by Craig Jones
I nodded my agreement and assumed everyone behind me had done the same because Mooney gave us the thumbs up and began to walk again.
Then the lights went out.
43
Gunfire and screams filled the air. It was becoming the soundtrack of our lives.
Despite Mooney urging us to hold our positions, the people behind us barged past and began to flee away in the darkness. One of the women stumbled to the floor and no one paused to help her. She was trampled and yelped out in pain. I dashed to her and pulled her up onto her feet.
“Stay with us,” I said, but she raked her fingernails down my face and she ran off. I tried to snare the back of her coat but my fingers failed to find purchase.
“She’s going the wrong way,” Jenny breathed, her arms wrapped around Robbie, whose head was buried in against his mother’s stomach.
“I don’t think there is a right way anymore,” Mooney said, lifting his rifle up to his shoulder. He glanced left and right then dropped to his knees.
“Get down,” he implored through gritted teeth.
We all hit the deck as footsteps flapped past just a car’s width away. Automatic gunfire rattled out somewhere behind us, and something exploded a hundred yards in front of us. The darkness blossomed with an orange radiance that allowed me to see the sweat running down Mooney’s face.
“What was that?” Jenny asked.
“A stray bullet into a gas tank, most likely,” Mooney told her. “Stay down. I’m going to take a look.”
Slowly, he rose to his feet, gun raised and at the ready. From my prone position, I watched as he surveyed the area around us, his eyes following the direction of his gun as he turned a full three hundred and sixty degree circle. He glanced down at me.
“I think we’re--”
The zombie hit him in the chest, diving over the car. It drove Mooney backwards into the truck at his rear, and as their fall was abruptly halted, Mooney was able to squeeze off a burst of fire. The zombie’s head exploded. Its skull flipped backwards from its head, and it slumped to the ground on top of the soldier. I scampered across on my knees and pulled the zombie’s carcass off Mooney, using all my strength to toss it aside. Mooney sat on the floor with his chin to his chest, covered in blood. His breathing was noisy, distressed like he was suffering an asthma attack.
“You’re okay,” I told him, hoping he would calm down.
Mooney shook his head.
“You got it, it’s--”
He lifted his head and blood spurted from a wide and ragged bite in his throat. It splashed on the tarmac and saturated his green shirt.
“Robbie, look away,” I heard Jenny say and then she stepped over me, bringing the butt of Mooney’s gun down onto the crown of his head time and time again. When there was nothing left to smash, she let the gun slip through her fingers and it rattled onto the ground.
“He would have changed,” I heard her say as she helped me to my feet and although I knew that she was right, I couldn’t believe how brutal she’d been.
“I couldn’t risk him turning, not when he was so near to my son,” she said, and then I understood. She thought she’d lost her family forever and now that she had a chance to make sure that Robbie was at least safe, she would do whatever she had to. And more.
I picked up the gun, not feeling comfortable with it in my hands, but knew that I may need it. I tried to get my bearings, hoping to spot the top of the scaffolding once more, but it was difficult with just the flickering light from the fire to see by.
“This way,” I said. “I think.”
“I think so too,” said Robbie.
We advanced slowly along the road. We were definitely moving in the right direction. The sound of gunfire was growing more intense, and that told me we were getting closer to the train station where the two hundred soldiers were waiting to protect us. The road opened up into a massive parking lot and just about five hundred yards away, I could see the muzzles of machine guns flaring as a wall of zombies charged at the entrance to the channel tunnel.
Each zombie that fell was replaced with another, but the troops were well organized and were comfortably holding their position. I saw a soldier in a blue helmet scramble up the scaffolding carrying a cable. It looked to me like they were trying to get the lights back on.
“There are too many of the undead out there! We can’t head straight in,” I told Jenny. “We need to loop around like Mooney suggested. Get away from the front and see if there’s a side entrance, maybe.”
