Read Online Blog of the Dead (Book 1): Sophie by Lisa Richardson - Free Book Online

knocking on doors in Dover Road when it happened. There hadn’t been a zombie sighting the whole way there. I guess we got overconfident. Archie had started a story about how him and a few of his mates had dared each other to go into the sex shop on Dover Road – I didn’t even know there was one – while he and Sam climbed the steps to one of the houses.
    ‘They shoved me in there,’ he said. ‘I fell in through the door to come face to face with a display of vibrators …’
    I listened to Archie while I stayed on the street to keep look out, my claw hammer in my waistband and my knife gripped firmly in my hand.
    Sam, knife in one hand, knocked at the door.
    ‘I felt so embarrassed,’ Archie carried on.
    No reply.
    ‘I knocked loads of them down …’
    Sam knocked again.
    ‘It made so much noise that everyone in the shop looked at me …’
    No reply.
    ‘I went to –’
    BANG! The sound, something hitting the other side of the door cut Archie dead. Then silence. Sam knocked again, and BANG! – BANG! BANG! BANG! Sam and Archie bundled down the steps as the door started to rattle, knocking into me, and we sprinted down the street.
    When we stopped we took a moment to recover.
    ‘Let’s try this one,’ said Archie. Sam followed him up the steps and knocked on the front door, while I remained on the street fulfilling my lookout duties. It was so quiet, I probably didn’t need to. Maybe if I’d gone up too …
    While they waited, Archie turned and looked down at me and gave me a huge, cheesy grin. I smiled back, and Sam looked round and all three of us started grinning like idiots. I guess it just hit us right at that moment how scared we had been just then, with the whole banging on the door thing. Then the door behind Sam flung open and something lurched itself at Sam’s back. I tried to scream a warning to him, but I couldn’t get it out fast enough. Sam went tumbling down the steps to land at my feet, the thing clinging onto his back. His knife went skitting out of his hand and along the pavement. I raised my knife, ready to plunge it into the head of the thing on Sam. But then I heard, ‘Help me.’ It had been just a whisper and I almost didn’t hear it at all. ‘Kill me,’ it said again. I looked down. The thing on Sam’s back was almost unrecognisable as human. It had been torn to shreds. Its face nothing but raw meat, an eye missing and it had been scalped. Bite marks covered its arms, huge chunks of flesh missing, veins and muscle hanging out. I could see the white of bone. One bloody trouser leg didn’t have a foot protruding from the end of it. The other foot, I could see, had a couple of toes missing. I couldn’t even tell if the thing was a man or a woman. It was still human.
    ‘Please, kill me,’ it said again.
    I started crying. Sam tried to buck the thing off, while Archie looked down, aghast, from the top of the stairs. It clung on to Sam, hugging him with ravaged arms. I could hardly see because of the tears. Sam had given up trying to wriggle away from the thing, and now tried to reach his knife. I don’t believe in God, but I thought then, if you do exist, then please forgive me. I raised my knife and I stabbed the thing through its head. Red blood spurted out of the wound, not the thick black stuff of a full blown zombie. I knew it had been infected and would have changed to become a zombie. But I had just killed a human being.
    I just stood there crying. Sam crawled out from under the body and grabbed his knife. He stood and came over to me, and wrapped his blood streaked arms around me. Then I heard Archie scream. I looked up and saw that a zombie had him, its rotten arms around his shoulders. It must have come out of the house. Shit! We’d been so stupid not to realise that there had to be one in there. How else had the thing that grabbed Sam got in that condition? Stupid!
    Archie tried to stab it with his knife but, with the zombie on his back, he couldn’t get the angle