Gerald

It would seem that being trapped in an upstairs flat amidst a zombie holocaust is not enough of a head fuck for me. To add an extra dimension of weirdness to my situation the internal clock on this website has gone haywire.

Yesterday was 21/6/07. According to this site, today is 27/6/07. I’ve effectively lost a week.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky that this blog site even exists. Everywhere else on the net is gone: Google, the BBC homepage, Reuters. This was the only page that would load from my bookmark folder. I have no idea if it’s being maintained by actual people or if the whole thing is running on automatic from some isolated server. I’ve mailed tech support several times and received zero response.

Early evening is fading into night. The sky outside is a morbid grey. The clouds are so low they seem ready to collapse into the earth. I’m surprised at the lack of rain.

Outside I can hear the wind ripping through the leaves of the fallen tree, even with the window closed. The undead dispersed about midnight, shuffled off to do whatever the fuck it is they do. Hunting for other survivors I suppose. At one point there were 30 or more of them gathered around the tree, all swaying out of sync with each other and moaning. God, the moans! I found myself moaning along with them at one point. It was so disgustingly infectious and terrifying at the same time.

I need to talk about Gerald. That was how this siege really began.

After the nightmare of Stockport Road I swerved down a side street. I was literally a minute away from my flat in Levenshulme. All about me was chaos. People were running from burning houses, running away from groups of zombies, being torn apart by the things in their front gardens. I’ve never seen so much blood, so much mutilation.

A girl stumbled into the road at one point clutching both hands to her face. I swerved to avoid her but not before she took her hands away and I saw that the skin had been ripped down from her hairline to her upper lip. The top half of her skull was exposed to the air; her eyes bulged from their sockets and the gristle of her nose flapped loosely above her mouth. I could clearly see the ropes of her cheek muscles – they were stretching and contracting as she tried to scream. It would have been better if I’d knocked her down.

I managed to turn on to Slade Lane without being mobbed by zombies. I took a left on to Albert Road, narrowly missing an overturned truck, and pulled up outside the flat.

Albert Road was unnervingly quiet in comparison to the surrounding streets. There were no undead in sight but a car was burning in a driveway several doors down from my house. I opened the car door and ran for the flat. My bowels loosened as I left the comparative safety of the car and I looked around for a weapon, any weapon. Nothing useful presented itself so I dashed up the driveway. Then I stopped dead.

The flat is in an old terrace house, split into two. I live upstairs, Gerald lives…lived…downstairs. The front door opens onto a tiny hallway with a door to the left leading into Gerald’s place and a door directly ahead leading up to my flat. The front door was wide open but this was not what stopped me in my tracks. The bay window, Gerald’s living room window, was smashed. The curtains had been ripped from the fitting and I could see right into Gerald’s flat.

He was in there. He had his back to me. I knew it was him because he was wearing his favorite Carcass t-shirt.

Gerald was rocking gently from side to side. His head was bobbing up and down erratically. His whole body language seemed unnatural and with the benefit of hindsight I never would have done what I did next.

I ran through the open front door. The door to Gerald’s flat was also open so I peeked in. The living room was in disarray. The floor was littered with DVDs and books, an armchair was lying on its side in a corner and a plate of food had been dashed against the wall. I inched my way into the room.

As the room opened out I saw Gerald again, closer now. He still had his back to me. His hands were in front of his face. This posture, combined with the bobbing head, made it seem as though Gerald was sobbing. I discarded this theory when I heard the noise – a soft squelch followed by a tiny crack.

‘Gerald?’ I kept my voice low, snuck a glance over my shoulder through the broken window.

Gerald froze at the sound of my voice.

‘Gerald, we need to go somewhere safe. My flat. The world’s gone fucking crazy…’

He began to turn towards me. He moved like a drunk, pivoting on one foot while the other did all the work. I glanced at his feet and that was when I saw the pool of blood between his legs. Unidentified chunks of God knows what floated on the surface.

Gerald’s face appeared in profile. His cheek was marble white but splashed with a butterfly stain of garish red. As he turned further in my direction I could see what his hands were doing.

Gerald owned a small dog. A terrier called Hercules. I hated the fucking thing – yap, yap, yap and if you were lucky a bite on the hand whenever you tried to stroke him. Gerald was holding the dog in both hands. What was left of it anyway.

Hercules was sprouting guts. They hung in thin, pathetic grey loops from his ruptured stomach, black beads of liquid oozing down their lengths. Gerald had chewed away most of Hercules’ snout; a dark glistening hole sat below the animal’s staring eyes. One of Hercules’ ears was plastered to Gerald’s chin with sticky thick blood. The dog’s tiny body spasmed wildly – I have no idea if Hercules was still alive or if he had reanimated while Gerald was eating him.

As soon as Gerald locked eyes on me he dropped Hercules and lunged forward, arms outstretched. He let out a keening, hungry moan which turned my legs to jelly. I stumbled backwards and tripped. My head hit something solid and everything went black.

…... …

A cold sensation in my big toe woke me up.

