Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse (16 page)

There was blood across the
back seats. Father Bob scrambled into the vehicle. A moment later Cutter saw the rear window slide down and the older man’s face appeared, red and gasping. He gave Cutter a ‘thumbs-up’ sign.

Cutter could hear the Durango’s engine idling steadily over the noise of the burning building. There were still dark shapes milling around the entrance,
but the frenzy in them had dulled. They began to wander away from the apartment block in aimless shuffles. Cutter knew that every second he hesitated increased the danger of being discovered. He pushed himself to his feet and sprinted for the Durango.

It was twenty feet to the car, and another few seconds to get around the hood and into the passenger seat. He went in a hunched
jinking run, his eyes fixed on Samantha’s face framed behind the windshield.

He heard the engine
revving as he got closer. His eyes swept the shaded sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Over his shoulder he heard a sudden loud explosive crash as though the apartment block was collapsing.

He didn’t look back. He didn’t dare. He
noticed Father Bob’s face in the back seat. The man’s eyes were suddenly wide and fearful. Cutter saw him thrust the revolver out through the window aiming past his shoulder. The man was shouting at him but Cutter couldn’t hear. The only sounds were the slap of his boots on the tarmac and the sawing of his breath, deafeningly loud in his ears.

He reached the hood of the Durango. Felt the warmth of the engine under the bonnet. Spun himself around the grille and his fingers groped desperately for the door handle.

Then Father Bob fired.

The
blast of the shot was hugely loud – a sound that ripped through the silence on the street. Cutter glanced up. He saw one of the undead running towards the Durango. He flung the car door open and threw himself inside.

“Go!” he shouted a
t Samantha. The ghoul was just a few yards away. He heard the pastor fire again and the roar was deafening. The zombie went down in a spinning heap. It collapsed against the trunk of a nearby car and fell slowly to the ground.

“Go now!” Cutter screamed.

Samantha tightened her grip on the steering wheel and slammed her foot on the gas pedal. The car leaped forward and she had to wrench the wheel down hard to swing the SUV up onto the sidewalk. Other undead had been drawn from the burning building by the gunfire. A dozen – maybe more – suddenly came snarling at a run from within the fiery building. They had once been men and women and children. Now they were the undead – possessed of nothing but mindless seething rage. Samantha mowed them down, her jaw set in a determined line, her teeth gritted as body after body crashed against the hood and fenders and went reeling away. One of the ghouls leaped onto the car and smashed its head into the windshield. Samantha screamed. The zombie raised its head like a cobra and lunged again. The windshield starred into a sheet of tiny opaque diamonds.

Samantha spun the wheel hard. There was a bench seat on the sidewalk. The Durango went crashing into
it, staving in the driver’s side fender with such a shuddering impact that the undead shape was thrown from the vehicle. Samantha slammed the Durango into reverse and the tires burned blue smoke and rubber. She spun the wheel again, and crashed back onto the street. The corner rushed towards them, just a few seconds more. There was another jarring shudder that seemed to shake the whole car.

“Cover your eyes,” Cutter shouted, and then punched his fist through the windshield. Chips of glass flew back into Samantha’s face and hair. Cutter punched again until the hole he had made with his fist was enough for Samantha to see through.

“Now floor it!”

The intersection was right on top of them and Samantha dragged the wheel over, skidding into the turn
, and clipping one of the traffic light poles as the off-side wheels went up onto the sidewalk then crashed down onto solid road again.

They were on a short narrow side street, and Cutter could see the next turn in the road racing towards them. He
wrenched himself around in his seat and stared over his shoulder. A swarm of ghouls were racing after the vehicle, running and snarling.

“If you slow down for this corner they’ll catch us and we’re all dead,” he told Samantha.

* * *

The Durango took the sharp turn at full speed, swinging wide onto the opposite side of the road as the tires squealed in a protest
of burning rubber. The vehicle handled like a boat; rolling and swaying as Samantha corrected quickly. A garbage truck filled the windscreen. It had been abandoned. The driver’s side door was open. Samantha stabbed her foot at the brake to bleed off speed and flung the wheel hard over. The Durango clipped the truck’s open door and then veered onto the right side of the road.

“Slow down,” Cutter said with the sort of calmness in his voice that was entirely forced. “We’re away from them. They’ve stopped chasing.” He reached across and touched one of Samantha’s white-knuckled
hands. “Ease off the gas,” he continued to encourage her. “The last thing we want now is to have a collision.”

The
road was four lanes wide – the major artery that led out of the city. Shops lined both sides of the street, but it was the old part of town, and many of them had been abandoned in recent years and attacked by graffiti vandals. Cars were parked up along the curb, and more were strewn across the lanes of traffic – abandoned by their drivers when the terror had struck and people had fled for their lives.

Samantha
slowed until the car was cruising. The street was like an obstacle course, and she veered across all four lanes as trucks, buses and family sedans made their progress into a careful slalom. They were surrounded by death and destruction. A bus was slewed across two lanes. It had crashed into a traffic light. The steel pole had snapped at the point of impact and lay across the road. The bus’s windows were streaked with blood and the emergency exit window at the rear of the vehicle lay shattered on the nearby sidewalk. There were hundreds of cars, all of them deserted. Many of them damaged, or sprayed with gore. Samantha drove cautiously, with her eyes fixed on the road ahead, as though she couldn’t bear to comprehend the devastation that surrounded her.

They were silent and somber as the
y drove towards the edge of the city.

