Dead Ahead (23 page)

The bedroom door was wide open. Caleb lightly stepped into the empty room and made his way to the bed, the pillow was smattered in blood stains and the bin beside the bed was full of brown bloodied tissues.

“Blimey! It doesn’t look good mate!” Frank whispered before spinning round with his rifle to cover the bedroom door.

Caleb turned to see Brandon staring at the bed, his eyes glistened with moisture in the dim light, Caleb placed his hand to one side of the boy’s head, distracting him from the morbid thoughts no doubt running through his mind, “It’s gonna be ok son! Just stay between me and Frank!”

Caleb passed Frank and checked the spare rooms and the bathroom, all were clear and tidy, no sign of struggle and no further blood splatters; Caleb began to hope that they had fled the house, which, at this point would be the best possible outcome. The only room left was the kitchen.

The door was closed. Caleb reached for the handle with trembling fingers and turned, the door swung gently open on well greased hinges, his feet made a quiet ‘crick’ as he stepped onto the black and white vinyl floor. His heart raced as he inched his way by the sturdy dining table and past the pine fronted kitchen cupboards, holding the pistol with both hands pointed at the floor. He stepped round the black worktop of the breakfast bar and pointed the pistol at the space hidden behind it, there was nothing there.

The clock ticked quietly on the wall above the dining table; it read ten twenty three, but it had always been five minutes fast.

“Looks like there ain’t nobody here!” Frank said, naturally too loudly. There was a loud thud from the door behind him that sounded like a tin of beans hitting the floor.

‘
The pantry
’ Caleb thought to himself, ‘
the latch had never been too good on that door,
’ “Wait!” he shouted as Frank raised his rifle and reached for the doorknob with his trigger hand.

The door burst open and knocked the rifle from Frank’s hands, sending it skiting across the floor, and turning Frank side on to the doorway and allowing Caleb’s mother to pounce on him.

She was dressed in her once white bath robe and a pink and white nightgown, both were covered in dark brown blood stains, her face was grotesque and twisted with pale white eyes and bloodstained snapping teeth, but it was unmistakably his mother. She pushed Frank back till he hit the worktop and pinned him there, his arms folded against his chest to stop her from biting into his neck.

“Shoot it! Shoot it!” he bellowed and Caleb lifted the pistol and pointed it at her.

‘It? She’s not an ‘it’! She’s my mother!
’ Caleb thought as he pointed the gun. Just then his father shuffled his way from the pantry. Caleb moved the pistol in his father’s direction, but still he couldn’t pull the trigger. His father’s face was thin and gaunt and his white eyes looked to Caleb and Brandon, surveying them, there was a gaping cavity where his father’s stomach used to be, tendrils of flesh dangled from his bare ribcage; but it was still Caleb’s father! His father then turned to Frank and his mother’s struggle and decided on the easier prey.

Frank was still screaming at him, begging him for help, but Caleb couldn’t do it, he couldn’t kill his parents! His father shuffled towards the struggle between Frank and his mother and flopped on top of them, grasping feebly at Frank’s face.

“Dad!” Brandon shouted from behind him, “You have to do it! You
have
to do it!”

Caleb let the pistol drop to his side.

“Shoot them! Shoot them!” Frank cried.

His parents, they were helping him. He could have both guns
and
be rid of Frank! Caleb spun round and grabbed the rifle from the floor, he then grabbed Brandon’s shoulder and ushered him towards the door.

“What are you doing? We
have
to
help
him!” Brandon squealed in a voice somewhere between youth and adulthood.

Caleb grabbed the car keys from the hook on the wall as he pushed him out of the door.

“Get back here you bastard!” Frank screamed at the top of his lungs as Caleb disappeared out of the door, still having to push Brandon all the way out of the house. He could hear Frank screaming behind them as they left; still cursing him at first, but the cursing turned to screams of anguish and pain. Caleb tried to block it out.

“What are you doing?” Brandon kept asking, “We have to help him!”

“Get in the car!” Caleb shouted in a broken voice, very similar to that of his son.

“But, we have to help him!” Brandon cried again.

“Just get in the
fucking car
!” Caleb shouted, with more venom than he had intended. Brandon did as commanded and slammed the passenger door as hard as he possibly could have behind him. Caleb climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

As they drove away there was a loud explosion from the house.

Caleb drove; he didn’t even have any idea where, he just drove. His body went into autopilot, as it often did while driving, as he tried to justify his actions to his self. ‘
Frank was a fucking nutter, it wasn’t going to end well with him around, they were better off without him, he would have given them away eventually and left them behind with no guns, they needed the guns, to protect themselves, to protect Brandon! He had done the right thing!’

‘Everything was going to be ok now!’

Caleb still didn’t quite believe himself, so he turned to Brandon for confirmation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what he got.

“We’re going to be ok now, Brandon, we’re going to be just fine!”

“How could you just
leave
him there?” Brandon asked with outright rage in his voice

“I
had
to leave him there; he would have gotten us
killed
eventually! We couldn’t trust him!”

“
We
couldn’t trust
him
?
He
trusted
us
!”

“
What
would you have me do?
Kill
my own parents for that
madman
? Kill
your
grandparents?”

“How can you be so
blind
? They were already
dead
! You would have been putting them out of their misery!”

“Could you kill me if
I
turned?”

“Wouldn’t you want me to? Would you rather I left you to roam around and kill other people, to kill me? You
selfish bastard
!”

