by Luke Duffy
There were more thumps and cracks as the heavy bus stormed deeper into the outer edges of the horde, batting them away in all directions and leaving huge smears of rotted human tissue that coated the windscreen.
“Hold on,” Charlie yelled.
Tina gripped tighter onto the counter with her arms almost being pulled from their sockets and her legs threatening to tumble away from under her as the bus swayed and jolted endlessly. The cries and howls of the helpless people on board continued to grow as they clung to whatever they could, waiting for the impact that would send them hurtling forward while the dead poured in through the battered doors and windows.
Again Charlie attempted to stop the vehicle before they were too deep into the horde. The bus slowed under his controlled braking, and before it had come to a complete stop and the infected were able to overwhelm them, he threw it into reverse. Again the wheels locked, and the engine squealed. The dead closed in, quickly swarming around the front of the bus and making their way along the sides while beating their hands against the panels and grasping at the window frames. Charlie pushed down on the pedal and began to steer them back along the road while struggling to see over the bobbing heads of the civilians as they panicked and climbed over the seats in their search for a safer place to hide within the passenger compartment.
“Down,” Tina called back at them as they wailed with fear and scrambled about. “Get your heads down.”
Charlie was fighting with the wheel, trying his best to keep the bus moving in a straight line as he attempted to reverse out from the seething mass that was rapidly gathering around them. If he was unable to get some distance fast, they would be completely surrounded within the next few seconds, and with no hope of smashing their way through and no chance of escaping from the besieged bus. They would be completely enveloped and trapped inside.
As the vehicle began to increase speed the tyres slid, abruptly spinning them to the right as they hit a patch of slippery ground. The steering wheel twisted in Charlie’s hand, almost breaking his thumbs in the process and forcing him to instinctively pull his hands away before one of his digits was traumatically removed. As the back end veered he reached for the wheel again in the hope of regaining control, but it was too late.
The long vehicle twisted in the road with its rear end leaving the tarmac and plunging into the soft mud at the roadside. As he grabbed the wheel again, turning it to the left and slamming the gear lever back into first, the engine beneath them groaned, sputtered and with a long, painful shudder it stopped completely. The vehicle had stalled with its back wheels locked in thick mud, losing all momentum in either direction. The sudden silence consumed them for a few moments as wide, bulging eyes turned to one another in the realisation that their situation had just worsened dramatically.
Charlie turned the key, but the motor refused to do anything other than emit a low grinding noise that was rapidly fading with each attempt. He helplessly stared down at the dashboard lights as they burned and faded with each turn.
“No, don’t do this now, you bastard,” Charlie snarled while stubbornly twisting the key in the ignition and banging his fist against the wheel. “No, no, not now. Come on. Not now, you fucker.”
Tina could do nothing but stand and watch him, willing him to get the engine to turn over and at least give them another chance at getting out of the mud. She looked to her left and saw the lumbering bodies as they approached. The first of them were only a few metres away and reaching towards the trapped vehicle and its passengers. Their fists began to beat against the body of the bus, weak and intermittent at first, but soon growing into a deafening drumroll as more and more of the infected arrived and began to scramble around them, pounding their hands and bodies against the thin sheets of aluminium that protected the terrified people inside.
“Come on, come on,” Charlie continued to plead with the motor, ignoring the cracks and bangs that were echoing around him.
The door rattled as a snarling face slammed up against it. Tina jumped to the side and impulsively threw herself against the entrance, wedging her feet into the step and preventing the door from collapsing inwards as more of the dead arrived at the weak point and started to hammer away at the glass.
“Get something to block the door,” she yelled out to the people that were creeping along the central aisle towards the rear and staring back at her with bulging eyes and gaping mouths. “Fucking help me.”
Her body convulsed as a group of the infected assaulted the door, sensing its weakness and realising that it was their best chance of gaining entry. Her knees buckled and her head snapped back as the door rocked again. She screamed in frustration as she heard the glass began to crack in their rubber frames.
“Help me.”
