Chapter Fourteen

Zombies are then a symbol of our own mad urges to destroy ourselves, and a terrifying portent that we might succeed.

-Gospel of the Living Dead

“We’re not the only ones left,” Liza said, shaking her head as if this were an absolute certainty. “I saw Blazer. I had looters. My housemates were seen alive just a few hours ago.”

Lilian shook her head harder. “I have been looking out of that window—” She jabbed her forefinger in its direction. “—since it started. At first there were lots. And there was stuff on TV, and on the internet. The radio. And then nothing. Nothing. Not here. Everyone got into these emergency coaches and buses to London, where it’s safer. Or they’re … out there, but they aren’t people anymore, so it doesn’t matter.”

Liza wasn’t sure what to say. Everyone had gone to London. Did that include her friends? They had been kicked out of their home, had nowhere safe to go, and, what? They had just … gone?

She looked down to experience some brief self-pity, but was immediately faced with the ragged bullet wound in her side, and the flowering purple and green bruising all around it. She had been shot point blank, so it was a miracle that it wasn’t much worse. She had a feeling it was down to the headset. Video game characters get shot all the time, after all, and they mostly just shrug it off.

“I need to get this out. Do you have a toolbox?” she asked. Lilian stared at her for a moment, expressionless, but then nodded. “And some alcohol?” Nothing. “Please get it for me.”

“Fine,” she said finally, and got up to leave. Liza waited with bated breath until she returned with half a bottle of whiskey and a rusty metal box, which she opened and displayed.

“Thank you,” Liza made sure to say, and looked through it. “Pliers, hello,” she said. “And hello, Jack.” She lifted the whiskey bottle and sloshed it.

“Do you greet every inanimate object you come across?” Lilian asked. Liza glanced at her. “Just wondering. I can see that getting annoying.”

Knowing that just pouring alcohol onto the rug would really piss off the other girl, Liza grudgingly placed the pliers over the half-empty mug and poured the Jack Daniels over the needle nose.

“Don’t waste it,” Lilian muttered, so Liza stopped, breathing out slowly. “Also, Jack Daniels? That’s … not a good idea to put inside your body.”

Making full eye contact, Liza brought the two remaining fingers of alcohol to her lips and swallowed it all. She gagged and shook her head. “Yeurgh.”

“Fine, your choice.”

“Lilian,” Liza said, hovering the pliers over her own wound and realising that the angle was completely off. She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled in another ragged breath. “Ever played Operation?”

“No…” the girl said. “This is stupid. You have no idea what…”

“Please? I know what I’m doing.” She thought about explaining the headset to the other girl, but she didn’t know how to do that without sounding completely insane. It might need to be a speech she rehearsed later on for other situations like this. “All I need to do is get it out. I didn’t really even need to sterilise the pliers. I just need the bullet out.”

“You could bleed too much,” Lilian said, lowering her gaze and chewing her lip. “Everywhere.”

Liza laughed. “For a second I thought you were worried about me, not the couch.”

A storm crossed the other girl’s features. “Don’t you dare tell me what my priorities are! I will do it if you need me to, but I think it’s stupid!” Liza opened her mouth but then shut it again. “Stupid.”

“Thank you,” she said simply, and lay back.

“I can’t put you to sleep,” Lilian said. “You, uh … might want to drink the rest of what is in your mug.”

The half-tea half-whiskey mug. It was a dark brown colour, almost appealing, but … milk, sugar, and whiskey. Was that a thing? Would she die from that before she died from lead poisoning?

She swirled it around and swallowed the pre-regret in her throat, and then chugged three quick gulps, gagged hard and covered her face with both hands. “Oh, god,” she said, and then coughed. “That was…”

“Interesting?” Lilian gave a wonky smile, taking the pliers from her and getting down onto her knees.

“I…” She coughed again, and then pulled a cushion from under her head and pressed it to her mouth.

“Are you going to throw up?” Lilian asked.

“No,” Liza said, as evenly as she could, muffled by the down. “I’m going to scream.”

*

“Shirt happens?”

Liza pulled the shirt down over her new clean bandage and watched her health tick slowly upwards, but grimaced at how dirty her hair looked. A few hours of sleep had stiffened her neck and back, but refreshed her mentally.

She looked at the words across her chest and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “It does.”

Lilian frowned and it took Liza a couple of seconds of combing her greasy hair with her fingers back into a ponytail before she realised the other girl was packing up her things.

“What are you doing?” she asked through the mirror.

