What were they hoping to achieve out there? Surely they must have realized by now that the situation was beyond hope? No one’s going to help you, he thought. You can’t cure death or make it any easier—these people needed to get a grip and get back indoors. Some of them began to squabble and fight, unable to react to their impossible situation in any other way. Most, though, simply staggered around aimlessly.
Simon watched them all walking in the same clichéd, slothful way—shuffling and stumbling, legs inflexible, arms stiff and straight. That was one thing those horror film people got right, he decided. They were out by a mile with just about every other aspect of how they’d imagined the dead would reanimate, but they’d got the painfully slow and clumsy zombie walk spot-on.
Zombies, he thought to himself, smiling inwardly. What am I thinking? He cursed himself for using such a stupid word. He wasn’t a zombie, and neither were Janice or Nathan.
Where was Nathan?
Janice was in the kitchen, still cleaning and fussing pointlessly, but he hadn’t seen Nathan for a while. He tried shouting for him but he couldn’t make his voice loud enough to be heard. The boy wasn’t anywhere downstairs and Simon couldn’t face the long climb up to check his room. He lurched into the kitchen.
“Where Nathan?”
Janice stopped brushing her lank, greasy hair and looked up.
“Thought you with him?”
Simon walked past his dead wife and headed for the utility room at the far end of the kitchen. Using the walls and washing machines for support, he hauled himself along the narrow passageway and looked up. The back door was wide open. The whole house would no doubt be freezing cold but, as they were no longer able to feel the temperature, humidity, air pressure, or anything else, neither of them had noticed. He squinted into the distance and thought he could see Nathan near the bottom of their long garden. There was definitely something moving around down there….
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.