Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent (7 page)

             
Will jumped down inside from the window ledge.  When he landed on the floor of an office, the jarring movement made the pain in his nose flare up again.  Feeling fresh blood drip onto his upper lip he cursed.

             
He would need to find a way down to the shop floor to find anything of use.

             
Siobhan dropped softly to the floor behind him.  Walking through the open plan office, Will and Siobhan started to feel uneasy.  There were beds made up on desks that had been pushed together.  Untidy sheets were covered in dark stains.  The room smelled of old blood and rotten meat.

             
The large room was divided into small workspaces - cubicles each containing a desk, computer and chair.  Although lots of furniture had been removed, Will assumed it had been to create barricades.

             
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this place.”  Siobhan felt her heartbeat increase as she realised that this had been a scene of violence.

             
When the whole human race had devoured itself in unearthly hunger, there was nowhere left that did not feel like a crime scene.  The whole world was soaked in blood.

             
A face appeared behind one of the cubicle walls.  In the dim light it seemed to be composed of only wild, dark hair and yellow teeth.

             
A creature lunged at the survivors, with one arm outstretched.  The light wooden cubicle wall collapsed, but the zombie stopped short.  Its other hand had been handcuffed to a desk, which it now began to haul laboriously along the floor towards Will and Siobhan.

             
“Fuck this, Will!”  Siobhan shouted, “Run!”

             
They hurtled back towards the window and out into the cold.

*   *   *

The survivors inspected their spoils.  They had found as much medical research equipment as they could hope to carry, and plenty of medicines for every eventuality.

             
Once they had taken their inventory, the time had come for the group to part company.  Danniella and Tina were destined for Down Street Research Laboratory, and the others for the Bunker.  There would be almost fifty miles separating their destinations: fifty miles that included London, the most densely populated area of the country, and now a stronghold of the undead.  Assuming they made it to their goals (which felt like a big assumption) there would be a whole world between them: their chances of ever meeting again were millions to one.

             
The moment of their separation felt momentous, but there was no time to bid emotional farewells, or make speeches about how much they had come to rely on each other.  They drove to a car park that appeared quiet, and hotwired a new car for Danniella and Tina.  It was small, but they were relieved to see it had an almost full tank of petrol; the moment the engine started they each ran back to their separate cars to drive through an advancing crowd of zombies.  Tina was driving, Danniella looked back wistfully at the car they had recently vacated, with Will, Siobhan and Arlene driving away forever.

             
She put her hand up to the cold of the window.

             
“Goodbye my friends.”  As their car disappeared from sight Danniella wished she could believe in an afterlife where they could meet one day in the sweet by-and-by; “But then again,” she whispered to herself, “six months ago I didn’t believe in zombies.”

Let’s go Shopping

Will, Siobhan, and Arlene were shopping.

             
Shopping had taken on a whole new meaning since the Apocalypse.  Cash and credit cards were no longer necessary: the new currency was weaponry and utter terror.

             
They had managed to slip into a shop called ‘Indoor Jungle’ where they picked up all the daylight simulation lamps they would ever need.  It had been relatively. They had entered through an upstairs window, the car circling the block while the shoppers explored indoors.  The original inhabitants seemed to have killed themselves after the food had run out.  There were luxuriant marijuana plants (Arlene picked all the leaves and stuck them, bulging into her jacket pockets) but there appeared to have been no wherewithal to grow fruit, pulses or vegetables– unless their choice of weed over tomatoes had been deliberate.  There was soil, fertiliser and indoor-gardening guidebooks (albeit focused on the growing of narcotics) and everything they would need to set up an underground vegetable patch.

             
Solar panels were another matter, they would have to visit yet another industrial estate.  They found a business directory in the ‘Indoor Jungle,’ and located a few which stocked solar panels.  They picked the option deepest in the countryside and set off.

             
The Bunker had its own water supply, so dried foods were particularly useful.  They stopped off at a garage shop where all the tinned food had been looted, but with no water and power the rice and pasta had been left behind.  This proved to be the situation in most of the shops they found.

             
Followed by a host of around two hundred zombies about 10 minutes behind them they approached a village.  It seemed deserted: just a row of a dozen houses and a small shop that been no more than a house with a minor conversion to turn it into a small grocery store.

             
It was getting dark was they crept around.  Once again there was no tinned food, and even the dog food (they was a large display proclaiming ‘Dog nibbles 2 for 1 Special Offer!’) had been looted.

             
A pile of unread newspapers, the last to be printed in Britain, told of disturbances in central London.

             
Siobhan remembered how the internet had outlived newsprint by a few weeks and (amid its usual slew of wild rumour and conspiracy theories) had told the rest the story: the infection travelled, more or less at the speed of human traffic over the globe.  The plague caught a budget airline flight to San Francisco, and the train through the Channel Tunnel to Paris.  No one had time to trace the origin of the Outbreak in Sidney, Australia, and no one was left to investigate afterwards.

             
Siobhan felt tears prick the corner of her eyes as she scanned the newspapers.  She took one, folded it carefully and slid the end into the back pocket of her jeans.

             
Suddenly the survivors jumped at the sound of footsteps upstairs.

