Great Bitten: Outbreak Read online

  Copyright Notice

  “Outbreak”

  Book One of the Great Bitten series by Warren Fielding.

  © 2013 – Dawn Peers writing as Warren Fielding. All rights reserved. No part or parts of this work may be reproduced in whole or in part without written consent of the author.

  “Breakout”

  Prologue of the Great Bitten Series by Warren Fielding.

  © 2012 – Dawn Peers writing as Warren Fielding. All rights reserved. No part or parts of this work may be reproduced in whole or in part without written consent of the author.

  Cover images © 2013 Danielle Tunstall of Danielle Tunstall Photography and Dawn Peers.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living, dead or in a confused state of ambulatory afterlife is intentional if the author has been kind enough to mention this to you in person. Any resemblance inferred through personal paranoia is not the fault of the author. All locations in the novel do exist in the UK however I have taken artistic license with names at various points; enjoy finding out where in the UK this work is actually set.

  You can follow the rambling of the author more closely at www.beyondapocalypse.com

  You can experience more of Danielle’s artwork at www.facebook.com/danielletunstallphotography

  Dedication

  For Keith. Because you get it.

  For Katelyn, Lola and Hailie. Because you’re beautiful.

  Prologue

  Great Bitten: Outbreak

  I’m not sure how much you really know about British culture and attitudes. Hell, I’ve lived in this country my entire life – barely even left it to go on holiday – and I’m not even sure that I know too much about its culture and attitude.

  If I was being honest, I would say it was a blend of apathy and indifference. We probably still liked to refer to it as a “stiff upper lip” but, truth be told, we never knew what to do when the shit truly started hitting the fan, and so it looked better if we could be seen to be powering through it all regardless. The Brits, we might not have an empire any more, but by golly we can stand firm through a ruck.

  What a colossal fuck-up that turned out to be.

  Don’t get me wrong – not all the nursery rhymes turned out to be true this time. But “London’s Burning” and “Ring o’ Roses” were pretty accurate, and if I ever feel sadistic enough to bring up any kids in this hell of a world in the future, I’ll just have to add on a verse or two about how when we’ve all fallen down we start getting up again and trying to chew each other’s faces off.

  As you can pretty much infer, I’m your lone-gun post apocalypse journal type, or at least that’s the handsome image I’m trying to exude. Before the world went all Alice in Canniballand on us I was a journalist anyway, so the acorn hasn’t fallen particularly far from the tree in this rebirth. It’s a shame I’m not going to get to relay this story to the world any time soon, but when civilisation does get its shit together and stick its head over the parapet looking for buddies, I’ll be ready with my story. It’s not exactly a fair reflection of how it’s been for the whole of the country – I’m alive, for a start, and primarily a vegetarian as of late for reasons of good taste. But it’s our story, and one that needs to be told.

  In the start of the twenty-first century, I suppose the UK were the also-rans of the international community. We weren’t a world power and we hadn’t been for some time. We couldn’t manage our own borders somehow, despite being an island, and every establishment on record was in-fighting in some manner or another. Our government ritually sucked the asses of the leaders around the world that were both more powerful and eminently more attractive than them, and as a result we were the nerdy kid in the international class. No one particularly wanted us around, but we were good to have around in case the bigger kids needed someone to throw in front of them in a scrap. A human shield of international proportions.

  So it was only fitting that Patient Zero was born and bred a British Citizen. No one knew exactly who he was, and the media wasn’t exactly around for long enough after the incident to find out and let us all know. Suffice to say this will put us back on the map for as long as maps are around.

  Do I know how much of the world is like this now? I have no idea. Are there any countries out there willing to save us? London is rubble and ashes. So are most of the major cities, if any of the short tales I’ve had from other survivors are to be believed, and I have no particular reason to distrust the testimony of these survivors, not any more. One of them, they called us a tacky name that I just can’t shake. Everyone has their taglines made popular by the film industry. Your Zs, Day of the Dead, you call it what you want. But he said to me that day “Great Britain my ass. This is Great Bitten now, and it’s survival of the fittest. At least we didn’t piss off any of the other countries enough for them to nuke us, eh?”

  To be fair, the thought made me want to find a nuke bunker – I’d heard of one in Milton Keynes – and make a straight line for it. But I hadn’t seen a mushroom cloud on the horizon yet and you know what? I just can’t be fucked. I’m comfy here. Got everything I need to survive, right now. So I’m going to be all World War Z and let you know how I saw the apocalypse unfold and what I didn’t do about it. And how the world watched as everything went aflame and asunder.

  And in Britain it started, as most things do, with a drink. Or two.

  +++

  “Fiction? That’s playschool shit, journalism is the coalface mate.”

  I was a complete git when I was younger. How I had any friends was beyond me. But this was one of my common statements, and writers of fiction had a special reserved space in the lower circles of my wide and all-encompassing fields of derision. All the way through university I both imagined and saw dozens of post-teens, unable to shed their fears and psychoses gained through years of bullying, venting it all on paper. Well, that’s the romantic version, it was keyboards really. Any Starbucks, Costa, wherever, you’d have some hunched over hollow-eyed borderline nut hammering out their life story hoping to be the next Plath to pour their depression out on to a page and get paid for it.

