Abandoned

This was written as part of an assessment for college as well as to satisfy my zombie needs. Enjoy!

 Six months ago Dr Lillian Mathews had been dropped off over the border, in Scotland, with some notes and one gun and told to do her best. Seven months ago Scotland she was cut off from the rest of the United Kingdom. Now, as light the flickering light illuminated her face in a dark laboratory, BBC 1 informed her that she wasn’t going home.

 

A patient lay upon her table covered in deep bites and scratches. From these deep wounds oozed a thick green substance with spots of blood in it. Dr Lillian’s patient was very much infected.

 

The whole of Scotland, or as far as the English government could tell, was infected.

 

When people had first gotten ill, the pandemic swept the full of Scotland in a week; all means of transport stopped, people stayed in their homes, in their beds and only the animals walked the stray streets.

 

Then, one by one, Scotland fell asleep. In the course of a month only the English and Welsh doctors who had came to help were left. When the Scottish awoke, they never went home.

 

In the month between complete infection and her arrival, Dr Lillian kept track of the ongoing processes to protect the rest of the nation. Volunteers from the rest of the country had taken up camo’ uniforms and started their services next to the trained troops, everyone was armed and sat behind fences which towered above the average house. Anyone over the border who came within a certain distance of this fence was gunned down immediately, if there had been anyone uninfected left then the chances were that there wasn’t now.

 

They drove her through a large, heavy looking door in the fences and dropped her directly at the entrance to the laboratory which was merely a door which was hidden in amongst a deep dense forest just off of the motorway. Behind the secret door there was a steel staircase which led down into a series of three rooms- the kitchen, the bedroom and a bathroom. All three were small and provided only the basics except from the fridge which had been packed with food and the cupboards were bursting with cans and sachets of make shift pastas. There was then a long corridor of green which led to a large laboratory, once again coated in steel. In the middle there was an operating table with a side table of tools. Cabinets surrounded the room and there was one black chair which Dr Lillian could wheel about on if she wished. In the far right corner sat the small black television connected to an aerial, not exactly the technology she was used to but she made do with what she had. The only channel left was channel one, all Scottish channels were shut down when there was no one left to host or make them. The left hand corner had a desktop computer with only a link to the headquarters so that weekly reports could be sent. After experiments had been done on her subjects, Lillian had to store them in the deep freezer which was through a door at the back of the lab. It was becoming too crowded for Lillian’s liking.

 

The government had hoped that soon Scotland would die out, the risen dead would die again and they would start repopulating the country with English volunteers but there seemed to be no such advances. In the mean time, they wanted to try to find a cure. Dr Lillian had been told some information about the biological order of the reawakening of the infected, what part of the brains came back and how people became infected, she had plenty of chances to witness it herself first hand and then that was it. Since then, she had not managed to uncover much else. The best she had managed to do was combine various antibiotics which would make the infected fairly calmer, almost dormant but only for a short period of time before they became uncontrollable. This time had been becoming shorter and Dr Lillian now had fewer bullets to sort out these situations. There had also been changes in the infected; they had become quicker and more cunning. Their senses had increased to their optimum, age didn’t affect them. Each of them were as fast as the other and could hear, smell and see better than any proper functioning human. Only when they were fed were they ever distracted and they were always in groups, they had discovered an immense sense of power in numbers and stuck to it.

 

In terms of medication she had, however, managed to completely induce an unconscious state to her current patient whom she had named Bill, mainly because she thought he looked like someone who would have previously had a trade- like a plumber. She was injecting him with a new concoction when she heard something she quickly wished she hadn’t:

 

“Despite an immense amount of effort from our volunteers we have been unable to uncover the doctor’s body”.

Her head snapped up and she fled over to the screen, sitting in her black chair while the dim flash of colour illuminated her matted black hair, glasses and splattered lab coat.

 

There was another doctor?

 

“The brave Dr Lillian Mathews volunteered herself six months ago in order to help a nation under threat. The doctor was sure she could find a cure, however, for around a month the doctor has not been in contact with her head office, raising an uneasy awareness among her distant fellow workers. Prior to this suspicion, teams were sent to her laboratory where she was not be found, the near by area has also been searched and no trace of her body has been found. The search party has had to abandon their search to an increase in the infected and have returned over the boarder unharmed.

 

May we always remember what Dr Mathews has sacrificed for us.”

 

The calm and dismissive tone of the news anchor shook Lillian to her core sending an uneasy sickness bouncing between her stomach and throat.

 

She got out of her chair and rushed over to the computer, all of her reports had been received. All of them had been opened by someone on the other side. Someone hadn’t liked what they’d seen. Someone thought it wasn’t worth their money anymore.

 

They’re abandoning me.

