by Glynn James
“And then swim through Zulu soup?” Predator said. “No thanks.”
“We’re only in eight feet of water,” Ali said, still facing and firing toward the prow, out to sea. “If we keep our heads above water until we touch bottom we might be okay…”
Juice said, “Close your eyes, get your ear protection in – and do not open your mouth.”
“Roger that,” Pred said, reloading.
“Do it,” Handon said, and then turned around to Park, at the very center of their ship’s last stand, in the center of the cockpit. The water was now mid-thigh. Handon drew a knife, cut a piece of rigging line in two places, and tied one end around Park’s belt buckle. “You get all that? Eyes and mouth closed?”
Park nodded rapidly, looking too panicked to speak, mainly trying to gulp air. Handon looked down and saw he held his laptop satchel clutched in both arms. “That waterproof?”
“No.”
“Screw it. They can take the plate out of the hard drive lat—”
The rest of his sentence was cut off by the first whumps of grenades, walking from the stern of the sailboat in toward shore. Whump after crump sounded, as the Alpha operators coordinated a perfect walking artillery strike, geysers of body-part-sodden water launching thirty feet into the night sky. As the last explosion settled, Handon pushed Park toward the landward edge of the boat – which was now the stern. The water looked far from healthy. But it did at least seem to lack animation.
“Wade out,” Handon said to Park. “Go!”
The deck of the sinking ship was now below the water, making this easier. Anyway, there was no place else to go.
“Go, go, we gotta go!” Ali said, she and Henno holding the rear, which was closing in on them hellaciously quickly. Slinging their weapons, splashing through the water, the operators also frantically grabbed last pieces of kit – weighing the odds of drowning, versus being infected by the hundreds of liters of zombie guts in the water, versus being eaten alive later for lack of weapons and ordnance… Then they slid one after another into the water.
The lightest of them was way too heavy.
And, as their heads went under, they paddled blind.
Ali and Henno fired unceasingly behind them, pivoting in an growing arc, covering the withdrawal. The deck was filling with dead, the weight of them swamping the boat more quickly, as it was overrun and pulled under. The momentum of an advancing pair of them took them right into the cockpit even as they were destroyed, landing right at Henno and Ali’s feet, further crowding the evacuation.
Ali was last out. Before she went, she stood on tiptoe, trying catch a last glimpse of Homer. But he had disappeared. And now a half dozen of the dead, and then a dozen, had heaved themselves up onto the sinking and nearly abandoned craft.
Ali let them have it. She slid into the water and swam for it.
Nearer
Lower Hardres, Kent, the South of England
John Gutteridge slammed his fist against the wheel arch of the tractor and cursed. He was a mile across the field, and it was a damned long walk to go and fetch his tools. He was cursing himself more than anything. He had known the knackered old machine was in trouble for two weeks now, but that didn’t stop him from lashing out at it when it finally failed.
It had been juddering as of late, mostly when traveling slowly, and the bend at the top of the field was usually the culprit. And that was where he was now, standing with the engine cover open, peering into the dirty mess at the heart of the machine, and wondering if he had enough pipe-and-hose tape left to fix the thing. It certainly wasn’t going anywhere at this moment, and was even then spewing its fuel onto the hard ground and over his boots. He also realized that he had nothing to tie it off with, so gravity was going to lose him half a tank of fuel at least.
He cursed again and began to trudge across the field, back toward the yard. He’d barely days to go before he needed this field ready and it was nowhere near that. Ten days from now a truckload of seed potatoes would arrive and he would need to get them into the ground.
He shivered against the chill of the wind, pulled his collar higher, and tried to walk faster across the uneven ground. This field hadn’t seen a plow for over six years, and he never thought it would again, but then the soldiers from Folkestone had come by the month before and told him he needed to increase his output to help provision the growing garrison. They’d even supply the seeds. This was just when John had been starting to wind things down, hoping to retire and sell off the land.
Damn zombie apocalypse had to scupper his plans, didn’t it?
He was about halfway across the field when he heard the first scream. Initially, he thought it was the distant sound of some bird of prey that had discovered an unguarded nest, and so he only stopped for a moment before carrying on his trudge across the uneven ground. Ten yards later the scream sounded far from avian, and it wasn’t letting up. It was coming from the houses behind the yard, on the main road.
John Gutteridge began to run.
As he sped across the open ground, dodging molehills and plow furrows as best he could, the sound of the screaming rose. More voices now, then a gun started firing, shot after shot. The gun kept on until John pushed through the gate that led into the yard, and then a louder, deeper scream joined the others.
He ran onward, his chest heaving and boots crunching on the graveled yard. He ran straight for the drive that led around the main building, wishing he had exercised more, as his body protested at the strain he was putting on it.
He never did find out who was screaming.
Gutteridge barreled around the corner at a speed he couldn’t control, and ran straight into the middle of the street, overtaking at least two of the staggering figures that now lined the road.