  I’d take away my black filter, no sugar, if you can stir it then it’s not strong enough, and stop just short of laughing in their faces. I was doing something worthwhile. I was telling the world the way things were, not performing an ostrich and pretending they were anything but.

  Again, I would find out that I was brutally wrong, but right at that time I was too far up my own arse to be able to tell any different. I know I’m not painting myself out to be either the most likeable or the most heroic of protagonists. But the journalist in me still isn’t dead (despite using a conjunction at the start of a sentence) and I have to tell you the truth whether I like it or not. Whether you like me or not is irrelevant. When this shitstorm fell I wasn’t a nice guy, and never dreamt I’d be a hero. Technically, I still ain’t. I just need to tell you how it is.

  Fiction saved my life.

  Not surprising, considering how much of it was around. I actually went in to a bookstore on a quiet day and checked out the horror section – the writers I held in high disdain had been churning out book after optimistic book about how the world would end in a cannibal bloodbath. I took most of them home and over time I’ve come to see that some of them were, if not completely right, then quite close to the money. That’s pretty impressive, so many genre stereotypes coalescing like that. I hope they’re alive for a handshake, but the chances are they’d try to eat my fingers.

  It was a film that saved my life, not a book. Zombieland. I love that movie. Still do, despite the live action versions playing out every day of our lives – which, by the way, still beats the backside out of watching TOWIE or Jersey Sho
re. Thanks to Zombieland, when I saw a blood-drenched octogenarian ambling towards me in the early hours of a Brick Lane morning, I turned and I ran like Bolt in the other direction back to my apartment. I was panicking and wasn’t sure what to do next, but it saved me from being a snack early on in the outbreak. When a pan-event occurs, you can always remember where you were when it first happened. When 9/11 happened, I was on a lunch break in an Asda (Wal Mart, for anyone American that might ever stumble across this). I was chewing away on a ham sandwich in the video section watching the Twin Towers smoke, and primarily thinking “fuck”. Long after leaving that store, University, graduating, working my more-hours-than-nine-to-five promised job, I never forgot that.

  Brick Lane and my first visual of zombie joy is similarly branded on my brain. I never want to know the complete details of how that old lady bit her dollar, and I wish she hadn’t been my first sighting. The only worse thing I think, would have been a kid. She had been someone’s grandma. She was on the slightly chubby side of life, and I could have easily imagined her bouncing a much beloved toddler on her knee. That, or baking cookies, cakes, puddings… anything but what I was forced to witness that night. Some of the lights on Brick Lane are sulphur and throw a gaunt orange hue over the street. Some are white, harsh, fierce. Cast on either side of the street, the blood caked to the front of her nightgown looked like a bad special effect at first. And by god, how I wished I had stumbled in to the filming of a B rated zombie flick. Alternately a mellow orange and a fully backlit night terror, this old lady shambled towards me. She didn’t make any sound – Christ knows why they have zombies screaming in all the films, the things are virtually fucking mutes. This old lady, she didn’t particularly have a choice in the matter as half of her throat had been ripped out and, dead or not, I’m pretty sure you need vocal cords if you want to make some noise. She had one slipper on, grotty and damp with the grit of the London streets, the other had probably been lost on some absent side-alley. Had she not been covered in gore and presenting a wound that should be clearly fatal, I might have mistaken her for a mental home escapee with cataracts. That’s the other thing the films got wrong, by the by. Her eyes, they were a milky white as if she just needed a quick session under the surgeon’s knife to set everything right. There was no amount of medical care that would ever set that woman right again.

  She looked at me, and damned I know it goes against the stereotype but she looked me straight in the eye and there was a desire there. In another time and another place – Hooters, for one – if a young woman had fixed me with eyes like that I would have had a guaranteed rock-on. But here? This? She wanted me and it was the most chilling stare I have received in my life.

  I fled. I have no shame in saying that. I’m healthy, sure, but I’m not Rambo and I sure as fuck ain’t no Tallahasse. I had been at work for a sixteen hour shift producing news for the world, and I hadn’t seen a single thing about anything rising from the dead, about anything eating anything else. There hadn’t even been any riots. This is London I’m talking about, when the fucksticks start flying, that place is the first to get its Looting on.

  I fled. I fled straight to my cosy apartment round the corner and hid. I didn’t turn on any lights as I didn’t want to bring any attention to myself, but I did pull down my blinds and pull across the curtains before I turned on the telly. Low. There was nothing on the BBC, and why the hell would there be? There was nothing in the US either, but at that time I wasn’t to know that the outbreak would start in, and truly screw over, the UK before it emigrated to warmer climes. I took to Twitter instead, and Facebook. If people are seeing something interesting, they’ll tweet it. If someone wants to have a bitch about something, they’ll put it on Facebook. Either way, I should find a bit more out about the drama.

