CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Everyone barricaded themselves in their homes. Then supplies started runnin' low. That's when you saw what people are really capable of.”

-Joel, The Last of Us

“We need a plan,” one of the guys at the back said, holding a wide-eyed girl tight around the shoulders with one arm while he looked from Liza to Blazer and back. “What do we do? We thought we were safe here,” he said.

Liza’s eyes were on the survivors while Yana and Celia tended to James. She did know basic first aid, thanks to her father, but she would prefer not to deal with medical issues. What she could deal with, however, was shooting stuff.

She strode to the crate behind this shivering couple and knelt to sift through it. Guns. Yes. Ammo. Yes. A couple more knives. Pretty much exactly the same haul as they had had from the starting crate, with perhaps a few more clips of ammo. A number was emblazoned on it: 320. What did that mean? There had been no number on the original that she could recall.

“What was your name, again?” the same guy addressed her from the squishy couch above her head. He had short, tousled sandy hair and freckles; he looked exceptionally non-threatening. She blinked up at them, two handguns in her hands. He attempted a friendly smile but it came out manic, panicked. His girlfriend bent to sob loudly in his arms.

“Liza,” she said, her voice catching. She cleared her throat. “What … what were your names?”

The girl’s sobs got louder. “I’m Eli, and this is Angie,” the boy said, raising his low voice a little to make sure Liza could hear. It was clearly important to him that she knew that they were people. Not just two of many, but ‘Eli and Angie’. It was a tactic she knew to avoid attacks in some cases; to ensure protection. Give as many details about yourself. Humanise yourself.

Eli probably wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

“She’s in shock, I think,” he told her, nodding at Angie.

“It’s been a shocking day,” Liza said weakly.

The girl said something, muffled by his arm. She lifted her face, wet and streaky, and looked up, shaky but determined. “We need a plan,” she said.

Liza loaded up a Glock with a satisfying ‘click’ and nodded in agreement. “I have a plan.”

They looked like they had more to say, and Liza felt a little bad about thinking this, but she knew that they had very little to actually offer her -- unless they happened for some reason to both have been through military training, what could they have to say to her that would be better than preparing for battle?

“Get James somewhere safe,” she commanded. Her voice seemed to naturally cut through the uneasy muttering of a roomful of scared people.

Yana shot her a terrified look over her shoulder. Tucker was healed up far more than he would have been without the headset’s help, but he was still cut open to some extent, and wincing from exertion. Celia could barely lift a fly. “You boys, help her,” Liza said, flicking her fingers in the direction of two men milling around near Blazer.

Who started to move to help, too, but she held out her hand without making eye contact. “Not you.”

He shrugged jovially. “Whatever you want me to do.”

Liza resisted the urge to tell him that he creeped her out, and instead turned to face the entirety of the group. “Alright, listen. There’s been a breach, from what it sounds like, and we need to cut them off or we’re trapped in here with them. So I will move down the passageway to meet them, and pick them off before they get to you, while someone else -- whoever is the second best shooter -- will run round and assess the situation from the other end.”

“The second best shooter?” Denslow spoke up again, her voice commanding; dominating. Even more so than Liza’s. Her shaped eyebrows were arched skeptically.

“Well, yeah, so we need to figure out who--”

“I’m guessing that means you think you’re the first best shooter?”

Liza pressed her lips together tightly. She hated being interrupted. “Look,” she said, “we don’t have time for whatever this is going to turn out to be.” She motioned back and forth between her and the other woman. “If you have a problem with me we can discuss it when we’re safe. I don’t care, right now, unless you have a problem with my plan.” Denslow regarded her silently so she continued. “I don’t care about anything except survival. I can use a gun. That’s all I’m saying. I’m good at it.”

“We’re all on the same page there,” Blazer laughed, but Liza shot him the most withering look she was capable of and he had the decency to look sheepish.

“I go down and cut them off,” Liza repeated. “Whoever can shoot the best out of all of you, go around and figure out what the breach is. Maybe you can just shut a door. Worst case, you come back around and tell us all that we need to leave.”

“That seems like the only thing to do,” Eli said, standing up and nodding over at her as if to show he had her back. Weirdly, this display of solidarity actually made her uncomfortable, but she was glad to have any kind of support now that her actual friends were all tending to a beaten up James. And the other survivors were whispering and nodding to Blazer.

“No one can shoot,” Yana said, irritably, as James was safely sitting up in a chair, mostly conscious. “We’re all English.”

