Z-Minus Box Set [Books 1-3] Read online

  “Sharon…” he said. “Wake up.”

  He picked up her hand, dismayed at how stiff it had already become. He pulled on it.

  “Come on, get up,” he said.

  He tugged harder on her arm. Her body lifted from the bed, and immediately slumped back down.

  “Don’t be lazy,” he said, his voice laced with impatience. “Get up now.”

  But she didn’t move.

  Chris went to the wardrobe and took out a throw blanket. He laid it over Sharon’s body and tucked it under her as if putting her to bed. He kissed her on the forehead and closed her eyes.

  “You must be ill,” he said, brushing the hair out of her lifeless eyes. “I’ll let you sleep it off, but you ought to be up and out of bed soon. We can’t sleep all day.”

  He stopped at the door, looked back at the figure on the bed, and then went back onto the landing, closing the door behind himself. His legs shook and he felt weak. He braced himself on the handrail. He let out a deep breath and went up the stairs to the second floor one step at a time. At the top, he kept his head bowed down, as the roof slanted at a sharp angle.

  The room had two of everything, one set full-size, the other half-size, for a child. There were two make-up tables. The larger one had only black make-up. The smaller one had a plastic yellow chair with a picture of Cinderella on it.

  “Maisie?” he said.

  There was no reply.

  “If you’re in here, you can come out,” he said.

  More silence.

  Chris headed back down the stairs to the ground floor, his footsteps heavy, his mind numb and unreactive. He had the presence of mind to take his old phone out of his pocket and dialled the emergency services.

  “Which service do you require?” the automated voice said. “Press one for police. Press two for the ambulance service. Press three for the fire brigade. Press four for the coastguard.”

  Chris pressed one. There was a busy dial tone.

  “All services are busy at the moment,” the automated voice said. “Please wait a moment.”

  The whole roof of downstairs was now thick with steam from the kettle. Chris felt like he was heading into a forbidden crypt, and with what he’d found he supposed that’s what it was. The kitchen was a sauna. The moisture beaded on his face and ran down his neck. He turned the kettle off. It gave a relieved whistle. If ever he needed coffee, it was then. He picked up the kettle and poured the water into the cup, but there was only a dribble left. Mixed with the large mound of coffee granules, it produced a thick mud-like sludge.

  The music on the phone stopped and the automated voice again said, “All services are busy at the moment. Please wait a moment.”

  Chris’s eyes drifted over the photographs of his family, the happy memories and the holidays. They weren’t always happy. In fact, they rarely were with Chris around, but frozen like that in nanosecond blinks of time he could at least pretend they were happy. He felt a hot lump form in the back of his throat and his eyes began to sting. He tore his eyes way from the photos. His eyes fell upon the floor. It took a moment for him to realise what he was staring at. He started.

  The shoes and tube socks were gone, along with Emily’s body. The single knife Emily had had in her dying hand was still there, untouched. A slow smile spread across Chris’s face. He shook his head in gentle reprimand.

  “I swear, I’ll never drink again,” he said.

  His bunched-up muscles surrendered to relief at the thought he’d imagined it all. He let out a sigh. And then he paused. Beside the knife, about where Emily’s mouth would have been, something caught the light. He kneeled down, peering close. It was small, and darkened the grey carpet. A small pool of saliva.

  The floorboards behind Chris creaked. Something leapt from the kettle’s steam like a wraith from hell, and grabbed Chris from behind. A low moan escaped the lips of his assailant.

  Chris turned, but couldn’t get a good view of him. He could tell by the weight of the body that he was not strong. Chris ran forward into the living room, and then abruptly stopped and changed direction, breaking his assailant’s grip.

  “Why did you murder my wife and daughter?” Chris said, whirling on the man.

  The assailant turned, and Chris’s breath caught in his throat.

  “Emily?” he said. “Emily, what are you doing?”