A number of the passengers suddenly sprang to life and came bounding forward and led by Tommy as they charged towards the front. Somehow, he had emerged from his fevered delirium, his survival instincts thrusting their way to the fore. He jumped down beside her, his pale and drawn face glistening with sweat while his eyes burned with fever. He threw his body up against the door and forced his shoulder in against the hinges.
“The seats,” he yelled back to Paul and Frank who had also arrived to help. “Rip the seats up. Get them up against the door.”
While Charlie repeatedly turned the key and felt the motor becoming weaker but was unwilling to give up until the last of the power was gone, the others began to tear the interior of the bus apart, ripping out the seats and benches and piling them up in front of the door.
Children were crying as they clung to their parents, and Jeff was barking relentlessly, pulling at the leash around her neck that was tied to one of the handrails and preventing her from jumping through a window and instinctively attacking the infected. Someone fired from the rear, the crack of the round from such close proximity causing everyone to flinch and a few people to cry out.
“Save your ammo,” Tina shouted, seeing one of the militia guards wielding his rifle.
The man looked back at her and then down at the magazine attached to his weapon. He understood what she was saying and why. They had very little left, and every round counted. Especially if they were going to eventually be needed for themselves.
The bus was rocking from side to side as the dead pressed themselves in on them. Their hands reached up and groped through the empty window frames, hoping to grasp hold of a warm body and then drag them out. The reanimated did not have the strength to grip on and heave themselves up into the vehicle, and nor did they have the intelligence to work as a team and begin raising one another up so that they could climb inside. Instead, they contented themselves with a dogged assault on the outer shell, hoping to gouge their way through.
There was no sound coming from the motor now. The dashboard lights were dark, and with each turn of the key Charlie became more convinced that the bus was completely dead. He sighed angrily and pushed his head back into his seat while staring out at the hands that slapped against the glass in front of him and the sea of deformed faces beyond. As the sunlight continued to dim, the dead became nothing more than a black, broiling liquid that swept around the broken down vehicle, threatening to cascade in on them at any moment.
“Give it up, Charlie. It’s no use,” Tina shouted as she and the others began backing away from the doorway and the tangled barricade.
He climbed out from his seat and headed towards the rear. He grabbed the radio, hearing the static hiss and a faint voice above the relentless groan of the dead voices. The rear was crammed to bursting point, with everyone pushing as far back as they could to keep away from the front of the bus and the flimsy doorway. More seats were being ripped up and flung towards the barricade, almost blocking the driver’s compartment and the aisle completely
“Charlie, you there? Send sit-rep,” Stan’s voice rustled.
“We’re in the shit, Stan. Big time. The bus is stuck and won’t start, and we’re surrounded,” Charlie replied as he glanced back at Tin
a. He then turned to watch the juddering door and the rattling frames of the seats piled up against it. “We’re pretty much fucked, mate.”
“Can they get in?”
Charlie eyed the barricade for a moment. It was moving slightly with every assault, but the doors were holding. There was too much of an obstruction for the dead to be able to barge their way through in the immediate future.
“Doubtful, but we can’t get out either.”
There was a long pause.
“Roger that. Wait out.”
24
Apart from the faint sigh of the light, icy wind, the area had fallen especially silent. The noise of the dead and the quiet sobs of the living had been replaced by a sinister calm that had descended upon the road like a smothering blanket. For hours the people inside the bus had remained still and hidden from sight while not daring to move. Stranded and with their rear wheels stuck fast in the mud, they waited for a miracle while the dead surrounded them in their thousands and refused to give up until they had managed to rip their way through the doors and into the living people inside.
Stan, having pushed ahead and rendezvoused with the advanced group, had tried everything they could to relieve the trapped survivors. Tirelessly and at great risk to their own safety they had used every trick that they could think of. Approaching the scene and blasting the horns had done very little other than attract more of the infected into the area. Flashing their lights and shooting as many as they could until their ammunition supplies were virtually exhausted had accomplished even less. Clusters of the infected were lured away by the activity of Stan and his team, but the vast majority were just too preoccupied with the immobile bus, the sight and sound of the living being so close that they refused to be distracted from their goal. As more of the infected arrived, the further away the two SUVs needed to retreat at risk of them too being surrounded and swamped by the army of rotting and diseased corpses.