 

She let the thought sink in to her.

She hadn’t even wanted to come here, she had been talked into it.

Now she had been abandoned.

 

A distant thudding began at her front door. Sometimes the monsters she’d been left with liked to try and visit. She stood up, in a state of shock, and walked over to Bill. The table he lay on was greasy with the ooze seeping from his body. Suddenly, Bill’s head moved and a prolonged gasp escaped from his lungs. Bill was waking up.

 

Dr Lillian suddenly realised that it didn’t matter. She didn’t have to try and sedate him more, she didn’t have to try and test his bloods for change and she didn’t have to sit and look at his god-awful ugly face anymore. She grabbed a hammer from the side cabinet and raised it above her head.

 

Then she brought it down onto Bills face. Again, again and again. She screamed in a fit of rage.

 

His skull cracked and from there leaked the grey matter of his brain. It swirled around in the pool of blood before settling and sinking slightly. His face looked as though it had caved into his nose, which was nowhere to be seen. His skin was ripped around his cheeks and the cheek bones protruded at an ugly angle, shinning white amongst the massacre. Lillian threw the hammer into Bill’s face again with another exhilarated scream and left it there, slowly sinking into the back of his head in a low gurgle.  

 

The thudding began to grow louder from down the corridor. A series of goose bumps began to rise down Lillian’s spine. She knew there was no point anymore.

 

She returned to her room and opened the small chest of drawers to find the small black pistol. She stormed up the stairs, her lab coat blowing like a cape, and swung open the door.

 

Startled infectious bodies tried to throw themselves at her and she kicked the closest one to her and all of them clumsily fell back. Five head shots later she was climbing over them, shielding her sore eyes from the cold morning light. She met few monsters as she made her way through the woods, none of them posed a challenge. Eventually she met the motorway, and began to head south.

 

Lillian never knew what she was hoping to achieve by walking south, they’d shoot her before she got a chance to identify herself. They’d probably shoot her even if she did. The government wanted to hide something from the rest of the nation, and she was amongst the millions who would never find out.

 

She made her away through the maze of abandoned cars and as the doctor climbed over an upturned lorry -which had blocked the full span of the motorway- she heard a series of snarls. When she reached the top, what she saw sickened her in the deepest pits of her stomach. A horse lay on it’s side while about twenty monsters munched into it, tearing apart its ribcage with a crunch and delving their hands into blood-soaked guts that squelched and spluttered as they ripped them from the twitching corps. 

 

She turned to climb back down when to her horror she realised she was surrounded. Numerous monsters now surrounded the back of the truck and seemed to be growing in number, apparently standing on top of a truck tended to draw their attention. She began trying to shoot at them but her shaking hand failed her and she missed several, wasting bullets. This angered them just as much as it angered her and they began to push against the truck. When she turned back to the horse munchers they had began to do the same.

 

The truck rocked uneasily and Lillian fell to her knees, she had nothing to clutch onto. Behind the truck the number had grew and she couldn’t count them just from looking. They finally shoved the truck so hard she flopped over the other side, right side of her body taking the brunt of the fall. Intestines became entangled in the mass of her dark hair and when she tried to sit up her right side gave way and she slipped inside the carcass of the horse, blood smothering her face and making her cough.

 

A tight grip grasped her left shoulder and an infected woman with short white hair hissed in Lillian’s face. Lillian tried to raise her right arm to either shoot the woman or at least hit her but she must have dislocated her shoulder, she could hardly even move it. Instead, she stretched out her left hand grabbed the woman by the neck and lay back, holding the snarling monster over her she tried to aim her gun from the ground and on her last shot she finally hit the head, the body flopped down on top of her.

 

Lillian had somewhat hoped that the body of the monster and the horse would conceal her own, like in all the movies Lillian had ever watched. She soon found out that the movies were a load of rubbish. The rest of the horse munchers clambered on top of them, crushing Lillian’s body further into the stinking carcass. Finger nails scraped at her skin, revealing flesh and blood beneath the dirty skin. They then scraped against the flesh, trying to get deeper. Eventually, after some time of scraping and screams of excruciating pain from Lillian, she began to pass out as she felt her ribs beginning to give way.

 

The last thing Lillian ever felt was a pair of black, sharp teeth rip into her jugular.

 

The last thing she ever heard was a snarl, vicious and sickening, residing in her ear.

Reviews

[LiteraryLout]

Prior to reading this, I had prepared myself for another mind-numbing tale about the shuffling dead and their proclivities, packed with trite characters and bound together with a shaky plot.

As a result, I was pleasantly surprised to find a short, concise piece about a nation plunged into chaos, featuring a protagonist that was doomed from the very beginning.

Great genre subversion pal, simply great.