Mostly Dead

Chapter One - What Thought Did

- PART ONE: THE DEADBOXERS -

- WHAT THOUGHT DID -

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

May 17th 2014 – Day 272 of Infection

I came into Kidderminster from Bridgnorth, travelling fast, with Ozzy – my ever-faithful bull mastiff – keeping pace at my side as always. I slowed my approach as I moved along Franche Road, trying to keep an eye on either side. Once it might have been frightening to see rows of blackened, burned-out cars lining the road as still as pulled teeth, but by now I was becoming used to it. It’s only after you stop waiting to wake up that you begin to accept the state of reality as it is.

Kidderminster had been a Burn Zone, and evidence of incineration with extreme prejudice was all around me, stark and poignant. Piles of semi-solid slag clung to the ground here and there where rain had mixed with soot and ash and the sun had baked both. Buildings were gutted husks, stripped of finery by the fiery winds of the tactical carpet-bombs that had swept the zeds out of town. The zeds had come back, of course – it’s what they do.

Around me I saw proof of humanity: boarded-up, empty deadboxes, messages daubed on walls in paint now dulled by time and weather, an old campfire in the centre of a dust-blown car park, uneven lines of bullet holes stitched across soot-smeared walls. Rain had washed away most of the blood but splashes remained as brown stains on charred brick – and there were still bodies, crow-pecked and decomposed, lying in doorways and propped perversely behind the steering wheels of barbecued cars, or else scattered haphazardly about the ground like rubbish accidentally tipped from a split bag.

Often these days, the blazing summer sun can seem almost insulting, but occasionally a little brightness is welcome. As I moved into Kidderminster that day, the latter was true. Besides which, I tend to counsel people to make the most of the sun while it’s still visible – there are so many crows nowadays, so fat and nourished on the demise of humankind, that I worry I might raise my eyes to the sky one day to find that I can no longer see the heavens for the beating of black wings.

Ozzy was on edge almost immediately as we crept into town, ears pressed flat to his broad skull, teeth bared. In response to his reaction, I slid Kevin from the sheathe on my thigh. Kevin is an eighteen-inch machete, named so for the rather mundane moniker scratched into the black, leather-bound grip. I found the blade – along with the hand that had wielded it in the (apparently failed) defence of its former owner – in a garden in Chorley. If I didn’t know the real world to be entirely devoid of magic, I’d believe that Kevin might well be enchanted after all the times it has saved my life.

I wandered past a debris-strewn car park on my left, stopping on a mini roundabout that offered a good view of the roads stretching away on either side of me. I hated to linger, even in Burn Zones, but Franche Road was long and I couldn’t see its entire length – there could be anything ahead of me. According to my roadmap I could follow this street all the way to the Ringway, and then head on to Bromsgrove. Most of Birmingham had been Green, which meant it was in my interests to avoid it, but I was already taking a long enough route to circumvent Brum on my way towards Coventry. I knew that Bromsgrove and Redditch were barbecue and had therefore planned my route to take me through them – which was as much of a plan as I ever had. My movements around post-Rapture England confined me to Burn Zones and their lower zed population. Green Zones were so teeming with the dead that a person would have to be insane, suicidal or desperate to traverse one. I was none of the above. Not yet.

As I walked something suffused the air, like the barely audible strum of tension on a plucked guitar string, like buzzing static. I could feel it reverberating through my every cell and a glance back at Ozzy, shoulders set, ears still flat, told me that he felt it, too. I knew that it was nothing external, but rather a primal instinct with which Ozzy had been born and that I had acquired over the last seven months. A strange wind ruffled piles of dust, scattered mounds of ash, troubled the dried petals of dead flowers and I felt, sooner than heard, them coming.