Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (17 page)

“Are you all right?”

She groaned. Her hand went to her head in slow motion and when her fingers pressed against the wound she winced painfully. I glanced past her. Harrigan was slumped heavily in the corner of the seat, eyes closed, mouth agape. I reached past the girl and shook the big man hard. He groaned, and came awake like a boxer on the canvas struggling to beat the ten count.

“Are you okay?”

Harrigan groaned again. He sighed deeply and his eyes fluttered open, dull and unfocussed. I forgot about him and hurled my weight against the door.

The air was thick with swirling tendrils of smoke, and the smell of gas was strong and getting stronger. The door creaked open and I had to use my foot to pry it the rest of the way.

I got out of the car and staggered on unsteady feet. Everything seemed to spin and swirl around me. I clutched dizzily for the side of the sedan, and at that moment a gun opened fire. Bullets flailed the air around me, rattling and clanging against the car, tearing up fragments of stone and dirt and glass, ricocheting off into the distance. I ducked my head, made my body as small as I could and staggered to the sheltered side of the car.

Harrigan’s
face was pressed against the window of his door. I heaved against the handle, and the door flung open so unexpectedly that I lost my balance and fell backwards onto the sidewalk. Harrigan’s heavy body fell out of the car and he lay crumpled and groaning in the gutter. I crawled to him.

“Come on, Clinton,” I said through clenched teeth. “I need you, man!”

He staggered to his knees. I could see no obvious signs of injury – but I’m no doctor. The Glock was in the foot well behind the driver’s seat. I lunged for it and thrust it into his big fist.

“There’s someone shooting at us from one of the houses
across the road,” I said, almost shouting the words in his face to make them register through the haze of his disorientation. “I need you to cover me while I help the others.”

Harrigan
nodded, then glanced back down the street in the direction we had come. Nothing moved – yet.

I helped him to his feet and he slumped over the car, holding the gun in two hands and resting his arms on the crumpled metal roof. He seemed a little clearer – a little
more steady. I reached in across the seat and caught Millie’s arm. She was tucked up in a trembling ball, knees under her chin, her hands covering her face. She was sobbing. I didn’t have time for niceties. I grabbed her arm and heaved. I felt something tear in my chest and a flash of pain that exploded through the top of my head. I dragged the girl out of the car and pressed her down flat on the grass.

“Stay there!” I hissed at her. “Don’t move!”

I heard more shots ring out. One smacked into the car. I didn’t look up. I went to the driver’s door and peered through the window at my brother.

Jed
’s head was slumped over the steering wheel. The whole front of the car had folded in, driving the engine block and the dashboard into his body. I heaved on the door but it wouldn’t open. I tried again, straining with all my strength until I saw pinwheels of light burst into bright stars behind my eyes. The door had crumpled into the front wheel. I couldn’t move it.

I climbed onto the
back seat and reached around, groping for the driver’s seat controls. There were a couple of plastic levers. I lifted the first one with my fingers but nothing happened. I tried the other one, and the backrest of the seat fell down towards me. Jed groaned.

I lowered the seat as far as I could. Jed rolled his head from side to side. I reached in and wrapped my arms around his chest. As I started to heave him backwards, he let out a fierce cry of pain.

I relaxed my grip and thrust my head through between the front seats. The front of the car was unrecognizable; a terrible mangled contortion of metal and plastic. I leaned over Jed and shoved my face close to his.

“Are your legs trapped?”

He groaned.

“Jed!”

He blinked his eyes open dazedly, and then winced in agony. I saw his eyes come into focus, hard and dark, but shadowed with pain. He spat blood down his chin and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Can you feel your legs?” I barked urgently.

He nodded. I clambered back behind his seat and linked my hands under his armpits again. “Then if this hurts – too bad,” I said.

I heaved. Jed cried out, but I ignored him. He slid back a couple of inches. I heaved again
, turning him as I did so that I could drag him out of the car through the back seat. He came out in an awkward tangle of screaming pain. I stretched him out on the grass but he sat upright immediately.

“What the fuck…?
”

I crouched over him.

“Someone shot out a tire,” I spat. “They’re in one of the houses across the street.”

He shook his head and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth like he was checking that he still had his teeth. “Zombies?”

“Zombies can’t fire guns, dip-shit!” I said.

Jed grunted.
“Walker?”

“I’m going for him now,” I said. “
Harrigan is keeping us covered.”

Jed looked pained again. He pushed himself to his feet and balanced tenderly
, like maybe one of his legs was broken. “Where’s my gun?”

I gave him the revolver. He leaned himself over the roof of the car beside
Harrigan.

I clambered back into the mangled wreckage of the car. Colin Walker was slumped against the backrest of his seat, his head turned to the side so that I could see his face was a mask of blood. The windshield had blown in on impact. There were thousands of tiny glittering pieces of glass across the man’s lap and in his hair
, and across his bloodied chest. I snatched at his wrist. His pulse was weak and racing erratically. He didn’t move.

I left him and backed out of the car.

“Walker’s not good,” I said to Harrigan and Jed. I saw Millie’s head snap round and her mouth fell open into a silent scream. I ignored her.

“I’m going to have to get him out through his door,” I said grimly. “You’ll have to cover me.”

Harrigan shook his head. “You won’t be able to do it on your own,” he said. He stared at me. His eyes seemed clear. “I’m coming with you.”

He gave the
Glock to Jed and we hunched down together by the trunk of car.

“Ready?”

Harrigan nodded.

