I went to Harrigan and hauled him to his feet. He was gasping for breath. We all were.
“It kept coming,” Harrigan said incredulously. “Wouldn’t go down. I buried the crow-bar in the monster’s back, and it just hissed at me…”
I nodded, but I was impatient. I grabbed Harrigan’s arm and dug my fingers into his flesh. “Clinton, we haven’t got time for this right now,” I said urgently. “Later. Right now we need to get to that helicopter.”
He nodded dazedly and his eyes were glazed and vacant, like he was replaying the moment in his mind. Jed handed me the crow-bar and I shoved it hard at Harrigan.
“Take it,” I said, putting an edge on my voice. “And swing it at the next one we see… only be sure to bury the claw in its head. Okay?”
Harrigan nodded. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, and when he opened them again, he seemed clearer – more focused. “Good man. Now move your ass.” I slapped him on the back and then turned on my heel and struck out towards the house.
Maybe ten or fifteen seconds had passed from the moment Harrigan had burst from the tree-line and dashed across the road into the path of the undead ghoul. But even ten seconds is a long time when you’re standing in the driving rain on a dark and dangerous night. I felt exposed and vulnerable. I had no doubt there were other undead nearby – maybe even in the house we were approaching. I wanted to get into cover. I wanted to be concealed and to make use of terrain and noise of the storm to hide us. Standing on the front lawn of a suburban home was certainly not the best place to hold a committee meeting.
I went forward in a crouch and made my way towards a row of ferns. Once behind their dark bulky shelter, I took a few seconds to study the house.
It was a brick home, built a couple of feet off the ground, with a porch that ran right across the front. I saw the front door. It was open – a dark yawning hole in the façade. Maybe there were more undead waiting inside. Or maybe they had already left the house and were moving in exactly the same direction we were – drawn inexorably towards the screaming flailing sound of the dying helicopter.
I went on grimly, with the Glock thrust out ahead of me, and my eyes swiveling from side to side, all of my senses alert for the slightest sound of danger, or the slightest suggestion of movement. I was soaked to the bone, and my jacket and the nylon bag felt like lead weights.
I reached the back corner of the house and waited without turning. There was dark flat space ahead of us, and then the black border of a fence. Beyond the fence, hanging low in the sky and whipping the air around us into a maddened frenzy, was the helicopter.
“Come on!” I barked, and then sprang instantly to my feet and dashed across the back yard towards the fence. I snagged my shin on something and fell. I immediately leaped to my feet and fixed my eyes on the silhouette of the helicopter. I started running again, then tripped on another solid obstacle and went tumbling face-first back into the wet long grass. Cursing, bruised and a little dazed, I got to my haunches and shook my head. My ears were ringing. I blinked my eyes and peered into the darkness. I couldn’t see Jed or Harrigan. I couldn’t even sense their presence nearby. I frowned and cursed again. I was near the fence – I could tell that because the whoosh of wind from the helicopter’s downdraught was muted, even though the sound was a roaring assault on my ears. I felt my shin through the sodden wet fabric of my jeans. I had no way of knowing if I was bleeding or not, but it hurt. I got slowly to my feet and stared hard into the night.
I stood perfectly still, kept my eyes fixed on the black brooding shape of the house, and waited. I waited to sense some movement – some flicker to my left or right that might suggest Jed or Harrigan were nearby.
Nothing.
I had lost them in the night.
I cursed with bitter frustration – and then I started to sense my own panic begin to rise. I hadn’t lost them. They had lost me. I was the one that was alone and on my own. I felt the fear that came with the realization, and I had to crush down on the impulsive urge to scream out, or to reach for the cigarette lighter.
If I had shouted at the top of my lungs, they could not have possibly heard me. The tremendous roar from the helicopter would drown out the sound of explosives. And the lighter was no good. Even in the sheltered lee of the fence, the draught of air being hurled out by the chopper’s rotors would make it impossible to get a light. So I stood there – feeling my panic rise, feeling the storm and the rain seem to build towards some ominous crescendo – and I waited, with my nerves fraying until I was on the verge of terror.
