Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (12 page)

His expression became flinty. “But you expect me to trust you?”

“No,” I said, and got to my feet. “That’s your choice. You’ve always got the option of leaving. The front door is right there.”

* * *

I took
one of the candles with me, and went out into to the kitchen for the first watch. My thoughts were black and bitter. Dark depression filled me, for I had a strange sense of impending disaster. It was like a heavy blanket draped across my shoulders – I just couldn’t shake the feeling off. Common sense told me it was a reaction to the stress, the fear and sheer exhaustion – but a tiny warning voice of instinct wouldn’t go away.

My thoughts started swirling in an unbreakable circle, going over the same questions, the same doubts. It was like trying to catch smoke. There was nothing substantial to grasp, and I realized I would get nowhere without more information about Colin Walker. Eventually I gave up.

Some time in the early hours of the morning, Harrigan appeared at my shoulder, silent as a ghost. I was at the curtained window, staring hard through a chink in the material at the night, watching the trees swaying until the storm finally blew itself out and the darkness became eerily calm and silent.

“Anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said.

There was a can of soda
on the kitchen counter that I had been drinking from, and beside it an empty can of beans. Harrigan picked up the soda and drank thirstily until it was empty. He burped.

“What do you think about Walker?”
Harrigan asked me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just have this feeling about the guy. Something doesn’t add up.”

Harrigan said nothing for a long moment and we stood in the silence both staring out into the night. I watched the big man’s face out of the corner of my eye. He looked thoughtful.

“Maybe you’re judging him unkindly,”
Harrigan said at last. “Trust is a two-way street, Mitch – and in fairness, you’ve told him nothing at all about who we are. Maybe that would be a good place to start.” His tone was gentle and placatory – but still I felt my anger rising. “As the Good Book says…”

I rounded on him
. Perhaps it was because he had a point, or perhaps it was because the last thing I needed right then was another one of Harrigan’s sermons. Clinton was a good man, but his sense of Christian faith and charity were diametrically opposed to my instincts for survival.

“You turned up at the safe house unarmed, covered in blood and carrying a Bible, Clinton. And it took me three days before I felt I could trust you. Walker was in a crashed helicopter w
ith a dead pilot and a teenage daughter. And a gun. He says he’s an ex-military janitor, and that he bought two seats to freedom for twenty grand each. Now, how many janitors do you know that have a lazy forty thousand dollars conveniently laying around their house at the precise moment the apocalypse sweeps across the country?”

I had other suspicions about Colin Walker too – ones I didn’t mention to
Harrigan right then, but fears nonetheless that troubled me deeply. Little things. Big things.

Perhaps they were all just a result of my own paranoia.

Harrigan took a step back. Maybe he was surprised at the extent of my sudden anger. His expression went blank.

“And the girl bothers me,” I went on, mollifying my tone
just a little and keeping my voice to a hoarse whisper. “She hasn’t said two words since we rescued them. Doesn’t that strike you as a little unusual?”

Harrigan’s
brow furrowed. “She’s scared, Mitch. After all she has been through tonight, I would think it’s perfectly normal.”

I raised my eyebrow to make the point. “Exactly,” I said. “She is scared, Clinton. She’s scared shitless – but of who? Is she scared of us, scared of the zombies – or scared of her father?”

* * *

I came awake slowly. It was still dark, and I lay there for long moments, listening to the sounds around me. Jed was nearby – I could hear him still snoring softly. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

It was light enough to see cracks and flaked paint around the light fitting. I turned my head and looked at the
full-length window near the front door. The curtains were still drawn tight, but there was a soft halo of light around the edges. It was morning.

Another day in an undead world.

I sat up.

Colin Walker was sitting on the living room floor, and his daughter was beside him. The girl had her legs folded
beneath her in that distinctly feminine way that only a woman can manage. They were both eating from open cans of cold spaghetti, and there was a can of soda on the ground between them. Walker’s gun was resting in his lap.

They looked up at me, stared for a moment,
then turned their attention silently back to their food.

I heard
Harrigan’s heavy footsteps in the hallway and looked round just as he entered the room.

“Morning,” he said, his tone polite but brusque. He handed me back my
Glock, which I had left with him throughout his stint of sentry duty.

“Morning,” I said, and scraped my hands down my face, feeling weary
and worn. The stubble on my jaw and chin cracked and crackled under my fingers. “Any idea what time it is?”

Harrigan
shrugged. “Sunrise was a few hours ago,” he said, making a face like he was considering the question carefully. “So… maybe nine o’clock.”

I got to my feet slowly. My body was stiff and sore. I hobbled to the window and edged the curtain open an inch.

It was a blindingly bright summer’s morning – so bright it hurt my eyes. The sky was clear brilliant blue. Across the street, the narrow fringe of nature strip we had run through the night before stood like a dappled green wall, beyond which I could just see the pointed roofs of houses. One of them was the safe house we had spent the last three weeks in.

The road between the house and the nature strip was empty, and still damp from the storm, glistening in the sunlight. It was as if the rain had washed the world shiny new and clean.

But I knew that wasn’t the case.

I let the curtain fall back into place and turned round to face the group. Jed was making soft throaty sounds. I nudged him with my foot. He grunted, then came awake in a single instant, his eyes sharp and alert.