Jenny looked in the direction I’d indicated. Massive high-sided trucks and mobile homes would provide us with plenty of cover, but if we ran into even one of those things then we’d have nowhere to go. She nodded, and I pointed for her and Robbie to move. I lifted the gun to my shoulder as Mooney had done and advanced after them.
We moved silently between the high siders, the noise of the battle muted by the vast vehicles. After about a hundred yards, I paused as a stone skittered into the narrow pathway behind me. I spun, finger already squeezing the trigger, and a single Romero staggered out from behind a truck. It looked back at me, wobbling from foot to foot. I’d never seen one so unbalanced, and then I saw that it had no arms to help maintain its equilibrium.
“MMMMMMMMMMMMM,” it groaned.
I aimed the gun and then stopped myself from firing.
“Move,” I said instead. “Let’s get away from it. The gunfire may just draw more of them to us.”
I ushered Jenny and Robbie in front of me, speeding up when I glanced over my shoulder and saw that our new friend had been joined by two other Romeroes.
“They’re stalking us!” Jenny said shrilly as we turned left and ran through a row of mobile homes.
“Check the doors,” I said. “Let’s hide. They’re not like the Remakes, they won’t search for us.”
Robbie and Jenny tried door handles as we moved and I kept the gun raised, ready for when the zombies rounded the corner.
“This one!” Robbie exalted. “It’s already been forced!”
It was a massive Winnebago, and Robbie was right. The door had already been forced open, but I could see that it would be easy to jam shut from the inside. At least we’d have something between us and our enemies.
“Get in,” I said, and Robbie and Jenny threw themselves inside. “Stay low, don’t go near the windows.”
I stepped up into the Winnebago and closed the door. Although the locking mechanism was broken, it clicked into place and I was able to lock it using a dead bolt.
“Someone else has been in here,” Jenny whispered.
“Good, because they made it easy for us. Now be quiet until the zombies pass us by.”
Sitting with my back to the door and the rifle cradled in my hands, I listened as the Romeroes moaned their way past us. For a little while at least, we were safe.
44
The Winnebago was huge. We were sat on the floor of the living room. There were two comfortable looking seating areas flanked by a broad table which Jenny and Robbie had crawled under. Jenny cradled her son in her arms, and they were both gently, almost silently, sobbing. A vast flat screen television was mounted on a wall between two windows; the curtains of which were pulled shut. The only uncovered glass was the frosted pane of the entrance door. A kitchen ran along the wall to my left with a cooker and a refrigerator unit, and towards the back were three doors. One had a sign on it that indicated it was a toilet, and I assumed the other two were sleeping quarters. At the front was the driver’s compartment with a deep bucket seat and more buttons and switches than the Starship Enterprise.
I froze as I heard footsteps outside the door. I could only see their distorted silhouettes through the glass the door, but I was sure the number of zombies out there had swelled beyond the three we’d actually witnessed. There was the briefest of pauses in their advance, but then they carried on past the door of the Winnebago. I released a breath I hadn’t realized that I had been holding deep in my lungs.
> “I’m scared,” Robbie murmured.
“We’re going to be okay,” Jenny told him. She looked across the cabin at me. The deep gratitude in her eyes made me crumble inside. Here she was, telling her son that we were going to survive, believing in me, trusting that I would do everything I could to make sure that we all made it onto the train. Tears began to well in my eyes, and when I blinked they coursed their way down my cheeks, dripping off my chin and onto the carpeted floor.
I wanted to tell them that, yes, everything was going to be okay. That I would save the day. But I had thought I’d be able to save my brother and I’d failed. I thought I’d be able to rescue Nick and his kids, and I’d failed that too. But I wasn’t crying because I was scared, weeping out of the anxiety and desperation that I would lose another person who was relying upon me so much. I cried because of the guilt that I felt. That I had caused all that was going on. All of the suffering. All of the death. I thought of Mooney, lying dead on the tarmac, his throat torn open, his head caved in. I thought about those poor women, shot in the head, alone in death. I thought of everyone we’d left back in the stadium in Cardiff, probably already starving to death, and if not, then just waiting to die in absolute agony when the cure was sprayed across the country.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, not just to Jenny and Robbie but to everyone who’d suffered.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“Oh, Matt!” Jenny said, and I could see from her body language that she wanted to come to me, wrap me up in her arms and comfort me as she did her son. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You’ve done everything you could have done, for Robbie, for all of us.”