Then the night was ripped open by a long jagged bolt of lightning, and a heavy bass rumble of thunder rolled across the clouds and seemed to make the air quiver and the ground beneath my feet tremble. And then a second brilliant jag of lightning ripped the night apart.
In the instant flash of that moment I saw everything.
Harrigan and Jed were still crouched by the corner of the house, and between us, spread across the long green lawn of the back yard, were the dark shapes of at least a dozen dead bodies. They were misshapen mounds, their limbs twisted at impossible angles, their corpses torn and dismembered. They were young and old. They were terribly mutilated.
They were the reason I had tripped and fallen.
I had stumbled over the dead.
I stared aghast – and then, mercifully, the night slammed down like an anvil and the back yard became dark once more.
But the image of that instant was burned into my mind and it stayed with me for long seconds afterwards as my panic returned, multiplied many times over.
Were they dead? I mean really dead.
Or were they undead?
Was I standing in a macabre slaughter-yard… or was I about to be set upon by the bodies in the grass, as they rose up from the ground in demented madness and tore me to pieces?
Fear paralyzed me – turned my limbs to lead. I shrank down against the fence and for long seconds I could do nothing more than concentrate on breathing. I closed my eyes and the image of the bodies littered across the lawn came back to me in gory detail. I saw the horror of their pale faces, their bloodied, muddied torsos and the gnawed, severed limbs – and it was so vivid and so confronting that I started to shake. I tore my eyes open, expecting the night to be filled with black hunting shadows – but there was just the howl of the wind and the drumming hiss of the rain. I drew a deep breath and forced myself into action. I fumbled the cigarette lighter from my pocket and flicked it.
The lighter sparked, then was immediately extinguished by the swirling downdrafts of wind. I did it again. And again.
Half a dozen times I flicked the lighter, sending an intermittent pattern of split-second sparks like a marker beacon. Then I leaned back against the fence, and waited – either for the mutilated bodies to rise, or for Jed and Harrigan to find me.
It was impossible to see anything in the crushing dark of the night. Down low against the fence, the ambient orange glow from the distant fires was blocked out, so that all of my senses were heightened – and all of them were utterly useless. My sense of smell was overwhelmed by the thick cloying stench of rotting corpses, and the smell of muddy earth and grass.
I waited.
The trembling in my hands became worse. I was shaking like a leaf. I told myself it was the soaking cold – and maybe it was. Maybe.
My teeth began to chatter and I was overcome by the sudden urge to run – to run anywhere. Just to flee like a coward. I wanted to be away from this place. I wanted to be away from the fear. I wanted to be safe – and I wanted to see again. More than anything else, I wanted that. The crushing dark and the horror-fueled images in my mind sent my imagination into overdrive. The clatter of the helicopter became the menacing scream of a horde of zombies. The slap of the wind against my neck became the fetid gasping breath of the undead. Alone in the dark, I felt myself unraveling.
I heard it too late – the splashing sound beside me of heavy footsteps. Then I saw movement – just the flicker of a darker shadow, but b
y the time I saw it, it was too late to react. I had time for a final gasping choking breath – and then whatever moved in the night was upon me.
“Fucker!”
It was Jed. I felt him crash into me and then slump down against the fence, the heat of his body hard against my shoulder. He was panting, his breath sawing raggedly across his throat. Not a second later, the shape of Clinton Harrigan appeared as a drifting black shadow a little to my left. I choked down a cry of panic that was rising up into my throat, and was overwhelmed by a surge of relief. They had found me.
“Fucker!” Jed said again, snarling. He was angry, but it was anger mixed with his own fear, and it flamed as he fumed in outrage.
“You just took off into the dark, you son-of-a-bitch!” Jed hissed. “You just left us.”
I shook my head – then realized that in the darkness, shaking my head was a useless gesture. “I didn’t leave you,” I said. “I just moved before I had time to change my mind. I thought you two were right behind me.”
