Night of the Zombie Brain Wasps

It was hard to sleep. The constant buzzing, occasionally drowned out by a helicopter overhead. The helicopters were still patrolling then, surely a positive sign?

        Saul sat against the wall, lit by light coming in from the open kitchen and hall doors where nobody had bothered to turn the lights off. Everyone else was at least keeping up the pretence of sleep. He watched over the top of his knees, pulled up until they touched his nose.

More buzzing outside, every now and then a thud against the window. No sign for hours of those vacant eyed men and women infected with the blood lust. But then, the curtains were drawn.

        There was more screaming, coming from somewhere towards the town centre, but it died as quickly as it started. Saul shivered.

“This is the way the world ends,” he said into denim.

A murmur came from an armchair across the room. “Not with a bang but a buzz.” 

        Saul looked at the pile of blanket the voice had emanated from and whispered its name. No reply.

“How long do you think we’ll have to stay in here?” asked Charlie.

        Nobody replied. Saul scratched his head as if to indicate thinking about it.

        “What if we can never go outside again?” she added.

        There was a grunt from across the room. Nothing that could be realistically called a word. “There’s food in the kitchen,” said Gordon. “It should last a little while?”

        “How little?” someone said, a voice in the corner.

        Gordon looked around. There were too many people in the house now. He didn’t want to say it, but it was true. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”

        “Thank you,” said Charlie.

        “You’re very welcome,” said Gordon. “Stay safe.”

        “You too.”

The one who called himself Renegade, who was at least good enough to admit this was not his real name, even if he would not say what that was, stood up, holding still a smeared cricket bat. He refused to put it down. He held it swinging loosely by his side and took a step towards the window. And another. Saul started up to stop him. He didn’t want the curtains touched. But Renegade paused I the middle of the room and stood there, looking around. The people sitting or lying across the place looked almost like his victims. It was creepy. Sinister maybe.

        Renegade had come out of nowhere off the high street, swinging that bat and roaring. His eyes had been wide and fevered and the group had thought for a moment they’d have to fight him off.

        As he stood there in the middle of the room, he felt his muscles twitching. He wanted to scream and to hit something. Contradictions made him angry. They made him want to do something. He felt that he should be alone. Moving fast and moving free. No responsibilities. That was who he was. Wild and independent. Equipped to survive. It made sense. But he couldn’t take a step. The door was so far away. And the uncertainty beyond it… he would never admit, even to himself, that it terrified him.  

        Saul watched this guy in the middle of the room, tall and muscular. He thought maybe he should say something to him, but what to say? Why was it his job? He was exhausted. He didn’t know where Kelly was. Perhaps at her house. Perhaps in his apartment, wondering where he was. Maybe she had escaped to, to wherever was better. Or maybe she was stumbling in though the night making that ungodly gurgling/buzzing hybrid sound. Stung and lost. But he mustn’t think that. He balled up his fists. He hadn’t prayed since he’d slept at his grandmother’s house as a child and she’d knelt beside him before bed.

Charlie couldn’t sleep. She knew that, but she tried anyway. She doubted she’d ever sleep again. The things she’d seen. She always told herself she’d seen it all, but this was something else altogether. She pulled the blanket over her head and closed her eyes. She felt like it was all translucent; her eyelids, her blanket, the walls beyond. She could see those things buzzing and swarming outside. They waited in the bushes and in the trees and in all the little spaces and their tails dripped with a poison that defied imagination. Around them gathered their… what? Their slaves? There was a better word for it, she was sure of that. Minions. Maybe minions. They stood around, amongst their buzzing masters, chewing on the air, waiting for her to step outside.  

        Tomorrow was her day off. She had laundry to do. She, been planning to bake some bread. She had a backlog of Netflix shows to get through too. She’d been baking a lot these past few months. She was starting to get good at it. And what did all this mean for her now. She just wanted to go home and sleep.  

They’d come to that house from various directions. The squat, solid block of grey concrete with its tiny windows had rung out like a beacon as they’d been running. A swarm had come upon them and Gordon and Simone had come from the front door with water guns full of petrol, pumping it over their heads for cover as they’d run past them and in. They’d been shouting something that Saul couldn’t recall. He thought inviting them in to safety. But maybe not. Maybe they’d even been telling them to go away. He didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

        He’d always heard that adversity brought people together. It brought out the best in them. He didn’t know what this was, but it didn’t feel like the best of anything.

        He didn’t want to sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the events replaying, projecting on his eyelids. He saw people screaming and falling. Cars abandoned in the street or speeding across the pavement, spilling people as they went. He saw, looking into his own closed off world of darkness, those empty eyes of the stung walking towards him. Empty, yet somehow screaming.

Upstairs, in the bedroom, Gordon and Simone spoke quietly. They had locked the door behind them and then barricaded it. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust these people downstairs, but something was happening and they didn’t know what.

