DEAD: Snapshot (Book 2): Leeds, England Read online

  Shadiyah grabbed the door knob, but Mrs. Raye pulled her back. “You have the better weapon, dear. Let me open the door. You cover me and I will see what we have.”

  Stepping back, she watched as the woman switched her flashlight to her other hand and opened the door slowly. There was a moment where nothing could be seen, but before the door had even been opened a few inches, a hand appeared in the crack. Even in the relative darkness, it was clear that the hand did not belong to one of the living.

  A second later, the door was yanked open and a tall, lanky man stood in the doorway. The man reached out with both hands and grabbed Mrs. Raye by the shoulders. The woman tried to bring her cane up, but lacked any real force behind the blow and the head of her cane glanced off harmlessly.

  A second zombie was directly behind this first one, and an open door immediately to the right gave off enough light for it to be clearly seen that this one was missing its left arm. It tried to push forward to join the other in the attack on Mrs. Raye and opened its mouth.

  The sound that came forth caused Shadiyah to stagger back. Even Mrs. Raye, who was obviously terrified and fighting for her life, paused in her struggle at that sound.

  A baby cry.

  With a hard shove, Henrietta Raye sent the zombie that had her by the shoulders tumbling back into the one that had just let loose with that chilling baby cry. Shadiyah shook off her dumbfounded stupor and lunged forward with her scimitar. The point slid into the open mouth of the lead zombie that was already recovering and lurching forward once more in an attempt to get at Mrs. Raye.

  “Straight to hell with you, you unholy bastard!” With that curse uttered between clenched teeth, the older woman drove the pointed tip of her cane down into the middle of the face of the one-armed zombie that had lured them in with its baby cry sound.

  Several more of the undead were now stumbling into the hallway. The women retreated back to the stairwell and were about to shut the door when a voice called from somewhere close.

  “Hello?” the voice squeaked. “Is somebody there?”

  Almost as one, the zombies in the hallway turned, reorienting on the voice and heading towards the third door on the right. Shadiyah paused, torn between her desire to get back to her sister and the fact that there was somebody here and now that needed help. From the sounds of it, this person was alone.

  “How many are with you, child?” Mrs. Raye called out.

  “Just me!” was the plaintive reply.

  Once more, the zombies halted their advance and began to change directions. They were actually bouncing off each other in their seemingly confused state. One tripped and tumbled to the floor causing two more to stumble over the downed figure.

  “How did these things get the upper hand so quickly?” Mrs. Raye said to nobody in particular.

  Shadiyah briefly recalled her mother’s helpless response to their father as he came for her and began to tear her apart. These things were not initially successful because they were so strong, fast, or coordinated, they were taking out humanity because they looked too much like us, she thought as she took in everything.

  Mrs. Raye moved to the first downed zombie and spiked it. She turned to Shadiyah with a scowl. “Are you going to help, or will you continue to stand there and make sure that the floor does not float away on us?”

  The two women made surprisingly short work of the half dozen undead in the hall and then arrived at the door. The sounds of sobbing could be heard on the other side.

  “Open the door.” Mrs. Raye gave a short rap with her cane. The sounds of the locks being turned sounded and the door opened up just a crack to reveal a single puffy, red-rimmed eye staring out at them.

  “Are they all gone?” a quiet voice hitched.

  “All?” Shadiyah snorted. “Hardly.”

  “The ones in the hall seem to be handled.” Mrs. Raye shot a nasty look at Shadiyah and then knelt down to be more on the same level as the frightened child on the other side of the door. “Are you in there all by yourself?”

  The girl opened the door another inch or so and shook her head no. “My mum is in here, but she is sick like the other people on television…until the television shut off.”

  “You say that your mother is in there?” Mrs. Raye put a hand on the door and started to apply just the slightest pressure in order to get the little girl to step back and open the door.

  “She is in the loo. She told me that I needed to leave her in there no matter what.” The little girl stepped back to allow the women inside.

  Shadiyah guessed her to be perhaps nine or ten. She had dark hair with the hint of a slant to her eyes that implied Asian heritage somewhere in her family tree. Her skin was amazingly pale in stark contrast, which only emphasized her delicate features. She was wearing denim shorts, sandals, and a tee shirt with a picture of a female singer, the name “Shari” in sparkly letters just above the image.

  “Stay with the child,” Mrs. Raye said, moving past the little girl and disappearing around the corner.

  A moment later, the sound of a door opening was followed by the start of a moan and then a sharp crack followed shortly thereafter by a thud. The little girl jumped at the sound and tears welled in her eyes.

  “My mum’s gone, isn’t she?” The little girl looked up at Shadiyah and her hand seemed to unconsciously snake into hers in an attempt to find some semblance of comfort.

  “I’m so sorry.” The words tasted bitter on Shadiyah’s tongue and she wanted to offer more solace, but there was a chill beginning to form in the core of her soul and she could not shake the feelings of detachment that were growing by the second.

  “Would you like to come with us?” Mrs. Raye asked as she came around the corner, wiping the end of her cane with some piece of cloth and then stuffing the stained square of linen in her pocket.