  Emily opened her mouth wide and hissed at him. Chris backed away, startled, and tripped over the sofa. Emily darted forward. Chris threw his legs up, performing a backward roll. Emily bit the sofa where his legs had been.

  “Listen, Emily,” Chris said. “If this is about increasing your allowance, this isn’t the right way to go about it.”

  Emily limped forward. Chris picked up a cushion and hit Emily over the head with it, knocking her off course and onto the floor. Her head smacked against the broken TV.

  The knives still protruded from her back, like the plates of a stegosaurus. They glinted and caught the sun as Emily looked up at him. She opened her mouth, and a low groan of death escaped her lips, her pale, milky-white eyes not really looking at him, but through him.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” Chris said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  But Emily was already back up, thick blood oozing out of a narrow cut to her face. He’d only ever seen her this angry once, when he refused to pay for Foo Fighter concert tickets.

  “Emily,” Chris said, “calm down.”

  She stumbled toward him again. Chris swung the cushion, but she was coming too fast. She caught hold of his shirt, pulled her head back, widened her mouth and lowered her teeth toward his throat.

  Chris pushed her back, and her teeth clamped together hard, missing his flesh. But she still maintained her grip. Chris thrust her forward again. This time she flew back, her fingers tearing the buttons off his top.

  “You bitch!” Chris said. “You know this is my best shirt!”

  Emily roared, spittle flying. Chris felt tiny droplets rain over his face, neck and arms.

  He turned and ran out of the house, slamming the door behind himself. There was a bang as Emily pressed herself up against the window, smearing the blood from the gash on her cheek against the glass. There was a wild ferociousness in her features he’d never seen before, like a wild animal caught in a trap.

  Then Chris heard another knocking sound. He looked up at the window of the main bedroom and stared in horror at Sharon as she pressed herself up against the glass. The blanket he’d wrapped around her shoulders was still there, draped like a superhero’s cape. Her mouth was wide open. Her eyes stared down at him without an ounce of recognition.

  “This is too much for one day,” Chris said.

  A door down the street flew open and Peter Sullivan, of number thirty-six, backed out of his house, mouth and eyes wide with fear. He was staring at something standing at the entrance to his house.

  Then the door to number thirty-three slammed open, and pensioner Jessica Hoon ambled out with drunken footsteps down the garden path. She wore a headscarf and a green gardener’s coat. She tripped over her own feet and impaled herself on the spiked metal fence that encircled her property. She peered at the spike through her stomach with an expression of confusion. She turned and looked at the people emerging into the street with her milky white eyes. She hissed at them, producing a whistling sound as the air passed through her front teeth, the only ones she had left.

  A door burst open behind Chris. Mr Bryant, who lived across the road, stepped out of his house. He stopped, peered up and down the street, and then looked at Chris.

  “Are you one of them?” he said.

  “One of what?”

  “The zombies.”

  “Zombies?” Chris said. “No. What the hell’s going on? Is it Scare-The-Shit-Out-Of-Chris-Smith Day today, or something?”

  “Them there is what we call the undead, my lad,” Mr Bryant said, as if talking about the weather.

  Mr Bryant was a short bulbous man with a big red nose. He wor
e a floppy red hat come rain or shine, and if given a fishing rod would have fit in perfectly well with Jessica Hoon’s prized gnome collection.

  “They’re what?” Chris said.

  “They’ve all become the undead. Rampaging, raging, destructive beasts, the lot of them. I know they don’t look it now, but give them a few days to swell their ranks, and our days will be well and truly numbered. You mark my words.”

  “But where did they come from?”

  Mr Bryant looked Chris up and down.

  “Don’t tell me a man of your age doesn’t know about zombies and the like?” he said. “They’re all the rage these days! There’s films, comic books, novels, games… There’s even a TV show starring Andrew Lincoln!”

  “Who’s Andrew Lincoln?”

  “The fella with the boards with writing on in Love, Actually. I was sceptical he’d be able to pull the part off, to be honest, but he does bloody well.”

