Life After Britain

Jack awoke with a shivery jolt. For a moment, he led there on his back in the thick black darkness that smothered his body woven in the sleeping bag. His heart was beating a little faster now, each thump striking his ribs hard and his throat choking with the tight grasp of nervousness. Death was lingering outside, just like it did every night.

It was the distant, seething screams outside that woke him. The familiar shrills that cut through the eerie stillness of the night like broken nails on a chalkboard. The screams were a little louder now and sounded like a person in agony, a person shrieking in a fit of rage.

He knew the screams all too well; they were the lullaby of death that kept him awake. To an untrained ear, an unwise person might rush outside and search the streets to help. But he knew much better. He knew the shrills were instead from the raspy throat of an infected. A hoarse howl driven not by fear or sorrow, but an insatiable and perpetual hunger for warm flesh. Right now, his flesh.

He shifted onto his side in the sleeping bag on the floor. The zip was undone, and his boots were still on his feet and laced up tight. He slept fully clothed in his cargo trousers, t-shirt, and chequered red and black shirt, just like every survivor. The chorus of wails of anguish were still there in the distance. Each hanging in the air as a reminder, nowhere was safe. Not anymore. The creatures were more active at night. The screams were closer now. Closer than he liked.

He pinched his eyes shut with a finger and thumb, desperately trying to block out the vision of being caught by the creatures. It wouldn’t end well. It never did for a survivor whose legs, heavy with exhaustion, just couldn’t run anymore.

The darkness was their sinister playground and should the creatures trace the scent of his flesh, he would likely perish in a gory and horrifying way.

Should the creatures find his hidden location, they would violently smash into the abandoned suburban house he was sheltering in for the night, and then he would need to bolt. Being caught in their grasp was a certain death sentence. The creatures would haul his wriggling body to the floor with a tangle of grotty fingers, and then the savage feeding frenzy would begin. Just like it always did when a survivor was cornered and caught. Teeth red with blood wrenching the flesh from bones. Eyes split wide and ghostly grey with infection. The mindless flesh eaters didn’t hear pleas for mercy. So, a survivor like himself needed to be ready to run at a moment’s notice. It was the only way to stay alive now.

He sat up and whipped the sleeping bag off. The figure in the sleeping bag beside on the floor was still curled up and asleep. Only the tuff of her auburn hair was visible, and the green fabric moulded loosely around her slim shoulders. There was no use in waking her. Not yet. Sleep was a necessity, and it was hard to find a safe place to get any decent shuteye. They would have slept on the double bed in the large bedroom, but the long hard months taught them both mattresses were often laden with mites.

He crept to the upstairs window and, with a finger, bent the cream blinds to carefully peer outside.

The world outside was a canvas painted with different shades of darkness. The cloudless sky stretched above like a blanket of smooth, velvet grey. The moon was visible tonight, and it took the form of a bright crescent amongst the scatter of stars that glimmered as white specs. Then there was the street below. The row of suburban houses opposite were black and lifeless and the road a snarl of abandoned cars. Dirty curtains flapped in the broken windows on the ground floor in the light breeze and the rusty hinge of a front door creaked slowly from somewhere out of sight.

He strained his neck to look further down the dead street, but there was no visible sign of any other survivors. That was good. Resources were strained and strangers could not be trusted. There was no dim glow of a torch in an upstairs window or the flicker of a candle. There was only darkness. The same as every night.

The outbreak struck London twenty-four months ago. It spread fast, quickly turning large numbers of the population into mindless flesh-eating monsters. It took little for a person to join the swathes of walking dead that roamed the streets outside. A single bite or scratch that broke the skin was enough for the virus to spread. Once in the bloodstream, there was no cure. A person lost control of themselves in less than a minute. The body underwent a fit of sharp jerks and contortions until words became raspy gasps and groans. Then they began the lifelong search for fresh flesh. If life was even the right word to describe what those infected were.

Shortly after the outbreak, anarchy spread, and society crumbled. The police forces were overwhelmed, hospitals overrun, and the military’s countless blockades and quarantine zones broken. Nothing could hold back the spread. Not the government, not emergency services or the military. He knew it was the end of society when the power stations finally went offline, plunging the country back into the stone age. He didn’t realise how much he himself actually relied on power until the cities were pitch black at night. Batteries were the new gold bullion. And he made sure to empty television set remotes.

When the power went out, people attempted to flee the United Kingdom. At first people fled north and south, but as survivors left London, the infection followed. City by city, the country fell into anarchy like a dying animal being eaten alive by maggots. Then people fled to Europe. There had been no international radio contact with anyone for over twelve months. Perhaps every country on the European continent had fallen. Perhaps the infection was now worldwide. That was an ominous reality, he thought.

“You’re awake…” a raspy female voice mumbled in the dark, before clicking on a tiny torch. The person in the sleeping bag stirred a little in the glow of cream light. The rustle of boots on fabric in the eerie stillness of the upstairs bedroom.

“Yeah. I heard those things outside.”

“We always hear those things outside. That’s life now.”

“The screams were closer than I like.”

“Those creatures are everywhere, Jack. No matter where we seek refuge, the screams will always be close.”

“Yeah… I guess you’re right.”

He sat on the edge of the manky bed, watching his wife Ellie sit up and rub her tired eyes. With an arm on a bent knee, she looked at him with her heart-shaped face and messy auburn hair loosely swept back into a ponytail.

