Among The Dead (Book 1): Shadow of Death Read online

  “Help!” he screamed, as he saw me approach in the mirror. “I’m stuck! I think my arm is broken!”

  “Relax!” I called to him wearily, scanning the coach for my bag and gun. My bag was at the front of the coach, but there was no sign of the gun. I crawled further along the seats and made my way to him until I stood on what used to be the door. The driver dangled above me in his seat. My appearance had caused excitement among the infected. They began pushing against the glass more aggressively, as if they couldn’t even see the glass was there. That wasn’t what concerned me though. The more they pushed, the more cracks grew. I grabbed up my bag. I looked up at the driver, who only stayed where he was due to the seatbelt. I could see he was a lot worse than he had said. His arm was broken for sure, and his ribs were crushed in places where the steering column had slammed into him. His head was also bleeding. Very badly. The infected hands were inches from his face, yet still out of reach as he pushed himself against the seat to gain some more distance. The stench was unbelievable. It was unimaginable even. As bad as you imagined rotten flesh to be, multiply that by ten and you still aren’t anywhere near the intensity that flooded into the coach.

  I unhooked his seatbelt, which caused him to crumple into a screaming pile as all his weight was forced onto the steering column.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said to him, wincing at his agony. I tried to adjust him, but it was just met with more screams. I didn’t know how to try to move him. Every time I tried, he screamed. Worse than that: as each second passed, the glass came closer to breaking. I heard the glass crinkle as the cracks spread further. I had to react and not think it through. I grabbed his good arm and hooked it around me, ignoring his protests and screams. It was for his own good. I pulled and moved him until he was free of his seat. I’m certain he passed out once or twice in the process. I looked at the obstacle course of seats ahead of me. I knew I had no chance of getting out with him. The front was no good after all. I needed backup. I placed him down.

  “Please don’t leave me!” the driver begged. “Please! Please don’t leave me! Please!”

  “I’m not,” I said, crouching to look him in the eye. “If we’re going to get out, I need to find my gun.”

  He nodded with desperation in his eyes. I climbed over the seats, looking between each for the gun. I heard the glass giving way as I spotted the gun. I jumped to it and scooped it up. As I spun around to face the front, I saw the glass collapse as the infected poured in. They swarmed onto the driver, whose screams emanated around me before being cut short. I had a brief flicker of thought as I realised I didn’t even know the dead man’s name. I felt bile rise in my throat but swallowed it down. When the infected were done with the driver, they turned to me. There was no hesitation before they advanced. They were fast but clumsy. Their movement and timing was off, as if it wasn’t natural to them. They moved forward slowly. They fell and stumbled as they tried to climb over the seats. They snarled. They moaned. They reached for me hungrily. I clambered over the seats, heading towards the back window. I jumped each seat, imagining each as a hurdle. I slammed into the back window, but nothing happened. The infected approached still and I was stuck! It was then I noticed an emergency hammer. I grabbed it and, despite the situation, I took some glee in hitting the window with the hammer. I expected the glass to fall to pieces, the way I had always pictured it would, but it just cracked. The infected got closer. I slammed myself into the glass, feeling it bulge outwards. I took a deep breath and slammed into it again. The glass finally gave way and I escaped the deathly grasp of the infected! I wasn’t safe though. I tumbled out into the road. My body ached, both from being thrown about and from the adrenaline. I picked myself up and began running. Not towards the woods, but towards the embankment. I dived down it, tumbling through the grass. In front of me there was a grassy expanse, with a farmhouse in the distance. That was my target. I ran. My legs and thighs burned. It felt as though acid pumped through me. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw that nothing chased me. I slowed to a jog and then stopped, confused. Some of the infected shuffled around by the coach, while others sprinted down the road. None of them looked at me. I quickly dropped to the ground and hid in the long grass. My brain raced. Why hadn’t they followed me? I thought about their behaviour. I hated jumping to conclusions but … the only logical reason was that they had a one-track mind. Once I was out of sight, I was out of mind; hence them just wandering about without aim. Whereas the others who carried on running must have done so simply because they didn’t remember the reason they had started to begin with. I knew one thing though: The longer I waited, the more spread out they would become and more likely to notice me. I had to move. I crawled through the grass slowly, heading towards the farmhouse. I didn’t know what I would do once I got there, but I could plan in safety. I kept going, checking over my shoulder every couple of minutes. Most of the infected had vanished from view, but that didn’t mean they weren’t around. Occasionally, I found streaks of blood in the grass. I readied my gun, just in case. Something bloody had been through there, and the upturned car told me what. I took a deep breath and continued my laborious crawl.

