Conner's Story

Look, don’t judge me alright?  Just, don’t.  I didn’t choose my name, my parents did.  They knew damn well what they were doing and they were old enough to know better.  I suppose I should really be kinder about them now but, hell I’m sat up here watching a city, and for all I know, a civilisation, burn.  I’ll maybe try being sentimental after I write all this down.

My name is Conner McLoud. Stop sniggering, I hate that bloody film.  I suppose I still live in Edinburgh, but from where I’m sitting Auld Reekie’s not looking too pretty right now.  If you’re reading this then I suppose I didn’t get through the next few hours or days but, to be honest, it’s not looking very likely.  I’m guessing you’ll know more than I do about the really big picture, but this is about me.  To hell with rest of you.

Until this afternoon, I lived in fairly typical urban tedium, right here in Scotland’s capital.  A city where it rains more than in any jungle and you’re always going uphill, even if you give up and turn back.  I didn’t grow up here, I’m from Glasgow, and hence the morons call me “Weejie”.  Well, when they’re feeling polite they do.  My mum made us move here when I was ten, I’m sixteen now.  A couple more years and I could have gone back home.  I don’t even know if Glasgow’s as bad as it is here tonight. 

Anyway enough of the This Is My Life crap. I don’t know how long I’ve got until they get here, so this is what happened to me.

I came home from basketball practice this afternoon, dumped the sweaty gear in the kitchen, near the washing machine, shouted hello to a silent house and wandered off into my room.  I suppose I should add it’s June 23rd so no school, but you probably know that.  At least, I hope you do.  I’m guessing it’s become a pretty memorable date.

As normal, I logged into World of Warcraft and spent a few hours killing things electronically. Sadly, even the online world is populated by halfwits.  So eventually I logged off when I started to feel hungry and like I wanted to kill someone in real life.  “Be careful what you wish for”.  That might be a cliché, but today it was true.

Normally mum just bangs on the door and brings in a tray with dinner on it.  If I’m hardcore gaming she just leaves it on my bed.  Today, there was no tray and I was getting pretty damn hungry.  I checked the clock and it was almost seven o’ clock.  My parents have never eaten dinner later than six o’clock, ever.

Now look, I haven’t been close to my parents for years now.  We grew apart when we moved and they couldn’t relate to me.  I was a problem to be managed and they managed by largely ignoring me.  I’m not complaining.  I had anything I asked for and they left me in peace.  Mum’s a Doctor and Dad’s an Estate Agent so I guess we had a decent life, if I didn’t see them too often.  Life in our house worked, even if it was far removed from The Brady Bunch.

My point is it took a few minutes for me to even remember Mum had been sick for a couple of days.  I know, I know, a sick doctor.  Feel free to make jokes.  She had been in bed since she came home from work two nights ago.  Last night, dad phoned out for pizza but even that didn’t happen tonight.  So, I took off the headphones and placed them beside the keyboard.  The house was still silent.  I play with the volume up really loud so, to avoid grief, I wear the headphones.  If I live long enough to see another computer I’ll never put another pair of headphones on again.  I’m fairly sure I know now what I missed while I still had them on. 

But the house wasn’t silent.  I could hear something.  Like a sliding noise, or a slipping sound.  I couldn’t place it.  Our house is a bungalow, a single story, built in an L-shape.  My room is on the corner with the door facing the kitchen door. To the right is the living room and on towards the front door. The noise sounded like it was coming from the kitchen side of the house and moving closer.  I could hear a weird kind of panting noise too.  It was just strange.  I got as far as putting my hand on the handle of the door when there was a bang from the outside.  I fairly jumped, I can tell you.  Then I realised mum must be bringing me dinner after all.  “Better late than never.” I actually said that.  God help me.  If there is one.

I opened the door and there was mum alright.  Only she wasn’t carrying dinner.  She wasn’t even standing in the doorway.  Nope, there she was, on the floor.  Drying blood smeared around her mouth, grey skin, blank eyes and her legs stretched out behind here like she’d dragged herself there.  She had dragged herself there, there was blood on the carpet leading all the way back to the kitchen, but I’ll get to that.  Her legs looked twisted, and the grey skin was ripped but it wasn’t bleeding.  The flesh looked kind of black to be honest.

Amazing the amount of detail you can absorb in just a second, isn’t it?  Want to know something else?  Thanks to George A. Romero, Edgar Wright and whoever took the time to write The Walking Dead, I didn’t panic.  Well alright, I had a little panic, and I suppose I screamed pretty loudly, but I didn’t try to reason with her.  There was no “Please, mum, stop.  What are you doing?” Or any other lame crap.  I was looking at a clearly dead woman, who was not only moving but looking increasingly like she fancied chewing a chunk right out of me.  One word: zombie.  God bless horror movies.

Sadly, being mentally prepared for this craziness didn’t mean I kept a shotgun under the bed or crow-bar behind the door.  We all know the motto is “go for the brain” but who actually has a lump hammer handy when they need one?  What I had here was a zombie making a grab for my wheels and I had no bloody idea what to do. 

