Dead Frost - 02

Also by Adam Millard

Dead West

Dead Cells

Dead Frost

Chasing Nightmares

Only In Whispers

Olly

Grimwald The Great

The Ballad Of Dax And Yendyll

Peter Crombie, Teenage Zombie

First Published in the UK 2012

This edition published 2012

Copyright
©
Adam Millard 2011

The Moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in
this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-0-9571033-1-3

© Crowded
Quarantine Publications 2012

www.crowdedquarantine.co.uk

dead frost

adam
millard

To all the zombie
enthusiasts

out there who
continue to buy my books. I salute you.

Prologue

The world ended on
October the seventh, 2011. Not with a bang, as some theorists
predicted, but with a whimper. There was no fruition of a Mayan
prophecy, no alien attack, no terrorist uprising, and no supervolcano
eruption. It was a simple virus that finished mankind off; a
superflu that couldn't be cured once it had been contracted. It
started in America, in a place called Burlington, Oklahoma. From
there it spread North, taking out the surrounding states within
thirty-six hours of the first reported incident. Within three days,
the entire United States of America was under attack, the infected
people –
brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, children
–
searching the wastelands for human flesh to sate their cravings. The
rest of the world soon followed suit, and in less than a week the
survivors were outnumbered by the infected a hundred-to-one. By the
end of the second week there were barely a hundred uninfected in what
were once some of the most populous cities in the world. It has been
a month since that first known incident down in Burlington, Oklahoma.

But to any
survivors, it felt like years.

One

The streets below
were filled with Lurkers. They were so tightly packed between the
dilapidated stores that there was hardly room for them to manoeuvre,
and they bounced off each other the way cells did beneath a
microscope. That was what they were; a strand of vehement flu with
only one purpose: Search and infect. When the outbreak first
happened, Shane Bridge was incarcerated, awaiting his release date
with excitement and hope. Now, with his legs dangling out of the
side of the helicopter and an M1919 Browning machine-gun between his
legs, there was very little left to hope for.

'No target practice
tonight?' a voice said through Shane's headset. It startled him a
little, and his trigger finger tensed, firing off a single round that
was meant for nobody in particular.

The pilot, Kyle
Poulson – or
Flyboy
as he was affectionately known –
banked the helicopter slightly, taking them away from the crowded
streets and towards home. If, in fact, you could call it home.

'Not in the mood,'
Shane said, taking his finger away from the machine-gun. In truth,
Shane knew that wasting ammunition for the sake of it was no longer
the wisest thing to do. There would be a time when bullets are
nothing but a memory, and when that time came Shane would like to be
the one to stand up and proudly announce to the world that he had not
wasted one fucking cartridge.

'Well,' Flyboy
said, 'I'm taking us in. There's no chance of grounding this beast
tonight, and I sure as fuck ain't setting her down just for the sake
of a tub of antibiotics.'

'I'm sure there are
some knocking around the barracks,' Shane said, pushing himself back
into the helicopter. He shivered as Flyboy dropped the chopper fifty
feet; it was getting colder by the day. Shane could tell that it was
going to be a bad Winter, worse than ever before. It was the first
Winter with the Lurkers, and keeping warm had already begun to become
a problem in the barracks.

It was the reason
they had been dispatched. A few people were starting to get sick
with chest-infections and flu. The antibiotics would have seen them
through the Winter, providing they snared a decent haul of them. Of
course, you could never predict the state of the streets, and setting
the helicopter down next to the pharmacy would have been suicide.

It would have to
wait.

'I do believe,'
Flyboy chuckled into his microphone, 'that this is the seventh day in
a row that you've volunteered for scavenger-duty.' He laughed,
before adding, 'Any particular reason why you won't let one of the
young grunts have a go?'

Shane didn't want
to tell Flyboy his reasons for leaving the barracks, so he made
something up, and it came out so naturally that he almost believed it
himself.

'I've just got out
of prison,' Shane said. 'I guess you could say that I'm trying to
repay my debt to society.'

It was bullshit,
but it didn't stink.

'Ahhhh,' the voice
crackled. 'And you think that being the hero and bringing these good
people what they need to survive is somehow making up for the fact
that you fucked up in the first place. I can see where you're coming
from, although I'm not quite sure I'd be doing the same thing if I
were in your shoes.'

The lie was about
to thicken, and Shane couldn't believe it when words started falling
out of his mouth.

'I promised myself
while I was inside,' he went on, 'that I'd make up for what I did.
This is my way...this is the punishment that I deserve.'

Shane sighed,
covering the tiny microphone dangling in front of his mouth so that
the pilot didn't hear.