  I eventually arrived at the house, uninterrupted by any nasties hiding in the grass. I noticed more blood wiped across the wooden decking and across the door, which had been left ajar. I almost turned back. Maybe there was somewhere else I could hide? Typically, as with every horror movie, that’s when the rain started to fall. Huge gobs of water splashed down and, before long, it was a torrential downpour. The decision had been made for me by some cruel and twisted God. Gun in hand, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  CHAPTER 4

  The house was dark, which was expected with a storm outside and the curtains drawn. I could make out stuff in the dim light that crept around the edges of the curtains. It was the opposite of a stereotypical farmhouse. Everything was top of the range and new, as if someone wanted to keep up with the times. I could hear talking in the next room but recognised it as staged television chatter as opposed to actual conversation. I closed the door gently behind me, the broken lock stopping it from being shut fully, and moved further into the house. I was in the hallway, stairs leading up to my left and a door further down the hallway on the right leading to, I assumed, the front room. That’s where the bloody trail led. The floor was laminated, so the blood was slick and slippery. It still looked fresh. I crept towards the door, my gun levelled in front of me, the weight heavy and unfamiliar. If there were any of the infected in the house, I had to deal with them first. I could feel bile burning the back of my throat. I felt my heart rate increase and the exhaustion left my body as I felt re-energised. Everything felt hypersensitive, as though I was floating. Adrenaline. I walked through the partially open door, and everything in the room hit me at once.

  A horrendous stench. I instantly knew it was the smell of the infected. I still didn’t know how to describe it. Dog scat boiled for a week in cat urine added with God knows what else? The bile which had been hovering in my throat ejected itself all over the once-blue carpet. The sound which bored through the room was a horrible grinding noise, like a dog chewing on a bone. How horribly close I was. What I saw could automatically outweigh all my other senses. Apart from the fresh vomit on the blue carpet, the room was fairly basic. There was a television which was stuck on some sort of chat show. In front of the television was a single armchair. At the risk of sounding sexist, it was the house of a single man: no fancy and pointless ornaments, but everything there existed out of necessity. In the chair was a body. It was an older man, probably middle-aged. In one hand was an empty bottle of vodka, in the other was a shotgun. The man was clearly dead, not just because of the sickly pallor of his skin, or the way his body hung limply. It wasn’t even that almost the entirety of his head was missing and just a bloody stump remained. The spent shotgun shell on the floor was all the evidence I needed for what had happened. What truly gave away that he was dead wasn’t the fact that the mang
led infected woman on the floor pulled strips of flesh from the man’s legs, which was followed by her mechanically shoving the flesh into her mouth and chewing it hungrily. It was the fact he didn’t scream or try to move that gave it away. The female corpse, which is what it was and nothing more, made me realise these were no longer “infected” people. They were undead. The undead woman was, without doubt, the car crash victim. She no longer had any legs; only bloody and mashed stumps remained of where they had once been. One of her arms was missing, and half of her face was torn away. Still, driven by hunger, she had managed to drag herself until she found something to eat. The undead woman was so busy feasting on the man, she hadn’t even noticed me. I lifted my handgun and aimed at her head. I breathed deeply and tried to steady my hand, which shook wildly. I tried not to think about what I was about to do. She used to be a person after all. I always used to laugh at people in films who wouldn’t kill the monster of someone they once knew. I was in that situation, except I couldn’t pull the trigger myself, and I didn’t even know the person. I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger. The concentrated explosion of the bullet that left the gun was deafening and left my ears ringing. No amount of video games or movies could have prepared me for it. I opened my eyes to see the damage and saw my shot had gone wide. The undead woman now had taken notice of me. She discarded the flesh of the dead man for fresher game and began to crawl towards me with surprising speed for something with so few limbs. I levelled my gun again and stepped backwards slowly as I did so, trying to keep my distance from the crawler. The back of my leg hit something, but my body just kept going. I landed on my backside, legs tangled with a footstool. I had thrown my gun to one side when I fell, and no longer had a weapon. I began to crawl backwards, and the crawler gained on me. I kept going back until I hit a wall. I couldn’t go any further. Panic took over. I felt sick. I just kept looking around wildly for a way out. In the corner next to me was an umbrella stand. In it were three umbrellas and a wooden handle. The wooden handle looked familiar deep in the recesses of my brain. I grabbed it and pulled it out. To my luck, and for whatever reason he had it, the owner of the house had kept an axe in the umbrella stand. I gripped it tightly and pushed myself up against the wall until I stood fully upright. The crawler was less than four feet away.

  “Listen,” I started desperately. “If there is any humanity left in you, you will stop and leave now.”

  There was no obvious recognition as the once human crawled towards me. I lifted the axe high above my head, gripping it tightly between both hands. The woman was a foot away from me, and she reached desperately up for me. You could almost forget she was trying to kill me with the sadness in her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered with an odd sense of calmness as I slammed the axe into her head. Television had clearly given me the wrong impression of human anatomy, as I expected it to be a lot frailer than it actually was. Although the strike slowed her, it didn’t stop her. She carried on coming at me, so I wrenched the axe free, leaving a gory gash through which I could see the splinters of bone and the pinkish grey of the brain. Bloody arches of flesh clung from axe to skull. I slammed the axe down again, aiming for the same spot. It hit home. The axe crashed through the already damaged skull. The woman slumped to the floor dead … finally dead … again.

  I stood over her tensely for a few minutes, expecting her to move again. She didn’t. I sighed, dropped the axe, and slumped to the floor. I put my hand over my eyes and tears began to flow. I didn’t know whether it was from the exhaustion, the homesickness, or the killing of a once human life, but the tears wouldn’t stop. I could feel hysterical laughter looming beneath the surface. My mind felt fit to crack and I didn’t know how to respond. Between the hysterical laughs and sobs, I heard a sudden creak and everything immediately stopped for me. I grabbed the axe and jumped to my feet in preparation for combat. I was tense, but that was broken when I saw something I never expected: a cat.

