Despite its grim-sounding name, Graves End was actually a pleasant, quiet kind of town. A decade earlier it had been a thriving semi-rural community, but that all changed with the construction of a freeway bypass that diverted all the passing traffic. This led to many local businesses closing down and property prices plummeting, as the residents deserted the town in droves.
The flip side was that the town then became very attractive to retirees. Not only could cashed-up seniors now afford a house twice as big as one in the city for half the price, they didn’t have to put up with any riffraff passing through their town and disturbing the serenity. For those that wanted to be left alone to enjoy their twilight years in peace, it suited them just fine. Thanks to the bypass, Graves End was the kind of place someone could only ever go to on purpose. Nobody ever stumbled across it by accident.
You wouldn’t need to consult census figures to know that the citizens of Graves End had an average age of sixty-one. You could guess this by the uniform neatness of every one of the houses. Each residence was a picture of homely perfection, with manicured lawns that looked like spongy green carpet and rows of flowers and plants that were so well maintained they almost looked artificial. This level of immaculateness was attainable only to those who were willing to devote entire days to the presentation and upkeep of their abode.
Elliott pulled into the driveway of his grandparents’ home which, like all others in this Stepford community, was impeccably presented. Only a few stray leaves on the front lawn hinted that something may be amiss.
They discovered both zombie grandparents inside the house. They were doing exactly what they would normally be doing at this time of day, which was watching their favourite game shows. The TV was on when they turned, which made it easier for Elliott and Miles. They were both able to quietly slip inside without drawing any attention to themselves. From there, it wasn’t too difficult to get them both off the couch and into the back of Elliott’s car.
“It’s kind of strange that no one reported it,” Miles said as he fastened their seat belts in place.
“I don’t know,” Elliott shrugged, carefully removing the rings from his grandmother’s fingers and stashing them in his pocket. “People tend to mind their own business out here.”
A shrill meowing interrupted them. Elliott looked up and saw Smokey, his grandparents’ twelve-year-old tabby, perched on their front doorstep.
Elliott groaned. He hadn’t thought about what he was going to do with the cat. “Say, Miles,” he said. “How would you like a new pet?”
“I think you already know the answer to that, Elliott,” Miles replied.
It was bad enough having a bunch of unwashed hippies and a giant tattooed pig stinking up his place. Miles didn’t really like the thought of adding cat urine to that mix.
“I guess he’s coming home with me then,” Elliott said with a sigh.
Elliott moved to pick the cat up, and it immediately bounded away. “Goddamn it,” he said to himself, as the cat scurried under the fence and into the neighbouring property. He wondered if he could just leave it behind and let it become someone else’s problem. But then he thought of how much his grandmother loved that stupid cat, and how she would have wanted her furry companion taken care of if she wasn’t around to do it.
He climbed over the fence and slowly crept up behind the cat until he had it cornered. The cat tried to run away again, but Elliott quickly scooped him up.
“Gotcha, you little bastard,” he said.
Elliott stood back up and found himself face-to-face with a white-haired zombie.
He let out a tiny high-pitched squeal that he’d be embarrassed about if he wasn’t so petrified. The cat leapt from his arms and scampered up a nearby tree.
The zombie stared back at Elliott, looking deep into his eyes. Elliott froze for what felt like an eternity, but was probably only about half a second.
It wasn’t until he realised that the two of them were separated by a thick pane of glass, and that the zombie was inside the neighbour’s house, that his heart resumed beating and he was able to get his limbs moving again.
Once the shock wore off, Elliott realised what this meant. Here was another zombie for them to take back. Sort of a buy-two-get-one-free kind of deal, and more money in his pocket. So maybe things were starting to look up for him.
He hurried back towards the fence, eager to inform Miles of this latest development. He climbed halfway over, then stopped. From this elevated position he could see directly into the backyard of the house behind his grandparents’.
In there, an elderly zombie slowly pushed a dead lawnmower up and down the yard. His zombie wife was nearby at the flowerbed, listlessly poking at it with a garden hoe over and over.
He climbed further up, standing on the top railing of the fence. He kept his balance by holding onto a branch from the tree that the cat was now hiding up. From here he could see into all the surrounding houses, where the same incredible scenario played out over and over.
Every resident in every home was now a zombie.
Elliott jumped down and hurried back to the car. Miles there was waiting for him. He could tell something was up with Elliott just by looking at him.
“What is it?” Miles asked.
