Dead Frost - 02 (15 page)

'What happened?'
she asked, pushing herself up onto her haunches and hoping that the
click her back made was nothing too serious. 'I don't remember...'

'Bright-eyes
here decided to swerve for a deer,' Terry said. He was dusting down
the leather cover of his bible. God forbid anything should happen to
that
.

'I didn't see it
until it was too late,' Shane said, not taking the bait. 'I didn't
have much of a choice. My reflexes took over.'

Jared, who was
sitting in the snow looking as glum as ever, said, 'Well, we are
truly fucked, now.'

Terry
sighed. 'This is not the time, nor the place for amateur-dramatics,'
he said, shoving the bible into his jacket and zipping it back up.
He still had the cheery disposition of an uncle at Christmastime.
'Besides, we have more things to worry about than the hordes of
undead after our tasty
asses.' He pointed to the sky. 'We're more than likely gonna freeze
to death if we don't find somewhere to bed down for the night.'

Shane, suddenly all
ears, snapped into life. 'We don't have time to sleep,' he said.
'My wife and daughter, remember?'

Marla stretched, as
if she had just been roused from a rather enjoyable catnap. 'Terry's
right,' she said, pulling her hood up and stepping cautiously out of
the wreckage. Terry helped her forward, unsure if she was just going
to buckle beneath her own weight. He seemed relieved when she
didn't. 'We're still...how many miles?'

'Forty-two,' Jared
said, pointing a finger towards a sign at the edge of the road. 'And
I'll be damned if you think I'm walking it.'

To Shane, Marla
said, 'We can look for a vehicle, try to find something to get us
moving again, but we need warmth and we need something to eat.
There's no point turning up in Jackson with no energy; for all we
know the place is gonna be overrun with lurkers.'

Shane's
face contorted; he hadn't thought about
that,
not since the barracks.

'You know she's
making sense,' Terry said. He jumped up and down a few times on the
spot in an attempt to keep warm.

Shane span an about
turn and put both hands behind his head. 'Shit!' he snarled. He
turned back to face Terry and Marla, and when he did his face was
full of strength, determination, steel. 'Okay,' he said. 'But first
thing in the morning and we move forward. Remember, I didn't ask any
of you along. You came through choice. If you don't like what I'm
doing, then head back.' He thought for a moment before adding, 'You
know I care about all of you, but my family are out there, somewhere.
I just want to get to them...I just want them to be safe.'

How did you respond
to that. Marla wanted to grab the big fool and pull him into the
tightest clench she could. If she did, though, she would probably
keel over under her own pain.

'We best get
moving,' Terry said. 'We do not want to be stuck out here once the
moon is up.'

'Are
you okay to walk?' Shane asked. Marla
nodded,
hissing as she put weight on her right foot. It hurt, but it wasn't
broken.

Just sprained.
Being a doctor – or former-doctor – had its little perks,
and one of those was: self-assessment.

The Snatch was
beyond repair; despite the thousands of dollars spent on extra
armour, it was the mechanical equivalent of braindead. The front was
a crumpled mess, and multicoloured cables and wires hung out of the
bonnet like dead octopi tentacles. Even if they were able to get it
running again – which would have been a feat of modern
engineering – three of the four tyres were punctured. Two were
already flat, while the third hissed as air slipped out through a
glass-gouged hole.

'Probably would
have ended up crashing it anyway,' Marla said, faking a smile at her
own optimistic prediction. The snow, however, made it more of a
certainty than just a blind guess.

'Did
anyone see where that deer went?' Terry said as he scaled the
embankment leading back up to the road. 'I always thought I would go
back to vegetarian, but considering the current situation, a bit of
venison never
hurt anybody,
did it?'

Shane knew that
Terry was honestly considering hunting the deer down, although he
presumed it would be long gone by now, counting its lucky stars, or
not really knowing how close it had come to bouncing off an armoured
windshield.

The
sign said
42 MI – JACKSON
,
but it also said
3 MI – SANDOWN.

'What do you
think's in Sandown?' Marla said, limping, clinging onto Shane's
shoulder until she was sure she had the strength, and the nerve, to
walk on her lonesome.

'Lurkers,' Terry
said without taking a breath. 'Lots of lurkers, but plenty of food.'

Terry was to be
proved right on both counts.

NINETEEN

Things were bad;
Susie Bloom knew it, Maggie Cox knew it, the entire goddam camp knew
it, but there was nothing like a bit of icing on a cake, and that
came in the form of silence.

'Shhhh,' Susie
said. 'Do you hear that?'

'Mommy, you're
scaring me,' Kelly said, latching onto her mother's cardigan.

'It's okay, honey,'
Susie said, stroking Kelly's hair. 'There's nothing there, but the
generators appear to have stopped.'

'Well, wouldn't
that just be a splendid turn of events?' Maggie said, lighting a
cigarette, coughing a few times, and then going in for a second,
deeper drag.

'I don't hear
anything,' Kelly said in a high-pitched tone that suggested her
mother was either hearing things, or had gone completely coco-loco.

'That's what I'm
afraid of,' Susie said.

Henry Colburn, who
was now tied to a chair in the middle of the corridor, began to tut.
'Tsk, tsk, tsk. You know what you need?' he asked, and despite his
face being hidden by the darkness, it was evident that he was
smiling. Grinning, even, like the maniac that he was.