The arterial road branched off in a major intersection, with turns to the north and
south, but as they drew closer they realized the corner was littered with more deserted cars. Some of them had been burned out. Several of the vehicles had collided and one had caught ablaze and still smoldered.

There were bodies too.

Not many – but enough.

They lay on
the street and on the sidewalk in desperate attitudes of panic and despair. Some lay dead with their bodies flung against walls, or hanging limp and lifeless from the open doors of their vehicles. Others had been crushed. Cutter saw the shapes of two young children, and beside them was the silhouette of a crashed Mazda. The vehicle had mounted the sidewalk and buried itself into the front of a pizza shop – leaving the mangled tiny bodies of the children snagged under its rear tires.

The morning was still – the silence like a heavy weight that bore down on them – as they drove past one horror and then discovered another
, until the tragedy and the despair crushed their spirit and left them grim-faced and desolate.

In the back seat, Cutter heard father Bob muttering prayers for the dead, whilst beside him Samantha wept silent tears. Cutter clenched his jaw and stared ahead through the shattered windshield, clamping down on
his despair – because it was the only way he could deal with the horror and still go on.

They reached the intersection and Samantha slowed the SUV to a crawl. “We
want to go north,” Cutter said. The intersection was jammed solid. Samantha stopped the car.

“How?” she asked. She leaned forward and stared through the shattered glass. There was a bus stopped at an angle across the intersection and behind it a cab that had flipped and rolled onto its side wedged against the
crushed shape of an old pick up. Behind the carnage were more vehicles in every lane and others that had been abandoned on the median strip as drivers had sought to find a desperate way through the traffic before forsaking their cars altogether.

“The sidewalk,” Cutter pointed.

There was an electrical store on the corner. It was a two-story brick building. The glass shop front windows had been smashed and Cutter could see a slumped body. The store had been looted. Out front was a traffic sign, showing distances to the surrounding suburbs. Cutter nodded. “Run it down.”

Samantha glanced at him and trapped her lip between her teeth.

“Are you serious?”

Cutter nodded. “It’s the only way.”

“You want me to mount the sidewalk and crash through the sign?”

“Yes.” Cutter said. “Because if we can’t get through this intersection we can’t reach Eden Gardens.”

Still Samantha hesitated. “There might be another way… Another turnoff that would be easier.”

“There is no easy way,” Cutter insisted. “This is the
only
way.”

Samantha backed the SUV up and revved the engine. The noise in the silence was unusually loud. Rats scurried away from the bodies they were devouring and dark shaped crows took to sudden
raucous flight.

Samantha slipped the car into gear and crushed the
gas pedal under her foot.

The Durango leaped forward, gathering speed quickly. It mounted the curb with a sudden jarring thump that flung them forward in their seats. Samantha’s arms on the wheel were
locked. The car bucked wildly, bouncing high and hard on its springs, then settled back onto all four wheels. A split second later the traffic sign filled her vision and she turned her head away instinctively and closed her eyes.

“Brace yourself!” Cutter shouted.

The Durango slammed into the sign and the metal post buckled before the vehicle’s momentum. The car went up and over, and the rending crashing sound was a hugely loud explosion in their ears. The vehicle jolted and tilted, then righted itself. A second later the car crashed back down off the sidewalk and swerved onto the road – heading north – with the choked intersection suddenly behind them.

Samantha let out a breath she had been holding. Cutter heard Father Bob sigh his relief. Cutter tu
rned round in his seat and stared through the rear window of the SUV. Dark wandering shapes were emerging onto the road, spilling from the buildings around the intersection but disappearing into the distance quickly. Cutter allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s relief. The undead were slow-moving, and the car was hurtling north – approaching leafy tree-lined inner-city suburbs.

They were safely through the intersection.

They were safely out of the city.

They were on their way to Eden Gardens.

And then the car broke down.

* * *

There was no warning. The car just stopped in the middle of a wreckage-strewn road.

Samantha stared down at the dashboard in horror.

Cutter swore. “Are we out of fuel?”

Samantha shook her head. “We’ve still got a quarter tank,” she turned to him and her eyes were huge and dark, filled with fear. She thumped the steering wheel,
then tried to start the car again. The engine whirred and died. She stomped her foot on the gas pedal and tried again.

The car sat dead on the road.

Cutter snatched a glance through the rear window. The distant shapes of shuffling undead were moving towards them, suddenly seeming to be filled with malicious awareness. He saw more dark shapes come from buildings, and he swore again.

“Get out!” he snapped. “We’ve got to find another car – and we’ve got to do it in a hurry.”

They tumbled from the Durango. Cutter was seething. There was no time. The dark wall of shuffling undead was drawing closer, their figures seeming to ripple in the morning heat haze that rose off the blacktop. He looked around in frantic desperation.

There were other aband
oned cars scattered on the road. He slapped Samantha on the back.

“
We can outrun them – but not for ever. Not with this bag. They’ll hunt us down eventually. So go and find something that has fuel,” he urged her, and she turned and ran further along the street towards a couple of compact Japanese sedans.

Father Bob
dragged the heavy canvas bag from the Durango and dropped it onto the road. He went down on one knee beside the trunk of the SUV and glanced over his shoulder at Cutter.

“I’ll hold them off,” the pastor said.
The older man looked ill, and between words his face contorted into a grimace of sudden silent pain.

Cutter nodded. He handed his
Glock to the big man and then turned and stared.