Left Behind: The Suburban Dead Read online

  Left Behind

  A story of The Suburban Dead

  By T.A. Sorsby

  This is a work of fiction. Adhering to this book as some form of Apocalyptic Survival Manual is not encouraged – you’re welcome to, but once society has been rebuilt, the Author is not liable for damages.

  Do not try this at home.

  All rights reserved. Even that one.

  Especially that one.

  Get in touch via:

  https://www.facebook.com/TASorsby/

  https://twitter.com/T_A_Sorsby

  Copywright T.A. Sorsby 2017.

  Chapters

  Chapters

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Thirty Two

  Thirty Three

  Thirty Four

  Thirty Five

  Thirty Six

  Thirty Seven

  Thirty Eight

  Thirty Nine

  Forty

  Forty One

  Forty Two

  Forty Three

  Forty Four

  Forty Five

  Forty Six

  Forty Seven

  Forty Eight

  Forty Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty One

  Fifty Two

  One

  I woke up with the sound of the amplifiers still ringing in my ears, a dull, resonant buzz. It clashed annoyingly with the electric chicken wailing of my alarm clock. I allowed myself a groan.

  Chilly early winter air wafted against my arm as I slammed my hand down on top of the clock’s little bumper, imagining I was actually hitting a chicken on the head – like in that old cartoon with the caveman family.

  I folded myself into a snug cocoon for a minute or so. The air up on the fourteenth floor always had more of a sting to it, but eventually I emerged from the sheets and shivered my way over to the bathroom to make use of the facilities. I brushed my teeth extra hard, trying to get rid of the flat-tongued taste of last night’s drinking. It probably wasn’t such a great idea to see a Saturday night gig with the missus and her housemates when you have to be up before seven.

  Once I made myself up like a passable imitation for a human being, I got dressed for work – seeing as it was a work day and all – Sunday post was never the busiest, but I’m sure the boss would laugh if I showed up nude.

  Nobody would accuse me of being up to date with the latest fashions. Dark blue jeans found themselves extracted from the pile of finished ironing, and were pulled on alongside a shirt from the last Some Bad Men tour. Yawning my way through to the rest of my apartment, I turned the kitchen radio on and put my cowboy boots by the radiator to warm up. I did warn you about the fashion.

  The radio piped out some middle-of-the-road soft rock while I prepared a healthy breakfast of grilled bacon and scrambled eggs on toast. That’s sorta healthy, right? At least it wasn’t all fried. When the music stopped, the presenter came on for the news. The station wasn’t run by the VBC, but news bulletins for most radio stations across Voison still come from Auntie Veeb.

  ‘Live at seven from VBC Tower in Orphen, this is the hourly update,’ it began.

  I tuned it out while I grilled bacon and put whipped eggs in the microwave to scramble. The morning was too short for scrubbing pans. The news of the day was largely boring; Consuls pushing legislative changes through the Senate, the President making an address about the super-bug in Rojas, and all the worsening rioting out in the East, where their dictators and pseudo-electorates were calling press bans as close to home as Redmond.

  I’d been there on holiday, only a couple of years ago. Hard to think that a tourist hotspot only a six hour flight away was being torn apart from within. I always kept an eye on foreign news since one of the guys I went on that holiday with worked a camera for the VBC, and last I’d heard, was out there now. When they were filming on the seafront I could swear he’d picked a spot right where we took a group photo.

  After cleaning off my plate and doing the washing up, I unhooked my leather jacket from the hat-stand; a real antique number that looked out of place beside the rest of my modern black and white décor, and draped it over the sofa while I brushed my hair. Long hair on a guy doesn’t look great if excessively tousled. Black curls look especially tatty if you don’t keep a handle on them.

  I fished my mobile from one of the pockets and flipped it open to see I had a message from my special lady friend. She’d been on at me about getting a new phone, but this one still worked. I didn’t need to check my email on the move.

  ‘How’s it hanging? You and me still painting the town red tomorrow night? Well. Giving it an undercoat…love x’

  ‘Feeling fine, still on for tomorrow milady xx’ I replied, before snapping it shut so her picture flashed up on the clock screen. I couldn’t help but smile.

  Katy’s hair was short, platinum blonde, and always worn spiked up. Except for when she was at work, where it was just plain messy. I’d met her on-shift, and with the scruffy hair-do and shapeless blue hospital scrubs, I was just powerless to resist – as she picked broken glass out of my scalp with a pair of tweezers. I’d seen her outside of work a few hours later, and she looked even cuter with a silver stud in her nose. On some people it looked a bit garish; on her it had been known to make my jeans feel small.

  I tugged on my jacket and zipped her up, leather creaking. I liked the jacket, in winter especially. It was fur-lined and snug, with a racy red stripe across the chest that stopped it from being mistaken for a biker’s jacket rather than a motorcycle jacket. It was also non-uniform for couriers at the post office, but my boss was cool with it, and it wasn’t like head office sent people around to check up on us.

