I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately when it comes to creative writing. I genuinely don’t think I’ve written any fiction since before Christmas. I’m not sure why, I guess I just haven’t had any inspiration. 

But today the first sentence of this following piece of new writing just came into my head and I rolled with it. It’s not my best work, but I thought I’d share it anyway:

 

The blood on his face, wasn’t all his.

Sure, his nose was definitely broken but he probably couldn’t feel that. The dead don’t feel. I stood for a moment, weighing up my options, I needed to make a decision soon because he was making enough noise to attract a whole load more of his kind.

He’d fallen into the 10ft hole I’d spent weeks digging, just in case anything got into the back garden. I looked to the back wall and saw the trail of blood where he’d climbed over and fell to the floor, ripping his stomach open on the spikes I’d managed to hammer into the brick and secure with some of that nice sticky tar they used to use on school fences. Weird, how had he managed to get over the wall? I looked back in the hole, ‘wait here’, I said and marched towards the end of the garden.

I stood at the wall, listening carefully to see if anything was on the other side but it was just silence. It’s mostly just silence, broken sometimes by the moan of a dead one shuffling outside. I used an overturned plant pot and carefully peered over the wall, nothing but the empty alleyway behind the house. Weird. Then I noticed the stool. One of those toddler ones that they use when they’re just starting toilet training. Someone had pushed that walker over the wall.

I backed away quickly, spinning round and heading straight for the house. Someone was trying to force their way in, like a coward, dropping dead people into my place. I felt sick, I mean it’s not like they hadn’t tried to get in before but people had simply tried to break down the reinforcements I’d secured  in front of the doors and windows.

These mainly consisted of front doors from other houses and parts of garage shutters. I’d spent a long time carefully securing each entrance and now someone decided to just dump a disgusting walker into my home. Cheap.

The one in the hole was getting louder and I knew I had to shut it up. I’d left a sharpened broom handle outside the back door for such a special moment and grabbed that. I stood looking into the pit for the moment, now noticing the black tar that was sticking to his face and hands and the dark brown ooze seeping from a wound on his stomach.

‘Sorry you ended up here.’ I said, as he looked up at me with his clouded over eyes, his hands clawing aimlessly at the dirt on the sides of the hole. I pulled the broom handle back with both hands then plunged it into his head, cringing at the sickening squelching sound as it easily punctured rotting flesh and bone.

He started to crumple but pulling the stick back out with force caused me to lose my balance and fall back hard, I winced at the sharp pain that spread through my coxic and knew that was going to continue hurting later. I sat for a moment, just staring at the wall, still trying to work out my situation and then someone shouted out to me.

‘Let us in and no one gets hurt!’ It was a man’s voice, reasonably young, and there was a slight tremble at the end of the sentence. ‘He was just a little tester of your reflexes, what were you doing? Napping?’ He added.

I rolled my eyes.

‘I was actually!’ I called back. ‘So can you just go away please?’

Why couldn’t other people just get that I didn’t want them in my fortress. It was the same before the dead began to walk.

I tried to sound cool but I was sweating. Everywhere. I didn’t know how many of them were out there. How many walkers they were preparing to push over the wall to get at me? This is Britain, we don’t have guns to pick them off, you’ve got to get up close and personal.

‘Sorry, but we really need to get in there.’ He called back . I heard shuffling, the sound of metal hitting the ground as something heavy was being lifted and then I watched in horror as the wall started to shake as they took a sledgehammer to it.