Krystal – Thursday: Plague Day
She landed first on her hand and then her face and couldn’t decide which hurt the most.
‘James? James?’
He was silent. He must have knocked himself out when he fell. She tugged her hand free of his. His skin was cold and it hadn’t been a moment ago. She got to her hands and knees and felt around until she touched his face. That was cold too.
His skin was dry and what felt like flakes of skin attached themselves to her fingers. She wiped them on her jeans, swallowing. He hadn’t looked like he had a skin condition. He’d looked fresh-faced and smooth.
‘James?’
Still no response. She pushed him a few times but he didn’t move. It felt like she was pushing a lump of wood. She trailed her hands over him back to his face and held her hand under his nose. She’d done this more than once with people she’d called friends and sometimes she felt something and sometimes she didn’t. There was no reason to think she wouldn’t, but…
Nothing. Not a breath. What the hell had just happened? He’d been fine, chatting away and then… she sniffed. The smell was stronger now, mold and something worse. She remembered the police cars crashing, the way they went from driving normally along to being completely out of control with no warning. This must have happened to them.
The fog. It was in here and got James. So why was she still standing? Her next thought was for Ed and she stumbled to her feet. Where was the door? Why had they shut it on the way in? She saw a thin line of light where it came in beneath and with a sigh of relief took a step towards it. That was when his hand wrapped around her ankle.
She screamed and kicked out and succeeded only in falling over. His grip was even tighter than when he’d held her hand and she felt panic bubble up, sweat breaking over her brow and her heart thudding in her chest. She ground her teeth together and took a deep breath. Panic was something that happened when you had something to lose.
She lashed out with her other foot, slamming it again and again into his wrist. She’d never been so grateful for her Doc Marten boots. They were the only item of clothing she had that was actually worth anything. For that matter they were the only thing she’d ever paid for.
His wrist gave way, the skin cracking beneath the blows and her foot ploughed into the softness beneath. She kept kicking and although the fingers stayed tight around her ankle, she pulled free and pushed herself on her arse across the floor. She scrambled up, staring into the darkness of the room, trying to imagine where he’d be.
She reached the door handle and yanked on it, shoving hard. The door stayed resolutely closed. She whimpered, a sound she’d not heard from herself in a long time and pushed again. Still nothing. She stopped moving, listening. He made plenty of noise, scraping and sliding as he got to his feet. He growled and she imagined him taking slow steps towards her.
She pulled her knife from her pocket. It was pathetic, a penknife with a blade about the size of her pinky, but it was better than nothing. She pulled the blade out and waited. A patch of darkness moved and she put her hands out. He stumbled into them and she screamed and shoved. It was like shoving a building and he kept coming.
His hands closed on her shoulders and she felt his breath close to her face. She put her hands where she thought his face was and felt slobber on her palms. She shrieked and pulled them away, then put them back a bit higher. His nose was soft beneath her palm and she pushed.
He tightened his grip and hauled her away from the door. Krystal kept her hands where they were, the knife still gripped tight. She lifted her right hand away until the tip of the blade pressed against the back of her left hand. She moved it until it rested between her fingers and then she guided it until it sat over what she hoped was his eye.
The manoeuvre seemed to take for ever and throughout it he dragged her forward, bulling his head at her and trying to push through her hands. She grimaced and pushed the penknife. She felt the moment it entered his eye and he whined, like a dog being beaten. She pushed further and hot liquid poured out and down her arms.
She gagged and spat and gagged again but kept pushing. Then he froze. She liked to think she knew the exact moment it pierced his brain, but the truth was she knew nothing except the feel of his fingers digging into her shoulders and the hot tang of his breath that made her stomach churn.
She shoved him in the chest and he dropped like chopped wood, thumping to the floor. Her arms hung by her sides as she took deep breaths, chest heaving. She turned around and found the door. She turned the handle and pulled it open. She could see herself, frantically pushing at a pull door and despite what had just happened, the blood rose to her cheeks as she blushed.
The light spilled into the room and she turned to look at James. It wasn’t James. It had, perhaps, once been called that, but it wasn’t any more. His hair was already falling out, leaving behind a scalp that resembled cold porridge. His eyes looked like one of her friend’s after a particularly bad winter. And he smelled, of meat left out in the sun for far too long.
She needed the knife. The handle poked from his eye socket like a flag and she screwed up her face. She needed it. She took one slow step and another until she stood over the corpse. She’d seen a few horror movies in her time, though nothing as bad as what she’d seen on the street, but she knew he wasn’t going to rear up for one last attack. The way he’d stiffened when she got the blade into his brain had been as final as it gets.
