‘Just look at this, will you?’ Peter Guest whispered nervously. He nodded deeper into the darkness at the other end of the wide, rectangular shop. The far end of the building seemed to be full of constant, shuffling movement.
In the half-light it was impossible to be sure how many bodies they now faced.
‘So what do you suggest?’ Stayt wondered, wandering forward slightly. They hadn’t had to deal with any more than two or three bodies at a time so far today. ‘Should we just go for it and see how many of them we can get rid of or…?’
One of the bodies started moving towards him. Spurred on by the sudden movement of the first, the others began to follow.
‘What the hell…?’ Guest mumbled as the corpses began to stumble towards them
‘Spread out!’ Michael yelled, concerned that he might be caught by Stayt’s sword in the melee which was inevitably about to unfold. ‘Spread out and hit the damn things until there’s none of them left standing!’
He lifted the crowbar again and ran deeper into the building until he reached the first body coming the other way. In a single, swift arcing movement he swung the crowbar up and forced it into the creature’s head, shoving it up through its chin and deep into its decaying brain. When the body became limp and stopped moving he lowered his hands and let it slide off the crowbar and onto the floor.
To Michael’s right Stayt was cutting his way through the crowd with his now familiar ferocity and intent. Behind and to his left, however, Peter Guest was struggling. He’d so far managed to avoid just about all direct confrontation with the bodies but suddenly there was no escape. He carried with him a cricket bat, and he now cursed his stupid and inappropriate choice of weapon.
‘What do I do?’ he screamed desperately as the nearest body lashed out at him. He didn’t really expect to be given an answer, but in the midst of the close-confined chaos and mayhem he got two.
‘Fucking hit them!’ Stayt shouted.
‘And keep fucking hitting them until they stop moving,’
Michael yelled in-between striking out at another two bodies. ‘Just do it!’
Half closing his eyes Guest instinctively held the cricket bat as he would have done had he been in the middle of a local club match on a Sunday afternoon. Anticipating the lurching speed of the hideous body which stumbled towards him he took two steps down an imaginary wicket and swung the bat as if he was trying to hit the ball over the bowlers head towards the boundary rope. The wood connected with the underside of the creature’s jaw, severing the remains of its spinal cord and practically smashing its head off its shoulders. It flew back into a freezer full of rotten, defrosted food and lay still.
More through luck than judgment, Guest eventually managed to dispose of another body. In the same short period of time Stayt had cut down four more and Michael another two. A total of thirteen of the wretched things had been destroyed.
After dragging more than twenty bodies out of the foul smelling building (including the remains of several which they’d found motionless on the ground) Michael, Stayt and Guest allowed themselves a short break. The long day’s work so far had been physically and mentally exhausting.
Their eyes now accustomed to the low light indoors, and with the car headlamps still providing limited illumination, they searched through the bloodied remains of the shop, picking through the wreckage as if they were high street window shoppers on a Saturday afternoon.
Michael leant against the nearest wall and flicked through the still glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine filled with pages upon pages of beautiful, immaculately presented men and women. Stupidly and pointlessly, for a second he suddenly became aware of his scruffy, blood-soaked appearance. The pictures in the magazine filled him with deep and unexpectedly bitter feelings of sadness and remorse.
‘Look at this,’ he mumbled to anyone who would listen,
‘just look at this.’
Stayt stood nearby drinking a can of beer and eating a bar of chocolate which was only out of date by a couple of weeks.
‘What?’ he asked, his mouth full of food.
‘All of this shit,’ Michael replied, turning the magazine slightly so that Stayt could see the page he’d been looking at. It was a double-page spread of photographs from some celebrity wedding or funeral or other. He recognised some of the faces in the pictures, but he struggled for a second to remember their names or what it was they used to do.
‘What about it?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Just hard to believe, isn’t it? Hard to believe that this kind of thing used to matter. Christ, thousands of people used to buy this crap every week, now there’s probably not even a thousand people left alive.’
Stayt picked his way through the rubbish to stand closer to Michael and get a better view of the pictures.
‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ he said quietly, pointing at the face of a television actress he remembered.
‘I had a thing about her!’
Michael nodded.
‘She’s probably like that lot now,’ he half-joked, nodding towards the pile of corpses in the middle of the street that Brigid and the others were still moving. ‘Hey, remember this?’ he asked as he flicked back a few pages to a film review section he’d just passed.
‘Bloody hell, yes,’ Stayt answered, his eyes darting around the spread of photographs from a long forgotten film. ‘Never got round to seeing that.’
‘It wasn’t that good,’ Michael volunteered, ‘I saw it about a week before everything happened. Anyway, I bet you could still get to watch it if you wanted to. If we can get the electricity supply working here we could fetch a projector from the mainland and show as many films as we can get our hands on. We’ll paint the side of one of the buildings white and we’ll project against it. It’ll be like a drive in, but without the cars. We’ll…’
‘No we won’t,’ Stayt sighed, shaking his tired head.
‘Nice idea, mate, but it’s never going to happen, is it? If we’re lucky we’ll get something set up so that we can watch videos or DVDs if we really want to.’ He took another magazine from the rack near Michael and began to leaf through its pages. He wiped an unexpected tear away from the corner of his eye. ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly, ‘I’d forgotten about all of this. I hadn’t thought about any of it until now.’
Michael continued to look through his magazine as he pondered Stayt’s words. He understood completely what the other man was saying. He couldn’t vouch for Stayt, but he’d spent the last two months either running at breakneck speed or sitting still and hiding in terrified silence. This was the first time they’d been able to move around freely. This was the first time for weeks that any of them had been allowed the luxury of being able to stop and think and react and remember without having to constantly look over their shoulders in fear of the seemingly endless hordes of bodies which plagued their shattered lives.
Looking back was painful. It hurt more than any of them might have expected it to, but now that they had suddenly been allowed to remember they found it was impossible to stop. They picked through the musty contents of the shop with nostalgia and with heavy, heartbreaking sadness and grief. Two months of repressing and ignoring unhealthy, troubling, gnawing emotions had taken its toll on most if not all of the survivors, and Michael was certainly aware of the damage that had been done. For weeks the speed and magnitude of the events unfolding around him had prevented him from dwelling on the memories of everything he’d lost. Even the brief respite underground in the military bunker had been filled with enough distractions and problems to keep his mind and attention focussed only on the immediate present. Since arriving on the island, however, the pace and urgency of life seemed to have slowed down dramatically and they now had time to grieve.
On the other side of the room Peter Guest was sitting on a counter, crying. Not just sobbing or sniffing quietly to himself, he was wailing with pain, almost screaming with the sudden release of previously pent-up and suppressed emotions. Michael noticed that Tony Hyde was walking past the front of the shop. The noise which Guest was making was of such volume that it made Hyde stop and walk towards the building. Concerned, he leant
