The Restless Dead: A Zombie Novel Read Free Page A

again.
    When the howling stops and the thing in Archie’s clothes lies motionless on the deck, the bat slips from my hand, and I sink to my knees. My face, hair, and clothes are covered in human minced meat. It's sticky and smells foul.
    I’ve killed Archie.
    As I lie slumped on the floor, I keep expecting Scott to throw his arms around me, to tell me he doesn’t hate my guts for killing his best friend who’s lying just a few feet away with a halo of blood framing his pulped head. But he doesn’t, and I wonder why the hell not. It was him or us. I had to do it.
    Scott’s standing in the doorway, his face the colour of putty, surveying the carnage. He’s shaking his head and muttering away.
    Amidst the angst-ridden gibberish, I make out the phrase, “...we’re fucked,” and I agree. Somebody had attacked Archie, and that somebody must have been a zombie because, last time I checked, the dead didn’t wake up, stinking of putrefied flesh and try to bloody eat you. No even in Glasgow.
    After I throw the duvet back over what’s left of Archie, Scott finally speaks. “Emma, this isn’t what I think it is? This is some wind up.” He pauses to take a frantic breath. “It’s got to be.”
    His eyes flick between me and the dead body and then he sinks to the floor and starts crawling towards me.
    Dread seizes my chest. “Scott, are you all right?” I crawl towards him through the gore on my carpet, the vein in my forehead throbbing like the alien’s gonna burst out of it.
    We meet halfway, and we cling to each other, survivors of the shipwreck that was once normal everyday life. We’re so close to each other we can hear the pounding of our hearts; they sound like bass drums.
    We stay that way for a few minutes. The stench in the room starts to sicken my stomach. We’ll have to leave, but I fear what other horrors lurk outside our flat. What dangers.
    “Scott.”
    He lifts his eyes to the ceiling as if he’s praying before he meets my gaze. “What?”
    “We need to find out how bad this is. If this has spread.”
    He closes his eyes, lips pursed, perhaps pretending to be at some point in time other than the here and now.
    I press, “We need to know if there’s any civilisation left.”
    He opens his eyes again, still a blank stare.
    “And we have to get to Fiona’s, somehow, and see if she’s all right. And your parents and your sister? How are they?”
    “You’re right.” His lips relax. “But let’s sit for a bit and pretend everything’s okay. We could go back to bed. Snuggle up. Pretend that when we wake up all of this will have been a nightmare.”
    As tempting as it sounds, something else occurs to me: the split condom.
    “Scott, I need the morning after pill. Remember?”
    Horror spreads across his face. The sudden influx of colour makes it appear as if he’s wearing blusher. Then his shoulders slump. “Does that even matter now?”
    Not the reaction I was hoping for. It’s okay for him. He won’t be the one trying to survive in a city full of cannibals and being up the duff. 
    I push him away, get to my feet, and stomp off to the bathroom, where I fill the sink with warm water. Haunted eyes stare back at me from the mirror. I almost yell for Scott because one of those freaks from the television reports must have gotten in, until I realise the haunted eyes are mine.
    Using a cloth, I wash the blood and gunge from my face and hair, scrub the blood from under my fingernails until the cuticles start to sting, and dab Vick’s vapour rub under my nose to cover up the smell of this human slaughterhouse.
    My gaze falls to the packet of razor blades beside the sink, and I have this fleeting thought of needing them later to cut my own stomach open and dig out my baby, because I’ve been bitten by one of those things, and I feel myself changing, becoming a monster who’ll devour my own baby. There’s no way the baby will be safe...from me.
    As I blink away the image, Scott’s calling my name,