4: Present “Yes.” Dan managed. “But that was a long time ago.”
“I was going to tell Phillip about us. I really was.” Caryn gestured
with her hand. “I knew he wasn’t going to like it so I was waiting for
the right time. Then as time passed it just got worse and worse. I was
worried he was going to get angry or suspicious. I still can't believe
that I didn't say something at the time, even that I knew you before.”
“No, I understand.” Dan conceded “I didn’t say anything either. That
might have had something to do with the fact that I had just watched
your boyfriend sort-of kill about fifteen people.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
It was broken by Caryn standing up abruptly; pulling her arm away from
Dan she tugged most of the cover out of his grip. Sloppily she turned on
her heels then turned back and bent over him to place a kiss on his
forehead.
“Goodnight.” She whispered.
“See you tomorrow.” He returned.
After Caryn was gone he drank the rest of his beer.
He mulled over his and Caryn's relationship, it had been almost four
years since they had split up. It had been with good reason as well, he
wanted to blame the drinking or the smoking but the reality was that he
had been a pretty terrible person and had continued to be a terrible
person until he met Nu. As soon as he started thinking about her the
pain started, it seeped through his shoulders and down into his chest.
For a few seconds it was as if his ribs were trying to break out through
the skin, he was struggling to catch his breath. He took another drink
and the pain subsided, he took a few more and it went away completely.
“Go figure.” He muttered to himself.
He started to feel sleepy so he got up to go to bed, noting that there
was still some of the 'Medronho' left. He took the bottle with him and
sauntered down the stairs.
He lay down in his bed, too tired to take his clothes off, he took a
couple more swigs before drifting off he noted with some satisfaction,
that the sun was coming up.
“How are you doing?” Nufonia asked.
“What?” Dan managed, there seemed to be something trying to choke him.
There she was standing in front of him as she had looked on that day,
there was a sign above her, but the letters kept jumbling up, sometimes
they read SHINING STRIKE, and then it was BILL'S NILLS, and then Dan
couldn't tell.
“You look like you are in trouble.” She said quietly.
“I.... am.”Dan struggled, trying to get his breath.
“I need your help. I can't...” Nufonia hesitated.
“You can't?” Dan felt the tension around his neck increase.
Dan was woken by shouting. He reached out and tried to grasp on to the
image of Nufonia that had been in his head, his fingers snatched at air
and duvet. He gathered his senses as he realised he was in his bed under
his sheets and sweating heavily. Looking around he saw the empty bottle
of booze by his bed and the clock said 11AM. The shouting started
again.
“You lying bastard!”
The declaration had come from outside the flat.
At that exact moment his hangover kicked in and it was a devastating one.
“You fucking wanker, don't even try to lie to me, you cunt!” Dan
vaguely recognised Alison's voice. “Get the fuck away from me and go
fuck your whore!”
He winced as she continued to shout. It felt like
something had shoved nails underneath his skull and poured bleach on
his scalp. Alison continued to hurl abuse at, Dan presumed, Phil B.
Then he heard footfalls up the stairs.
It was then that his hang over really kicked in. A huge gloriously evil
pain started in the center of his skull and spread out until it was
sawing against the walls of his cranium like a million rusty, serrated
knives. Dan lay still as the pain changed its intent of just ripping all
the nerve endings in his brain apart and began to leak down his cheeks
and into his teeth causing him to tense up and grit his teeth, the
muscles in his neck tensed up.
He closed his eyes, but the agony
was there in the sockets of his eyeballs stretching out to his pupils
through the capillaries in the whites. Dan groaned as a door slammed
somewhere in the house. He couldn't understand why they were so loud. He
admitted that the hangover was bad but never as bad as to make sounds
so amplified.
Then the mattress sagged as something put weight on it.
It was one of his worst nightmares, to be caught off guard when the
zombies finally got into the house, countless times he had woken up
scared by images of being powerless as they bit and tore at him while he
lay in bed.
Dan flipped forward, his hangover forgotten, his
heart pumping he forced the creature on to the floor using the duvet as a
barrier between them. With a million thoughts pounding through his
mind, Dan was about to smack the thing in the head when it gave a squeal
of surprise and delight.
Panting, he scrambled back on to the bed. Staring down at the covered figure, Dan realised that it wasn't a zombie at all.
Jo's head appeared from under the covers. She gave him a doe-eyed look and an apologetic smile cut across her face.
“Sorry the doors were open.” She said picking herself up.
“... Yeah, sorry.” Dan said, trying to calm down.
