Free After the Fall (Book 1): Outside by Stephen Cross

Chapter 1
     
    Thump. There it was again.
    Thumps in the night used to be the stuff of nightmares and imaginary monsters when Jack was a child. But now he was an adult, and the monsters were real.
    Thump.
    Just outside the window. On the wooden veranda that surrounded the chalet.
    It was raining hard, but that wasn’t the reason he dismissed the notion that it was a person, or a living person, to be exact, making the noise; he dismissed the notion because a living person would have to be crazy to be outside after dark, raining or not.
    Jack’s stomach fluttered with anxiety. There were no lights he could switch on as they still hadn’t got the holiday park’s generators working. Three months since the Fall and still living in medieval darkness.
    Thump. Clatter. Thump.
    Whatever it was, it was moving.
    Must have smelled me.
    He got out of bed, his heart beating fast. He moved to prise up the wooden window slats to look out. He placed his hands on the first slat and stopped.
    What if it saw me? What if it didn’t know anyone was in here yet, and was just looking, and when it saw me, it would smash through the window?
    No one had ever seen them smash through windows, but that didn’t meant they couldn’t. They were always surprising people, alway doing something that people said they couldn’t.
    Stop, said Jack to himself. Stop. Relax, breath.
    But he couldn’t relax. He hadn’t been able to relax for three months.
    Ok then, just think, focus. He had to get to his daughter’s room, quietly. If the zombie heard him and moaned like they do, his daughter would scream. That could bring more of them.
    If there was one, there was always more. That was the rule.
    He looked at his watch, the luminous dial showing him it had just passed 3am. That meant the storm had been in full rage now for five hours. The summer storms on the Cornish coast where like nothing he had seen back home in Leeds.
    Home.
    It wasn’t home now, and it never would be again.
    Thump. A bit further away, a bit further up the side of the chalet. Closer to his daughter’s room.
    He knelt down and reached under the bed to grab the sledgehammer he kept there.
    He stood up, his knees clicking.
    Jack gripped the hard hickory of his sledgehammer in both hands and pushed the bedroom door open with his foot. He stood in the darkness for a moment, too afraid to move, his legs refusing to budge.
    What if one of them was in the corridor? What if his ears were playing up, and the sounds were actually from in the chalet?
    Then he would have to move even quicker to rescue his daughter. She was the only thing that kept him moving in this new world. The only thing that stopped him curling up into a ball and hiding in a hole until he died. That little six year old was all he had, and he had to do everything to protect her. So he found the strength and stepped into the hall. The darkness rendered the chalet’s interior into a series of uncertain inky blue black forms, silent in their stillness.
    The next room along from his was his daughter’s. He crept towards it, feeling with his feet for loose boards - just because he couldn’t hear his footsteps above the torrential rain didn’t mean the zombie couldn’t.
    Assume they see, hear and smell everything.
    He rested his hand on his daughter’s door handle and turned it slowly. Small mechanical clicks, which to his ears sounded like the heavy clunks of industrial machinery, accompanied each slow inch of the handle’s rotation.
    Jack peered in.
    His heart left his chest.
    He flung the door open wide.
    There was a shape by the window. Standing on his daughter’s bed. Its deformed silhouette hung in the darkness, poised over his daughter.
    He raised the sledgehammer and leapt into the room.
    The thing moved quickly and let out a scream.
    “Daddy! It’s me, Daddy!”
    Jack stopped dead, his heart pulsing fast and unbridled, a stallion out of the stables. Sweat quickly formed on his brow and adrenaline got him higher