Undead at Heart (13 page)

She would have said
her mum and dad, but her dad had always been busy at the college, even at
weekends, so it had just been her and her mum. She’d seen much more of him when
they got to Boston. His position at Harvard had more prestige and, strangely
enough, that came with a lighter workload. But by then it had been American
society he had been introducing her to.

She missed the
familiarity of New England, but was still sure she had made the right decision
to come back to the old one. She couldn’t have stayed. The whole place was too
tied up with her and Rob. She’d met him at 18 and he’d taken over from her father
as her interface with the world. Everything she had seen and done as an adult
had been done with Rob, and when she had found out about him and Crystal, she
had known immediately that not only did she have to leave him and finally have
a life of her own, uncontrolled by him, but she had to leave her adopted home.
She needed a fresh start in a new place with new people, where she could
recreate herself on her own terms.

What kind of a name
was
Crystal
anyway?

She realised that she
was going over all this old ground in her head to stop her from thinking about
what was happening around her; to stop her thinking about Alyssa, and Stan, and
everything, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to think about it all, if she
did it would stop her moving forward. And if she didn’t move forward, she would
never find any way to resolve any of this.

That was the way she
had rationalised her move back to England. She needed to get away, and after
all those years of Rob showing her off as his woman from the ‘mother country’,
she knew where she ought to belong. Once her mind had been set, she had just
put her head down and made it happen. She’d found her job, found her house, and
a school for Alyssa, and she had moved them with nothing much more than the
force of her stubbornness.

And now she was left
wondering if it was the right idea. She was a fish out of water. Every turn she
took she found that although this country seemed to speak the same language, it
was a twisted, through-the-looking-glass version where everything meant
something else. She kept getting things wrong and the moment she opened her
mouth her voice gave her away as an intruder; an interloper. She had thought
she would be coming home, but instead she felt like she was living abroad. She
was an ex-pat in her own country.

She realised she was
no longer simply walking, but was striding down the road. Despite the long
summer evening, the high hedges and trees which bounded the road were making it
darker and darker and she was all but rushing into it.

She started to slow,
but she was still going too fast to stop when a figure came crashing out of one
of the hedges, leaves and twigs flying in front of it to rain against her face.

She just had time to
make out that it was a man before she collided with him in mid-recoil and the
two of them fell onto the road, entwined. Nicola kicked and screamed, trying to
separate herself from her attacker, pushing back on his face to keep his teeth
from her neck.

In turn the man was
pushing at Nicola, trying to keep her away from him. His hand forced under her
chin and pushed her head back.

“Get off me, you
fucking thing!” he shouted, and she realised she knew the voice. It was Dave.

She stopped fighting.
“Dave?”

He stopped, mid push,
and peered at her in the gloom.

“Nicola?”

She nodded, easily
pulling back from him now they had both stopped struggling. “Thank God,” she
panted, still recovering from the surge of adrenaline which his appearance had
caused,” I’ve been searching for you. What happened? Where did you-.”

She stopped because
Dave had ignored her question. Now freed from the tangle he had leapt to his
feet, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up with him.

“No time,” he panted.
“Later.
Later.
Now…
Run!” And
he set off down the road, dragging her nearly off her feet.

She stumbled for a few
paces until she got her feet under her, and then she was able to run with him.
He let go of his hand and they raced down the road. They were running so
quickly it was difficult to speak, but Nicola managed to pant, “What? What?”

Dave didn’t respond,
just kept his head down and carried on running. But Nicola got her response
when she heard the sound of the hedges tearing behind her and at her side.
Other people were breaking through, but all of them, men, women – some of whom
Nicola recognised from the group she had led through the woods – even children,
had loose flesh hanging from their throats and a range of other injuries. One
or two of the figures looked strangely misshapen, almost not human at all, but
she didn’t stop to examine them. She just ran and ran, Dave at her side,
desperately trying to outrun their pursuers.

“When she did, I ran,”
James continued.

Sam watched the
contortions his face was going through as he struggled on with his story. She
wanted to go and put her arms around him, but Debbie had taken that role and
she didn’t want to crowd him. Everyone else was silent as he spoke.

She couldn’t speak for
the rest of them, but part of her was having trouble believing his story. The
rest of her, the part that had seen planes bomb a farmer’s field, which had
seen two people flattened by half a jet fighter, that had seen giant metal
spiders destroy a pub that she was sitting in, knew he was telling the truth.

“I didn’t know what
she was going to be like when she got up, but I didn’t think it would be good.
I’d seen what dad had done to her. I’d seen the blood run out like water from a
tap. I’d seen the mess he’d made of her throat, and I’d seen her drop to the
floor like a bag of spuds. She wasn’t breathing after that, I was sure of it,
but that didn’t seem to stop her.”

He paused for breath,
panting, reliving the experience. Debbie rooted in her giant bag and came out
with a bottle of water which she passed to him. He drank and calmed a little,
then continued.

“She was fast. Between
the first flicker of movement and me being out the door can’t have been more
than a few seconds, but she was on her feet and after me all the same.

“I ran from the house,
presuming she was after me. I ran all the way across the yard, vaulted the
gate, and kept going. But then I realised that the gate had made a loud clang
when I had cleared it. The bolt gave way last year and now we just use a hank
of rope to keep it shut. It means it’s loose, but it does the job. If she was
after me, surely I would have heard it. I risked looking back and she wasn’t
there. No-one was. I was alone.

