Chapter Eleven

“Don’t you get it? We ARE the walking dead!”

-The Walking Dead Vol. 05

Liza stepped over the first half of her front door, and then the second half, and fully into the hallway of her student home.

It was horribly still and silent in the entrance to her home, and Liza swallowed the dryness in her throat, eyeing the off-white walls for signs of blood and gore. There was none.

A scuffling sound under the floorboards -- the kitchen -- made her pause and flatten her back to the wall. The instinct was to yell out to find out if the occupant of the room downstairs was somebody she knew, but that didn’t seem too smart. Right now, whoever it was had no idea she was in there, and armed.

At that thought, she paused in the hallway and fell to a crouch, snapping a new magazine into her Glock and carefully loading up the rifle to full again. 25 rounds, short and long range, but the noise would draw every zombie in a half-mile radius right to her unprotected doorstep.

The noise. That would make the perfect upgrade to her guns. Silencers! How had she not thought of that sooner? All she needed was to find a silencer or find Celia to draw a rough diagram, and the game would create one for her out of … plastic, or whatever they were made out of.

Peter Volkov was a smart and powerful man, and undeniably a leader, but as far as she could recall he had never been into silence, as a concept in general. It would have to be something Liza discovered how to utilise on her own -- she was pretty confident about throwing herself headfirst into a situation, guns literally blazing, but the idea of sneaking about and manipulating things from the shadows was alien to her.

It would have to be a skill she learned if this apocalypse was going to carry on for more than a couple more days.

The way Fairacres had crumbled and fallen right around her eyes had been insanely fast, so much quicker than she ever would have expected. At the slightest sniff of trouble, most people had just jumped in their cars and headed down London Road to the capital. Anyone who hadn’t made it had been turned into one of the monsters, and all the people who happened to be left seemed to be busying themselves taking out any latent frustrations on the city itself.

Liza had assumed that there would be help by now, but the military, or whatever, would be starting with the highly populated areas. The cities, not the sweet little suburbs and campus towns.

By the time they devoted their attention to Fairacres, there would be nothing left.

Liza’s survival had to be in her own hands, and she was uniquely capable of getting through this. No excuses.

She stayed in a crouch and made her way past the closed door to James’s room, through into the cramped little living room.

Her heartbeat picked up considerably when she caught sight of the floor by the small couch. Two smeared droplets of what was definitely blood, indented with a patterned shoeprint,

Was that Tucker’s blood, or was it more recent? She didn’t know enough to know how old the stain was -- a couple of hours, or less?

Another scuffle underneath her and the sound of clanking crockery. Liza held her breath and backed into the hallway again. No ‘maybe’s about it; there was somebody down the stairs. A gruff laugh followed by a higher pitched noise of glee informed her that it was no animal, and it was almost certainly more than one person.

A low murmur echoing somewhere in the back of her perception indicated that they were speaking -- she had lived in this house for a while now, and she knew the origins of most strange noises that crept through the insulation and escaped the walls. She also knew that if she stood in a specific position to the left of the 50-inch plasma, she could hear almost word for word any conversation going on downstairs.

“...you stupid fuck, why would we?”

“I thought I might be able to eat them tonight?”

“You and what microwave? Fucking spanner.”

The first speaker seemed to be a big fan of swearing, and had a deep rasp in his voice from cigarettes or general extended screaming. The second sounded more unsure and had a lazy accent that implied he kept his mouth open for longer than was necessary. Probably a mouthbreather.

“We could make a fire and we could share--”

“Shut the fuck up, your voice is doing my fucking head in.”

Liza slid slowly down to a crouch, knowing that in this position most of her body would be obstructed by the shelf they used for CDs and DVDs. Her butt knocked a lamp, and she span around as quick as she could to catch it.

Her long fingers curled around the metal shaft of the standing lamp, and she resisted the urge to hiss out her relief, instead gently pulling it back to its upright position, with a brief clattering noise that made her wince, her teeth gritted tight.

“Did you hear something?” Raspy said suddenly.

“Nah, they all left. They wouldn’t come back. You proper scared them.” A nasty laugh.

Raspy didn’t sound convinced. “They had that injured guy with them … maybe they came back for supplies. Maybe the cathedral isn’t well-stocked.”

They were definitely talking about her housemates; about Tucker. They had been the ones to scare them off for sure. They were probably the ones who had broken the front door in half.

