I’ve seen strings of abandoned cars where a single accident has royally fucked the whole area, with undead shuffling between those vehicles, or writhing in them after retreating to perceived safety after being bitten. A single incident occurred, and zombies awakened from the dead killed in those accidents outright or had subsequently died from untreated injuries. More accidents from panicked drivers stacked atop the already shitty situation, and the slow rampage of those ever-increasing numbers of undead caused mass panic. People fled their vehicles, gripped by the primal terror of the undead.
Where those people went, I couldn’t say. As we’re four months in, I imagine many of them are shambling around as undead as well. I’d like to think some more resourceful ones have managed to survive. I can only hope we get the chance to help some of them if they’re still kicking, because with winter so close, that will undoubtedly kill off a large portion of those who survived through summer and autumn. The north of England can have shitty weather at the best of times. In winter, it’ll be as cold as a politician’s heart, and without proper resources and shelter, the death toll will only rise.
I appear to be philosophising and musing a lot, rather than just recounting my tale, but I think these things need recording. I need you to have a sense of what it was like Freya, as I’ve never known anything like it. It was almost 2pm, the sun was shining bright and it was a balmy summer day, but the world around me was a frenzy of action and a cacophony of noise. Always in the distance there was shouting or screaming, distant booms of unseen explosions and collisions, and black plumes leaking into the sky from countless fires. The rhythmic thumping of a police helicopter overhead was a constant, the acrid smell of fire and blood clinging to the air, as frantic people in vehicles or on foot with wide, wild eyes rushed to unknown destinations in a vain hope of shelter and safety. I was standing at the end of my road, staring around me in complete horror, as my sleepy little town collapsed around me.
It’s my most common saying, but I’ll say it again and again, Freya.
The apocalypse sucks.
I decided to stick to shortcuts through housing estates, rather than going anywhere near a main road. I had visions of dickhead drivers mounting pavements to get around jams on the road, so I needed to keep on the move while avoiding the constant threat of being run over. I decided to cut through a council housing estate where I could see any cars coming and would have plenty of space to run if needed. Hopefully, it would also keep me away from the epicentre of any erupting clusters of undead.
I was given a sharp and violent lesson that day that the living can be far more monstrous than the undead.
I’m not going to cast aspersions or stereotypes on council estates and say they’re all bad people, because they’re not. But, as a general rule, they house a higher quantity of those below the poverty line, and poverty inevitably brings with it a higher chance of crime. They can be rough places to live, and I know because I’ve lived on them. Desperate people will often do desperate things to survive, especially when the situation is more desperate than anyone could have foreseen. Throw an end-of-the-world vibe into that poverty-stricken existence and shit gets real. People lived from week to week, sometimes day to day. They didn’t have reserves of food or supplies, so once shit started collapsing, the council estates became warzones.
I was horrified to discover roving gangs, openly armed with knives, bats, iron bars, and even a couple with small snub-nosed revolvers. The small convenience store at the centre of the estate, which just consisted of a couple of aisles of basic necessities like food, booze, cigarettes, and everything else you’d find in your local Spar shop, was a fucking mess. As some of these hastily assembled mobs assaulted the store, they clashed with each other, fighting over the meagre resources in a frenzy of close quarter violence, and fearless in doing so because they knew by now that no police would answer any call.
What the violent human monsters didn’t click to, however, was that every one of their downed victims was now a danger to them. A few went down and stayed down, their skulls and brains already ruined, so they gave the idiots a false sense of power and security. Some who went down with stab wounds and subsequently bled out though… well, we all know what happened to them.
Things got chaotic as I watched dead gangbangers climb from the floor and lunge on former buddies. Some didn’t need to rise, just reaching out to grab an ankle, haul their reanimated bodies in a single motion, and bite meaty lumps from their skinny legs. The small car park outside the store was a bloody battleground, with the violent, the dead, the dying, and the undead all over the asphalt. Some idiots thought they were in a video game, or put on an air of bravado, and thought they could take the undead on and get those precious supplies.
Freya, you cannot sustain melee combat with the undead in any kind of number. You just can’t, but some of these idiots had watched too many zompoc movies. Human muscles and lungs get tired, brains are flooded with adrenaline, decision making is impaired, and weapons get lodged
