by Frank Tayell
They weren’t the most stirring of words, but Scott could think of none better as he grabbed his tool bag, and followed the sergeant outside. There’d been an edge of tension to the sergeant’s tone, as close to fear as he’d heard from the career soldier. It took him until he reached Adrianna, standing by the door to her minibus, to realise why.
“We can’t shoot them, can we?” Scott said.
“Bullets will go right through the side of that van,” Salman said. “Clearly, from the way those zombies are battering to get inside, there are people still aboard. Adrianna, get someone to remove the barbed wire from the rear of your minibus. If we’ve got to shunt your bus out of the way, we don’t want it getting tangled with the coach.”
Ahead, barely a hundred metres away, the undead beat and clawed against the van’s thin metal. Scott counted twenty-one, and guessed around twice that number were out of sight.
“Have you got a plan, mate?” Scott asked.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Salman said. “Otherwise, try to lure them away from the van, hopefully shoot them.”
Scott put his bag of tools inside the minibus, took out a hammer which he tucked into his belt, and a tyre iron which he gripped with both hands.
“After you, mate,” he said.
But the instructions had to be translated into French. The survivors from the coach had to be gathered. Time dragged. Seconds turned to minutes that felt like hours. His gaze went to the high-sided embankment, but found his eyes dragged back to the van, waiting for the undead to notice the arrival of new prey, and equally hoping they wouldn’t.
Closer to the bridge, he saw a gap in the undergrowth along the embankment. It was too far away to be sure, but it looked as if someone had driven up there, and recently. Perhaps they could do the same. Perhaps that was a safer way to escape than a frontal assault. There would be no time to find out.
“Advance!” Salman called. He and Starwind had moved the people from the coach into a thin line, while Adrianna had moved hers to either flank. Though some carried a shotgun or rifle slung on their backs, they held only tools and blades in hand. But give it a few seconds of chaotic battle, discipline would break, and the guns would be drawn.
The first shot came when they were still fifty metres from the bridge. It didn’t come from the advancing line, but from inside the van.
“Steady!” Salman said. “Steady.”
Another bullet punctured the van’s thin walls, missing the nearest zombie by a head’s width.
“They’re signalling to us,” Scott said, keeping his voice calm. “And they’re still alive. What is it that Chester says, that we’re the help that comes to others?”
“Nous sommes le futur pour tout le monde,” Starwind said, repeating the words, screaming them at the undead as she raised the long knives she held in each hand.
“That’s the spirit,” Scott said, still looking for an alternate plan. There were tyre tracks leading up the embankment close to the bridge. The minibus might make it, but it was too steep for the coach, with too many thick trees requiring too tight a turn. There was no way out of this but forward, and that meant through the undead, and the creatures at the back had heard the new arrivals.
A zombie turned away from the van, staggering a step towards them before a second shot was fired from inside. This bullet, aimed lower, hit one of the undead in the chest, spraying black pus across the tyre-churned mud. The zombie at the rear of the van turned back to the vehicle.
“Keep yelling!” Salman barked. “Get their attention! Yell. Shout. Scream!”
The French did, the tremor quickly leaving their voices as fear gave way to furious anger.
Scott didn’t scream, but began humming the tune to the electric ballads that had accompanied his Australian road trips. Slowly, one zombie, then a second, stepped away from the vehicle towards them.
Someone fired, someone without a suppressor, but Scott didn’t look to see who’d drawn their weapon. A zombie fell, but three more turned away from the van and towards them. To his right, her furious scream rose to an incoherent yell as Starwind charged ahead of the line, her knives raised. Adrianna ran after her, then Salman, then everyone, Scott included, though he was slower than the rest, reaching the van after that moving wall of slashing blows and flurried blades sliced into rotting flesh.