“You think they’d have the balls to mess with us a second time?” Mouthbreather asked. Liza’s lips tightened. Did that mean her friends had messed with them a first time? She could not imagine either Celia or Yana giving somebody a hard time when they had just split a wooden door in half and invited themselves inside. And Tucker might have tried to be a hero and miserably failed, with his debilitating injury. Luckily it sounded to her that they were all still alive, and they had fled for the safe area.

Fairacres Cathedral.

The padding sound of deliberately muted footsteps up the stairs alerted her to their approach.

“Who wants to mess with us?” Mouthbreather taunted, and then kicked the door to the basement kitchen open, a bundle of canned goods balanced with one arm, and a thick butcher’s knife gripped tightly by the other. He was a lot chubbier than she had thought from the sound of his voice.

“You picked the wrong fucking people!” Raspy added, stepping out through the doorway and revealing greased back dark hair and a band t-shirt that indicated he liked someone called the ‘Abandoned Stairwells’, depicting a naked, bleeding woman lying across a staircase in the middle of a forest.

Liza waited for them to spot her, partially obscured by the wall-mounted television and the shelving, and politely cocked her gun in their direction.

Mouthbreather’s mouth fell open, and she heard a sucking gasp as he struggled to keep his breaths even. The raspy-voiced guy didn’t move a muscle except his twitching brow.

“You boys appear to be in my house,” she said, flicking the Glock’s muzzle from one to the other and then back again, just to make them as sure of its presence as she could. “Now, we’re going to stay calm. Drop the knife down the stairs behind you,” she said, nodding her chin at Mouthbreather, who was standing with his puffy lips parted and the knife trembling in his hand.

“And you,” she said to Raspy, who still hadn’t moved, “do you have any weapons?”

He shook his head, and she smiled.

“Great, we can do this easily. Drop the knife down the stairs, now. And any of your other weapons.”

With a clumsy wrist movement, the kitchen knife clattered down the wooden stairs and skittered noisily across the exposed brick floor at the bottom of the stairs.

“Nicely done, now … sorry to do this, because you stole it all fair and square, but drop the food on the floor again. Keep eye contact with me. Don’t look at each other. And don’t get any ideas. This is fully loaded, and it has a pretty exciting body count already.”

Raspy gently cleared his throat, and she eyed him, wondering why he didn’t look as frightened as his girthy pal. It unnerved her, but she wasn’t going to let it show. She pulled in a deep, slow breath through her nose and watched the mouthbreather lower into a squat and let the cans tumble onto the floor.

“Thank you,” she said. “We can be pleasant about this.”

“We need that food,” Raspy said low. “We have a whole group, and there’s only one of you.”

She frowned at him, really disliking the way he was talking back to her when she had a gun. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.

“Well … go raid the supermarkets,” she said. “I’m not really interested in giving a couple of thieves survival tips, to be honest. I just need you to get out of my house.”

Raspy stepped forward, his palms facing her, his face expressionless. “You’re not going to shoot,” he told her gently, and for some reason his matter-of-fact way of speaking right then reminded her of the way her dad spoke to their old dairy cow.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You said body count. You meant zombies,” he said.

“Stop. Stop there. I will shoot you!” she said, her voice raising an octave, and she internally cringed at her instinct to take a big step back to regain the distance between them. He was maybe a yard and a half away from her, his palms still up.

Was he right? Could she shoot a person?

She swallowed, and his gaze flicked to her throat and then back up at her face, and he smiled. He could see her nervousness like it was written in neon lights on her head.

“You aren’t going to shoot me. We’re going to walk out with a couple of these cans -- not all of them -- because we’re neighbours. Lower the gun. We don’t have any weapons on us.”

The balls on this guy were unreal. Liza really, really wanted to open up the gap between them as wide as it would go. She trained the pistol on his forehead, knowing that she could blow a perfect steaming hole right between his eyes the very second she decided to.

But knowing at the same time that he was right. She wasn’t going to.

She wasn’t going to lower the gun, though.

“Good girl,” Raspy said, his voice hoarse and confident, and his smile patronising as all hell. Her arm quivered. Liza really didn’t like being patronised.

“We could do with a gun, Eric.”

Raspy slowly turned to look at Mouthbreather, whose lip twitched upwards into a smile, and then he looked back at Liza.

“Don’t listen to him, he’s just high on apocalypse,” Raspy -- Eric? -- said to her, staying completely calm.

