Breakout

by Craig Jones

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” I told everyone.

  I tucked in behind our driver as he walked across to where Rogers, Bateman, and Redcliffe were talking. A few of the other soldiers were gathered around but most had fanned out and were scanning the area around us through binoculars.

  “I want your minds on the job,” Rogers instructed. “And don’t let anyone off the buses. I don’t want a repeat of…”

  When he saw me, his eyes narrowed and an index finger moved to the scar on his forehead.

  “Ah, what the hell?” he said. “You might actually be needed, come and listen in. Just make sure this that you keep your mouth shut and don’t repeat a word to the rest of them.”

  If nothing else, he knew I could be trusted to do that. After all, I’d not said a word about the risks to human life that the so-called cure brought when he’d given people the option to stay. There wasn’t much to tell anyway, except that Redcliffe and Bateman would ride on and scope out the situation at the train station. Rogers was clear that he expected there to be a zombie presence.

  “There’ll be other packs,” he told us. “Just like the one in Wales. Just because we killed the leaders back there doesn’t make me feel comfortable at all. Whatever we find up there will have its own superiors calling the shots. Organizing them. Having them ready for whoever arrives.”

  The bikes rode off and I returned to the bus. The waiting was always the worst. We had plenty of time to wonder if we would ever see them again. It didn’t take long for them to come back on this occasion. We were used to bad news. Hearing that we’d have to make a massive diversion, finding out that the easy route was blocked. This time was different. Worse. The worst.

  “The roads are clear until we get right to the Channel Tunnel depot but then the roads are grid locked,” Bateman said, explaining what they’d been able to find out. “It’s a mess. They must have been attacked while they were queuing to board a train. The buses will only get as close as half a mile to the depot.”

  “Well that’s closer than I expected,” Rogers answered defiantly. “I expected--”

  Redcliffe cut him off.

  “That’s not the worst of it,” he said. His face was pale and his hands trembled. “There’s a hill that overlooks the trains…it’s packed with those things. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Just stood there waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?” Rogers snapped.

  Redcliffe looked on the verge of tears. He couldn’t find his words. He was a big man, strong and muscular, but Rogers’s glare was making him wilt like a vase of flowers without fresh water. He swallowed and looked across at Bateman.

  “Us,” the captain said. “I don’t know how, but it’s like they know we’re coming.”

  41

  What was left of our convoy crept in as close as it could to the Channel Tunnel train station until like so many cars before us we go snarled up in the traffic jam. It was late afternoon by the time the engines were extinguished and the sky was filled with low hanging clouds, black and heavy.

  “I’m scared,” Robbie said, pulling himself closer into Jenny.

  I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was afraid too, and I didn’t need to glance around the bus to know the same expression would be etched across everyone else’s visage as well. This is what it all came down to now. Two miles or so on foot. The difference between life and death. Freedom or a horrific and painful death. Jenny’s gaze sought me out.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  I bit my bottom lip. There was only one answer I could give and that was that we had to go on. If the general made it across to France with the cure, then even if we decided to stay, even if we found ourselves another safe haven like the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff had been for us, then we were dead anyway. What other option did any of us have? There was no way I could wrestle the vial of serum from Rogers’s grasp and smash it. I’d end up with a bullet in my head before I could snatch my last breath. The fact of the matter was that the final train out of Great Britain under the British Channel was the only choice. The risk that came with that choice was being out in the open if the zombie horde decided to swoop upon us.

  “We can’t stay behind,” I said, trying to sound confident. “You were lucky, Jenny. We were even luckier being in the stadium. The chances of us finding somewhere safe to hold out are small. And I don’t think anyone is going to come back and rescue us. Not this time.”

  The rest of the bus was silent. Everyone was filled with nervous trepidation. The vehicle had been a safer place than any of us could have wished for, but now the time had come for us to leave that behind and walk into our very own version of Hell.

  Our driver, Mooney, stood up and turned to face us.

  “This is as far as we’re going,” he announced. “General Rogers wants to address everyone before we head towards the terminal.”

  He paused, uncomfortable with his own choice of words.

  Terminal.

  As in “the end.” While most of us hoped that the journey on the train would lead to a new beginning, the proximity of death was suffocating.

  “Sorry,” Mooney continued. “Follow me. Keep the noise to a minimom. Don’t worry everyone, it’ll all be okay.”

  His tone of voice was a contradiction to his words. I wasn’t sure how many other people on the bus had noticed but his hands didn’t just tremble. They shook as he spoke. Was it fear of the zombies or anticipation of our escape? I looked down into my lap where my hands were clasped together. I knew if I uncurled my fingers then my hands would shake too. And I knew that it would be because of absolute terror. I’d faced the undead several times over. I’d seen what they could do and still I was fearful I’d freeze. Most of the people in the convoy hadn’t been up close and personal with the creatures and I wondered how they would react if they suddenly had a hungry Remake hounding them.

