Ground Zero
Dawn. Huntington. The high pitch squawk of a large crow interrupts the still air, as it picks at rubbish strewn over the pavements. A few moments later, the bird takes flight, flapping its wings in exaggerated fashion. Its call echoes around the desolate streets. Rain has beaten down heavily all morning. It eases off to reveal a cool freshness in the air. Showers have become more frequent now, heralding a seasonal shift from autumn to winter. There’s a slight chill in the air. On closer inspection, the downpour has done little to wash away the heavy blood stains. Everywhere there are signs of carnage. At one time, this would have been unimaginable. For those who witnessed the transformation, life would never be the same again. This was ground zero in the biggest catastrophe to reach England’s shores since the Fourteenth Century Black Death.
The faint sound of footsteps become heavier and more pronounced as a figure emerges from the alleyway beside the town’s art gallery. It’s a girl. She’s dressed in combat fatigues, carrying a rifle with a telescopic sight. Her gentle jog broken as she ducks and weaves amidst the debris. She cuts a low profile as she makes her way into the middle of the abandoned town centre. Stopping only to look through the sight, she moves stealthily alongside a broken row of burnt out cars, their metal frames twisted and battered, moulded into jagged contortions by long-extinguished fires. It’s impossible to tell what models they might have once been. The crumpled vehicles lie motionless. Pathetic reminders of the past.
The girl makes her way through the deserted streets, carefully sidestepping the badly decomposed bodies and the rubbish piled high around the once bustling shopping precinct. Everywhere there is evidence of an unimaginable tragedy. The smashed-in windows of long-abandoned stores, commercial banks and pubs make it hard to see how this was one of England’s thriving urban centres. Everywhere there are signs of an epic confrontation settled by force of arms.
The girl had seen scenes like this before. In the Middle East and North Africa. But never here. Never in England. The domesticity of these scenes of carnage seem unreal.
Slowing her advance through Huntington, she checks her rifle, dragging back the working parts, gently sliding the cocking handle into position, before carefully and deliberately flicking the safety catch off. There is anticipation in her movement. She’s seen this scenario play out a thousand times before. Fight or flight. There’s always a lull before the enemy come out into the open to make their attack. She’d experienced this first-hand. She’d come close, too close, to the enemy as it moved at speed towards her. Once in the carpark of a local supermarket, another time as she made her way across a ridge overlooking Huntington, returning from another expedition into the neighbouring village of Titchmarsh. Luckily her military training kicked in and she stopped the creature dead in its tracks. There wouldn’t be another slip up like this. She would not become another fatality in this war between man and beast.
The girl had seen armed conflict before the outbreak of the Sudanese Flu. The clatter of gunfire and deep boom of explosions were the soundtrack to her deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now this cruel background music was making its way to the foreground of her life in post-apocalyptic England. This was a country unaccustomed to such violence and cruelty. It once had an unrivalled reputation the world over as a peaceful nation of shopkeepers, a land of keen gardeners and small-town beer festival-goers, of craft markets and church fetes. Quaint was a term often applied to her England. No longer.
She dropped to one knee in the doorway of an old travel agency and scanned the near distance. Memories flooded her mind. She remembered the old photograph that hung in her parents’ hallway showing her father as a battle-hardened soldier on the streets of Belfast. He’d been a young officer back then. A man dedicated to serving his country who had been psychologically wounded in a terrorist bomb. He’d always worn his long years of service in Ireland, the Gulf and Bosnia like a badge of honour. He was proud of his service. The carnage returned to haunt him over many long nights. The older he got, the more difficult he found it to deal with what he had witnessed as a young man. These were parts of the world accustomed to everyday life being ripped asunder. Inhabitants of such places greeted death like an old friend. It became a way of life for many. The abnormal became normal.
What had happened to England, though, was beyond comprehension for most of its inhabitants. Huntington had become a battlefield. The girl’s family and friends became its victims and survivors, its refugees and internally displaced peoples. They were its casualties in the way the people of Northern Ireland had been in their own little war. The girl thought of her father’s advice. ‘Always try and put yourself in other people’s shoes,’ he told her on many occasions. Empathy and compassion were his defining traits. They were what made him a good man, a proud man. She was sure that’s why her mother had fallen in love with him. It was his good nature that kept them together for over thirty years of marriage. It’s what held them together until the end.
The girl wiped away the sweat beads running along her brow. England could no longer insulate itself from such horrors. She’d realised that within weeks of the outbreak. Deep-down she knew how life would never be the same again. Wailing babies, the bloodcurdling screams of men, women and children now haunted the narrow streets of Huntington. They’d become as familiar as the sounds of civil war in the far-off lands she’d once soldiered in. The rules of the game had now changed. What people most feared in life – an influx of change so rapid, so devastatingly that it threatened everything they’d taken for granted.
Iraq may have given birth to organised warfare several millennia ago, but it was England that had witnessed the creation of a new form of warfare. A biological disease with no known cure, its effects were felt as far away as the South Pacific islands. Nothing would ever be the same again.
