Great Bitten: Outbreak (10 page)

Dan spared a glance for the shuffling incomers and hustled to his car. Carla and Anna looked on in muted and calm interest, though I could see the mother’s protective arms had tightened that little bit more around her son. Were we all so immune to the bloodshed already that the sight of three walking corpses was becoming unspectacular?

Dan came back and grinned as he showed off a gigantic wrench he had salvaged from his car. I gave him a low whistle of appreciation and Rick gave him a slap on the back.

“Ever taken one of these out Dan?”             

“Just the one, but it wasn’t exactly mobile. You?”

“Three for me. Rick’s the virgin, so he gets to go first.”             

“Hey fuck you Warren, I’ve got six of
‘em so far.”

“Hitting ‘em with the car doesn’t count. Do I have to show you how to do everything?”

Same as ever. Bold as brass on the front, shaking like a shitting dog on the inside. I moved to the right, deciding I’d pick off one on the side. I gestured for Dan to do the same as he had actual experience of this and I genuinely didn’t want to see Rick hurt. Quick and enthusiastic to keep his family sage, Dan followed my lead. I hesitated to get a good look this time, at what this person might have been. All my kills so far had been frenetic and charged with bloodlust. This was the first zombie I had seen up front and with time to take the situation in; at least in person. YouTube doesn’t really count.

This time, it was a woman. She might have been the same age as
Carla, though it was difficult to tell now. It was hard to look at her for long without bile and an overwhelming sense of revulsion involuntarily rising in my throat. One arm may as well have been stripped clean of flesh. The shape of the bone was barely held together with thin strings of meaty sinew. The fist was mainly intact, though was covered in blood. It hung limply; there weren’t enough tendons left for the limb to function. The feasting had stopped just beneath the shoulder, but had carried on across to her right breast, generous red gouges now all that remained. Blood was striped across her naked torso; her pelvis and legs were thankfully still clothed. I don’t know why, but the sight of the woman naked and so prone was somehow worse than the bloodied and tortured torso I had stumbled across earlier that night. If she had been completely naked, then I would probably be attacking from the right flank and leaving this particular dirty task down to someone else.

Dan caught my eye and we synchronised our attacks. The zombies were so much slower than us. Perhaps it was rigor mortis. Perhaps it was the trauma the bodies had already suffered in death before being reanimated. Each agonising step was a slow fight, as if there was an internal dialogue where even in the afterlife the people they had once been were trying to fight against the monsters they were destined to become.

Dan’s lucky victim was an androgynous youth. I say androgynous; I mean flat-chested, and with very little face left to give me any sure fire way of identifying gender. There was an older man in the middle and I began to wonder if they had perhaps been a family, all caught unawares at the same time and victim to the same blunt teeth and tearing fingers.

They were all victims now. Though perhaps, if there were some inner voice trapped in their begging for release, we were the ones to give it to them. Even if there were a cure, and I had no doubt that humanitarian debates would be raging about whether or not it was right to be dealing the killing blow, I’m not sure I would want to be revived only to find out that I had no arm left, and the majority of my family had been eaten alive. So whilst I had to avert my eyes from her one remaining naked breast and could not meet her own salivating and voracious gaze, it was with a guilt free heart and a calm mind that this time I brought the claw of the hammer around in one clean and heavy sweep, burying it deep in to her temple. She crumpled. Dan’s went at the same time too, and Rick followed suit mere seconds after. None of the zombies even managed to react to us, and I began to wonder how much of a threat they were after all. Again though, the memory of the driveway and the videos of the nightclub massacre shook me from my complacent haze. This wasn’t going to be so simple and easy all the time. We had already taken a lot of risk by standing out in the open discussing our options here. The marina would have been a prize destination for many people, and it seemed only our delay in making our decisions had actually saved us from any confrontations or conflict.

The women had moved back a few paces, but they didn’t same fazed. They even seemed slightly relieved that it had all been dealt with so calmly. I nodded my thanks to the other guys and suggested that we head for the car. I didn’t need to suggest it twice.

As the welcome doors of the VW Touran closed around us I thought of asking how recently the tyres had been changed. I’d been sarcastic enough for one evening, so I left it. I put my head back and closed my eyes. I guess I hadn’t known how tired I was until I stopped moving. The soft vanilla of the car scent and the warmth still gently radiating from the seats had me yawning. The backs of my eyes pulsed and I thought “what harm could a few minutes’ do?”

I closed my eyes. Within moments, I was asleep.

+++

“
quis custodiet ipsos custodes” - Juvenal

I know
I was asleep. I know I must have been, because I wouldn’t have been jolted upright by the car, then blasted awake by the noise of the horn. I think I would have remembered when the screaming, the shouting and the arguing started. I wouldn’t have had to fight through the murky fog of my frontal cortex to figure out what the hell was going on. It seemed to be that Carla was beating at the back of Dan’s headrest and Anna was waving her arms in blind panic. Rick looked like he’d just been jerked awake too, and based on Carla’s ‘I thought you lived around here, how the hell have you gone the wrong way’ I’m guessing she hadn’t been paying much attention to proceedings either, for whatever reason.

