Dearly departed

At the bootcamp a few weeks ago, we were set the task of writing a short story in a day. I had never written anything like that before so was thrown in the deep end. I started the story I have posted here and then abandoned it at 10 pm on the night before it was due to be handed in.

I started another story which is much much better and got it done in time (much to my relief!). Anyway, I'm posting it here not as an example of good writing - in fact it's pretty crap - but it allows me to post the problems with it afterwards - and that's the real point.

Dearly departed
By Alex Meehan

She hadn’t left her fourth floor apartment in four days now, and if anything it seemed that the noise was getting louder. There must be more of them out there now. Hour after hour the shouting, screaming and banging continued as the creatures below were driven more and more insane. Of course to be insane, you have to be human, and it was doubtful that anything down there could be described as human anymore.

Jenny had woken on a Saturday morning to the sound of gunshots outside her apartment block and rushed out of her bedroom to look out the small living room window of her sixth floor flat. The corporation had been threatening to tear it down for years, and hadn’t bothered with renovation, so it had fallen into disrepair, along with the common areas around it. Sadly, the sound of gunshots had become a relatively common feature of urban living in this part of town.
On this occasion, she expected to hear the screech of car tires and the usual silence that descends after a street shooting, but instead she stared, shocked.

A man stood in the green space below, armed with a smoking sawn off shotgun, looking at a body at his feet. He was either dead or seriously wounded. Jenny stood there in shock before moving away from the window and scrabbling for her mobile phone to call the police. Her shaking fingers had difficulty dialling the numbers and she had to make two attempts before she pressed the dial button and noticed there was no ring tone.

BANG! BANG! Jenny turned back towards the window, incredulous, to see the same man walking backwards towards the block, reloading his shotgun. The body from before was gone, and now two men were running at the man below. Something was wrong. The gunman was desperately attempting to reload his shotgun, but couldn’t get the cartridges to fit.

Suddenly his assailants reached him and in a second overpowered him. Jenny watched them wrestle him to the ground, stuck in the moment by grotesque fascination. Afterwards, she would remember that the running men looked strange. Of course, now she knew why, but at the time she couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong.

However, in front of her eyes, the men started biting and tearing at the gunman. Blood spurted as the men ripped chunks of living flesh from the screaming struggling man. Jenny was transfixed with horror. She felt her stomach sink in shock and she had an urge to vomit.

The horrible scene unfolding in front of her was around 100 feet away, but she could have sworn that one of aggressors looked like the body that had been lying on the ground when she first came to the window.
While she watched in shock, the same man looked up, straight at her. She jumped involuntarily, even though he couldn’t possibly know she had been looking at them. He climbed to his feet and started to sprint toward the base of Jenny’s apartment block, all the while holding her in his stare. Jenny screamed as the man disappeared from her view below.

What should she do? She looked at the phone again but it held no solution. It was powered on but showed no signal. She looked out the window again and now all she could see was the dead gunman, lying prone on the grass. Both his attackers were now gone. Maybe they had run away?

Seconds passed while she stood, routed to the spot by indecision. Then the sound of rapid gun fire, this time muffled and distant sounding, interrupted her thoughts. She ran to the door and slid the bolt across, locking it securely and then looked through the spyhole.

She paused and listened. Nothing. Opening the door, Jenny looked left and right and then walked in her tracksuit bottoms and teeshirt down the hall. She paused at the top of the stairs. She could hear noises far below - voices were talking in muffled tones, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Her heart pounding, she crept down five flights of stairs and as she turned to go down the final stair case to the ground floor, the voices got louder.

“I don’t ****ing know, it just came for me. What would you do?” said a gruff male voice

“What do you mean ‘it’? This is a person, you’ve just killed a person – for God’s sake don’t you realise what you’ve done?” answered a second voice.

“I don’t think God has much to do with this,” the first voice answered.

“You’re insane,” said the second voice, “I’m going to get help.”

Jenny looked around the corner as the first voice shouted “wait, John, don’t go out there!”
From her vantage point, she could see the owner of the gruff voice in the hallway, with an obviously dead body at his feet. It was Roger, the forty-something janitor who lived on the second floor. Jenny only knew him to say hello to when they passed in the corridors, but on one occasion he had shouldered her door open when she lost her key.
He was holding a shotgun and as she watched, he started up the corridor towards the receding outline of the first man who was hurrying towards the main complex door. “John!” he called as the first figure disappeared through the door.

