The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(153)

He went out to investigate, struggling to keep his balance through the long, wet grass. The shape slowly came into focus. It was Nathan, crawling around on his hands and knees.

“What the hell you doing?”

“Playing,” Nathan answered, still trying to keep going forward, unaware he’d crawled headfirst into an overgrown bramble patch. “Lost ball.”

“Inside,” Simon ordered, leaning down and trying unsuccessfully to grab hold of his son’s collar. Nathan reluctantly did as he was told. He reversed direction and shuffled back out, dragging spiteful, prickly bramble stems with him which refused to let go. He stood up, fell back down when one of his legs gave way, then got back up again.

“What you doing?” Simon demanded, managing to swallow just enough air to make his voice sound almost as angry as he felt.

“Fed up. Want to play…”

Simon grabbed Nathan’s hand and dragged him back towards the house. He stopped and held the boy’s discolored wrist up closer to his face. His paper-thin skin had been slashed to ribbons by branches and thorns. His ankles were in an even worse state. Flaps of flesh hung down over the sides of his feet like loose-fitting socks.

“Look what you done! Won’t get better!”

Nathan snatched his hand away and trudged back towards the house, zigzagging awkwardly up the boggy lawn.





Simon’s eyes weren’t working as well as they had been earlier. It was getting dark, but when he looked outside it was still bright. The light was moving, flickering.

“Think it’s… a fire,” Janice gasped, inhaling mid-sentence. “House on fire.”

He turned around to look at her. She was scrubbing at a dirty brown handprint on the wall, her barely coordinated efforts seeming only to increase the size of the grubby mark. He noticed that she’d changed her clothes again. Probably for the best; several large, bile-colored stains had appeared on the white dress since she’d started wearing it. Now she wore only a shapeless, baggy pullover. He noticed that lumpy brown liquid was dribbling down the insides of her bare legs and splashing on the carpet between her feet.

“What we going to do?”

Simon had been trying to think of an answer to that question all day, and he’d come to the conclusion that they only had one choice now—to barricade themselves in the house and try to maximize the time they had left together.

Earlier, when it had been lighter and he’d been able to see more clearly, he’d watched the chaos on the road outside with a mixture of fascination and unease. Their quiet cul-de-sac had become a seething cesspit of activity. There seemed to be a constant flood of people filling the street, marching incessantly towards nothing. (Just like in the films, he thought.) He remembered how he’d seen several of them trip and fall, only to be trampled down by countless others who were being forced forward en masse by the pressure of the swollen crowds behind. The street had become little more than a putrid, flesh-filled channel, ankle deep in places. But still they came, and still they fell. Stupid. Pointless. He was glad he’d had the foresight to have a gate installed across the drive. It made it easier to protect his family from the madness outside.

And what about Nathan? He’d caused irreparable damage to himself whilst on his own outside, and that had only been the beginning of his problems today. In punishment, Simon had sent him to his room, only for him to stumble back down an hour or so later, clutching his stomach. He’d fallen off his bed and had torn a deep gash in his side. Struggling to coordinate their clumsy and frustratingly slow movements, he and Janice had patched up their son as best they could. They packed his gaping wound with towels, then wrapped virtually an entire roll of gaffer tape around his misshapen gut to keep the wadding in place. He now sat on a stiff-backed chair in the corner of the room, under orders not to move.

“What we going to do?” Janice asked again. Simon had lost himself in his thoughts. That kept happening.

“Stay here,” he eventually answered. “Open windows upstairs…make it cold. Block doors.”

“Go out,” Nathan grumbled from the corner, trying to pick a maggot out from a hole in his left leg just above his knee. The bones were sticking out of the ends of two of his fingers, making them as difficult to use as chopsticks.

“Not out,” Simon snapped, conscious that their conversation was beginning to sound primitive and almost totally monosyllabic.

“Yes, out!” Nathan said again. “Bored here.”

“Can’t,” Janice said, positioning her tottering, half-naked frame directly in front of what was left of her only child. “Listen to Dad.”

“No point…”

“Go out and get hurt!” Simon yelled.

“Already dead!”

Nathan’s bizarre but factually correct response completely floored his father. His response, like many parents who lose an argument with their child, was to ignore him.

“Not going out. End of talk.”





The dark came again, then the light, then the dark. The family had barely moved in hours but, as dawn broke on the fourth day after death, Simon was forced to take action. When the bright sun was finally strong enough for him to be able to see out with his increasingly weak and useless eyes, he saw that the front of their house was surrounded.

He staggered towards the window and squinted out. The number of dead people crammed into their crowded cul-de-sac had continued to increase. During the night just ended, the size of the crowd must have reached critical mass. The gate had finally given way and their block-paved driveway was now filled to capacity with rotting flesh. There were hundreds of them out there, faces pressed against his windows and doors. Furious and frightened, he hobbled over to one side and pulled the curtains shut.