Anna was blubbering. “I’m sorry, I just… I just started going home! What do I do
now?”

“Turn the car around Anna, just turn it around!”

“I can’t, I can’t! You haven’t looked behind us! You can’t see in the mirrors!”

Whatever few minutes of garbled sleep I’d managed hadn’t been enough. Before, my eyes had just been hot and blistered. Now there was a full orchestra in the throes of the Flight of the Valkyrie playing on my forehead. I s
narled. I was sat in the middle seat between Rick and Carla, so I shoved my head through the middle of the two front seats and demanded to know what had happened. Anna shrieked at me. The shrill squeal felt like a canyon being split in to the side of my skull. I ground my teeth. My knuckles went white around her headrest as I resisted every angry and morally wrong impulse coursing through my body. I turned to Dan. His face looked as white as my clenched fist. “Answers?”

“Anna went a wrong turn. And fell asleep. It’s okay Anna we’re just
talking about it… she hit something. Okay Anna, I’m… and then hit the horn. Anna, I’m telling him. Anna, just shut up.
Shut up will you
?” Dan realised quiet coaxing wasn’t working and finally caved in, shouting at his wife as his son began to squirm and cry in his lap. “I’m sorry Tommy, go back to sleep. Anna, I’m sorry, but crying and shouting isn’t going to help. What’s wrong?”

“Look out the back windows, for Christ’s sake!”

Carla turned around. And didn’t say a word. Rick turned around.

“Fuuuuuck.”

I turned around. My heart dropped out the bottom of my feet.

“How long did you lean on the horn for?”

“Not long, it wasn’t long, but there were so many other cars. I must have… I must have just…”

“How did you fall asleep at the wheel with all of this going on!”

“The rest of you got to sleep just fine! I’m only human, I couldn’t help it!”

“She’s right Warr
en, if no one else was watching her then who can we blame?”

“We can blame her, she could have shouted any one of us awake! She could have wound down a window, turned on the air con. Anything expect
crash
,
lean
on the car horn and alert
every
fucking zombie in Bennington to the fact that we’re on the road, alive and well and waiting to be eaten!”

I was panting and Tommy was now in full flow, tears and screams both muffled against his distraught father’s chest.
Carla hauled me back and mouthed ‘not helping’. I pushed her hand away. “I don’t care how it sounds Carla. We’ve got in to a car with two strangers and now look!”

I was the one screaming now, but I suppose we all had reason to. Behind the car, in the static floodlights of sporadically abandoned cars and streetlamps, there were zombies following us. They were coming out of houses and across from a park. Anna had turned the wrong way and we were going through a residential area. And now the road behind us was virtually cut off with a wall of the walking undead. I realised then that she was still going forward; of course she was, she wasn’t exactly going to stop the car. But where were we heading?

“Where does this road go?”

“Town. We’re heading towards the town centre.”

“No fucking way. Turn around.”

“In to that lot? No way – we’ll be overwhelmed!”

“They’re slow – they’re not exactly going to be ploughing in to the windshield.”

I looked arou
nd as if to reinforce my point, and nearly threw myself in to the front seats as a body slammed itself against the back of the car. The VW jolted forward and I shouted at Anna to speed up. “But we’re still heading to town!”

“Can’t you go around? There must be a way around!”

“There are plenty of ways around Anna, just calm down. Keep the driving steady and keep your eyes on the road. We’ll cut through and… geez!”

The car rocked to the side as another body threw itself against us, this time to the right. The back shook again as the same zombie had another go at throwing itself through our rear window.
One of the smaller windows shattered. “How fast are we going?”

“Only about 20.”

“Then go quicker!” I yelped as I saw another sprinter heading straight for us. They might not be able to call each other, but there was apparently enough of a commotion to keep drawing every dead thing in the night to our spot. The shambling dead were now a long way back but the Bolters seemed to be heading at us from all angles now. Some were slower than others and it was clear that, despite their comparable speed, they would never be able to catch us. But I didn’t know when they might stop, or if they’d just keep on running in the same direction they last possibly saw lunch.

“I can’t keep going. The
traffic lights are red and there’s cars everywhere. What if some of these are real people?”

“Real people don’t run in to cars, it usually happens the other way round! Just put your foot down, we need to get clear of this section of road!”

Anna did as she was told and I could feel a small acceleration in the car as we began putting some safe distance between us and the following horde. Well I say horde. Thankfully they hadn’t got close enough to us to make a difference. Then the car started weaving and still looking out the now-cracked back window I made sure there wasn’t anything else heading for us. But as my body began to sway from side to side I began to see more and more cars left at the side of the road. The majority of them were heading out of town. There were one or two minor accidents, but the most worrying thing was what I couldn’t see: people. Where was everyone?

“
Carla, don’t you think it’s pretty weird? I mean, we haven’t seen anyone yet. Pretty much at all. Where do you think everyone’s gone?”

“
You mean the ones that weren’t just trying to throw themselves through the car window? Everyone sensible is still at home big brother. That’s where we should have stayed.”

“With that front door and commotion? I don’t think so!”