At twenty-seven, she was one year younger than himself. She wore the same clothes as always, blue jeans with side pockets, a grey t-shirt and a flannel shirt with breast pockets buttoned up. She was all he had left in the world, and the same went for her with him. Everyone they knew—friends and family—everyone was dead and gone. Devoured by the infection in the early months.

She smiled at him; one eye shut with weariness. Then she yawned her sleepy words, “What time is it?”

He peeled the shirt sleeve from the digital wristwatch. “It’s three-thirteen.”

“Sunrise isn’t for another five hours.”

“Yeah. You should get some sleep.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“If those creatures find us, that could be tomorrow if you aren’t well rested.”

“Same goes for you. You don’t sleep much these days.”

“It’s hard to sleep knowing we could wake up with teeth sinking into our throats.”

“And not in the good way.” Ellie whipped the sleeping bag off and clambered to her feet. Hands on her hips, she stretched out her back and then bowed forward, fingers out to reach the tip of her boots. “I’m up now.”

He watched her step over the sleeping bags and then she stood in front of him. In the crook of his open legs, he looked up at her pretty smile and brown eyes. She always had a way of making an awful night better.

They had met two years before the outbreak happened. They had bought their first house in Bristol, and both worked long hours at mundane jobs to pay for it. A week before the outbreak hit London, they were married in a registry office. There was no honeymoon. No time for any celebration because the country was suddenly being eaten alive by the bizarre virus. Their honeymoon was a never-ending climb out of a rut. But there was nobody else he would rather see out the end of the world with.

She stroked her thin fingers through his shaggy brown hair, her head tilting slightly to the side with a sincere smile. In the dim light of the torch, her brown eyes shimmered with love and exhaustion. “What’s wrong—did the scary monsters outside wake you again?”

“I guess they did.”

“Awe. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“They sniff us out, smash the windows and break inside whosoever’s house this once was. Then they would eat us alive.”

“Exactly. So don’t worry about things outside of our control. We’re safe. For now. So, let’s worry about things we can control—like food. Do you fancy an early breakfast?”

“At three in the morning?”

“No point in going back to sleep now. It’s the end of the world. Might as well be awake for it.”

“Seems like we’ve been awake for the past two years. A decent night’s sleep feels like a distant dream now.”

“Dreams are dead and gone. We live in a nightmare now.”

They rolled up the sleeping bags and pulled them tight with a belt. They slung their rucksacks over their shoulders and crept downstairs, the wooden floorboards creaking loudly under their weight. In the eerie stillness of the silent two-story house, an unseen clock still ticked. Each second gone was marked with a dull monotone click. A sad reminder that even after society collapsed, time continued for those left.

Ellie wandered down the dark hall to the kitchen with a torch and he checked the early warning system at the front door. A system he had proudly come up with himself. A system that had saved their lives countless times.

He was a keen angler before the outbreak struck and spent many hours at the side of fishing lakes. The early warning system comprised three components. Two metal rods outside in the street with fishing line tied between them at ankle height. Then a third and longer piece of line tied to the closest rod ran across the ground, up the front garden pathway, through the letterbox and wound around the fishing reel on the floor. But it was the bite alarm that made the contraption work. A small black plastic box a few inches in height with a central rolling mechanism with built-in speakers. At a lakeside, if a fish took the bait underwater, the line would spin the roller and the speakers would bleep. Here… if an infected kicked the line outside, the alarm would wake him and Ellie. Then they could ready themselves to fight or flee.

The system was still intact. But considering they were awake and would leave the house at sunrise, he took it apart. He turned the bite alarm off and cut the loose line with a knife, then packed it all away into his rucksack, ready for the next time. The poles outside he would collect in the morning.

“We have stale cereal with no milk or stale crackers with no cheese and butter?” Ellie said, rummaging through the side pouches of her rucksack on the stranger’s kitchen counter. “I also checked the cupboards earlier. There’s nothing to eat we can salvage. But they have a nicer tin opener than the one we have, so I’m upgrading us.”

He smiled at his wife and leant against the door frame with his arms folded. She had set the torch on the counter with the beam painting a cream ring on the ceiling, fending off the surrounding shadows and bathing her in a pool of dirty light. “You know, El, this isn’t exactly how I saw us spending our marriage.”

“Me too, but fate had other plans for the world and us. This is life now.” She gestured at the kitchen. “The pair of us living out of abandoned houses.”

“And what a life it is.”

At first, he had felt out-of-place wandering the rooms of a stranger’s house. They were both technically trespassing, but the owner was likely dead and gone or wandering the streets as an infected. As time went on, every new house somehow strangely felt like home. Like temporary hotel rooms. Only, there weren’t any clean linen and soft beds waiting for them. Some houses they had broken into for refuge unearthed bizarre finds. Some interesting, some surprising, some plain right creepy. One thing they eventually learnt from moving from house to house was on a dull street with dull houses. Behind closed doors, the neighbours couldn’t be more different.

The faint hiss of shattering glass in the distance made him shudder. He looked back along the hall. Waiting and listening for any further commotion from outside. It was no doubt an infected that had broken into a nearby property. Survivors didn’t venture out in the dark. It was much too dangerous. They both looked at each other in shock.

“Do you think it’s a horde?” Ellie asked.

“For both our sakes, I really hope not, El. Because I didn’t plan on us drying tonight.”