  “So, what do I need to know?”

  “Well, they’re slow-moving creatures. No faster than a walk, normally, if fiction has got any truth to it. Their real advantage is large groups. They can defeat anything if their numbers are big enough, and they will be – in the towns and cities. So, make sure to stay away from them as much as possible. They say the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain. Why that is, when they’re hardly using it on a daily basis is a mystery to me, but there it is.”

  “What about silver bullets?” Chris said. “Do they work?”

  “Boy, you really don’t know about zombies, do you? Here,” he said, reaching into a deep pocket on his coat and producing a book, “read this. It’s my Bible.”

  Chris looked at the cover. It showed a fiery explosion with a shadow emerging from it.

  “World War Z,” Mr Bryant said. “It changed my life. I never thought I’d see the day when a zombie apocalypse would come to Nottingham. But here it is!”

  “Wait,” Chris said. “How is it Sharon and Emily, and all these other people became zombies, but I didn’t?”

  “They must have had some kind of contact with them.”

  “If Sharon had been necking with a zombie, I’d know about it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be kissing, although that is a possibility. A bite or a scratch or even a sneeze can do it.”

  “Wait. Can do what?”

  “Can turn you into one of them. That’s all it takes: a bite, a scratch, or sneeze.”

  “A sneeze?” Chris said with rising alarm.

  He reached up and touched his face. His fingertips came away with red spots.

  “I got sneezed on,” he said, “but I haven’t changed. That means there’s nothing wrong with me, right?”

  “Well, you’d have thought so, wouldn’t you? But that’s where you’re wrong. It’s genuinely interesting. You see, in all the films and books and everything else, a zombie becomes a zombie pretty much instantly. But guess what? It’s not true! In real life, the gestation period of zombies takes eight hours. You get infected, you become a carrier. You’re not a zombie yet, but in eight hours you start to feel real sleepy, and when you wake up, ZOONK! That’s it! You’re gone. You’re dead. And now you’re a zombie.”

  “Great,” Chris said. “That’s really uplifting. So, I’m going to turn into one of those things in eight hours?”

  Chris lifted his watch and accessed the stopwatch feature. He set a countdown for:

  7 HOURS 55 MINUTES

  Mr Bryant slapped Chris on the back.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m a fellow carrier too! It doesn’t kick in for another eight hours. You can do anything you want, and there’s no need to worry about the ramifications! Because in eight hours you’ll be dead anyway! I’ve got three hours left, myself.”

  He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a wrinkled, warty and saggy arm of skin. He gestured to a missing mouth-sized chunk.

  “See here?” he said. “Margaret bit me with her dentures. I never thought they’d have been strong enough to bite through flesh – she always has trouble with meat – but she did. I was quite shocked, believe me. It’s not so bad for me, I’m getting on in years. I’ve done most of what I wanted to do in life. I feel sorry for the little ones, though. It’s a terrible shame when they turn. Then again, a lot of the teenagers I see these days, they might not even notice the difference.”

  Chris looked up at the house that had been his home. Sharon banged her head against the window upstairs, while Emily did the same downstairs.

  “Isn’t there some medicine?” Chris said. “A cure? Something?”

  The old man shook his head.

  “They’re probably working on one as we speak,” he said, “but I’ve been watching the news and I haven’t heard anything.”

  “This doesn’t seem real.”

  “Oh, it’s surreal all right,” Mr Bryant said. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

  “Is it only here it’s happening?”

  “Where have you been?” Mr Bryant said. “Haven’t you been watching the news? It’s been on all day every day for the past week! Were you under a rock somewhere?”

  “Yes,” Chris said, “actually I was. The Rock pub. But they tend not to show anything other than the football. They’re probably in there now, completely unaware.”

  “It’s not a bad way to be, I suppose.”

  Chris’s mouth felt dry and he suddenly felt desperate for a drink.

  “What are you going to do?” Mr Bryant said.

  “I don’t know,” Chris said.

