CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Repent, The End is Extremely Fucking Nigh

-28 Days Later

The car rolled up to the peak of the highest hill in the city, which represented the border at the end of Fairacres, and the beginning of the unfortunately-named Slutterby Bay.

The coast wasn’t a bad idea. Whoever hadn’t decided to go to London to seek out rescue would probably have gone there. Especially if they had a boat, and many residents of the more affluent half of Fairacres probably did.

When they came to a stop, Liza saw a car already there, and she was the first to pop the door and step out -- she meant business now.

“Right,” she said, clapping her hands together and expecting the worst. “Forty or so were in the cathedral. We have to assume the others took off. Who is left?”

Celia and James hopped out of the other car and wrapped her up in a hug, but now that the adrenaline of near-death had worn off, she was uneasy wrapped in so many arms. She backed off and smiled awkwardly, patting them. “Anyone else?”

He nodded behind him. Out of that car hopped Blazer, and Lilian.

The bell tower group alone remained. Liza swallowed.

“No time to dwell, or wonder what happened to everyone else -- they have each other, and we have each other,” she said. “We are going to London.”

“We’ll hop back in the cars, then,” Tucker said. “Gas up on the road?”

Liza turned around and looked at the beaten up red Honda Accord and the sky blue dented BMW with the huge copper pole sticking up from its head. Perfectly fine vehicles to take them a hundred miles. But they would be defenceless if something went wrong. And there was no way nothing was going to go wrong.

She wanted them to do better than defenceless. She wanted them to do better than wishing, and lucking out. Liza needed to be prepared from now on. Now that they knew what they were facing; now that they knew what life was going to be like from now on. She swallowed and rubbed at her face. At her hair.

“I need a shower,” she mumbled.

“We all need a fucking shower, Liza!” Yana snapped suddenly, and everyone looked at her. She sagged. “Sorry, I’m really … on edge.”

“We all are,” Lilian said with a wrinkled nose. “Everyone is. Until a few hours ago I had no idea anyone was alive except me.” A pause. “And her.” She jabbed her forefinger in Liza’s direction. “And no offence but you’re not exactly the best in a crisis.”

Liza turned and looked over her shoulder, and then back at Lilian. “What, me?” She felt her jaw almost literally drop. “Seriously?”

“I’ve hardly known you and you’re always passing out and shouting and yelling!”

“Shouting and yelling are the same thing!” Liza shouted.

“Ladies, come on. Liza has some good ide--” Blazer began, lifting his hands.

“And you!” Liza drew her gun and rounded on him, and everyone instinctively took a step back. “You are stupider than I thought if you still think you’re coming with us. All your supporters are gone now. I should just shoot you in the gut and leave you here.” She cocked the gun dramatically and stared him down. Beads of sweat glinted on his face. The sun was rising behind him over the hills in the distance.

“Liza,” Tucker said low. “Don’t … don’t shoot him.”

She didn’t turn around. “Why?”

“I got into a knife fight in the first fifteen damn minutes of this shit,” Tucker said. “With someone who used to be my friend. He slept with my girlfriend, I know, but I thought I was over that. I tried to fucking stab him.” He swallowed visibly out of the corner of her eye. “There’s violence in the air, especially for us -- people who aren’t used to any real conflict at all. We got drunk on it for a while, but it’s fading. Leave him out here if you don’t trust him, but don’t shoot him. You can’t take that shit back.”

She didn’t lower the gun but she didn’t fire either. Blazer was a human. He had expressive eyes and a twitch in his lip; he was definitely not a zombie. If she killed him, he would never be anything again. He didn’t deserve any favours from her, but did he deserve death?

Most of her thought … yes, he did.

“Liza,” Celia said softly. “This isn’t self-defence.”

“This is an execution,” James agreed. He looked at her sideways. Disappointed. She wondered if he had been filled in on the events up until then. The look on his face almost physically hurt her. He had always been a fan of hers; laughing at her jokes, agreeing with her publicly if she got into a disagreement. He was … probably the best friend she had ever had. How was that thought only just occurring to her for the first time?

