by Wilson, Mark
Alys grabbed at his left sleeve as he made his routine checks of his equipment.
“You hear that?” she asked.
Joey craned his neck to the side and signalled to her to stay silent. He rotated his head as he listened all around. They’d agreed to risk travelling at night because the number of Zoms who’d been drawn to their camp throughout the day had reached a level where the possibility of them breaching the tangle of shrubbery and trees into their camp, by sheer weight of numbers, was becoming a probability.
Scanning around, he signalled again to Alys to extinguish the burning torch she carried. Joey’s eyes had begun to adjust to the creeping darkness but he wanted the light completely gone so that they could reach their peak.
Standing still for several minutes, listening, watching, he noticed Alys crouch beside him. She was more silent in a crouched position.
Joey’s ears and eyes did their work, piercing the darkness, seeking out the smallest movement. Snapping of twigs, dry, dusty groans that grew louder, clumsy footsteps. He counted, and counted, and counted. Five, twenty, forty.
Eventually the sounds became less distinct and formed a din rising all around them. The dead were hungry. They’d sensed a meal and had gathered in number. Joey’s best guess was that there were well over three hundred walking corpses, obscured behind the twisted and moss-covered trees and shrubs that lined the one-time cycle path. They leaned against the natural barrier; a unit, pressing, pushing, and reaching.
Alys tugged at his trouser leg.
“How many?” she mouthed.
He watched her jaw stiffen as he mouthed a reply.
She nodded and stood, bringing her mouth close to his ear to whisper.
“We’ve no choice, Joey. We have to run.”
The heat from her breath in his ear brought goose bumps to his skin that even the realisation of being surrounded by the dead hadn’t provoked.
He turned his head to whisper into her ear.
“Let’s wait until one breaks through.”
He pointed at a swaying, creaking section to their left.
“Once they break that section, they’ll funnel through it together. They always follow each other, right? We should be okay if we keep ahead and run towards the hospital.”
Alys shook her head. “They’re just as likely to break through several sections at a time. Besides, they’ll keep following after us unless we give them something else to chase. They don’t tire, remember? We do.”
“Just go for it, then?”
Alys gave him a sharp nod and sprinted off along the cycle path. Despite the danger, Joey grinned broadly at her receding back before pushing off after her.
Almost immediately the foliage to their left began to collapse and the dead poured through. As Alys had predicted, section after section broke, releasing Zoms in varied states of readiness and decomposition into their path, ahead and behind them. Most were old, dried and badly decayed, but some were fresher, dead maybe a year at most. Almost all were dressed in the tell-tale uniforms and pyjamas of hospital staff and patients.
A quick exchange between them communicated that the thinnest group lay ahead. Joey drew his blades, one in each hand, and turned on The Ringed to their rear whilst Alys and her Sai ploughed through three Ringed like they were made of paper.
Joe silenced five, one after the other, with kicks, blows from the handle of his right blade and the edge of his left blade. One of those he kicked, a man in a shredded business suit with his throat torn wide open, picked himself up from where Joey had knocked him to the path, still very much in the mood for a snack. He chomped down onto Joey’s right foot, dislocating his jaw as he slid his mouth around the toes. Joey’s right hand flashed down, driving his blade through the back of the creature’s head as he felt pain shoot through his foot and up his leg. He kicked the Ringed off him and stamped the back of its head in a rage of fear. It bit me!
Joey whirled around and saw Alys, ten Ringed at her feet and a clear path ahead, staring at him with wide eyes, filled with shock.
“Move,” she yelled at him as another large group burst clumsily through the treeline behind him.
They ran hard, punching, kicking and stabbing a path through the seemingly never-ending stream of Ringed, crashing like a flood onto the path behind them, in front of them, beside them. Adrenaline drove them and allowed Joey to ignore the pain in his foot and the fear in his heart. He had one thought: get Alys out of this before I turn.
Suddenly the narrow, tree-lined path filled with the hungry dead opened out into a wooded area. Joey and Alys shot out from the narrow path into the open space, taking formation in the centre of the clearing, back to back. The wood was filled with the dead also.
They were surrounded, front, centre and rear. Hundreds poured along the cycle path in a raging torrent of hunger and death to join hundreds more of their undead brethren already shambling their way along. Joey and Alys took their stances and began fighting.
Wave after wave of green splintered teeth, broken-fingered hands, foul-smelling feet grasped and clawed for them. Alys had pulled her sharpened Sai and was spinning it along with her standard one, severing hands, puncturing skulls and breaking faces. Most of the former hospital residents and staff were in the final stages of decay, meaning that bone and structure disintegrated easily under the lightest blows. The fresher ones were getting closer, though. When they reached the pair at the centre, the fight would be a different beast.
Joey hadn’t bothered pulling out his bow. He felt sick, dizzy and weak. The bite? Besides, The Ringed were far too close. He continued stabbing, clubbing, tearing and silencing the dead, making his shoulders ache and his legs tremble.
Tirelessly the dead shambled towards them. Relentless in the eternal hunger, they crawled and tripped and shuffled over their fallen comrades. The fresh ones, faster, more powerful and more resilient, finally reached the centre.