Alright, I suppose I should have mentioned the wheels earlier.  Wheels, wheelchair, useless legs.  A drunk driver nearly cut me in half on a pedestrian crossing when I was ten.  Boo hoo.  I got over it a long time ago.  I don’t rage at my arms for being unable to fly, do I?  Mind you, in all the time since that cretin nearly killed me I’ve never missed the use of my legs so much as I did today. I found myself with a reanimated mother clamping her hands onto my feet and pulling herself towards me with her teeth bared and drool running down her chin.  Then the chair tipped, rocked, rolled and shot out behind me.  We landed in a heap with me on top.  Mum had obviously made her way straight from her sickbed and was still wearing her nightdress.  There are some things you just can’t unsee.  The vision of my mum’s cold, grey ass hanging out as she snapped her teeth at my legs is going to haunt me for about as long as I’ve got left.  Yeah, zombies are cold.  I don’t know what they’ve got animating them, but it’s not keeping them warm at night.

So I landed on top of my mother and twisted and rolled over onto the floor.  I was still inside my room facing out and she had her head and shoulders inside the room.  Those arms were scratching at my face trying to get purchase to drag me within munching range.  So what choice did I have? Lying there like a fool flapping my arms at my zombie mother?  I took both hands, planted them on top of her head and, with all the force of six years moving my ass about in that damn chair, I smashed her face into the carpet. Again and again and again.  Until whatever that force was moving her body was gone.  The noise her nose made when it broke off and drove up into her brain makes my stomach lurch just to think about it now.  I know I should have been sobbing, lamenting the terrible loss of my mother but I was probably just in shock.

One thing about being stuck in a wheelchair?  Having your mother’s corpse blocking the doorway is a real pain in the ass.  I had to hitch myself round to the doorway and then, with my back against the doorframe, lift mum up enough to tip her out into the hall.  Finally, sweating like I’d played another game of basketball, I dragged myself back into the chair.  I think then it hit me what I had done and I vomited on the carpet.

I was sitting there feeling really sorry for myself when it occurred to me; why had mum’s legs been ripped up?  I wheel slowly out into the hall and looked at the long trail of blood.  I was kind of surprised it didn’t lead to my parent’s bedroom.  It went right up and into the kitchen instead.  I sat there in the hall looking at the blood trail and back at my mother’s torn legs.  It hit me.  Mr Snuggles, her bloody awful, smelly, little Chihuahua who had a thing for chewing tyres. I hadn’t heard him and he’d surely have heard all the noise I made in the struggle with mum. Another thought: wouldn’t dad have heard it too?  Wait, all that blood on mum’s face and on the carpet but none coming from her legs.  I’m no Columbo but I’ve seen enough movies to know what had happened here.

Do you know the reanimation time between someone being killed by a zombie and then coming back as a fully fledged grey-skinned, flesh-craving member of the living dead?  On this evidence, I’m going to guess about an hour.  That’s it, just one hour.  One hour since my dad had been stood in the kitchen looking through takeaway menus, turned round to see his wife, probably asked her if she was feeling better and she’d ripped his throat out with her teeth.  She’d eaten a fair bit of his abdomen as well.  How do I know that?  Well, it seems a fair guess based on his appearance when his slavering reanimated mess of a corpse lurched out of the kitchen and groaned at me.

Quick bit of info if you’ve been lucky enough to avoid seeing one of these things: you remember when it got trendy for movies to have zombies that ran like Usain Bolt?  Well 28 Days later can kiss my ass.  Whatever powers that mashed up mess of an undead brain can’t handle anything more than an aggressive lurch.  That’s just fine with me.

I looked at the remains of my dad, leaking bits of intestine and whatnot from inside the ruins of his mauve Marks & Spencer shirt, as he lumbered out of that kitchen door.  Did I have a plan? No, of course I bloody didn’t.  But I could see what he couldn’t so I took a couple of big, deep breaths and started off down that hallway, my arms pumping like jackhammers, the wheels on the chair whirring on the tiles.  At the last instant I lowered my head and tried to aim above the sticky bits.  I hit him like a charging rhino.  I’m quite a big lad for sixteen and my house chair is pretty damn heavy.  Dad was thrown straight back across the narrow kitchen and against the back door, his head hitting hard.  When I looked up he was just standing there looking at me blankly.  Then he sort of hissed and sagged at the knees.  The three-inch steel Ikea coat hook on the door had burst straight through the back of his skull.  I wiped bits of his stomach off my head and was rather proud that I wasn’t sick again.  Then I looked to my left and saw the head of Mr Snuggles lying on the floor several feet from the rest of him.  Bits of mum’s legs were still stuck between his teeth.  My stomach couldn’t stand that.

I didn’t do much for a while.  On my left, my dad was hanging from a door by his skull and in the distance on my right I could see where I’d bashed my mum’s brains out on the floor.  I’ve had better days.