“No one here has ever held a gun before this?” Liza asked. She resisted the urge to put her face in her hands, and instead kept her ears open for noises in the passageway -- zombies made noise, but there was nothing, not yet. “No one?”

Several shaking heads and more murmurs informed her that this was correct. No one else. Someone yelled something about playing a lot of shooting games but she ignored him. So did everyone else.

Blazer pointed to the ceiling. “I mean, since this whole thing happened, I have--”

“You do not get to hold a weapon,” Liza said, raising her voice to a higher level than was probably safe. “Because you murder your friends. Say it.”

“What?”

She looked into his sharply defined, classically handsome and yet extremely punchable face, and she narrowed her eyes, mirroring Denslow’s look to her. “Say it. What I just said. I want to know that you understood why you’re not getting a gun any time soon.”

He furrowed his brow, attempted a smile, but it faltered when he realised she wasn’t messing around.

“The sooner we can trust you, the sooner you get the privilege of holding a weapon again. So show that you understand why you can’t have one and say out loud that you murder your friends.”

He paused, and then shook his head, his gaze never leaving hers. “I don’t…” He trailed off.

“For fuck’s sake, you have the attitude but you don’t have the urgency,” Denslow snapped, a comment that made Liza turn to her with confusion. “If you’re going to insist on leading you have to stop getting sidetracked. We’ll do it your way. Pick someone at random. Fuck it.”

“We’ll go.”

Liza searched the survivors for the weedy-voiced volunteer and found that it belonged to Angie, who had finished up her panic attack and was standing and smoothing out her dirty skirt.

“We want to be useful,” she added with a resigned smile. “We want you to count on us. We’re smart. We might not have held real guns before but we’re good at that kinda stuff. Really.”

“Yeah. We’re pretty sporty,” Eli joined in, nodding.

“Hang on,” Denslow said, holding up her hands. “You want them to go out and risk their lives while you stay in here and pop zombies off safely? If they fail they’re dead.”

Liza sucked in her lower lip and sighed. “I thought about it. But if I fail in here, we’re all dead. I think it should be me who goes through the passageway.” She turned to the awkwardly hovering couple. “You guys can run fast, right? I just need you to see what’s going on. Just shut a door, or a gate, if it’s safe. Nothing crazy.”

Eli nodded again. “We run, we’re runners. We can run.” The content of his speech betrayed how panicked he actually was, but his demeanour stayed relatively calm.

“Great.” Liza lifted her gun and eyed the passageway that James had entered through. “There are things everywhere. The zombies. So be careful. Don’t be stupid.”

“Got it.” Eli pulled out a gun and handed it to Angie, who looked a little pale and turned it over in her hands. Liza quickly made sure they knew how to point and pull the trigger. They probably wouldn’t get many easy headshots, but in a pinch the guns could definitely save them.

“Alright, stay here. Arm yourselves,” Liza addressed the rest of the room. “Blazer doesn’t get a gun,” she added before he could speak up. She turned to Denslow. “Everything sound OK to you so far?”

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Denslow blinked slowly, like a cat, and then gave a single nod.

“Good luck,” she shouted over to the couple, who were nervously making their way through the church to the double doors, turning around the handguns they held nervously. Liza exited the vestry through the passageway that James had come in through, shot him one last look over her shoulder to see him limply wave at her and turn to the others.

“I’m telling you, she’s gonna be fine,” she could just about hear James saying. “She’s gonna save us all.”

No pressure.

Wiping her palms on her jeans, Liza twisted through the long corridor, ignoring any stairs or doors and focusing on making her footsteps as quiet as she possibly could -- no easy feat with thickly-heeled boots in an empty building.

She rounded a corner with her Glock raised -- though it completely didn’t matter, she kind of hoped it was her original Glock 19, but it felt different in her hands somehow -- and caught sight of what James had been running from.

Thirty or more zombies were scattered throughout the open-plan archives, groaning and lurching around. The double glass doors that led from the garden, and the back streets, to the archives were shattered. Liza wheeled back around the corner and flattened herself against it, calming her breathing as much as she could.

What sort of zombies were these? They didn’t run. They had less intelligence as predators than a shark or a spider. They didn’t track, smell, chase, hunt. They followed noise until they lost it, and then they just … stood there. They weren’t Romero zombies, they weren’t 28 Days zombies.

Liza chewed her lip as it came to her.

They were video game zombies. Low-intelligence mob enemies. They chased until you were out of range. Then they milled and waited. Forever. Maybe they moved on, but like with the riot gear zombies, it wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t far -- and probably prompted by a noise. That was the reason they spread out to fill the space they occupied in a horde: they were programmed to all wander randomly. They were fake. Shells. There was no way to mistake a zombie for the person it had once been, because it simply wasn’t. It was overtaken with … code. Or the closest approximation possible.