It wasn’t the zombies, of which there were at least a hundred moving along the main thoroughfare and forcing their way into the houses that lined it, that put John down. It was the Ford Mondeo driven by Samuel Neale – the local convenience-shop owner – moving in excess of fifty miles per hour that did that. John didn’t have time to slow down, and the car hit him head on, launching him thirty feet further down the road, where he landed right at the shuffling feet of one of the zombies. The car had swerved at the last moment, but not quickly enough. It also now went spinning out of control and crashed into the front of an old Victorian cottage that had once been a rented holiday home.
John Gutteridge was eaten alive over the course of the next five minutes, trapped in his broken body, his spine shattered in a dozen places. He was unable to defend himself and couldn’t even raise a hand toward the creatures that fell upon him. By the time they had finished with him there wasn’t enough of him left to be recognizable as human, let alone to turn.
Samuel Neale, a man who all of his life had endured bad luck, met his end much more abruptly and mercifully. He had been in such a panic that he hadn’t put his seatbelt on, and when the Mondeo collided with the solid stone structure of the cottage he was sent flying forward at fifty miles per hour, headfirst through the windshield, and into solid stone. He was dead long before John’s screams ceased and the village fell silent.
A hundred zombies lumbered their way through the now-quiet hamlet, heading north – always north. Less than an hour later, thirty more stumbling figures clumsily made their way out of the houses of Lower Hardres and followed after the others – and following the one that moved much faster than them, the one that even now sensed another place not far away where there were more to be infected.
The city of Canterbury.
Huntress
The female of the species, free now of responsibility for the less-deadly male, as well as her vulnerable offspring, moved through the night-time forest in silence. The starlight and bit of moon failed to penetrate the canopy of trees, and she made her way mostly by memory and touch, as she followed the disturbing and unfamiliar sounds. Was it the sound of prey? Or more fearsome predators than she?
She was determined to nose her way forward until she
found out.
She had sent the male and the cub back as soon as she’d sensed something was wrong. The three of them had been out hunting together, mostly because the female judged it safer, on a night like this, not to go out alone. And since she also much preferred not to leave the young one by himself, that meant they all went together.
But any anomaly or danger she would face on her own.
The blackness of the thick forest gave way to the heavy gloom of the town. This was the place of greatest danger. This was the area that always drew her back, but which she stayed out of when at all possible. Tonight, she couldn’t keep herself from following the sounds of this unlikely fray. It was the sort of noise she hadn’t heard in the better part of two years.
Human sounds.
Voices – whispered hisses, but recognizable, or nearly so. And then shouts, unmistakable. And the puffs and snaps of gunfire. And finally the explosions. The dead made a lot of trouble, but she knew they rarely blew up. And there was little if anything left in the human settlement that might go boom. All of this could mean any of a number of things for the female, and for her family – but most of the possibilities were very bad news.
Though it was just conceivable…
Either way, she had to know.
She circled around the perimeter of the small and rustic lakeside town, stealing peeks through the wooden-slat structures onto the packed-dirt main street, and across to the small marina – and finally out onto the great sprawling body of the lake itself. Sure enough, there was a craft on the water, outlined smudgily in the tiny amount of ambient light.
And there were men upon this boat. And they were fighting – with the dead.
Much worse, at least for these humans, was that the noise of the scuffle had carried into the town itself. And the dead on land had perked up and were moving out. Even if the men on the boat survived the maritime assault, an amphibious one was lined up right behind it. Unless they could get moving back out onto the lake, to the safety of deep water, they were done for.
Crouching a bit lower, set back in the deeper shadow in a gap between buildings, the female smoothly unslung her Ruger Mini-14 rifle from across her back, wrapped the strap tightly around her forearm, pulled it in to her shoulder, and sighted in through the Leupold scope on top. Feeling her way through the magnified and jerky darkness, she walked her crosshairs out from the pier to the boat, which was less than fifty meters offshore.
Her view came to rest just in time to be obscured by a great heavy plume of water rising like a beast from the deep. The first of the explosions. But they already had plenty of real beasts coming up from the deep – the former acquaintances and neighbors of this human female, whom she’d hoped would have found their rest at the bottom of the lake’s shallows.
But then here came the living, being a pain in the ass, riling them all up again. At least the dead could be counted on to quiet down after a while. And, generally, she found that if she left them alone, they left her alone. They were also pretty predictable.
The living, of course, were capable of absolutely anything.
* * *
The first boom wasn’t the last, and the walking explosions under the water took her by surprise. She also clocked nearly instantly what they were doing – clearing a path through the water – and she knew she was right when they waded in near the spot of the first explosion and swam for it. She could also see that their boat was listing, and probably sinking, so maybe desperation had inspired genius.
Or maybe it had only inspired more desperation.
They might make it to shore, but that would avail them little. Because their welcoming party was already wading out to greet them.
The woman withdrew and swung silently around the back of two other buildings, to improve her observation of the point where they’d emerge from the water. She moved warily – with the whole town riled up, the dead might pop up anywhere. But she got where she was going without incident. When she crouched again and settled in, she reached down just to touch the automatic pistol on her belt, and the hand-held radio nestled beside it. She wished she had some of her old colleagues from Metro with her now.
