Chapter Text
(Sometime in November.)
“Fucking—no!” Martyn shouts. “You can’t just—let’s just go, let’s just leave, we don’t have to—”
“You know we can’t do that,” Scott says. He’s not looking at Martyn: his bloodshot eyes are fixed on the heap of flesh twitching on the ground between them. Even in the weak light from the moon and Pearl’s torch, she can see the skin around his lips is so pale it’s almost blue.
“Scott’s right,” she says. Martyn turns to look at her, blood-red and furious; Scott’s eyes don’t move. “Don’t look at me like that. We agreed—”
“You agreed—”
“Yeah, we could leave,” she continues over him. “What about everyone else in this fucking city?”
“It’s one—”
“One’s enough.” Her eyes slide: Martyn, Scott, the thing on the ground. Martyn, fists clenched, hair falling lank in his face, veins standing out stark. “They’re going to stick around if we don’t. You don’t want to see them, after—” Her voice catches in her throat. “After.”
The pistol sits quietly on the ground. It’s too close to the monster. She takes a step forward, keeps her eyes moving. Martyn, Scott, the gun, the body. Martyn, Scott, the gun, the body. Martyn, Scott, the gun—
“I can’t.” Martyn says, fury leaching out. He slumps. “I can’t.”
“Scott?” she asks. Another step, and she’s next to the gun on the ground. She nudges it with her foot, six inches closer to Scott.
Scott’s mouth opens: all that comes out is a wordless, airless croak.
The thing on the ground twitches more violently. A hand, flung out, stiffens, clenching into a fist tight enough to hear bones creak.
“Scott.”
“I—” There are tears in Scott’s eyes. “Yeah. Give it to me.”
She squats, carefully, keeping her centre of gravity over her feet. Keeps the gun pointed carefully at the ground, fingers curled around the unfamiliar shape of the grip. There is a bullet in the barrel; she flips off the safety and passes it to Scott. His fingers fumble, the same way, into their place.
The twitching is an overall shaking now, a sprawled-out body drawing further into itself. It curls into a foetal position, arms and legs underneath its spine, the unbreathing expanse of its back. She can see a hand, emerging from the cuff of a bright green hoodie, too big. Its fist flattens against the ground, and pushes.
“Scott, now.”
“I can’t, I can’t fucking—” Martyn’s footsteps recede.
Scott stands frozen. The body on the ground pushes to its hands and knees, silent, unbreathing. The pistol shakes.
“Maybe,” he says, very quietly. “Maybe they’re—are you—”
“It’s not,” Pearl says. She takes a step back despite herself, heart rising into her throat. “Scott, do it, Scott—”
The creature straightens to its knees, mouth opening—too wide—as if to scent the air. It turns unerringly towards Scott and Pearl, grey lips drawing back from its teeth. There’s a gap between the front two. Pearl knows without looking.
It growls, lunging forward on its knees, and Scott sobs, and Pearl—
Pearl yanks the gun from Scott’s hands, points, and pulls the trigger.
A bang erupts, echoing through the air, bouncing off the building behind them, and the creature’s head explodes. It falls prone to the ground, twitches once, and goes still.
Pearl’s ears ring. A dozen heartbeats, and she turns to Scott.
“Come on,” she says, heart pounding. “Come on, that’s going to bring in more of them.” She reaches out and tugs on Scott’s sleeve: she can barely hear herself. “We need to go back in, we can figure out—come on.”
Scott shrugs her hand off his shoulder, stiff as a corpse: she has to pull him away by his sleeve, toward the cold glass doors where Martyn stands with his head in his hands.
She does not look back at the body on the ground.
—
(Sometime in September.)
A few weeks after the cloud arrives, the streets go silent.
Cleo’s curled up on the balcony in one of Scott’s fancy teak chairs, feet propped on the edge of a pot of dying basil. The yellowing plant brushes against the bottom of their trainers. A breeze—cold for September, they notice, like that’s their biggest problem, like it’s even close—ruffles the pages of the notebook sitting in her lap, and they move a thumb to hold their place. The scrawled list stares accusingly up at them.
more food—how?
get onto other balconies
what gets planted in September?
supermarkets, canned stuff—get to the car, more petrol
gardening supplies
gardening books
will power last come back?
The opposite page is full of scribbled notes and circuit diagrams. Scott’d come down with her to the electrical closet in the cellar yesterday to examine the backup generators. They’re burning through their propane each time the power goes out, keeping all the hallway lights on, and she’d wondered if she could rewire them to direct the power to a specific flat. It’s possible. Maybe.
