Hiding in the darkness, I heard the sickening sound of teeth crunching through a human skull...

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That’s part of the nightmare I have suffered every night for years. It’s a memory from the very first zombie attack I witnessed. In the dream, I can feel my confusion, fear, tears and icy sweat. My entire body trembles and the broken lines of a prayer escape my lips. The panicked screams ring in my ears. Horror consumes me utterly...

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Some people are torn with disbelief at how the dead began to rise four years ago. My own disbelief was how the dead came back stronger. In a common-sense reality, dead tissue should be weak due to decomposition; the sinews should snap like old string; the muscles should disintegrate; the bones should break easily... In our hellish world, the rotting cadavers were stronger than they had been in life. I’d seen a reanimated little old lady tear a man’s arm off as if it was plucking a feather from a bird. What made them so impossibly strong and tenacious? And why hadn’t they rotted to oblivion during the last four years?

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There was a much bigger question, of course. One which overshadowed the rising dead and their strength... What the hell had made the Earth bleed before the dead rose?

 

*     *     *

 

If you had to travel outside the perceived safety of a camp, you never went out after dark. Night was the worst time to encounter the undead.

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Their eyes are pure white and faintly luminous in the dark. Many people believe this means the creatures have some kind of night-vision. Whatever the case, whereas a human being is hampered by darkness, the undead can hunt their prey in pitch blackness. Other senses they might possess could add to this advantage – they may be able to trace a target keenly by scent, sound and motion, or maybe even detect them by supernatural means.

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My team had been sent out on a salvaging trip. We’d left camp shortly after sunrise, with an estimated four-hour journey to a big auto scrap yard on the outskirts of Naderville. The job was easy and we’d done similar ones a hundred times before. Get there; find the spares we needed and scrounge around for any useful tools or other supplies; be back on the road by early afternoon; be home four hours before nightfall. It should have gone smoothly. But on that day, Fate took our plan by the balls and squeezed hard.

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There were five of us in the truck. The twins were in the front, Bob driving and Shaun riding shotgun. These two had been just twelve years old when the apocalypse hit our world, so most of their memories were from after ‘EB1’, the first year in which the Earth bled. They were skinny, medium-height and grim-faced; they had learnt very quickly and had established themselves as engineers and electricians. Both had black greasy hair hanging down over their shoulders – neither had yet grown a speck of stubble on their faces. Bob was the louder, smarter and more forceful of the pair, making him the natural leader of our team. Shaun was quieter and nervous, and had little experience of fighting the undead.

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The eight-wheel truck was well-protected. On the front was an armoured shield akin to a snowplough scoop, designed for pushing through crowds. Every window was heavily grilled. The rear section of the truck had originally been flat, but had been converted into a huge steel cage, and a tarpaulin roof had been added in case of rain. If it came to a fight, the people in the rear could fire through the cage bars, safely beyond the reach of zombie attackers.

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Marie, Miguel and I had chosen to remain in the cage. There was a long seat fixed behind the driver’s cab, facing to the rear, with seatbelts for safety. I occupied an outside position; Marie was in the middle and Miguel was on the far side. All of us were grateful for the fresh air the cage offered – and grateful not to be victims of the twins’ legendary flatulence in the front of the vehicle.

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Marie was a forty-year old woman whose grey hair and lined face suggested she was fifteen years older. Like the rest of us, she had seen and done things during the last four years which would age anybody. She was tough, pleasant and talkative. Despite our circumstances, the woman always dressed smartly and kept herself scrupulously clean. Marie could handle any weapon, person or situation at least as well as any male member of our camp. Better still, nothing frightened her. She said all the fear had been scared out of her long ago. It was rumoured Marie had once been a teacher – however, she had never discussed her past with me.

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Miguel was half-Mexican and half-Greek, yet possessed none of the good humour or pride of those peoples. He was a sour son-of-a-bitch: scruffy, unwashed, miserable and complained constantly. His favourite phrase was ‘but is it really worth the effort?’. Miguel told people that before the world went to shit, he had been an IT manager, fashion designer, movie director or had worked in the stock market; no one believed a word he said. The only reason Miguel volunteered for our trips outside the comparative safety of the camp, was to see if he could find himself some booze, drugs or porn.