But they were all gone now. And best not thought about.
A few seconds after reaching her new position, she got her second surprise: the hapless sailors came out of the water shooting – and shooting well. They cleared their beachhead in seconds, and waded ashore with authority.
But the woman knew there were plenty more behind those first ones. They could be seen stumbling into town from either end. Not to mention trying to claw their way out of structures.
When the woman and her husband, and their son, had built their cabin, six miles up a rutted dirt road from the village, they had selected the spot very carefully. The weekend vacation cottage was also intended to serve as their BOL (“Bug Out Location”), so they’d sited it far enough away from other people to be isolated, should they need to disappear, or defend their patch. But also close enough to be a source of supplies, or support, if they needed that.
Of course they hadn’t seriously considered the possibility of something like… what had actually happened. If we had, the woman thought mournfully, we would have put it in the middle of the Canadian boreal forest… or maybe the Canadian Arctic tundra…
The sound of gunfire, suppressed but still audible, grew louder now – as did the noise of grunts, spoken commands, and moaning and hissing, as the group of newcomers fought their way into the town proper. Watching them move, she counted seven. And it suddenly dawned on the woman that they were actually displaying pretty outstanding fire and movement. She was no expert, but she had buddies on the Emergency Task Force, and she’d gotten them to let her sit in on some of their tactical training. And this group moved with authority.
But then they made their fatal error. They fled into the church.
Suddenly, the woman had no idea how these guys had survived two years into the Crunch – which, let’s face it, was really almost certainly the EOTW. Anyway, one thing you never did was hole up in a structure – not once the dead were on to you. No, they’d just hang out forever, drawing more and more with every frenzied moan, and there would be your last, eternal stand. There you’d be entombed. The woman knew that much.
As she watched the group file into the square, squat, and not-terribly-big wood and stone structure, with most of the deceased local population hot on their heels, she figured that was it for them. And that was probably a good thing.
No, it was definitely a good thing.
Because, as noted, the living were utterly unpredictable. And, this far into the Crunch, the resources needed to survive – food, clean water, ammunition, fuel, batteries, spare parts, medicine – were so thin on the ground out here that they were without question worth killing for. Which, basically, made the living every bit as dangerous as the dead – more dangerous, really, because the living had guns and tools, knew how to climb over obstacles and open doors, and could also drive vehicles. And, very worst of all, the living could trick you.
They could lie to you. Pretend to be your friends.
Until they took everything you had.
No, in the state of nature, in this post-civilizational hell into which they had descended, interacting with other people was just way too tense – and encounters with strangers far too dangerous. Even if you found yourself facing another person as good and decent as you, he would almost certainly be as heavily armed as you. And you could find yourself in the Hobbesian trap of having to shoot that person, just to keep him from doing it to you first… who might only be doing it to keep you from doing it first… and on and on into death, or at least insanity.
Yes, the woman was relieved by this outcome. The group would disappear into the church, and they would never emerge. With a little luck, they’d even thin the local undead population a little first. But, at any rate, now she didn’t have to make an agonizing moral decision: whether to let other, possibly innocent, people die – and they
were seven of the probably tiny handful of her fellow humans still left alive anywhere. Or else to endanger herself and her family – to go out of her way to worsen odds that were already horrifically against them.
No, it was better this way.
She had just unwrapped her rifle sling and started to slip away, when something stopped her. It was something strange about the way one of them moved. It was anomalous. She pulled the scope back to her eye, just in time to see the last of the group step backwards into the doorway of the church, squeeze off a last few careful shots, take a final look around, and then pull the door closed – on her small and graceful silhouette.
It was a woman, or girl.
Shit.
Lay Your Burdens Down
“Sarge, we go in that church, we ain’t comin’ out.”
So had said Henno, sidelong, when Handon ordered them in there. He was just Mr. Gloomy Pants today. And Handon knew he might be as right as he’d been before. But there was little or no choice. They couldn’t conduct a running firefight through an unfamiliar stretch of wilderness, with one mobility casualty and one terrified civilian, plus one man detached and unaccounted for.
Mainly, they couldn’t do it drenched chin to toe in probably infectious goop.
They had to consolidate. And this was as bad a place as any.
Now, with the slamming of the church’s heavy wooden door still echoing, and competing with the moaning and banging outside, the team fanned out into the nearly pitch-black interior, through the entryway, and down the aisles between the pews into the church hall.
“Ali, Henno,” Handon said, “sweep and clear. Everyone else on me, to clean up.” With that he pulled out the tube from his hydration sleeve and rinsed his own face and eyes. He then pulled and cracked a fluorescent glow stick and dropped it on the ground; then produced a bottle of water he’d stuffed in a pouch. Roughly, he tipped Dr. Park’s head back, got busy pouring, and told him to shut up and settle down while he did it.