Giving those wildly swinging weapons a wide berth, Scott angled towards the bridge’s side. More zombies lurched towards them from behind the van, but no other vehicles were in sight. Then there was no time to look at anything except the enemy in front of him. Old before the outbreak, burned, cut, skin peeling from bare arms and bald head, its dead arms moved quickly as it clawed at Scott’s face. He ducked just in time, lashing out with the tyre iron. Metal cracked into bone. The zombie tumbled forward, and Scott barely dived out of the way, and straight into a second creature. Together, they tumbled to the ground.
Scott kicked his way upright as fingers clawed at his coat, caught in his shirt, curled around his arm. Now he screamed, kicking, turning, twisting until he was free. He lashed out with the tyre iron, slamming it into the zombie’s arm, then its head. He raised the tool again. A blinding flash coursed from his brain to his eyes, temporarily blinding him as the instant of pain surged across his body faster than thought. The tyre-iron fell from his hands as he fell to his knees. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He could barely see anything except the broken teeth in their withered gums, set beneath sightless eyes, now barely a metre away. And he saw the thin blade puncture the zombie’s temple, piercing the skull, the tip emerging the other side. Starwind let go of the blade, pushing the zombie sideways as she hauled Scott to his feet.
“Go!” she hissed, pushing him towards the bridge’s wall.
As the moment of incomprehensible pain faded, clarity returned. His empty hands dropped to his belt. The hammer had fallen out, but the knife was still in its sheath, the pistol still in its holster. There were no clear targets. With everyone too close to the undead, and far too close to the van, he couldn’t risk a shot. He drew the knife, his eyes moving from zombie to survivor to Starwind.
The young woman rolled, hacked, ducked, and stabbed. She moved with an elegant grace, an utter fluidity of movement, a knife in one hand, a hatchet in the other. It was almost as if she were dancing. No, she was dancing. It was ballet. Or it had been, months before. Now it was something else, but the echo of the dance was still visible in her movements, an echo he remembered from a dozen years before, when Clemmie had, briefly, taken up the art.
Starwind pivoted, spun on one foot, and launched her left hand outward. The knife slammed into a zombie’s eye. It fell, and Starwind held her position for a long half-second. A half-second that was too long by half. At her feet, a crawling zombie grasped her foot. As it pulled itself forward, it tugged her off-balance. She sprawled to the ground. The zombie’s other hand slapped out, its hand catching around her arm. Knife held two-handed, Scott dived, slamming the blade into the zombie’s skull as he landed on its back.
“Scott!” Starwind said, rolling to her feet. She dragged him up, and pushed him back towards the wall. “Go!” she said. “Go back.”
But there was no need to retreat. The battle was over.
Scott watched Adrianna help the survivors out of the panel van, while Starwind picked her way nimbly between the outflung limbs of the dead. The young woman held her knives by her side, slightly away from her body, ready to thrust downward should one of the zombies move. None did.
“Scott?” Salman asked.
“Hmm?”
“I asked if you were all right,” the sergeant said.
“As right as a kangaroo on a surfboard,” Scott said.
“Does that mean yes?”
“Right now, yes. Later, there’ll be trouble, but it’s a problem for then.”
“You’re a fan of the odd expression, aren’t you?” Salman said. “Can we repair the van?”
“How much time do we
have?”
“None,” Salman said. “The undead are catching up with us. Amber’s killed ten already, and more are coming. With the high embankment, she doesn’t have a clear line of fire until they reach the road. If they do that in large numbers, it could get bad.”
“And you’re a fan of understatement,” Scott said. “Give me a minute, and I’ll give you an answer.”
It took one look at the front of the van to know it wasn’t driving anywhere ever again. The undead must have gathered beneath the bridge. The van had driven at them, hoping to force a passage through. The front tyres had blown, the axle was cracked, and a good portion of at least one zombie was now liquefied around the engine block.
“Can you fix it?” Starwind asked, sauntering over.
“Nope. I need a long rope and a short chain,” he said. “And we’ve got to move these bodies to the side of the road. Can you ask people to do that?”
“Of course,” she said, utterly calm, utterly confident, utterly oblivious to the death surrounding them. “What do we do with the rope?”