Except for the utter silence above them—no footsteps, no vacuums, no muffled televisions—it almost felt normal: Cleo and her kit, on an odd job for the manager; Scott, propped in the corner, tooling around on a guitar. Really, the strangest thing about yesterday was that he agreed to hold her torch for her.
Cleo looks back up. A plume of thick black smoke rises in the distance, maybe a couple miles off. Downwind, thank god, in the direction of the city centre. They smell awful when they burn, and half the time it doesn’t even kill them.
Sitting here, around the back side of the block of flats, Cleo doesn’t hear any of them either. Maybe the group piling up by the front gate has dispersed. Unlikely: probably the building’s just blocking their noise. The chain-link out the front is an awful eyesore, but none of the bodies have managed to find their way over it the way they did the waist-high picket fence down the road. Small blessings.
The list. Cleo looks back down, twirls their pen between their fingers. It’s—Scott’s still inside, still working his way through the freezer and the pantry and making whatever calculations he can, but Cleo can see how their food’s been dwindling. God only knows if the shops will have anything left, too, or if they’ll all be overrun with dead things walking.
The door to the balcony creaks open, and Cleo startles.
Scott hisses. “It’s too cold.”
“Put on a jacket.” They look back up at the smoke rising into the grey sky. “I know you’ve got one. I’ve seen it.”
Scott sighs. “That’s not what I meant.” His arm slings around their shoulder as he settles heavily into the other fancy garden chair next to them. “Has the internet come back on?”
“No.” Cleo pulls out her phone, just to make sure: the little YouTube astronaut stares upside-down at her. The battery’s at 23%, too. Not great. “Yeah, no. I don’t think—I don’t know. I don’t think the WiFi’s coming back, but the cell service might. Maybe.”
“Should really have printed stuff out while—”
Cleo cuts him off, propping her head on her palm. “Yeah.”
Scott sighs and scoots his chair towards Cleo’s. His hand comes up to scratch through the too-long hair at the back of their head, the strands—stubble, usually—long enough to run his fingers through. “I, er. I finished going through the pantry.”
“Mhm?”
“It’s not—we have a couple more weeks. Maybe. If we can keep the frozen stuff cold.”
“That’s, er.” The smoke blends in with the clouds when it gets high enough: staring at it for too long makes Cleo’s eyes water. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back into the pressure of his fingers, and Scott starts to comb through the longer hair at the top of her head, long enough now to fall in her eyes. “I don’t think we can count on that.”
“Yeah, it’s—” Scott leans closer, resting his head on her shoulder to peer at the list on her lap. “Okay, you’re ahead of me. We need to get more to eat. I know it’s—” He cuts himself off with a grimace. “I don’t want to.”
“But what choice do we have.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you think there’ll still be anything to take at the shops?”
Scott straightens in his chair and rests his chin on his hands. He stares, half-frowning, out into space; she’s not sure if he’s looking at the smoke too. “I…don’t think there’s a lot of people left.”
“Okay.” She has to swallow past something thick in her throat. “Now? Today?”
“No, it’s too late.” Scott turns to Cleo, frowning. “I don’t know, I don’t want to get caught in the dark. Have you seen them at night? Do you think they can see in the dark?”
“I don’t think they really need to see at all.”
Scott makes a face. “Right. I want more of a plan, anyway.”
“Tomorrow,” they decide. “We can go tomorrow. And I want to try to go to the library too, if the power doesn’t come back. We have to figure out how to plant stuff.”
“Do you want to do B&Q too, then? If you want to make a list.”
Cleo thinks about tall shelves, tall ceilings, dark aisles. Food now; food later.
“Yeah,” they say. “Yeah, I think we have to. Tomorrow. I—er.” The question sticks in their throat.
At least Scott can read their mind, as usual. “I think that’ll be the last of the petrol. We should have enough for this, but.” He trails off. Cleo chews at their lip.
“It’s. We’ve got to, right?”
“Yeah. We—yes.”
“And they can’t smell us when we’re in the car, if we don’t run the air.”
Cleo nods. “And we bring the gun when we go inside.”
“Yeah.” Scott blinks hard before he starts to unfold himself from his chair. Cleo closes their notebook.