“Just get out. Hands where I can see them.” That last bit was a cliche, but she understood its necessity. She didn’t trust these boys one iota. If this meant giving up some food, who even cared? It would take a while to replace their stock, in a time when non-perishables were key, but that was better than having to look into the dark eyes of this smirking boy for one more second.

“The gun is mine,” she said, her voice a growl, her knuckles white with the effort to keep the pistol locked onto Eric. “Leave now and keep your lives.”

“Where did you get it?” he asked, while his crony behind him gathered up the cans again. All of them, expressly against her orders, but she wasn’t feeling like arguing with them for another second. She wanted to find her friends and make sure they were alright.

Liza was standing in the way of the open door to the hall. She would have to slink further into the living room to allow them to leave, and she didn’t want to back down.

She was the one with the weapon here, dammit!

“I said where did you get the gun?” he repeated coolly.

What was she supposed to say to that? “None of your business.”

She hated how awkward her voice sounded to her; she was supposed to have the power here. Eric looked to her like a coiled cobra, ready to strike her at any second, and Liza wasn’t ready to pull the trigger in return. In a world like this, it wasn’t the more heavily armed who had the upper hand, but the willingness to harm another that made somebody more deadly. That was what made the zombies outside so scary, after all. There was no hesitation.

“Bitch,” he laughed under his breath. Then took three quick strides towards her. Liza kept the muzzle of the gun trained right on him, until the Glock was sticking him right between the ribs. Her eyes widened, realising the seriousness of this situation, and he smiled, and curled his long, cold fingers around her wrist.

“Get off me, I will shoot,” she said, but her voice was quiet. She was a bad liar. “I said get off.”

The boy leaned forward, his lips touching the strands of her hair that hung around her ears. “This should be in the hands of someone who is willing to use it,” he said softly; reasonably. “Do you agree that’s fair?”

“Fuck you,” she said, struggling against the vicegrip he had around her gun hand. “I don’t want to shoot you.”

He chuckled. Mouthbreather let out a nervous laugh behind him too.

“But I will,” she finished.

He was stronger than her. He pushed her hand away from his ribcage and then away from his body entirely, pointing the muzzle, against her struggles, towards the window to the garden. With a sharp tug and a strategic elbow jab, he had the pistol out of her hand, and the breath from her lungs. She sucked it in again, her cheeks on fire, and let her mouth fall open.

What the fuck, Liza? she asked herself.

Her heartbeat quickened by what must have been a hundred beats per minute. She still had a rifle they had not seen yet, leaning beside the television and obscured by the shelving from where Eric stood, but if he was observant he would grab that the second he walked past her towards the front door.

And if she lunged for it, he would shoot her.

She knew that with absolute certainty.

“Thank you,” he said, parting his lips to show teeth. “As a thanks, I’m not going to kill you. I’ll let you stay here. But we are taking the food. Do you have ammunition?”

“No.”

His face twisted and he arced his arm through the air, the butt of her own Glock smashing into her right cheek, splitting the skin and, judging from the blood that filled her mouth, her gum as well.

“You’re a fucking terrible liar,” he spat at her. She knew that was true. “Where is it?”

It was in her bag, on the ground half an inch away from the propped up rifle. She used all of her self control not to glance to her left at it. She cradled her cheek instead, pretending it had stunned her mentally as well as physically.

She had to think her way out of this. It was probable that she would not get another weapon for quite some time. If her friends had had their weapons to hand, these looters would already have them, and wouldn’t be acting like these were their first guns.

And Liza couldn’t help but think that Tucker would have fucking blown holes in them if he had been able to reach one.

Why couldn’t she be more like that?

“Tell me where the ammo is,” he said again, louder. He had struck her hard without seeming outwardly angry; Liza could only imagine what he’d be capable of if she riled him up to real fury.

“I … I need to get it,” she said.

“How stupid do you think I am?” He waved the gun around. “Tell me where it is.”

“It’s in a safe,” she lied. “Let me open it. Then you can have whatever you want from inside it, and you can leave me.”

“So you can get your spare weapons and whatever else?” he said. “You must be really fucking dim if you think that’s going to work, bitch.”

She let out a shuddering sigh. “I won’t kill you,” she said quietly. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

He paused. He glanced at Mouthbreather. “Hurry up,” he said.