“Miles.” It took Elliott a moment to catch his breath and figure out how to put what he had just seen into words. He swallowed hard.
“I think we’ve hit the mother lode,” he said.
Elliott’s car crawled slowly up and down the streets of Graves End. He and Miles kept their eyes peeled for survivors, but the further they drove the less likely this seemed. What they found instead was zombies in every direction they looked.
Elliott’s grandparents were now safely buckled in the backseat. The seat belts holding them in place weren’t quite as secure as the restraints they had in the minibus, but they were effective enough. A zombie possessed neither the motor skills nor the physical dexterity required to undo a seat belt, and the grill over their faces prevented them from biting anyone.
“Do you think there’s anyone left?” Elliott said as he scanned the area for signs of life.
Miles shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said.
He’d heard of this sort of thing happening before, where an entire town succumbed to an infection, but he didn’t think it was something he’d ever see with his own eyes.
The further on they drove, the less hope they had of finding anyone alive. All they saw was the undead. The citizens of Graves End, people Elliott had known for years, were gone, replaced with macabre shells of their former selves.
An eerie scene played out around them as the car travelled through the town at low speed. The residents carried on with their daily routines at one-third the pace of their pre-zombie existence.
An elderly zombie trudged up and down the pavement with the assistance of a Zimmer frame. Another two rode around aimlessly on mobility scooters, bumping into parked cars and each other. A never-ending game of lawn bowls was in progress at the bowling green, played at a glacial pace.
“How could this have happened?” Elliott said. He was still struggling to come to terms with all of this.
His watch beeped to remind him to take his pills. He shifted around him his seat to retrieve them from his back pocket.
“It’s rare, but it’s not unheard of,” Miles said. “Especially in towns of this size. An infection gets brought in, the person responsible is reluctant to seek help, or their families don’t want to turn them over to the authorities, and so it spreads. The fact the Graves End has an older population would have been a contributing factor. They turn a lot faster because their bodies are weaker, and they’re more susceptible to an attack since they can’t move as fast. It doesn’t take much for an entire town to be overwhelmed within two or three days.”
“I was just here yesterday,” Elliott said, swallowing an orange pill with a mouthful of water. “Everyone seemed fine. People were walking around like there was nothing wrong. I talked t
o Lyle yesterday!”
To their left was Zombie Lyle, the service station’s eighty-year-old proprietor and throat cancer survivor. Zombie Lyle was doing what he’d normally be doing at this time of day, which was sitting out by the ice box, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette through the tracheotomy hole in his throat.
“Then it looks like you got out just in time,” Miles said. “At some point in the last twenty-four hours it would have reached a critical mass. The point of no escape.”
They drove for over two hours, until it became apparent that the only living souls remaining in Graves End were the ones inside the car.
“I guess we better call this in,” Miles said, absentmindedly scratching the cat’s head as it sat on his lap. The cat purred lightly, enjoying this a little too much for Miles’ liking.
“Is that our only option?” Elliott said.
“According to the law it is.”
Undead management and control firms were only permitted to work on jobs with one hundred obits or less. Any more and they were required to report it to the authorities. The Paramilitary Undead Management Authority would be sent in, and the area sealed off while the PUMAs evacuated the remaining inhabitants. The firm would receive a nominal finder’s fee for reporting the incident. In the case of Graves End, a town of about five thousand residents, this would amount to around $20,000.
Elliott had been silent for a moment, staring out the window. Miles knew him well enough to know that there was something formulating inside his head. He had that look on his face.
“What?” Miles said, slightly worried by the sudden glint appearing in Elliott’s eye.
“Maybe there’s another option,” Elliott said.
Steve jumped up from behind his desk and quickly closed the door. Once Elliott had informed him of what was happening out at Graves End, he assumed that the rest of this conversation should go no further than the four walls of his office.
“How many people live in Graves End?” Steve asked, settling back into his seat.
“About five thousand,” Elliott replied.
“And they’re all infected?”
“Yes.”
“Every last one?”
“As far as we can tell. We drove around for about two hours and we couldn’t find any survivors.”
Steve shifted his attention to Miles, sitting alongside Elliott. “You can confirm all this?”
Miles nodded. “It’s a category five plague. The entire town has been wiped out.”
Steve leaned back in his chair and looked to the ceiling. The cogs in his brain were working overtime.
