the house by the sea pt. 2: waiting for Linda

He waited for Linda in the front upstairs bedroom of his terraced house, watched for her in the street outside through the mostly boarded-up window, through minimal shafts between the affixed lengths of wood or through long cracks or circular holes left by dislodged knots in the wood itself. The road was packed three and in places sometimes four abreast with abandoned cars all smouldering in the morning, cars littering the pavement and wrapped around toppled front walls, a sea of twisted metal and exhausts, of sagging spent airbags and shattered glass that crunched underfoot like freshly packed snow, a silver-blue sea of automotive paint pigmentation in dappled crests that rose and fell with the moving sun, pools of near-black blood slowly drying on the pavements into gruesome assertions of territory and each flanking odd disembodied limbs left decomposing and overlooked in the frenzied abundance of ready meat.

Although he hadn’t been outside for several days he was sure that most if not all of the other houses on the street were empty. Once the problem had spread east the panic had been immediate and brutal and everything had quickly collapsed, the commonplace intricacies of modern infrastructure at once became something distant and alien, codified through then-incomprehensible Latinate symbols to be unearthed in some future archaeology, and even instinctive deep-rooted human traits, the propensity toward some structured society, towards a higher rationality or a moral sense, all were erased with devastating efficiency once order fell. People had tried to flee the city in huge swathes of senseless flesh with no plan and no foresight, had all bolted for the one final certainty that their vehicles represented. As the roads congested rapidly and traffic reached a standstill they sat in their thousands, bumper-to-bumper in cyclical futility around both ring roads and waited, blasting their horns in some new unlearnt but mutually existent communication method and shouting incomprehensibly into their own steering columns and wood-effect dashboard interiors, too confused to just leave their cars and run. They were easy pickings when the dead came, their still warm flesh torn easily from the bone like tender barbeque, the sounds of snapping ligament and stripped tissue and of snarled mastication all part of a hideous symphony, the car horns gradually silencing in rows with the advancing dead, eyes manic yet resigned darting from mirror to mirror and watching the inevitability of their fate as though a film, or as happening to somebody else.

He had known a guy whose wife worked low-level in local government and had received the official brief, essentially ‘do nothing’, that had outlined the fundamentals of the emergency, bare minimum kind of stuff that insisted on muting the threat, putting the word “emergency” in inverted commas throughout as though it was an act of incredible irony to even use it. It offered nothing in the way of guidance, or advice, or planned tactical responses. This is how things probably might be. By the time the brief had been circulated to local councils the problem had already spread too significantly to contain. It had at least given him the time to nail the boards up, more than most.

He had watched the neighbours go armed with kitchen knives and utensils, their two cats in transporters, a few bits of clothing stuffed into supermarket carrier bags, and make a run for their Nissan, but a couple of dead were on them before the engine had even turned over, their persistence taking out the windows and pulling the girl out through the shattered remnants, her legs snagged on the seatbelt, hanging upside down, her long hair reaching down to the road. It was hard watching but harder not, his forehead pressed against the cold wooden board. They bit down straight into her neck and he saw the vocal chords working with the screams that stopped when bare hands tore her stomach open, her guts spilt and slopping over her breasts and against her face so terribly apologetic as they then fell wet into the road like dirty washing, picked and eaten and she watched it before the end happened as it would. The boyfriend was paralysed in the pointless driver’s seat, one hell of a carving knife gripped in both his shaking hands, he stuck it into one of them when they had got his door open, right in the chest, and nothing changed, the knife sunk to handle in putrid flesh. An abundance to overcome and all of it for nothing. His slender sides gnawed. The dead shuffled unsatisfied away in isolated clusters that composed a dominant species, the two cats secured within their plastic transporters on the back seat of the car. He could hear them through the closed bedroom window, and somehow the synchronization of their pitiful and methodical whining over the screams and the engines and the groaning of the dead that like the very wind filled the air and so travelled for miles was much worse than anything else he had seen or heard in the hours preceding it. He wanted to rescue them from the car but knew he couldn’t, that it would be foolish to do so and that there was no kind of life for them now.

He spooned cold rice pudding from cans in his kitchen and ate it gratefully waiting for Linda. She arrived hours later sometime in the afternoon, he saw her picking her way silently through the street as though the soft soles of her trainers didn’t even touch the ground beneath them, her navy blue parka jacket ripped at the pocket just as he remembered and hood pulled right up over her head. She held a screwdriver in her right hand with blood stuck around the Phillips head and encrusted in neat lines like painstaking cartography down her fingers and hand. He rushed downstairs and prized the three boards from across his front door and let her in urgently, and they kissed watched only by armchairs and other equally absurd relics of past normalcy and hammered the boards back in place. They planned to head to the coast, to a house by the sea that Linda had seen on weekend walks, an abandoned place that clung to the fringes of the eroding cliff side and threatened to fall with every rainstorm, archly resigned to the inevitability of its own end, the frailty of its construction. He had a tandem bicycle and they were to leave the city on that, taking turns to pedal while the rear cyclist would carry a long metal pole that they could thrust in self-defence and keep watch. It was a poor weapon but they thought it would buy them the time to get away, and they could both pedal if things looked bad. They had attached one of those bicycle trailers to the back, the kind that people tow their dogs in, and filled it with basic provisions and other makeshift weaponry, mostly old tools or other DIY utensils in a way that felt like a fundamentally British response to the problem. He poured her a glass of water from a huge plastic container and watched her drink it, then he poured her another and they went upstairs. Without speaking they lay down upon a pile of blankets he had left on his bedroom floor. The first thing he had done on hearing about the problem was drag his cheap mattress into the front garden and set it alight, although he couldn’t remember why he had done so. It was probably something he had seen on a TV programme or in a film, as if the heat of the fire were some kind of repellent to the creeping cold of the dead. It burnt for hours in stuttered flames, its clouds of rank smoke from its melting synthetics and slowly warping springs huffed in billows to the sky like life leaving the city. On the blankets they lay side by side and waited for the darkness and the light that followed.