  “Meow?” it said, cocking its head to one side and looking at me.

  I don’t know why, but I asked, “Are you hungry, buddy?”

  The cat mewed again and brushed up against my leg, purring.

  “Ok, let’s find you some food,” I said, smiling, face salty from tears. I opened the closest door and saw it was the kitchen. I walked in and looked through the cupboards for a bowl and food. I eventually found both. I filled the bowl and left it on the floor.

  “That should get you by,” I said again, smiling as the cat ate. “I’m just going to check the rest of the house.”

  I picked up the gun and axe, making a point not to look at any of the death and destruction around me. I crept up the stairs, surprisingly without a single one creaking. I found nothing in any of the rooms. However, my earlier suspicions about it being a man’s house was confirmed; the toilet seat was left up. The bed was king-sized and there were lots of books in an office. Every man’s home is his castle! I looked out of a gap between the curtains and saw nightfall had pretty much closed in, the darkness made worse by the storm. I couldn’t see any movement outside but could feel the undead out there.

  I turned and looked at the room. I didn’t like being in someone else’s room, but it would have to do for the night. I moved over to the bed and stripped the bedding before changing it for new. Call me crazy, but I couldn’t sleep in someone’s unwashed bedding, even if I had just brutally caved in a person’s skull. I pushed that thought from my head. I closed the door just as the cat darted into the room.

  “Didn’t want to be alone either, eh?” I said to the cat. It mewed in reply. I shut the door completely and, as an extra measure, pushed the wardrobe in front of it. I sighed and climbed into my temporary bed still clothed, in case I needed a quick escape. I laid down and closed my eyes, stroking the cat for comfort.

  “What the hell have I done?” I said aloud, before more tears came, before falling into a fitful sleep.

  TAO OF SAM – WEAPONS: THE BASICS

  Let’s keep this simple.

  Handheld weapons are your weapon of choice; something light which can crush or cut through the skull. Anything which isn’t ranged. No guns or other devices. You want something up close and personal; a non-projectile weapon! You want to be able to destroy the brain, but you want to do it as quietly as possible. Heavy weapons like sledgehammers will slow you down before you get anywhere. Think axes and machetes.

  Guns are useful, but avoid them. They are loud and need reloading. They will be a hindrance. They are time-consuming in terms of maintenance and finding ammunition. However, they make an impression on the living; another group you need to guard yourself against.

  Homemade weapons will be your way forward. You can mix and match things, like a knife taped to a snooker cue. This will give you enough range to keep distance and dispatch the undead. Just use your imagination!

  A combination of silence and range will save you. Remember, blades and such don’t need reloading!

  CHAPTER 5

  I was pulled from a restless sleep by a strange buzzing sound. I opened my eyes. They were wet. I’d been crying in my sleep. What was the buzzing? It was continuous and close. It took a moment as the grogginess of almost-sleep fell away for me to realise it was my phone vibrating: a phone call. I reached for, and fumbled with, it. I looked at the screen. I didn’t answer. It was my mother calling, as well as fifty-five other missed calls from various family members. Mother. Sister. Grandad. I continued to stare at the phone, as if I’d never seen one before, and waited until the call went to voicemail. I looked away in shame. I physically couldn’t answer it. I considered sending them a text but, in my head, I still thought of my journey as a short trip. A quick there and back again. It would have been so easy to send a message or ring. I don’t know why I didn’t. I crawled out of bed and plugged my phone in to charge it, making another call to Alice as I did so. Answer the phone. Please answer the phone. It went to voicemail. I put my phone down and hoped for a call back. Nothing. I sighed and ran m
y hand through my hair; a coping mechanism for stress. I looked around the room as the light from my phone disappeared. The room was essentially pitch-black. No light at all, even from the window. I crept over to the curtains, stepping ever so quietly, and peeled them back just enough to look through. There was very little light outside; the only light came from the street lamps and distant twilight sky. The abandoned coach was illuminated like a beacon. I could see some of the undead, the majority of which still shuffled around and didn’t stray too far from the coach. A few had wandered into the field. One was even in the immediate vicinity of the house. I watched it for a few moments as it walked without direction. It didn’t even seem aware of the house. My eyes slowly adjusted to the almost darkness. I turned from the curtain and let them close again. I could see the cat sleeping peacefully on the bed. I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep at that point, no matter how tired I was. My brain was wide awake and ready for action. I crept around the bedroom as silently as I could and prepared to leave. I didn’t plan to leave immediately, but it kept my thoughts away from the horror scene downstairs. I couldn’t handle it currently; it could wait until the sun was higher in the sky. Instead, I sat silently on the edge of the bed and replayed the events of the previous twenty-four hours, with censorship on certain parts which I didn’t feel quite ready to face yet. I doubted I ever would be able to. I breathed quietly, listening to the sounds of the house, and somewhere along the line I fell asleep …