“We could have barricaded upstairs and kept quiet. Hell we could have just gone in to the loft. I don’t think these things can work ladders. Why are we still heading towards town?”

“We’re not,” Dan called over his shoulder. “We’re going to cut thr
ough past the train station and then we’re going to…”

“No.
” I cut him off abruptly. “Not the train station. Avoid that route.”

“Why?”

“W… well we’ve already been told that hundreds of zombies got off just one train. I don’t even want to think of what might be happening around there. Where are we now? Can’t we just cut through some back streets and get back up to the main road?”

“How did we manage to go this far the wrong way? Aren’t we already almost at the station?”

“It was just two roundabouts. It’s not a big place. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking, I just.…”

“Shh it’s okay Anna.
” I ran my hands through my hair, trying to maintain my composure whilst trying to resist the impulse to throw her out of the driving seat and take the wheel myself. “We can’t turn back the route now, we just need to work around the problem we’ve got. Now if we already know the station is a dead zone, we need to figure out another way. There’s a turning coming up on the left that goes over the tracks. We just need to go up that way and we’ll be on a virtually straight road back to the main road.”

“Oh yes, I know. I know where we are
now. I’m so sorry Warren it’s just I’ve never liked driving and this is just so strange and so stressful, and I feel so tired.”

“We’re all tired. We just need to get somewhere safe and then we can all rest. Just take the turn and then we’ll be back on the right route.”

Anna indicated as she started approaching the turn. I chuckled hysterically that a woman who had driven so badly so far when the world itself was still collapsing around us could still keep the mechanical basics of road use in place. In her manic state she understood why I started, and couldn’t keep back her own ironic mirth. For about 5 seconds, we all had a little chuckle to ourselves. Then we took the turning we needed. We saw the barriers across the train line were down. We saw the train carriage straddling the tracks. We saw the carriage full of dead bodies, beating at the windows.

She stomped on the brakes and we all jerked forward and back hard in to our seats. We were all mesmerised by the sight in front of us. What had been outlines before were now
embossed in the beacon of our headlights, and that really bought us some attention from the undead denizens of the train. We could see fevered hands pumping against windows that weren’t designed to hold the strain and at one end of the carriage it didn’t take long for the window to begin coming out of the old and degrading seals. They flopped over each other in a desperate bid to escape the claustrophobia of their cylindrical coffin. One or two were caught underneath a torrent of bodies and I watched in horror as the sheer weight and pressure literally pushed one figure in half, the upper part of the bloodied torso sliding gruesomely down the side of the train.

“Start reversing Anna.”

“But that leads to town!” she squealed.

“We haven’t got too many options l
eft. Just get us away from the fucking corpses!”

Dan echoed what we were all thinking, but none of us wanted to head towards the seafront. The places we had been eyeing up as refuges were turning out to be dead ends or routes to doom; there was no telling what the town centre itself would hold for us.

Right at that point though, we didn’t exactly have a range of choices. Anna reversed and shrieked as she threw the car around. Their boy must have gone catatonic at this point; he was just sat clutching his father’s shirt now, rocking slowly and staring out at nowhere. As the car spun; a handbrake turn that would have sat proudly on the cutting room floor of any Top Gear show, we hit another zombie side-on. There were more runners now emerging from the side streets. I craned my head around, starting to appreciate just how built up the area we were in was.

“Is town the only way?”

“We could go back the way we came?”

“Is it safer?”

“Based on what we’ve just seen on the way here, we’d have to go to the seafront and through residential a lot of the way. Big fifty-fifty chance if we still want to head for the Downs. They’re only a mile or so from where we are, we’re just stuck in the centre of Shitsville and our compass isn’t quite up to scratch at the moment.”

“Just keep heading onwards then Anna. As long as we’ve got those
eerie fuckers well behind us I don’t think I care where we’re heading at this point.”

“I don’t think you’ll be saying that if we end up
sandwiched between a full deck of them.” broke in Dan. “Take the main road down to the seafront then. It’s risky, but hopefully most of the activity will be in the centre of the town. There’s no real safe route between here and the road back north; we’re right adjacent to the train track so there’s no telling how many zombies have spilt out along this road.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea Dan? I mean as long as we’re not getting their attention, we should just be able to sneak past them on this road the same as any other, right?”

“I really don’t know Carla. I don’t want to be leading this outfit. I thought your brother or your man was in charge, but if you need me to lead I will.”

“I don’t know the area well enough,” I broke in. “I can’t lead blind, that’s just suicide. I’ll welcome anyone taking the
reins at the moment as long as we get out of this town alive.”

The car was trickling along at a pace to outstrip the
ambling dead, but not quickly enough for us to run out of road before we could make any decent decisions. There were a few intersections, and we all tried to see what we could. It was more of the same everywhere; dark houses and abandoned cars. There were however more and more of the slow zombies crawling out on to the street. They were still freaking me out, but they weren’t even vaguely as threatening as the sprinters that had been pelting at the car before. If we came across a horde of those in the road, I’m pretty sure we’d be overrun and devoured. I still didn’t know what made one zombie quick and another slow. I was hoping to get somewhere to spend some more time researching, but at the moment getting quite so much alone time seemed like some impossible wish.