  There were only three apartments on our floor at Castle Towers. The whole block had been gutted and renovated a year or so before I moved in, knocking some of the pokier flats into larger, modernised apartments and giving a facelift to the rest.

  Not every flat was occupied, and the neighbourhood wasn’t exactly gentrified, so the rent was manageable enough for my single-bed place. Even so, it’d have been nice to share it with someone. Katy and I had talked about it plenty, but she’d decided splitting the bills three ways at her current place would help her save for a deposit on a real house.

  One of my neighbours in modernised, budget living was just leaving as I was, coming from the two-bed apartment at the end of the hall.

  Neville Roberts lived with his daughter Morgan, and worked a lot of shifts for a lot of hours at a major law firm downtown; security guard, not ‘attorney at law’. He was a first rate father, but only around as often as he could be, since he had to work all those hours just to afford the creeping rent and shiny things that teenage daughters seem to need.

  I knew Morgan better than her dad. We weren’t strangers, but we’d never spent much time together. Most of our conversations went through Morgan, checking in on each other by proxy, but every now and then we’d bump into each other in the corridor.

  Neville’s shifts meant t
hat half the time he was just coming home from work as she was leaving for college, or vice-versa. So when my own shifts at the post office allowed, me and my lovely lass would keep her company, either at Katy’s place or mine. It felt wrong to call it babysitting, since Morgan was seventeen-going-on-twentysomething.

  Even so, we’d had quite the influence on the kid. She’d fallen into the rock scene, and Katy and Morgan were kinda like best friends, despite there being more than half a decade between them. They even played for the same field hockey team every weekend, but I’m a terrible sportsman by comparison, so when we looked after her we usually played video games or watched movies…But never a rom-com, since Katy has this thing about them where she cries.

  Neville was in uniform; pressed navy blue shirt, black slacks, with a heroic utility belt and bronze-effect security service shield. His weapon holster was empty – he didn’t like having guns around the house with an inquisitive teen about.

  ‘Morning.’ He smiled, giving me the nod as we fell into step along the corridor, sharing a companionable silence as we waited for the elevator. He must have shaved this morning – his cologne was strong, a familiar, old school aftershave. Perfect for a day protecting the legal elite.

  ‘So what’s the plan for the day, Mr Kelly?’ Neville asked as we stepped through the pinging doors together, riding down from the top floor to the bottom.

  ‘Got work until around five, but I have to swing by Hannah-Smith’s to pick something up for later,’ I hummed, ‘pretty much a boring day. Never anything on TV, is there?’ I added, starting to feel uncomfortable with the way Neville was staring at me.

  ‘Hannah-Smith’s? Seriously?’ he asked, grinning like cartoon cat, ‘Well I never pegged Katy for the type. Erm, that’s to say, I didn’t think she’d, you know, not that she wouldn’t be great, you know.’

  ‘Nice back-pedal there.’ I noted.

  ‘I liked it too.’ he nodded, the pair of us grinning like co-conspirators when the plot begins to thicken. ‘You need a lift in?’ he asked.

  ‘If you’re going my way, thanks.’

  Neville tuned into a different morning station to me, so we got the news again at the half-hour. Apparently some contaminated livestock had been imported, and now our noble homeland of the Voison Republic was looking at exposure to that East Rojas super-bug, some “Human Rabies” thing. A pang of worry shot through me, thinking Katy might be exposed to that at work. At least she worked at County General. She’d told me last time there was a health scare that Mercy Hospital was the infectious disease specialist. County was surgical.

  Nobody in the post depot noticed me come in, twenty or so minutes early. Even Gladys, the mail-matriarch, was too absorbed in a TV news report about Centre for Disease Control contingents shipping out across the country in preparation for the “ERHR” crisis. So I filled in my timesheet like I’d started half an hour early. As a trusted Senior Delivery Specialist, I’m on flexi time.

  Don’t look at me like that! They won’t let me take the courier motorcycle home for personal use, leaving me pedestrian and almost perpetually a few minutes late for work. It’s a wonder I don’t fudge my timesheets more often, the way bus prices keep bumping up – three silver and a shilling for a day pass, now that’s worth eyeballing someone over.

  Using one of the post office’s statutory smoking breaks between parcel deliveries, I slinked away on the bike to pick up my little box from Hannah-Smith’s jewellers, and got back before anyone seemed to remember that I don’t actually smoke.

  As the day went by all I could think about was how much I wanted it to be over so I could get on with tomorrow. Tomorrow was a big thing, and the biggest event of my Sunday was when I almost got a ticket for being illegally parked for a grand total of two minutes.

  The owner of the pawnshop across the street from Castle Towers had stepped out for a while, leaving some kid, maybe his, in charge of the store. One of the duties of Senior Couriers was handling licenced materials, and I always seemed to get stuck with the problem packages.

  I’d had to explain to the kid that he needed to provide a licence to accept firearms in the post – National Service papers are enough to buy one yourself when you go straight to the dealer, but I needed to see a store licence, since he’d be selling them on. He wasn’t getting it, but I’d been here before, so I told him where the boss kept his paperwork.