When they lever themself from their seat, they end up face-to-face with Scott. His hair is growing out too, reddish-brown roots pushing out the bright teal; the dark circles under his eyes are deep, but weren’t they always? They turn, and his hand lands on their shoulder as they wrench open the creaky door to the balcony: calloused and warm and human. “Is your hair—on your ears, is it bothering you?” he asks. “I can try to cut it, if you want.”
“I—yeah, thanks.” They pull him in for a hug, one of their arms around Scott’s shoulders. “That’d be great.”
—
Feeling a little silly, Cleo pulls the ancient blue estate carefully into a parking spot in front of Tesco’s. The car park is littered with cars—some parked neatly between white lines, some askew or crumpled, or waiting patiently in line to exit. Most have zombies still trapped inside, belted into seats, purple-mottled hands and faces pressed up against windows with yellow eyes wide and hungry mouths open. Their groaning, thank fuck, is muffled.
Cleo tries not to look into any windows as they cross the car park. She and Scott each have an empty duffel bag slung across their back; Cleo carries her pistol ready, and Scott sticks close behind her, head on a swivel.
Ahead of them, the Tesco looms with its windows dark. The automatic doors aren’t working, but one of the windows is broken, the hole big enough for a person to step through. Cleo feels Scott stiffen behind them.
“I don’t like that,” he whispers. Cleo nods mutely. “Do we—do we try another?”
“I don’t hear anything,” Cleo says. It’s true: all the noise comes from behind them, from the zombies trapped inside their cars. They take a step closer: as far as they can tell, the inside of the store is silent. They turn back to Scott. “And we don’t have enough petrol, if we want to get to the other shops after.”
Scott’s lips are a thin line, but he nods. Cleo squares their shoulders and steps carefully over the jagged shards still lodged in the window’s frame.
Just inside, two shelves have been dragged over and arranged into a v-shape, forming a triangle with the broken window and trapping Scott and Cleo in a small pen. The shelves are full, huge bags of charcoal and—and rice, oddly, packed in so the shelves are full to bursting. The close air inside the shop smells like rotting fruit.
Cleo swallows hard. The shop is still perfectly silent; even if they strain their ears, the constant pained-sounding groan of the zombies is absent. There’s nothing in here with them—or. Well. Cleo looks around at the carefully arranged pen they’ve walked into. No zombies, at least. It’s slightly cold comfort.
It’s hard with the shelves weighted, but with Scott’s help they push and shift one wall of the triangle a few inches, with a loud scraping noise as it moves across the floor. They both freeze, holding their breath, and listen: still nothing. If they squeeze, there’s a big enough gap to slip through into the shop.
Cleo looks at the gap, then out at the car park. They gesture Scott closer. “When we leave,” they whisper. “We should move it back.” Scott nods, adjusting his bag on his shoulder, and pulls out a torch.
The makeshift barrier by the broken window opens up into the produce section—explains the smell. Scott wrinkles his nose and inclines his head towards the taller shelves beyond, and Cleo nods and follows. Rotting fruit gives way to rotting meat. Some of the shelves are standing upright, but their contents have been swept onto the floor—or, no. Not swept. They pick their way down an aisle of cleaning products. The shelves are empty, but the bottles of detergent and washing up liquid are arranged in a careful pattern that covers the floor, leaving almost no space to place their feet. The hair on the back of Cleo’s neck is standing up.
The deathly silence enveloping the Tesco stays uninterrupted by anything except Cleo and Scott’s footsteps as they tiptoe through the chaos of the shop. Once, Cleo swears she spies a flash of red disappear as they turn down the bread aisle, but it’s gone by the time Scott swings the torch that way again.
Cleo’s eyes start to adjust to the darkness. Despite the chaos of the shelves, the store doesn’t look looted. She passes a few jars of peanut butter and some protein bars to Scott, and then heads to the canned foods. Cleo’s serving as lookout, gun at her side, while Scott uses the torch to sort through cans. “We should get water bottles after this,” she tells Scott, turning away to look down the aisle. The darkness presses in on them from above, behind, all sides, and Cleo, in the beam of the torch, sees—
There’s a figure peering around the corner of the aisle. Cleo has her pistol raised and the safety off before she even processes the glimpse of long, lank brown hair and a red sweatshirt ducking behind the shelf. Cleo’s striding forward, torch in her other hand, still on autopilot, finger on the trigger and mind racing: whether the sound of the shot will draw out more, how the thing stayed quiet enough that they didn’t hear it moaning before, what exactly they’ve walked into, before—
Zombies aren’t quiet. Zombies don’t hide. Cleo freezes, gun still raised. It’s a split-second decision, and probably a mortally stupid one, but Cleo doesn’t think at all before they shout, “We’re not dead!”