“We’ll tie it to the rear of the van, loop it around a tree at the top of the slope, and then tie the other end to the minibus. The bus reverses, hauling the van up the slope. We’ll secure the van to the tree with the chain, and maybe lodge some rocks under the wheels, whatever we can find. Then we drive the bus and coach under the bridge and on into Switzerland. You got that?”
“Every word,” Starwind said airily, and began shouting at the survivors in French.
Scott left her to it, and turned back to the van. There was little inside and nothing worth taking, and no time to bury the bodies. Seven people had survived inside the van. The driver hadn’t, nor had two passengers from the rear of the van. Both had been stabbed. One in the chest.
“I’ve got the rope,” Starwind said, though it was Adrianna who was carrying it.
“Tie it off here,” Scott said. “Then follow me.”
“She was stabbed through the chest,” Adrianna said, looking into the back of the van.
“Probably wanted to open the doors and make a run for it,” Scott said as Starwind turned towards the coach where the survivors were helping clear the corpses from the road. “In the heat of the moment, that was the only easy way of stopping her.”
“Hmm.” Adrianna said, keeping her opinion to herself. She tied one end of the rope to the van, then trailed the rest up the slope, following Scott to the first decent-width tree, far enough up the embankment that the van would be off the road.
“We’ll need a longer rope,” Adrianna said. “This won’t reach.”
“And two spare tyres,” Scott said. “We cut one into eighths, and that’s the track the rope runs through. The second runs between the trunk and the track. Now, ideally—”
Starwind unslung her rifle, firing up the slope before Scott even noticed the zombie approaching.
“But we’ve no time,” he said as the corpse slid down the embankment, nearly as far as the tree. “Get another rope. Get everyone else ready to push the van.”
“There are tyre tracks here,” Starwind said as Adrianna slipped her way down the slope. “Large tyres.”
“Two vehicles, I think,” Scott said. “And I think one of them was a six-wheeler.”
“My mother,” Starwind said scornfully.
“You don’t know,” Scott said.
“Six wheels means an APC, yes?” Starwind said. “And whoever drove up here left those people to die in the van, yes? It was my mother.”
Scott sighed. “Look, I don’t know what happened between you and your mum, but speaking as a parent with a daughter your age, cut her some slack. For your own sake, if not hers.”
“I have accepted who she is, what she is,” Starwind said. “I no longer care.”
“Who do you think you’re fooling?” Scott said. “Because it ain’t me. I don’t know her well, but the only reason I can think of she’d leave those people to die is if she was coming back to look for you. Since we didn’t come across her, odds are these tracks belong to someone else. Someone we’ll never see again. But we’ll know tonight, when we get to the rendezvous.”
“Like you said, you don’t know what happened,” Starwind said. She raised her rifle, and fired. “Zombies. More of them.”
Below, on the roof of the coach, Amber fired. Here on the slope, he could see more of the land beyond the road. Bare-branched trees still obscured his view, but he could make out the shadows moving between them.
“We need to hurry,” he said.
Ten minutes later, the van had been raised from the road, and was secured to the tree with a chain that was creaking as loudly as the roots. They didn’t have long.
The minibus drove under the bridge before Scott reached the road. He jumped aboard the coach, Starwind a few steps behind, and made his way to the back of the vehicle, smiling at those they’d rescued, grinning at those who’d fought alongside him. At the rear, he sat down, peering through the window, watching as the bridge disappeared, watching the undead drift along the road beneath it.
“That’s a pity,” he said, mostly to himself. “I was hoping the chain would fail, the van would fall, and the road behind us would be sealed. But it didn’t.”
He leaned back in the rearmost row’s middle seat, stretching his legs along the aisle, letting exhaustion wash through him. He wasn’t the only one drained by the panicked frenzy of the last hour. Some were talking, adrenaline raising their voices to an unnatural pitch. A few, like the woman in the corner seat next to him, were asleep, or pretending to be.
