The Falling Stars (The Vamps and One Direction Zombie Apocalypse)

Chapter 17- The Deep Stuff

“Any new connections today?” Asked Tom. I could hear Dougie humming in the background

“One.” I replied “Just this one guy called Jeremy”

“Oh right. We talked to him too,” he replied. I could hear that he was eating something “Did he swear at you a lot too?”

“Oh so that’s what he meant by all ‘these bloody boybands’ ruining his day?” I laughed.

“Really?!” This time Danny replied and laughed mildly. Brad was pawing at my shoulder so I moved aside to let him talk to the guys.

I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a can of water from the side. It was late night now, whereas when I had first begun broadcasting with the radio that day it was morning. I had lost track of time talking to the boys and kind of regretted it when I saw the arm sticking through the huge hole Ava had stamped through the previous day to get in.

Almost absentmindedly, I took a knife and a wooden board and slashed at the partially revealed arm until it vanished. I jammed the splintered wooden board back into the hole and it left only a miniscule gap around the top edge. The infected’s hateful eyes glared through at me, and I jammed another two boards into place so that I could only hear its almost bored sounding groans.

It was great to hear some familiar voices again, even if McFly too was incomplete. Tom, Gi, Dougie, Danny, and Carrie had set up camp in an abandoned supermarket. They were surrounded, but had all the supplies they could ever need. Except for one fatal flaw. They were missing Harry. And they were missing Georgia. Just like we were missing Tristan and Lucy. Lucky for them though, they had some light amongst the dark. By light I mean baby Fletcher, who had only been mentioned once or twice but we could sometimes hear crying in the background.

It was surprising to us that any life could have formed and been born in this desolate world, but the fact that the child was born only made us all so much more aware that we were alive. We were not gone, not yet. Our tiny fragments of fractured souls clung to the threads and broken seams at the edges of the fabric of light on which we wished to remain. Our hearts beat like the drums in the attic, our lungs breathed the air they were not denied, and we did as we were designed to do in this isolated planet floating amongst bleak and barely glowing stars. We lived. They always said, those dreamers, those wonderful people who knew the true meaning to all of this. They always told us to live every day like it was our last, but no one ever truly believed it until that small moment. Sure, you may get into that mind set, but then you just fall back into the rhythm of waiting for tomorrow to come and forgetting to live in today.

You have to live like it’s your last day alive. Be a genius. Do something amazing. Start a fight and then resolve it again just because you can. Fall in love with a mad woman. Do anything. Just do something. Because one day, it will all be gone, and you won’t see it coming.

You could be hit by a bus, shot by a sniper, or just die of an illness. Get bitten by a zombie because you forgot to lock up. Live in today, because tomorrow is transient.

Living may just be a side effect of the eventual end, but if you do not live in the moment, the moment may never arrive. If you spend your time waiting, and not doing, it will never happen, because all those stupid mistakes are what make us all undeniably human. The emotions that take us over. The anger, fear, righteousness, grief, love. All piecing together to create one unique organism known as a human being, which, despite all the blood and turmoil and destruction they had brought the shattered and broken world, had survived.

Because we are amazing. We are fire and ice and time. Science and technology, brains and ingenious discoveries. We are at the centre of time itself and drive our never ending strength of hope ever closer towards that final finish line which will make us victorious. And we are wonderful.

The fact that we lived, breathed, survived in this whole situation proved our community had the tenacity we needed to survive this hell on earth and pull through to live our life as we deserved. But for now we were living our best lives in the moment, because we knew how ephemeral our life spans were in this abhorrent Armageddon.

I turned slowly on my heel, walking away. The floor felt cold on my bare skin, and sent small shivers that felt almost electrical up my spine. I felt the oppressed weight of unconsciousness creeping into the edges of my mind, dragging me down towards the darkness. My vision blurred as I walked, and I held myself up with the handrail on the stairs, as it was the only thing stopping me from collapsing with fatigue.

It took copious amounts of strength and effort to force my body to become responsive and place one foot in front of the other. I sluggishly dragged my broken frame up the dusty stair case, until I reached the first landing, where I let myself into the nearest room and collapsed on the carpet.

I yanked myself towards the bed, and dragged myself under the soft covers. The room smelled vaguely of flowers I noticed, but had very little time to ponder much else as my sleep deprived eyelids were drooping and the thick suffocation of deepest sleeping was falling over my whole body.

I succumbed to the drug of rest in seconds, and was floating away on the cloud which would keep me away from the day.

I had one of those mundane everyday dreams that we often don’t remember, but it was too important to forget those prosaic moments that may be the only thing to hold onto some day.

I dreamt I was in the hotel, the day the world collapsed, only this time it didn’t. We recorded Wild Heart, ate together, laughed together, and had an awesome time. We were not attacked. We didn’t have to run. We didn’t have to leave Tristan.

We just lived out our perfectly normal lives until the end of the day when we slouched back to the hotel room and fell asleep.

I wished to some day journey back to the soporific humdrum of everyday life.

It would be better than living in this halfway state. This halfway state where anyone could die in a second; be removed from your life like they had never been there in the time it takes you to blink.

The marks we left too often scars as we leave behind the destruction of our wasted world, a barren landscape filled with the screams of the dead and dying, crying out for family and friends that would never return.

We may have been alive, but we certainly weren’t living.