At least she knew how to kill them. She blinked, hand hovering above his head. She knew how to kill them. What the hell was going on? When had she been able to kill anything? And what were they? She knew the answer to that. Zombies were cool. At least, they were until you were shut in a cupboard with one. Then they were just smelly.
She looked at her hands, wondering at the cold. The blood that caked them was cooling down and becoming sticky. She heaved and bent over, trying her hardest to keep her five cups of tea down. Once the urge to regurge was gone, she reached out again and wrapped her hand around the knife.
It took some tugging, but eventually it came free with a sucking noise normally reserved for freeing your boot from deep mud. That thought took her back to camping with mum and dad. It was an early memory, one of the few not ruined by what came after. She remembered fires and lying on the beach and walking through woods and laughing.
She scrubbed her eyes with one hand and then pictured herself with blood smeared across her face. Considering the state of her hands, it probably wasn’t the worst that could happen. She carried the knife with her thumb and first finger out of the room and straight across to the toilet.
As it clattered into the sink, the shakes set in and she grabbed the edge as her knees gave way. After a few minutes of hyperventilating on the bathroom floor, she pulled herself up and blasted the hot water on full, scrubbing her hands until they hurt.
The clean knife went in her back pocket and she finally looked at herself in the mirror. The blood was scrubbed off, but she looked different anyway. Older and far more scared. Fear was something that had become so common place she thought she’d conquered it. Turns out there are different kinds of fear.
A ball coalesced in her stomach, heavy and painful as another type of fear she’d never had assailed her. Where was Ed? She ran to the lift and hammered the button. Had he switched the lifts off as well? There were like, a million stairs in this place. She stopped hammering and let out a long breath once she heard the whir that signalled the lift’s approach and listened. The building was eerily quiet. No air con, no hum of lights, no voices.
The ride up was long and fidgety and she kept touching the knife in her pocket and remembering the sound as it came out of the zombie’s eye. She’d done plenty she wasn’t proud of in the last three years, and few things she was. She’d had to defend herself a bunch of times and sometimes she’d succeeded. Other times she’d ended up bruised and bloody and penniless, but that was how it worked.
But she’d never used the knife. It had been there, but any time she’d been tempted to reach for it, she’d imagined the person she was fighting having something far larger stashed away and the moment she brought it out, they had an excuse. Now she’d not only used it, but she’d killed someone she’d been chatting to only a few minutes earlier.
Her shoulders hunched and she wondered whether she shouldn’t have just stayed in the bathroom. Then the doors slid open and she groaned. Across the room she saw Ed, backed against the window, hands before him like they’d make any difference. The floor was covered in corpses, stiff and cold like James. The air con hadn’t made any difference.
She dashed across, weaving between the corpses and grabbed him by the shoulder. He flinched and shoved her away.
‘They just all fell over. One minute she was talking about her son and the next she just fell over. They’re so cold.’
‘Yeah, not for long. C’mon.’
Ed finally looked at her through eyes that struggled to remain still, flicking this way and that.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ll wake up soon.’
The little amount of blood that had managed to remain in his face fled and he took her outstretched hand. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Went to turn off the air con. Getting a bit cold in here.’
‘How do you know how to do that?’
‘I don’t. Took James with me.’
‘Where’s James? Who’s James?’
‘James is a zombie. Well, he was. Now he’s down an eye on the floor of the electrics office.’
Ed’s eyes settled on her, brow creasing. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Tell you later, c’mon.’
She was trying to keep her voice calm and quiet. She’d seen the ambulance people do it when they came to take someone away. They always talked to her and anyone else around, always with the same questions.
‘Did they have anyone, anyone we should call? Did you know they were struggling?’
And she’d always notice the calm quiet voices and somehow she’d answer the questions with a straight face, like they weren’t the stupidest questions in the world. She was using that voice now talking to Ed and he was responding just like she’d always done.
‘Yeah, course.’
He let her lead him across the room, weaving between the bodies. They could wake up. At any moment she could put her foot down and feel a hand around her ankle. She had to stop herself running across the room, if only so Ed didn’t lose the plot entirely. She kept seeing things from the corners of her eyes, movement that made her jerk to one side, only to see nothing but corpses.
They reached the lift without Ed freaking out further at the presence of lots of dead bodies and stepped in. They both sighed and she pressed the button. The doors were most of the way closed when an arm slipped through. Ed screamed and threw himself back, banging off the opposite wall. She grinned, waiting for the door to close and snap off the offending limb.
Instead, they pinged and reopened and she stared at the faces of those with whom they’d shared their day, every one staring at her with sunken eyes and teeth bared.
Next Installment Monday 6th October
