air and watch clang back together on the way down.

“Uhh, are you meant to look through that thing?”

“No, dude, you attach it to the ear, look.” Fred swivelled the box around to show a clean sketch of the product clipped to the top part of somebody’s ear. Across the face was a bezel-free screen that showed the words ‘GAME OVER’, which was probably a weird choice for the packaging, but it got the point across. Revelations Software had kept their plans very secret, but it looked like The Alpha Virus was an earpiece that somehow projected augmented reality screens in front of the eyes. How incredible was that? It kind of seemed impossible.

“OK, you gotta let me try it. That’s amazing. Give it!” Aaron teased, reaching across his friend’s lap, but allowing Fred to move it out of his reach.

“Me first,” he said. “I just wanna go first.”

Aaron wrinkled his nose in an exaggerated grimace. “Selfish.”

“Yep!” Fred said, and hummed as his fingers trailed across the simple instructions. “Clip to ear, press button to start. Fuck me, this is amazing. No charging even needed.”

“How?” Aaron asked, snatching the box from Fred’s lap as he fixed the blue scrap of plastic to his left ear. “Shit, but that’s so cool.”

“Yeah, man, is that on?”

Aaron checked. “Yup.” He squirmed some more. “Do it. Did you do it? What can you see? Are you still on a bus?”

Fred chuckled. “Chill out, wait a second. OK, there. Pressing.” There was a tiny click as Fred’s fingernails scratched across the plastic to find the ‘on’ button, and then dug into it with excitement just as the bus stopped to let somebody on.

Aaron grinned, bouncing around, and Fred’s head lolled for a second. He must have been staring at something interesting on his lap. “Dude!” he squealed, not caring how dumb he sounded. “Dude.” He shoved playfully at Fred’s shoulder. “Are you reading something? Fuck! Stop ignoring me, I’m dying he—”

In a slow motion, Fred raised his head again and opened his mouth. A thick line of drool escaped from between impossibly cracked lips. Seconds ago he could have applied to be a male model and now he looked … unwell. Aaron struggled to get out the rest of his word, and then his best friend leaned forward, his lips hovering from Aaron’s skipping jugular.

And then Fred nuzzled into his neck, breathed hotly, and tore out his throat with his front teeth.

There was a scuffle, and then a scream, and then it harmonised with half a dozen other screams.

“What’s going on back there?” the bus driver demanded in a voice ravaged by cigarettes.

The last thing Aaron saw was a muddy, crazy-looking blonde girl by the front of the bus. He thought she must have just hopped on because he would have noticed her earlier. He saw her reach determinedly into a hip holster as Fred gorged himself, and just as she lifted the gun with her left eye closed, surrounded by shrieks, Aaron slipped painfully into death.

For only the first time that day.

*

Headshot!

80 UP

The zombie on the left slumped forward and oozed thick black blood on the seat in front of him, now vacated since everyone on the bus was screaming and jabbing at the emergency exit button on the door.

“The fuck is going on back there?!” the bus driver yelled. “What the fuck?!”

The back doors slid open even though the vehicle was cruising down the road at what had to be 40 miles an hour.

“Don’t do it!” Liza protested, moving towards the group of terrified people standing at the doors and looking insane with terror, from the zombie and back to her gun.

There was a groan then, and the poor chewed up boy stirred in his seat and lifted his head up. His pupils were faded and there were deep purple bags under his lifeless eyes. He groaned again, and it rattled violently due to the general state of his throat.

“Shit,” Liza squeaked, and her breath caught in her throat as the bus rounded a corner violently.

“Fuck, is that a gun? Don’t fucking shoot anyone! Please!” the bus driver screamed.

“Shoot! Shoot!” an elderly man roared with all his might to Liza at the same time.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Liza cried, no idea who she was talking to. She let out a breath and went for a headshot, but the zombie lunged from his stained red seat towards the cluster of deliciously alive people by the open doors — and her bullet burst through the chair instead. They all screamed, and the bus turned a corner wildly as the driver cried out too, clearly having caught sight of the true enemy in his mirror, finally.

The combination caused four of the people to fly out of the open doors and roll onto the ground at a high speed, and Liza winced.

The zombie, who had probably been only a year or two younger than herself in life, lunged to the one young woman who had managed to hang on to the poles when everyone else had knocked each other out, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips trembling so violently it looked like she was stammering, but no noise was coming out.

“Fuck, keep still!” Liza ordered the zombie desperately, but he was moving faster than the last zombies up til now had, and that was really throwing her off. The shooting she had done with her father had been stationary targets. When the targets started to move, she had always missed.

Always.

Fuck.

She remembered everything she knew. Stance. Arms. Eyeline. Breathing. Fuck. Come on.

