Breakout

by Craig Jones

  Pants On Fire Press

  Winter Garden Toronto London

  Madrid São Paulo New Delhi Tokyo

  Breakout: The Zombie Apocalypse, Book 2

  Pants On Fire Press, Winter Garden 34787

  Text copyright © 2014 by Craig Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher, Pants On Fire Press. For information contact Pants On Fire Press.

  All names, places, incidents, and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Illustrations and art copyright © 2014 by Pants On Fire Press

  Visit us at www.PantsOnFirePress.com

  eBook covert art design by Pamela Sinclair, It Girl Designs

  eBook dsigned by David M. F. Powers

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content).

  First edition: 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

  eISBN: 978-1625175687

  US Softcover ISBN: 978-0692210031

  This one is for my friends.

  The ones I kill.

  In this book, of course.

  And if you survive this one, I’ll get you in the next one.

  1

  I scanned the street below me, searching for signs of the undead.

  Nothing.

  Nothing except for bodies strewn across the pavement, over smashed and abandoned cars. My breathing was short and shallow, fast like my heartbeat, which pulsed in my ears and threatened to make my head burst. I picked up the binoculars and brought them to my eyes, looking further ahead. More and more, it seemed, this was the scene that greeted us as we searched for sustenance beyond the secure walls of the stadium.

  “All clear,” I whispered, laying down the binoculars.

  “Don’t tell me,” said the voice beside me. “I can see that as much as you can. Get on the radio and tell the guys below.”

  I glanced across at Chris. I couldn’t see his face, as he was staring down the telescopic sights of his sniper rifle. He was as nervous and scared as I was, but that was only part of the reason for his sharp tone. Chris hadn’t been happy about the role I’d been given within his unit. He didn’t see the need for any civilian support. The British Army was considered the best for a reason, and as far as he was concerned, I simply did not fit the mould.

  We were three stories up in a building within the safe zone, an area that the soldiers had cleared of zombies in the last month. Slowly but surely they had expanded our perimeter, first checking the stores and houses for any of the creatures that held us captive, and then putting barriers in place to make their advance towards us just that more difficult.

  I picked up the walkie-talkie and squeezed the speak button.

  “You are clear to go,” I said before retrieving the binoculars from the window sill.

  Heavy footsteps echoed up from the silent street below, and six soldiers in fully armored combat fatigues came into view. They moved forward with precision in pairs, guns raised and ready. As the lead troops reached the next spot of cover, whether it was a car rolled on its side or a shop doorway, they would pause and signal the rest of the team to advance up to their position.

  “Matt!” Chris hissed. “Don’t watch them! Keep your eyes ahead. Your eyes are their eyes!”

  Chris Garlick was the unit’s top marksman and I owed him my life. When I had fled the Millennium Stadium, the last safe place in South Wales, on my ill-planned rescue mission, he had picked off the marauding horde of zombies as they had chased me to my Range Rover. It had also been his finger on the trigger when I returned, not with Nick and his whole family but just with his son, Robbie. Chris had refused the initial order to shoot us down when he recognized that we were still human. The mere fact that he had saved my life didn’t mean he necessarily liked me though.

  I brought the binoculars back to my face and scanned left, right, and as far ahead as I could see.

  “Still clear,” I said into the radio, and out of the corner of my vision I saw Chris give a tokenistic nod of his bald head, the closest indication I would get of his approval.

  The soldiers reached their goal; a small but—we hoped—well stocked convenience store. The stadium still had plenty of supplies, food, and drink, but the general didn’t want us getting to the point of desperation. He had stared right at me when he told us that desperation made people do reckless things. What he perceived as my desperate action, my mistake of leaving the stadium, was not going to be easily forgotten.

  The lead soldier kicked the locked door of the shop until it caved in after his fourth attempt. The noise of his stamps rang out like gunshots, bouncing back and forth across the walls of the street. If we could hear the sound so clearly from up high, then so could any of the undead out there.

  I alternated between the binoculars and my own true vision, quickly homing in on any movements below. The wind blew back towards me and Chris, whistling as it carried litter and debris across the long, deserted road. Every time a plastic bag or a newspaper shifted its position, my head flicked toward it. I held my breath until I could be sure whatever it was presented no threat to our men on the ground.

  One newspaper got trapped in the arms of a corpse that lay spread eagled in the middle of the road. I could clearly make out the hole in its forehead where it had been shot and the arc of dark red goo that had dried on the ground behind it. Its face was grey, its eyes wide open but unseeing. The suit it wore was ragged and torn down one arm where the businessman it had once been had been attacked, tackled to the floor, bitten. Transformed into one of the flesh-eaters.

  I dragged my eyes away as four of the soldiers slowly entered the shop, assault rifles at the ready. They had no idea what they were going to find inside and weren’t prepared to take any chances. They had orders to shoot on sight and run like hell. Two remained at the door, crouched low, weapons poised. Each wore headphones directly linked to the radio I carried.

