Mostly Dead

Chapter Three - Team Building Exercise

- TEAM-BUILDING EXERCISE -

Bury, Greater Manchester

October 9th 2013, Day 55 of Infection

I am not by my nature a violent person.

I grew up in Altrincham, not Moss Side, raised by parents who made a lot of money by being good at what they did, and not by being crooked. I had an older brother, who’d taught me to look after myself, and a younger sister, who’d taught me to look after others. At the time of the outbreak I was at college, part way through A-Levels in English Literature, Media Studies and History. I had a girlfriend named Lydia and two hobbies that occupied my free time so completely that I’d never had to turn to crime or mischief to fill the hours of my day.

I wrote and illustrated a comic book series called “Perception”, about a kid with magic glasses that showed him the truth of anything he looked at. The kid’s name was Anson Ramie, and he lived in a world halfway between Stephen King’s Derry, Maine, and Guy Ritchie’s East End. I wrote them because, before the End, it seemed a cool concept to be able to see people for what they were no matter the image they presented. Sometimes I think about how easy it would be now if you could just look at a person and see if they were infected, see if Big Red had gotten to them and if they were going to turn, or if they were just carrying the infection. Maybe it’d be cool to put on those glasses and look in a mirror, and maybe see what no one saw – not even myself – when they looked at me. I’d never tried to achieve publication with Perception; I wrote it for me. It kept me out of trouble.

My other hobby was running. I don’t mean marathons and hundred-metre dashes, I mean running. Freerunning kept me fit, kept me free, kept me alert – after the End, it kept me alive. Before the outbreak, freerunning had always been the release I needed to deal with anything life threw at me – arguments with Lydia, trouble with my brother, Nick, the perennial “black sheep”, problems at college, at work, anything… It was more than just looking cool and doing flips; it was about freedom, maybe self-expression, mostly adrenaline. I’d never bought into the YouTube mentality of our nation’s youth, not because there was anything wrong with it but because the one thing I was above everything else before the End was, well, shy. I read a lot, I studied a lot; I didn’t run to be in with anyone’s crowd, I ran because it let something loose in me that no other activity could. The risk was always outweighed by the reward. Always. I guess since the End my running has become something a little closer to parkour, more structured and efficient, but that’s a necessity when you use it for survival and not for recreation. The philosophy, for me, remains the same.

But I digress. I left Manchester pretty much with everybody else. No one walked away from the city – everyone ran, and the dead followed us for miles. They didn’t get tired, and we were exhausted. We were mostly unarmed, and they would tear stragglers from the back of the press of bodies with nails and teeth and frenzy. I lost count of how many died – I lost count of how many people I saw die. To call it horrific would be to belittle it somehow, to turn it into just an event that happened, just a tragedy – it was more than that. It was men, women, children, the elderly, the infirm, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor – it was humanity itself, torn to shreds. I saw zeds chew through clothing, scratch out eyes, tear out throats and hearts and entrails. Some people were devoured like cattle – no, not like cattle, nothing so humane as an abattoir death… Others were infected; some were merely bitten, or scratched, or else spattered by infected blood. On the skin, a zed’s blood is dangerous, but ingest it in any way, and Big Red will get you. And the time it takes to turn differs for every person. For some it’s days, for others, minutes; for a few, seconds. People in the crowd were turning as we ran, attacking the poor bastard nearest to them, perpetuating the virus. The things I saw that night changed every thing about me, everything. I travelled with Lydia and Ozzy, keeping them both close, moving fast, trying to avoid the main swell of the crowd. Lydia and I wore dust masks, safety specs, gloves; we were wrapped head to toe. I’d seen enough zombie movies not to take chances; call it childish, but what the Hell else could I base my survival plan on?