I jumped to my feet and ran around the side of the car. I heard myself screaming, and
felt a sudden disruption of air around me that fanned my face like a hot dry wind as a bullet ricocheted off nearby wreckage. My heart was racing, fear knotting the strings of my nerves. I reached the passenger door and Harrigan was close behind me. I heard the loud
‘blam’
of a gunshot and realized that Jed had returned fire.

I snatched at the car door and heaved. It didn’t budge.
Harrigan shouldered me aside and hurled his weight against the door. It came open with a rending groan. I ducked in through the door and at that instant the sound of the fire fight seemed to fade into the background.

Walker had been thrown forward by the collision at the same instant the
windshield had exploded in on him. There was a wicked gash right across his forehead, and a wet livid slab of flesh hung down from his scalp across his eyes. Blood was spattered over his chest and in his lap. I backed out through the door, crouching down to make myself as small a target as possible for the hidden sniper, and tried to shut out the terrifying sounds of passing shots.

“Grab him,” I said to
Harrigan.

The big man reached in through the door and took hold of Walker’s arms. When he was half out of the car, I scooped up his leaden legs and between us we carried him back behind the shelter of the wreckage. Jed fired two more shots and then ducked down behind the car.

“The fucker is in the brick two-story place,” Jed hissed. He had his back against the car. He ran his eye over the stretched out body of Colin Walker and his expression became somber.

“He
don’t look too good.”

I shook my head. I ripped open Walker’s shirt and tore it into long strips. I pressed the loose flap of skin back against his forehead and bandaged it in place. His hair was matted thick with blood, and his face was pale, his lips turning a soft shade of blue.

Harrigan dropped to the grass beside Walker’s prone body. The big man’s hands were shaking. For that matter, so were mine.

He glan
ced over his shoulder, back along the empty street. I followed the direction of his gaze. The morning was hot, the land baking under a fierce summer sky. A heat haze rippled and shimmered off the blacktop. The road was empty – but the haunting sound of the undead we had driven through seemed to hang in the distant air.

“They’re coming after us,”
Harrigan said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “Can’t see ‘em, but I can hear ‘em.”

I could too. We all could – the noise ebbing and drifting like a pulse.

Jed got up onto his haunches and narrowed his eyes in quick calculation. He pointed.

The nature strip on this side of the street had been left behind and we were in a built up area with houses on both sides of the road. The
flat-bed truck had been parked out front of a single story brick home, and I glanced over my shoulder at it.

“We could get inside that house before they come,” he said.
“That only leaves the redneck with the AK to worry about.”

I thought about it. Walker was in bad shape. I didn’t think we could move him far. The undead were still out of sight, but not for much longer. If they crested the little undulating rise in the road and saw us, we were as good as dead.

I nodded. “Check it out,” I said.

Jed went at a running crouch, using the wrecked car to cover him from the sniper across the street. I watched him all the way to the front porch of the house, weaving as he went
, while the air around him snapped with the roar of gunfire. I turned back and leaned over Colin Walker.

“We’re going to move you soon,” I said. “We don’t have much time. I’m afraid it’s going to hurt, but there’s nothing I can do about it. If we don’t move soon, we’ll die right here.”

Walker said nothing. His chest heaved, labored and shallow, and the breath in his throat bubbled and gurgled. I cast another anxious glance down the length of the street, and then back to the front of the house where I had last seen Jed. The door was open, swinging ajar. I saw Jed’s head and shoulders appear in the opening. He was smiling. He came back across the lawn, running awkwardly, bent-over at the waist.

“It’s clear,” he said. He was panting and wincing against some sharp pain. He had one big hand wrapped across his chest like he was holding in a shirt full of broken ribs. “No bodies. No bad guys. No dead guys.”

I decided. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

But it wasn’t that simple.

Walker couldn’t be carried safely without anyone helping him standing upright and moving with his body slung between them. That meant exposing themselves to long dangerous seconds of fire. Even moving hunched in a bent-over crouch was risky. Sooner or later the gunman in the house opposite was going to get lucky.

“Grab the bag,” I snapped at
Harrigan.

I had stuffed a blanket inside the nylon bag before we had left the safe house. Now I unfolded it and spread it out on the patch of lawn sheltered from sight by the car wreck. “We’ll get him on the blanket and drag him across the grass,” I explained. It wasn’t the best idea in the world – but it would be faster than two men trying to carry him.

We sat Walker upright and slid the blanket beneath his back, but when I tried to lay him down again, he clutched fiercely at my shoulder – his grip so intense that it startled me. His eyes came wide open – clear as a mountain lake – and he stared at me with cold intent.

“Leave me,” he said. “Give me a gun. I’ll hold them off. You’ve got to get away from here. You’ve got to get Jessica to
Pentelle. Nothing else matters.” A froth of bloody bubbles appeared at the corner of his mouth and he gave a great weary sigh.

“
Jessica?
You mean Millie, your daughter…”

Walker shook his head, swallowed hard like he was trying to choke down jagged glass. “She’s Jessica Steinman,” he said. “She’s not my kid. She’s Jessica Steinman – the Vice President’s daughter.”

Nobody spoke.

Everyone was too stunned, too incredulous, trying to make sense of Walker’s shocking revelation so that the silence stretched out for long numbed seconds. Gradually, slowly, we all turned our heads to look at the terrifi
ed teenage girl, seeing her now in a different light entirely.

I blinked. I shook my head – and stared at the girl while pieces of the puzzle I had worried over since the helicopter crash tumbled silently into place.

I frowned. “Is it true?”

The girl nodded. “I’m Jessica Steinman,” she said. Her voice was shaky, choked, I suppose, with a myriad of emotions at that moment. “
Mr Walker is my bodyguard. He’s Secret Service.”