I heard Harrigan’s voice, sharp and tense, loom out of the night. “Well we weren’t,” he said. “You should have waited, Mitch. That was stupid. Next time, wait until we’re ready. And make sure we know what you’re doing. I don’t want to go through that again,” he said, and there was an ominous tone of warning and suppressed violence in his words that left me in no doubt that he too had been frightened, and that I should not take Harrigan’s Christian nature of benign benevolence for granted. He was letting me know that he was a nice guy – because he chose to be.
A warning.
I got to my feet, and groped like a blind man in the dark until I felt Harrigan’s shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “I gave us all a fright. It won’t happen again.”
Harrigan might have said something – I’m not sure, but if he did, his words were drowned out by the sharp sound of Jed suddenly crying out in horror. He was standing on the other side of me. I felt the rub of his shoulder and his rigid tension. “Jesus Christ! Look at that!”
My head snapped round, and I peered over the top of the fence.
My body went ice cold.
I had to screw my eyes into narrow slits against the maniacal shriek of the beaten wind, but that didn’t diminish the horror.
The land beyond the fence was clear. It might have been a suburban park, but the grass was long and swaying in the night. It stretched for maybe two hundred yards, and then the ground began to rise gradually to a hilly crest that was built out by suburban homes.
The hill was on fire.
I could see at least a dozen buildings ablaze, the flames flickering into the night sky, as if lashing out in anger at the rain. I couldn’t see smoke, but I could smell it in the air, and the burning skyline created a red-orange backlight that gave me a view clear across to the far side of the park.
In the night sky – not fifty feet from the fence – was the dark shape of the helicopter. It was very low, the skids beneath the fuselage seeming to scrape and slash at the grass as the craft swayed perilously from side to side. But even so close, and even with the fire blazing across the distant hills, still the helicopter’s shape was dull and blurred, and I realized it was because the helicopter had been painted black.
I felt Harrigan suddenly squeeze my arm, and his grip was vice-like and painful.
“We’ve got problems,” he said.
I frowned, not understanding – and then saw a blur of movement in the distance.
I stared for long seconds. The rain was a grey misting curtain that beat down in a vertical haze. But through it – right on the edge of the field, I suddenly saw several shapes. They moved like ghostly apparitions, seeming to hover and undulate through the driving squalls. The shapes were lit by the glow of the fire, but it was an uncertain light, and it took me many moments before I suddenly realized what I was seeing.
There was at least a dozen of them – a dozen undead – drifting through the long grass of the field, drawn towards the sound of the helicopter, and moving in a long ragged line, like a pack of wolves stalking a wounded prey.
I heard movement in the dark beside me and I glanced sideways. It was Jed, his big muscled frame hanging against the fence and peering into the night – seeing the horror that I was seeing, and, by the sound of his voice, feeling the same fear.
“We can’t fight them all off.”
“I know,” I agreed. “Not with a couple of pistols and a crow-bar.”
I tore my eyes back to the bucking, swaying shape of the helicopter. “If he doesn’t try to land now, they’ll be on him before we can rescue him.”
My attention snapped back to the approaching shapes of the undead. They were like flickering mirages, moving quickly through the dark. I tried to calculate the angles and get a sense of how close the undead were – and how much time the pilot had before they would be upon him – and us.
It wasn’t long. Maybe sixty seconds. If the pilot didn’t set the helicopter down right now, it would be too late – for all of us.
At that moment a building on the crest of the distant hill seemed to explode in a huge column of flame, and in the flare of brighter light, the line of zombies suddenly took on sharp outline and solid form. Behind them, other dull drifting shapes were beginning to loom out of the night.
“There’s more of them,” I said ominously. They were filling the dark streets, spilling from the nearest houses. A road ran parallel to the far side of the park, and I could see burned out vehicles and dark shapes laying on the blacktop like small broken toys as the undead gathered into a milling, swaying tide that began to uncoil and surge down into the long grass of the field behind the first line of hunters.