Miles noticed some red abrasions around Steve’s neck and found himself speculating as to how they might have gotten there, before chiding himself for thinking inappropriate homophobic thoughts. There may be perfectly innocent reasons why Steve would have what appeared to be belt marks at the base of his throat. He couldn’t come up with any off the top of his head, but he was sure they existed.
After returning from Graves End, Miles and Elliott took the two grandparents to the processing centre and collected their payment. Elliott offered to split the money 50-50, but Miles insisted he keep the whole $1000 for himself. He figured Elliott needed it more than he did, and considering the circumstances he would have felt weird accepting it.
They then concocted a cover story as to what they were doing at Graves End – they said they were there to help Elliott’s grandparents move some furniture when they stumbled upon the town full of zombies – before approaching Steve and Adam with a proposal that just might save their business.
But Steve’s response was not quite as enthusiastic as they had hoped.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said, shaking his head. “We can’t do it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Elliott said, throwing his hands up in disbelief.
“We have to do the right thing and call it in.”
“This job is like a gift from God, Steve. It fell into our laps at the exact moment we needed it the most. If we turn our backs on this, it’s like we’re giving the universe the finger.”
“I’m sorry, but my mind is made up.”
“This could solve every one of your problems.”
“And it could create even bigger ones for us, too.”
“Oh come on, Steve. Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t do this.”
“I’ll give you two. One, because it’s very dangerous, and two, if we got caught attempting a job this size we would be facing a seven-figure fine and prison time for Adam and myself.”
“I understand it’s a huge risk, but don’t you agree that a risk like this just might be worth taking?”
“That’s easy for you to say, Elliott. We have a lot more at stake here than you do.”
“It’s not really that dangerous. We’re all trained professionals. This is nothing we haven’t done before, only on a slightly larger scale.”
“What’s all this ‘we’ talk?”
“What do you mean?”
“If we do decide to go ahead with this hypothetical job you’re pitching – and that’s a big ‘if’ – what makes you think we’d welcome you back with open arms?”
“Well ...” Elliott hesitated. “I just thought since I was the one that brought this to your attention then I’d be involved. And with a job this size, you’ll be needing as many workers as you can get.”
“But we’re not doing the job, so I don’t know why we’re still discussing it.”
“Has anyone ever been found guilty of doing a job that should have been called in? It’s, like, a technicality. No one ever gets convicted.”
“With the luck we’ve been having lately, we’d probably be the first. Seriously, can you imagine what would happen if we were caught, on top of everything else we’ve been through these past few weeks? We’d be publicly hung, drawn and quartered. They could shut us down just for having this conversation.”
“No one would ever know. Graves End is well off the beaten track. Ever since they built the freeway bypass they don’t get traffic passing through there anymore. The only people we’ll see are locals, and they’re all zombies.”
Steve closed his eyes and exhaled. Elliott seemed to have an answer for everything. He knew that it would be beyond stupid and irresponsible to agree to what was being suggested here, but he couldn’t deny that he wasn’t just a little bit tempted.
He looked across to Adam. “What do you think about all this?”
Adam had remained mute throughout the discussion, and hesitated to break his silence. “You know what our current financial situation is,” he finally said.
Steve didn’t need to be reminded of the catastrophic state of the business. They were already struggling to make ends meet, but the fine they had just been slugged with would almost certainly spell the end for Dead Rite, as well as personally bankrupting Steve and Adam.
“Do you think we can afford to risk it?”
“It’s your call,” Adam said, shifting awkwardly in his seat. While he appreciated that Steve was involving him in the decision-making process, he was slightly irritated that the responsibility for making a decision of this magnitude seemed to be shifted solely onto him. “But I’m not sure we can afford not to do it,” he added.
Steve sighed and looked out the window to the car park. He took everything in, weighing up the myriad pros and cons. He’d love to be able to sleep on it and make a decision without any of the pressure and emotion that was weighing down on him now, but that was a luxury he didn’t have. This had to be dealt with immediately. The longer he took to make his mind up, the greater the chance of someone else coming along and discovering the town.
Adam, Elliott and Miles all sat in silence and waited for an answer.
“Steve,” Elliott said, leaning forward. “If it had been Z-Pro and not us who’d made this discovery, do you really think they would hesitate for a second to do a job like this?”
That was all Steve needed to hear – Elliott in
voking the name of Dead Rite’s much-loathed competitor. He swung around to face the others, a look of steely determination sparkling in his eye, and rose from his seat.
“We’re gonna need a bigger bus,” he declared.
Chapter 18