I started to worry how I was going to explain this to anyone but I needn’t have worried.  I switched on the TV and the test card was up on the BBC.  Every other channel apologised for the interruption and promised to be back with me soon.  I decided I didn’t believe them. 

My mind turned to survival.  All those movies had taught me more than just “go for the head”.  Out in the open you can outrun lumbering zombies but in tight confines you’re pretty much screwed.  I’d been lucky with my parents, I didn’t fancy hanging about to be someone else’s lunch.  Especially not our neighbour, Mr MacMillan.  He was a fat, old, patronising sod that looked at me like I was missing a bit and could be fixed with the right spare part.  I was damned if he was eating me. 

So, outside then.  I switched chairs, threw clothes, tinned food, a tin opener and bottled water into a bag and looked for some kind of weapon.  I wasted a couple of minutes wishing I’d pestered my parents for a katana last Christmas but instead settled on a large chef’s knife and a claw hammer from dad’s tool box.  To be honest, I was most proud of remembering the tin opener.

I’m really kind of grateful to Mr MacMillan now.  He was the first person I met when I left the house.  I actually breathed a sigh of relief when I saw him lurch across the grass at me.  At least I wasn’t going to have to explain my parents’ deaths.  When he leaned in to grab me I took quite a lot of pleasure in planting the hammer between his eyes.  I rolled on without even checking to see if he got back up.

I didn’t really have a plan so I just did what anyone does in Edinburgh.  Look up, see the castle, head that way.

The further I went the more I realised the world had fallen into the worst kind of hell.  Crashed cars littered the streets.  I saw lots of people running.  I heard so many screams I soon stopped jumping.  I saw one crashed car with one zombie hanging out of the door caught up in the seatbelt.  He hissed and moaned as I passed, his hand grasping for me, hunger in his eyes, drool trickling into his beard.  Please don’t mention Meals on Wheels.

A woman ran past with a bundle clutched to her chest screaming about her baby.  She paused and looked at me but clearly decided I couldn’t help and kept running.

The fires grew worse as I got closer to the city centre.  Houses, cars, shops were burning.  As night gradually fell the sky started to glow red.  At least it wasn’t raining.  Can you believe I saw a guy come charging out of a shop carrying a wide screen TV?  The world’s gone to hell and scumbags are still nicking tellies! 

I was doing fine.  The zombies I did see couldn’t keep up with me and the couple that did get close enough got smacked with the hammer. 

I got cocky.  I was getting closer to the Royal Mile, the long street that runs down the hill from the gates of the castle, and I stopped to look around.  I was gathering myself for going up that hill when something hit my chair from behind.  I was thrown sideways and toppled onto the pavement.  An old woman, complete with blue rinse and bingo tights, landed on top of me, her teeth snapping inches from my face.  Her saliva dripped into my eyes.  I couldn’t believe this was how I was going to die.  I just couldn’t get the old dear off me.  She pulled her head back to lunge at me and went stiff.  Her eyes rolled back and she slipped off me.

I looked up into the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen in my life.  A girl, a couple of years older than me, was standing there with a blood-spattered axe in her hand.  She asked me if I needed a hand and I burst out laughing. 

God help me, will I never be able to play it cool with girls?

She helped me into the chair and asked me where I was going.  I told her I didn’t have a plan.  She told me her name was Alice and she’d heard on the radio that the police had fortified the castle and we should go there.  We would be safe.  She said “we”.  I fell in love right there.

I sat in the street with the world falling apart around me and she smiled a real smile, completely free of pity, disgust, or generosity.  I smiled back.  She swept her hair behind her ear.  I really wish she hadn’t done that.  That’s when I saw the bite mark on the back of her hand.  Her brother, apparently.

We set off for the castle, as fast as we could.  Alice started to slow down.  She started to cough and turned grey.  She was sweating really heavily.  When finally she stopped to slump against a wall, I kept on going.  I didn’t look back, I couldn’t.  Please God, don’t let me see Alice again.  Not now.

So I got to the castle.  The police were pretty thorough about checking for bite marks before they let anyone through the barriers.  I didn’t even know they had that many guns in Edinburgh. 

It’s fully dark now and anyone who was going to get in is already here.  So are they.  I think they’re drawn to us.  I can see them coming up the hill towards the castle gates.  It looks like most of the population of the city’s out there, desperate to get in.  That bloody moaning is getting louder.

Me, I’m sat up here on the wall watching the city burn.  The fires are out of control now.  It will probably be the fire that stops the undead because there’s no damn way the police have enough bullets.

I’ve heard people say that help is coming, that the Army are on the way.  I think of all those blank channels on the TV and I can’t see anyone to save us.  I doubt they can save themselves.  But I’m damned if I’ll let them get me.  I can’t see a zombie being able to work a wheelchair.  I’ve got my dignity, you know?  It’s a hell of a long drop from the top of this wall.



THE END