When The Dead Walked by C. C. H. Whillock

Author:C. C. H. Whillock [Whillock, C. C. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zombies
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

DIY Alone

Two-and-a-bit months in a Lake District bunker

After she had been locked in, carrying nothing but her mother’s portrait and bag, one of the first things Mia noticed was how cold it was in the bunker. During her initial, panicked searching of the building, Mia discovered a series of expensive cardigans in the wardrobe of the bedroom. When she had finally been brave enough to put them on, she found that they fit perfectly. But the knitwear, despite its quality, could not warm her sufficiently.

For weeks now, the chilly rooms had been sucking energy from her, until she found herself sitting on the sofa for long moments at a time, instead of completing her tasks. Her motivation to go on like this was dwindling. Although circumstances had forced her to learn a lot of DIY during her time stuck down there, fixing the heating still felt like too much for her.

Mum – a thin, pale woman with hard eyes and an imperious stare – had only really loved herself at the end, it seemed. Mia couldn’t avoid the large portrait that her mother had insisted be put up in the lounge on the far wall from the front door. It directly faced the sofa.

Despite that, Mia had also grown to love the portrait in the two months that she had been in the bunker. It was a very distinctive image, painted by one of the most accomplished artists of the Keswick Fine Artists Society.

“Wish you could have been here,” Mia said to the painting. She raised a glass of whisky, a single malt that had been her mother’s favourite and was therefore in plentiful supply. “Here’s to you.”

She didn’t know what kind of life her mother could reasonably have expected to enjoy down in the bunker. She was far too active a woman, even with her illness, to sit still enough to play cards, or to be happy whiling away her time reading a good book. She probably would have even become bored of the exercise bike and the sewing machine eventually. Being underground, there was only a grainy black-and-white CCTV feed from a small camera pointed at the door of the shed which housed the entrance hatch.

But Mum had left herself little puzzles still to do. That’s why, Mia realised to her annoyance, there were so many plant cuttings that needed potting, so many unsorted screws and batteries in the drawers, so many different types of lightbulb used throughout the bunker.

In the first two weeks that she had been down there, Mia had managed to organise the cutlery, and source a few empty Tupperware boxes, into which she sorted all of the screws, nuts, and bolts, in size order. She had put together the office chair for the CCTV desk that sat by the front door, and had re-sorted the pieces of over one hundred curiously jumbled jigsaw puzzles back into their correct boxes.

That last task in particular had convinced Mia that her mother had done this on purpose, as though she knew she would need something to keep her mind active and her brain engaged.

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