From outside, Jenny could hear noises, raised voices followed by a scream. John was shouting from outside, but he had started calling for help. Roger rushed through the inner fire door and went to the main door, but to Jenny’s horror, instead of opening it and helping John, he grabbed a chair from the corridor and used it to jam the door closed.
While she watched, he reached into his pocket and took out an enormous bunch of keys, picked one out and locked the door. He took several steps back into the corridor and stopped.

Outside Jenny could hear what sounded like a fistfight. She walked slowly down the corridor, her eyes fixed on the body on the ground as she did so. She walked past it and called out “what’s going on? Why don’t you help him?”
Roger turned quickly, raising the gun as he did so. When he saw it was Jenny, he paused, then said “have you been outside? Quickly, tell me?”

“Jesus,” said Jenny, “what are you doing? Don’t point that thing at me!”

“Answer the question,” he said coldly.

“No, I haven’t, I’ve just woken up for God’s sake”

Roger stared straight at her, saying nothing as the noise continued outside. He lowered his gun.

“You couldn’t pay me to go out there right now.”

He’d barely finished speaking when a loud wet thump made Jenny jump. Behind Roger, something was trying to get through the main doors. They both turned. It was John and through the smoked wired glass of the door’s window panel, Jenny could see he looked injured.

“Let him in, he needs help,” she said.

“He can’t be helped now,” said Roger.

“What?” she replied. What was this guy talking about?

Suddenly, Roger raised the shotgun and pointed it down the corridor past Jenny. He fired and an enormous echoing boom filled the space, causing Jenny to drop to the floor in fright, hiding her head in her hands. But Roger hadn’t fired the gun at her. Looking down the corridor from behind her hands, Jenny saw the unthinkable. The dead body from before was no longer dead. It was walking up the corridor.

It had a hole in its chest the size of a football and its head hung at an awkward angle. But it was the eyes that Jenny would remember. The cold dead eyes, rolled so far back in the man’s head that all you could see were the whites. It moaned, a desperate sound the like of which Jenny had never heard before.

Roger was reloading his shotgun. “Get behind me,” he shouted, as he closed the shotgun up and raised it again. This time, he fired both barrels at the same time, and the man’s head exploded. Outside, the noise from before had become louder and moans similar to that of the creature from the hall had started. The people outside were banging on the outside of the door.

Roger closed the fire door and locked it before running back into his office and returning with a hammer and some pieces of wood. He started nailing the wood over the fire door.

Jenny was still on the floor, in shock, but by now she wasn’t alone. Several people who had been observing events from behind their spyholes were venturing out into the hall. “Quick help me seal the exits,” shouted Roger. “Find wood and bring it back here as soon as you can.”

* * *

That was four weeks ago now, and it seemed like ancient history. There had been a time when she had stood on her tiny balcony and looked out at the London skyline during the day, but not anymore. It wasn’t safe. The world had changed utterly for Jenny and millions of other Dubliners since then, and now she had difficulty thinking about before. The pain was too much.

It was easier to live in the moment, in the now. Wasn’t that what all those new age philosophers said? She laughed, remembering a time when people had such mundane things to occupy their thoughts.

At first, she had spent time on her balcony, hoping to call for help from passers by. But there weren’t any passers by. Not human ones anyway. All her calling did was attract more of them and soon the numbers gathered at the doors below grew. She spent hours and days waiting for them to get bored and go away. After the first three days, it became obvious they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Whatever eldritch horror drove them, whatever perversion of God’s design for man, wouldn’t let them rest. The tormented lived up to the name.

When the last escape attempt was mounted, she counted as best she could and found there were 120 of them outside. Now she stayed away from the windows altogether.

Her world now consisted of this six storey apartment block, its 20 inhabitants, and Roger the janitor turned leader. He became the de facto leader of the remaining group and it seemed they were lucky to have him. He knew a lot about what had happened, and in retrospect, she had been lucky to live in this apartment block, with this group of people.

Roger had expanded on his theories that first day, when Jenny had helped with the other residents of Merrion Heights to board up the doors of the block, front and back.

He had acquired a shot gun and had plenty of ammunition in his flat. He took four men armed with whatever weapons they could find - his shotgun, an old sword that someone had used to decorate their mantle piece and some pieces of wood found in the basement.

They’d gone to the local supermarket, loading up with food and returned, looking seriously shaken. They couldn’t be drawn on what had taken place, but since then Roger had taken charge and the other residents had gone along, eager to be led in the chaos.

“There’s no cure for this. It’s a virus, there is no drug for that,” he replied when Jenny suggested that maybe the people outside were temporarily ill and would respond to medical treatment if only they could call a doctor.
“It’s called OSC73Z and it was developed by the Russians during the Cold War. Really, it was only a matter of time before it was released into the wild. If anything, it’s surprising it wasn’t used before this.”