  It was that close to the end of my shift that if I could take the bike home, I could just flop right onto my sofa, instead of heading back into town and getting a bus. You see my pain now?

  Because of some traffic accident blocking the main route out of town, I ended up getting back home about half an hour later than usual; and feeling even better about the timesheet thing, thanks. I reached into the fridge and fetched myself a frosty beer to drink in the shower – multi-tasking I call it, and hung my towel up just before the six o’clock news.

  The flatscreen warmed up and flashed to life just in time for me to see the pictures of several people; forced school photo type smiles for the kids, and happy wedding photos for the parents. A woman’s voice spoke over them, sympathetic, but neutral;

  ‘…gruesome murder of this Overbridge family will surely touch the hearts of this small community.’ the reporter finished, cutting back to the presenters in the studio.

  ‘Thanks Gillian,’ the suit said, shuffling papers on the desk. ‘Police informed us at a press conference earlier today that they are treating the deaths as gang or possibly cult related, due to the condition of the victims, and tying it in with several similar murders across the county in the last few days, as far south as Orphen and as far north as Kilmister.’

  I sighed, and changed the channel, gambling I’d see nothing overseas tonight. It’s not that I didn’t care about the news, or the murders or the victims. I knew that TV could make problems seem far away and irrelevant, even though Overbridge wasn’t more than an hour or so drive from Greenfield on the motorway. I just thought there’d be something less depressing to watch on a Sunday night.

  Monday was one of my days of rest; a busy postal day I was lucky enough to rarely be on rota for, since most of my co-workers liked their weekends spent at home. But I’d be meeting Katy later on – which meant an entire day of puppy-sized butterflies in my stomach. She got off work at six, eight hours of eternity away, which gave me a little time to prepare myself for the night ahead. I fired up the games console, colonising distant solar systems, then started watching a movie over a late lunch. There came a knocking from my door as I was putting the dishes away.

  I’d been expecting a package today, so had actually gotten dressed. I’m not above spending a day in my bathrobe, but I hate it when people answer the door like that to me, so I put the tiniest bit of effort in today.

  ‘Tiernan Kelly,’ the postie said as I opened the door. He’d pronounced it right – tea-air-nan. My grandmother had called it a traditional name. People at school had called it stupid. ‘Thought it had to be you.’

  ‘Hey Terry.’ I greeted, taking the signing pad and stylus from his outstretched hand. As I passed it back, I caught the colour of his face. ‘You look awful.’

  He was the other Senior Courier at our warehouse, and I was sure that my tendency to get the awkward deliveries was no coincidence. I took the small package from him, handing the signing pad back.

  ‘Something I ate, I think.’ He said, ‘Sunday Dinner isn’t sitting right. You have a good weekend shift?’ he asked, the faintest trace of a smirk on his green-tinged face.

  ‘Just the best. Thanks.’ I added, when the door was already half-closed. Our working relationship was brisk.

  Morgan was supposed to be coming over after college, so I tidied up a bit, tackling the laundry pile with the film in the background. She text at about half three to say she was going to hang out with one of her friends, get on with some coursework assignment instead. I finished the laundry, but suddenly running the vacuum around didn’t seem like such a big deal until Katy text,
asking after Morgan. A pang of guilt urged me into domestic action.

  I filled her in as we text back and forth, but her replies were shorter and further between than usual. Something was happening at the hospital, she’d tell me about it later.

  After the hours had ticked by, I showered and shaved. Preening completed, I tugged on my best jeans, a silky black shirt and my jacket. I hadn’t bought it for work; I could have used a ratty old postal one for that. Katy’s ‘hog’, as she called it, was one of those huge bikes with the ridiculous tasselled handlebars and the engine that rumbled people’s teacups like there was an approaching dinosaur. With the vibrations coming off that engine, I didn’t feel totally safe with her driving; so I bought a real expensive jacket and matching helmet.

  I brushed my hair, dabbed on just enough stinging aftershave to be noticeable but not overpowering, then grabbed the box from Hannah-Smith’s and deposited the contents into the package Terry had delivered – a double-thick steel DVD case. It just about fit in one of my roomy jacket pockets.

  Just as I was coming out of the flats, Katy was pulling up on her bike; in all its black, tasselled and shining glory. She had one of those open faced helmets, with the aviator goggles and everything.

  ‘A wizard is never late.’ Katy said, raising her voice over the rumble of the engine. I could hear her dirty-times smile playing across her lips, and was again glad that I’d come…prepared.

  ‘She arrives precisely when she means to.’ I smirked, climbing onto the bike behind her, and unclipping my helmet from her side-saddle. I slipped my hands around her waist in a familiar gesture, and she wriggled herself closer to me.

  ‘Hold tight.’ she warned.

  ‘As always.’ I said, trying for romantic, but settling for just being heard over the engine.

  We rode to our favourite watering hole, a cheapish and relatively cheerful place in the city centre. A great venue for a quiet night’s drink. She parked the bike in a little courtyard around the back entrance, hung her helmet on the handlebars, and as we dismounted, turned to face me properly.