Undead UK (Book 2): Hunting The Dead Read online

  Hunting The Dead

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 Rob Lopez

  All rights reserved

  E-book Edition

  First Edition January 2017

  www.roblopezblog.blogspot.co.uk

  Author’s Note

  This book is written in British English, so color is colour, defense is defence and dialog is dialogue. These aren’t spelling mistakes. Sidewalks are pavements, diapers are nappies, and trousers are worn over pants (underwear). And beer is supposedly drunk warm, which is as disgusting as it sounds – give me a cold beer any day. I’m not that partial to tea, either.

  But it’ll all make sense in the end. Enjoy.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Sample Chapter from Remember Me Dead

  From The Same Author

  1

  The zombie was called Janice. Or at least it had been once. Janice Farebrother – that was the name printed on the ID badge that still hung around its neck, the faded logo of Leicester City Council running up and down the blue ribbon straps. Labour Councillor for Westcotes ward.

  Ex-Labour councillor.

  The thing that had once been Janice lingered on the pavement outside her house on Narborough Road, a once busy thoroughfare that was now silent and covered in dried leaves from the trees that lined the road. Weeds flourished in the pavement cracks, their spindly stems reaching up to waist height. Moss and mildew formed tidal marks around the blocked drains. Sycamore seeds and bird droppings accumulated on the hooded lights of the pedestrian crossing. The hardware store, pizza takeaway and mini-mart opposite Janice’s house stood shuttered and empty, though looters had long ago torn open the metal shutters, leaving pizza boxes and plastic buckets among the weeds on the pavement. Nobody had bothered breaking into the carpet shop, which, according to the sign, had been 'flooring Leicester for seventy years’. But Leicester, like every other city in the UK, had been floored by something far more deadly than twist piles or Persian rugs. The protozoa infection, which scientists had hastily labelled TP135, had laid waste to civilisation in a matter of weeks, and it was more interested in inducing extreme hunger in its undead hosts than it was in floral patterns or choosing something that matched the curtains.

  Two years ago, Janice had been on the front line of the fight against that infection, chairing the Council’s Emergency Committee, managing the city’s curfew and quarantine zones and liaising with the military. The zombie that had been Janice didn’t remember any of those things. The outer parts of the brain that stored such memories were mush, the synapses disconnected or rotten. Only a single piece of short term memory remained in the hippocampus, at the bottom of the brain, still waiting to be processed and distributed. It had nowhere to go and it ricocheted uselessly, playing the same scene over and over. Janice’s last committee meeting was interrupted by the alarming news that the dead were walking the streets. Nobody was sure whether that was connected to the plague that had filled the city’s hospital beds, or whether it was just a stupid rumour, but gunshots echoed outside the Council offices. Phone calls were hastily made, but Janice was unable to get through to her babysitter, and adjourned the meeting to rush to her car. Her credentials got her past the first few army checkpoints, but she was stopped at the last one, the soldiers telling her it was too dangerous to proceed. Dead bodies lay before the checkpoint, and Janice was appalled at the thought that the army was shooting civilians. She had been clear in her dealings with the local colonel that looters were not to be shot – people only wanted to eat – and now she feared that martial law had taken a sinister turn. Thinking of her baby at home, Janice crashed the barrier and drove on, expecting the soldiers to open fire on her. No bullets came, and the checkpoint receded in her rear view. Other vehicles joined her on the main road, driving crazily, and Janice was convinced that people were fleeing the persecution and trying to get out of the city. Traffic lights were ignored, and vehicles swerved around collisions at junctions. Dazed looking pedestrians with gaping wounds staggered about, victims no doubt of the military thuggery. Torn between terror and anger, Janice screeched to a halt outside her house. Exiting the car, she thought she heard cries coming from her house: a baby’s cries. Desperately, she ran towards the house, pushing past some poor drunken man lingering outside a bus stop. She assumed he was homeless, and he didn’t know the buses were no longer running.

  The man grabbed her arm, however, and as she was spun round, she realised he wasn’t drunk. Realised then that he wasn’t even human. His eyes were glazed, his teeth coated with blood, his lips black. Bruised skin was stretched taut over his facial muscles, and his grip was like a vice. He moved as if to kiss her, his fetid breath choking her, and instead sank his teeth into her neck.

  The memory ended there, starting over again from the beginning, but the zombie that had been Janice was not really aware of it, and certainly didn’t dwell on it. It was just a useless echo in an empty organ, crowded out by the pervasive hunger it felt as the microbial protozoa living in its brain stem pumped out the chemicals that urged the thing to keep seeking food.

  Its appetite was insatiable. Made desperate by its starvation, it craved warm flesh and a beating heart. The sound of the wind in the leaves was loud to its sensitive hearing, but it was an irregular sound, a natural sound with no pattern to it, and it paid it no heed. Somewhere nearby, however, there was a rhythmic pulse of blood. A living thing that promised to feed its gluttonous desire. But the location of this food... ah, that was the confusing part.

  The sun beating down on its cold skin made it difficult to feel the direction of the heat source. The warmth emanating from the stone walls around it, and from the hot metal of the car nearby, confused it further, causing it to turn, and turn again, lurching first in one direction, then another.