Their voice echoes through the cavernous expanse of the dark building. Cleo hears Scott’s quick intake of breath behind them. He stands, crosses to them and gets a grip on their sleeve. No response comes, and the darkness goes silent again.
Suddenly, Scott speaks up from beside them. “We just want to get some food and water,” he says, holding tight to Cleo. “We don’t want to hurt you, seriously, we just—” He turns to Cleo and shrugs, wincing, before he continues. “We just need food. We can…trade with you, if you want?”
Still no response. Cleo takes a breath, ready to tell Scott not to bother, when a small head pops out from behind the shelf.
“What do you have?” she asks. The hood of her red sweatshirt is pulled up over her head, with her long brown hair hanging around her face, bangs long enough to fall in her eyes. She’s shorter than Cleo or Scott, and her eyes dart between them fast enough to make Cleo dizzy.
“Er,” Scott starts. “We don’t have much with us, we—” Cleo elbows him, and he cuts himself off. “I’m a nurse, if you’re hurt at all? And Cleo’s an electrician, she can—I don’t actually know what she can do, exactly.”
The woman looks at Cleo expectantly.
“Not much,” Cleo admits, and the woman’s attention slips off them and back to Scott.
“You’re a nurse?”
Scott swallows. “I am.”
She looks him up and down. “I have someone here with me, and he’s hurt,” she says. Her eyes dart to the side, into the darkness of the store. “If you can help him, you can take whatever you need. Alright?”
Scott nods. “I can do that.”
The woman regards them for a long moment, then nods decisively and turns. “Alright, come on. I’m Pearl, by the way.”
Scott trips over himself to follow, still holding Cleo’s arm. “I’m Scott. This is Cleo—I think I said that.”
Pearl chuckles. “Yeah, you did. I knew you weren’t zombies, also. Tilly would have said something.”
Cleo wonders who Tilly is, but figures they’ll meet her soon enough. Pearl pulls another torch from the pocket of her baggy pants and leads them without hesitation through the maze of fallen shelves, deeper and deeper into the shop. There are clear paths through the debris, Cleo realizes: they’re hard to see, but Pearl steps confidently in areas where the cans and bottles and packets have been moved aside just enough to step easily. Scott follows behind, and Cleo brings up the rear. Despite their frayed nerves, the shop is still quiet; with the power out, the only sounds are the echoes of Scott and Pearl’s voices, and the noise of three pairs of feet against the cold tile.
The supermarket’s back wall emerges from the darkness, and Pearl takes them to the right and into a small hallway at what must be the shop’s back corner. It’s full of boxes and more food, with another narrow, deliberate-looking path through the centre they have to pick their way through. Pearl stops in the hall, Scott and Cleo drawing up behind, and whistles low.
“Tilly!” she whispers. “Come here, girl, come on.”
A pale shape forms out of the darkness and click-click-clicks across the wreckage and into view. Cleo shies back as a huge white dog, dirty fur clumsily cut short, pads up to Pearl and nudges her hand with its head. She goes to one knee and scritches the dog behind its ears, and its tongue lolls out of its mouth.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Pearl coos to the dog. “Did you take care of Martyn?”
Scott shifts nervously next to Cleo. “In here?” he asks. There’s a few doors in the hall, accessible by similar paths through the debris. In the dim, scattered light from Pearl’s torch, Cleo can make out loos, and a door marked Employees Only.
Pearl nods toward the last door and stands. “Right there. Tilly’s done a good job guarding the door, haven’t you? Yeah?” Tilly gets some more enthusiastic ear scratches. “Yeah, you have.”
Pearl and Tilly lead them into a small office with cinder-block walls and the same tiled floors. A few desks and ergonomic chairs have been stacked in one corner next to a minifridge. In another corner, a tall set of metal shelves overflows with nonperishable foods. There’s a hastily folded stack of towels on the floor, but most of the space is taken up by a makeshift bed, also towel-based. In it, underneath a shiny silver emergency blanket, lies a blond man who blinks awake when the light hits his face.
“Pearl?” he asks groggily. Moving gingerly, he props himself up on an elbow and scrubs at his eyes with his free hand, frowning when he sees the three of them in the doorway. “I—well, hello. Sorry, if I’d known we were having company, I’d have washed my hair.”
