Undead at Heart (14 page)

A male voice sounded
from the group, “Thirty? Shit?”

A larger figure stepped
forward to where Nicola could see him without squinting. “How far behind you
were they?”

“Not far,” said Dave.
“They won’t follow us in here while it’s still light. But, listen, when it gets
dark they-“

The other man cut him off.
“We know. They don’t like the light but they love the dark.”

“What are we going to
do?” asked Nicola.

“We were just
discussing this and we think we have a solution. It’s not the best, but we hope
it will do.” The man turned and led them towards a barn. The rest of the group
followed and they entered into the almost complete blackness of the building. A
young voice said, “Hold on.” There was a rattling noise followed by the scratch
and fizz of a match being lit. A teenager was standing by a bench at the side
of the barn, holding a large lantern. He applied the flame to the wick and the
room grew measurably brighter. “This way,” said the boy, and led the way round
the side of the tractor and the red side wall of a Combine Harvester.

Reaching the rear, he gestured
under the body of the monstrous contraption. “There,” was all he said.

Nicola watched as the
large man who had spoken to her last in the yard crawled under and opened a
trap door in the floor. He took the lantern from the boy and held it down into
the hole. For a moment, they were plunged back into darkness, and Nicola felt
her skin crawl. She was sure, for that moment, that there was something in the
dark with them. Then the man pulled the lantern back out and the feeling went
away, but she thought she heard noise in the distance. Could it be the sound of
feet on the road?
Maybe in the farmyard?

“It’s okay,” said the
man. “There’s room for all of us if we squeeze in. There’s no food or water,
but we’ll be okay overnight.”

He stopped talking and
cocked his head. Tony started to ask something, but the man held his hand up to
shush him. Nicola realised that the footsteps weren’t just in her imagination.
He could now hear them too.

She stepped back and
peered around the side of the harvester. There was still the glow of sunlight
in the yard, but it was even darker now. If they were somehow allergic to
sunlight, they wouldn’t have to worry about it for much longer. She didn’t wait
to be asked, but rushed through the darkness to the door. Dave was at her side.
Working in silent accord, they pulled the barn door shut, and slotted a large
beam she had seen when the boy had lit the lamp into two hooks on the backs of
the doors. She rooted around on the bench from which he had taken the lantern,
and found some lengths of rope. She passed
them,
working by touch, to Dave, and the two of them lashed the beam to the hooks. It
wasn’t totally secure, but hopefully it would do.

She had just finished
when she felt a groping hand reach hers in the darkness. She drew breath to
scream, but Dave shushed her. “It’s okay. It’s me,” he whispered then pulling
on her hand led her back round the side of the barn. The group of people had
climbed down into the cellar, and soft light spilled out of the hole into the
darkness of the barn.

Dave helped her down
into the trapdoor, hands reaching to help her down, and then he followed after
her. He pulled the hatch shut and the boy was at his side, helping him bar it.

The cellar was about
twenty feet to a side, so was large enough for them all, if not exactly
palatial.

She moved down and
found a wall to sink down next to, finally aware of her legs shaking from the
run, and her body aching generally. She wondered where Alyssa was as the night
settled in, and hoped with all her body and spirit that the girl was okay. She
was still full of questions, but like the others, she knew that this was not a
time to speak.

She looked around at
the group she had joined and was surprised to see a woman carrying a baby. She hadn’t
noticed her before. Nor had she seen the older couple, or seen that the young
blonde who had attached herself to Tony earlier was still with him.

They all sat round the
edges of the underground room, their backs to the earthen walls, the lantern in
the centre of the room, lighting all of their faces. They looked like she felt
– shaken and drained. But there was a stoic quality which helped her keep calm,
for now. But she knew it was going to be a long night.

No-one spoke, no-one
moved, except for the mother rocking her baby. Every
ear
was cocked, listening for sound from above. They had done what they could. The
headlong race of the afternoon had led them here, and now they finally had to
stop and see what happened next.

In the solitary light
from the old paraffin lamp, they waited.

Sam woke with pain in
her back and neck from sleeping on the earthen floor. The room was in darkness,
as it had been before she fell asleep, the paraffin having run out after only
an hour’s light.

They had sat around
the room, whispering occasionally to remind themselves they were not alone in
the solid darkness. Mostly, though, they had listened. They knew when night had
fallen because they heard banging and groaning coming from outside. It wasn’t
any attempt to get in. If those creatures knew there was anyone inside the
barn, they didn’t have the wit or co-ordination to get in. After a while the
banging stopped and the screaming started.

It was loud and
terrified and when it started Sam felt everyone in the room become still and
tense. It took her a moment to work out, but then she realised it was the sheep
who had been in the field next to the barn. The – god, she hated even to think
the word – the
zombies
were slaughtering them. She wondered if they
would become zombie sheep, but she didn’t dare air the thought. She didn’t know
whether she’d laugh or scream.

All too quickly the
noise stopped. After that there was nothing but silence.

They had waited, all
of them trying to be as alert as they could, but the silence simply stretched
into the night. Without a way of telling the time, the seconds and minutes
stretched ever longer. Eventually they felt they could talk.

At Nicola’s
insistence, Tony told her about what had happened since they last saw her. Sam
noticed that his story seemed more accurate than when he told it in the pub. If
anyone else noticed, they didn’t say anything.

When he finished,
Nicola started to tell her tale. She spoke calmly, her voice almost
inflectionless, even as she spoke about her daughter’s disappearance. She had
told of Dave and the others disappearing from the yard, and the way in which he
had returned, chased by the transformed group of which she had been the leader.
Sam wondered how she felt about having lost so many people who had looked to
her for guidance, but again she said nothing.

