Apologies: I missed my posting date yesterday. It’s the first time in well over a year I haven’t posted on a Monday. In case anyone was waiting with baited breath for the next part, apologies 🙂 In my defence, my son is five days old and I was lucky enough to be sneaking out to see Ani Difranco in London, but still, I feel lame. Sorry, folks, and here it is.
David – Thursday: Plague Day
Soho was just the same as Trafalgar Square. Bodies littered the streets like leaves in autumn. But it was peaceful and the rumble of the soldier’s trucks was gone completely. In fact, he couldn’t hear anything. Was this his world? Had he returned to the place he’d spent the last eleven days? Maybe that was the truth of it. Perhaps all the time he spent wandering the empty streets, the corpses had been there, yet somehow hidden from view.
He walked into Soho square and found an empty patch of grass. He lay down, brushing away the remnants of the fog that still clung to the ground. It was strange how tenacious it was in some parts of the city but almost gone in others. Perhaps the wind moved through here and had already stolen it.
He lay back, settled his head onto the grass, and stared up at the sky. The blue looked wrong, like someone had painted it on there. The corners of the buildings that towered around the square crept into his vision and he grunted. He needed space.
He climbed to his feet, brushed imaginary dirt off his trousers and jogged out the square. He’d go to Regents Park. It wasn’t far and he could find somewhere to stare at the sky until his eyes watered.
He should be more worried about what was happening. He vaguely remembered the soldiers and the shooting, but his mind was doing an excellent job of blocking it out. If he tried hard enough, he could pretend the whole waking up and running and screaming thing was a dream. He could walk with his eyes turned up to the sky and ignore the bodies and it would be like home.
Soho fell away behind him as he jogged up Regent’s Street, across Oxford Street and past the BBC building. The park lay before him and he clapped his hands together as he ran through the tall black gates. It smelled better here, less rot and more trees. Maybe he’d see some squirrels.
There were bodies. However hard he tried, he couldn’t quite block them out. Runners in jogging pants, sweat still drying on their faces, lay spreadeagled as though they were trying to run despite their deaths. There were cyclists as well, tangled up in the wrecks of their bikes, the blood from scratches out of place amongst the peace of the park. The dogs were dead as well. Everything was dead.
David found an empty patch of green grass. He flung himself down and stared up at the sky. It wasn’t long before it blurred and ran with tears. He wasn’t sure whether it was the brightness or the truth that was doing its best to creep around his barriers and make itself known.
He stared and stared and tried his best to forget. He imagined when he turned his head he’d see the emptiness that had become his life. He screwed his eyes up and rolled onto his side then slowly opened them. Twenty feet away, a woman lay face down on the grass. She was dressed in jogging pants and a crop top and would have been pretty when she was alive.
Through the blades of grass that stood like fence posts before his face, he could see her eyes, peering out through half-open lids. They were red, devil-red, and surrounded by deep rings. She looked like she’d been on a bender and drunk herself to death. But her skin wasn’t flushed. It reminded him of the modelling clay Amber used, a sort of grey-putty that went crumbly if you left it out of the box.
Her skin was already crumbling. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. She was still there. He rolled onto his back and stared up. Tiny wisps of cloud, more optimism than any real threat of rain, scudded across the sky. Scudded was the wrong word. They crept and crawled at a snail’s pace.
He tried to make shapes in the clouds but they remained obstinately clouds and nothing more. He’d never been creative, not really. All the bullshit he wrote in the cards was recycled, ideas pinched from other cards, or famous people or random tweets. Nothing really his own. The clouds seemed to know this and mocked him, shifting slowly as if they were about to reveal the shapes that hid within them, before twisting again into nothing.
He closed his eyes and rolled onto his side. When he opened them, she was gone! Laughter rolled up his throat and he giggled, wrapping his hands around his sides. It had all been some horrible fever dream. It wasn’t surprising, living alone did funny things to you. He chuckled and rolled onto his back and the woman fell on top of him.
He screamed, spit catching on his lower lip and dripping down his chin. Her hands felt like ice when they grabbed his neck and twisted and pulled. She bared rotting yellow teeth and lunged. She was going to bite him. It didn’t matter, this was all part of his fever. She’d disappear any second. The smell of rot and mould hit him. She wasn’t about to disappear.
David thrashed around like he was being carted off to the gallows. Her hands lost purchase on his neck as her teeth scraped against his nose. It stung, just a little, before he got his knees between them and shoved her away. She fell beside him and he leapt to his feet. She was up almost as quick, hands outstretched like some movie zombie.
He blinked and the world came back into focus. He remembered the flower seller and the silence and then the blur came back. His mind, so sharp for a brief moment, felt once again like cotton wool. But he knew one important fact. This thing in front of him was a zombie. It was an actual living zombie. And this wasn’t a dream.
She grabbed his arm and he kicked her as hard as he could in the leg. The skin was hard but brittle and broke apart like egg shells. Beneath, the flesh was soft and he moaned as his foot sunk into it. The zombie hissed and swung at him. One clawed hand caught him across the side of the head and the force knocked him on his arse.
She took a step toward him and her leg buckled and spilled her to the grass beside him. Where she landed, her face was turned to his and they stared at one another for a moment. Was there something in those eyes, some semblance of humanity? There really wasn’t.
Her hand landed on his leg and he shook it off and staggered to his feet. He had time for a brief glance around the park. Others were getting to their feet. None had spotted him, not yet, but they would. He made for the nearest tree with low branches and ran.
The branches weren’t as low as he’d hoped and he spent a futile few seconds jumping up and down. Something growled and without looking back he set off again. He found a tree nearer the ground and threw himself up into the branches. David climbed as high as he dared and stopped, arms wrapped around the trunk like it was Steph.
The sudden picture of her in his mind almost made him fall off. He’d blocked her out sometime in the last week and even the image of her was ill-formed. He wrinkled his nose, trying to remember her smell, but nothing came to him. How could he forget her? Amber was still there, every detail of her, and he felt a longing he hadn’t experienced in years. The need to apologise burned suddenly and brought a lump to his throat.
He heard a growl and looked down. Anther zombie, this one a large man wearing a wife-beater t-shirt, prowled around the base of the tree. It paused. It was easier to think of it as an ‘it’. As soon as he started thinking of them as people he’d lose his mind completely. He giggled. What was left of it.
It wasn’t gone completely. He knew he still had something in there, because when the zombie pulled itself up onto the lowest branch, a streak of terror went through him that left him panting and sweating. He blinked, lights flashing before his eyes. His breathing sounded like a steam train and he stared at his hands, focusing on something while he tried to calm down. It wasn’t working.
A hand grabbed his leg and he kicked and kicked. The zombie balanced on a branch beneath him. And it was waiting. They were supposed to be stupid and thoughtless, incapable of something like climbing a tree. He’d watched Dawn of the Dead and though his memories were pretty slight, he knew they weren’t smart enough to do that.
This one was though. It would wait as long as—. It barked and leaped up, grabbing at his leg with both hands. He wasn’t ready and with the same lurching in his gut he got the time his car went into a slide on ice, he lost his grip on the trunk and fell.
Next Installment Thursday 25th September (honest)
