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He should have had a gun. Everyone in zombie movies or apocalyptic stories had a gun. Maybe a Magnum for optimum brain splatter. Or a rifle. With a scope, so he could sit up above the tree-line and pick them off as they came for him. He didn’t care which. He just wished . . .
But Philip was not resourceful, and had never been shooting in his life. The best he could manage was the baseball bat he now had slung over his shoulder. It became heavier with every lonely mile. With each step, he thought he’d have to drop it if he really wanted to carry on. But he couldn’t bring himself to lose it. He’d smashed his wife’s skull with the bat, and all that was left of her was smeared on the head, a drying cake of black blood and auburn hair.
“I need a gun,” he said, wretched, crying. The trees didn’t hear. Neither did the rocks. If anything did hear, it offered no reply.
He walked higher into the hills, and a warbler sang him on.
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“Going into the hills will be best,” he says. “There are mines. Deep, dark, easily defended. And they keep stores of food and water down there in case of cave-ins.”
“You really believe that?” Rose asks. The sneer is in her voice, if not on her face. Even now, with everything they’re hearing on the news and seeing on TV, she finds time to put him down.
“Yeah,” Philip says. Feeling uncertain now, as always when she questions him, even if he knows for sure what he’s saying is true. That’s the hold she has on him. She strangles his certainty and obscures his world.
So they go, even though Rose exudes disapproval.
But when they leave their neighbourhood and start their drive out of Knoxville, they see sights that silence them both, and she scoots over in the seat so that they can touch each other for comfort. It’s never the same on TV.
Then in the beautiful foothills south-east of town, the car runs out of fuel. Philip’s fault, because he hadn’t checked. So they walk, and an hour later they can look downhill and see the car park at the beginning of a scenic walk. People are running and shooting, a car is on fire, and they see more terrible things.
“Up,” he says. “That’s the only way. Up to the mines.”
He’s even starting to convince himself.
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Two days after he destroyed what his wife had become, close to the most beautiful landscape of hillside, valley and lake he had ever seen, Philip witnessed a group of zombies taking down a woman and her child.
He had not slept for almost sixty hours. By day he walked, and at night he climbed a tree and cowered, licking moisture from leaves, listening, waiting for them to come. Terror kept sleep at bay. That, and Rose staring from beneath her blood-caked hair with dead, accusing eyes.
He heard the mother and son screaming from a distance and ran to see, crazy ideas of saving them terrifying him. With every step the fear bit in, and by the time he caught sight of them scrambling down a rocky outcropping he knew there was nothing he could do.
Useless, he thought, but it was Rose’s voice, and it was him she was talking about.
So he hid behind a pile of felled trees and watched. The woman was helping her young son climb down the rugged cliff face, perhaps believing that she could escape them that way. She was correct in assuming that the dead could not climb.
They fell instead. The first one tumbled, cracking his head on an outcropping and spinning past six feet from the boy. The second and third missed as well, but the fourth struck the woman’s shoulder. She cried out, twisted, and lost her grip on her son.
Philip closed his eyes as the boy fell, but he could not close his ears.
“Nate! Nate! Nate!” the woman screamed, and whatever she saw below her—hidden from Philip’s sight by a fold in the land and more piled logs—must have been awful. It took only five seconds before she let go and fell after her boy.
Philip ran in the other direction. He ran further than he ever had before, hardly stopping for two hours, and by the time he slid to the ground beside a stream and took a drink, he thought he was going to die.
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They find the family late that first afternoon.
“We need to stay away from them,” Philip says. “Something’s wrong.”
“One of them’s hurt,” Rose says. “That’s what’s wrong.”
“So let them call an ambulance!”
Rose does not even answer. They’ve both tried calling the emergency services and heard the same recorded message.
When Philip fell in love with Rose, it was her compassion that drew him to her. She cared too much, he would tell her, but at the same time he found her selflessness and concern for others incredibly admirable and attractive. He loved her love for other people.
After their wedding, her lack of empathy for him would have struck him as ironic if it weren’t so sad. Rose was intelligent and sometimes even superior, and did not suffer fools gladly. And Philip was first to admit that he was a fool.
