Lockey vs. the Apocalypse by Meadows, Carl (7 ebook reader TXT) 📗

two doors on the wall facing you, and one either side, with just a tiny space before them all. My flat was an end one, number twelve, so I came out and went through the door into the stairwell and was immediately punched in the face by the smell wafting up from below. Yes Freya, you know what that smell was, but it was the first time I’d ever experienced it and I involuntarily dry-retched.

I peered down between the handrails and my eyes were immediately drawn to the fucking sea of crimson in the ground floor hallway, before a shambling figure shuffled through the ocean of blood, unmindful their fluffy purple slippers were sloshing through all that vileness.

I recognised the figure as Sylvie, an old woman in her late seventies who lived on the ground floor. I always liked Sylvie. She was of Jamaican descent, and I always loved hearing her talk. There’s something rhythmic about those Caribbean accents that captures the imagination, like funky street music that just draws your attention when you hear it.

Sylvie, or at least the thing that used to be her, must have heard my dry retching, as her face snapped straight up, white eyes fixing to me with blood and gore crusting around her mouth. I don’t know for sure what happened, but I’m theorising that Sylvie must have had a stroke, or a heart attack, or something to that effect. I remember her once telling me she was on heart medication and the doctor was forever telling her to take it easy, but if you’d ever met Sylvie, that woman took orders from no man. She was a bright ball of Caribbean sunshine, with a deliciously wicked laugh to accompany her equally improper sense of humour, and always struck me as someone that grabbed life by the balls and dared it to make its move.

Everyone’s met one of those old ladies that you just know has stories that would put even the lewdest of contemporary tomboys to absolute shame. I reckon Sylvie had a litany of spicy indiscretions that would make their antics look like an episode of children’s TV in comparison. And that belly laugh was just so full of joy, a bit like TV chef Rustie Lee, but with an added dash of wickedness. She was ace.

I’ve surmised that the paramedics were there to treat her, she died and bit the first guy, both of them scarpering outside to slam the front door shut on her. We know what happened from there.

Other undead shuffled into sight through that gap, eyes turned upwards towards me, and I recognised a few other faces from the building. Some must have tried to make it past the seemingly harmless dazed old lady, and instead got a fatal lesson in the predatory lunge of the undead.

Basically, the ground floor was now an impassible barrier of shambling zombies, and two more undead first responders were bumping against the other side of the front door anyway. Anyone left in our building was trapped.

Everyone except me.

I went back into my flat, locked myself in and moved to my patio-style door in the living room. It opens inwards, so I did that, hopped over the other side and gripping the thin railings, I inched myself down until I was hanging from my fingertips, my toes just inches from the top of the same window guard of the flat below. That was when my stoner neighbour, Rodney, opened his own window-door.

“The fuck you doin’ lad?”

I don’t understand the “lad” moniker at the end, when I obviously have boobs, but this was Rodney’s linguistic peculiarity. He ended every address with ‘lad’, whether you were man, woman, child, dog, cat, wasp, or penguin.

“The fuck does it look like I’m doing Rodney?” I snapped, hanging from my fingers. “Move back and let me swing in, you bell end.”

Rodney, being a stoner of gargantuan proportion and a small-time dealer – and probably small time because he smoked most of his stash – obeyed instantly with a vacuous look on his face. In fairness, he usually had that look on his face. Rodney was not a young man who spent much time in this plane of reality. If anything, the waking world was a mental holiday for him.

His flat reeked of weed. It pervaded everything, and I’m quite sure that stench is locked into every fibre of his dirty furniture. His kitchen was a pigsty, with crusts – even mould – encasing every pot, plate, and cup, a beige carpet stained by multiple fizzy drink spills and pizza drops, and shit just everywhere. It’s funny what you remember, even this far on. Even though there was a zombie apocalypse erupting all over the globe, I swung into that flat and remember thinking that the stench of the undead might be preferable to Rodney’s malodorous apartment. Honestly, I’m amazed there wasn’t a cruise ship of cockroaches chilling in every corner with their shades on, sipping mojitos as they enjoyed their all-inclusive getaway. Just rancid.

“What you doin’ climbin’, lad?”

“Well, Rodney, when one elects to climb, it is usually for one of two very good reasons; to go up or to go down.”

His blank look just made me sigh. Any form of sarcasm was going to be lost on a man who was unlikely to remember his own name for the best part of a year.

“Do you know what’s going on, Rod?” I asked. The detachment was starting to leave me at this point, and I think where my initial hyperactivity started to ramp up. “You’ve seen the news, right?”

He shook his head. “Just got up, ain’t no power, lad. Thinking we might need to call the building manager.”

I stared at him for a moment, rapidly blinking, then risked fungal infection by grabbing a fistful of his sauce-stained shirt and dragged him to the window, pointing down at the blood-soaked paramedics. Words would not sink into his sense-resistant brain, so maybe a visual aid would help him.

“See those two