When The Dead Walked Read online

  When The Dead Walked

  ◆◆◆

  A Living/Dead Novella

  CCH Whillock

  “When the dead walked, I was…”

  A person makes meticulous plans for survival with their dog; a young couple drives into a service station in the throes of an argument; and a woman tries to pass the time in an underground bunker built by her mother.

  It is now known that only 1% of all people ever succumbed to the virus colloquially known as ‘The Infection’, a small number when thought of as nothing more than a simple statistic.

  However, the devastation was not – as evil things tend not to be – spread evenly among all people. Some communities, towns, cities, countries even, were affected terribly, while others went unscathed. Whole neighbourhoods could turn into blood-thirsty cannibals incapable of basic thought, while a street only a mile away might have a limited number of casualties, if any.

  The salvation of each place was down to the response of the government, the strength of character of the people involved, and – most importantly – luck.

  Though debates still rage in high courts questioning the sanctity of life for those who remain infected, the fact remains: in those early days, it was kill-or-be-killed.

  The title of this collection, ‘When The Dead Walked’, is drawn from a much-maligned short fiction competition held in the ashes of The Infection. It was an insensitive, aborted cash-in by a national bank (who shall go unnamed here) who thought they could spark some form of healing through creativity, while also reminding consumers about their brand.

  To speculate in a fictitious way when there is so much first-hand testament seems in poor taste.

  These are some of the first accounts of The Infection in the United Kingdom. Stories from those who survived, ephemera from those who did not.

  - CCH Whillock

  Copyright © 2019 by CCH Whillock

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover image by Charles Deluvio

  Cover design and all illustrations by CCH Whillock

  When The Dead Walked

  Seventeen days in a Glasgow flat

  Day 16

  The dog, like all dogs, has a routine comprised of three basic needs: to eat, to exercise, and to go to the toilet. To an extent, I am the same, which is why it has been hard keeping both me and him healthy and alive while trapped in this building I can adjust: limit my activity, my food intake, my bathroom habits.

  But he can’t.

  He won’t.

  And, he doesn’t understand why he would ever have to.

  If it wasn’t for his sake, I’m not sure I would be facing the horrors outside head-on like I have been.

  I never liked going outside of my building, so the fact that it’s impossible now doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve seen what happens out there, even before the infection. That doesn’t mean I’m entirely self-sufficient, of course. And it certainly doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely, or sad. If it wasn’t for the dog I probably would have thrown myself out of a window a long time ago.

  The dog doesn’t know what’s going on, which is good. It would be hard for me to try and explain it to him anyway – and believe me – I often think about how I would explain human things to him.

  Before I figured out his toilet situation I had to try to get him to do his business in the flat on a piece of newspaper. He’s not a cat, so it’s not second nature, and I was also trying to break years of housetraining.

  That’s why I wished I could explain what was going on, so he would play ball with me. Not literally, of course. There’s no time for that.

  Plus, it would be too noisy. I’ve stripped rugs and carpet from every flat that I’ve been in so far, and covered every floorboard in the flat. I’m trying to keep the noise down in here, but the dog doesn’t won’t hear of it. He careens around any given room, smashing his wagging tail on the hollow walls and jumping, all four paws in the air like he’s trying to deliver a dropkick to an invisible opponent. But I can’t tell him what’s going on, or ask him to walk softly, so I have to instead hush the clickity-clack of his little toenails as they march up and down the corridor every morning.

  And I have to keep him calm, that’s the main thing. Nice and calm, even if that means sitting down with him for precious minutes at a time. Giving him a treat but letting him know it’s only when he stops jumping for it.

  It was those kinds of noises, the ones he makes when he’s not calm, that brought the first one to my door.

  It was the second day when it happened. I had thought myself safe after the first night, because I knew the front door to the building was shut, and I hadn’t heard anybody in the hall up until then. If my neighbours were still indoors, they had stayed inside their flats, for better or worse.

  I had been very quiet up until then. I was relatively settled: there was still electricity and running water, and I could see occasional shimmers out of the window that, on reflection, may have been people signalling. The lift was out of order and had been for weeks. It had ground to a halt on my floor with its doors jammed open. I’m on the top floor, up ten flights of stairs, so I didn’t think that when I went to the peephole that morning, I would be eye-to-eye with one of them.

  He was a young guy, freshly turned, a red mark around his neck like a collar but barely a scratch otherwise. He looked like he was half-dressed for work, which meant he didn’t blow in off the street.

  I didn’t recognise him, and I had already made a mental map of everyone who lives in my building. That’s what I do, I try to plan things meticulously, rationally. The map looked like this (from first flat to last flat on each floor):

  5th Floor: An empty flat; my flat; an Irish couple who seemed nice enough.

  4th Floor: Eastern European guy with two kids; two students who smoke weed out of their window; one annoyed older gentleman who smashes a broom on his ceiling from time to time.

  3rd Floor: Ghanaian family who are always moving furniture in and out; empty; Lady with two little girls who are afraid of the dog.