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I made up the team with a complex mixture of charm, wit and steely determination. Okay, I’m making that stuff up. My name’s Edgar and on that day I was in my thirty-third year. Earlier in my life I had been a writer and artist for one of the major comic companies. When I reached a height of success and income, I decided to try alcohol poisoning for a few years. I’d drifted in and out of rehab for some time... but I’d been sober for ten years exactly when the dead rose. Yeah, my reward for sobriety was a shiny gold medallion and the zombie apocalypse. I have wondered whether drinking myself to death might have been a better option.

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After surviving for a while on my own during EB1, I had met members of the camp where I now lived. I had thrown myself into doing whatever I could to help the encampment and its thousand-odd lost souls – from learning to fight and kill, to apocalyptic first aid, to basic mechanics, manual labour... and, of course, foraging in the wilds outside the camp.

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People jokingly call me Big Ed. Not just because I’m tall, at six foot six, but because I have a large, squarish head. Think Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, minus the scars and bolts, and you wouldn’t be far off. I started to go bald at twenty – by thirty-three I had a little dark brown fringe left over the ears and at the top of my neck. My beard isn’t for fashion, rather because none of the men at the camp shave – the blades we have are put to better use. And speaking of fashion, my clothing also matched the average person at the camp – heavy, well-worn and patched; and, like most things we possessed, the black leather jacket I owned was found during one of our salvaging expeditions. Each of us also wore strong gloves, though these would not save fingers from the power of a zombie’s bite.

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We were all armed to the teeth. Pistols holstered at our waists. Survival knives strapped to our legs. Automatic rifles carried ready for use. Miscellaneous, personal favourites were also borne for quick action – my own being a razor-sharp machete.

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Oddly, when trouble hit, all our weapons were useless against it.

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*     *     *

 

For someone who had driven many times along roads during the pre-EB years, a road trip was always surreal and haunting.

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The quiet outside the truck struck you first. It wasn’t the pleasant calm I remembered from journeys along empty country roads, it was a chilling absence of sound. No traffic, birds or distant mechanical roars from farm vehicles; none of the occasional zooming sounds from aircraft rushing across the sky; no hums from power lines running parallel to the tarmac. The speed of the truck obscured the sound of the breeze blowing across fields or through trees – only the noise of bad weather would penetrate our steel-encased environment. And the day was clear and cloudless, offering no respite from the near-silence of the world of the dead.

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Everything we saw told a fragment of a story. A car abandoned and now turning to rust: the two front doors hanging open, suggesting the occupants had fled on foot after the car came to a halt. An area of the road streaked with tyre rubber, stained with old blood and littered with pieces of bone: had a vehicle slammed through an undead horde here – or even through a group of pleading, living humans? A bus had careered off the road and hit a great oak fast enough to concertina the front third of the vehicle: had the driver swerved to avoid a group of zombies on the road? Two dozen cars and a tanker merged together in a crumpled mass at a major junction: most likely, some of the drivers had been speeding in panic to escape whatever was behind them...

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And I also glimpsed, occasionally, in patches of rough ground, in open fields and muddy banks... seepages of Earth’s Blood. Even in areas of shade, this dark red liquid seemed to reflect and gleam. The nature of the substance gave it an uncanny, almost mottled look. It would be easy to imagine hundreds of rubies floating in the blood. Could there be solid or semi-solid material inside the fluid? I had no idea and I prayed I would never to get close enough to find out. All I knew was, the Earth’s Blood never dried up and never lost its colour.

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The smells of the country roads were very much different from my old memories too. A little of the freshness remained, but tinged with scents that were either unnatural or deeply unpleasant. Most of these smells were variations of rot. Since there was nobody to care for the patches of woodland we passed, infected or dead trees and vegetation decayed and stank. Acres of crops had been left in fields, deteriorating over time, becoming blighted and overgrown by weeds. And, wherever the undead had found a victim – be it human, animal or bird – the ragged, gnawed flesh was left on the ground to putrefy... For, although the zombies hunted for food and tried to eat their prey, they could not digest it. In their insane, feral state, the creatures could mimic devouring – but they couldn’t swallow, and the chewed flesh dropped from their jaws. It was as if Nature had left them the biological imperative to feed, whilst denying them the ability to do so.

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The worst odour we occasionally caught a drift of, was of the zombies themselves. Not only did the long-arisen dead reek of putrefaction, they also had a sharp, acidic stench – chemical and artificial. This second smell was of whatever substance kept the cadavers from falling apart completely. Combined, the stench was appalling and twisted your guts. A rule of thumb was, the stronger the stench, the greater the number of undead. So, if you found yourself choking on the stink, you were hopelessly surrounded...