She finished her story
with the moment of reunion with Tony and Sam, and fell silent. Sam was
surprised she hadn’t asked Dave to tell his story. Surely she must want to know
what had happened to her daughter. She was about to say this, and then realised
that Dave might not have good news. In fact, he might not already have told her
because he didn’t want to tell her that her daughter was dead.

The room filled up
with unasked questions and unspoken thoughts, until finally Dave started
talking.

“It happened almost as
soon as Nicola ran inside. We heard a scream from her, and then there was a
shadow over the sun. It was one of those huge metal spider things that you were
talking about, Tony. I guess it must have been while you were in the pub
telling your tale, or you’d have seen it. Hell, maybe it was even the same one
that crashed in on you. I don’t know
,
I didn’t stay to
watch. It was moving straight towards us. I scooped Alyssa up into my arms – that
was when she called to you, Nick – and then I was running. It only took me a
moment to realise that the others were following me.” He paused, and Sam
wondered if he was also thinking about the way these people had cast him as
their leader and he had led them to, well, to their living deaths. 

“I led them down the
road to the left. It twisted to the right and took us in a straight line away
from that huge thing. But it was moving so fast, it was over us before we knew
it. And then… it was over us and gone.
Just like you said,
Tony.
It didn’t look at us twice, just carried on over the countryside.
Soon it was gone, but we were still running. We slowed down, and I would have
come straight back for you Nick, I really would, but we’d reached another farm.
I thought it made sense to see if we’d come far enough for power to be working
before we came back for you. It would only be a minute.”

He fell silent, and a
pregnant stillness swelled to fill the room. Then he sighed and it blew like a
chill wind through the silence, causing Sam’s hair to
raise
on her arms and her neck to prickle.

“We didn’t know about
the darkness, you see. I looked in the farmhouse, taking a spade I found in the
yard with me just in case. But it was deserted. After that, we were just complacent.
We started looking the barns. A whole group went into one and…” Again he let
out a huge sigh. “And they didn’t come out. We didn’t hear any screams or
anything, but I think there must have been a whole family in there, maybe some
farmhands too. I think they jumped the group as soon as they walked in and
ripped out their throats before even one of them could scream.”

Sam heard him shift
and realised he had turned to Nicola. There was a tone of pleading in his
voice. “I would have gone in after them. Maybe I could have done something, but
Alyssa wouldn’t let me go and kept asking for you, so I stayed outside. The
rest of the group – all of them – grabbed whatever they could find and went in
after the first lot.
Oh, God!”
He let out a wail which
was immediately muffled as someone – Nicola maybe – put a hand over his mouth.

Eventually he calmed
and his breathing slowed enough to continue. “This time there was screaming. It
sounded like a massacre. God, they weren’t soldiers, or fighters or anything.
They were just people. They went in, without fear, to try and help strangers,
and…” He trailed off.

“I waited. Alyssa was
crying for you, but I waited. I hoped that one of them - at least one of them,
for God’s sake – would come out. But they didn’t. Well, not as they had been.

“It all went quiet and
then a man came to the doorway. His head was split and not only was his throat
gone, but so was most of the side of his face. I could see his – his – his
teeth and his tongue through the side of his face. He watched me for a moment
and then he leapt. I grabbed Alyssa and started to run. He followed me across
the yard. God, he was fast. But soon I heard him slow. I looked back and
stopped. He had slumped to his knees. I saw his skin catch fire and he melted
to jelly right in front of me.”

He paused, but no-one
filled the gap. Sam thought she heard a sob from the far corner but couldn’t
tell who it came from.

“That was when I ran
properly. I headed across the yard, past the house, over the fields. At the top
of one of the fields I found a shed of some sort. It had no windows, just stone
walls, a roof and a single thick door. I took Alyssa in there with me. She was
screaming blue murder by then, and I hid.”

“You have to
understand, I couldn’t believe what I had seen, and I couldn’t… I just needed
some time. I needed to work it out.”

His voice was shaking
so hard that Sam couldn’t understand how he could keep going, but somehow he
did.  “I should have come back. It didn’t take me long to work out that it
was sunlight which had done for that… that… thing. But I couldn’t. Once we were
in there with the door locked, I just wanted to stay. I just wanted to hide
until it all went away.”

Sam heard him turn to
Nicola again. “Alyssa quieted down. There was some hay in there and she went to
sleep on it. I sat and tried to think what to do. It was only when I realised
the light was fading that I knew I needed to come back and find you, if I
could, before it got dark.”

He started crying quietly
as he continued. “I left her sleeping. I didn’t think we’d end up here. I
thought I’d find you and we’d go back and we could all be there when it finally
got dark.”

Sam imagined this new
pause was to allow Nicola to say something, but there was only more of that
silence. When he realised she wasn’t going to say anything, he carried on. “It
wasn’t that dark when I left. It would have been okay, but I hadn’t thought
about the long summer shadows. In order to get back to you I had to pass
through the farmyard, and the shadows of the buildings were long enough that
they had come out of the barn and were milling about. I saw them before they
saw me, and I ran through them, but they followed. The shadows were long
enough, from buildings and then from trees and hedges, that they only ever had
to be in the sun for a moment at a time. I think some of them didn’t make it,
but you saw how many were still with me when I reached you. I’m so sorry I left
her. I’m so sorry. I – I –“

He had stopped talking
and just cried.

Nicola hadn’t said
anything more for the rest of the night.