The Zombie Diaries - Part 3 - Beaches and Bite Marks

We sit under the desk that’s barricading the locked door, my arms clutching Hayley, she’s rocking backwards and forwards slowly but she’s gradually getting faster and faster. Tears have stained her make up and there’s a dark line along her face, running down her round checks and then stopping at her chin where the tear had dropped of. Her blue eyes are blood shot from the sting of sea water and blood has stained her wavy blond hair, it’s still trickling down the back of her neck. We hear a scrapping at the door and then a long grunt. Hayley buries her face in my chest and I rest my chin on top of her head. Not long ago we we’re all so happy, everything was right with the world, as apposed to now, now it’s the exact opposite. Something tries to push the door as she sobs but the lock on the door holds. When I listen and when what’s out there is quiet and there dead silence I can hear the waves still crashing into the beach. The smell of the sea is now mixed with the smell of blood but I can still remember the sand between my toes and the sunlight caressing my skin, the sound of laughter fills my ears like the world isn't upside down anymore. 

Two Days Earlier 

The waking moment can go one way or the other, theres no grey area in my mind, you either feel really good or really bad. Really bad is when you wake up to the sound of an alarm and feel like the day ahead will kill you, really good is the sound of crashing waves in the distance, you’re curled up in fresh white sheets that feel cool next to the heat of the rest of the room. In the distance someone is cooking and I realize it the enticing smell of bacon thats woken me, I imagine it sizzling away and I wonder who’s cooking. I stretch out my legs and they brush against someone else’s, I’d almost forgot about Hayley was here with me and I roll over to see her sleeping softly. I stop for a moment and listen the her breathing, my face next to her I can just feel her breath on my face. I watch a beam of light cross her until it hits her eyes and she blinks awake, she scowls at me for watching her sleep then sinks back down. Her hairs a mess and she’d say she was looking her worst right now but to me she’s the most attractive person on the planet. 

“Hey lover birds” a teasing voice says. And I roll over and sit up so fast the rush of blood makes me slump back down.

It’s Curtis, my oldest friend, who carries a tray and I know without looking there’s bacon on it, I know he must want something if he’s cooking for other people and I look at him with suspicious eyes. The moment he puts the tray down however Hayley pounces on it, takes a gulp of coffee followed quickly by orange as it burt her mouth, she's shoveling egg by the time i’ve even started. 

“So what have you done, or what do you want?” I asked and he perches on the end of our bed and gives us his best, sweet as sugar look, but that look hasn't worked since school on anyone, and not since we were a single digit age for me. 

“I overloaded the power in the lounge or summit, well nothing in there is working anyway” Hayley gives a stifled laugh through her food and then swallows. 

“So what do you want us to do about it?” she says as I start my toast. “We made a pact not to leave this island in a month” he nodded, he must be feeling properly guilty. 

“We can still phone over and get help or is that breaking the rules?” he says slightly relived, why we we’re the ones he came to first is beyond me, are we the most authoritative or something? 

“It’s fine by me but run it past the rest of us, we’ve been what, six days now without TV I'm sure they’ll start going mad if we hit a week” he hinted at a smile and left the room.

On this island were six of us, or three couples, me and Hayley, curtis and Michelle and Sayed and Tash, short for Natasha obviously. The girls barley know each other and I can’t quiet tell who likes who between them but us guys have all known each other for years. The only reason we actually got out here to this paradise was because Curtis won £100,000 in a lottery and as well as paying his university fees he payed for all of us to come over here. We’d all protested at first but eventually through some form of blackmail of persuasion he got us over here. Him and his Girlfriend were only just together a few months when he won and I have a feeling she’s clinging to him now, she’s taller than him stereotypically beautiful with blond hair and everything that goes in hand with that. To me she holds nothing on Hayley of course, curtis has a thing about getting with the wrong girls in my mind, but he’s been with worse. 

Sayed and Tash however are engaged, which came as no surprise to us as they’re both muslim and Sayed is very strict, lets just say they sleep in separate beds and leave it at that. Tash isn’t however, she doesn't wear a headscarf and curtis swore he saw her eating bacon once. She is however an amazing person and I couldn't be happier for Sayed, she challenges him on brains having met him on the same dentistry course and made us all actually want to be her best friend after meeting her, we were so weirded to how Sayed got a girl this good. Me and Hayley got the impression though that Michelle and Tash don’t get on to well, and the four of us often left curtis and her to there own devices. 

As me and Hayley finish our coffee we eye the bathroom door over our mugs. She took a final gulp and rushes in just as I leap up. The smell of sea salt is hard to get out now but the girls still try every morning. 

I sauterne into the lounge and find the guys in the same, everyday, situation. We all smirke and debate who was the worse for taking the longest. This being a luxury place we all have our own shower, well one per couple. Curtis had phoned someone and he is coming over, apparently he’d said summit about a fuse, but I knew nothing about that stuff, would be good if school prepared you for stuff like this.Curtis wins and Hayley comes out first, followed closely by Tash, none of us are surprised that Michelle is last. After we’re all showered, fed by curtis and clothed we take to the beach. 

It still startles me everyday, not the actual place cause i’ve seen places like this in picture and stuff but the idea that i’m here standing in front of it. Ocean spread out in front of us nothing on the horizon apart from a tiny island. Thats are link to the rest of humanity, we’d been brought from there and then from there you go to the mainland. For some reason I felt like a pirate when I used words like that. The island we’re on is about five kilometers in circumference we’d walked it once and camped on the other side another time, there are so many more stars out here, you wonder why people don't appreciate the small things like that and block them out in big cites. Every morning I just take a step onto the sand then back again, looking at my impression, I never thought i’d make an impression on a place like this. The sand here is perfect, just the right shade of white, but not white the lightest shade of yellow. The ocean is the perfect shade of blue, I mean real blue, I don’t think i’d ever saw an ocean that is actually blue before, it was grey or a darker shade of blue. The small bit of jungle on either side of me provides a backdrop to it all this, this little slice of perfection. 

As we walk out onto the beach however our perfection is interrupted by the sound of humanity, there’s a boat on it’s way over to us, curtis’s look of guilt is back on and we all shot him a, you deal with it, look. 

“Tom you know what I'm like explaining things...” his tone makes me feel sorry for his guilt. 

“Don't let him win Tom” Tash says quickly, there’s a running thing with all of us that I give in to easy to Curtis, which is probably true. 

“Yeah don't let him guilt trip you” Sayed added. I looked into curtis’s puppy dog eyes and sigh. 

“I’ll just talk to him on the beach” I said but they all have there own personal noise of disapproval, apart from curtis of course who has a sudden look of relief. We walk up to about where the boat looks like it might land and I greeted the handyman and something about him makes me recoil at once. He has olive skin and I think he might have been the one that brought us over here but none of that bothers me, what bothers me is the fact that he looks like he had a fever and on his upper arm is a bite mark. A human bite mark, the drops of blood glistening in the bright sunlight. 

TO BE CONTINUED...