“This is Scott and Cleo,” Pearl says, apparently used to—whatever this is. She nudges them further inside before retrieving a cheap metal chair from the pile of furniture and shoving it underneath the doorknob. “Scott’s a nurse, he says he can help with your leg.”
“Oh, brilliant.” The man—Martyn, presumably—struggles the rest of the way upright, still covered from the waist down by the thin, crinkly blanket. His green hoodie is smudged with dirt. “I got really fucked up a few days ago—few zombies managed to break a window, you know how it goes—”
Cleo stiffens, hand moving automatically to the gun at their hip. Their eyes go from Martyn, to Pearl and Tilly, to the chair barring the door. Scott takes half a step, as to move to cover their back, but Martyn’s already shaking his head.
“It’s not a bite!” he hastens to clarify. “Not from one of them, I—” He cuts himself off with a rueful laugh, then winces. “I was sprinting through this place trying to find my gun, and the power was already out, and I tripped. All the shelves are—well, you saw. Something was sticking out, and it went right into my leg. Through my jeans. Got away, though, can’t complain all too much. Hurts like a bitch, though.”
Scott’s turn to wince as he kneels down next to the pallet, shifting to pull a small tube of hand sanitizer from his pocket and clean his hands. “Is it still bleeding?”
“Pretty sure, yeah. Not fast, but…” Martyn shrugs gingerly.
Scott hums, pushing the blanket back from Martyn’s leg. “Let me—hold on, is there a light?” Pearl hurries past Cleo, Tilly at her heels, and kneels down with the torch. “You should lie back down,” Scott tells Martyn. More rustling. Cleo takes a long look at the door and the flimsy chair wedged under the handle, and decides to move to the opposite corner of the room. Martyn’s eyes track her over Scott’s bowed head as she moves: when she leans up against the pile of desks and chairs, he looks deliberately at Pearl and Scott, huddled around him, then grins at her and shrugs like the two of them are in on something.
Scott hisses at whatever he sees, and Martyn’s eyes snap back to him. “Yeah, you—I mean, you’re sort of lucky, it missed all the really important things.”
“S’why I’m still alive, yeah?” Martyn gets a look at whatever Scott’s doing and goes pale, lying back with an arm tossed over his eyes. Cleo can see his jaw working, and wonders for a second where he managed to get chewing gum.
…Oh. Right.
Scott huffs out a laugh. “Yes, but, you—look, you really need stitches. And to clean it properly.”
Martyn’s jaw stops working.
“Can you do that?” Pearl asks.
Scott hesitates. “Not…here.” Martyn is still silent. “There’s probably surgical spirit around here somewhere, so maybe we could clean it, but—”
“We’ve got a first aid kit,” Pearl interrupts hopefully. “It might have tape?”
Scott shakes his head. “I—don’t think that’ll do it.”
Pearl is silent for a second. “Can you go and get—”
Scott sits back on his heels, worrying his lip between his teeth. Pearl looks at him; he looks at the ground. Martyn lifts his hand from his face and looks at Cleo. Cleo—
“There’s stuff at our flat, right?” Cleo says, surprising herself. Four faces (three human, one canine) turn towards her: Martyn shoots her a little conspiratorial grin.
“Er,” Pearl says, shifting on her knees. “So you could…get it and come back?”
“Do we have enough petrol?” Scott asks. Cleo doesn’t know what face she makes, exactly, but it seems to get the point across. “We’ve got to—there’s other things we have to do, and if we—yeah.”
Nobody seems to want to take the next step, but Cleo looks at the three—four—of them: Martyn, pale, hair lank and falling across the sweat shining on his forehead; Pearl, tense and skeletal, picking at the hem of her sweatshirt; Tilly, yellow eyes shining in the torch’s glow.
Scott, looking at them. Waiting for their call.
Fuck. Well, there’s really only one choice, right?
“You should come back with us,” Cleo says. “We’ve got space. Beds—er, sleeping bags. And we’ll have food now.”
They watch Pearl look around the small room with its cracked floor tiles. At Martyn, whose quips and grin can’t hide the tension around his eyes even Cleo has noticed whenever he moves. At Scott, with a flash of something curious in her eyes.
Cleo stifles a wince. Barking up the wrong tree, that one.
“Alright,” Pearl says, rising suddenly to her feet. “Let me show you lot where the water bottles and all the canned things are, and you can fill up those bags. You do have an opener at your flat, right?”