I Dream of Zombies by Vickie Johnstone

“Where do you live?” he asked, turning to his passengers.
    “Not far. Just a ten-minute drive back the other way,” said the man.
    “Can you direct me?”
    “Sure,” he replied. “Thank you. I don’t know what we...”
    “Don’t think of it,” said Tommy. “Best not to.”
    He waited until the car in front moved forward, enabling him to make a tight right-hand turn out of the queue of traffic, before heading back in the adjacent line. Three helicopters hovered in the sky ahead. That made five. Behind him someone was talking into a loudspeaker: “London has been quarantined. You are advised to make your way home and stay inside. There will be an announcement on the news of measures to evacuate the city. Please go home. London has been sealed off by the army. Any protest or rioting will be dealt with. These are our orders from the government.”
    Tommy glanced in the rear-view mirror. Several cars turned around straight away while some drivers were stepping out of theirs to argue. Soldiers stepped forward, accompanied by armed police and officers on horseback. He glanced at his companions. “Do you know what happened to your neighbour?”
    The woman looked away and stared out of the window. “He changed after he was bitten,” the man answered. “You need to turn right here.”
    Tommy blinked. “Bitten?”
    “Yes. He was bitten by a woman in the street one night. We heard him shouting and came out. Left here... The woman ran off, luckily. I realise now I was really lucky. I have no idea why she ran. Maybe it was my torch or a noise. Who knows,” said the man.
    “Did you ring the police?”
    “Yes, they showed up real fast. They told me to take my neighbour to the hospital, so we did. They bandaged up the wound and sent him home. You just go straight here as far as you can go. Anyway, he seemed fine, but then he got this fever and couldn’t sleep. When we checked the bandage to see if there was a problem, I couldn’t see anything wrong. They had stitched it up in the hospital. Looked fine to me,” the man remembered.
    “I offered to take him back there to see the doctors , but he wouldn’t move and I couldn’t move him. He said he felt hot and sick – asked for painkillers and water. Ah, please take a right here. Then, God help me, I left him there and went back to my own house. In the morning I knocked on his door, but there was no answer. I thought he’d gone out, that he was fine, you know. Then, today, well it was earlier, so it was still dark, I heard these noises... Oh, please stop here. That’s great. We live just there,” he said, pointing to an attractive looking house with a well-tended garden.
    Tommy wanted to compliment the couple on their home, but it seemed inappropriate under the circumstances. “What happened next?” he asked. He could tell that the woman wanted to get out of the car, but she wasn’t daring to do it alone.
    The man shrugged. “It got weird from there. I told Annie here that I was going to check on our neighbour. I could hear these strange cries, you see. Well, she didn’t let me go alone. She came with me.”
    “Did you have any protection with you?”
    “No, but Annie had her rolling pin,” he replied, raising his eyebrows. “I knocked at the door and there was no answer, but I could hear these God awful moans and groans, so I called the police. While I was talking the door opened and he came out, only it wasn’t really him. I said his name and he didn’t recognise me. His eyes…” He paused and sucked in his breath. “His eyes were lifeless. He looked dead, believe me, but he wasn’t.”
    “Oh, I do believe you. I’ve seen it – on a video. My friend saw it in person.”
    “I feel sorry for her,” the man continued. “We panicked then. He tried to attack us and we panicked. We should have just run back into the house, but I fumbled with my keys and dropped them, and we just ran. But we couldn’t outrun him. It took him a while to come after