             
Siobhan was about to call out, offering shelter in the Bunker, but something about the staccato rhythm of the feet made her stop.

             
“Hello?” Arlene had no such qualms. “Is there anyone there?”

             
The footsteps gave way to a frantic beating: the unmistakable sound of the undead, driven wild by unnatural hunger.

             
“Time to go, people!”  Arlene grabbed a celebrity gossip magazine from the stand by the door on the way out.

             
The engine of the car was ticking over in the road outside.  Will was in the driver’s seat, looking around nervously.

             
Suddenly he saw a face he recognised.  He couldn’t quite remember the man’s name.  They had met on a team-building course.  Two companies had been sharing a centre for a week, doing ‘high ropes’ and canoeing.  He remembered being terrified in the canoe.  He was not a confident swimmer, and desperately tried to hide his fear from his workmates.  He was so relieved when the instructor handed out life jackets that he almost cried.

             
In the end he enjoyed the exercise:  paddling down a scenic river in the Surrey countryside.  His fear of water made it an exhilarating experience.

             
Near the end of the canoeing afternoon Will had turned over his canoe, but in the shock of cold water and the panic of not being able to breathe, he had been unable to right himself.

             
He had thought how ridiculous it would be to drown so close to land all his work colleagues.

             
This familiar face had been nearby, spotted Will in trouble, and paddled over to help.

             
Will had been glad that the water and shivering cold had hidden his sobs of relief.

             
He realised that he must be losing his grip.  While he had been remembering the World Before, the man who had once saved Will had nearly reached the car.

             
He beeped the horn: the signal that it was time to move on.

The two women were already running from the shop.  The window above them shattered as two zombies came racing out: a man and women, both in their thirties, and both dressed as if for a night out.  He wore a black suit with a red tie; she wore a green evening dress.

             
Apart from the looks of demented hunger on their faces they could have been alive.

             
They landed but the woman, wearing very high heels, landed awkwardly: her leg made an audible crack, as bone jutted through her lower leg.

             
She appeared not to notice, and hobbled horribly onwards, arms outstretched.

             
In an ungentlemanly fashion the male zombie in the suit ignored his companion’s injury, and literally hit the ground running.

             
Will winced when his former rescuer’s face smashed into the driver’s side window of the car, smearing it with blood and creating a spider-web of cracks.

             
“Oh Jesus!”

             
He slammed the car into reverse, and his friends cried in dismay as he screeched backwards away from them. They had two glass-covered zombies in pursuit, and now they were face-to-bloody-face with another zombie.

             
Will realised his mistake and slammed into forward gear, the gearbox howling in protest.

             
Siobhan and Arlene hesitated, they didn’t know which way to turn.  Their indecision cost them dearly: the creatures behind caught up, and the first caught Arlene’s hair in its hands, and hauled her backwards off balance.

             
Before the others had time to react the zombie’s teeth zombie connected with the top of her head and filled its mouth with flesh and hair.

             
Blood splashed on the creature, and started to flow down Arlene’s face.  She screamed, and other creatures started to emerge from behind nearby houses of the village.

             
Will ploughed the car into his ‘life-saver’ zombie, leaving it pinned to the bonnet of the car, its hands hammering against the metal, denting it alarmingly.   Will could feel its feet underneath the car.

             
He slammed the brakes again, and opened the passenger door to the others.

             
“Come on ladies; your carriage awaits.”

             
Only then did he take in Arlene’s blood-soaked visage. “Oh fuck!”

             
But it was too late to do anything.  The suited zombie had Arlene by the head, and was tearing her scalp way from her skull with a wet, ripping sound.  Arlene’s screams had given way to soundless mouthed prayers.

             
Siobhan hesitated; there was nothing she could do to help Arlene now, the only merciful thing would be aid her to a quick death.

             
Siobhan couldn’t believe Arlene was dying in front of her eyes.  They had been outside together so much in the last twenty-four hours that she had started to imagine it could be possible to survive in the world outside the Bunker.

             
Will flung open the passenger side door and yelled, “Come on, it’s too late for her, we gotta fucking motor.”

             
Siobhan threw herself into the passenger seat, and Will shot off down the road.

             
Looking backwards Siobhan could see Arlene’s bloody hand, outstretched for help, her eyes pleading, but even if they could rescue her she was infected, death would soon follow, and then a fate worse than that.

             
“I just didn’t know,” Siobhan spoke hesitantly, her voice small, like a child, “that it could all end so quickly.”

             
“Yeah, right,” Will was concentrating on driving, having to weave through the running creatures who were emerging from behind the houses in the village.

             
As they journeyed onward, painfully slowly, Siobhan started to cry.

             
A crowd of ragged children was following the car.  She wondered if they had been at school when the End came, or sheltering together.  All their little bodies were mangled in one way or another: among the small figures she could see a sprinkling of missing eyes, ears, or even limbs; many throats had been ripped out, leaving brownish-black gaping wounds.  And yet they still looked so like children.  It was hard to believe that they were not just dressed up for Halloween.  The eyes that should have been innocent and full of laughter, were wild and full of hunger; their screams sounded somewhere between the snarling of full-grown undead and the high-pitched screams of delight that had once echoed around the world’s playgrounds.