Free The Dying & The Dead 1: Post Apocalyptic Survival by Jack Lewis Page A

daughter upstairs and left Ed alone in the dark room, his muscles
aching and his head throbbing. He shut his eyes and listened to the sounds of
the natural disaster outside and the wind as it blew through the cavities of
his old house. Despite the pain his body was tired, and slowly his brain began
to relax.
     
    Something
banged so hard upstairs that his ceiling shook. Not my roof too, he
thought. Two houses in one day? Surely nobody is that unlucky .
Then a voice shouted to him.
     
    “Ed!”
     
    It was
Bethelyn’s voice, and there was a twist of panic in it that he never expected
from her. He stood up from the chair but felt his stomach lurched with
something akin to sea sickness. No sooner was he on his feet that his legs felt
so light that he didn’t have control of them. They buckled underneath him, and
he fell forward and almost cracked his head on the coffee table as his body met
the floor.
     
    He was
led on the carpet now. His arms and legs felt completely numb, as though they
were phantom limbs that didn’t belong to him anymore.
     
    “Get
the hell up here Ed,” shouted a voice upstairs, but the sound of it faded.
     
    He
tried to move but his vision was fading and his body shutting down. He pushed
against the feeling but knew it wouldn’t budge. Whatever it was, whatever was
happening upstairs, he couldn’t get there.
     
    As his
vision became fuzzier and his head lighter, he knew it was useless to fight. He
was fading into nothing, and the world around him was fading too. He
surrendered to the numbness and felt the fingers of darkness close his eyelids.

 
    5
     
    Ed
     
    A
spray of water woke him up. His eyes flickered as daylight hit them, and he
felt a breeze blowing on his skin. For a second it mixed with his
semi-conscious mind and took him back twenty years, to his older brother
sneaking through in the window of their shared bedroom at midnight, of getting
a waft of weed as James climbed clumsily into his bed opposite Ed’s. Pretending
to be asleep while his brother whispered his name, no doubt excited to tell him
what he’d been up to when mum and dad thought he was in bed.
     
    Just
as quick as he’d come back, James was dead again, and Ed saw a spray of glass
on the living room floor from where the window had smashed. Bethelyn’s tape job
had kept the shards bigger than they would have been.
     
    Pain
twisted in his temple as though wound in there by a sadist with a screwdriver.
He closed his eyes and tried his old hangover trick, which never worked, of
simply wishing the pain and nausea away. He pushed himself off the carpet and
sat up. He ran a hand through his hair and felt the grease that slicked his
locks. Something in the house stunk in the same way as a pub toilet an hour
before closing. He looked down at his pants and quickly realised it was him.
     
    What
the hell? He
hadn’t done that in years. Not since James and dad had taken him to the Dirty Feathers
for his sixteenth birthday and convinced the landlord, Des, to serve him a few
lagers. The night ended with James supporting Ed all the way home, tolerating
the drunk Ed’s swaying with a patience that every big brother probably learned
to develop.
     
    Ed
blinked, and again James was gone.
     
    Nobody
knew if James was dead, of course. Not officially. His boat had hit a storm too
big for the vessel to break through, and none of the crew had ever come ashore.
No sane person could look at the freezing sea, imagine the group of men sinking
beneath it, and hope that fate had taken pity on them. Ed had never seen the
body, but he’d let himself grieve because that was the only way he could cope.
Everyone talked about hope as though it was shining light that anyone could
follow, but sometimes that light led you into dark tunnels.
     
    He
walked out of the living room and stretched a foot onto the stairs, but even
the slight movement made him dizzy. How long had he been out for? He’d hurt
himself in Bethelyn’s house when the roof