Blood on the Floor: An Undead Adventure Read Free Page A

host. One of many. One of billions. He is part of the hive mind of the infection but now largely forgotten and left to seek his own way. The infection is busy in a million other places and becoming increasingly focussed on a man called Howie who refuses to die the death he should be having.
    Instead he has been brought back to be left to rot and find his own way in this brave new world. His scent receptors have been ramped and honed to seek the smell of blood, piss, shit and sweat. The smells of the living. The smells of fear. Anything that connects to potential new hosts. Go find them and take more hosts for that urging in your head is relentless and unceasing. It will never stop. Find hosts.
    So he goes on. Searching without knowing what searching is or the concept of what that word means. He walks street after street unaware of the carnage and devastation all around him.
    Doors to houses hanging from hinges or removed altogether. Windows smashed through to let the beasts gain entry. Some of those beasts ended their existence at that point. Lacerated from shards of glass slicing through veins and arteries that sprayed blood everywhere. Despite the signs of violence the bodies are fewer in number the greater distance from the epicentre of the battle he drifts. Cars left in streets. Some locked and left as they were. Others with doors open and thick blood smears across the panels. A child’s bicycle still propped against a garden wall where it was left on the afternoon before it began.
    Smoke hangs in the air. A row of houses smouldering from the fierce blaze that swept unabated from one to the other until the materials were all burnt away. He walks past them. Heedless to the acrid stench of burnt chemicals.
    It’s hot too. Hotter than it should be for southern England in summer time. The cessation of mankind has wrought global changes to weather patterns and humidity. The instant loss of gasses produced by people, cars, machines, factories, planes, ships and power plants. He doesn’t sweat. Sweating loses moisture and the infection inside knows his core temperature is stable enough. The host is not exerting to the extent it cannot function.
    The host reaches a junction and passes straight on over and into the next residential street of more houses, more cars and more doors and windows broken open. More blood too but its old and dried out.
    As the day passes on so his stride opens that little bit more with the first sign of renewed strength in his core. His balance regains. Any stiffness he had abates and eases and so he heals from the inside out at an astonishing rate that would simply be unbelievable to even the most advanced medical practitioners.
    Miles pass. Miles of walking without thought or idea. One foot after the other with a nose drawing in air to process the scents for signs of potential hosts but here are none in this area that he can detect. Seek. Feast. Bite. Seek. Feast. Bite. The urge is relentless. A singular objective where nothing else matters save the calling to do what must be done.
    The road he’s on leads naturally to a main artery that feeds into the local town. The houses get denser. More cars on driveways and at the sides of the road. Commercial premises start to break up the seemingly never ending flow of houses that he passes. A garage forecourt selling second hand motors. Dry Cleaners. More houses. A Kebab House. More houses. A block of flats. A convenience store. All looted and emptied of anything worthwhile. The apocalypse is still so new but already the land is becoming scavenged.
    Smells everywhere. Blood but old. Shit but old. Sweat and piss but old. Noise stops him. Noise from an alley on his right side that leads to the back of a fish and chip shop. He waits. Head fixed and red bloodshot eyes staring as the woman walks out. They stare at each other for a mere second as though establishing if the other knows where the hosts are. She turns away first to fix her red bloodshot eyes on the