I can’t help it, he’d tell her. I just don’t see the world the way everyone else does.
“I’m going down there,” she says.
“No, don’t be stupid!”
“Philip.” Spoken with ire.
“I mean it! Look . . .”He grabs her arm, gently, and pulls her down beside him. The family is gathered around a truck with two flat tyres, and Philip and Rose are well hidden up a small embankment, trees and bushes making them part of the land. “Look, Rose. The tall guy there has a gun. He’s holding it ready. That’s his family he’s standing there protecting. The girl on the ground...maybe his daughter.” They never had children, but Philip thinks he can understand the protectiveness that man must be feeling. He yearned to feel it himself.
“He’s not just going to shoot two people coming out of the woods.”
“How do you know?” He struggles to keep his voice down. “We haven’t got a fucking clue what’s happening, and no one else has, either!”
“No need to swear at me.”
“I’m not swearing at you! I’m swearing at everything. You saw what was happening in town as we left. The smoke. The fires. Those people. You heard the guns, Rose! And you saw . . .”They both saw things. Terrible things that do not need vocalising again. “The news. What people were saying.” He points along the road towards the crippled car. “He’ll do anything to protect his family. And that’s what I’m doing.”
Her laugh is almost a spit. A cough of derision. It stings, but does nothing to temper his caution.
“Please—” he says, and Rose shrugs him off and stands.
“Hey! It’s okay, we’re normal, not like them.”
The man aims his rifle and freezes into a shooting stance, and Philip can’t help watching even as he thinks, I’m going to see Rose’s head blown off, he knows how to shoot, perhaps he’s done plenty of shooting today already, and her hair will fan out with the impact and her brains will stain the road. And deep inside where the most hateful thoughts dwell blooms a tiny spark of relief. With Rose gone, he will only have himself to save.
“I’m a nurse,” Rose says. That isn’t quite true; she is a care worker, looking after old people in an expensive retirement home in the countryside north of Knoxville. But maybe today it is close enough.
Philip stands slowly and steps out into the road, but he does not advance with his wife. Something is still wrong. The girl lies on the road beside the truck’s open rear door, and even from this distance he can see the blood.
“Ask what happened to her,” he says, loud enough for Rose alone to hear. She ignores him.
“Got bit!” the man shouts. Perhaps he heard Philip after all. “My little girl got fuckin’ bit by that crazy old fuckin’ loon from three doors down!” Rose reaches them and kneels, obscuring Philip’s view. Those around the prone form move back a little, giving her room.
How long ago? Philip thinks, because he has been reading frantic reports on Twitter. Already a timeline seems to be forming. More than half an hour? Because that seems to be the longest—
Someone coughs, and growls. And then a scream. It is such a shocking, chilling cry that Philip closes his eyes and turns away, which means that he only hears the gunshot.
He falls to the ground, dropping the baseball bat he’s been carrying since the car ran out of fuel. Presses himself flat to the road. Scoots around so that he can look back towards the truck—
And Rose is rushing back towards him, eyes wide, a bloody smear across her left forearm.
Touched her! Philip thinks, and there are more screams. Close to the car three shapes struggle in the road—the bloody girl and two others. The man with the rifle steps around them, gun raising, lowering, coming up again as he struggles with what to do. The shot must have been accidental, and the bullet had gone nowhere. The next might find wet.
But Philip will not wait to see. He grabs up the bat and reaches for Rose’s hand as she runs past him, but she ignores him. Her eyes are frantic. She’s terrified, and soon he will ask what she saw.
Soon. Because first they have to escape the screaming and chaos. The bloodied girl is up.
And Rose has blood on her. Philip runs after her, watching her movements, listening to her breathing. Waiting for something wrong.
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Four days after leaving Knoxville, he found a mine.
It was almost a hundred hours since he’d slept. He’d done his best to avoid anywhere there might be people, or the dead—skirting around small towns, staying off roads, losing himself in the wilds. If he heard voices he ran in the opposite direction. If he heard other things—once there were soft hooting sounds, and then the shuffle of aimless feet—he ran even faster.
