However, Brian was far more comfortable losing all of his material possessions than he was with the prospect of being completely alone in the apocalypse.
They had loaded the vehicles with all the supplies they had, including every weapon and every bottle, jar, flask and jug Brian had in the house, all of which had been filled to the brim with water from the kitchen tap.
When everyone was ready, Kingsley did one last mental check that he hadn’t forgotten anything. Then he started the engine and led their little convoy out of the driveway and down the lane toward the A120, which they joined and then immediately exited north on to a string of back roads that would take them all the way to Sible, provided there were no blockages.
As he drove, Kingsley snuck glances at Emma in the other seat who gazed out the window at the passing landscape showing the first signs of autumn.
“Why did you want to come?” he asked her.
Emma was silent for a moment. Then she turned and stared straight ahead through the windscreen. “As I said back there – you were right. Brian’s house won’t be a safe haven forever.”
“But maybe Leena’s also right. Maybe these people at the castle aren’t what they say they are.” And I thought you hated me, he wanted to add.
“I hope for all of our sakes she’s wrong.” Emma looked at him now. “We can’t lose trust in people. We can’t be the only good ones. Because if we are… I don’t know. I just don’t want to live in a world like that.”
*
The first thing that hit him as he opened the shop door was the stench of a decomposing body. An indescribably pungent mixture of spoiled meat, faeces and rotten eggs. Kingsley didn’t think he would ever get used to that smell. It was like he could physically feel it crawling up his nostrils.
They had stopped at a petrol station after detouring around a pack of snappers feasting on the carcass of a deer in the middle of the road, and he had come in here to see if he could get the pumps working; although the power had gone out in Colchester, there was a chance it hadn’t in this area.
When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he noticed the body of a man on the floor between the back wall and some empty multipack crisp boxes. The corpse was bloated and stiff, his skin red with patches of blue and black, eyes bulging from their sockets. Flies buzzed around him.
Judging from the black, desiccated blood spreading out from his head, Kingsley reckoned the man had died from head trauma.
Covering his nose with his shirt, Kingsley slipped behind the till and tried the light switch. The lights didn’t turn on.
No power, as expected. Still, Kingsley couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. He finished his perfunctory scan of the few items scattered around the dim shop and barged back outside, his eyes watering as he left the awful smell.
“Any luck?” Emma asked. He shook his head no.
She sighed. “Okay, looks like we’ll have to hop in with Brian then.”
The butcher’s van had been running on fumes when they pulled up here; with no way of refuelling the van, it wasn’t going to get them all the way to the castle. They would have to leave it here.
There was enough room in Brian’s sedan for the three of them. It was not a problem. Kingsley just hoped more than ever that this journey would be worth it now they’d lost a vehicle along the way.
Just then a snapper jittered out from behind the car wash and came into the forecourt.
“Fucking pests,” Kingsley muttered as he moved toward the zombie with his machete. He chopped at the snapper’s neck and almost took it’s head off in one go. It collapsed, it’s cleaved spine rendering it quadriplegic.
Kingsley stared at the impotent snapper as he wiped blood off his cheek. Something bugged him about it’s appearance and he couldn’t figure out what it was… The skin of the person it had once been was going green and looked slightly waxy, but the body was nowhere near as rotten as the one he’d just found in the shop.
That was it, he realised; why weren’t the snappers decomposing as fast as the countless dead bodies decorating every street and disused building?
Of course it was possible that the snapper in front of him now had only recently turned, perhaps within the past few days. But all the snappers Kingsley had encountered looked no worse for wear than this one, except for those that were significantly mutilated.
It pointed to a frightening possibility: the virus was preserving them.
Maybe the snappers weren’t decaying because the virus, the disease, the parasite – whatever the fuck it was – kept their bodies from deteriorating so it could remain in the host for longer and have a better chance of spreading.
Unsure why Kingsley was staring at the half-decapitated snapper, Emma came up beside him. “What is it?” she asked.
He recalled the conversation he’d had with Kara in which she pointed out that the snappers were nothing more than walking corpses, and therefore their muscles and limbs would eventually succumb to decay, giving out and leaving them unable to stand. Unable to bite and infect. Harmless.
But if something in them was indeed preserving their flesh, it might be a while before that happened.
“Kingsley? What’s up?”
He looked at her. “Err, nothing. I was just daydreaming.” He crouched next to the snapper and chopped into it’s skull to stop it’s jaw from