The silent company of the past evaporated as she clocked the sound of breaking glass a short distance away. She froze. Unhooking her rifle from its sling, she tightened her grip around the stock, bringing it more firmly into her right shoulder as she had done many times before. She crouched beside an old wastepaper bin. Brushing back strands of her long blonde hair, she carefully surveyed the scene to her front. The burnt-out cars. The bodies. The wrecked shop fronts. She’d now entered another battle scene. Her heart beat faster as she scanned the foreground through the optical sight. Exhaling quietly, slowly, then inhaling, she performed the ritual acts of a professional soldier. She breathed lightly as she peered inquisitively through the sight. It wouldn’t be long until her enemy revealed itself. Her breathing relaxed, then settled into a comfortable rhythm as she watched and waited. Then she saw it, about one hundred yards in front of her. The unmistakable jittery movement of a scavenger rifling through an overturned vehicle. It began staggering in her general direction, slouching up the middle of the high street. The creature seemed oblivious to her presence.
Its rotten flesh, bloodshot eyes and gaunt complexion reminded her of an old zombie movie she’d once seen. Its politically-inspired plot far too obviously ahead of its time. A small group of survivors flee a major city in the United States in a helicopter. As they make their way towards their imagined safe haven, they happen upon a large, abandoned shopping mall, which they quickly make their home. Their comfortable lifestyle rudely interrupted by a band of marauding right-wing thugs who want to loot the mall. It said a lot about US society that whenever humanity came under attack from a common enemy, there were still those who were still prepared to abandon any sense of community to satisfy their own personal greed. Caught between the armies of the living and the dead, the group make a desperate last stand. What they have, they must hold. The movie’s special effects were limited. The dead seemed robotic. Slow and plodding. Not at all like the creature jittering as it headed towards her general direction. It wasn’t a zombie. It wasn’t quite alive either. These creatures, known by the small band of survivors she lived with as scavengers, were covered from head to toe in huge scabs. Thin to the point of anorexia, they were typically undernourished but could still close in on a victim rapidly, driven by an insatiable thirst for warm flesh. They made a horrendous, blood-curling noise akin to a howl when in the vicinity of other scavengers, a form of primordial communication that was their only connection to the human beings they had once been. Scavengers were ugly beasts, complete with leathery, swollen faces and bulging, menacing, bloodshot eyes.
She couldn’t help but think about the deaths of her parents. Both of them were murdered in their own home by a small pack of these creatures. They invaded their cottage like the looters from that old movie, attracted by the smell of blood. Beating down the makeshift fencing surrounding the property, the pack grew bigger in number. It swarmed the girl’s parents before they could defend themselves. A tear ran down the girl’s cheek as she remembered how she’d arrived too late to save them. Her dear mother and father killed in less than fifteen minutes in a brutal home invasion. The creatures fed on their bodies for over an hour. There was little of them left afterwards. It made her angry to think about the suffering, the pain, the sheer terror they’d endured. It made her hate the creatures even more. They weren’t human. Not any longer. Now they were something else. They were mere bodies playing host to a deadly strain of flu coursing through the veins of those who were unlucky enough to catch it. It drove them insane and rotted their cerebral cortex, turning them into rabid killing machines. The infected inhabited a totally different world from those who had survived the initial wave of the disease pandemic. They now belonged to two different tribes. One was alive and scraping out an uneasy existence in the ruins of the world while the other was dead and animalistic, undeterred in its quest for blood. The world she now inhabited disgusted her.
She brought the rifle tighter into her shoulder, picked out her target’s mid-section and confidently squeezed the trigger, exhaling as she did so. The scavenger let out a yelp and then fell back. It looked stunned as blood oozed from a wound on its bony rib-cage. Although she’d killed before, this was a whole different ball game. There was no telling if it would go down, or not. The first bullet clipped the creature above where its hip had been. A second bullet entered its left cheek. It dropped with a heavy thud, careering into the rusted frame of an SUV as it did so. Panic dissipated from the girl’s mind. A moment of elation washed over her. She lowered the rifle slowly and mechanically while unwrapping a camouflage cloth from around her chin, revealing her attractive smile.
Twenty-nine-year-old Lucy Manning took a step forward into the morning light from where she had been nestled in the shadowy doorway of an old bank. The fresh kill felt good. She flicked the safety catch on and shouldered her rifle. It was time to push on back to the farmhouse before nightfall.
‘Chalk one up for the good guys,’ she said under her breath.
About the author
Aaron Edwards is a Belfast-born writer who has been living and working in the South East of England since 2008. A recipient of an Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for the Individual Artist award in 2016-17 and again in 2018-19, he published my first short story, "News of the World", in the summer edition of the Honest Ulsterman, Northern Ireland's oldest literary magazine. He is currently completing his first novel, Years of Pestilence, and his first collection of short fiction, Tribal Rites.