Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Amighty chorus of moans ripped from the sea of dead, followed by familiar hissing.
Oh. No.
Three bodies from the front charged forward, hissing like cats filtered through a dead human throat.
Speedies.
Three speedies at once.
I dodged the first one, her jaws snapping, fingers grasping, spinning out of her trajectory. I drew my axe, beheading the second, only just avoiding the lunge of the third. His fingers scraped along my coat as he passed, his speed forcing him into a collision with one of the buses.
The whack made my teeth hurt.
Other speedies shoved through the slowies, wild with hunger, snarling for my innards.
The horde was seriously stirred now, waking up from their stasis with the promise of blood and meat.
Refusing to be supper, I took the only exit out of here, praying there wasn’t a second part of the horde waiting for me down the long alleyway connecting this road to another.
No zombies down there yet, but plenty of rotting bodies and litter, hurdles threatening to trip me. I moved with haste and care, never looking back at the hunters on my trail, focused on staying alive.
My boots hit something squashy, something slippery. I winced, managing to keep vertical, picking up speed.
Please don’t be supper.
Please don’t be supper.
I made a sharp left turn at the end of the road, once again navigating vehicles and bodies and debris, passing boarded-up shops still standing amongst the burned ruins of other properties.
So many places and vehicles were burned across London. At one point, in the early weeks of the zombie apocalypse, I thought the city might burn to the ground with so many fires popping up in just about every borough.
A series of vicious summer storms put a stop to those flames.
A zombie fell into my path. I leaped over her, executing a slide across the front of a car, taking off the head of another with a fluid spin-and-slice.
Living in London remained a constant fight for survival.
I stayed because of the Faery gates, four portals in and out of my world spread across the city.
All of them closed, no way of opening them—in order to protect Faery.
I failed to get to a gate in time when things turned to crap, and His Majesty would not ever permit them to open again while zombies ruled the land.
Staying in London, as close to the west gate at Shepherd’s Bush as possible, let me cling to the hope of going home. But I kept finding myself drifting further away from the gate, pushed further south, crossing the river Thames to find new shelters and food.
Maybe I should start thinking about country living. Would it be any better out there away from this rotting ruin of a city? Were there farms out there producing milk and food? Self-sufficient communities rebuilding their lives?
A nice idea.
I kept running down Brixton Road, followed by the sounds of hissing, and bodies crashing and slamming into vehicles behind me. Speedies might be fast, but they were also prone to mishaps. A dead body moving like that didn’t make for an Olympic champion by any stretch.
Squeezing between a bus and a van upturned under the first railway bridge, I chewed up the remaining distance to Brixton Underground station, the entrance heavily sealed up, but with an access point higher up.
Above the entrance was a window subdivided into twelve panels, each of them boarded up from the inside, the red circle and blue bar logo of the London Underground covered in dirt below it.
I could see the bottom left panel sat at a jaunty angle. Kind of like a wonky door.
Going underground? Hmmm. Not ideal, the risk of being trapped in the tunnels was a great danger.
But with a horde approaching, it would be the best place to be.
I could always leave in the morning. The zombies wouldn’t follow me down there if I was quick.
Their senses responded to loud sounds, prey within their line of sight, and the scent of fresh, living blood.
Being injury free, and determined to be quiet, I climbed onto a graffitied electricity box, ignoring the human skeleton hunched next to it.
I grabbed the edge of the glass awning above the station entrance, taking careful steps on the grubby glass, checked behind me for dead eyes spying, the speedies of the horde not quite here yet, and gently pushed the wooden board.
It opened on a smooth hinge. I slid my slender frame through the gap just big enough for me.
On the other side I met thick darkness, a narrow ledge, and a musty, dusty atmosphere.
My favorite.
Not.
This door meant others occupied this station, most likely vampires—they loved the tunnels and pitch darkness. I looked for the red X symbol warning against trespassers. I didn’t see one, so assumed this point to be free.
Assumptions were bad, yes, but these were desperate times.
Closing the makeshift door behind me removed the last trace of dusky light, so I fished my tiny penlight from my coat pocket. The device fit in the palm of my hand and boasted a rather bright beam. Well, three different beams from mild to spicy.
Clicking on the mild setting for safety reasons, I roamed it over ticket barriers, a ticket office, and long-dead ticket machines. The floor was a blanket of dust with many shoeprints in it, and a scattering of old newspapers—those free ones littering the city every day.
This area of the station wasn’t a place for living, only a means for entry and exit. But there should be a guard or watcher here.
Suppressing my rising fear, trying my best to ignore the anxious butterflies in my belly, I clicked my penlight to the medium beam.
Still nothing but motes of dust drifting across the light.
I didn’t like it. Silence was often worse than noise.
I checked again with the spicy beam.
Nothing moved, nothing caught my eye.
With no other choice, I lowered myself to the floor. The ledge was too narrow to sleep on, and I could still hear the moans of the horde. The slamming of rushing bodies into all manner of solid objects rang like a warning outside.
Stay in here. Wait it out.
I settled myself down in a corner close to the entrance. A sickening bang rattled the boards, a string of hissing, groans, and a marching nightmare only kept outside by some sturdy wood.
Thank you, wood.
Another day down. Another day spent dodging death and not becoming a chew toy.
Success.
Life might be a cocktail of pining for my homelands and fighting to stay alive, but it also carried hope with it. The umbrella in the cocktail, the thing I clung to with the firmest grip.
I had to stay alive. I had to believe in an ending to this horror. Somewhere in the future, sunny shores waited for me again—both literal and figurative. I refused to die here, to succumb to the apocalyptic nightmare.
“Better days are coming,” I whispered, pulling my knees up and hunching forward.
After an hour of listening for vampires or anything else, my shoulders began to slump, my limbs loosening. Sleep crept up on me, beckoning me to step into the dreamscape.
I yawned, resistance futile. My body was exhausted, craving a crumb of rest.
Just a crumb.
Just a sliver.
Please…