Finally, someone
spoke. Sam was vaguely surprised that it was Tony. “Where was she?”

“Still
in the house.
I
went back, you see. It took me a while and I went really slowly, but I needed
to know. When I got back there I could hear her in there, moving around in the
dark. I called out, and she didn’t say anything, but when I stepped closer to
the doorway, she leapt out, but only as far as the shade would allow. When she
hit the sunlight she jumped back. That’s why I thought we would be safe out
here. Whatever they are – whatever she’s become – they don’t like sunlight, I
don’t think.”

His story told, he
stopped talking and his head dropped down between his shoulders like a robot
with flat batteries.

The others looked
around, eyes meeting, expressions grim. One or two glanced up to the sinking
sun, and Sam knew what they were thinking, because she was thinking the same.
If sunlight was protecting them, then they needed to get somewhere safe before
it went dark.

“Okay, I get all
that.” It was Tony again. “What I don’t understand is why, if they like the
dark so much, you were hiding in the cellar under the barn. Surely that’s the
darkest place around.”

James nodded, his head
rising slowly with each nod, as though he was re-inflating himself with a pump.
“I heard someone coming. After I’d worked out that I was safe in the sun, I
didn’t really know what to do. I was just wandering around the farm, trying to
think of a plan, when I heard noises coming from the road. It sounded like
engines, but not cars. I don’t really know what they were, but I didn’t want to
wait and find out. The cellar is pretty well hidden. If you don’t know it’s
there, it’s hard to find. There aren’t any other entrances, no windows to break
in or doors to force, and it had a large bolt on the inside. Dad said it was
used by smugglers or something, but I think he was making that up. He always
says that –.” He faltered as he remembered again that his father was dead.

“Anyway, it seemed the
best place to hide, so I hid.”

Their pursuers were
fast, but Nicola and Dave were faster. Her legs soon felt like lead and her
lungs were burning, but there was no way she was slowing down. After a hundred
yards or so, new zombies had stopped bursting from the hedge, so they no longer
had to run the gauntlet of their emergence, merely out-distance them.

They ran side by side,
Nicola occasionally taking the lead, but Dave managing to keep up despite
carrying more weight than she was.

Slowly, foot by foot,
they started to outrun the creatures following them. She scanned left and
right, checking for any new ones emerging from the deeper shadows at the sides
of the now darkened road, but none came.

The road twisted and
snaked, and signs of pursuit disappeared, but neither of them slowed down.
Nicola wanted to ask so many questions. She wanted to know what had happened to
Dave and the group. She wanted to know how so many of them had become – well,
whatever they had become – so quickly. Most importantly, she wanted to know
what had happened to Alyssa.

Even as they had
started their panicked race, she had scanned all the scarred and mangled faces she
could see; terrified that one of them would be a twisted, staring parody of her
daughter’s. None of them had been, but until she knew from Dave what had
happened to them, she didn’t want to hope that this was a good sign.

They rounded another
bend, still racing, and a patch of late summer sun
lay
across the road. It was the gateway of another farm. The trees and hedges
stopped, and the large open farmyard allowed the last rays of the setting sun
to reach them. The cracked tarmac
glowed
red as though
a furnace door had been opened, but Dave didn’t pause. He reached out and
dragged Nicola through the shining portal of the gate, facing straight into the
red searchlight sun.

He slowed. “Sun… Sun…”
he panted, his breath catching in his throat. “Sun hurts them. We’re… safe…
here.”

“Yes,
but… only for… a moment.
Just…a … rest.”

“Yes. Yes.
A moment.”
Dave stood in the full glow of the sun, his skin
bloodily lit, and tried to gain control of his breathing. Nicola found the pain
in her lungs was already starting to clear, and she raised her head to look
around her.

A group of dark
silhouettes was advancing on them out of the sun. With all that had happened
today, she could be forgiven for flashing back to Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, but when she wiped her hand across her eyes, they refused to disappear.
She reached for Dave’s arm, getting ready to repeat his favour and dragging him
into another run. Obviously Dave’s fact about the sun was wrong. But before she
could move, one of them spoke.

“Nicky? Is that you?
My God, what happened?”

She peered into the
light, trying to make out features. “Tony?” she asked, recognising the voice.

The man-shaped shadow
at the front of the group moved round so he was now half-lit, and she saw that
it was indeed the man she had left in the forest only a few hours ago. A few
hours
which felt like a lifetime.
In the red light, he
seemed to have a patch of black covering the side of his face. She guessed,
after a moment, that it might be blood.

“Yes. It’s me.” He
stepped forward and she could see him more clearly.
He looked
like a different person; older and calmer.
Then she realised what was
different. It wasn’t the head wound or the dirt on his clothes. He wasn’t
staring at his cellphone. She almost laughed at the banality of the thought.
“What happened?” he asked again.

“Do you know?” she
asked, unable to find the words to describe the images in her head. “Have you
seen?”

“Zombies?
Yeah. Well, we’ve heard.” He
pointed to one of the others who still stood in the scarlet glare. She didn’t
see which one. “There’s one in the farmhouse, apparently. Why? Did you see
one?”

She snorted. The edge
of condescension she remembered from the afternoon was still there in his
voice, but she didn’t care anymore. “Seen one? I beat one to a pulp with a
frying pan, and there are another – what, thirty?” she asked Dave, who nodded.
“Thirty, following us.
They were chasing us down the lane.
We just stopped here for a moment’s rest.”