Lilian didn’t look up. “I’m coming with you,” she said.

“Where?”

“To London,” she said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “There might be a coach left. If there’s no coach, we’ll rent a car.”

“Rent a car?” Liza repeated. “I don’t think the rental places will still be operating as normal.”

Lilian sighed, and slung a gym bag filled with things over her back. “The rental places have cars, and they have keys,” she said. “Put two and two together.”

“Fine, yes, yes,” Liza said irritably. But she couldn’t be too annoyed, considering the nursing student had just penetrated her torn flesh with pliers like an absolute champ. No crying, no retching, no complaining. Just in and out. The offending bullet sat on the coffee table beside the disgusting mix of tea and whiskey, which now also stained the cushion Liza had been screaming into, and the bloody bandages. The bullet got a coaster, too, of course.

Couldn’t have germs rising up to kill all the remaining humans, after all.

“Where are we going?” Lilian asked when they were all ready to get going.

“The cathedral,” Liza said, but her determination about that fact had wavered. “I really feel like it would be safe there. And I think people I know have gone there.”

“Or they went there, and then got on one of the coaches to London from the bus depot across the street.”

Liza shook her head. “I live on London Road. There’s been a car across both lanes until recently. Then there was an impenetrable horde. Not to mention the blocked train line. There’s no way they got past without me noticing. They would have stopped for me.”

Unless she had left by the time they had passed. But the horde!

“There are other ways,” Lilian said. “There’s not just one road. It’d be the quickest, but there have got to be other ways to London from Fairacres.”

Maybe.

“I just can’t think of anything else to do,” she admitted after a short silence. “What else is there to do?”

“Drive to London,” Lilian said. “It’s our only chance of survival, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that.” Liza led the way down the stairs and to the door, while Lilian scoped out the situation out the window. “What about the police zombies?”

“The what?” Lilian clomped down the stairs after her.

“There was a bunch of riot gear zombies in the archway,” Liza said over her shoulder. “I couldn’t see if they were still there through the window. If they are, we’re going to have to do something dramatic to get past them.”

Her hand hovered at the Bowie knife at her belt. Now that she had her mental faculties back, and now that she had eaten some good high-energy breakfast foods, and her health was filling instead of emptying, she felt so much better. She felt faster and sharper than she had in a little while.

Having only a knife to her name didn’t seem to be the death sentence she had thought it was.

Once out of the door, Lilian looked to Liza much less imposing and much less of a consideration in general, to be honest. She was larger around the middle than she was (and, by some cruel joke of the universe, smaller around the chest) but in the context of the dangerous outdoors, Lilian seemed suddenly to be very tiny, pale, and frightened.

They had left her house, and entered Liza’s. Now she would call the shots.

“The archway is clear,” Liza breathed, resisting the urge to bend double at the waist and praise everything. “We can get to the cathedral from here, easily.”

“Don’t get too excited,” Lilian said, expressionless and when Liza followed her line of sight she saw exactly what she didn’t want to see. At least five zombies had filed out of the pub at some point during the night but they hadn’t bothered to roam very far. Along with two riot zombies, they remained under the awning, softly rasping and shuffling up and down.

She could see what had drawn them out, and the sight made her wince. A smear of dark blood on the floor, and the remains of some poor four-legged animal; a thick red tail and what looked like a paw or two. A fox, maybe.

Now, sated, the group was just content to shuffle back and forth, turn around, gnash their teeth and stare vacantly.

Liza moved back around the corner and nodded to the van at the other side of the street.

“We’re going to have to run,” she said. “You’ll need to get in as fast as you can and then just trust me.”

“It’s completely demolished, are you insane?” Lilian asked. Liza deflated, and shook her head.

“I am not insane,” she said. The girl had saved her life, in a couple of ways, and they needed to go. There was no time to argue about things like this. “Just get in the passenger door as soon as it becomes possible.”

She glanced around the corner again to see how close they really were, and found herself face to face with a wandering corpse. Its jaw dropped open and its arms flew forward. Surprisingly strong hands gripped at the material of her jacket and Liza suppressed a cry of surprise and pressed her palms flat on its upper chest.

It kept trying to lean forward and rip the skin from her throat, and the commotion riled up the rest of its pack, who began to shuffle towards them with interest, and then with hunger.

“Go,” Liza snapped. “Get in the van, if it’s unlocked.”

“You’re crazy,” Lilian yelled, and yanked the knife from Liza’s sheath and stuck it into the desperately struggling zombie’s temple. It fell to the floor and Lilian tugged and tugged to remove the Bowie knife.