  2nd Floor: Turkish guy who held the door for me when I moved in; another Turkish family who own the coffee shop at the end of the road; empty

  1st Floor: Handsome white couple who love fussing with the dog whenever they see him; an older gentleman who I only saw once before; empty (presumably). Note – the first floor also has a doorway to a courtyard shared with all the buildings.

  So, this new guy was a bit of an anomaly – as far as I was concerned he didn’t belong to any of the flats in my map. He knew I was there, for sure. And, because it was near breakfast time, and he hadn’t done a shit yet, the dog was going hog wild behind me, smashing into the shoe rack and spilling the contents. That just incensed the guy behind the door. The fact that he couldn’t use the door handle gave me comfort, because it meant that anybody in my building who wasn’t out in the corridor was likely sealed in until I was ready to go and explore a bit more. Of course, during this initial encounter, my urge to ‘explore a bit more’ was somewhere around ‘none’.

  Confronting half-dressed guy in the hallway was the first time I had ever, truly fought for my life.

  Today is a special day, because today I have cleared my penultimate flat. As per my map, every day starting from day three (which, as I mentioned, gave me two, long, silent days filled with anxiety and denial), I have been moving, one flat at a time, around my building. Because each flat is an exact copy of the one directly above it, I know intimately the layout of all of the ones in my flat position on every floor. After going into my fif
th floor neighbours’ flats, I got to know their layouts well too.

  Now, obviously, everyone has a different layout, but for flats in this economic bracket there’s really only so many ways to orient IKEA furniture (and I should know, I built a lot of the stuff when I first moved in). What that meant is that there was only ever going to be a finite number of people inside, and I wouldn’t let myself be cut off from the door, or jumped on from some hiding place that I hadn’t considered.

  I started on day three with the one I knew was definitely empty, at the end of my corridor. Give myself a little easy win, I thought. No infected people in an empty flat, are there? Plus, it was probably the nicest one in the building due to the fact the landlord had it professionally cleaned when the girl left. Poor girl, she was only gone a day or two before this all started. I hope she got her flight back home, and is far away from this all.

  What I didn’t count on was the amount of noise it would take to break down a locked door, even one as flimsy as those in my building. After working on it for longer than I care to admit, the frame split loudly and I almost fell inside.

  That’s when the couple at the other end of the hall, the Irish couple in the third flat along, started to scratch at the ir door. I knew then that they’d turned, and I was surprised to find that my immediate thoughts were not about them, but rather about their own dog. It was a mean, vicious little brown mutt, shivering with rage whenever it encountered a human or another dog, and that meant they barely took it outside.

  If they were gone, what had happened to the poor thing?

  Back to the empty flat: I don’t know why I expended so much energy trying to get into what I already knew had nothing inside of it. In my head, I thought it would be a perfect place into which I could expand my living situation. It wasn’t. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in there apart from a bin, and other than a toilet there was nothing I could use. There was a curious assortment of items on the kitchen counter: an old pot of potpourri, a broken digital clock, a few pens, and a bag of lightbulbs. At that point I didn’t even know if the electricity would stay on much longer, and I wasn’t in the habit of switching on the ceiling lights anyway.

  This promised land, which took me all day to get into, turned out to be fairly useless. It was cold too. You don’t realise, until you take all of the furniture out, quite how objects and items and life increase the temperature of a room.

  I ended up letting the dog shit and piss in there. That was no mean feat. After a quick rest, I had to coax the dog in to one of the empty rooms and stand there for a long time until he finally couldn’t hold it anymore.

  When a dog does a shit, it looks straight at you with the most pathetic expression you’ll ever see. But it’s a look that is instantly recognisable as one of kinship, like you’re supposed to protect it somehow.

  I was rather hoping, in situations like this, it would be the other way around. Every dog owner privately – sometimes publicly – wonders if their pet is going to protect them in a deadly situation. Up until then, I hadn’t seen anything that convinced me of this. In fact, the more information I gathered about my circumstances, the more I wanted him away from any and all danger.

  Seeing that he wasn’t being chastised for going to the toilet indoors, he took to it more easily the next time. I started by picking it up as I would if I were outside, with a bag around my hand.

  I’m very paranoid about getting excrement on my hands. One day, long before this all happened, I was so sure that somehow shit had got into a small cut on my finger, and I was convinced I’d contracted some nasty bacterial infection. I started planning for the removal of my finger then and there.

  But, that was me being melodramatic. But I have also been known to be careless and actually touched the poop directly. And sometimes (possibly worst of all), I’ve done everything as carefully as possible, and still ended up with a hand covered in poop. There's no such thing as a perfect system.

  Anyway, at that point, standing in the empty flat, I still wasn’t opening windows for fear of making too much noise. Instead, I put it in the bin that was there, which thankfully had a lid. I knew it would start smelling at some point, but I didn’t have too much choice. I didn’t want to flush it; I didn’t know how much longer the water would last, and I didn’t want to contaminate any of it.