  “How about you take us to your room and we pack a few things just in case you need to stay for a while.” The girl nodded and the three of them headed up the hall and to the bedrooms.

  “What’s your name?” Mrs. Raye asked as the girl pulled clothes from a small dresser and placed them with surprising neatness and care into a small travel case of red plaid.

  “Annie Sun,” the girl replied.

  “Pleased to meet you. My name is Henrietta and this is my friend Shadiyah,” Mrs. Raye said with cheerfulness that Shadiyah knew she could not have managed. Ten minutes later, they had a small suitcase packed and were ready to go.

  “Can I bring my iPod?’ the little girl sniffed after closing her dresser drawers and turning to face the two women.

  “I don’t see why not?” Mrs. Raye shrugged.

  As they reached the door, a nearby explosion rocked the building causing a few things to tumble from a shelf in the living room. Annie screamed and flung herself against Mrs. Raye, her arms wrapping around the woman’s legs. The sounds of moans echoed up and down the corridor as the three living residents currently on this floor all sort of stumbled out while trying to catch their balance.

  “What the hell was that?” Shadiyah moved ahead of the other two and hurried to the door that led to the emergency stairwell. She gave it a push and discovered that the door seemed to be stuck. Stepping back, she gave a hard kick. There was a slight screech, but the way was still barred. Looking over her shoulder, she waited impatiently for the other two to join her. “Help me get this door open.”

  Mrs. Raye put her shoulder into it as Shadiyah kicked again and again. After the fifth or sixth attempt, the door creaked open about an inch. That caused both women to renew their efforts until they managed to get a gap wide enough for all three of them to slip through.

  “Good thing none of us are fat,” Mrs. Raye gasped as she followed the other two into the dark stairwell.

  At last, they reached their destination and once again had to force the door open. Shadiyah peered through the opening first. They were fairly confident that they had put down any of the free-roaming walkers on the floor, but she was growing cauti
ous as her jangled nerves began to get the best of her. As expected, the hall was empty of anything moving.

  She rushed to her door, pulling out her keys as she did. When she opened the door, an acrid stench assaulted her nose and it took a moment to realize that there was a steady breeze blowing inside her flat. She ran to the living room to discover the large window had been obliterated. Her first thought was that it had something to do with the explosion…then she realized that there was almost no glass inside the flat around where the window had once been.

  She approached the gaping hole, her feet moving like they were mired in a thick, viscous mud. When she finally reached the far side of the room and looked outside, her eyes refused to look down and instead drifted to the oily black smoke that was wafting skyward and carrying on a stiff northeasterly breeze.

  She did not know what had happened exactly, but she could tell that it was coming from the direction of the train tracks to the south of the Clyde Court Towers. She could see walking dead converging from all over. It almost looked like they were coming right for her building, except they had just enough of a deviation in their approach to make it clear they would pass down by the train tracks.

  At last, she looked down. Her eyes almost seemed to be able to shift to a telephoto mode as they locked onto a single figure sprawled in the courtyard. It did not matter that she was several stories above the figure…she knew with certainty that it was her little sister. Beside the ruined body were the twisted remains of the chair that used to be at her father’s desk.

  Assi had jumped to her death, and in Shadiyah’s mind, it was all her fault. She had failed her sister. Yet, underneath that thought was something else beginning to bubble and seethe from the recesses of her mind.

  Anger.

  ***

  “Bloody Americans are probably all doing fine,” Simon snarled as he brought his baton around and jabbed it into yet another eye socket.

  They had only a few more steps to go and they would be in the stairwell. Hopefully there were not as many zombies to be found as there were in this corridor. He had lost count after putting down seven of the infernal creatures. He had also discovered that beating a skull until it shattered was nearly an impossibility. All the books, movies, and television shows where people simply swung once or twice and busted in a zombie’s skull were rubbish. He hoped that anybody who had ever helped propagate that myth had gone down under a swarm of the undead with an impotent club in their hand.

  “Why do you think the Americans are doing any better than us?” Cedric gasped.

  “They all have bloody guns. Most of them probably own three or four.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Seen it on a documentary once about how well armed the Americans are and how their freedoms to own such things have led to them being the murder capital of the world.”

  “I seen a documentary about how they have the corpses of aliens from some flying saucer that crashed back in the Fifties or Sixties…don’t make it true,” Cedric huffed as he grabbed the corpse of an old man by the throat, pinned him to the wall, and jammed his gore-coated knife into the man’s temple.

  At last, Simon reached the door to the emergency exit and threw it open. The first floor landing could be seen, but looking up, it was an inverse abyss of blackness. He suddenly realized that Mrs. Raye had the only torch.

  “We need to move,” Cedric said, giving Simon a bit of a shove in the back. “I think a dozen more of those things are coming in the main door.”

  “If we pull that door shut, we’ll be blind as bats.”

  “No,” Cedric nudged past Simon and clicked a button on something he pulled from his pocket, “we won’t.”

  The man had a large, powerful flashlight in his hand that seemed to light up the entire stairwell in a dazzling blue glow. He pulled the door shut behind them and then took a position just ahead of Simon.