  The bus emptied slowly and we re-grouped in a grassy picnic area just off the road. The soldiers and the passengers of the second bus were waiting for us. Rogers, Bateman and Redcliffe were standing at the front of the group, and when Mooney signaled to his general that everyone was in place, he climbed up onto one of the wooden benches and began to address us.

  “We have come so far, and now we are this close,” he began. “But this last journey is not without peril. The vehicles are useless to us now, and without them we lose a great deal of firepower. We’d never have made it out of the university if not for the heavy artillery. So now we have our choice…”

  We had all drawn in close to him, so his voice was not ringing out in its usual booming tones.

  “Or rather…” he continued. “You have your choice. I have no such decision to make.”

  He touched the bulge in the breast pocket of his combat jacket.

  “It is my duty to ensure that this cure makes it safely on board that train. The rest of you, well, you get to choose if you come with us or leave. You can take a bus. You can take all of the supplies. All I ask is that you leave at the same time as we do and try to draw the zombies away with you. Honk the horn. Holler out of the windows. Anything that may give us an extra one percent chance of making it.”

  He tapped the case holding the cure a second time.

  “Anything that means this gets across to France.”

  I shuddered. A tickle of ice-cold water ran down my spine. I knew what staying would mean.

  “This is all that matters now,” Rogers told us. “If you see me killed then take this from me. Pick up the baton and run with it. We must never stop until all of those creatures are dead! We know they are dying already, getting slow, getting hungrier and hungrier every day. They are no match for us! No match for us at all!”

  His words had lost some of their power over the group. Ever since he’d had the women executed, people had more fear than respect for him. Down at the front of the group I saw a hand slowly rise into the air.

  “Yes, Soldier?” Bateman asked.

  “Sir, there�
��s a rumor that the zombies…” he trailed off, and I could see that it was Private Davis. He looked exhausted, broken. “That they know we are coming, sir.”

  Rogers shook his head.

  “You choose to raise this now?” the general barked. He swept an open hand in the direction of the assembly. “When I’m trying to rally us, to lift morale? You…”

  In an instant, Rogers leapt from the table and stormed towards Davis. Although both Redcliffe and Bateman moved to intercept him, neither was fast enough and Rogers’s right fist smashed powerfully into Davis’s face, knocking him to the ground. The crowd surged in all directions at once. Some people, it seemed, wanted to witness the brutal beating, like it was the aftermath of a car crash. Others tried to back away while most were jostled left and right.

  I could hear the thumps and the muffled grunts from both men as they brawled on the floor, but I knew there’d only be one winner. Finally, Bateman and Redcliffe pulled Rogers to his feet and off Davis. The general had a wide and wicked grin plastered from ear to ear. One of the civilians helped Davis up. His face was covered in blood and his nose was squashed against his left cheek, obviously broken. Rogers lunged at him again, a bloodied fist arcing through the air, forcing Bateman to restrain him with more aggression.

  “Let me go, Captain,” Rogers ordered, his voice unsettlingly calm.

  Davis touched his face, winced at the pain and then examined the red stain on his finger-tips.

  “You’ve… you’ve given me a death sentence,” he accused. “They…the zombies…they’ll smell me coming. You’ve--”

  Rogers shook free of Redcliffe and Bateman, drawing his handgun in a smooth motion. Before anyone could stop him, he held the muzzle of the gun against Davis’s forehead.

  “Then maybe I should just execute you now,” he hissed. “Put you out of your misery?”

  Everyone around me froze and in the silence that fell, all we could hear was Davis’s desperate breathing. A tear leaked from his left eye and cleaned a track through the blood on his cheek.

  Without moving the gun, Rogers fished the case holding the cure from his pocket.

  “Because this is all that matters. Not you, not them.”

  He shoved the gun into Davis’s face, sending the soldier tumbling backwards. Then Rogers spun on his heels and aimed the gun into the crowd.

  “And any of you who get in my way? I’ll put a bullet in you without a second thought.”

  42

  Davis left. He took one of the buses and had managed to round up about twenty civilians, and two other soldiers to join him. Bateman, Redcliffe, and Rogers himself headed out on a final reconnaissance mission as a misty dusk had fallen across the sky. The rest of the soldiers had either been maintaining a patrol around the perimeter or helping with rest of us distribute food amongst the survivors.

  I’d been sitting in the picnic area with Robbie and Jenny when the bus engine roared to life and began to drive away from us. A couple of the soldiers attempted to give chase but, their raised voices were quickly hushed.

  “We have to stop them,” I heard someone demand.

  “You keep shouting like that and the zombies could hear you. We don’t know how far away they are.”

  Robbie bristled, his eyes suddenly becoming wide.

  “They don’t know how--”

  I reached over the table and took one of his hands in mine.

  “They don’t know how far their voices will travel,” I said soothingly. “That’s what they mean. When there were cars and animals in the fields, then those other sounds would block it out. But now it’s so quiet, and we can’t be sure how far one loud voice will travel.”

