Wildfire- Destruction of the Dead

by Shaun Harbinger

  I turned in my seat and said to Lucy and Sam, “Hold on.”

  Lucy nodded. She and Sam were harnessed into their seats. Sam gave me a weak thumbs-up.

  Everything became dark momentarily as we drove beneath the bridge. Then we slammed into the Fiesta, pushing it along the road in front of us. Its tires squealed against the wet road surface as we emerged on the other side of the bridge and into daylight.

  Tanya hit the brakes, reversed slightly, and then guided the Mastiff around the crushed Fiesta. As soon as we were clear, she accelerated along the center lane, leaving the bridge behind us.

  I checked the mirror again. The cars were still coming.

  If it came down to a firefight on the motorway a second time, I wasn’t sure we would come out on top again. There were at least twelve cars behind us and we had a man down. I wasn’t even sure we had enough ammo left to take out all those vehicles.

  “Can’t we go any faster?” I asked Tanya.

  She shook her head. “The top speed seems to be around sixty.”

  I felt my heart sink. Those cars could outrun us easily. They would reach us in the next couple of minutes, if not sooner.

  I climbed out of my seat and went into the rear compartment to check my weapons. Lucy unharnessed herself and did the same.

  “What’s the best way to do this?” I asked her. “From the roof or through the rear door?”

  “Both,” she said. “You take the roof, I’ll take the door.”

  “Okay.” I stepped up onto the platform and opened the top hatch. The wind resistance battered me as I climbed up through the hatch, staying low, and thankful for the raised edge that ran around the perimeter of the roof. I crawled to the rear section and peered over the raised edge.

  The cars were close. Nobody was shooting yet but I could see that the occupants had guns. Unlike the bandits we had seen earlier, these seemed to have a plan, and that was scarier than if they’d just started firing haphazardly at us.

  I positioned my M16 so that the muzzle jutted over the edge of the roof. If we were going to go down, at least we were going to go down fighting.

  Then something on the opposite side of the motorway caught my attention. There was an exit road there and coming down it was a convoy of military Jeeps. I counted five of them, painted in desert colors like the Mastiff. Each Jeep had a driver and a soldier manning a large gun mounted on the rear of the vehicle.

  They came racing south along the northbound lanes and opened fire on the cars behind us, shooting across the median and over the safety barrier.

  The air became thick with smoke as the fleet of cars took hits from the large-caliber guns. The scene behind us was one of mayhem as vehicles exploded and crashed. I saw a red Ford Galaxy drive off the road with black smoke pouring out of its engine, its bodywork shredded.

  I crawled backward to the hatch and dropped down into the rear compartment. Lucy had the rear door open and was watching the carnage on the motorway. She turned to me and grinned. “Here comes the cavalry to save the day.”

  Even Sam was smiling although he looked exhausted.

  The cars that had been chasing us were now no more than burning pieces of wreckage on the motorway.

  The Jeeps came alongside us on the opposite side of the road and the lead driver waved his hand in a downward motion at Tanya.

  “He wants us to stop,” she said. “Should I?”

  “After what they did to those cars, I don’t think we have a choice,” I answered.

  She slowed us down to a gentle stop. Lucy and I got out. The road surface was beginning to dry in the midday sun now. The rotting meat smell still hung in the air.

  The Jeeps halted on the other side of the barrier and three soldiers walked across to us while the others remained with their vehicles. The big guns were trained on us now. These soldiers might have saved our lives but they still didn’t know who we were and they were probably ready to kill us at a moment’s notice.

  Tanya came around the side of the Mastiff to join us. She had kept the engine running.

  The man in the lead looked to be in his late thirties. He had dark hair with some gray at the temples and a thin, hawkish face. As he got nearer to us, his eyes roamed over the Mastiff, Lucy and me, and our combat clothing. I guessed that he was probably trying to mentally process how two people who were obviously not military personnel were riding in an expensive piece of military hardware.