  “Still clear,” I informed them, keeping to the script I had been told to use. Simple instructions, no need to elaborate. Either it was clear or it wasn’t.

  Chris lifted his head away from his rifle. I leaned in to hear him.

  “Do you see it?” he asked, his voice hardly audible. “How they’re dead but not shot?”

  I snapped the binoculars back to my eyes, the street below jumping quickly into sharp focus. I tracked from body to body. Most of the cadavers were disfigured. Most were the same as the guy in the suit, with a hole in their head and that corona of blood splatter on the ground behind them. But some were lying there with no apparent gunshot wound.

  “People who didn’t come back as…them?” I asked tentatively.

  “Nah.” Chris shook his head. “Check out the one by the red car…and the one on the corner…”

  I found the bodies he was describing, and there was no doubt that whatever had occupied those skin-covered shells most recently had not been human. The woman by the red car was missing a hand, and the old man at the corner looked like he’d been carrying half of his intestines in his arms before he finally collapsed to the dirt. Even as he lay there, truly dead, he continued to cradle his innards like he was holding an armful of spaghetti bolognaise. Both had dark, almost muddy stains around their mouths. I’d seen that enough to recognize long-dried blood.

  “Do you think—?”

  “They’re dying?” Chris interrupted. “Screw what I think… It’s what the general thinks. I just hope to God that he’s right. And seeing them dead with no headshot? I think that speaks for itself, don’t you?”

  I moved the binoculars from body to body,
now starting to differentiate more and more between those which had been shot and the ones that had just dropped dead in the street. I’d had hope before and had learned that sometimes hope was not enough. But this was more concrete, something to cling to, a hope that maybe we were going to make it through this after all.

  The radio crackled.

  “We’ve hit the jackpot, boys!”

  A soldier emerged from the shop pushing a trolley full of food. A second troop followed him, pulling a cart laden with cans and boxes.

  “Think back to the last one we saw up on its feet,” Chris continued. “It looked like it hadn’t eaten for weeks. It was thin, sluggish, like it had no energy.”

  I closed my eyes and bit down on my bottom lip. All I could see was Danny, tied to the rafters of the shed at the edge of our garden.

  No matter how much or how little I fed him, he still lost weight. I was convinced that if I upped the amount I was giving him then he would start to look more, well, more human. But instead, he continued to fade away. In the darkest of nights, I believed that he was, in fact, rotting from the inside out, like he was host to a huge tumor that was draining his body of its vital nutrients.

  “They’re starving to death. That’s what the general says, and that’s what I think too,” Chris said confidently. “We’re their only food source and we’re either dead, one of them, or locked away safe in the stadium.”

  I brought the binoculars back to my face so Chris couldn’t see the tears that welled in my eyes. Every time I thought of Danny, I was filled with guilt. Not just for what I had done to my brother, but for what my actions had meant for the rest of humanity. I lifted the lenses to look ahead of the soldiers as they continued to drag more and more full carts out into the street. Litter breezed across the pavement, first snagging on the base of a broken streetlight and then around the denim-clad leg of a…

  I snatched up the radio.

  “We have one,” I said.

  2

  I tracked the creature as the soldiers below us silently shuffled back into the safe confines of the shop. Beside me, Chris chambered a round into his sniper rifle and locked his eye over the scope.

  “Talk to us, kid,” said the hushed voice of the lead officer on the street.

  I zoomed out, wanting to see the whole picture before I spoke. The last thing those guys needed right now was for someone, for me, to make a mistake—to focus on the single zombie when there could be a hundred of them creeping towards us. The binoculars trembled in my hands and I tried to breathe deeply, slowly, with more control. Whenever I saw one of those things, it was like seeing them for the first time all over again, at the gates of my home.

  I couldn’t blink. I could feel my eyes drying out, but I couldn’t take them off of him. His left arm gripped one of the metal struts of the gate. His right hung limply at his side, severed at the elbow. It hadn’t been cut off; it had been torn away, and the ragged flesh of what was left of his bicep was covered in black, congealed blood. A shard of bone poked through the mangled mass of flesh.

  The zombie staggered along the street. It was male, wearing just a pair of blood-smeared jeans, and was what the soldiers had started calling “a classic Romero zombie.” Slow-moving, thoughtless beyond the desire to feed. One leg dragged behind as it stepped miserably around a decapitated body. It kicked the severed head in front of it as it advanced, its mouth moving up and down, and its wasted jaw muscles were prominent in its gaunt visage. The skin was mottled, the eyes that dead grey I knew all too well, and although I couldn’t hear the sounds that emanated from its mouth, I knew what they were. I heard them every night in my dreams.

  “MMMMMMMMMMM.”

  I took a moment to search the rest of the street and saw no other movement.

  “Lone Romero,” I said into the walkie-talkie. “Two hundred yards to your north, moving in your direction.”

  “Roger that,” the lead officer, Bateman, replied. “Chris?”

  “I have the shot,” the sniper next to me replied, subtly adjusting his stance.

  “Wait!”