She got up and handed him his duvet. He took it and lay back down; the
painful pins of his hangover were traveling to his gut now as well. He
pulled the cover up to his chin and looked up at Jo a little
pathetically.
“Poor baby,” she sat down next to him, and fussed with his hair, “too much to drink?”
Dan nodded, finding that, despite himself, he was enjoying the feel of her soft fingers on his brow.
“So,” she started casually. “What did you do last night? Apart from get drunk.”
“Nothing really, you?” He managed.
He looked up at her; through his fingers he could make out that she was
giving him her demure act, part blushing modesty, part devilish
knowing. She maintained that smile and squinted her eyes as she regarded
him.
“Not much.” She finally answered.
She leaned forward and pulled down his covers a bit.
“You're still dressed.” She commented her grin unwavering.
“I didn't know I was supposed to take anything off.” He replied.
Her eyes widened, the first time he had seen that expression he had
mistaken it for a look of shock, as if she was saying 'I can't believe
you would suggest that!'. Now he knew better, it was her delighting in
what she was now entertaining.
“I read somewhere.” She
stopped to take off her top. “That the old excuse of having a headache
is bollocks and that having sex is the best antidote for them.”
“Really?” He couldn't hold back a smile.
She got up and closed his bedroom door.
“Yup.”
“I don't believe you.”
“Well it is something we should put to the test.” Her bra was off now.
“What about Orfax and Jocelyn?”
She stiffened slightly, he knew he shouldn't have said it but he
couldn't have helped it. She relaxed again and started to unbuckle her
belt.
“You can be an arsehole when you want to, can't you?” She said a little stiffly, her smile twitched.
He wanted to apologise, but wasn’t sure what to say.
“Is that it?” Her smile starting to fade.
“I just thought.” He searched for the words but realised he wasn’t sure
what he thought, why he had even said what he had said in the first
place.
She turned away and started putting on her bra, muttering
under her breath. Dan sat up and reached for her, she snapped her arm
away from his hand.
“Do you know what?” Jo turned to look at him.
He looked at her, still unable to articulate.
“Ugh, of course you don’t have anything to say. You are too busy thinking about her aren’t you?” Jo snapped.
“No.”
“I miss her too.” Jo said finding her top. “However, I am trying to move on.”
Jo left the room, slamming the door. Dan rolled over and let the hangover swallow him up.
The
barbecue was to start late afternoon, Dan managed to get upstairs by
three to find that things had already begun to roll. The fire had been
abandoned and the group was now taking advantage of a self-contained
portable drum barbecue. Jay stood over it and basted the items with
something he proclaimed as his secret recipe.
Orfax and Jo showed
about 40 minutes later. Orfax was looking more sober than he had in
days. Everyone started to sit down as food was served. Dan dumped
himself down between Caryn and Oli and tucked into a non-descript meat.
Oli patted him on the shoulder.
“Hey, how's it going?”
The comment grated, as it always did when Dan was hungover, he always
found it miraculous how such an innocent question could make him gnash
his teeth, maybe because he had heard it a thousand times.
“Not bad.” Dan managed to smile. “Did you sleep okay?”
“A bit cold, but not bad.” Oli smiled, his attention swayed as Duck
walked onto the roof. “Now excuse me, if you know what I mean.”
“No offense taken.” Dan said.
The sun was out and he kind of liked it, he took a few, tentative bites
of the heavily condimented meat. He looked across at Jo who was making a
fuss of Orfax. At first he thought the whole thing seemed a little
exaggerated and it dawned on him that she was pointedly not looking at
him. This was her way of saying ‘fuck you’.
Likewise Alison and
Phil B. were clearly not talking, something to do with the morning's
argument, no one bothered to inquire. This was a regular occurrence; the
idea of trying to pry was stupid. Caryn had once attempted to talk to
Alison after a severe encounter that had earned her a string of
vitriolic abuse.
Philip got up and started handing around cigars to
everyone who would take one. He came up to Dan with a big grin, it was
obvious he had been drinking, and stuck one in Dan's mouth.
Dan
mused, as Philip lit the cheroot, to assume that Philip had been
drinking was like saying that the sun would follow the moon.
Puffing slowly on the wad in his mouth, Dan grabbed a beer from the
table and went and sat on the edge of the roof and looked down. He could
remember the mounting horror that he had felt a few weeks after they
had sealed off the ground floor forever and he had looked down from the
same point, the view had been similar. Around three hundred zombies
teemed around the building, and maybe a hundred more wandered the
square. At the time Dan had felt like he was going to throw up with how
scared he was, he never would have believed that he might have been able
curl up a lump of phlegm in his mouth, spit and smile as it spiraled in
the coastal winds and eventually disappeared into the mass of hands and
faces below him.
