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

crashed, but surely not this badly?
     
    “Beth?”
     
    Silence
met him at the top of the stairs. He gripped the edge of his bedroom door and
let it support him as he staggered into the room. What he saw locked his legs
in place.
     
    They
could have been asleep if it weren’t for the fact their eyes were wide open.
April lay on the bed with her arms above her head and stretched along the bed.
Her chest rose and fell, but there was a stillness to her that you usually only
found in photographs. Her skin was grey like concrete dried in the sun.
     
    Bethelyn
was on the floor next to the bed. She lay on her stomach with her face buried
in the carpet. Ed crossed the room and stood over her, but he couldn’t speak
and didn’t dare touch her. He hoped he was wrong, but he had an idea what had
happened. His stomach twisted.
     
    They
could have been asleep. They weren’t asleep . The same thing happened to
him, after all. He hadn’t just fallen asleep naturally, yet some stretched out,
indeterminate time had passed and he had woken from it. It could have been
something to do with his injury. It could have been something, anything else,
but that was wishful thinking. The woman on his bedroom floor made it clear
that, no matter how empty it made him feel, this was exactly what he thought.
     
    He
left the bedroom, climbed downstairs, passed through his living room and
stopped in his kitchen. Three knives hung from a metal rack and swung slowly in
the breeze. He tapped his finger along them and settled on the longest one. The
blade was wide, jagged, and there was enough handle to keep his hand away from
anything he chose to use it on. His dad used to cut pork shoulders with it. He
gripped the knife in one hand and leaned on the plastic-coated kitchen counter
with his other.
     
    When
he thought of using it his throat dried up. What should he do about them?
Should he just kill them? He’d seen the early stages of the outbreak on
television. Shaky-cam films of infected as they walked through cities in
disorganised waves, their minds distracted by the still-alive hunks of flesh
that ran in all directions around them, screaming and shoving each other into harm’s
way.
     
    The
public information newscasts had told him what to expect from infection. It had
told him that you caught it through a bite or scratch. That once you got it you
fell into a coma and then you awoke as one of them. How then, was Ed still
human enough to consider the question? What’s more, how the hell had he caught
the infection? He hadn’t been bitted and neither had Bethelyn or April.
     
    He
thought again of having to go up there. There was a dim image in his mind of
what he needed to do, but he didn’t dare cast light on it. Instead there was
another answer, and he decided it lay outside of his house.
     
    A walk
across the living room and out of the hallway later, he stood outside his house
and felt the tickle of a cool wind. The sky was light grey with cracks where
the blue shone through, and it seemed as though the bulk of the storm had gone and
left the rear-guard in its place.
     
    He
walked up a cobble street which twisted through Golgoth and connected each
house. Further up, beyond a stone wall which had collapsed seven years ago and
was never fixed, he came to Gordon Rigby’s house. Rigby was an old-timer, an ex-headmaster
who had retired to Golgoth and let his mind grow as old as the island’s eroding
cliffs. He was a man who loved order but was slowly losing the ability to
achieve it. His fingers tugged on lots of webs, and Gordon had involved himself
in almost every social hobby and past time on the island. His brown hair, which
despite his age refused to grey, and jacket and waistcoat combination were
often seen at domino games and pub quizzes, at knitting circles and scouting
trips. He was also heavily involved in the town council, and ran it in the
manner of a school classroom.
     
    Ed
stood outside Gordon’s house, and he saw signs of