Joey stole a glance at Alys. She was a lethal whirlwind of death with a hundred Ringed in pieces and at peace at her feet. She had never looked fiercer, calmer. She’d never looked more beautiful. But even Alys couldn’t keep this pace forever. She wasn’t tiring yet, but it was in the post and he himself was only standing out of sheer bloody-mindedness. He hit another Zom and glanced back at her. She seemed to be working herself a little room, an exit route he hoped.
Joey whispered an apology to her and passed out, falling onto the grass at her feet with the rest of the dead.
Chapter 20
Alys
Harder. Push harder. Again, again. Move faster, be better, be stronger. Alys’ mind mocked and encouraged her in equal measure, and in Jennifer’s voice. Always the voice of her mother. It had become second nature, that voice driving her, empowering her. This is what she’d spent thousands of hours training for. This.
The years of torturing her muscles, taking the hits, falling, rising, again, again, again. This was so worth it.
She’d never felt so free, so alive. She’d never felt such purpose.
This. This is what she was made for.
With a scream of rage and joy she leapt at the next one, taking its head clean off with a single slash. Volleying the dried head, she marvelled at how light it felt as it struck her foot and bulleted off, straight into the face of an oncoming fresh Zom who staggered back. She felt like laughing. Instead she shoved her Sai through the temple of the next one, and the next, and began to clear herself some room to move. A few more inches, maybe a foot around her. Just a little bit more space free, unoccupied by the next Zom. Then she could really get going.
Chapter 21
Joey
Joey regained consciousness, becoming slowly aware that he still lay on the grass beneath her. She hadn’t left him.
Whirling, jabbing her Sai, leaping and kicking, she was a lethal whirlwind of blows and strikes and death. Inches from his prone body she did what had to be done. That’s what she always did. He rolled over from his back onto his side, curled his body inward and
ripped off his right boot. One glance at the red stain blossoming out across the fabric of his sock from the big toe of his foot told him that it was all over. The nail had been bitten through. He watched the blood spread, detachedly noting to himself how like a poppy it looked with his toe at the centre of the blood flower.
Why is she still here?
Glancing across at his left hand, he noticed that an injury he’d taken there was bleeding freely also.
Trying to stand, he braced himself with the palm of his right hand pressed into the mud and blood, but found that his legs weren’t listening and crumpled back to the ground. He tried twice more to stand before she kneed him in the shoulder, knocking him back to a curled position. She’d fought harder still and made a three-second gap in the fight to turn her attention to him. Three seconds was three times as many as she’d need, but that’s how she was. Well prepared. He’d taught her that. They’d taught each other so much in the too-little time they’d spent together.
Instead of the terror he’d expected, a peaceful acceptance slid over him. He didn’t raise his hands to protect himself and he didn’t close his eyes. Placing one foot either side of him in a strike position, she raised her third Sai, the deadliest, swirled it around in her palm to a stabbing position and threw herself at him. As she struck he did close his eyes. Not for himself, not to welcome the black darkness he still missed from Mary King’s Close, but for her. She shouldn’t have to look in his eyes as she killed him. Silenced him.
Thank you, Alys, Joey’s voice whispered inside his head. Outside, Joseph MacLeod was still.
“Aaaaaaargh.”
Joey’s upper body curled up, launching him onto his feet in response to the pain in his right foot. Alys was already back into her stride, whirling, showering her personal space with a hundred different killing blows, defending him as well as herself. Joey shook his confusion off and returned to the fight, ignoring the pain in his foot and his former toe, which Alys had severed and a Zom dressed as a fire-fighter had just made a quick meal of.
Reinvigorated, inspired by her bravery, by the risk she’d taken to try to save him from the infection spreading, he steeled himself and fought harder than he’d ever done before. Together they pushed back the dead, stabbing and thrusting and bleeding from a million scratches, cuts and tears from rancid fingernails and calloused hands. They cleared a space and the dead began to thin out.
“Up there, Joey.”
He turned, following Alys’ Sai tip to a broad oak tree twenty feet to Alys’ left.
“Think you can get up there?” She elbowed one of The Ringed in the forehead with the blade of her Sai along her forearm as she spoke.
A huge grin broke out on Joey’s face as Alys began to count down.
“Three, two, one.”
On one, Joey spun around in front of Alys and began sprinting at the tree. Shouldering six Zoms aside, one at a time, he reached the trunk at full speed, ran several steps vertically up the trunk and grabbed out for the lowest hanging branch that would hold him. Scooping his legs up after his hands, he landed smoothly astride the branch. Joey rose to his feet instantly and began scrambling further up the tree, coming to his knees in a ready position at a wide meeting place of two large branches.
He had fifty arrows at hand and didn’t waste a single shot as he cleared a path for Alys out from the epicentre of the herd she still fought.
As Alys took her cue and took off at a sprint towards the Royal Infirmary, dispatching a few more Ringed as she ran, Joey fired his remaining arrows into some Zoms that shambled after her. He had no idea where he might find replacements for the arrows he’d spent, or if he might have the opportunity to recover the fifty that protruded from so many Zom heads in these woods, but they’d survive. That was all that mattered. Descending the tree, he ran after Alys, a little clumsily, due to the lack of a big toe on his right foot.