“You have no idea!” I hissed petulantly, tears streaming from my eyes, snot clogging up my nostrils.
“I do,” she implored. “I’ve seen all you’ve been through. I’ve seen all you’ve done!”
“All I’ve done? All I’ve done?”
I was going to die here. I had no doubt about that at all. There were too many of the undead out there for the soldiers to wipe them all out. Before too long, they’d find us. Or we’d have to gamble and step back outside where we’d be sitting ducks. If I was going to die, then I needed to confess what I’d done. Someone needed to know that I wasn’t a hero. I was just a stupid kid.
“Do you want to know what I’ve done?” I stared at Jenny and tried to avoid Robbie’s startled face.
“I…”
“You have no idea, Jenny,” I said and all I could see was her and Danny at our house in Usk during the first epidemic. How convinced they were that rescuing the people from the hairdressers’ was the right thing to do. How I had let them coerce me into agreeing to the plan. How it would be easy now to blame them for everything that happened afterwards. But it hadn’t been them. It had been me. Me and my desperate hope to save Danny, that there would one day be a cure for what he’d become.
“After Danny got bitten, he didn’t throw himself into the attacking zombies so I could escape,” I began. “He changed, and I knocked him out. I hid him in the basement of the shop and then brought him out to our house as soon as I could.”
Jenny’s mouth had dropped open. Robbie looked at me with an expression that was both incredulous and accusatory.
“I hoped that one day he would be Danny again. That someone somewhere would find a way to rewind what had happened to him. Not the kind of cure that Rogers has in his top pocket. A real cure. I don’t know, an injection that would bring Danny back. But then I realized that it was never going to happen, and I ended his suffering.”
I stopped, wiped the tears from my face, and shook my head.
“And he was suffering. He wanted to die. He told me, you know? In his way, he told me that he wanted to die. Properly die. Forever. And that’s what I did. I drove a wooden stake into his brain and buried him in my garden.”
“Oh, Matt,” Jenny whispered. “You’ve been through so much. Who wouldn’t want their brother--”
“I buried him the day before this second outbreak began. But he was dug up and his blood was transferred…and...and I caused this, Jenny. They came back. The zombies came back, because of me!”
Her mouth dropped open once more. Robbie looked up at his mother with an expression that told me he wanted her to take back the things that I had said, that there was no way that Matt, his friend who had saved his life, could be responsible for all of the death and carnage that he’d seen—that I could be the one who had caused the death of his father and his sisters.
I sighed, nothing left to say, nothing left to give. I’d done enough.
“You couldn’t have known what was going to happen,” Jenny said. “All you wanted was your brother back, all you thought--”
We all gasped when one of the bedroom doors at the back of the Winnebago clicked open.
“I think I’ve heard enough,” General Rogers said, his gun aimed at my chest.
45
“I always knew there was more to you than meets the eye,” General Rogers stated, the motor home rocking gently as he strode cross the living quarters towards me. “But I never thought it would be this.”
I looked across the Winnebago to where Jenny and Robbie cowered under the table.
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed to them, and I saw genuine sympathy in Jenny’s eyes. Robbie looked completely aghast. Of all of the options of what we might have met in the dark, Rogers was the last person, or thing, that Robbie wanted to be near.
Mooney’s assault rifle lay on the floor at my side. I hoped that in the poor light the general hadn’t seen it. If he was going to shoot me, I decided that I might as well go down fighting. All I wanted to be sure of was that I didn’t lose control of the rifle and send stray shots in the direction of Robbie and his mother.