“We need to make a plan,” I stated the obvious. “Clearly, we can’t wait here until help arrives. Based on what Walker told us last night, help isn’t going to come – ever. So we have to help ourselves. Sooner or later we are going to have to strike out and find other survivors – maybe find a safe place that hasn’t been affected by the virus,” I paused and swept my eyes across the faces before me. Everyone seemed somber. “But before we do anything, we need to check this house again. We have to go from room to room, gathering everything that might be useful, but nothing that will slow us down. My guess is that we missed plenty last night when we cleared the house. Today we’ll find it.”

It certainly wasn’t a
Churchillian speech. No one got to their feet and applauded. Everyone sat in bleak, listless silence. I glanced at Jed.

“How do you feel?”

He nodded. “Better,” he said grudgingly. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and then rubbed the side of his face with his hand. The swelling had almost completely gone. He dragged his hands through his hair and opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a man making sure his jaw was still hinged after being punched. He got to his feet and went down the hallway towards the kitchen.

I turned back to Colin Walker. The man’s eyes swung to mine like the double-barrels of a shotgun. He was wary.

I forced a smile. “It was pointed out to me last night that we know very little about you, Mr Walker, but that you know even less about us,” I said, glancing at Harrigan’s suddenly smug expression as I spoke. “Let me fix that right now.”

I crossed the living room and held out my hand.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. Walker reached up and we shook hands, suspicion still creasing his features.

“My name is Mitch Logan. Up until a few weeks a
go, I owned a small appliance store in Forresterville. It’s a little town about thirty miles north of here. I sold refrigerators and television sets, and I had two sales staff helping me and an office girl. None of them survived the plague,” I shook my head with genuine sadness. “And if I live to reach my next birthday I’ll be thirty seven years old. I’m single, but not by choice. My wife divorced me three years ago and I hope like Hell that the dragon-slaying horror bitch was dead and mutilated by the first wave of the zombie plague – but knowing my luck, she will have survived, only to bite them back.”

I stepped away
, turning to Harrigan. “Now you,” I said. “Since you’re the one who thought we needed this little love-fest.”

Was I being sarcastic
?

Yep, it was.
Harrigan’s self-congratulatory little smile slipped from the corners of his mouth.

He introduced himself to Walker and nodded his head politely to his daughter, like a refined gentleman might
, back in the days before the Civil War.

“My name is Clinton
Harrigan,” he cleared his throat and stood quite straight. “And before the terrible plague, I owned the town bakery,” he said. “I was married, but my wife was killed by the undead when we tried to escape into the country. We were never blessed with any children.”

I watched Walker’s face carefully, but his expression never changed. He would have made the perfect poker player.

“You don’t have a gun, Mr Harrigan?” Walker asked, and he sounded bewildered.

Harrigan
shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t. I carry a crow-bar and a Bible. They are my weapon and my shield, along with God’s infinite grace and mercy.”

Walker said nothing.
He rolled his eyes to me. I nodded.

“
Mr Harrigan is our resident devout Christian,” I confirmed, making my voice sound bright and conversational. “But not the kind that will beat you over the head with Bible quotes until your ears bleed.” Then I paused for a beat.

“Not if he knows what’s good for him.”

Walker nodded. “And what about your brother?”

Jed was still out in the kitchen. I could hear him rummaging through cupboards. I shrugged. “
Jed is two years younger than me,” I said, “and what you see is exactly what you get. You’re a smart enough man to work out the rest, I’m sure.”

Again Walker nodded.

He glanced at his daughter then back to me. “So what now?”

I forced another tight smile. “Now you take the gun from your lap and put it i
n your pocket. It makes me kind of nervous. I’m sure you understand. Then we start searching the house in the spirit that Mr Harrigan here believes we should – with choir music in the background and little blue-birds on our shoulders as new-found life-long friends… for as long as life lasts.” And then I muttered dryly, “Praise the Lord.”

Harrigan’s
face became a dark brooding scowl. He was annoyed that I was mocking him, but he still couldn’t resist the compulsion.

“Amen,” he said softly.

* * *

We couldn’t all search the house – it would be madness not to keep a watch posted in case undead drifted nearby, so I split us into two groups. Walker, Jed and I would search every room, while Harrigan and the girl would stay in the living room and stand guard at the front door.

Most of the rooms were at the back of the house and I figured Jed, Walker and I could cover those windows while we were looking for anything that might be of use.

This caused the girl to go into a meltdown. Her eyes welled with tears and her face lost all of its color until she looked pale and white as a ghost. Her lower lip began to tremble, and her fingers began to fiddle anxiously with the chunky bracelet around her wrist, until finally Walker took her aside and spoke to her for several minutes in quiet whispers.

The girl had been completely traumatized by the helicopter crash. The idea of being even in a different part of the house than her father sent her over the edge, and it took a lot of patient coaxing before she finally relaxed enough to follow
Harrigan, timid and reluctant, to the big full-length window.

I left my gun with
Harrigan and snatched up the nylon bag. There were a couple of full water bottles and a few cans of beans rolling around in the bottom. I left them on the living room floor.

“This shouldn’t take long,” I said to
Harrigan, but I was talking for the girl’s benefit. “Maybe half an hour. We just need to be thorough. We can’t afford to miss anything that might be useful.”

Harrigan
nodded. He twitched the curtain aside half-an-inch and peered out at the bright morning, then glanced back over his shoulder at me. “Take your time,” he said casually. “If we see anything, or hear anything, I’ll send Millie to fetch you.”