“I....”
‘What had he done?’
“I did it to keep you safe, Brandon!” Caleb said, still trying to convince himself.

“
To keep me safe...?
You let a man
die
to keep me safe? You kill
Husks
to keep people safe! You kill
Infected
to keep people safe! You
don’t kill people
to keep people safe! The more people we have
around
us the
safer
we are!”

“But we have the guns now! We can protect ourselves!”

“
Guns
?” Brandon laughed sardonically, “Haven’t you been paying
any
attention? Every time Frank fired one of those
guns
it brought a swarm of them to us, those guns are fucking suicide. What
use
are they? Is that why you left him there to be eaten, for
fucking guns
? You’re crazier than he
ever
was!”

Caleb didn’t know how to respond. The boy was right! How
could
he leave Frank there to get eaten? And his parents, how could he leave them like that? He had left them shadows of themselves, wandering the earth. It suddenly dawned on him that he had left the doors open to his parents house; they were probably outside now, free to attack more poor innocents, Frank too, he would be one of them now, a Husk, torn and tattered. Guilt started to tear him apart.

But wait! The explosion! Frank must have used a grenade to save himself from being eaten. Maybe he had killed Caleb’s parents with the blast; the thought soothed him a little, though not a lot.

Caleb drove on, wallowing in his own self deprivation. Brandon was still putting up a hostile front towards him, staring out of the window and ignoring any move he made. Who was Caleb turning into? He was supposed to be a role model for this boy, and so far he had run away from two people who desperately needed his help; his thoughts automatically turned to Sam, he was supposed to be his best friend, and he just ran away! He was nothing but a coward!

Caleb saw a sign post for Windermere and took the turning without thinking. He drove on, mile after mile; drowning in his own thoughts. He passed casually through towns filled with wandering dead, not breaking the speed limit, swerving to avoid obstacles and dead alike; their grim faces drifting by the windows with morose wails.

Caleb didn’t care for their lives, or even their deaths. He just wanted to leave it all behind, he wanted to get as far away as he could from what happened, from what he had done; but he was
so
tired, the weeks of broken sleep were taking their toll on him, and he was crashing badly from the adrenaline rush he had experienced at his parents’ house. He had to find somewhere to rest.

The outskirts of Windermere loomed up ahead of him.

The streets were full of the dead, gradually the throng got thicker and Caleb could no longer weave between them; he sped up so that the impacts wouldn’t affect their speed too much and started ploughing in to them.

Brandon looked over to him with concern spread across his face, he was worried that he would be the cause of their deaths too; but Caleb wouldn’t let that happen!

“We are heading for Lake Windermere,” Caleb managed to say with conviction, “The slipway isn’t far from here; I’m going to drive the car down it and into the lake. If the crowd thins out before the slip, wind your window down and climb out when the water starts to flood in; climb on to the roof and into the raft, cut the ropes if you have to; I will cover you!”

“Ok!” Was all that Brandon said, the boy was still pissed but he knew enough not to fuck about in these situations. Caleb handed him the pistol, but he had to wave it at him a few times in order for him to reluctantly take it. Caleb was relieved that he did.

The crowd didn’t thin out, it got thicker. They kept a good speed but it got to the point that Caleb couldn’t quite see where he was going; he had so swerve sharply to avoid a crashed car in the road that appeared through the mass of rotting bodies. Upon doing that, he found that driving in zigzags actually helped their progress, as the husks were slow in turning he was glancing off their sides rather than heading straight in to them.

Caleb saw masts of dry docked yachts sitting tall above the crowd and he knew he was close. Mercifully the crowd did start to thin out and he gave the boy a nudge.

“Get ready” He told him, but got no response.

They burst through the last line of Husks to see that they were well off target for the slipway and running straight down the low level pier right next to it; it was too late to stop now!

“Windows down!” Caleb shouted as he put his foot to the floor to take them as far out into the lake as possible; they thundered down the pier and clipped the lip at the end of it hurtling the front end up into the air, the back wheels connected with the lip and corrected their flight path allowing them to land, more by luck than any driving prowess on Caleb’s part, flat on to the water. With the sudden impact jolted them leaving them dazed for a second, quickly they unbuckled their seat belts as the water started to flood in. Caleb grabbed the rifle from the back seat and tried to climb out the window past the rushing water, but the front of the car was sinking faster than the back and he couldn’t push himself past the torrent flowing in, he decided his best chance was to smash a back window and try from there. He took the butt of the rifle and hit the window as hard as he could; shattering it into a million tiny squares and allowing the water to flow in from there. He forced himself out against the tide, it wasn’t easy, there wasn’t much of a gap left between the water and the top of the window; they were sinking fast!

By the time Caleb got out, Brandon was already sat in the raft cutting its bonds, the front of the car was deep into the water and the raft was sitting at a steep angle. Caleb looked back to the pier which had a mass crowd of Husks inching their way towards the edge. They didn’t stop. The back of the crowd pushed the front ranks forward, over the edge and into the lake, they fell like lemmings into the water, a constant flow of corpses fell while they untangled the raft from the roof rack. The car slowly disappeared beneath them, leaving them floating gradually away from the pier.

A commotion stirred in the crowd at the piers edge, Caleb knew what it was. An Infected emerged through the throng and stood staring after them in its hunched and unnatural stance, he was close enough to see the pink drool dribbling from its mouth. Brandon grabbed the paddle and moved to the front of the raft, pulling at the water in front of him, pushing it under the raft to move them away from the pier. It worked, slowly they moved away from the creatures, too slowly!