  “This is the end the crazy guys wearing signs always kept going on about. This is the end, my friend. The good news is, you can do anything you want. Anything at all. The only question is, what do you want to do?”

  A rasping hoarse voice came from Mr Bryant’s house.

  “I’d best go,” he said. “I’ve got to give Margaret her lunch.”

  He rolled up his other sleeve, where he had several other missing lumps.

  “She’s very hungry these days,” he said. “I just hope she isn’t in the mood for rump steak.”

  Mr Bryant headed back into his house. More doors banged open up and down the street. Figures lumbered out from their homes like characters at a shooting range. And though he wasn’t a good shot, Chris wished he had a gun.

  The Brayer twins from down the road, hellions at the best of times, had matching bites to their arms and head, each missing an ear. At least we’ll be able to tell them apart now, Chris thought. But his smile faded when the twins turned their cloudy milk eyes on him.

  Chris backed away and ran across the ring road, back into the relative safety of the countryside.

  Z-MINUS: 7 HOURS 44 MINUTES

  Chris came to a stop on a windy bluff of hill that overlooked the town. He panted lightly from the exertion, the muscles in his calves burning. He put his hands on his head to expand his lungs and catch his breath. Smoke rose from a dozen locations within the city, each a different hue of grey. Sirens rose and fell like bird mating calls, each louder and shriller than the last.

  Chris took his phone out of his pocket and hit the internet icon. He was greeted by big recurring headlines: ‘THE DEAD RISE!’ ‘ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!’ ‘DAWN OF THE DEAD!’ There were hundreds and thousands of images and videos of people lumbering across paddy fields, mountain tops, deserts, cityscapes. There was even a video of the moment a body reanimated, dead body rising, getting to its feet, and then biting a doctor who was crouched over him. Chris felt numb.

  He turned to descend the slope that led to Nottingham Forest, former home of Robin Hood. If anywhere provided sanctuary, surely it was there? He came to a stop.

  A little girl stood before him. She had shoulder length frizzy hair and a round face. She wore a blue duffle coat with mittens that ran around the back. She was looking at him with something approaching curiosity. Her eyes were big, brown, and soulful.

  “Maisie?” Chris said. “What are you doing here?”
<
br />   “I followed you,” Maisie said in her sweet voice.

  “Have you been bitten?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  She shook her head.

  “Come here,” Chris said.

  She hesitated, and then approached him. Chris wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight. It felt awkward for them both.

  “Where have you been?” Chris said.

  “I was at home. Behind the curtain in the living room.”

  “The whole time? Why didn’t you come out when I came home?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you were one of them or not.”

  “I might not look like George Clooney but I don’t look that rough!”

  Maisie didn’t reply. She often didn’t. She had a studious air that always made her look thoughtful and distant. Definitely not something she’d inherited from Chris.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Chris said. “Did you see what happened to your mum and sister?”

  Maisie nodded.

  “Can you tell me?” Chris said.

  Maisie’s mouth formed an upside down ‘U’. She sniffed and wiped the tears out of her eyes. She shook her head.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Chris said. “Talking makes it better.”

  Maisie took a few deep breaths.

  “I’ll try,” she said with a sniffle. “We went food shopping yesterday. A man fell over. His wife leaned over him to help him, and then suddenly he got up. He attacked her. People tried to stop him, but he was too crazy. We tried to run, but he came out of nowhere and attacked us. He bit Mum and scratched Emily on the arm. We got home, and Mum cleaned their cuts while I watched TV.

  “There were videos on the news of people who died and then came back to life. The man said if I knew someone who had headaches, cold sweats, shakes, and then went to sleep, that I should run away. Or kill them.

  “So, I went into the kitchen to get the knives. I stood over Emily, but I couldn’t do it. I went upstairs to Mum. I couldn’t kill her either. Mum took the knives off me and told me to stay upstairs. I heard her go down into the living room. There were voices, some crying, and then silence. Mum came back upstairs.