It'll Come Back... Read online

  ‘Well done,’ said Kate. ‘Good thinking!’

  Screamer practically flew up the steps and slid the long metal pole through the handles. The pole rattled as the first of the Dead began pounding on the doors, but it held. BG grasped a freestanding wooden clothes rail and dragged the heavy thing, clothes and all towards the back of the shop, while Screamer came down to help him carry it up the steps to the doors.

  ‘I’ll go and make sure the front–’ A growl from somewhere in the store cut Kate off. ‘Shit,’ she whispered.

  Kate, holding the umbrella aloft, put her fingers to her lips to quieten the others. BG and Screamer stopped like a couple of mannequins in the shop window, mid-hoist and both stared wide-eyed at Kate, while the old lady made to follow after her. Kate shook her head at the old lady. ‘Stay,’ she mouthed at her, and turned and edged her way further into the store.

  Kate hadn’t got far when she felt a presence. She turned and saw BG and the old lady creeping up beside her, both holding metal rails that they must have removed from their wall fixings. Kate nodded to them and together they peered cautiously around racks of clothes as they edged further into the store. The wet sound of raw meat being torn from bone met Kate’s ears and she put her free arm out to halt the others. She peered around the next row of clothing rails to see one of the Dead – what used to be a young woman in a smart grey dress, now torn and blood splattered. It was on its hands and knees, feasting on a woman lying on her back on the floor.

  The Dead had its back to Kate, so she slipped her ankle boots off and crept from behind the rail in her purple-stockinged feet, placing each one down slowly and carefully. She stopped right behind the Dead and raised the umbrella like a spear, the tip in line with the Dead’s head. The woman on the floor gasped, making Kate jump. She hadn’t realised she could still be alive, not with her stomach ripped out.

  The Dead turned and growled at Kate, before leaping at her, throwing her back. She landed heavily, knocking the wind from her, and she dropped the umbrella. Kate thrust her hands up and caught the Dead by the throat, managing to keep its snapping jaws at bay while it pinned her to the floor. Then, so fast she barely knew it had happened at first, the weight of the Dead lifted off her body as with one swing of his clothing pole, BG knocked the thing off her. Kate sprang to her feet to see BG using the pole to batter the Dead until there was nothing left of its head other than a jellied mush.

  ‘I think you got it,’ said Kate.

  BG looked up at her. His eyes were wide, his cheeks flushed. He looked down at the bloodied mess at his feet, and then to the pole in his hands – blood and brain dripping from its end – and back up to Kate, his mouth hung open as though it had only just dawned on him that he had done it.

  ‘Keep it together,’ said Kate. ‘We still need to get the front doors secure.’

  BG nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m good,’ he said and darted off to the front of the store.

  Kate glanced down at the woman on the ground. There was a large open wound in her stomach and the flesh from her jaw was missing, exposing her bottom teeth on her left side. Her eyes were closed but she wasn’t dead – her chest rose and fell in ragged breaths.

  ‘Oh my God – she’s alive,’ said Screamer as she drew up beside Kate.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Kate, her voice cracking.

  ‘Only thing we can do,’ said the old lady. ‘I worked on a farm as a young woman, and sometimes animals needed putting out of their misery.’ The old lady raised her metal pole.

  ‘You can’t!’ said Screamer. ‘You can’t!’

  Kate watched BG stride back towards them from the front of the store. He had removed his suit jacket and tie, and his blood spattered shirt had been loosened at the neck and rolled up at the sleeves. He looked more alive than Kate had ever seen him. Determined. Strong. Handsome, even. He nodded his agreement to Kate. ‘It’s the kindest–’

  At that moment a squeaking sound from behind the nearby sales counter halted everyone. With their makeshift weapons raised, the group of survivors edged their way towards the counter. Kate heard a muffled scraping sound – something scuffing over the lino. She reached the counter first and stopped at the corner. Craning her neck to see over the counter and to the other side, she could just make out a pair of black Converse boots. She edged her way around the counter a little way, just enough to see the bottoms of a pair of skinny jeans… skinny jeans attached to a pair of quivering legs…

  …attached to a quivering boy wedged in a gap beneath the cash register. Kate rounded the counter to see a hipster with tattoos and a beard that probably wasn’t as thick and bushy as he wanted it to be. The beard didn’t make him look any older, just made him look like a little boy with a stick on beard playing a wise man in the nativity play.