  I was wrong. He seemed to know exactly who we were. “I was told you lot were resourceful,” he said, “but where the bloody hell did you get this?” He pointed at the Mastiff.

  “You know who we are?” Lucy asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “You should have ID badges to show me if you are who I think you are.”

  We dug into our pockets and showed him our badges. He inspected them and nodded before handing them back to us.

  “I’m Captain Price,” he said. “We were told at Prometheus that you were coming. The brigadier sent us to meet you. It seems you had a welcoming committee of undesirables so we arrived just in time.”

  “We were about to deal with them ourselves,” Tanya said.

  He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I’m sure you were.”

  Then he walked to the rear of the Mastiff and looked inside, raising an eyebrow when he saw Sam.

  Price turned to face us again. “So tell me,” he said, “where the bloody hell is the vaccine?”

  23

  We told Price about the drones patrolling the coastline and the vaccine on our boats. He listened to our story of how we had commandeered the Mastiff and driven south on the motorway to get to Prometheus. He listened quietly and nodded when we were done.

  He pointed at Sam, who was sitting in his seat quietly, his face pale and sweaty.

  “And what’s wrong with this chap?” Price asked.

  “He’s been bitten,” I said.

  “I see. And I assume he’s already been vaccinated?”

  “Yes, we all have.”

  Price went to the rear door and looked in at Sam. “I suppose this is as good a test as any for the efficacy of the vaccine. I’m going to have to insist that you keep him in that harness until we get to Prometheus.”

  “Prometheus?” Tanya said. “We just told you that the vaccine is on our boats. Call off the drones so we can go back and get it.”

  Price pursed his lips, thinking. “That’s not my decision to make. Besides, the brigadier will want to see you. He’ll decide what happens regarding the vaccine and how we get it off your boats.”

  He paused as if considering something and then said, “We were told that you lot might know something about a problem we’ve been having at the camp. Something has been sneaking in at night and attacking our men. We’ve had a lot of good soldiers go missing.”

  “Why would we know anything about that?” I asked.

  “Because the men who went missing are probably the lucky ones. It’s what happened to the others that you might know something about. They were killed.” He paused and then added, “And their spines were torn out.”

  I felt Lucy stiffen next to me. My heart began to race. Was Jax at Camp Prometheus? In a way, it made sense. She had jumped overboard near the coast north of here. Camp Prometheus was the closest place that was densely-populated with living people. She must have been attracted to it like a fox attracted to a henhouse.

  “I can see from your faces that you know what I’m talking about,” Price said. “We were told that the creature is something to do with you people.”

  “She was one of us,” Tanya said, her voice sad as she remembered her friend.

  “Yes, so I gathered,” Price said. “I also heard that you faced one of these creatures before, at a lab in Scotland.”

  I nodded. “We did.”

  “Well then, you might have some ideas about how we can get rid of this one. We’ll escort you to the camp. It’s a good seventy miles south of here and involves a little jaunt past Carlisle. If y
ou’re interested in zombies, you’ll see plenty on that leg of our journey.” He turned to go back to the Jeeps but stopped, seemingly remembering something. Turning to face us again, he pointed at Sam and said, “And keep a close eye on him.”

  With that, he turned and marched back to the Jeeps with his two companions.

  “I can’t believe Jax is here,” Tanya whispered to me as we watched Price return to his vehicle.

  “And I don’t know why he thinks we’ll know how to deal with her,” I said. “We didn’t exactly deal with Vess.”

  “Let’s just get to the camp and convince this brigadier person to call off the drones,” Lucy said. “As soon as they do that, we can get back to the boats.”

  We got back into the Mastiff. Lucy sat in the back with Sam while I went up front with Tanya.

  Survivor Radio seemed to have a new presenter for the midday slot, a man named Chris Barnes. He wasn’t quite as upbeat as Sasha Green had been earlier but his voice was soothing with a low Scottish burr. “This one is for all you survivors out there,” he said. “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol began to play.