  It stopped when at last it heard something. A cry. A human cry, coming from the house.

  The zombie tottered towards the building, moving its head from side to side, its milky, shrunken eyeballs trying to detect movement, but a tree and a wall of overgrown ivy in the small front garden obscured its view. Staggering over the stone lintel and through the open gate, it approached the three storey building with its half-timbered gable and its wooden porch. The beating of the heart was closer, and the pitiful cry louder.

  It was the cry of a baby.

  Eager to feast, the zombie dragged its wasted muscles, its bone-thin legs, down the paved path, getting closer to the porch. The baby’s cry that it heard synced for a moment with the cry of Janice’s last memory, and the zombie faltered, hormones triggering the strange emotion of pity. Sorrow, anger and fear flashed through the remaining synapses of its brain, and the memory it had been carrying for two years broke through the fog and paralysed the creature, conflicting messages travelling the motor neurones and attempting to prick some life from the dessicated tear ducts.

  But it was only for a moment,
and the hunger soon swept aside these alien impulses and drove it on to the tiny, flesh-coloured form that lay in the shadow of the porch. Reaching out with its one remaining arm, it stooped to gorge itself on the warm flesh, aching to taste the hot blood, to rip apart the skin to get at the soft organs within.

  Then it stopped. The baby was still crying, but the zombie was confused, for there was no warmth coming from the little body, no succulent heartbeat, no sighing breath.

  Indeed, the heartbeat appeared to be coming from its left.

  Too late, the zombie tried to straighten up, knowing now where the real food was, but the sharp blade of the Katana that flashed in the sun cut down through its neck, slicing through the spine and dropping its head onto the floor.

  The baby doll’s drawstring loop reached the moulded rubber chest, ending abruptly the canned crying.

  *

  Breht stepped over the zombie’s body and into the shadow of the porch, pressing himself against the wall so that he was out of sight from the road. There weren’t many zombies on this stretch, but he’d seen a couple wandering back and forth, and he didn’t want to be disturbed from checking his latest kill.

  Crouching down, he levered his steel toe-capped boot under the body, revealing the diamond necklace nestling in the fluids that oozed from the open neck. With a gloved hand, he retrieved the necklace, wiping off the congealed blood to examine the diamond.

  He was no expert on diamonds, and this one could easily have been fake, but he thought it was worth the risk, which was why he’d targeted this particular zombie. He was also after her handbag.

  Handbags carried by the undead were one of the few things that hadn’t been looted, and were thus valuable commodities, namely because of their contents. Breht rummaged through it, finding a purse, tampons, a pack of tissues, lipstick, deodorant, a baby’s nappy, a hair brush, stockings, and spare glasses. These were useful for trading at settlements, especially the glasses. People with sight deficiencies were prepared to barter a lot for those, and most zombies tended to lose or trample the glasses they wore, so a complete set, still in its case, was like gold dust – provided you could locate a person with the right level of short or long sightedness. Unfortunately, the really strong lenses tended to have been worn by the victims before they died, since they needed them constantly, and there weren’t many of those left unbroken. Glasses still in their case were likely to be low powered driving or reading glasses, purely for occasional use. Breht peered through the lenses, judging them to be the latter. Well, it was better than nothing.

  The hair pins, mirror and nail file were more immediately useful, as were the painkiller tablets, mints and hand sanitizer. The sanitizer was past its expiry date, but it had ethyl alcohol in its ingredients, so Breht was still confident in its anti-infection properties. The painkiller tablets, less so, though even a weak tablet was better than no tablet. And he was going to eat the mints anyway, no matter what it said on the packet, because food was the most precious commodity of all. Finding something to eat after the apocalypse was a full-time job.

  The ear rings he found matched the necklace, which increased their marketable value. Some settlements still accepted cash in their closed economies, but most refused, seeing it as totally useless, which it was. Jewellery, silver and gold, however, maintained their value somewhat, taking over as currency – provided the settlement wasn’t starving, of course, in which case the shiny stuff was also useless, which, again, it was. But the lure of such things hadn’t diminished completely. People still liked to wear status symbols, or were prepared to waste precious fuel melting down rare metals. Living out in the wastes as he did, Breht failed to see the logic in that, but many people, safely ensconced in defensive enclosures, seemed to think they had the luxury to see beyond mere survival. Maybe in those places it was easy to forget where they really were. Or maybe they had a point.

  Living outside for so long, Breht had come to accept that he’d grown apart from most survivors, and that he had little in common with them anymore. Not having had much in common with them before the apocalypse, that suited him fine. As long as they didn’t judge him, he didn’t judge them.

  Getting to the bottom of the bag, he ignored the phone and MP3 player – totally useless now – and pulled out what was possibly the biggest prize of all: a tub of vitamin and iron tablets. Again, their efficacy was questionable past their expiry dates, but iron didn’t deplete, and his current diet was bound to be lacking in something. If he broke open the tampon and stuffed it in the tub, he could stop the tablets from rattling and giving his position away every time he moved.