  ‘Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!’ he said, his eyes scrunched closed, his head turned in towards the wall and his right arm raised towards Kate in that palm-of-steel kind of way, which in reality – if Kate were about to kill him – would result in his palm being skewered just before his head.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m not going to kill you,’ said Amazonian warrior-esque Kate, the umbrella halted in mid air.

  ‘Everyone’s killing each other!’ he said, sobbing and drawing his knees up to his chest.

  ‘It’s okay, we’re not them. We’re not going to hurt you. We escaped from them.’

  The boy glanced up at Kate for the first time. ‘You’re not going to kill me?’

  ‘No. Those things out there – they’re not alive. They’re dead, crazy things. They’re not us anymore.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kate, shaking her head.

  ‘One attacked my manager – started eating her!’

  ‘The woman on the floor,’ began BG, who rounded the counter to stand next to Kate, ‘that’s your manager?’

  ‘Yeah. It tore into her. There wasn’t anything I could do! Just leave me here,’ sobbed the boy, hugging his knees. ‘Don’t let them find me. I don’t want to die!’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, dear,’ said the old lady as she squeezed past BG to get behind the counter. ‘None of us want to die but hiding under there and crying is not going to help anyone now, is it? Man up, dear.’

  ‘I don’t want to die!’

  ‘You won’t die. We won’t let you,’ said Kate.

  ‘But they’ll get in and they’ll get me.’

  ‘Listen,’ said BG, easing past the old lady and Kate to crouch down beside the boy. ‘You work here, right? Do you have the keys to the doors – we have them barricaded right now but I don’t know how long that will last.’

  Everyone could hear the banging that had started up at the front and back of the store and which increased in volume as more of the Dead lent their weight to the efforts of getting inside.

  ‘It’s really important we get this place locked up,’ added BG.

  ‘My manager – Jane – she…’

  ‘She has the keys?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Yeah. She’d just opened up. They’re probably in her pocket.’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ said BG. ‘And… um… I’ll put her… if she’s… you know… I’ll…’

  ‘Got it,’ said Kate. ‘Just go and do it.’

  BG stood and Kate followed him around the counter to the shop floor, leaving the boy where he cowered. BG crouched down on his haunches beside the woman and felt her neck.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said, looking up at Kate and the others.

  He rubbed at the bridge of his nose with his left hand. Kate noticed the wedding ring. Has he wondered if his wife is okay? thought Kate. Has it occurred to him yet that this could be happening everywhere?

  ‘Better get those keys,’ said Kate.

  ‘On it,’ said BG. He slid a hand inside one of the pockets in the woman’s jacket, grimacing as he had no choice but to touch blood and guts.

  ‘If we get the place locked up and stay out of
sight for a while–’ Kate stopped as the woman’s eyes sprang open. BG yelped with surprise and he shuffled back a little way across the floor. At the same time, Kate raised the umbrella, ready to strike. But the freshly risen Dead moved quickly and it sprang forwards and sunk its teeth into BG’s upper arm, biting through the fabric of his shirt. He yelled out with the pain.

  Screamer screamed and the old lady cried, ‘Oh oh oh!’ while Kate rammed the tip of the umbrella through the top of the Dead’s head. It slumped to the ground, properly dead.

  ‘Shit! Are you okay?’ Kate asked, kneeling down beside the injured man.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s just a scratch.’

  ‘It’s not just a scratch, dear,’ said the old lady. ‘That’ll leave a nasty scar. She took quite a chunk!’

  ‘I’m okay. Let’s find the bloody keys and get this place secure,’ said BG, clutching the bite with his good hand, while blood oozed through his fingers.