“If you want to be a respected leader, you have to retain your humanity,” Blazer said quietly.

“Shut up,” she said. “I didn’t ever say I wanted to be a leader.” Her gun lowered by an inch and seeing the relief on Blazer’s face made her shudder. “I don’t think…”

“You know better than any of us what we should be doing,” James said. He smiled weakly. “When do we need to build our first fire?”

She lowered the gun completely. “You aren’t coming,” she told Blazer, looking away. “Find your own way. In fact,” she added, “don’t come to London at all. If I see you again, I will interpret your presence as a threat. And I will kill you.”

“Liza,” Celia said quietly.

“I know,” she said, holstering the gun and folding her arms.

“We never really spoke about anyone being a leader, as such,” Tucker pointed out. “Is that better? Is it a good idea?”

“I think it’d be fucking stupid for us to listen to anyone but her,” James said.

Liza sighed. “Well, does anybody not want me to call the shots? I know I can get us to the city.” A silence followed. “Well, if I have to take responsibility for your lives, you’ll have to promise to follow me. I can’t guarantee who will live and who will die if you ignore what I say.” She looked around. She twisted her body in the full circle, trying to catch the eye of everyone there. “I ask again. Does anyone disagree with me taking control here?”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Her friends caught her eye, a couple of them shook their heads, including Yana, which was a good sign.

“Good,” she said. “Now, I…” She trailed off again. Lilian’s hand was high in the air, her pale blue eyes fixed on the ground beneath her.  Liza felt a thump of anger in her chest that she hadn’t been expecting.

“Why don’t you stay with Blazer, then?” she snapped.

Lilian looked up, brows creased. “You’re very bossy,” she said. “And you talk a lot. But everyone is probably dead. They’re gone. They were safe before you showed up. They could have waited for rescue there, and now they’re in danger again. And you destroyed Fairacres Cathedral. How bloody irresponsible is that?”

The nerve of Lilian calling somebody else bossy almost made her laugh, especially when the redheaded girl had her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. But then the accusations hit Liza, and coming from somebody other than herself, it actually hurt.

“There was nothing she could have done,” Tucker yelled over.

“If they had stayed in the building they would have been killed. At least that way,” James said, looking pale and breathing slowly, “at least they had a chance that way.”

“They might already be halfway to the city, completely safe and happy,” Liza pointed out.

They all looked over the hill at the same time as if they would be able to see from all the way up there. The cathedral still burned violently, a rippling black column from the centre of the city. Inside, hundreds of zombies roasted, and their potential body counts died in there with them. Liza brought up the notification on the top right corner of her vision. It had continued to update as each zombie bit the dust (or the ash) and she had ignored it until now.

Roasted Alive (or Dead)! x288

50 UP

50 UP (+10)

50 UP (+20)

[see 285 more lines]

How … how many points could that possibly even be? She didn’t want to expand the message and stand there scrolling through almost three hundred lines of text in order to find out. She would check her Character Screen a little later.

But Liza had the feeling that she would not have to worry about running out for a very, very long time. Even if whatever she had gained had been split five ways with her allies, including Denslow who still sat inside the blue car behind her.

She closed it, and took a breath. “Armour,” she said, turning to face everybody, but ignoring Lilian and Blazer. “We’re not going down because of a bite to the arm or the leg. We’re going down because we get torn to fucking shreds in an incident we could never have protected against, or we are not going down at all. Do you hear me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” James said. She didn’t laugh.

“We are going to London and we are going to find out what plan the government has for us. We are not going in flimsy cars,” she added, gesturing at them. “We’re going in a bus, like I said. But not just any bus.”

She opened up her Character Screen for a quick glance, and let out a little “Holy fuck.” Rubbing her head, she turned back to the others with a big smile on her face. “We are going to make the meanest, biggest, baddest bus that you can think of. A tank. A war machine.” She punched her fist into her other palm. “Who’s on board?”

“All aboard the party tank,” James wooped, raising his fist into the air. Lilian rolled her eyes, and Blazer stared at her, silently.