I lifted my head as far as it would go which wasn’t far due to the pounding sensation behind my eyes. When my vision cleared I saw Gerald crouched at my feet. The shoe and sock on my left foot had been removed. Gerald was slowly lowering his mouth over the toe. His breath was like ice.

I panicked and by pure fluke managed to twist my body to the side and away before he took his first bite. I rolled across the carpet on my stomach and desperately tried to regain my footing. Gerald let out a cheated groan and staggered after me. His fish white hands, fingers hooked and wicked sharp, clutched at me as I back pedaled across the carpet on my arse.

I shuffled through the archway that led into the kitchen. Gerald’s face loomed over me as he crawled along in pursuit. He was grinning. Strands of dog-gut clung to his teeth. His eyes were bleached of all colour as though they had been replaced with egg whites. I could see a gaping wound in his neck, exposed flesh hanging in ragged shreds, where whoever had turned him had feasted.

My hands waved around for something, anything, to protect me from the horror creeping up between my knees. My fingers skimmed over the sticky surface of the kitchen floor, seeking, grasping, until they finally met something solid. I wrapped my fingers around whatever it was and brought the object down on to Gerald’s head as hard as I could.

Blind luck had granted me the gift of a saucepan - a big, heavy fucker.

The first blow bounced off the side of Gerald’s head and sent him reeling. This gave me time to grip my new weapon properly. It was one of those stainless steel affairs all single men have, pockmarked with age but capable of denting titanium if required. I grabbed it by the handle and staggered to my feet.

Gerald was rolling around on the floor in a daze.

I waited for him to climb up to his knees and turn his face towards me. I planted my feet solidly on the kitchen floor and looked down at him.

‘Sorry Gerald.’

My next blow dented his forehead. The impact sent shudders along my wrist. Gerald fell on to his back and stared vacantly at the ceiling, his fingers clutching spasmodically at nothing. I crouched over him and raised the saucepan over my head, the handle gripped in both hands. The second blow collapsed his nose, the third split his skull. The fourth produced a spray of greyish red tendrils which I took to be brains. I noticed a smell and thought, ‘Gerald’s brain smells like shit. So that’s what a brain smells like’. It was only later that I realised the smell was coming from me. Without noticing I had soiled myself for the first time as an adult.

A strange calm overtook me. I continued slamming the heavy base of the saucepan down on to Gerald’s head until only a thick bony paste remained. When I was done, nothing that could be called ‘Gerald’ was left. His body from the neck up was a nightmare rendered in mutilated flesh and bone.

After a while (who knows how long?) I dragged myself out of Gerald’s flat and closed the door. I also closed the front door to the house. Albert Road was still free of the undead. Nothing attacked me as I secured the place. I opened the door to my own flat, locked and bolted it behind me. Then I filled the stairwell leading up to my home with every heavy object I could find: An oak bookcase, an armchair, a table, five stools, a wardrobe. Somehow I found the strength to lift these things and place them down in the stairwell as securely as possible. All the time I could hear my mother’s name repeating over and over as though someone just behind my ear was calling for her.

When the last item was placed on the barricade I stopped and listened. It was me calling for my mother. I'd failed to recognise my own voice.

The Change

Last night was one of the calmest nights I’ve experienced since everything changed.

I’m not sure if revisiting this blog made a difference. Maybe I just needed to start writing it all down. They say things are put into perspective if you write out all your problems. I certainly slept better last night but I’m unconvinced that this was a result of typing my thoughts into a computer. I suspect the lack of explosions and screams helped more.

The silence of last night unnerves me. Has the city finally succumbed? Am I the last person alive? How long will I survive?

At least I got some decent sleep.

I’m hungry again. It’s hard to concentrate on writing when your stomach is asking if your throat has been cut. The boiled rice and mushy peas seem like a year ago. I only allow myself to eat once a day. I tend to make dinner before bed because it makes me sleepy.

My neighbour, Gerald, used to make a mean chili. I know how to make a mean chili myself but Gerald’s chili was something else. He never told me his secret ingredient and now he never will...

Gerald.

It happened like this…

…FUCK!

…………

A tree just fell over behind the house. A giant oak. Felt like a bomb had been dropped on me for a second there. I looked out the window and spotted four of the undead heading for the tree. Do they eat plant life? I hope the noise doesn’t attract more of them. What the fuck happened to the tree?

Anyway, Gerald.

It was a Thursday. Usual boring day at the office. Same old people, same old tasks. I first noticed something was different when I went out for lunch.

I was faced with the same dilemma as always. Should I buy a Greggs pasty, a sandwich from Fresh n Tasty, or wander round Asda to gaze at the fruit and veg meaningfully and then buy a pot noodle?

That day I decided on Asda. Except Asda appeared to be in a state of emergency. People were running away from the place. Five police cars, two riot vans and three ambulances sat in the car park. The alarm system was going haywire .

I approached a police officer (except he had a blue band round his hat which means he was a ‘community support officer’) and asked what the problem was.

He told me in no uncertain terms to mind my own business and go away. I took his advice but not before I saw people being carted out of Asda on stretchers, some of them bleeding quite heavily from various parts of their bodies. I also saw real coppers, armed with automatic rifles, heading towards the building.

This got my mind in a twist. What was going on here?