He ate little. A hard, dry sandwich found in an abandoned car. Wild strawberries. He drank from streams, and he’d had diarrhoea for almost twenty hours. It seemed that the more he drank, the more thirsty he became.
Hallucinations haunted him. Rose trailed him through the trees, wearing the dress from their wedding five years previously. She had only ever worn it once since, when they’d come home drunk one evening and wanted a dirty fuck. Now it snagged on branches and brambles as she came for him, always walking faster than him, yet never arriving. At least Philip still knew they were hallucinations, however awful. Soon, even that would change. Perhaps then would be the time to follow that poor mother from a cliff.
And then the mine.
“There it is,” he said quietly. The sound of his voice in the wild silence was already shocking him, but it felt like company. “Down there’ll be food and water. And somewhere to hide. But I’ve got to make sure...”
So he found a rock with a slight overhang, from which he could watch the mine entrance, the workings, the buildings and car park surrounding it. The trees to the west were made ghostlike with dust that had been blown that way over the years, the guts of the earth brought up and exposed to the elements. He waited there for an hour, two, and saw no movement.
He closed his eyes to sleep, but sleep would not come.
“Maybe down there,” he said. “Down in the dark.” But he was already starting to wonder whether he could ever descend from the world. There could anything down below. There could be . . .
The time came to move. He staggered down the slope and across the muddy enclosure around the mine entrance, ground churned up by heavy wheels and soaked by the previous night’s rain. His boots picked up wet soil, each step heavy. His limbs did not belong to him.
There was a green corrugated structure around the mine shaft itself, and one flap of iron smacked rhythmically against its support.
He thought he heard voices. Paused. Turned this way and that, listening to a gentle breeze passing through telephone wires above him. A soft call, like doves in the distance.
“Rose,” he said, looking at the mess on the baseball bat.
Three shapes emerged from out of the darkness.
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He tries to convince himself that there’s no alternative.
They ran for thirty minutes, desperate to put distance between them and the stricken family. Along trails, across the stark open space of denuded woodland now consisting of stumps, rotting trunks, and a creeping undergrowth that seemed to be doing its best to smother the sad ruin. There was one more gunshot from far behind, and a child’s scream, and for a terrible moment Philip thought that Rose might turn and go back. But then he started to wonder.
“Rose?” he asks again. She’s sitting on a rock beside a stream. She has one trainer off, foot dangling in the water, but doesn’t seem to have the strength to remove the other. She has not spoken for half an hour.
Half an hour, Philip thinks. He holds the bat by his side. She laughed at him when he brought it along. What are you going to do with that? Fucking idiot. It was her fear talking, partly. But for years now, he had often seen fucking idiot in her eyes when she looked at him.
“Rose?”
Her head is dipping, chin touching her chest. He can’t hear her panting anymore.
I should circle around. See her face. See if that’s a cut—a bite—on her arm, or just a smear of blood. It looks like a handprint, but that could be where she grabbed it after she was bitten. Bitten.
They’re saying it’s the bites.
Twitter has been alive. Panic has gone electronic. The end of the world, with hashtags.
“Rose?”
She snorts. Coughs. Maybe she’s just exhausted. But—
Philip raises the bat and waits for her mocking glance, her dismissive comment, her constant denial of all the good things about him, her emphasising of the bad. Everything that makes her Rose. Yet none of that comes.
So he swings.
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The three people were dead. Two were men, one of them with his throat ripped out, the other wearing bib overalls and with a hole where his left eye should have been. He carried a length of hose that he might have been gripping for four days, since he died.
The third was a young woman. She tilted her head to the side and hooted softly, a strangely mournful sound coming from something so dead. She had no face.
Philip swayed. He had no strength to lift the baseball bat when they came. He had a headache from dehydration and exhaustion, and his limbs seemed far away.
Before the battery on his phone ran out, he’d read reports about how the contagion had spread from somewhere deep in the Appalachian mountains, and that the victims’ only aim seemed to be spreading the disease. They were fast, he’d read. They ran.
He could do nothing to defend himself now. And as he waited, he wondered whether it would really make any difference if they bit him, or not.