Reminiscence
“You ever think about what’s out there, Jen?”
“Probably the same as what we’ve got going on right here,” the young woman replied, fussing the retriever bitch as she did so. “Reckon if that wasn’t the case we’d know about it and besides, ain’t no way the Blue Rain was limited only to these fair isles.”
“You’re probably right.” Tommy sighed as he stared out over the bay, “Sometimes, I just wonder what happened to the people back home.”
“Same as here,” Jen replied with a shrug. “Families torn apart, parents eating their kids and vice versa… It’s the fucking zombie apocalypse, Tommy. So how about you stop being such a sentimental reminiscing shit, and we get on with what we’re bloody here for.”
“Yeah, the older man replied. “Yeah, alright. Just gets to me sometimes.”
Tommy pushed himself to his feet, the breeze coming in from the bay whipping at his unruly hair as he did so.
“We hit the hotels and B&B’s in the southern section of the village,” said Jen as she hopped down from the seafront wall herself. She led the way a few hundred yards back from the coast to where they had parked the car, with the retriever at her heel. “Nice and quick, no fucking about. Anything edible as well as bedding, clothes and shit.”
As she clambered into the car she shifted the machete at her hip to make things a little easier and more comfortable.
“Anything that can be used to brain a fucking zombie, too.” She chuckled, starting the engine. “Then again, I figure that probably goes without saying.”
Tommy had not needed such a reminder, of course. Anyone who had been lucky enough, or perhaps unlucky enough, to have survived for the better part of four years since the outbreak had had little choice but to put down a zombie or two and as such knew all-too well the value of anything able to put a member of the Undead Community down for good.
“I don’t think we’re too far away from the site where that fucking mega horde was put down last year,” said Jen, quite jovially as she drove the vehicle, picking her way carefully along the streets littered with debris of all kinds. “Shame we weren’t able to get all of the bastards.”
“That battle cut the human population of the UK by a third,” said Tommy in reply. “That’s my best guess, anyway. Those of us who did manage to survive that and make it out alive, fuck…”
Jen remembered the occasion well enough, but like everyone who could say the same she suspected, she wished that she couldn’t. It was a brutal, bloody, fuck-awful seventy-two hours.
“This looks like a good shout,” said Tommy, as Jen pulled the car to an easy halt. “OK so that’s a lie, it actually looks like a horrible place to raid; alleys, gates, narrow streets… But there are pubs, inns, B&Bs aplenty though.”
“Reckon we’d both be best off keeping to the street,” said Jen, nodding in agreement with Tommy’s assessment of the location. “You take the left side, I’ll take the right. Let’s make this quick though.”
“Agreed.”
“You stay, dog,” Jen said while ensuring the window was cracked a tad. “If anyone or anything comes this way, make some noise.”