  The single word was out of my mouth before I knew I was going to say it.

  “What do you see, kid?” The question from Captain Bateman came through the radio with just the smallest sense of unease. Chris didn’t look up from his rifle, but I could see him shaking his head.

  “There’s only one of them…but gunfire could bring a whole lot more down on us,” I blurted.

  “Bring it on!” Chris barked. “The more the better. I could do with the shooting practice.”

  “Yeah, you could! But not while my unit is down here, you don’t,” Bateman retorted. “Hold your fire and maintain visuals. We’ll deal with the Romero. I don’t want a bunch of Remakes on my tail if I’ve got to run for it.”

  “Thanks, kid.” Chris didn’t try to hide his sarcasm. “I need some hits to get me back on top of the scoring charts, and bulls-eying Remakes scores double.”

  The Army had coined the name Remakes for the faster, more agile zombies of the second epidemic. I had seen both versions of Dawn of the Dead, watched them with Danny, of course. He preferred the original while I liked the newer one. I’d just never expected to be living it.

  One of the soldiers had seen the films too, and he made the reference as a joke. The name had stuck. It was all bravado, tongue-in-cheek gallows humor to hide the fact that there was no quick fix to stop the fast ones. I’d seen first-hand just how quick they could be.

  I glanced over my shoulder when I heard the thing pursuing me bellow in anger and jump in one single motion from the road to the top of the wall. If it hadn’t been raining, it would have caught me there and then. But it had been, and its feet whipped out from underneath it as it landed on the damp stone. It clipped the wall on the way down, the sports coat fanning out like a cape as he fell inside the boundary, landing on one foot, using the other knee for stability on the chippings.

  And to me, they weren’t Remakes. To me, they were what I’d made.

  Two soldiers slipped silently out of the shop and advanced on the Romero. One of them snagged a shopping cart and walked it straight towards the undead. The other skirted to the opposite side of the street and unsheathed his knife. On seeing the movement of humans—the arrival of food in front of it—the zombie became more animated. Its hands reached out towards the soldier with the trolley and, for the first time, Chris and I could hear that grotesque, guttural growl.

  “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.”

  Its body was waifish, arms thin and reedy and yet its teeth were bright, white and clean. They snapped together as the soldier approached, keeping the trolley between the two of them. The creature tried to step left and right, desperate to get nearer to the soldier, but it was nudged back by the cart at every turn. I moved my attention to the other soldier, who had worked his way quietly behind the zombie and had raised his knife.

  I looked away as he brought the blade down in a firm and swift motion, only glancing back just as the zombie slumped to the ground, its eyes wide open and staring. The soldier wiped his knife clean on his combat trousers and slipped it back into place on his hip.

  “Good call, kid,” Bateman called through the radio. “Now get down here. Let’s cordon off this area and get the supplies back to the stadium.”

  I rocked back onto my heels, pleased with my input into the situation, but as I watched Chris stow his sniper rifle with stiff movements, I was worried I may have just made myself an enemy.

  3

  Chris didn’t speak a word to me as we made our way down to the street and regrouped with the ground unit. They had already started to move cars into the road to create another barricade, and Captain Bateman was waiting for us. He was tall, over six feet, and had a thick moustache. He spoke in an eloquent way I’d always associated with military officers, the way they always sounded in the movies. He reminded me of Captain Mitchell, the soldier who had led the Army as they cleared Usk of zombies during the first outbreak.

 
; “Once the cars are in place, we’ll get back to the stadium,” Bateman informed us. “Good work up there, kid.”

  Before I had a chance to reply, Chris jumped in.

  “Sir, I had the shot. If we’re going to start taking orders off civilians, then—”

  “Listen to me, Private,” Bateman admonished. “We need all the help we can get. This has gone beyond military and civilians. We’re in this together, and I’d rather have to deal with one Romero than twenty Remakes. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir… But we don’t know there’re more of them close by. And, surely, the more we can wipe out the better!”

  “But not by putting my men at risk! Now make yourself useful and move that car.” He shook his head as Chris went to his task, then he turned to face me. “The truth of the matter is that you’ve had first-hand experience of these things in the field, Hawkins, and as far as I’m concerned, you made the right call.”

  “Sir!” shouted one of the soldiers. “Three more of them!”

  The zombies ambled out of a side road and reached out towards us with that bone-chilling noise pouring from their mouths. Chris pulled a car into the final space in the barrier and hurried out, pulling his rifle off his shoulder and aiming at the undead.

  “Garlick! You fire a single shot and you can stay out here with them,” Bateman bellowed. “Just let them get snared up on the cars and we can take them out quietly.”

  The soldiers waited and watched the three zombies approach, their arms outstretched and their mouths working hungrily as they came. Finally, they reached the blockade of cars and came to an abrupt halt. They staggered from foot to foot, still trying to advance on us, blood-encrusted fingers grabbing at fresh air. All they could see was their prey and their mindless need to feed drove them on. One by one, Bateman’s troops readied their knives, awaiting his orders.