So what the hell was Malcolm that he could integrate something so close to code into reality itself?

Liza smoothed her hair from her face and, though there was not as much urgency as she had thought, if someone in the vestry shrieked or hiccuped particularly loudly, they were going to have a miniature horde on their hands and nowhere to run.

She needed to clear them, but she couldn’t just start shooting or that would mobilise a currently harmless bunch of monsters.

Just as she thought that, a loud crack of gunfire sounded from somewhere to her left, outside the building. Eli or Angie had felt threatened enough already to start opening fire. Another shot went off and Liza winced internally. That wasn’t good. And her own job wasn’t too tough -- she should have done their job instead. Denslow, Blazer, whoever else, they had been right.

But at the sound of gunfire outside, a glimpse around the corner confirmed that the zombies were beginning to mobilise. Most of them were wandering to the window through the open-plan archives to look at the tasty snacks, but the ones nearer the large shattered doors that led to the gardens and the cobblestone street outside followed the noise out that way, and soon Eli and Angie were going to have many more things to worry about.

Liza paused to think. The many or the few. If she was overrun or passed by when she summoned this horde, the vestry survivors would pay for her arrogance.

But if she could … lead them all somewhere else.

There was another pathway to her left, and from her limited knowledge of the layout of this cathedral -- she had come to these archives for a tour when she had been looking into this university -- she was certain it led straight to the main church.

Four limp strands of a weak plan came together. Feebly. She rubbed her forehead. “Fuck,” she whispered.

If this worked, she would not only help out the nice couple outside, but she would significantly change the chances of surviving in this small, beautiful city. At a cost, of course, but they all planned to go to London anyway -- staying here long-term was never the plan. And it wasn’t as fortified, at all, as she had expected it to be.

Should she do it? Force them to travel to London much earlier than they had wanted to? She couldn’t help but think of all the points she would earn from something so reckless. But the zombies were moving, and the gunfire would be drawing clusters all around them closer and closer.

This place had so much history, so much incredible beauty and so much cultural significance that it had put the city on the map.

Could she actually destroy Fairacres cathedral?

*

The vestry had stood for a thousand years and with rigorous upkeep it would stand a thousand more. So many people had come and gone from within its walls. So many stories had played out. Every stone, every brick, even every foot of plaster and paint. The beautiful, majestic, culture-rich cathedral put Fairacres on the map.

“New plan,” Liza said, striding back into the room and going straight past the startled survivors to the crate, pocketing more ammunition and slinging a rifle across her back, and checking the Bowie knife was safe and secure. Armed to the teeth again, and flushed with anticipation, she stood and turned in a 360 degree arc to regard everybody.

“What?” Tucker asked low.

The screen flickered and fritzed and Malcolm tutted and tapped on the side of it, looking to his right to see Rayna enter with a tray of colourful foods. He rolled his eyes at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said forcefully; she couldn’t speak any other way, of course. “I’ll leave you to it, Malcolm.”

He leaned back and frowned, looking at the stripes of raw bacon and red cabbage, arranged just as he liked them on a plate, and then back up at Rayna.

“No,” he said, and stroked his stomach. “Stay. Watch with me. Look at this girl.”

The screen buzzed and flickered once again. Rayna flicked her grey eyes, almost identical to the glitching screen, up at the ceiling and moved to the back of the large observation room, where she could still see the screen as perfectly as he could. Possibly still more so. His eyes weren’t the best now that his body was nearing its 50th year.

When the image snapped back to perfect quality from the top corner of the vestry, over the AV Crate, he tapped excitedly on Liza’s animatedly talking head.

“What?” Rayna asked, bored, as Malcolm peeled a limp, pink strip of meat from the plate and dangled it onto his eager poking tongue, his eyes never leaving Liza.

“She’s exciting. I was switching from AV Crates trying to see something fun, but there was very little of interest. Then the system informed me that one of the players got over 13,000 Upgrade Points in under a minute so I had to go and take a peek as soon as I could. She’s quite a firecracker. And, get this … the boy we were watching, earlier?”

“Oh, yes,” Rayna said, cracking a slight smile. “Him.”

Malcolm frowned. He wasn’t sure why she was showing interest in any men she wasn’t supposed to, but that was something he could take a look at later. “Him,” he repeated. “They’re related.”

Rayna raised an eyebrow. “What sort of a coincidence is that?”