  I spent hours burning my eyes to pinholes reading tweets and posts about the situations people were in. Some had started to barricade their homes and buy in non-perishables. I glanced at my own yuppy cupboards and sighed inwardly. I had a penchant for bottled water which meant I would last on that front, but my diet consisted of takeaways and sandwich spreads so a trip to the local 24 hour store was in order. Thank the supermarket gods for commercialism, and not living in a village in the arse-end of Wherevershire. I’d escaped the old lady – I may not forget her ravenous eyes but in the heat of those first few hours, I’d forgotten everyone else’s existence – and got home at 11pm. It was 4am now, but what else would I find out there?

  There didn’t seem to be much of a choice here as I didn’t know what else to do. I grabbed a gilet, my bank card and a backpack (I hate pinching cheap carrier bags that feel like they’re going to slice off your fingers) and legged it to the store. I’ll give journalism its due – the job is stressful, but you learn to glean all the useful information you can in a very short space of time. I was heading for canned goods, things that would last. I was heading for aspirin, paracetamol, bandages and antiseptics. I was getting bottled water and purifying tablets (have you ever looked closely at the Thames?) And when I got back I was checking my bike. London is bad enough in a rush hour. If this thing was going to gather like the shitstorm it seemed, then there was no way public transport was allowing me to get out of that city in any short space of time.

  City life. Ha. It’ll kill you, you know.

  There were very few people on the streets and the store was less than half a mile away. Everyone else seemed like they were still in the throes of their Friday nights out. Which, from the looks of things, they were. Couples that were either high or drunk staggered around doing reasonable impressions of the walking dead themselves. It never occurred to me, at any point, to tell any of them that there was a problem – that the apocalypse might be on the way. Same old self-centered me, but would they have believed me? If you were ten sheets to the wind and some stranger ran up to you on the street clean-shaven, professional looking and to be fair, not that panicky, and told you that dead people were walking around, what would you do?

  If you’ve not got a strong constitution, you’d probably vomit, and I did see one or two of those on my way through the streets. But no-one sober. And none of… them.

  The store was just as deserted and the singular lad – lanky, greasy, bored – student stereotype – was clearly praying for the end of his shift to come. Quietly efficient, I grabbed more than what I needed of everything I wanted. I baulked at the weight of my basket, but in my head thought that if I couldn’t carry it with me now, there’s no way I was carrying it on the bike. These things were essential, and it was enough for a few days of travelling if it came to it.

  The lad cocked his eyebrow when he was checking the stuff out. The beeping of the checkout was punctuated by the usual London noise. I’m in Shoreditch, it isn’t that far from the nightlife but it’s far away enough to get some peace. There were the sirens, the car engines, the occasional holler. But no screaming, no sounds of someone dying from cannibalistic dismemberment. Yet. I was getting a little nervy and was throwing the stuff wretchedly in to my pack, wanting to be out of there and sorting a cogent plan for this.

  “Sorry sir, you can’t buy more than two packs of painkillers.”

  I snapped back to reality.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The aspirin sir, you can’t buy more than two packs. It’s illegal.”

  I was incredulous. “Do I look like I’m going to fucking overdose? Just ring the things through!”

  “I can’t. The tills prevent it.”

  I didn’t like his attitude but I suppose mine was pretty shitty by return.

  “Look kid, I just want to get out of here. Tell you what, just make it look like you’re ringing those things through for the cameras, and you can shove an extra twenty quid in your pocket from this, deal?”

  He sneered at my apparent desperation, and complied. Why on earth I didn’t just go to another store to buy more didn’t occur to me then. I was in the middle of London it’s not as if places were sparse.

  I g
rabbed the backpack and got cashback on the lot to give the kid what he wanted. I suppose curiosity got the better of him as I shouldered everything and he asked,

  “What do you need all that for? Bit of an odd time to go for a trek.”

  “I saw a zombie, and London has over 8 million residents. I’m getting the hell out of here.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me again and I resisted the urge to hit him.

  “Zombies, hey? Sure you’re not going to kill yourself later?”

  I flicked him the the v’s with a sigh and left with my haul. The streets were still damp and deserted. I threw the backpack in to the hallway and went back to my computer, checking train and tube times. Chances were these would all still be running okay for me to get out of the city itself, but I was paranoid about the stereotypes and didn’t particularly want to become someone’s lunch stuck in a tube train in the deepening dark. No. I didn’t want to go that way at all.

  It was 5:30am when I thought it was a reasonable time for me to call my younger sister. I was the early-thirties go-getter with the City Pad and all the trimmings. At this introduction most people expected me to say that she was either the Black Sheep stoner or the Mummsy home-keeper. Neither. My younger sister was just as career minded and brutal as I have ever been, but she made her monies in law and was already working the rungs to Partnership in a regional firm in the south. She lived in a thinly populated suburb by the South Downs. Hills and space on one side and the coast on the other, with an airport nearby and enough marinas and boatyards for half of England to set sail if they wanted. If this thing was going to hit the fan, I wanted to be at my sister’s place.

  +++

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  Professionals we may be, but both my sister and I were blessed with a soldier’s repertoire of swearing from our colourful and well-travelled father, may he rest in peace. Him and our mother, both gone in a car accident. It was tragic at the time but with post-apocalyptic hindsight, maybe that was for the best.