“What are we going to do?” Jed asked.
I didn’t answer for a long moment. The line of zombies on the edge of the field seemed to stop moving closer, but I knew it was just a trick of the poor light. They would still be moving – still stalking their way forward. I glanced up at the helicopter again, and as I did it seemed to swing directly overhead, and then tilt at an obscene angle. It veered back over the long grass of the field, but it was lower now. The shaft of the spotlight suddenly blinked on, and the patch of ground beneath the hull was turned bright as daylight. It lasted for only a few seconds – long enough to give the pilot a chance to sight the ground, and long enough to completely destroy my night vision.
I turned my head away – but the flare of the light was burned onto my eyes. When I opened them again and looked back across the field, the wavering line of undead was blurred and indistinct.
“We’ve got no choice,” I said with a sense of rising fear and anxiety. “We have to rescue that pilot – if he survives the landing. There’s no other option. We’re dead men if we don’t.”
The helicopter tilted up on its tail rotor like a rearing horse, and hung in mid air for a moment, its nose pointing towards the clouds.
Then it just stopped flying.
Stopped – and fell out of the sky.
The big whining engine died – and for an instant the night was perfectly silent.
But just for an instant.
Then the helicopter dropped like a stone. The heavy weight of the nose fell towards the ground, but the helicopter was not high enough in the sky for the front-end to gather momentum, and so the craft dropped in a flat fall – the skids collapsed and the dead-weight of the machine crumpled the hull in a shattering collision that shook the ground beneath my feet. Grass and mud were hurled into the sky. The rotor blades flailed, and then tore off. Grinding, tearing metal shredded through the air as the machine ripped itself to pieces, and the sky was filled with a thousand flying shards of splintered death.
“Oh my God,” I heard Clinton Harrigan breathe, and for long seconds we could do nothing more than stare, numb and dazed and appalled, until the dust cleared and the sound of the collision faded.
At last, the night was silent.
At last, the helicopter was down.
But the danger was only just beginning.
>
Chapter Two.
“Come on!” Harrigan cried, and we went at the fence in a rain-soaked awkward tangle of knees and elbows.
I went over in the long soft grass, feeling the weight of the nylon bag’s contents pushing me down like extra gravity, and I sank in the soft muddy earth to my ankles.
The fiery glow of the distant burning buildings gave good light and we ran towards the crumpled wreck of the helicopter with no thought of stealth. It was a race against time.
Jed pulled ahead of me – he was big and fit and strong, and I kept my eyes on the broad of his back as he ran with his legs high through the grass, like a man running into beachside surf. He reached the nose of the helicopter and I saw him crouch there, peering past broken twisted metal, while Harrigan and I struggled to catch up.
I ran with my eyes moving everywhere, trying to take in everything in an instant. The undead were much closer now – they were solid shambling shapes that were sweeping towards us like a dark ragged tide. The helicopter was badly damaged. The whole underbelly of the craft seemed to have split wide open. The tail section had broken off: it lay in the grass like a dismembered limb, and as I got closer, the ground became a series of deep troughs and furrows where the rotors had cleaved gouts out of the soft earth before splintering and breaking. I could see the cockpit door. It was hanging open – as if the lock had been sprung by the shattering impact as the helicopter crashed to the ground.
I ran faster. Harrigan was at my shoulder. I was breathing hard from the effort, my nerves screwed up tight.
I saw Jed turn his head towards the approaching zombies, and then quickly back to us. He had the Glock in his hand, resting it on a piece of the broken helicopter.
“Check the pilot,” he said urgently as we got nearer. “I’ll keep an eye on the bastards. When I start shooting, you’ll know it’s time to get the hell out of here.”
“Okay,” I gasped. It was all I had breath for. I felt the strain of fatigue in my shoulders and legs, and my lungs were burning from the effort. I went straight for the cockpit door. Jed turned back towards the zombie tide.
Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse Page 4
