The lights in the facility were on and even in the dark of night, I could see occasional flickers against the windows as people moved in front of them, blocking the light briefly.
“Here, My Lady.”
Samuel led me a short distance towards the riverbank where two men dressed in the black outfits favoured by the Dead, stood careful watch. On the ground beside them was a body. A torch flicked on and I got to see exactly what it was.
Young and wearing the uniform of a CDF soldier. I guessed he was on patrol and had stopped to pee judging by the way his trousers were open. Blood covered his shoulder, soaking through his coat and pooling beneath him, while a large chunk of flesh was missing from his neck.
“Where’s the other?” I asked. The CDF patrolled in pairs and had done since they first started.
“That, we do not know.” Samuel indicated the dead young man, pointing at the bloody hole in his temple. “Some of our people heard the cry and when they arrived, stopped him from rising. They were too late for anything else.”
It was possible that his companion had fallen into the river. It was wide and deep, with a current strong enough to take him out to sea. That didn’t tell me anything about what had attacked them and where it had come from.
My gaze went once more to the facility on the hill at the other side of the river and my heart sank a little.
“Any tracks?”
“Plenty,” Samuel said, swinging his torch across the ground to reveal the impressions in the mud. “However most of them are all around here. One set of tracks heads up and into the town.”
“Send some…” I stopped as I realised that of course, he had already done that. “Let me know if they find it.”
“Of course.”
“Back into the truck and then let's go to the facility up there.”
He turned and looked up at the building and his expression grew dark. He nodded once and gestured for everyone to head back to the truck. Before he left, he issued a quick instruction to the two acolytes beside the river.
They would take care of the body and clean up the mess before the people of the town woke up and we had a panic on our hands.
I climbed back into the truck, hating just a little the fact that I needed help, and in minutes we were off. Another short journey, barely ten minutes to follow the road through the town and then across the bridge to the north and onwards to the research facility.
When we arrived, there was just one harried looking man standing guard at the main entrance. He came to full attention as he saw me and performed a salute.
“Ma’am.”
There was a nervousness to him like that of a child caught doing something wrong. I clenched my hands into fists and held back my sigh as I fixed him with my best glare.
“Report!”
“Ah…”
“You heard her, what is going on here?” Samuel snapped and the poor CDF soldiers eyes flicked from me to him and the two fists of acolytes standing silently behind him. “Well?”
“There’s been an incident, ma’am. Sargeant Jameson has…”
“What incident?”
“A-an escape.”
Fuck!
I pushed past him and into the building, Samuel and the others following behind. I needed to find Professor Ashworth or one of the researchers and get some answers.
The offices were empty, though the building lights were all on. I pushed on through the corridors until we came to the containment area.
Professor Ashworth and Vanessa were standing in the centre of the corridor arguing hotly. She was gesturing wildly as she practically screamed at the smaller man who, to be fair, was giving as good as he was getting.
“The hell is going on here?” I demanded loudly. Even so, I had to repeat myself before they noticed my arrival.
They both turned to me at the same time, faces twisted in anger that faded as they realised who had spoken. Or perhaps, when they saw the armed men and women behind me.
“Ah, Lily, it’s… ah,” Darren began but I cut him off with the swipe of a hand.
“Direct and to the point Professor.”
“A-ah, of course. Ah, there’s been an… incident. Regrettable but entirely unpredicted.”
“Fool!” Vanessa snapped. “She’s gone!”
“Who is?”
“Briony.”
My eyes widened slightly at that and understanding came. Not a Reaper then, that was something, but the young woman that had taken the vaccine could well be something worse.
“How?”
The professor and doctor shared a look and I just knew they were about to try and blame each other so I cut that off before it began.
“I am not interested in excuses. At least one man is confirmed dead and another missing. What the hell happened?”
“She killed someone?” Vanessa asked, face ashen. “She wouldn’t!”
“Someone did. Tore their throat out on the banks of the river,” Samuel added, his voice stern with tightly controlled anger. “Tell me what happened here.”
“One of the technicians,” Darren said, pushing his thick glasses further up his nose with one finger. “He went in to feed her and she attacked him.”
“Did the guards not stop it?”
“There weren’t any, ma’am,” the professor said apologetically. “At Doctor Cassidy’s insistence.”
“She’s harmless,” Vanessa said. “Despite the… issues, she has, she was still herself.”
“Clearly not,” I said and turned to Samuel. “Mobilise as many of your people as you can. She’s across the river and into the town. We need to find her and retrieve her.”
“As you command.”
“Samuel.” He stopped as he was turning away to look back at me. “I want her alive if at all possible.”
His expression didn’t change but he nodded and made a sharp gesture. Two of my guards broke off and followed him back out of the building as I looked back at the two incredibly intelligent, yet stupid, people.
“What happened to the technician?”