'Well, all I can
say to that is
Bravo
,' Flyboy said, and the sound of hands
clapping together came through to Shane's earphones. The helicopter
did a little shift to the right, which made Shane grab onto the
leather handle next to him. Flyboy was a good pilot – possibly
the
best
pilot they could have been left with – but
Shane wasn't sure how stable he was when it came to flying with no
hands on the controls.

'Just keep this
bitch under control,' Shane said. 'Otherwise neither of us'll return
heroes.'

As the chopper
drifted homeward, Shane thought about the real reason why he had
optioned for scavenger-duty every night for the last seven.

He was restless.

And he believed, in
his heart of hearts, that his wife and daughter were still out there,
somewhere. Whether they were alive was another matter, but he could
feel them, beating inside of him, their souls still connected to him
in some sense. The nightmares that he had suffered, the endless
visions he had been plagued with for almost a month, were taking
their toll.

He knew he had to
do something.

It was the
not-knowing that was killing him.

The helicopter
sliced through the cold midnight air towards the barracks, where sick
people were waiting for medicine and would be severely disappointed
when the scavengers returned empty-handed.

TWO

Marla heard the
helicopter approaching and rushed out into the freezing night. There
was already a small gathering of people awaiting the scavengers
return; they were clinging to each other for warmth, and despite the
fact that they were wearing coats that were several sizes too big for
them, and blankets which they had stripped from their makeshift beds,
they shivered and clenched their teeth together uncomfortably.

'How long have they
been gone?' Marla asked the crowd; one of them would know down to the
exact second.

'Only two hours,'
Victor Lord replied. 'There's no way they've made a thorough search
in that time. For fuck's sake!'

Captain Victor Lord
was, to all intents and purposes, the man in charge. His military –
or ex-military, as it now was – background made him the ideal
candidate to run the show, although some of his methods left a
helluva lot to be desired.

Marla didn't like
him. It wasn't the fact that he constantly chewed on an unlit cigar,
or the way in which he combed his hair across to cover what was
obviously a bald-patch. It was because he was a cunt; the kind of
man you couldn't trust as far as you could throw him.

Shane didn't like
him either. He had never said it, not in as many words, but Marla
could tell just by the look in his eyes whenever Lord was talking, or
barking orders – as was usually the case – that Shane was
just as wary as she.

'Right, all of
you,' Victor said, chomping his rudimentary cigar as if his life
depended on it. 'I want you to go back inside. The last thing we
fucking need is more of you getting sick. Shit, this flu's going
round quicker than a Vietnamese lady-boy.'

The crowd glanced
at each other, as if to test the Captain's resolve, but eventually
dispersed, shuffling slowly towards the doors that led back into the
barracks.

Marla didn't know
why Victor had to be so mean all of the time; they were in it
together, and it was nobody's fault, at least none of the people who
he had just ordered back inside.

'You're not gonna
make many friends talking to people like that,' Marla said, trying to
stand her ground.

Victor seemed to
grow an inch as he turned to face her. His eyebrows knitted
together, and when he took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth
Marla wished she'd kept her own mouth shut.

'Listen, lady,' he
spat. 'I ain't here to make fucking friends. I'm here to make
survivors. If they don't like the way I talk to them, then they can
ride on out of here and find a nice farmyard somewhere to live the
rest of their days.' He paused, shoved the unlit cigar into the
corner of his mouth, and said, 'But I can guarantee you this: They'll
wish they fucking listened to Captain Victor Lord. When those
creatures are tearing out their insides and chowing down on them like
a bagful of noodles on Chinese New Year.'

Marla tried not to
smile at the metaphor, but it was difficult to stare into such
meaningful eyes when such bullshit is dropping out just a few inches
below them.

'So why don't you
run along with your
friends
,' he made quote-marks with his
fingers to reiterate his intentions towards the rest of the group,
'and I'll keep us all alive. Feel free to thank me later.'

Now he had pissed
her off; royally. It was no use arguing with him, though. He was
ex-military, as stubborn as they came, and he liked to think that the
world owed him something.

It didn't.

The helicopter
appeared just as that moment, which was lucky as Marla was about as
frustrated as she possibly could have been. As Victor stepped away
from the helipad and edged closer to the roof's end, Marla had the
urge to accidentally nudge him over. She was pretty sure that nobody
would miss him;
fuck
, the rest of the group might worship her
like a goddess.

As the helicopter
touched down, kicking up a miasma of dirt that whirled and danced in
the night air, Victor turned and made little walking-legs with his
fingers. This only served to infuriate Marla even more, but she knew
she'd be the first to hear from Shane if there was a problem.

She turned,
shivered as a mixture of gale-force wind and rotor-spin caught her
full on at the nape of her neck, and headed indoors.

Victor Lord
sneered. 'Fucking nuisance,' he muttered, although it was barely
audible as the sound of the helicopter powering down filled the
night.