I forgot lunch and headed back to work.

My manager was waiting outside when I arrived. The building was locked. Everyone appeared to be gone. I asked what was going on and he told me that the company was implementing its Business Continuity Plan.

I asked him what our Plan was.

He told me to go home and lock all the doors.

…………

So that’s what I did. I went home.

The drive back was a nightmare. Twice, stuck at traffic lights, people tried to get inside my car. The first was an old man with blood pouring from a cut in his cheek. The other was an eastern European woman clutching a baby to her breast. The woman was worse. She kept screaming, ‘Nekem! Nekem!’ The baby was silent but I’m sure I saw red seeping through the blanket it was wrapped in.

I kept the doors locked both times and drove on. By now my heart was fucking pounding.

Then I got to Longsight and the situation stepped up a gear.

Stockport Road was a scene from a war movie. A 192 bus had fishtailed across the entire road. A huge double decker with the front end embedded in a butcher’s shop and the back end in flames. Smoke was billowing into the sky. People were running around screaming. Some of them were on fire. I saw more community support officers trying to keep the peace. They were failing dismally, and not just because of the panic. It was because of the walking corpses.

This was my first experience of them. The undead. The fucking zombies. Whatever you want to call them.

They were easy to spot. They looked like people but they moved like puppets from an old stop motion film. I watched a man try to help a girl by lifting her up out of the road. She was lying on her side next to the bus. He almost had her upright when three of these things gathered round him and beat him to the concrete. The three zombies bent over the guy and for a second there was nothing. Then there was a scream which I’ll never forget.

Their arms began to work furiously, elbows pumping. I saw droplets of blood at first, flying over their heads in ever increasing waves. Then a bluish tube appeared and flopped onto the road. A flood of dark liquid followed. I’ve never seen a person's insides before. The three undead bent their heads and started to bite chunks out of him. I saw one of them bite his cheek off. The girl he had tried to help just stared, her face blank.

Someone ran towards my car. It was another living person, a little boy. He was about 12. His small fists hammered on the driver’s side door and I could hear him shouting for me to let him in. I could only focus on the other sounds around me, the horrible scene unfolding right in front of me. Sirens, screams, a crashing thump as the roof of the butcher’s shop caved in.

Then a screeching sound behind me. I glanced back at the boy just in time to see him vanish underneath the car that had almost broadsided me. The car was doing at least eighty and the driver tried to brake as it approached the burning bus. It didn’t work. The car spun sideways and flipped over on to the man who was being eaten.

I had one second, at most, to think 'Shit!’ before the car slammed into the bus and both vehicles exploded. The resulting mushroom cloud blew out all the windows within a 20 meter radius.

That was enough for me. I got the fuck out of there.

…………

It’s late. I’m starving.

I feel too sketchy to deal with Gerald tonight. If I don’t eat I’m going to throw up. With so little in my stomach to regurgitate I may lose a lung.

There are more of them around the tree that fell earlier. They’re not doing anything, just standing near the torn up roots and swaying. I hope they go away soon. I need to eat and get some sleep. The thought of those monsters walking around just outside the garden wall makes me very nervous.

That reminds me, I need to check the barricades before I make dinner.

Food etc...

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I suppose that’s not surprising, all things considered.

Food has become a problem. There is a distinct lack of the stuff. The cupboard is growing bare rapidly and it means one thing - either I go outside or I starve to death.

I suppose I’m lucky in some respects. The electricity is still working otherwise I’d be stumbling around in the dark. The gas also works so I’m able to cook.

Unlike the food, which I can account for, I have no idea how much longer the gas or electricity will stay on and the water could go at any time. The city looks darker each night when I look out the window. There are fewer pools of light out there, fewer signs of other survivors. Fuck…

I can’t do this.

Sometimes I shit myself.

I wake up and I feel that horrible warmth in my boxers and I know it’s happened again. Thankfully I’ve only done it once while awake. That happened right at the start, when the world went insane.

When I look out at the city 20 metres below me, the window cracked open to the night, I like to think nothing has happened. Everything seems so peaceful. No traffic, no drunken shouts, no sirens. Just silence.

Then I hear a moan or the dull thud of a wheelie bin toppling. Sometimes I hear a scream…or the liquid sound. The ripping sound is the worst. I cry every time I hear it.

I need to calm down.

……………

Calm.

I think I can tell it now.

One day I was a normal person, doing a boring job, the next I was beating my neighbour to death with a saucepan.

Let me elaborate: the world ended. Strange creatures, most probably undead human beings, invaded the city and began to systematically eat everyone and anyone alive. I assume they were zombies because the ones I saw looked rotten as fuck and the way they ripped people apart…well, it was a bit of a giveaway.

I don’t want to involve myself in a circular argument about the causes of the Apocalypse, and as I’m effectively writing to myself on this blog I’m going to continue with my undead / zombie theory until proved otherwise. If you don’t like it then you can kiss my shit-ridden pants.

Or you can post comments.

I need to eat something now. Its getting dark outside and I need to check the barricades. I hope they don’t hear me checking tonight. They always try to break in when they know I’m here. Luckily they have short memories.