“Eric?” the chubby guy said from the end of the room, a playful lilt in his voice. As Liza wandered over to the entertainment centre, wondering how she was going to get out of this alive and still armed against the dangers outside -- and it was only day one of this whole damn thing -- she could feel the two men in her home communicating specifically about her silently behind her back.

She held back a shudder and kneeled to pretend that she was reaching behind the television to access some kind of safe … that was right underneath the TV in their living room? They weren’t worried? They really did see her as zero threat.

Eric let out a low laugh. “I don’t give a fuck, Micky, but I sure as hell don’t wanna watch.” There was a pause, where Liza’s hairs pricked up at the back of her neck while his gaze scraped over her. Her breath was coming in sharp bursts.

“You don’t?”

“Not my type.”

Micky, Mouthbreather, laughed shrilly. Out of their eyelines, her left hand inched to wrap around the butt of the rifle, and she instantly felt a thousand times better.

Even though it was a far cry from having it properly aimed with her finger on the trigger. And Eric had the pistol pointed right at her already.

Liza carefully pulled the magazines from her backpack out of his eyeshot while the continued to quietly talk about whatever they were talking about.

“You’ll need to hold the gun though,” Mouthbreather said.

“Fucking disgusting,” Eric said with a sigh. “I’m not watching, I told you. Figure something else out.”

“Mate, I saved your life twice. You told me you owed me.”

Eric sagged. Liza tossed a look around her shoulder just in time to see him advance on her and drag her backwards by the back of her shirt. She yelped and struggled, but he pressed the cold muzzle on her temple and bared his teeth until she went limp against his body, panting with fear.

The rifle she had been tentatively holding onto had fallen so that the muzzle was visible between the shelving and the entertainment centre that housed their consoles. She squeezed her eyes shut and silently begged anyone who was listening for the two boys not to glance down at that exact square inch of space.

Her left foot was hovering by his shin, and she knew that she could stamp down hard and debilitate him easily, but what then? Either he would keep his composure enough to squeeze the trigger, or it would fall to the floor and his friend would grab for it and end her life. Spraining his ankle wasn’t worth the uncertainty. She needed a real plan.

“Down,” Eric said, pressing his knees into the backs of hers until she dropped to a kneeling position. “How do you want her?” he asked his friend with a sigh.

And Liza realised then exactly what was happening. “Hey,” she said, trying to get back to her feet, but Eric shoved her back to the floor. She fell onto her knees again with a cry of pain. “No,” she forced through gritted teeth. “Please, no.”

“That’s fun,” the mouthbreather told her, stepping forward to run his fingers through her hair, tenderly at first, but then he tangled it around his fingers and tugged. “Keep doing that.”

She twitched backwards, her head darting instinctively in the direction of the door.

“Don’t run,” Eric said, bored. “I’m not like you. I will shoot.”

“I believe you,” Liza said, shivering. She swallowed, looking up at the chubby guy grinning down at her. His hands danced through the air, down towards his belt, making a show of it. “Lucky for me, you don’t know anything about guns.”

Eric snorted. “What do you mean?”

She let out a laugh of her own, though she felt like making any other noise at that moment. “I’m not scared; I bet you don’t even know how to switch off the safety.”

She glanced over her shoulder to see him turn the gun on its side and frown at it, and she didn’t hesitate.

Her elbow launched backwards the hardest she could manage, right between his legs, and then as he bent double to let out a horrible choking noise, she slammed her head back as hard as she could, her skull connecting with his. She saw stars, but since she had been expecting the blow, she managed to throw herself to the left, yank the rifle from its poor hiding place, and turn it onto Eric before he moved.

“Wait,” he sputtered, one eye closed as he looked up at her. Liza fended off hyperventilation, and blew a hole in his skull.

“What the fuck?!” the other guy screamed, staggering backwards and pressing a hand on his mouth, the other on his stomach.

“Your fly is undone,” Liza said, and squeezed again, ripping all the way through his gut just as he retched dark blood over the front of his shirt. Eric toppled over, blood pouring across the wooden floor and seeping between the cracks.

Micky the mouthbreather staggered forward, groaning, while she stared at the dead body she had made with wide eyes. His hands closed around the pistol and he swung it in her direction, firing wildly, but she darted out of the way and the 50-inch brand new TV exploded in a shower of sparks.

Under the cover of the electricity, she ducked under his arm as he fired again, punching a hole in the plaster right where she had been just a split second before.

“You’re going to die,” she screamed, leaping over the arm of the couch in an effort to get through the door to the extension. Maybe she could get into the garden and hop a fence. “Stop shooting and … call an ambulance.”