He caught up to Alys as they broke through some tangled greenery at the end of the cycle path and out onto the grounds to the infirmary. Joey flashed her a smile.
“That’s a finger and a toe you owe me,” he said, jabbing the stump of his middle finger at her in a rude gesture that had become their own private joke.
“Stop feeding them to Zoms, then,” she replied, face breaking into a smile of her own.
She punched him in the usual spot and then shocked him for the second time that day by wrapping her arms around him. She pulled him close in an embrace he hadn’t a hope of escaping, if he’d even wanted to. They held each other for a few long moments, each just happy to still have the other. Joey could have stayed there forever.
“What’s that?” Alys suddenly broke off and moved nearer to the hospital grounds.
Having had his back to the hospital, Joey followed after her, noticing something shining in the distance.
“Is that…. a light?” Alys stammered.
“An electric light?”
Joey shrugged. He’d never seen one before. Neither had she, so how could they be sure?
Peering deeper into the darkness, he spotted something and took Alys by the hand, guiding her a few feet on towards the building shapes in the distance. Reaching out with his hand, the one that held hers, they made contact together with a very large, very tall, and very strong steel fence which sealed the hospital grounds.
After their encounter with the massive herd of The Ringed, which had so clearly originated from the hospital, they’d expected the grounds around it to be overrun also. It seemed that someone had cleared the hospital compound and secured it with a very impressive perimeter fence. It was far taller and stronger than any that surrounded their own communities and more closely resembled the outer fence-line around the city. The one that prevented the survivors from leaving. That meant safety from the pursuing herd.
“We need to get in here,” Joey said.
After searching around for less than ten minutes, they found a hole, dug under the fence from their side, leading into the compound.
A darkness spread over Joey’s face.
“He’s already here,” he said softly.
“It might be someone else?” Alys offered.
Joey bent down and ran his hands along the trench and under the fence-line. Pulling at something, he lifted a scrap of chequered material from golfer’s trousers for Alys to see.
“It’s him. Let’s go.”
Being smaller than Bracha, neither had any difficulty slipping under the fence-line.
“What’s the plan?” Alys asked.
Joey shrugged.
“Hole-up ‘til morning?”
“You give us the advantage at night.” Alys gestured towards his eyes and then flicked his right ear. “Bat-boy.”
Despite the tension, they both laughed.
“Okay. But something’s not right. There’s a weird sound here I haven’t heard before. You hear it?”
Alys cocked her head.
“A kind of humming?”
“Yeah, but it’s not an animal. I don’t know what it is. Let’s find that, and then see about our favourite golfer. That okay?”
Alys agreed and fell in behind him, signalling that he should lead the way. Pressing against buildings and using greenery as cover, they slowly followed the sound from one end of the compound to the other. As they moved, Joey scanned around constantly. Their path was taking them closer to the light they’d seen earlier.
“Weird,” Alys whispered.
Joey jerked his chin upwards in a questioning gesture.
“There are no Zoms at all inside their fences.”
Joey realised that she was right. He was so accustomed to the presence of The Ringed that once he registered that he couldn’t see or hear one anywhere around, he felt instantly uncomfortable. It didn’t feel right, this silence outside.
Silence in Mary King’s Close he was familiar with, but outside? The soundtrack was all wrong without the shuffle-groan of the dead.
Alys reached out, taking his hand and squeezing it to reassure him
that it felt odd to her also.
“Let’s go.” He moved off, a little more alert than before. “We’re close,” he whispered to her. “I can feel the vibrations from it.”
“Me too.”
Joey and Alys slipped around the edge of the Chancellor’s Building and stopped dead as they spotted the source of the strange sound they’d followed.
Both recognised it instantly from pictures they’d seen as kids. It was a relic from the past. It should be silent and rusted and still. But there it was; a huge, fully-functional generator, chugging away, pouring out electricity, sending the energy along so many cables leading to the main hospital wing in which a row of six electric lights shone bright as suns through fully intact glass windows.
Interlude
Fraser Donnelly
Pressing his thumb to the keypad on the door to his apartment, Fraser held his anger in check as the scanner slid over his fingerprint and chirped cheerfully for him to enter. He threw his coat onto the floor as he stepped inside, slamming the door loudly behind him. Leaning his back against the inside of his apartment door, he let loose a stream of very colourful expletives and some very impractical suggestions for what his superiors could do to themselves.
He felt better for getting it out of his system, here in the privacy of his apartment. In the boardroom, of course, he’d been supremely calm and confident. Yes, sir… Have you considered that, sir… Here’s my plan, sir. He silently thanked… whoever that they’d eventually sanctioned his idea.
Ignoring the growl from his stomach, he strode towards the drinks dispenser by the refrigerator.
“Glenmorangie. No ice,” he barked at the automation.
Seconds later he’d downed the golden liquid and ordered another, whilst enjoying the pleasant burn from the last. By the time he’d had his third, a double this time, Fraser already felt mellower and much more confident that events would play out the way he wished them to.