Liza grasped her wrist and helped, and the blade sickeningly rasped out against the skull bone. “Go,” she said again, and this time Lilian bolted across the street, Liza close behind, and a pack of monsters at their heels.

The door was unlocked on the passenger side, but the dent meant it only opened a foot or so, and then made a noise not unlike nails on a chalkboard.

“Come on,” Liza said, panicking now. They were only across a road from the oncoming pack, with one knife and nothing else. They barely had seconds.

Ford Transit (2010)

UP to Next Level

Repair?

24/100

410

Features

Standard Body

700

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

410 points just to repair it? Liza had never clicked a button with her eyeballs so fast. The van, before their eyes, was as good as new as though it had never been a wreck. It was more like they shifted to a different reality than the van actually changed.

“In!” she yelled, popping the door and ushering Lilian to the passenger seat. She sprinted around just as the zombies clawed at the slamming passenger door, and they began to swarm around the van just as Liza hopped in. She slammed the door as hard as she could, amputating a dead hand as she did so, and before the garbling noises of the hungry undead could draw any of their friends over, Liza quickly unlocked the ‘Hotwired’ aspect and when the engine began to turn over she whooped.

“What is going on here?” Lilian screamed suddenly, and Liza could see out of the corner of her eye that the girl’s frizzy orange head was in her hands and her entire body was trembling from head to toe. “First the undead, the dead people everywhere, like a bloody … movie! And this? What is this? How did you do that?” She was shouting at the top of her lungs now and Liza was trying hard to concentrate on weaving around the zombies, not sure how much a crash would compromise the integrity of the van, or the speed they were building up.

“This is crazy! This is insane!” Lilian was screaming. She was scratching at her own cheeks with her bitten fingernails and it seemed like she was having something of a delayed nervous breakdown in response to the end of the world.

Apparently it had been climbing into a miraculously brand new van that had been previously crushed that had done it.

Liza was suddenly incredibly impressed that the girl had managed to hole herself up, believing that everybody else had left for the capital city, watch outside the window as cars crashed, people were killed left and right, and the dead rose again just, as she said, like a movie, and then pluck a bullet from a stranger’s body, all without going completely insane.

It also meant her insult of choice make a little more sense. Everything was insane. And it was a little odd, probably, how quickly Liza had accepted the whole apocalypse thing. But it was what it was, and she wasn’t going to pretend to freak out when there were things to get done.

They whizzed through the archway and lost a wing mirror, with a crack that made Liza yell ‘Woops!’ while Lilian’s screaming rose an octave or two.

The zombies on the pedestrian-friendly high street beyond the archway turned and gaped with their milky eyes trained on the erratically zooming van, and the long piercing note that escaped it.

They tore through the street, turning and screeching down the side street that led to the regal, gothic silhouette, and halting. Lilian continued to scream into dead air for a few minutes, and Liza patiently waited for her to run out of breath.

But then she sucked in another lungful and began to start again, and Liza had to press her hand to her mouth. Then yanked it back.

“Ugh, you licked me!”

“Don’t put your hands on people’s mouths! Do you know where most hands have been in a day?”

“You think my hand is dirty so your instinct is to lick it?” Liza yelled, and they looked around.

Zombies. So many of them, approaching slowly but surely, in every direction.

“Gotta go, no time to talk,” she said, interrupting Lilian’s inevitable response. “Get out and run. Panic later, OK?” Lilian was scraping her bottom lip with her teeth and staring in front of them.

“I stabbed it, right in the head,” she said.

Right. Yeah, that kind of thing usually freaked people out a lot. Liza figured it would be akin to the first time she had snapped the neck of a wild rabbit. A shudder rolled through her body. Except this had to be worse, because the zombies had human faces. Almost. Not quite.

“Out,” she said firmly. “Run to the gate, and we’ll see if it’s open.”

“It’s not,” she whispered. “We’re stuck out here.”

“OK. OK, Fine, you stay in here,” Liza said, feeling desperate at how close the monsters were getting, and figuring that the other girl was not willing to move herself from the safety of the van any time soon. “Just … wait here.”

She popped the door and slammed it behind her, and sprinted the few feet to the gate, and yanked it. Through the big back gothic entrance was a pretty, manicured courtyard and then the imposing, safe structure of the Fairacres Cathedral itself. She shoved it the other way just to check.

Nothing.