'Shut up,' Maggie
said. 'You lost the privilege to talk when you tried to fucking kill
me.'

Kelly gasped as the
curse-word resonated around the hallway. It was a funny word,
though, wasn't it; Kelly thought so and began to silently mouth it to
herself, though she would never dare to say it out loud. Not while
her mother was around.

'What you need is
somebody to fix the generators,' Colburn continued. The fact that he
was bound to a chair, at the mercy of two very pissed off ladies and
a wet-behind-the-ears little girl seemed to have no bearing on him,
at all. 'And I think you'll find that I'm the only fucker in this
hellhole who has the slightest idea how to make 'em work again.'

'
Bullshit
!'
Susie said, and then apologised to Kelly, who was somewhat proud of
her mother's outburst. 'You don't know a thing about those
generators. You're a soldier, not a mechanic. The only thing you
know is how to murder old ladies when they least expect it.' She
paused, a beat, and then added, smiling, 'And you couldn't even do
that
right.'

'I'm not
that
old,' Maggie said, slightly offended. 'I've just had a difficult
life.'

'I know how to make
'em run again,' he said, his voice hoarse and thick in the darkness.
He spat, a globule of blood and bile landed at Susie's feet.

'Well, you're quite
the charmer, aren't you?' Maggie said, drawing on her cigarette and
exhaling a plume of bluey-grey smoke. 'But if you think we're
letting you go after what you tried to pull, you've got another thing
coming.'

And then, Henry
Colburn did something that none of them expected. In fact, it caught
Maggie so much by surprise that she almost fell into the wall.

He laughed.

And he laughed.

He was like the
evil villain in a James Bond movie, only worse. He was laughing so
hard that tears began to stream down his face. If they thought he
was a maniac before, then now he was totally fucking bonkers.

'I'm not listening
to this anymore,' Susie said, taking Kelly by the hand and leading
her away from the lunatic in the chair. Maggie followed, although
she couldn't help feeling a sense of foreboding, as if somewhere
along the line this man, this
wacko
, was going to have to be
untied. If he
did
know about the generators, the others would
want to set him free – the lumberjack contingency would only be
able to think of their families, and the fact that the nutjob who
professed to hold the key to repair the generators was highly
unstable would fall by the wayside.

'You'll be back,'
Colburn chuckled, practically foaming at the mouth. 'I
guaran-fucking-tee it.'

As Maggie hobbled
forward – had she hurt her leg during the attack? She wasn't
sure – she knew that everything had taken a turn for the worse.

What about Victor
Lord?

What happens when
he gets back from his little hunting expedition to find that his man
has failed, been overpowered by a weak old lady and a mother? Surely
there would be no happy-ending. No way, uh-huh.

As Maggie Cox
smoked her way down the stairs, back to the remnants of civilisation
– if ever there could be such a thing – she prayed for
God to take her the next time she fell asleep.

Rather him than
someone else.

*

Sandown was barely
even a town. There were a few stores, raided of course, and in the
middle of the square there was a bronze statue of a man on a horse.
The figure sitting atop the steed actually reminded Shane of Governor
Charles Dean, the man who had gone out of his way to make every
prisoner in Jackson feel like a piss-puddle. He even had the same
moustache, which bordered on Victorian and would not have looked out
of place on the set of some ridiculous British period drama.

'Well this is all
kinds of creepy,' Marla said. The cut on her head had stopped
bleeding and her eyes were once again focussed. For awhile back
there, Shane had been concerned.

'Looks like the
whole town was overrun,' Terry said. He was holding the shotgun,
ready for action, which made perfect sense as they were walking into
the unknown.

'Either that,'
Shane said, 'or they're waiting, hiding out, hoping for someone to
ride to their rescue.'

'Well, good luck
with that,' Marla muttered. 'We're all waiting to be rescued, it's
just some of us have considered the possibility that the cavalry is
no longer searching.'

She was right; if
there had been remaining government wouldn't they have tried to
transmit, perhaps a short-wave radio message for all survivors. That
was what happened in the movies; that was how it should have happened
now.

Of course it
didn't
, though. There was no Morgan Freeman to tell everyone
to remain calm using that magnificent voice of his; there were no
military heroes screaming “Get to da choppa!” whenever
the shit hit the fan. This was real, it was happening without the
aid of a film-crew and sound-engineers.

Across the square
was a small building. Shane would have used the word
bungalow
,
had he known whether it was indeed the right word for the job.
Nevertheless, he walked towards it, feet crunching through the snow.
It was so deep, now, that his boots had started to fill up; he would
have to find some taller boots, or failing that he would fashion a
pair out of a couple of plastic bags and an elastic-band. He had
seen that on the TV once.

'What is it?' Jared
asked, keeping close to Terry. The man holding the biggest gun was
obviously the best man to stick by.

'Looks like some
sort of school,' Shane replied, rubbing his hands together and making
a mental-note to add gloves to the list of
Things to keep me
alive.

Marla kicked
the sign next to the gate, forgetting that she had recently been
involved in a very painful accident. She winced as the snow covering
the sign dropped down, revealing the words
SANDOWN
ELEMENTARY – THE BEST START THEY COULD WISH FOR.

'Yep,' Marla hissed
through clenched teeth; the pain from being so stupid was obviously
affecting her. 'It's a fucking school.'