  In the silent world of the undead, stealth was key to oneness, well-being and a distinct lack of zombie bites.

  The last thing he pulled out of the handbag was a curiosity: a passport.

  Breht was aware that some people preferred to forget that the undead were once people. It made killing them a lot less poignant, and they were so grotesque in their appearance that it was easy to dismiss them as monsters. Breht, on the other hand, remained aware of exactly who they once were. He didn’t get sentimental about it – they wanted to eat him, after all – nor did he learn to hate them, or even fear them. Preserving his life from their hunger was simply a matter of practicality, and he bore them no grudge. They had lived lives once that he didn’t mind knowing about, and now they lived a kind of half-life that was not his fault. If they didn’t get in his way, he let them carry on. If it was necessary, or useful to him, he’d kill them.

  As a teenager on his grandfather’s farm, he’d shot rabbits. The fact that they remained undeniably cute didn’t prevent him from shooting them in the head. Once he’d done enough to cull their numbers, he left them alone. It was the sober, practical approach of the hunter, and it never stopped him reading Watership Down or feeling sorry for the characters that didn’t make it, and it never stopped him from going out and doing it again. As far as he was concerned, there was a clear dividing line. It was an ancient approach to life and death that he knew his classmates in the city wouldn’t understand, so he never talked about it. He didn’t need to justify himself and, after the initial shock of the apocalypse, he’d adapted those same sensibilities to the undead. He co-existed with them and knew that, one day, he too could end up like them. It was the impersonal lottery of life.

  So he leafed through Janice Farebrother’s passport without guilt, seeing that she’d travelled to the United States once, the Maldives once, and Egypt a few times. She’d obviously liked it there, or maybe it was because the holidays were cheap. Did she visit the pyramids, or was she the type that stayed on the beaches? Her date of birth indicated she was thirty five – or maybe less at the time of her death – but she looked younger in the photo, even with the serious look required by the passport office. She was missing her left arm now, so he couldn’t tell if she was married – which was a pity, the ring would have been useful – but she didn’t look like a mother in the photo. Barely a student, in fact. The passport was close to its renewal date, so the photograph was almost ten years old. But she had a baby’s nappy in her handbag. And iron tablets. So she probably looked different two years ago, after the birth. Maybe more tired if she suffered anaemia.

  Breht checked out her address and saw it was the very same house he was sitting by. She wasn’t far from home when she’d died, then. She appeared to be in her work clothes: blood stained blouse, a once-black skirt that had slipped from her emaciated body and hung now like a pennant from the weeds at the end of the gate, and one shoe remaining with a low heel. On her key ring was a VW car fob, and parked on the road was a red Volkswagen Polo, its windows opaque with dust. It was slightly askew, having mounted the pavement, and the driver-side door was open.

  She was rushing home to get to her kid.

  Maybe that explained the slight hesitation of the zombie as it lurched towards the sound of the crying doll. Breht had used the doll as a decoy many times, but he’d never seen that reaction in any other zombie. He wonde
red about that trace of humanity that still appeared to be trapped inside this creature.

  Or which had been until he’d cut its head off.

  He put the passport back in the bag, and secured it under the body. He couldn’t do anything else for her, but if someday in the future society reorganised itself and began burying the dead, at least they’d be able to ID her. Which was more than could be said for him. He didn’t even have his army dog tags anymore.

  He did have her house key, though. Grabbing the doll and his backpack, he let himself in, closing the front door quietly behind him.

  *

  Breht had never seen a zombie baby, which, on reflection, seemed strange. Maybe the infection killed them outright, being so young. He’d seen zombie children, however. Did zombie babies continue to grow? Would he encounter an undead two year old tottering towards him? He wasn’t sure, but the question went unanswered, as the house turned out to be empty. It had been comprehensively looted, too. The door to the garden was ajar, but the lock hadn’t been forced, and the windows were intact. The occupants had perhaps fled out the back, leaving the house wide open for scavengers to come later. The kitchen cupboards had been flung open, and Breht found only mouse droppings. The small cellar had once housed an impressive wine collection, but the racks were empty now, and a thick layer of dust obscured whatever footprints might have existed. The dining room table was intact, though the cupboard drawers had been pulled out, spilling corroded cutlery onto the floor. The sofa in the living room had been slashed open in a futile search for hidden stashes, and the pot plants lay shrivelled and dessicated, linked to the window by sagging spider webs. Dusty pictures above the old fireplace showed Janice with a man on the ski slopes of some snowy resort, and Janice with her friends on a boat in the Mediterranean.

  With his sword ready, Breht crept upstairs, his reinforced leather trousers creaking slightly. He found a bedroom with pictures of a different woman on the wall, perhaps a lodger, another bedroom with pictures of the man she’d gone skiing with, plus photos of an older couple who might have been her parents. An extensive bathroom had been stripped of toiletries, towels and even toilet paper – another precious commodity. The baby’s room contained an empty crib, pastel colours and toys scattered across the floor. There were no further packs of nappies, but Breht took the toys. The scavengers had been so thorough that it was all they’d left.