They exchanged looks once more and I set my jaw, teeth grinding together as what little patience I had began to fade.
Vanessa spoke first, taking a step back towards the cell that had held Briony and waving towards it.
“In there.”
I took a step forward and stopped as a low growl rose from Jinx beside me. I glanced down at her. She was staring at the cell with ears pricked and teeth bared. Likely had been doing that since we’d arrived but had only made a noise as I had moved closer.
With one hand, I reached down and patted her gently. Two of the bodyguards seeing her reaction moved up ahead of me. I followed them, one hand pressed against my stomach and more than willing to let them take point.
As they looked into the cell, they raised their knives, a gasp escaping one of them. I hurried forward before they could do anything and looked in the cell myself.
A figure knelt on the hard concrete floor. Blood stained the blue fatigues he wore and his head was bowed, fingers pressed against the cold concrete. There was blood there too and the finger ends were split and torn, blood leaking from them where they had been scraping against the concrete.
He looked up at my approach, eyes round and dark, filled with a pain and fear that I couldn’t possibly understand. Black lines ran across his skin and I realised they were his veins, showing against the too pale flesh. They radiated out from the ragged wound in his neck.
His mouth opened and a slow, high pitched wail escaped from him. He looked like one of the undead and yet there was intelligence in his eyes. An understanding of what was happening to him.
As the sound ended, his gaze met mine and he spoke, the words filled with pain and horror.
“Kkkkiiiiiilllll meeeeeeeeeee!”
Chapter 11
My blade sank into the skull of the zombie and I raised one booted foot to kick it away as I pulled back my knife. I did a quick check of the street and grunted, as the rest
of the small group of zombies were slaughtered by my minions.
All in all, the trip had been a little disappointing. The town should have held anything between seven and eight thousand people before the fall. I’d gone in expecting to find a similar number of zombies and so far, we’d found a great deal less than expected.
I cleaned my blade and rounded up my minions with a wave. They set off after me as I turned into the next street, determined to find a group large enough to lead out of the town to where the meatgrinders were set up.
The drone footage had shown streets full of the undead. It was more than a little disturbing to find so few then. A suspicion had begun to grow within me and I was pretty sure things were going to get unpleasant.
Not that it would stop me.
We ignored the houses other than to make sure that we wouldn’t have a handful tumble out of a doorway after we had gone past. Street by street, we moved through the northern part of the town. My black-clad minions following me, knives bloodied from the few zombies we had met.
Unlike many of the other towns we had visited, those on the island had not had the mass exodus that they had. Their cars were parked neatly in driveways and on the roads. They had no need of them to escape as there was nowhere to go.
As we approached the streets nearest the coast, we found more signs of the chaotic flight. Abandoned belongings, bags and clothes, muddied and wet from being out in the open weather for over a year.
Some people, it seemed, had tried to flee. Headed towards the docks and hoping for a place on a boat. Most of them hadn’t made it judging by the bones that littered the ground.
A lot of those people had died and not had the chance to rise again as a ravenous horde of zombies had devoured them, leaving little but tattered bones.
The various fists of minions that I had sent out to the outlying streets all converged on the main road that led through the centre of the town. None of them had found more than a handful of zombies and it was with some frustration that I led them towards the bridge that spanned the Sulby River.
I paused at the northern end of the bridge. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were walking into a trap. I had the radio if I needed it, and could call for reinforcements but the whole point of going into the town was to draw the zombies out and not have a pitched battle in the streets.
“My Lord Death,” a minion said with quiet reverence.
I glanced across at him and he raised one arm to point at the sky. I looked up to see a drone hovering high above us, high enough that the sound of its rotors turning was lost, carried away by the breeze.
The admiral, then, knew what we did and perhaps more. I raised the radio and pressed the button on the side before I spoke.
“Any sign of the zombies?”
I knew there was protocol and various phrases you had to use, but I had little real interest in bothering. They could get the gist of what I meant without me adding ‘over’ at the end of each sentence.
“They’re massing south of you, dude.”
“Can you be a little clearer, Charlie?”
“Yeah, follow the road across the river and you’ll see a fuck-ton of them all spread out waiting for you.”
It had to be a Reaper. That would be the only reason for them to fall back before us. There were only forty people in my group. Hardly a threat to the thousands of undead that must have been in the town.
“Better have the admiral send his people in then. There’s no way we could fight them all ourselves.”
“Already on their way. Got some new orders for you, dude.”
I raised an eyebrow at that even though she couldn’t see. “Orders?”
“A request,” Admiral Stuart said smoothly as he took over the radio from Charlie.
“What request, then?”
He could call it whatever he wanted, but if he tried to order me around he would soon learn that I wasn’t part of his command structure.
“I need you to wait. We’re moving the battle lines to you. There’s only two bridges across the river and where you are, it’s wide enough to have three of your… devices, side by side.”