  We set off down the road with the Jeeps matching our speed on the opposite side of the motorway.

  “Do you trust them?” Tanya asked me.

  “No, I don’t. I’m grateful to them for saving us back there, and I respect the job they do, but I don’t trust them. There are very few people I trust in this world. I’ve always been that way.”

  She said, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” but she didn’t elaborate.

  A blue sign overhead told us that the motorway had become the M6 and we had fifteen miles to go before we hit the city of Carlisle.

  At our current speed, that would take us about twenty minutes.

  I turned in my seat to face Lucy. “How are things back there?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  Sam attempted a grin but it looked more like a grimace. I gave him a thumbs-up and turned to face front again. I had thought, maybe naively, that being vaccinated meant a zombie bite wouldn’t affect us at all. Now that I thought about it, that had been a simplistic view.

  A zombie bite passed the virus into the bloodstream of the victim. That virus was deadly to an unvaccinated human so of course it wasn’t going to be painless, even for a vaccinated person. A chemical reaction must be taking place in Sam’s body as his vaccinated blood fought the powerful virus.

  I just hoped it wouldn’t be too long before Sam’s body started to win the fight.

  Twenty minutes later, we reached the junction where a slip road led to Carlisle. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles here and I could see zombies through some of the windows. Tanya steered us around them expertly and said, “I wonder how long they’re going to stay trapped in those steel coffins?”

  I shrugged. “Probably until they rot away or someone comes to dispatch them.”

  In the distance, beyond the fields and trees, I could see some of the buildings that were part of the city. A column of black smoke was rising from somewhere in that direction, obscuring the view. I wondered if there was a single living soul in any of those buildings. Probably not. And if there was, they were as good as dead.

  “I wonder how they’re going to clear the cities,” I said. “We can vaccinate every living person in the country but someone is going to have to get rid of all the zombies that are already here. What about the cities? How many tens of thousands of undead must there be here, in this small city, never mind densely-populated places like Birmingham and London?”

  “Maybe they won’t ever clear everything,” Tanya said. “Maybe this is what life is going to be like from now on.”

  That surprised me. Tanya had always been adamant that the rest of the world was uninfected. Had she changed her mind now?

  The Jeeps were now on our side of the motorway. They had taken the exit at the northbound junction and turned around to join the southbound lanes. They stayed at a constant distance behind us.

  “Price said we would see plenty of zombies here,” Tanya said, “but I haven’t seen…” Her words trailed off as she gazed at the road ahead.

  I followed her gaze. The motorway was seething with zombies. They were shambling up and down the road while others staggered across the fields. Their movement seemed to have no purpose but when they heard and saw our vehicles, they began to come our way. The moan that came from so many rotted throats filled the air.

  “I don’t think we can drive through them,” Tanya said. “There are too many.” She brought us to a stop.

  Price’s Jeep pulled up alongside us and he motioned for Tanya to lower her window. She did and the rotten stench that entered the Mastiff was almost overwhelming. “We’ll clear a path,” Price said. “But you have to stick right behind us. The blue bastards will fill in any hole we make in no time. Got it?”

  Tanya nodded and put the window back up quickly.

  The Jeeps pulled in front of us and started to fire the big guns into the center of the zombie mass. The undead were blown apart and the Jeeps edged forward, still firing.

  Tanya accelerated so that we were directly behind the Jeeps, inching our way through the horde of rotting, seething flesh. The gunners in the Jeeps continued blowing the zombies apart in front and to the sides of their vehicles and moving forward. As we were the last in the line, the horde closed in around the rear of the Mastiff and banged on the door with their fists.

  At least these slow zombies wouldn’t climb aboard like the hybrids had. Instead, they pounded on the steel cage to no avail. They were never going to break in here.

  It took us fifteen minutes to clear a path through the horde. By the time we had driven beyond the last of them, the road behind us was full of zombies again as if we had never passed through.