The zombies were almost at her. She cursed under her breath, and ducked under the grasping hands of the one closest to her, span and booted another one in the chest so it fell backwards, and she pulled open the van door and hopped back up into the leather seat, slamming it shut.

“What do we do now?” Lilian cried, her eyes welling and her voice thick. “We go to London? What about your friends?” She stopped talking and clutched her chest, beginning to pant.

“Lilian?” Liza asked, reversing as far back as she could go as the zombies still advanced. She didn’t fancy another drive straight through a horde. That feeling when the car had slowed and being surrounded by grasping hands and clacking teeth … that had been the worst. Beside her, the breathing had sped up and become more shallow and urgent. “Lil?”

“I … can’t … breathe.”

“You’re panicking,” Lia said as calmly and matter-of-factly as she could. “You just have to … try to calm down.”

“You idiot, you think I can just calm down? Do you know anything at all about panic? Or do you just make everything up as you go along?” Lilian bellowed.

Liza’s eyebrow twitched. “Looks like you’re OK now,” she said. “Seatbelt, please.”

“What?”

“Seatbelt.”

To her surprise, Lilian clicked her seatbelt into place and turned back to the front.

“Thank you,” LIza said politely.

“You’re welcome,” the girl muttered.

Liza changed gear and put her foot down, hard.

The van roared and groaned and then accelerated as fast as it could. “Shit, it’s not enough,” Liza yelled, slamming her palm down on the wheel and hearing the beep ricochet through the empty street, but for the herd now at least a hundred strong. “Faster!” she yelled at the van. “Stupid idiot!”

“Stop talking to inanimate objects!” Lilian yelled back.

“Brace!” she ordered, and Lilian actually did lean forward and cover her head with her arms, with a small gasp as they crashed through the gothic gate and into the courtyard. She turned and screeched to a stop and launched herself out of the door to run back to the gate as fast as she could.

Already four, five, six zombies had filtered through and more every second. Liza inspected it.

Cathedral Gates

UP to Next Level

Repair?

29/100

350

Features

Empty Slot (Unlock)

100

Empty Slot (Unlock)

200

She spent the points and it suddenly looked brand new, as if it had never been demolished for a second.

She backed up fast, counting thirteen zombies who breached the cathedral grounds, and ran to open Lilian’s door. “Now, get out, no more moping. No more panic. Survive. Come on. Out!”

Lilian half fell out the door and into Liza’s arms, limp from adrenaline, exhausted mentally and physically from tensing up and screaming, from hyperventilating and questioning everything. But Liza didn’t have time for sympathy, or for empathy, or for anything. She grabbed the girl’s upper arm so tight that Lilian let out a mewling noise, and she dragged her to the huge double doors.

Holding her breath, she pounded on them. Lilian waited.

The zombies lurched towards them.

She pounded again. “Help us!” she screamed.

“Help us, God!” Lilian yelled. “I know you’re in there!”

“Let us in!”

“You bastard!”

The zombies approached. They were close now. Run past them, through them, back to the van? Keep knocking? Split up and hope for the best? Take on a baker’s dozen of predators with nothing but a relatively small knife between them? There was nothing smart to do; nothing that jumped out at her.

“B-back to the van,” she said, tripping up on her own uncertainty.

“What?” Lilian asked, face wet with tears and limbs trembling. “What?” she asked again, louder this time.

“To the van. Past them. I don’t … I don’t see what else we can do.” Liza yanked the knife out of its sheath and ran to the closest zombie, slamming it into its eye. The creature gargled and fell and she pulled the blade out with ease before pulling her arm back and punching it into the temple of the next nearest one. She pulled it out. Eleven more came closer, reaching, scratching at her clothes, working their jaws, eyes wide…

“Liza!” Lilian screamed, grappling with a zombie near the doors. Liza booted at one and then ran the three paces back to Lilian, yanking the zombie off of her with all her strength and slamming the knife between its eyes. She could see her skin shining with sweat. Her hands shaking.

Melee 1HKO COMBO x3

100 UP

100 UP (+10)

100 UP (+20)

330 UP

What now?

And then Liza could almost hear angels sing, church organs trill, as the double doors behind them opened.

They were pulled inside, and the doors pushed shut against the straining undead outside. Finally the huge deadbolt was pushed into place, and Liza bent double, knife loose in her hands, and caught her breath while Lilian tried her hardest to stop the tears of fear.

They were safe. They were safe.

Whoever this person was, she could kiss them. Liza looked up at her saviour.

There was a beat as their saviour stared back, palms raised.

And then she lifted her knife and lunged right for him.