Dan took another puff of the cigar and curled it
around his tongue and thought about Gray as he looked at the stragglers
joining the main body surrounding their house. Poor old Gray had thought
that the things used smell to track the living. Dan wasn’t so sure.
Zombies were different from dogs and the like; they didn’t raise their
noses to the wind and sniff out things at least not in a knowing
fashion. It was something that he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't
been around them for as long as he had. They seemed to move by feeling,
by waves of instinct and electricity, almost like there was a pulse
going through them. He and the others had watched part in awe and part
in dismay the first time they had seen hundreds of undead appear from
underneath the tide at Brighton beach. The horde then marched up the
stones and filtered into the streets, an hour or two later another group
walked back into the sea. Jocelyn had commented that they looked like
tortoises coming up to lay their eggs during mating season. George had
reasoned that maybe they were seasonal. There were weeks where there
were more of them, too many to go out. Then, apparently randomly almost
all but a few dozen would leave. At first Dan and the others had thought
it might be that the creatures had gotten bored, or that another target
had come into the vicinity. Some of the house (the really hopefully)
still believed that there was a chance that this was true, Dan didn't
know anymore. He imagined that, maybe, they had some kind of schedule,
like a zombie Easter, Christmas, summer solstice, Hanukkah, whatever;
that they had some kind set dates for things that ran on completely
different time scale. George had agreed with Dan’s observations. Before
he had been killed, George had drunkenly talked about the idea that they
were somehow following vibrations or sounds and that was why they moved
about with the sea. Thoughts like that hadn’t done George any good
though.
Dan looked away from the seething crowds below him as someone put some music on, it was quiet and sad.
He took a swig of his beer and looked down on the zombies five stories
below again, reaching, clasping for where they were. Dan felt himself
shudder uncontrollably as he remembered the time he had almost been
bitten; the creature had broken its teeth on the steel toe cap of his
boot. Even so he had felt the pressure, the power that an old lady of
eighty could never have possessed in her life clamping down on his shoe.
A couple more inches and it would have been him down in that crowd with
Denny-
“You alright man?” Phil B. sat down next to him.
“I think so.” Dan managed, trying not to think about that old lady
that he had mercilessly beaten, no matter how dead she had already been.
“Just hungover. You know how it gets when you drink; it is like the
weight of the world is on your shoulders.”
“Yeah.” Phil
B. looked in Alison's direction, she was pointedly ignoring him. “I
know what you mean. Everything smells wrong as well.”
Dan smiled, clamping down on the cigar as he did.
“Look,” Phil started but then hesitated.
“What?” Dan asked.
“Well, me and Alison talked about this last week when all this shit
wasn't going on.” Phil B. seemed to be picking his words. “Well, it’s
just that living here is great, we like it here, and we like you guys...
It’s nothing personal. But me and Alison are thinking about moving on.”
“Okay.” Dan responded, unsure why he was being told this.
Then as Phil B. started speaking Dan realised what he meant.
“Well I know Craig will come too, that is, if we go.” Phil B stumbled
around his sentence as if looking for the right words. “Well, there'll
be a spare seat.”
“Do you think that Philip will let you
go?” Dan asked, dabbing the cigar ash off the edge of the building. He
took a swig of beer; it tasted mildly of the cheroot.
“It's not his choice, is it?”
“He won't be happy.”
“You reckon.” Dan couldn't decide if Phil B. was making a statement or posing a question.
“Why are you asking me?” Dan asked. “I know that there is a reason, but
surely there is someone else, other than me who is more likely to want
to go.”
“Surely you can see this situation is fucked.”
“I had noticed that the world was infested with zombies, yes.” Dan almost caught himself smiling.
“You know what I mean.” Phil B. poked him jokingly but it didn't feel
like much of a joke. Dan had been here at the beginning of the house, he
couldn't imagine leaving before the end.
The music changed, something heavy, like late eighties metal, Pantera maybe.
Dan looked down at the fans and waved.
“Phil it isn't going to happen, I'm not leaving.”
“We can't just stay here though.”
“Why not?”
“There might be more people out there, somewhere safer, with a better food supply.”
“I'm not sure I believe there is anywhere else, that there is anyone else, not anymore.”
As
if in response to Dan, a car appeared on the main road, plowed into a
bunch of stragglers dawdling on the tarmac; it then careered onto the
pavement and into the rail that cordoned off the upper level of the
beach.
Perfect timing, Dan thought.