Malcolm turned back to the screen while Liza argued back and forth with an attractive dark-haired woman that looked quite familiar to him. Curious. He would look her up but the internet had all but gone down. It would be a few hundred years before people prioritised server failures again.

“Turn it up,” Rayna said dryly. Her voice always sounded too dry to him. It was a weird quality that he had never been able to quite pinpoint or address, but it lay somewhere within the uncanny valley.

“... ready?” Liza asked.

Malcolm counted thirty-three humans in that room -- so cramped -- and wondered what they had been thinking, designating the crumbling old walls as their safe area. The gate was effective, but it took a long time to open and shut, which made it almost useless. And then there were the glass doors connecting the new archive extension to the street. They had thought they would just sit in that vestry, protected from the rest of the weak cathedral by a velvet curtain and an irritatingly low doorway?

When upstairs there were safe, thick, insulated quarters that would be so easy to convert into pretty nice living situations. At least until Malcolm believed that they were too comfortable … he hadn’t done anything to help since the first couple of hours -- where he had really concentrated the zombies into the houses and highly populated areas to make sure that people were in a state of panic. After all, the zombies weren’t runners. It wasn’t cardio that killed you here, it was fear. It was stupidity.

“Government gone. Martial law enacted. They’re really going to London?” Rayna asked, responding to what Liza was saying on the screen.

“They don’t know that.” Malcolm thought for a moment, hands hovering over the controls beside the wall of screens. Some were splattered with gore, which he hadn’t actually accounted for -- he would send drones to clean them when there was no one around to witness that. “I could push them to stay or to leave or to go somewhere else, I suppose. People are quite easily manipulated.”

Rayna let out a polite, close-mouthed laugh. “I don’t want to watch them stay in Fairacres,” she said. “It’s small. It’s boring. Are they going to blow anything up? What is she saying?” Her grey eyes widened with joy. “Fire.”

“You do like a good fire,” Malcolm said with a chuckle. “I’m more into the interpersonal relationships. The betrayals. Give me a tearful slap over an exploding car any day.”

He picked at some shredded red cabbage on his plate, placed some strands on his tongue, and sucked on them as he watched the survivors stand and nod, ready to follow the small blonde into a warzone. Ready to splinter off and risk the tiniest victories they had won so far, for her. For this girl.

Interesting.

“She has sent most of them away. Twenty of them with only three guns and two knives,” Rayna observed. Twenty of them indeed filed through the red curtain, and out of sight. Liza followed after them, gun raised. Malcolm strained his ears to hear the huge wooden doors creak open, and he heard screams and gunfire. Then Liza returned.

The twenty survivors presumably were escaping through the gates. But why?

Why leave the cathedral now, when she had only just arrived?

Malcolm tutted at the dirtied camera he had pointed to the back door. Presumably the breach they had mentioned was fairly significant. When Liza split the remaining thirteen of them into groups and ordered one team of five outside, he strained his neck to try to follow them, before remembering it was a flat screen. He swallowed the cabbage by accident, tutted, and replaced it with a couple more pieces.

“Tucker, Yana, Blazer and Celia. You get to the bell tower,” she was saying, pointing. “Quick as you can, the whole thing hinges on this. We need to make as much noise as we can.” The four of them moved fast. She turned and looked at the few that were left with her, none of whom Malcolm recognised yet. But he found he was excited to get to know them. “We’re going to do the most dangerous part. Are you up for it?”

“The most dangerous task? Herself?” Rayna snorted. “She might be gutsy, but she is not yet a leader.”

Malcolm spoke around the cabbage on his tongue. “Why do you say that?”

Rayna placed a taloned hand on her hip and narrowed her eyes at the events playing out on the screen. “If she dies, I believe they all will. She should learn that.”

“Hmm,” Malcolm said, leaning back in his chair and considering her point for a moment. “But if her plans fail, they may all die anyway.” They both looked on in silence for a moment, and he flicked at the joystick to zoom in on Liza’s face for a moment. Her determined smile dropped when everybody else had left the room, and just for a second she turned and stared bitterly at the floor behind her, before shaking her head and walking away.

“I think I am rooting for her,” Malcolm said, sounding surprised even to himself. “I want her to go into Phase Two.” He turned over his shoulder and looked at Rayna, propping up his elbow on the headrest and blinking rapidly. “Do you?”

The impossibly beautiful woman strode up to grab his empty water glass and take it from the room. “I want what you tell me to, Malcolm,” she said, her voice dry; mechanical. “You know that.”