“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.
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