  The Jeeps increased their speed and Tanya did likewise to keep up with them.

  I relaxed a little and closed my eyes, listening to Chris Barnes play a selection of songs by Coldplay, The Killers, Bastille, and Green Day. The lyrics of those songs spoke of a world that was gone now and might never come again. Even Tanya had her doubts that this apocalypse would ever end, and that worried me. Her outlook was usually optimistic. Not in an “everything is going to be okay” with rainbows and unicorns way, but in a pragmatic and realistic way. If she was thinking that a future without zombies was doubtful, then it probably was doubtful.

  I wasn’t sure if I could live the rest of my life like this, constantly running and fighting and searching for the people I loved. But I had no choice. I thought of the people living at the motorway services, too scared to go outside. They might as well already be dead. Soon, when they ran out of food and were too afraid to go out and find more, they would be dead.

  I might not be the most courageous person in the world, but I could never give up on life like they had. It just wasn’t in my nature.

  When I opened my eyes again, there were red signs that said SURVIVORS CAMP THIS WAY every mile or so.

  I turned to check on Sam. He was looking much better. The color had returned to his face and he didn’t look sweaty anymore. “How’s it going?” I asked him.

  “I’m fine, man. I felt a bit out of it earlier but I’m all good now.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, feeling a sense of relief. Even though Sam had been vaccinated, there had been a niggling voice in my head telling me that he might turn.

  Half an hour later, we drove past Killington Lake Motorway Services and came to a stop at a farm gate that led to a dirt road. A red sign had been erected by the gate. It said CAMP PROMETHEUS. One of Price’s men opened the gate to let us through. We followed the road past a tree-lined lake. The area was surrounded by rolling hills and would probably be picturesque if not for the huge fenced camp that had been erected there.

  Just like at Camp Apollo, there were guard towers and huts. Unlike Apollo, the military huts and the civilian tents were in separate fenced-off compounds. The gate to the military area was opened and we drove through.

&nbs
p; Another thing that made this place very different to Apollo was the number of people in the compound. The place was buzzing with activity. Mechanics worked on vehicles in a large garage, a group of soldiers was engaged in some sort of briefing, listening to a female soldier who was standing in front of a whiteboard and pointing out various areas on a diagram. There were troops jogging around the compound in white tops and camo trousers, being led by a physical training instructor who was barking insults at them.

  Tanya parked the Mastiff in an area that was pointed out by one of Price’s men. A number of other vehicles were parked here, from civilian cars to armored personnel carriers.

  We got out and stood, watching the hive of activity. The thing that caught my immediate attention was the smell of beef and gravy coming from the cookhouse.

  Price waved at us over to join him. When we reached him, he said, “I’m going to take you to see the brigadier. You,” he said, pointing at Sam, “are going to see the medic.”

  “Hey, I’m fine, man,” Sam protested.

  “It wasn’t a suggestion,” Price said. “My men will escort you there now.”

  Two of the soldiers stepped forward to escort Sam to the medic. I assumed that “escort” was a euphemism for “take you there, by force if necessary”.

  Sam complied and told us he’d see us later.

  Price said, “Come on,” and marched off down the wide graveled area between the huts.

  I had to almost jog to keep up with his pace. He took us to a hut that had the name Brigadier James Gordon stenciled in black on the green door. Price knocked.

  “Come in.” The voice was strong and confident.

  Price opened the door and ushered us inside. He followed us in and closed the door behind him.

  The room was a simple office with a large desk.

  The brigadier was in his late fifties, maybe older, but he looked fit and solid beneath his uniform, even sitting behind the desk.

  Price said, “These are the people from Alpha One, Sir. Lucy Hoffmeister, Alex Harley, and Tanya Lee.”

  The brigadier eyed us with a questioning look. “Are you the people who were supposed to bring me a shipment of vaccine?”