  Jenny nodded approvingly. I may have been talking complete rubbish, but it seemed to distract Robbie from his worries.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. He looked up at the darkening sky. “There are not even any birds in the sky. And I can’t remember the last time I saw any cows or horses in the fields we’ve driven past.”

  He carried on speaking, but I faded him out, backtracking through my own memories to check if Robbie’s observation was true. Because if it was, then things could be very different for us. I excused myself and went to find Mooney.

  “Have you seen any livestock?” I asked him. He was cleaning his gun and had the parts lain out in front of him on a pristine cloth. He oiled each part and snapped it back into place with pace and precision.

  “Livestock?”

  “Yeah…sheep…cows…anything in the fields?”

  He dropped a piece of polished metal from his fingertips.

  “No! No, I haven’t,” he said, losing his poise. “Do you know what this means?”

  “I think I know what it might mean,” I replied.

  “I have to tell the general!”

  I put my hands on his shoulders, trying to make sure he wouldn’t run off.

  “Remember how he reacted to Davis?” I asked. “Rogers is convinced the zombies are starving to death, and he doesn’t like his authority being challenged. If one of us starts spouting about the undead hunting farm animals, he’s not going to be happy. It’ll make him look--”

  “Make him look what?”

  Mooney and I froze. We’d been so intense in our conversation that we hadn’t heard approaching footsteps. I turned around, expecting to be in a whole world of trouble.

  “Well?” Captain Bateman asked.

  I sighed, the sickness in my stomach not going away all together, but at least I hadn’t sprayed him in vomit.

  “Sir,” I said, my voice both relieved and terrified still. “I don’t think that the slow zombies are the ones dying from hunger.”

  “Go on.”

  “Because I don’t think they are dying of hunger. I think they’ve learned to feed on animals since we--well, us humans-- are in short supply.”

  Bateman looked like I had puked on him and then punched him in the stomach for good measure.

  “Then all the zombies up on that hill over the train station might be Remakes…” Bateman was talking to himself rather than to us. His forehead was creased with worry lines. “Let me tell the general. Good work but keep this to yourselves.”

  “Are there really hundreds of them on the hill?” Mooney asked.

  “More,” Bateman replied. “We’re going to need every soldier we’ve got.”

  Suddenly Rogers’s voice filled the air with expletives.

  “We have a few less soldiers,” I told a confused looking Bateman. “Davis took one of the buses while you were gone, and I think the general has just found out.”

  When darkness finally fell, it was like someone had draped a black cloth over us. The clouds in the sky meant that we didn’t even have the moonlight to guide us. Rogers demanded that all lights were kept extinguished and had been meticulous in his preparations for the final leg of our exodus. We’d be travelling in groups of about ten, with just two soldiers per group. I was with Jenny and Robbie, and one of the soldiers allocated to us was Mooney. We were to be the fourth group to head out, with Rogers insisting on a fifteen minute gap between each departure.

  Once night had fully crept in, our destination was clear. With audible “pops” even from our distance away, floodlights were turned on around the entrance to the train station. It gave us our direction but there was also concern that the glow would attract the zombies like moths.

  “There are two hundred UN troops waiting within that bubble of light,” Rogers told us, trying his best to raise the clearly dented morale of the survivors. “Nothing is getting in there except for us. If you manage to get to where the soldiers can see you then you’ve made it because they’ll shoot down anything that comes after you.”

  Captain Bateman was leading the first group, and he gave me a deep nod as he headed out, quietly slipping between the rows of abandoned cars. Fifteen minutes later, Rogers himself led the second pod of people. The waiting was almost painful. To be still in the darkness was unnerving, but knowing that soon we’d be creeping throu
gh the last parking garage in Britain made the waiting feel like bliss. Finally, Mooney gave us the signal and it was our turn.

  He led us to the left side of the road and past the first few vehicles and then he cut into the middle of the road, so we had high-sided trucks covering our movements. I followed him closely, my left hand behind me, holding onto Robbie’s right. Jenny tucked herself in close to Robbie, and I saw she’d taken a grip of the back of his jacket. She was never going to let him out of her sight again.

  The only sounds were from our feet as we scurried along the road. We could neither see nor hear the groups in front or behind us. I kept Mooney’s back right in front of me, keeping my head low when we passed cars in case the zombies were looking our way. I couldn’t see the hill they were massed on, had not been able to try to work out just how many there were and I was glad for that. If the threat they posed was more visual, I may have been frozen to the floor, but I was able to progress inch by inch in Mooney’s footsteps.

  Mooney raised a hand and we all stopped. He turned to face us.

  “It’s not too far now,” he whispered. He pointed towards where the glow of floodlights stole away the black of the night. I could just make out the very top of the scaffolding that the spot lights had been mounted upon. “We’ll go left here and loop around before we head directly for the station entrance.”