“Help me help … HELP ME!” the woman screamed, a louder noise than Liza thought a human could produce, but it didn’t even pause the zombie for one second as it lunged to her, teeth-first.

“Fuck,” Liza hissed, and squeezed the trigger, hoping desperately that the bus wouldn’t lurch around another corner and cause her to shoot a hole in the alive woman.

The bullet punched through the zombie’s nose, cutting it clean from his face, and this gave him a second of pause as though he felt that he had run into a barrier — nothing more. He grasped at the woman’s arms and she managed to kick him in the knee with such force that it snapped, and he fell down, teeth still gnashing through the nose blood. Liza’s bullet grazed the top of his head and he gargled with a desperate hunger.

How many bullets did she have left?

She had stopped counting.

“Please!” the woman was yelping, kicking at him again and again, tears coating almost her entire face.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Liza gasped, and breathed out again just as the zombie leaned forward. The gun let out that now-familiar, comforting ‘boom’ and kickback, indicating that she had at least one more beautiful bullet in the chamber, and it ripped through the boy’s head.

Headshot!

80 UP

“Th—” the woman professed, just as the driver screeched around a sharp corner with a screaming expletive, and at least three horns honked. The woman’s eyes flew open wide and she tumbled from the open doors.

“No!” Liza screamed, but the movement caused her to tumble and slam her entire abdomen into the luggage rack, and her pistol skittered across the floor.

Stars in her eyes, and the bus whining to a halt, she pushed herself to her feet and tried and failed to suck in a couple of breaths. Totally winded, she staggered and gasped her way towards the back of the bus just as the front doors opened and a tubby guy in a police uniform leapt on, gun drawn.

Liza fell to the ground and raised her hands, gasping and shaking her head rapidly in his direction. She tried her hardest to speak as he raised his gun at her with shaking hands, but all that came out was a wheeze.

The driver door opened and slammed shut and the sweating driver rested his hands on his knees and looked like he was going to throw up. He managed to croak out a few words.

“Don’t shoot her, she ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

“Is she … are you … one of them?” The cop shook his gun in her direction and raised his voice. “Why aren’t you speaking?”

He was scared, she could see that. She shook her head again and pulled in a breath. “No,” she managed to wheeze. She coughed, and rolled around on the floor. “No, I’m me.” What did that even mean? ‘No, I’m me.’ He didn’t know who she was!

“OK,” he said. “Where’d you get a gun?” he asked, pointing to the pistol behind her with the barrel of his own. Liza had never seen a police officer with a gun up close — it was a rarity in the UK, especially outside of problem areas like the centre of London.

“I…” She struggled to think of an explanation that didn’t sound insane. “I found it. I just found it.”

He paused, and then nodded. Score one for her being a wide-eyed 20-year-old girl.

“You be careful,” he said, looking pretty grey and glancing over his shoulder. Liza sat up quickly when she realised that she could hear chaos through the ringing in her ears. “People are tearing each other up in the streets.” He rubbed his palm against his mouth for a second. “It’s like a goddamn zombie apocalypse out there. Keep yourself safe.”

His eyes lingered on the two dead boys for a second before he shook his head in a mixture of disgust and sorrow and exited the bus.

“Get off, get out, they might stand up again,” the driver said, scratching manically at his bald spot. “C’mon girl, go, go.”

A goddamn zombie apocalypse.

Liza got to her feet and snatched the Glock up again, staring at the town centre through the front window of the bus.

People screamed and ran, some splattered with blood, some cradling wounds. A car had smashed into a shop front and was flickering with light flames. Two living men beat each other to shit in front of the scene. A police officer let off a warning round into the sky but nobody took any notice. A woman snatched a screaming toddler, hopefully her own, off the street and took off at a sprint. A group of hooded teens streamed out of a big store with heads ducked low and expensive merchandise under their arms.

Liza couldn’t even see a single zombie.

Was this all it took? A couple of slow-moving undead, to devolve humanity to this extent? Out of the corner of her eye she could see a car driving at full speed towards the illegally-stopped bus and she screamed and dove out of the open doors, but the impact never happened, because a second speeding car t-boned it metres away, and they both skidded through a group of looters and smashed clean through the glass into the store.

There were so many screams and sirens and shouts that for a second it sounded like nothing. Like one solid white noise, instead of hundreds of separate ones. Liza stood there and stared, her gun hot in her hand, and then she wiped the sweat from her face and began to walk.

So much for getting here to save people. It looked as though McCray had won already. All over the world, this was happening. She could see a TV in a mostly-looted tech store, behind the spiderweb cracks in the glass. The news was silent, but clear as day. Across the world the same thing was happening.

He had won, she had never had a chance. The police officer had been exactly correct.

It was a goddamn zombie apocalypse.