The Man Comes Around

Bekki looked around at her surroundings and thought to herself that none of what was happening was how she expected to be spending the end of the world. Then she checked herself when a small yet irritatingly rational voice in the back of her mind asks her how she had expected to spend the apocalypse.

Well. However she might have imagined her last days on the planet, it certainly hadn’t been trapped in a church with her mother, stepfather and a couple dozen other people, all hiding from the walking dead that were roaming the streets and eating anyone who had the misfortune of getting too close.

Before all of this, the last time Bekki had even set foot in a church had been at her Confirmation, cand that had been six years previously. She wondered if she needed to make a confession or something to a priest, or if her decidedly un-Catholic lifestyle was going to count against her when supplies started to run low.

She would have preferred to stay at their apartment, all things considered, and not because of any uneasiness over the potential state of her soul or similar. The apartment was on the third floor, after all, and was therefore well protected from the zombies that were shambling around at ground level. Even if some of them had managed to get into the apartment building they wouldn’t have been able to go very far; some bright spark had cut the power to the lifts quite early on, and even if zombies could manage stairs, the doors to the stairwells were all security-locked for residents’ use only.

They had had plenty of food – a few weeks’ worth, at any rate – and the building had still had power, so there were still things like lights and the TV – although Bekki had known they wouldn’t have lasted forever. And their apartment building had been relatively quiet compared to the rest of the city – Bekki had spent several informative hours out on the fire escape outside her window, quietly observing the carnage unfolding below her whenever she had gotten bored of the TV and its endless recitation of ‘rescue centres’ and interviews with people who really had no idea what was going on but were trying not to let it show, and from the distant sounds of sirens, gunshots and screams, it seemed like things were much worse elsewhere.

She had also taken to watching things from the fire escape because, once the news reporters and so-called ‘specialists’ had finally stopped fucking around and admitted that what they were dealing with was the “newly dead returning to life in order to attack and feed upon the living” – and provided footage to support that claim – her mother had turned the TV off. She just hadn’t wanted to see what was going on. So Bekki had moved onto the fire escape, which gave her a good and perfectly safe view of the roads around their building. There were a couple of abandoned cars at a junction; their drivers had ditched them after they had smashed into each other and ceased to be useful transportation. Boxes and trashcans skittered around occasionally, moved by the slight wind. There were a couple of bloodstains too – whatever had caused them was long gone but they remained. From her distance Bekki had almost been able to pretend they were just oil or paint spills. Almost.

A few zombies could always be seen shuffling their way aimlessly about the streets as well. There were different zombies pretty much every time Bekki went out onto the fire escape – she found she could distinguish between them, even from three floors up, by comparing their various injuries and bloodstains – except for one particular zombie who seemed to be there just about every time she looked out.

In life the man had been a tall and sturdy-looking black man, and very little of that had changed now that he was dead, except that he was now missing an arm. He was well dressed enough that Bekki imagined that he had been a businessman – maybe a stockbroker? – when he had been alive, and she wondered if he had carried a briefcase with that missing arm. Whenever she saw him, it seemed as though he were looking for something, either stumbling back and forth across the same section of road, or just standing still and seemingly staring blankly into the middle distance. Bekki wondered if he were looking for his arm, and part of her wished that he somehow would find it, because every time she saw that torn shoulder socket, circled by ragged strips of cloth and flesh, and with a jagged white nub of bone in its centre, her control and detachment over the whole damn situation threatened to shatter and leave her a sobbing mess.

But she didn’t have to worry about seeing that particular zombie anymore, because they were no longer at home where it had been pretty much safe. Julian, exhibiting once more the evil asshole qualities that made Bekki loathe him so much, had decided that they needed to go to one of the rescue centres, where there would be more people and, more importantly, people with guns who could protect them. Her mother had disagreed, pointing out Bekki’s reasoning that they were safe enough on the third floor. They had argued – Bekki had heard it out on the fire escape, and when she’d gone back inside her mother had a split lip. Again.

She’d known there was no point in arguing with Julian. Her mother never let Bekki get involved in their ‘little fights’, no matter how bad they got, and would defend Julian with the loyalty of a puppy hoping not to get kicked if it ever did get brought up. So Bekki had silently, begrudgingly, gone along.

Besides, she’d had to protect her mother.

Once at the ‘rescue centre’, however – also known as the Church of the Sacred Heart – Bekki had felt even less like they were all going to get through things in one piece. There were a lot more zombies in this area, for one thing – whether they were attracted by noise or the prospect of people/food she didn’t know, and didn’t really want to find out – and they clawed at the barricades and at the car itself, whenever it slowed down long enough for them to get near. Men, women and even children – all of them dead and yet somehow still moving around, and almost all of them with chunks of flesh missing from somewhere on their bodies. Bekki had found herself staring into the glazed eyes of a woman in a nurse’s uniform who had a torn, gaping crater where her left cheek should have been, and had barely been able to tear her eyes away.

The cops and army guys manning the barricades looked as though they hadn’t had any sleep for two or three days, which Bekki guessed was probably the case. The barricades themselves didn’t really look all that better, and it looked pretty likely that they would eventually collapse if enough zombies beat on them for long enough. And it looked like more zombies were arriving all the time.

She wondered how much ammo their ‘guards’ had left.

Inside the church things didn’t look much better. Most of the people who had sought sanctuary there were families, so about half of them were children who were either running around and being hysterical or sitting still and being hysterical. The lights periodically flickered on and off – presumably they were being powered by a generator or similar, rather than the city grid. No one really seemed to be in charge, although Bekki thought she saw a man in a priest’s dog collar attempting to calm a sobbing young woman.

And of course, only one medic, who looked to be terminally overworked as he dealt with cases of shock, broken and sprained limbs and… other injuries.

Bekki had seen all the movies, and while people might have pointed out that movies didn’t exactly correlate to real life, it wasn’t every day that the dead got up and started walking around. So she was instantly wary about the three people who had been unlucky enough to get bitten by zombies while they had been trying to get to safety... in particular the man who was lying on one of the pews, his skin a disturbing waxy colour, who periodically twitched.

Her mother, ever helpful, went to help the harried medic, and Bekki wasn’t really amused to see that Julian seemed to be just as unhappy about that as she was... albeit for different reasons. Julian himself was moving around the church, talking to people in an attempt to find out who was in charge and who was going on. Bekki hoped that he was starting to realise that his plan hadn’t been nearly as good as he’d thought it had been.

She still felt trapped, however. Trapped and vulnerable. There were too many people, too much movement and chaos for her to get an accurate bearing of what was going on at any one point. Eventually, she knew, there were going to be zombies in there with them – it was just a question of whether the barricades would fall and they would get in from the outside or whether one of the injured inside would die from their wounds and then come back first.

However it happened, Bekki wanted to be ready for it, though. There was no way she was dying in a church, of all places.