        “We did the right thing,” said Simone, leaning towards Gordon’s ear, as if fearful somebody was listening from under the bed. “Didn’t we.”

        “They would have died out there,” he said, and leaned himself towards her, to put his arm around her. “We saved them.”

        “So we did the right thing.”

        “I think so,” he said.

        “I hope so,” she added.

        Gordon kissed his wife.

        While he had been talking to the people downstairs earlier, explaining how they’d sealed off the house, giving out spare blankets, Simone had snuck into the kitchen and taken out bottles of water and tins of food. She’d brought the knives and their water guns – Phil and Danny’s actually, please God, let them be safe with their parents, locked away somewhere, maybe with people like them, who offered help to strangers – she’d brought all of the things they needed up to the bedroom. It was better to be safe than sorry.

        “What do you think will happen?” asked Simone.

        “We’ll see in the morning,” Gordon told her. “Maybe the TV will be on again then.”

        “I hope so,” she said. “Somebody should be telling us what to do.”

Saul woke to silence and darkness. Silence. He breathed deeply and lifted himself unsteadily to his feet. Why was it so dark?

        He walked carefully to the window, trying to figure out where was safe each time he wanted to put his foot down. What was person, what was blanket, cushion, sleeping bag.

        He pulled the curtains apart a crack.

        Darkness.

        Swirling darkness

        It twisted and danced in front of him. He rubbed his eyes, pulled the curtains wider, put his hands against the window and looked, his head tipping from side to side, moving with the wisps and trails.

        It took him a while to realize that this was smoke.

        It took a while longer to realize what that meant.

        “Fire,” he said quietly.

        “Fire,” he repeated more loudly.

        “Fire!” he shouted when still nobody had stirred, kicking at the nearest body shape on the floor, which groaned and swore. “Fire!” he repeated.

The mood turned quickly from moaning at being woken to panic. Bodies scrambled to collect up their belongings, to dress themselves in whatever protective clothing they had cobbled together during the previous day. Renegade was on his feet. He had those swimming goggles and the surgical mask pulled over his face. He held the cricket bat up on his shoulder, both hands gripping the handle, ready to swing, as if he planned to smash the window. Instead though, he just looked out. “That’s a lot of smoke,” he said.

        “It is.”

        “Where’s it coming from?”

        “I don’t know,” Saul told him.

        “Are we safe in here?”

        “Your guess is as good as mine.”

        “I don’t want to go outside,” said the short fat man with the hat, who hadn’t told anyone his name. He’d fallen asleep laid out across the sofa, in the most comfortable spot in the room, almost as soon as they’d gotten in.

        “We might have to,” said Saul.

        “Who are you to decide that?” asked the short fat man.

        “You don’t have to do what I say,” Saul told him. “You do what you want.”

        “I’m coming with you,” said Charlie.

Saul had saved her once, pulling her into an open car and slamming the door shut behind her. They’d been crashing against the windows, and the keys weren’t in the car. It was just luck that they’d been parked on a slope and when he took the handbrake off they’d rolled far and fast enough to get away from that swarm. The impact when they’d hit the traffic lights had spun her head and she’d crunched her teeth together painfully, but if that was all she’d come away with, she’d take it.

Saul led the way.

        They went out into the hall in a line. Saul knew he had to move forwards, because there was nowhere to retreat with the bodies behind him.

        He got to the front door and put his ear against it. He didn’t expect to learn anything, but he was hoping that any extra time would help him to think.

        Gordon and Simone had come down and stood at the bottom of the stairs, wrapped up tightly, with not a single bit of flesh exposed. They each had a back pack and their water pistols and held umbrellas in their other hands. They weren’t sure what was going to happen. Maybe they’d stay were they were. They wanted to see though.

        Charlie opened the door a crack, and he stepped forwards, holding a thin, light blanket in front of him. Behind him, everyone was silent, waiting. He strained his ears. There was no buzzing.  

“Where’s the fire?” someone asked behind him.

        “I don’t know,” he said.

        He couldn’t hear any buzzing. None at all. He wafted the blanket a little. The smoke dissipated. Something was moving, but he struggled to make it out. He was ready to run, whether back into the house or forwards into whatever was there. Every muscle in him tensed and strained.

        Then he saw them. Men and women, dressed in big yellow bodysuits with plastic windows on their bucket helmets. They waved planks of wood, drawing smoke trails in the sky, bringing it around and down like whips. Why would they wear yellow? He wondered. They looked like giant wasps themselves. He almost started to laugh, and as he did so, he inhaled smoke. He coughed and bent over.

        Charlie was behind him, her hand on his back.

He straightened and waved his hand to brush the smoke aside and when he had made a space, he looked up at the early morning sun. It shone so brightly despite it all. There it was. The fire.