He wasn’t wrong. The road that crossed the bridge was wide enough for two lanes of cars and pedestrians at either side. Line up three of the grinders and then take one over to the next bridge and the only way any zombies would get across would be to go straight through them.
“Once in place, You’ll need to bring them to us.”
Now that was the sticking point. Several thousand zombies versus a handful of my minions. Even with a Reaper controlling them, they would rush towards us as soon as they saw us. The problem was getting close enough for them to see without us being trapped.
We couldn’t just make noise or commotion, though sounds attracted them. No, we would need them to get our scent and come chasing after us. Depending upon where they were, that left us with the unenviable task of walking into a maze of streets and potentially, having them close in around us.
“Fine. Bring your people.”
I thumbed off the radio before he could reply and settled down to wait, staring all the while across the river, towards the horde of zombies that I couldn’t see but were undoubtedly watching us.
The trucks arrived first. Each of them carrying one of the containers. Behind them came the mobile crane and then the rank and file troops of the CDF. I waited impatiently for them to unload the container and put them in place across the end of the bridge.
My worker minion, the former engineer, moved around them like a mother hen with her chicks, as she supervised the fitting of the motors and hooked them up to the small, fuel run power generators.
Once they were in place, she and her assistants moved around each of them, drilling into the ground and then inserting steel rods to anchor them in place. A smart idea as the zombies would put a lot of pressure against them.
We had no way of lining the side of the bridge, so there would be no let up in the number of zombies that would be passing across it. They would all be trying to move through the grinders at the same time and I was reasonably sure that would clog them up pretty quickly.
But, it was just a test run so I expected things would not work as well as I hoped. At least when they failed there would be a small army of men and women lined up ready to kill any zombies that made it through.
I checked my weapons once more, taking a moment to pull out a sharpening stone for my knives as I watched them set up. One thing they had clearly not considered, was how I would be getting back across the bridge.
Clearly, they expected us to go through the containers. There was a four-foot gap beneath those rolling, grinding teeth. We could drop down and crawl beneath them, while the zombies wouldn’t consider doing that.
They had been left like that so some lucky souls could reach under and shovel the ground up zombies out of the way to make room for more. Not a fun job by any means, but likely one that would be required.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I felt about the crawling through the meat grinder. My paranoia, while much reduced over the past few months, was still there. I had no intention of putting myself in a position where I would be at risk like that.
So, I’d need to come up with something else.
“Sir.”
I looked over at the CDF soldier that stood nervously a short distance away. His eyes darted this way and that as he looked everywhere but at me. Not the kind of behaviour that decreased my paranoia in any way.
“What?”
“We are prepared.”
Many of the CDF soldiers were moving into place in side streets while some lined the wall beside the river bank, crouching low to remain hidden for as long as possible. Both sides, it seemed, were preparing to ambush the other and in between were my minions and me.
It was going to be fun.
“Well then, let’s get started.”
I didn’t wait to hear the reply, but rose to my feet, my minions rising with me. I jogged across to where the conta
iners stood and leapt, grabbing the top of the nearest and pulling myself up. I grinned at the confused expression of a nearby soldier. I had no need for him to understand, but going over the meatgrinders was safer than going through.
My minions copied me, climbing up and running over the top of the container before dropping down to the bridge. I paused just long enough for the majority of them to be down and then set off, jogging easily across the bridge.
Just a year before, I would have been out of breath from a short run. Months of running and training with my minions had given me a considerable boost to my stamina. Which was a useful thing to have in the zombie apocalypse.
Immediately across the bridge, the road split. I ignored the road that led off to the south-east and kept on straight south. Anything that came up the other road would be seen immediately by the troops massed on the other side of the river.
A drone flew overhead and I flicked on the radio. If they had any warnings, it was better that I hear them before I became caught.
There was a large bakery to my right as I jogged, followed by a supermarket. On my left, a bistro and a car park. There was no movement around any of the building and the car park had just a few cars sitting rusting.
The road turned to the left and I slowed to a stop at the junction I found myself faced with. It split in three directions and in the distance, down towards the south, were the first of the zombies. They massed in the road, jostling and moaning, though the sound was lost on the wind.
It was a simplistic setup. I was, no doubt, supposed to rush straight to the south and then more of the undead would come up the roads to either side and block us in, trapping us between two groups.
Reapers were smart, yes, almost as smart as they had been when alive. But, they weren’t tacticians. Not really. They could create rudimentary traps, but they still relied on numbers more than anything else.
I could already see a couple of holes that someone could wriggle through. Especially if they weren’t too concerned with losing a few of their number if required.
With a savage grin, I pulled free my blades and set off jogging once more, to the south.
Killing the Dead Season 3 Box Set | Books 13-18 Page 58
