The backpackers took hold of her any way that they could and dragged her, wailing, across the platform. The doors beeped, ready to close.
“Hold the damn doors!” Robert yelled. With the injured lady half in half on the platform, the doors closed. Their sensors recognised the blockage and opened up again. A man appeared on the platform. His head shook from right to left with rapid motion, as if he had succumbed to an over fix of caffeine which had now burst into his body. Blood covered his face from the chin down.
“Get her in now!” a backpacker screamed. His voice alerted the crazy man who stopped shaking. The doors bleeped again, ready to close. The sound of a thousand footsteps echoed from the escalators. Crowds emerged, falling over and spilling onto the platform. They fell onto the surface, vanishing beneath the stampede of people behind that continued to push their way onto the platform. Hundreds trampled each other as they sprinted onto the platform, all soaked in blood.
“Close the doors! Close the damn doors!” Robert whispered. The electric doors slid closed as the mass of people barged across the platform. The train pulled away as the first of the crowd crashed against the carriages. Hundreds of faces filled the windows as the train moved, all of them snarling and banging from the outside. Blood obscured the windows as they pounded against them with their hands and heads attempting to get to the commuters inside. The train gathered speed until the station vanished into darkness.
Day Zero had been born.
Day Zero
Somewhere in Northamptonshire
I awoke to the cold sensation of rain as it pattered down upon my face. My left leg ached. My right arm strained, taking the full weight of my unconscious body. In the daze of my confusion, the floor fell away before a head popped beneath my armpit. I’d been hoisted. Someone supported me as my sleeping legs dragged across a solid, saturated terrain. My senses came back in a flash. Panic engulfed the small town street in which I found myself.
“Come on, Bucky. I can’t do this by myself.”
Bucky? Oh yes, that was me. My mouth opened and expelled either a raspy gasp or cry, I couldn’t tell which. Instinct told me the voice referred to the legs I had yet to engage. Without hesitation, I placed my weight down and supported my body weight upon my feet.
“That’s better.”
“Is he okay?” came an alarmed but familiar voice.
“Yes, he’s walking.”
A queasy sensation befell me and the need to vomit became immense.
“No, he’s going! I need help!”
I awoke again a few seconds later. The supporting voice sobbed.
“No way! No way!”
“Come on, keep moving.”
“Did you see that?” another voice rattled from close by.
“They took him down and, oh shit, they…”
“Don’t look back!” a panicked voice ordered. “Don’t look back.”
My senses came back stronger. Pungent smoke filled my nostrils. Car alarms wailed their monotonous tones throughout the chaos. Voices emerged, yet they were not voices I recognised. Growls, moans and snarls all emitted in unison within my surroundings. Fire flickered from smashed cars. Someone wailed. A body emerged from the fire wrapped in elegant, dancing flames. They flapped and span as though their cognitive minds had been replaced by madness, before falling to the rain-soaked road and ceasing their panic. Two men shambled across to help. They knelt beside the burning body and…
“What are they doing?” I asked as I stumbled through the rainfall.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” replied my guardian angel.
“But…”
I watched through misty eyes as these two humans began their meal and my stomach fell. Regardless of the flames they endured, the men scratched and tore at the person, pulling burnt meat from the roasting body. Dark flesh shovelled into their mouths. Flames engulfed their clothing and hair, yet there they sat eating the deceased with disregard to their own mortality.
People flooded from the pharmacy we passed, stumbling and falling atop of one another. They bore contusions, cuts and abrasions. All of them bled from their eyes and noses. The alarms vanished a second as the high pitched shrill of a woman bellowed through the carnage.
“Shit! We’ve been spotted!” came a familiar, female voice.
“Come on, Bucky, I really need you to help.”
“What’s happening?” I rasped, still unsure of what I was doing.
My guardian deflected the question. “No time to explain, just move.”
“Look at them! Oh God, look! They’ve got Mr Finch’s guts! Oh shit, man!”
“Don’t look back!” my supporting voice wailed.
“Lacey, look out!”
I had no idea what happened. I heard a familiar sound, like a ball hitting a cricket bat, and remembered I’d been on the minibus on the way home from an inter school match against a local team.
“It’s okay, I got him,” Lacey replied.
“You killed him!” a voice yelled. “You killed a man!”
“I had to! He’d have killed me!”
I slipped, falling to the ground via an oily patch I’d wandered through. My knees took the full brunt of the tumble.
“Damn it, Bucky, get up!”
I struggled to my feet, the oil reducing my shoe soles to nothing more than banana skins.
“What is oil doing on the floor out here?” I asked, my senses now returning.
“That wasn’t oil.”
For the first time since God-knows-when my vision and cognitive thinking returned. I peered down at my cricket whites and found my knees plastered in blood and matter.
Fear twisted my stomach into knots. The voice that helped me was not disembodied. It belonged to my fellow teammate, Johnny Neill.
“Johnny, what’s…”
“Shut up, Bucky, and concentrate. Look.”
With his free hand, Johnny pointed to a doorway where an old man beckoned to us.
Johnny turned his head. “Come on, guys, to the hardware shop.”
A man rushed with outstretched arms. Blood trickled from his eyes and nose and seeped through his clothing. His pupils vanished, leaving nothing more than eye white where they once existed. Everything that was once alive had vanished, leaving an empty, soul-less husk of a human being.
“Six!” A cricket bat smashed down upon his skull as Lacey thwarted his advance.
