Iain McKinnon - Remains of the Dead

“Little present,” Ryan said, dangling the nappy at arms’ length. “Bombs away!”

And with that, Ryan let go.

The excrement-filled ordnance plummeted down the side of the office block. With a satisfying splat it landed square on a zombie’s head and ruptured open. The shit-smeared towels blew off, sticking to the zombie’s shoulders and a few adjacent zombies as well. The nappy sat on the zombie’s head, steadily releasing a stream of khaki brown gloop down its face.

Ryan beckoned Cahz and Cannon over. “Look at this poor fuck.”

The zombie looked bemused, not comprehending what had happened or how it should react. It looked to and fro as if expecting a helpful suggestion from one of the surrounding creatures.

The three men hung out of the window and laughed while the zombies continued their futile clawing at the air. A gust of wind whipped a shit covered towel and slapped it clean across a zombie’s face. Blinded, the creature moaned more franticly and stumbled around. Not intelligent enough to pull it free, the blind zombie jostled the others in the crowd, striking out randomly, bumping like a wild pinball. The three men fell around in fits of laughter, pointing and snorting as they tried to catch their breath.

“Ah, classic,” Ryan gasped as he returned to his daughter.

The baby was merrily kicking out on her back like a stranded turtle. She wore a smile that exposed a few peggy teeth as she empathically joined in with the mirth. Ryan picked the tiny girl up and held her under the armpits, looking at her angelic smile. The girl met his eyes with a mesmerising stare. Her blue eyes locked onto his in an intense unblinking gaze.

Ryan’s smile widened as he studied his rosy-cheeked girl. Then his joy collapsed as he remembered the significance of the scratch down the right side of her face. He pulled the baby close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. The baby flung an arm out and grasped tight to the arm of Ryan’s t-shirt before nuzzling into his neck.

“There, there,” Ryan said instinctively as he gently bounced the child. “There, there.”

The baby smacked her lips and closed her eyes, calmed by her father’s warmth.

“What now, boss?” Cannon asked.

“Nothing, I guess,” Cahz replied. He nodded to Elspeth’s quarantine. “We wait for her.”

“You want to take turns watching?”

“No need while she’s locked in there. But I guess we’ll all feel safer if one of us keeps an eye on her.”

“Who’s up first?” Cannon asked.

Cahz looked at his watch. “I’ll do it for the next hour.”

Cannon sauntered back to his spot on the floor. “Give me a nudge then. I’m going back to sleep,” he said.

Cahz turned to Ryan. “A nap is a good idea. It could be anywhere between nineteen hundred and o’six hundred before we get picked up. Best we’re rested and alert for tonight.”

Ryan nodded and went back to sitting against the wall, cradling his child.

“Cannon!” Cahz shouted through the smoke. “Where are you, buddy?!”

Cahz edged forward, heading for the stairwell, praying it hadn’t caught fire too. He called out again, “Cannon!”

But the only thing he could hear was the crackling of the flames.

Cahz reached the fire doors and swung them open. The way ahead was clear. He held the door open and called into the thick smoke, “Cannon!”

A figure emerged from the billowing black clouds.

Elspeth’s eyes were blank but her lips were drawn back, exposing sharp needle teeth.

“What the-”

Before Cahz had time to think, Elspeth had leapt on top of him.

Cahz tried to throw off her cold grip, but he couldn’t shift her rigor mortis fingers. Flailing wildly, he toiled to heave her off, but in his struggle he stepped back and missed his footing on the stair. He fell backwards, tumbling the whole way, the zombie biting and scratching as he fell.

With a heavy thump Cahz hit the ground.

“Fuck!” he bellowed, snapped out of his slumber.

He sprang to his feet and anxiously looked round.

“Easy, tiger,” Ryan said calmingly as he popped another cranberry into his mouth. “Bad dream?” The cellophane rustled as he grasped with one hand at the dried fruit while cradling the baby in the other.

“You okay, boss?” came a more concerned voice.

“Sure, Cannon,” Cahz said, standing dazed in the converted office.

He looked around to see things exactly as he’d left them: the crates, the camp bed, and Elspeth still in her glass cage.

“Just a bad dream…” Cahz stopped dead.

He rushed over to the window and looked out at the street below. There were still thousands of zombies besieging the building. He turned and ran to the other side of the room and did the same. The back of the office block looked down at a relatively quiet employee car park, but behind the wire fencing, packed in the alleyway, was a thick mob of zombies.

“The roof!” Cahz barked as he ran for the stairwell.

“Boss, you’ve got me spooked. What’s going on?” Cannon asked as he pounded up the stairs after Cahz.

“Smoke. There was smoke in my dream,” Cahz said, worry in his voice.

“So you had a bad dream. Ain’t no other kind nowadays,” Cannon replied, jumping two steps at a time to keep pace.

“Met a special forces guy in the field once.” Cahz didn’t look back as he vaulted up the stairs. “He told me about a course on intuition his unit were sent on.”

“Don’t get you, boss,” Cannon said flatly.

“They pulled a whole unit out to go on a course run by a civvie psychologist. The crux of it is they were taught if you get the feeling something’s wrong then something is wrong.” Cahz thundered up to the roof access door and flung it open. “And I’ve got that feeling.”

Cannon barrelled up behind Cahz onto the sunlit roof. As he took in his first breath of the outside air, he could taste it.

Cahz walked calmly to look over the building’s edge.

“Shit,” he said. “Just what we freakin’ need.”

Cannon drew level with him.

Down below, the adjacent office block was on fire. The flames were unimpressive, their orange glow tempered by the bright sunlight and only visible on the ground floor, but a lick of smoke was twisting its way up.

“Maybe it’ll burn itself out,” Cannon said hopefully.

Cahz said, “Even if it doesn’t spread, do you think you can land a chopper at night with smoke all around? Idris won’t even know we’re here. We set off a flare and he’s never going to spot it.”

He pointed to the narrow alleyway between the buildings. Other than the throng of zombies there were a number of skips.

“See there,” Cahz asked, pointing.

“Yup,” Cannon confirmed.

“Full of trash that was never collected. It’ll catch. And that’s a gap for the flames to bridge and get to us. Hell, those W.D.s down there will dry out with the heat and combust. One of them could burst into a flaming torch and the fire could spread that way.”

“We’re fucked then,” Cannon said softly.

“We’re not fucked,” Cahz said confidently. “There’s plan B.”

“What’s plan B?”

“Don’t know yet,” Cahz said. “But we’d better come up with one.”

Fishing

With his aching leg resting up on a stool, Ali reclined in an easy chair and took a swig of black coffee. He’d learnt to enjoy black coffee back in the warehouse. Some of the others had become accustomed to the powdered whitener but he’d never made the adjustment.

The strong smell of his drink mixed with the smoke from the small fire he’d set on the cooker to boil the water. He could have made the campfire anywhere in the apartment, but an atavistic bent instinctively called him to the cooker. In all the destruction, the rubble and collapse, Ali still clung to an ingrained sense of cleanliness.