  When I found out that my next door neighbours had turned, I knew that there was probably no hope for anybody else in the building. The first night after I had begun to explore, and heard their deathless scratchings at their front door, I did not sleep at all. I closed my eyes and I saw a cross-section of my building: fifteen flats all in darkness, but fourteen of them lit only by wide, hungry eyes all turned inwards on me, top-middle, as I quivered under the covers of my bed.

  When I got into the next flat along the next day, I found it had been unlocked the whole time. It shocked me how little truly separated us in the end, but I was also glad that the doors all opened inwards.

  I found that my neighbours’ dog had not lived. It was the first thing they had killed when they had turned. Despite the gruesome situation, it seemed preferable to having a possibly infected dog to deal with. I didn’t know what qualities the virus would affect in the neighbours’ dog, particularly given how aggressive it had been when completely healthy. I hope it died quickly.

  The man of the couple had done most of the damage in the flat, to the dog but also to his partner. What was left of her had also turned but was immobilised, meaning that I only had to deal with one moving target.

  It was harder than I thought it would be; with the half-dressed guy in the hallway (after some panicked deliberation) I had opted for a hammer – literally the strongest, most destructive thing in my flat. Hectic and clumsy, I eventually prevailed, as I did with the neighbour now.

  But something bad happened anyway.

  When I broke into the Irish couple’s flat, the dog was off the lead, and I wasn’t able to intervene in time to see him take a big bite out of the man’s body. He didn’t even stop to consider the scene, he just raced in with his jaws open. He smelt something he could eat, and that was that. I pulled him away while simultaneously trying to fell the man, who was quite a bit bigger than me, but sluggish thanks to the infection.

  The sight of the dog eating my neighbours disturbed me more than anything.

  This dog is incredibly food-motivated. I have seen him go for seagull bones and fox shit; anything pungent enough is irresistible. I can’t count the number of times he’s crunched something inappropriate – an old piece of fried chicken or a green slice of bread – and I’ve sat worried for hours after each occasion, fretting about the state of his insides. To see him eat infected flesh, that feeling came back one hundred times. I knew it would be a death sentence for him.

  As soon as I had dealt with all immediate threats, I shut the dog in one of the rooms in the empty flat at the end of the hallway, and waited for him to inevitably turn. I felt like I had failed as an owner.

  I felt angry at him, for being so disobedient, for hindering my progress more than he had helped it. But mostly, I was angry at myself, for not taking precautions, not protecting him from himself. I knew he had been longing for a taste for some days now, by the way he strained for the body of half-dressed guy (who I had stashed in the lift) every time we walked past it.

  Another feeling struck me, at the same time as this shame and guilt and anger: surprise.

  Surprise at his willingness to eat people.

  As a dog owner you often wonder, if you were both trapped, how long after you died it would take for your dog to eat you. Having seen my dog rummage through bin bags as though they were a gourmet meal, I had always said to people that he would wait pretty much until I had hit the floor, and not a second longer. Maybe loyalty would stretch out that timeframe, but probably not.

  What was worse: it had only been four days at this point, but it had dawned on me that, despite his irritating routines and constant noise-making, the dog wa
s the only thing I had that resembled a companion during this trying time.

  I had to shut out all thoughts and wait for the inevitable. So, I turned to dissecting my neighbours’ flat for anything useful.

  They had laid out all of their pots and pans on the floor in the kitchen. I realised that they had been making preparations to go to the roof and collect rainwater. Our building’s roof is mostly flat, accessible by a hatch in the corridor ceiling. The pots and pans struck me as a remarkably clever idea, and I made a mental note to find a ladder before the water ran out.

  I threw the bodies of the neighbours, their dog, and the half-dressed guy out of the living room window in my neighbours’ flat.

  I don’t know why.

  I suppose I wasn’t thinking clearly, I was too distressed. The flesh was too tempting for the crowds below, and I have no idea if any of them saw me do it. They wandered over and gathered at the foot of the building, eating until there was nothing left. I dragged one of my neighbours’ stained armchairs into the corridor and used it to create a small blockade against the stairwell door. All the while, I could hear the dog whining at the other end of the corridor.

  I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess in the neighbour’s flat. I found some sponges and scrubbed all the spots I could manage, sprayed air freshener and disinfected all the surfaces. After twelve hours, early on the fifth day, I was satisfied with the state of it.

  To this day, I still don’t know if bleach and antibacterial spray kills the virus, but something has to, right?

  The noises from the empty flat had stopped, but I wanted to deal with the situation before the morning, to get it over and done with and then be able to move on – whatever that meant. I wore my thickest clothes to prevent any powerful bites. He’s a big lad, and I wanted to avoid having my throat torn out.

  When I opened the door, he looked up immediately from where he was, lying in the middle of the room. He’d done a shit in the corner, and was wagging his tail, but he was fine. I can’t express how happy I was to find that the infection didn’t affect the physiology of animals – or, at least, dogs. He ran to me and tucked himself up in-between my waiting arms, twisting and turning, before falling onto his back and exposing his tummy.