  Chapter Four

  BG raised his injured arm and held the bloodied keys up towards Kate. He used the palm of his other hand to press against his bite wound, stemming the flow of blood as best he could. His torn shirt sleeve had been stained vibrant red and the soaked fabric glistened in the overhead strip lighting.

  ‘Take them,’ he said as he rose onto his knees.

  Kate swiped the keys and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Stay,’ she said, not wanting him to attempt standing while he looked so pale from the blood loss and shock. ‘I won’t be a sec and I’ll sort that out for you,’ she added, nodding at the bite.

  The keys jangled as Kate thrust them into Screamers hand. ‘Lock the front and back and then stack as much shit up in front of them as you can,’ she said to the teenage girl.

  ‘I don’t want to go near the doors,’ said Screamer. ‘Those things are at the doors.’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘But which key…?’ Screamer held the bundle of keys up. There were at least six to ten keys.

  ‘Just go and try them all,’ said Kate. ‘Just go. Come on. The sooner we get this place secure the better. Go!’

  Screamer hesitated, before speeding off to the front of the store.

  Kate darted back to the counter and poked her head around the edge to see the trembling feet and lower legs of the boy.

  ‘We really could do with some help out here, you know,’ she said to him. When he didn’t reply, she opened her mouth to speak, to coax him out somehow, when the old lady stomped – or as close to stomping as her frail, bony legs would allow – around the other side of the counter ahead of Kate.

  ‘Come on, lad,’ she began. ‘Look lively, there’s a good boy. There’s jobs that need doing around here and they’re not going to do themselves. And a strapping young boy like yourself needs to get up off his arse and come and help! Come on – quick march!’

  Kate watched as the boy’s trembling feet went still, then, slowly, he placed them flat on the floor and he raised himself up to standing. His wide eyes flicked between hers and the old lady’s while he waited for the next order.

  ‘Help reinforce the doors with, um… with that girl. Just shove whatever the fuck you can find against them. Okay?’

  The boy nodded at Kate and mumbled, ‘Um, yeah. Yeah,’ and he shuffled off in the direction of the front of the store, after Screamer.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kate said to the old lady.

  ‘You’re welcome dear. No room for hangers on, eh?’

  Kate smiled and gave the old lady’s forearm a gentle squeeze, before returning to the injured man. She sat down on the floor next to him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Kate asked him.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said with a forced smile.

  ‘That must really hurt,’ she said, nodding at where he clutched his torn flesh.

  ‘Yes, it fucking hurts. But compared to what happened to her,’ he said, nodding down to the half-eaten store manager beside them, ‘I think I got off lightly.’

  Kate smiled at him. She unzipped her bag, rifled through it and pulled out a packet of tissues. She ripped open the plastic wrapper and pulled it off. ‘Let me,’ she began as she placed a hand on BG’s bloody one, easing it away from the bite. Blood welled up from the wound and ran down his arm. ‘Nasty. It’s deep.’ She placed the wad of tissues against the bite.

  He winced and sucked air between his teeth but he didn’t complain.

  ‘Here, keep these pressed against it. I’ll see if I can find something to make a bandage.’

  ‘Will this do?’

  Kate turned to see the old lady holding out an off-white fabric handkerchief.

  ‘It’s clean,’ she added, nodding at Kate to take it from her.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kate and she grabbed the piece of fabric. It wasn’t the delicate lace sort of handkerchief she’d have expected an old lady to have but a large, plain and functional square of thick off-white cloth. She noticed initials stitched on one corner in dark blue cotton. A.N.

  ‘My husband’s,’ said the old lady. ‘God rest his soul.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Kate smiled, took the handkerchief and used it to secure the wad of tissues to BG’s arm.

  As she tied the fabric in place around his arm, Kate could hear the sound of clothes rails being dragged across the lino as Screamer and the boy barricaded the doors. The Dead groaned and slammed their dead hands against glass, whipped into a frenzy at the sight of Screamer and the boy as they worked. The din echoed off the walls of the deserted store making the otherwise large space draw in, causing Kate to feel claustrophobic. Trapped.

  The group sat around a small table in the staffroom out the back on the first floor. Nobody spoke – a collective pause for breath as they each attempted to get their heads around what had happened that morning.