  “I already had to make this trip a few times, and I was actually in the stairwell when we lost power. Thought that we had emergency lighting, but I guess the maintenance staff sort of let that slip,” Cedric said quietly, his voice still echoing a bit in the cavernous space. “It probably took me two hours to get the rest of the way up.” The man laughed uncomfortably as the two started their climb. “Probably not that long, but it sure as hell felt that way.”

  They had just passed the ninth floor when a terrible explosion sounded. It shook the building violently, causing both men to grip the railing to avoid falling. When the shaking ceased, Simon swore his ears were still ringing; also, it suddenly felt a bit warmer.

  “We need to pick up the pace,” Simon panted.

  The two men hurried and finally made it to the floor where Cedric pulled up to a halt and pressed his ear to the door to listen for anything that might be on the other side. The man switched off the light and plunged them into near perfect darkness.

  “What are we waiting for?” Simon whispered after several seconds passed.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Cedric replied. “If there are living people still waiting, then I would think to hear something. The corridor was cleared; none of the flats had anybody or any of those things still wandering around. I told everybody to leave the doors open just so that it felt like we were all together.”

  Simon puzzled over that statement. It simply made no sense for this man to be a part of those disgusting blokes he was associated with.

  “Well we aren’t going to know anything if you don’t open the door,” Simon finally growled, beginning to lose his patience with what now seemed like delay tactics by this stranger.

  Cedric sighed and pulled the door open slowly. A bitter smell that was a mix of petrol, rubber, and possibly wood managed to actually dominate; but the smell of undeath could easily be picked up. When it was finally open a few inches, Simon pushed past and stepped into the hall of the top floor.

  He was two steps towards the nearest door on the right when a child poked its head out from the doorway. Simon froze, at first believing that the child was okay. However, when the child stepped out the rest of the way, it was clear that he was not among the living any longer.

  The boy had a massive bite from his left arm that looked like it tore away most of the bicep as well as a good bit of skin all the way up to the neck. Also, it looked like his lower lip was hanging by a thread as it bobbed and swayed on his chin. The boy took a step closer to Simon and stopped, tilting its head as if regarding him and trying to determine if he were friend or foe.

  For a brief second, Simon considered the possibility that his own bite acted as some kind of mask that the zombies would see and consider him one of their own. He shifted his feet and adjusted his grip on his baton. That seemed to be all it took. The child lunged, suddenly becoming just like any other zombie. It staggered for him, arms out and hands grasping. He was caught so off guard that he simply stood with his baton in his hand as it grabbed him by the wrist and began to pull it closer to his mouth to take a bite.

  Something pushed into him and sent him stumbling to the right as Cedric stepped in and plunged his knife into the boy’s temple. A second later, the boy’s sister appeared around the same corner. If he was messed up, she was mangled.

  The little Middle Eastern girl was maybe four years old. From the looks of things, she had been last, and apparently the one to suffer the most heinous attack. Her left leg was dragging and most of her calf had been torn away. Her clothes had mostly been ripped off in the attack, revealing at least a dozen bites taken out of her back, buttocks, and thighs. Her right hand was simply gone, nothing but a stub of jagged bones poking from the ravaged skin. Her belly had been ripped open and much of her insides had been torn from her body. Simon recovered as the little girl collapsed, and he was almost certain that he could see the remnants of horror in the frozen expression of her eyes as he stepped past her to join Cedric in the search of this particular flat for any possible survivors—though he doubted they would find any.

  The bedroom helpe
d to confirm Simon’s hypothesis about the little girl’s final moments. There were dark stains on the floor near the bed that were consistent with somebody being dragged from underneath it. Also, splatters of darkness were visible towards the head of the bed, closest to the corner. He tried to clear his mind of the horror that poor child must have endured in the final moments.

  A low moan made the two men spin around. The third child stumbled into the room, most of his throat torn out which seemed to be a merciful death compared to that of the little girl. Right behind the child was one of the old ladies. Her mouth was smeared with a dark stain. From the looks, this lady had tried to fight. One of her eyes was swollen shut and there were at least five bites on her face that had only done enough damage to be visible through the impressions that remained.

  Simon was confused since those were the only injuries he could see; none of them were fatal. At the most, she should simply be showing the tracers in her eyes.

  That thought jolted Simon and he drifted away from Cedric as the man ended the old lady’s existence. He hurried to the bathroom and used the little ambient light there was to give his eyes a check.

  Still nothing? How could that be? His sister had bitten him almost three full days earlier.

  “Hey, where did you go?” Cedric actually sounded frantic.

  Simon stepped out of the bathroom and discovered Cedric backing away from another older lady, a woman and two young men around their late teens. The zombies were stumbling and pushing forward to get to the man, but the space in the hallway made it a bit crowded and that is probably what saved Cedric.

  Moving into the living room, Simon stepped behind the long sofa and called for Cedric to join him. The man kicked out at the old lady and then dove back and scrambled to join Simon.

  “Where the hell did you go?” the man panted, anger tainting his voice as he yanked his blade free from the younger woman’s face.