Keeping my head up and my eyes on the muzzle of Rogers’s pistol, I slowly began to edge my right hand out to my side, fingers searching for the cold steel of the gun. I moved a millimeter at a time, desperate not to draw the general’s attention. I forced my gaze from his gun, meeting his scarily calm stare, all too aware that I was only a measured squeeze of a trigger away from death.
“So now you know,” I told him. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted to save my brother.”
My fingers crept ever closer to the rifle.
“Ah, yes,” Rogers nodded, his tone full of sarcasm. “The hero brother.”
“Don’t you dare mock him!”
Rogers wiggled his handgun from side to side.
“Seeing as I’m the one with the weapon, I think I’ll do what I like. Especially when it’s you that caused all of this.” He gestured towards the door with a slight head movement, indicating he meant the death and destruction just outside.
“I hated them the first time around,” the general continued. His eyes were wide, like he’d drunk ten cups of coffee, but the gun in his hand held steady. “I’ll admit it. They scared me. I’ve faced so many things in this job but every single one of them I could explain…but not the dead coming back to life. But we beat them. We were stronger, faster, more intelligent.”
He paused. The orange glow of the fire outside cast flickering shadows across his face. I could make out the perspiration on his forehead, the sheen of the sweat making his scar stand out just under the peak of his cap. The fingertips of my right hand reached the butt of the machine gun. I cast a quick glance across at Jenny to see if she’d spotted what I was planning. She’d pulled Robbie closer in to her and had turned her body protectively in front of his. I guessed she had.
“But this time around?” Rogers said, shaking his head, his eyes ablaze. “This time it was them that were stronger and faster. I thought we still had the rights to intelligence but it looks like I was wrong even on that…”
I eased my hand along the rifle, searching for the trigger.
“My wife phoned me…she and my kids…they’d locked themselves in the bathroom but it was no good. I heard t
he door being smashed in. I heard their terror. I heard them die. And I could do nothing about it. I’ve never felt so sick. I’ve never felt so useless.”
I wound my fingers around the gun’s grip.
“I’d have done just about anything to save them, to have them back.”
I readied myself. I was no longer afraid. If death came to me now then it was my time. I’d been dodging it for long enough, and maybe I could save Jenny and Robbie before Rogers blew me away.
“But I didn’t. I accepted it. And that’s what you should have done you silly little boy!”
With a roar, I strained every muscle in my right arm and shoulder as I tried to lift Mooney’s rifle, but it only rose four inches off the floor before Rogers’s boot stamped down on the barrel, pinning it and my hand to the carpet. Before I could reach over and try to use my left hand, he jammed the muzzle of his gun into my throat, just as he’d done when I’d emerged from the sewers back at the stadium.
Jenny and Robbie let out pitiful yelps and I knew that finally, our time was up.
“But none of that matters now.” Rogers’s demeanor was too calm and that scared me more than if he’d been acting like a raving lunatic. He gently tapped the top pocket of his combat fatigues and even in the darkness, I could make out the bulge of the cure’s protective case. “This is all that matters. I was going to sit it out in here until you three came along…wait until the zombies had eaten the rest of you and ran back up onto their hill. That was the plan. Then I’d just wander on through to the train. But, like I said, then you three came along.”
I heard Robbie begin to sob more openly. Shouts, screams, and gunfire continued outside, and although there was only the width of the walls of the Winnebago between us, it seemed a whole world away.
“You could just let us go,” Jenny said. “We won’t get in your way.”
“Oh, I’m sorry but this little boy has gotten in my way one time too many,” Rogers snapped back and then pushed the gun harder against me. “Chris Garlick knew something, didn’t he? That’s why you let him die! I’m going to enjoy shooting you, Hawkins. But first I think I’ll deal with your friends, just so you can see just how bad it feels to lose someone you care for one last time.”