“You mean someone made those . . . things deliberately?” Jenny was shocked. “I don’t believe it, why would anyone want to do that? It’s preposterous.”

“Well, a lot of money was spent on biological weapons in the 1950s, and in this case they got it right. Or wrong, depending on your view,” said Roger.

According to Roger, the virus worked by infecting the blood stream of the host, travelling to the brain and infecting the frontal lobes. Its original intention was to create a temporary psychotic state, a useful trait in front line soldiers. In the end the research was shelved because of the catastrophic effects on the first human test subjects.
Where OSC73Z had a mild effect on lab monkeys, it had a catastrophic effect on humans, irreversibly destroying the living brain. “The first test volunteers infected with the virus had been hard up soldiers, offered the chance to earn a few extra rubles. They were assured the tests were safe, but after a few hours, to a man the test subjects developed high fevers and aching joints. After five hours, they become more and more incoherent and their temperatures increased to 106 degrees.”

“Paralysis set in, and the men slipped into a coma. The died approximately 20 hours after exposure. It should have ended there, but it didn’t. Three hours later, almost a full 24 hours after infection, they . . . revived,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘revived’,” said Jenny, “corpses don’t revive. You must mean they weren’t really dead. Those things outside aren’t dead. Listen, you can hear them now! How many dead things do you know that make noises like that?”

“Oh they’re dead all right. I should know, I’ve shot one twice at point blank range in the chest, and it’s gotten right back up. Live people don’t do that and if that thing was alive before, it certainly shouldn’t have been after that. The only way to kill them is to separate the head from the body. Even then, I’m not sure they are actually dead.”
Jenny looked at him, perplexed. Why was he saying these things – it was so patently ridiculous that she didn’t understand how anyone could take it seriously. However, there was no denying the cacophony coming from outside. She didn’t know what to believe, but decided she needed to hear more.

“What happened to the Russians then? Did they develop a cure?”

“No. I’ve told you, there is no cure. When the soldiers reanimated and tried to kill the staff of the military hospital, they had to be killed, but it took a lot to take them down, and the staff had no way of knowing the danger they were in,” said Roger.

“You see, the virus multiplies and reproduces exponentially within the bodies of the infected. It was designed to be administered to controlled subjects, but once deployed, the infected soldiers were driven to kill any living thing they came into contact with, infecting them in turn. The result was an outbreak that killed the 470 people in the Ukrainian hospital it was born in, including all of the research scientists involved in its development.”

“In the end, the facility was boarded up and torched, permanently killing everyone and everything inside.”
Roger went on. Few things were known about OSC73Z, other than that there was no known cure and that biting or scratching by an infected person resulted in infection 100 per cent of the time and that infection was 100 per cent fatal. It didn’t affect animals and wasn’t airborn or waterborn. There was only one way to get it.

“How do you know all this,” Jenny had asked. “I’ve never heard of this,” and gesturing towards the direction the noise was coming from, she said, ”and it’s kind of hard to not notice that”

Roger fixed her in his gaze. “I’m part of a community of like-minded individuals, people who don’t take what they hear from their governments at face value. We talk online, share information, keep an eye on what’s happening and try to stay ready for when this corrupt and decadent society gives way to the new order. I’d say that day has come, wouldn’t you?”

Oh God, Jenny thought, an internet geek with a taste for conspiracy theories. “But the period you are talking about is over fifty years ago,” she said.

“Let’s say what you’re saying is true - and don’t think for a second I believe it is - but let’s say it’s true. Why now, why fifty years later and why here? We’re a long way from Ukraine,” said Jenny.

“I don’t know why we’re seeing it now. The existence of OSC73Z has been rumoured for years though, and many things that were top secret fifty years ago are less so now. Yesterday’s secrets are bought for the price of a vodka in the right place today.

“When the Soviet Union broke up, where do you think all those bombs and rockets went? Do you want to know the answer? No where, they’re still there, rusting away with no one to look after them. The military that maintained and looked after those facilities upped and left in 1989 when there was no-one to pay their wages.”

“Many of the officers from that time supplemented their meagre incomes by selling off anything they could lay their hands on with the letters CCCP on it. Anything that would bring in some funds. Maybe someone kept some OSC73Z for a rainy day and dropped the test tube. Who’s to say?”

ENDS

This is the point where I realised this wasn't going to work. The next post should explain why . . .

PS - I can't stress strongly enough that I would never use asterixes instead of the word fuck, but apparently on blogspot you can't swear. Yeah. Right.