He raised a hand towards his head, saw the mud and gore caked on every finger, and let it fall to his lap. His head was worrying him. Specifically, that there was something wrong with it more than the lingering effects of concussion. There was nothing that could be done, of course. In Belfast, perhaps the admiral could provide an accurate diagnosis. There was a hospital there, though it would take more than a generator to get the MRIs functioning again. And while a scan might tell him what was going on inside his brain, there was absolutely nothing even the admiral could do to fix it.
“That’s life now, isn’t it?” he said aloud. “We’re back to the olden days where you’d try to ignore the twinges and aches, quietly hoping they weren’t going to be what kills you.”
The woman gave a snort.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” Scott said.
The woman gave a grunt. A gasp. A coughing rasp that Scott recognised too well. He spun around as the woman’s lifeless eyes opened, fumbling with his holstered pistol as she dived forward, and he dived sideways, away from the thrashing hands and snapping mouth.
Her arms banged into the seat as his hand curled around the gun. There wasn’t time to draw, so he just fired, through the holster, and into her chest, neck, face, then brain. The zombie slumped, dripping on top of him as he pushed it away.
“Scott!” Salman said, running down the aisle, Amber and Starwind close behind.
“Infected,” he said. “She was infected. We didn’t check them.”
“After all this time,” Salman said. “I assumed—” The glass window creaked. Spiderweb cracks rose from where one of Scott’s bullets had travelled through the glass.
“Shall we check everyone?” Amber asked.
“No, they won’t go along with that,” Salman said. “But it’s easily solved. The coach has seatbelts. Starwind, tell everyone to buckle themselves in. Anyone who doesn’t want to can get out and walk. Private, you and Mr Higson stay at the back. Starwind and I will stay at the front.”
Scott sat in the row second-from-back, watching the crack creep up the window; it was better than looking at the corpse.
Chapter 4 - Handover of Power
Laufen, Switzerland
“Scott! Scott!” Amber said, her voice ringing with urgency.
“What is it?” he asked, tearing himself awake.
“We’ve arrived,” she said.
“At the border?” he
asked, levering himself upright in his seat. Darkness lay beyond the window. One thing the starless shroud couldn’t hide was that the coach had stopped.
“We crossed the border ages ago,” Amber said. “We’re in Switzerland. Ahead are lights. This must be the rendezvous.”
“What time is it?”
“Just after dusk,” she said. “Are you coming, or what?”
Everyone else was still seated, and some were still asleep, though no one else had died, or turned into one of the undead, during the agonizingly erratic journey east.
Scott made his way down the aisle after Amber, but was stopped at the front by Madame Bensayed. She pushed a shotgun into his hands. A 12-gauge Mossberg, like the weapon still jutting from her large bag, but with a bandolier of shells strapped to the barrel. She gave a cautious shake of her head, but stepped aside so he could step outside.
“It’s turned cold,” Scott said. “And it’s dark. Can’t see a single star. I can see lights, though, ahead and behind. Are those headlights?”
“Sort of,” Amber said. “It’s a checkpoint. We just drove through.”
“And we’re on a bridge,” Scott said.
“It runs over a ravine, I think,” Amber said. “The sergeant and Starwind went to say hello. I hope… I mean, I think these are the Ukrainians.”
“They’re not shooting,” Scott said. “I always take that as a good sign. Are we meant to follow Salman?”
“We’re meant to wait here,” Amber said. “The sarge said I should let you sleep, but Madame Bensayed wanted me to wake you.”
“She did?” He glanced back up the steps. The older woman now stood on the steps leading to the door, a machine pistol in her hands. She seemed to have stashed a small arsenal in her bag.
“Did she say why she wanted me awake?” Scott asked.
“She didn’t exactly say anything,” Amber said. “Not in English.”
“Then she isn’t as worried as she might be,” Scott said. “Tell me about this checkpoint.”
“What’s there to say?” Amber said. “They’ve four armoured cars blocking the northern side of the bridge, with just enough space left for a single vehicle to drive through.”
