Plague Of The Revenants Read Free Page A

that’s why you’re in here, remember? That’s why you’re jerking off to pictures of the weather girls in the Sunday magazines instead of being out there in a real world getting some real pussy of your own. There’s some really nice pussy out there at the moment, Grant, did you know that? All the girls are wearing these really low cut outfits and every one of them is gagging for it in ways you can only imagine.”

Blake liked to provoke people. He was never violent himself, rather he was a master of manipulation. A quiet word from him could see inmates at one another’s throats, could turn guards against one another, could insight riots. He picked on everyone to a certain extent but he was especially hard on me. I suppose he relished the challenge.

Nobody knows what started the outbreak, only that it was pinpointed to a remote part of Siberia. Maybe it was an ancient plague unearthed by the retreating ice caps, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe it was the wrath of God visited on a corrupt and wicked world. Everybody had a theory. In those early days when the infection was isolated and faraway it was easy for the so called armchair experts to sit in the comfort of their studios and discuss the what ifs and whys. To begin with it was just something that didn’t affect us and was likely as not never going to. To begin with the general consensus which got reported on the news was that it was the result of some sort of designer drug driving people crazy and making them attack others. Later on it was declared a strange, rabies like virus. That is to say: people were bitten, died, and then somehow they came back again. The most sensible consensus, to me at least (and I had become very rational by then) was that it was some kind of parasite transmitted through blood and saliva that killed its host then took over its brain and brought it back again. Once you were bitten it was the end for you. You would undergo a brief period of death before the parasite re-established control over your brain and rose you up to live again in an uncontrollable desire for human flesh. How soon it took you to turn depended on how badly you were bitten, although even the slightest scratch from a tooth of one of the infected was invariably fatal in the end. There was no cure. I don’t think the governments ever got close before they too were wiped out. I remember the first time I saw a revenant on the television news report. It’s slow and shuffling walk, dead eyes, head tilted lopsidedly to one side and the low moan from the mouth from which speech would once have come. All the same I could not believe it would present so much of a challenge, could not believe it was right now toppling governments and leading to some of the biggest unrest the world had ever seen, could not believe anybody could be slow enough not to outrun them. This was before I discovered how quickly they could in fact move at close quarters, before I came to respect their sheer weight of numbers. I knew nothing back then, of course I didn’t. Soon the infection spread from Siberia to Moscow and from there to Eastern Europe. Every country in the world closed its borders but it was too late. Three weeks later the infection spread to France. A week later the first case was reported in Hastings. The army was sent in to close the place down. It was still too late. When it reached London we knew the country was fucked. Mass panic set in. People started rioting on the streets which had the effect of spreading the virus still further. Religious nut-jobs put signs around their necks and paraded around saying it was the ‘end of times.’ They were right, talked the most sense of anyone involved with the outbreak so far. When we went into the yard for exercise we could smell the fires and roasted flesh from where the government was desperately attempting to burn the bodies. Once we heard angry shouting and chanting outside the prison walls. We thought it must be the revenants come