Micky coughed, and then let out a gargling cry at the pure, primal pain. “No one will come,” he sputtered. “No one is coming.” He pointed the gun limply in her direction again, his eyelids drooping. “If I’m dying, so are you,” he added at a whisper.

The door behind her was shut. His hands were weak and he was swaying, but he lifted the gun up again and squinted in her direction.

“There’s … one problem with that,” she said, leaning against the wood behind her and struggling to catch her breath.

“No point in trying to keep me talking,” he mumbled, slipping away before her eyes and struggling with the pistol. “The … what’s the problem?”

She blew out a breath, delaying him for as long as she could. “It’s a big problem,” she said. “The sound of all this gunfire. It attracts…”

“I don’t have time for…” he interrupted, and then trailed off. His brow knitted as he noticed she was looking pointedly right behind him. “Oh, fuck,” he said weakly as the sound of rasping breath cut through the room and rotting hands wrapped around his torn abdomen.

Teeth ripped into his neck and Liza screamed as the pistol went off, ripping through the couch beside her, and then again, up straight into the light. Then the hand holding it lolled, and the gun fell loudly to the floor.

Liza lifted the rifle and aimed carefully, chest heaving. “Thanks, guy,” she said to the feasting zombie, and then squeezed the trigger.

Headshot!

80 UP

The rotted skull exploded in a shower of gore and the intense smell of metallic rot that almost made Liza heave. But she didn’t have time. More zombies would be coming in soon, attracted by all the noise.

She gathered up all of her things, breath shallow and head spinning at the knowledge of how close she had come to death just then.

Or worse.

One thing was for sure: she was never going to hesitate in protecting herself again. What she would have done for a few extra hours to splash cold water on her face and huddle under some blankets.

A few hard blinks to clear her head later, she had all of her weapons reloaded -- she only had a couple of magazines left for each weapon -- and back securely on her body, and the cans of food packed into her backpack along with the rest of her ammunition. The smell was almost getting to be far too much for her stomach, and with her pistol in hand she made her way out of the hallway. She had been right about the noise -- at least a dozen zombies were trudging towards her front gate, ready to make their way up the two steps and past the nonexistent front door.

She tutted and pulled the Bowie knife from her pack, ready to run past as many as she could without making any more noise. Her friends had left with their lives, and they were somewhere safe.

Her eyes trailed across the silhouette of the small city and landed on the gothic spikes and arches of the Fairacres Cathedral. Then her gaze lowered to where London Road turned into Main Street. Her route.

A horde a hundred strong was beginning to round the corner, ambling right for her and her enticing gunfire. The bunch she had freed from the store, plus plenty more.

She rubbed at her forehead -- if she made no more noise and drew no more attention to herself, it was possible that she would be able to jump into an abandoned car and go all the way around to make it to the cathedral in one piece.

As soon as that thought entered her head, a deafening ‘crack’ made her drop to a crouch on her doorstep, eyes darting left and right. Then another gunshot, and then another. Three of the zombies in front of her dropped to the ground, two of them still alive but incapacitated.

“You idiot,” she hissed low, and then she dared to lift her head to see what well-meaning soul had braved the horde to come and clear a path.

“Yo!” a tall, well-muscled guy with ash-blonde, styled hair, a long stained tank top and sandals yelled over to her from the corner. He strolled over as if he was unafraid of the rapidly increasing number of zombies that Liza herself had set upon them. “What was your name again?”

Liza groaned inwardly. “Hello again, Blazer,” she said. “It’s Liza.”

“You headed to the safe place too?” he shouted, his hand cupped to his mouth for extra volume.

Well, she had no choice but to step from her front gate and glower at him. He laughed.

“What’s got your knickers in a twist? Aren’t we going to the same place? It’ll be safer together.”

In response, Liza lifted her gun and took out the two prone zombies he hadn’t managed to off completely, plus another one behind him.

Headshot COMBO! x3

80 UP

80 UP (+10)

80 UP (+20)

270 UP

He chuckled. “You’re a pretty good shot,” he said encouragingly.

Liza hated him.

“C’mon then, Blazer,” she muttered, lowering the pistol to hang by her side and looking over at what had to be two hundred shuffling monsters blocking the entirety of the road ahead of them. From the way it looked to her, there was no way through. But, as always, she had to try or die. “Let’s find that safety we were promised.”