  Even though Kate had lived through it, she couldn’t process it as a true event… as something that had actually happened to her for real, and not just some terrible incident she had watched on a news programme. She’d seen enough footage of disasters such as earthquakes or bombings. It felt like bad things happened to other people. But now here she sat in the middle of a full on crises situation.

  So far that day, she and the others had witnessed people attacking people in random acts of violence. Mass murder. Carnage. Death. Not just that – though that would be bad enough – the dead were rising. The dead were bloody rising! They had survived while others hadn’t been so lucky. Kate and the others were safe but for how long? This whole thing was impossible. But yet it had happened. So many people had died. They had made it. But what now?

  ‘This is insane. It can’t be happening,’ said Screamer. She didn’t raise her eyes from the little section of pale wooden table she’d been staring at since they all sat down. Little pools of her tears spotted the table top beneath where she held her head in her hands.

  ‘It is happening,’ said BG. ‘I’ve got the war wound to prove it.’ He gave a little humourless laugh as he shrugged the shoulder of his injured arm. Blood had already soaked through his makeshift dressing and stained the hanky red.

  ‘You can show the scar to your grand kids and tell them how you survived the apocalypse,’ said Kate, trying her best to raise spirits.

  ‘You think any of us are getting out of this?’ said the boy.

  ‘Yes. Yes I do,’ said Kate, looking deep into his eyes. ‘We’re all making it through this, okay?’ Kate looked at the others in turn. ‘First things first, what are your names? I’m Kate,’ she kicked off.

  ‘Edith. My name’s Edith,’ said the old lady.

  ‘Good to meet you, Edith,’ said Kate.

  ‘Lucy,’ said Screamer, looking up at Kate with red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Hey Lucy.’

  Lucy managed a half-hearted smile.

  ‘Louie,’ said the boy.

  Kate gave him a nod before turning to BG.

  ‘Phil,’ he said. Kate nodded at him and they both managed a sad smile. ‘So, what’s next?’
/>   Kate jumped as her mobile phone rang. She yanked her bag off her shoulder, tipped the contents on the table top, located her phone and answered it.

  ‘Andrew! Andrew you’re not–’ Kate listened as Andrew began a tirade of words. She caught bits and pieces:

  ‘Dead… Carnage… Fucking craziness… Nationwide… Massacre…’

  ‘I know, I know. Are you okay though?’

  ‘No I’m not okay – there are mad, man-eating people outside, Kate!’

  Yes, Andrew, I know. I’ve met a few of them! Look, don’t panic. They can’t get into the flat. Listen, Andrew, I’ll– Andrew? Andrew, can you hear me? Andrew, are you there? Andrew!’ Kate stared at her phone. ‘It’s gone dead,’ she said, looking up at the others.

  Lucy rummaged inside her bag, pulling out her mobile. She dialled a number, listening with the phone to her ear. ‘Mine too,’ she said.

  ‘And mine,’ added Phil, having pulled his mobile from his trouser pocket.

  ‘He-he said it was on the news. It’s everywhere,’ said Kate.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Lucy.

  ‘We’re screwed,’ said Phil.

  ‘My-my husband. He’s got a broken leg,’ said Kate, tossing the mobile onto the table with the rest of her junk. ‘He’s totally housebound. He can just about mange to get as far as the bathroom to use the loo. He’ll die if…’

  No one spoke for a while. Lucy sobbed while the old lady held her hand, rubbing the back of it. Louie sat with his head in his tattooed hands, while Kate watched Phil turn his wedding ring around his finger.

  After ten minutes or so, Lucy took a deep breath and wiped the tears from her cheeks and looked round the table at the others. ‘We have to survive,’ she said.

  ‘We will,’ said Kate.

  ‘We have to survive for everyone out there that didn’t make it.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ said Lucy. ‘My mum and dad. My little brother… I have to get home.’

  ‘You know that they…’ Phil let his words trail off.

  ‘I have to get home,’ Lucy repeated with resolve.

  ‘Where’s home?’ asked Kate.