“Thank you for not hurting me, Liza,” he said finally, cutting through the celebrations. “I think that took a tremendous amount of self--”

She turned and, without pausing, she slammed her fist into his jaw with such unexpected power that he half-fell onto his side and had to use his hand on the ground to steady himself. He sucked in a breath and then spat on the grass.

“Punching happens to be one of the skills that comes with being raised in a crazy ubermasculine family,” she told him, and with her foot she knocked him off of his centre of gravity so that he fell fully, red-faced, averted eyes. “And I never said I was not going to hurt you.” Nobody said anything, but Lilian tutted and looked away.

“We get back down there and loot the military store in town. Swiss army knives, thick clothing, and whatever else they have that we can use for survival. Also, we go places in groups of three or more. No exceptions.”

“Sounds fair,” Tucker said. “Party tank!”

He hopped back in the car, and Liza watched James and Celia get into the other one.

Blazer sat up in the floor, knees drawn to his chin, and looked up at her with one eye squinting, a line of blood glinting at his lip.

“You’d better be glad there were other people around,” she told him, too quietly for anyone else to hear. Lilian hovered by the car door but was clearly trying to listen surreptitiously. “If you had just kept the panic locked away and managed not to act on it, you would be coming with us. We might have become friends. I would have protected you.” Liza backed away. “You’re lucky my friends aren’t trigger happy yet. They will be. This world will change them. Well, some people will change. Others will just be revealed. Like you.” She paused by the door of her own car.

“Please,” he said, looking at the ground. “You were fine. I don’t have anything. You didn’t let me have a weapon. I don’t have anything.”

“No,” Liza said. “But you don’t have a bullet wound either. And I turned out fine, right?”

She got into the car, slammed the door, and nodded at Tucker in the mirror. He drove up, made a u-turn, and started back down the hill.

Fairacres was no longer filled with a horde hundreds thick, or clusters of thirty-plus, but there were zombies lurching every block or so. Here and there.

They had made an marked improvement when it came to the survivability of this city. It was a shame, in a way, that they were leaving.

“Stop fussing with it,” Yana was muttering to Tucker in the front while he sucked in a breath through his teeth. She tutted and pulled his hands away from his wound and tugged on the bandage while Tucker focused on the road.

“How’s it healing?” Liza asked. She had to admit she had forgotten to change her wound. The pain in her side thudded like some faraway metronome, the kind of thing she found it easy enough to get used to and work past. It was the pain in her hands that was the real issue right now.

“It’s fine,” Tucker said. There was a silence as they navigated through debris, bodies, trash.

“So, you tried to stab that guy first, huh?” Liza said, drumming her fingers on her thigh and staring out the window like it was no big deal.

“Hmm?” Tucker asked, like he had no idea what she meant. There was a pause.

“Nothing,” Liza said finally. “Go down here to the right. If it isn’t already looted to the bare bones, we’ll find some good stuff.”

In the mirror on Yana’s sun visor Liza could see pursed lips. Whether the expression was for her or for Tucker, she couldn’t be sure.

They pulled up and were careful to look around before they quietly opened their doors and ducked out from the car. The only shufflers were far away enough that if they were quiet, they would be able to make their way around the debris and into the store to see what they could salvage.

“We could convert the BB guns into real guns,” Tucker whispered to the two girls as they picked their way over upturned trash cans and burned up tyres.

“How?” Liza whispered back.

“Celia would know how.”

It just didn’t seem like a good use of their time to her. They already had a fair store of guns, and they would run out of ammo before they ran out of firearms. And no British high street store was going to sell real bullets.

But would they sell plastic, or rubber bullets? BB pellets? Surely it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to upgrade them to metal. A wave of excitement washed over her. She had been neglecting the system, but the shock of the events had worn off, and the resolve that came from a complete and total will to survive had taken over.

Her primal instincts were stretching and waking up deep inside her.

For the first time since this all had started, she had a lull. They had a second. She could regroup and charge up and then they would be ready to face what came next.

Her future enemies, whoever they turned out to be, would have no idea what they were dealing with.