Bay of the Dead by Mark Morris Page B

had happened to look in a mirror at that moment, Sophie would have been alarmed by how deathly pale she was, how blue her lips had become.
She had run all the way home, a distance of two miles, and, by the time she had arrived at the front door of the house she shared with her lodger – a graphic design student called Kate, who Sophie had never really developed much of a bond with – her stockinged feet were bleeding and embedded with gravel.
Sophie hadn't even noticed. Even now she didn't feel the pain. She sat at the kitchen table, the sobs tearing out of her, her body heaving with tears. She cried for a long time, and when she was done she felt dizzy, sick and drained. Almost subconsciously she crossed to the kettle and flicked it on, took a mug down from the cupboard and spooned instant coffee into it.
When the coffee was ready she re-took her seat at the kitchen table, stared into space and smoked a cigarette. She lit a second from the butt of the first, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. Recently she'd been trying to give up, and she'd been doing so well too; she'd got down to three a day. But after what she'd seen tonight, all those things like cutting out smoking and eating healthily and going to the gym suddenly seemed so pointless, like trying to deflect a hurricane with an umbrella. Because sooner or later death would come, whatever you did to try and prevent it. It was an unstoppable force: massive, ruthless and unpredictable. Tonight it had taken Winston and Kirsty, and it had nearly taken her too. And, although she had escaped, she felt as if it had the measure of her now, as if she was living on borrowed time.
Sitting in the kitchen, smoking and drinking coffee, her mind drifting haphazardly from one crazy thought to another, Sophie felt a kind of numbness setting in. It was almost comforting in a way. She wished she could sit here for ever, not thinking about anything, cut off from the world. She had always known the world was cruel and unforgiving, but until tonight she had never realised quite how cruel, how unforgiving, it could be. But now she did know, and she wanted no further part of it. It could go on without her as far as she was concerned. She was happy just sitting here, doing nothing.
It was the creak on the stairs which eventually roused her from her torpor. She raised her head slowly, looking across at the kitchen door, willing it not to open. The last thing she wanted right now was Kate babbling on about what a stressful day she'd had at work. Sophie heard the plod of descending footsteps, and braced herself for the inevitable. Just as she'd feared, the door to the kitchen swung wide.
Kate was there, all right, but not the whole of her. There was just her head, eyes and mouth wide open, as if she'd been caught by surprise. The head was hanging by its hair from the clenched fist of a recently dead Asian man in a dark suit, whose wire-framed spectacles dangled from one blackening ear.
The man growled like a dog confronted by a stranger, his slack and stupid gaze fixing on her. As Sophie rose from her seat, thinking almost wearily, Oh no, not again , the zombie opened its hand and Kate's head dropped to the floor with a dull, squishy thump.
With a cry of fury and despair, Sophie snatched up her half-empty coffee mug and hurled it with all her strength. Coffee sprayed in an arc across the kitchen as the mug shattered against the zombie's forehead, opening up a wound which trickled with blackish blood.
The zombie didn't flinch, or even blink, from the impact. It just kept shuffling forward, raising its bloodied hands towards her.
' Why can't you just leave me alone! ' Sophie screeched at it. She rounded the table and ran towards the kitchen window.
The window was above the sink, and Sophie had to scramble up onto the draining board to reach it, dislodging crockery and pans, which crashed and clanged on the tiled floor. The window itself was divided into three sections. The main picture window in