As the hours passed, the survivors witnessed the lights of the SUVs becoming dimmer and the sound of their engines growing fainter as they gradually withdrew from the area. From the woods surrounding them they could hear the cracks and scrapes as the walking dead charged through the trees, crashing through the branches and underbrush, being attracted to the vicinity by all the firing, blasting horns, and the wailing of their comrades in death.
Slowly but surely the people inside the jolting and swaying vehicle began to lose hope as they watched the crowds grow and their chances of survival dwindle. For now, the doors were holding, but they would not last forever. Eventually the determination of the infected assaults would prevail and the barricades would collapse. It had happened countless times over the past twelve years. No matter how strong they were, the defences always broke before the infected did. No one acknowledged the fact, but everyone had witnessed it happen at some point in time, and each of them knew that now would be no different.
There was very little food or water and almost no ammunition aboard the bus. They were cold, terrified, and utterly exhausted. One by one the living fell silent, choosing to hunker down and wait for the end while remaining below the window line, and not wanting to see the monsters beyond that were staring back at them with lustful gazes and snapping teeth. It was only a matter of time now, and time was a luxury that only the dead could afford in the new world order.
It had grown very quiet inside the bus. At first the whimpers and cries were endless, but after some time, and when people began to realise that the dead were not going to come pouring inside any time soon, they settled and slipped into their own worlds. Outside the dead kept their vigil on the bus, pressed up against its sides and undeterred. Their assaults had subsided substantially with only the occasional thump and scrape, accompanied by a rasping moan coming from the outside now. They waited in silence while the survivors inside kept their heads low, doing their best to stay out of sight and avoiding exposing themselves and riling up the crowd again.
“We’ve gone static a few Ks further up,” Stan’s faint and almost inaudible voice informed them, sounding as though he was a million miles away. “Just sit tight, Charlie. We’re doing everything we can to get you out of there.”
Charlie nodded and let the handset slip from his fingers and into his lap. He was sitting in the centre aisle, his head drooping towards his chest as the feelings of despair and fatigue took their hold on him. He wrapped his arms across his chest and tucked his cold hands beneath his armpits in an attempt to stop them from becoming useless through numbness.
Tina was sitting beside him, idly and repeatedly running her thumb along the cold metal top-slide of the pistol that she was holding in her hand. She was staring into her lap, but her eyes were unfocussed and saw nothing. Instead she saw old memories as they flitted through her mind. Memories of events that had occurred and people she had known before and after the rising of the dead. Things had not always been bleak and desperate since the collapse of civilisation. There had been times that life had seemed sweeter than ever over the past twelve years. Though she had to admit that those moments were rare and only fleeting. She could see the faces of the people they had lost along the way staring back at her as though waiting for her to join them in her rightful place at their sides. She silently acknowledged that their wait would soon come to an end.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered with a shrug. “At least we tried.”
Charlie lazily raised his head and stared back at her, seeing only her dark silhouette but able to picture the expression of resignation upon her face.
“Don’t talk like that,” he grumbled, sounding like a grandfather chastising a child over a defeatist attitude. “Stan will find us a way out.”
She looked back at him and huffed, shaking her head dismissively before turning her attention back to the pistol in her lap and continuing to caress it. She had counted her rounds a number of times and had silently promised that she would save the last for herself before either the dead or the cold got to her.
“You don’t know the man. I do,” Charlie continued in a voice that was tinged with an air of confidence and certainty. “That old bastard out there doesn’t know the meaning of the word failure. If there’s a way out of this mess, Stan and his boys will find it, one way or another.”
“Tell that to Ben,” she sighed.
“Who?”
“He shot Ben in the face back at the complex,” she continued in a weary and hushed voice. “He’d been hit by a stray round in the chest, and Stan… he just shot him without a second thought. He didn’t give him a chance.”
Charlie adjusted his position and grunted. His buttocks had become numb from the cold and hard floor. He pictured Stan and his actions, and if he were completely honest with himself, he was actually astounded that there had not been more incidents of that manner during their retreat. He knew Stan, and when he saw the amount of wounded and infirm that they dragged with them through the sewers, he was a little more than surprised that Stan had not shot the entire group, saving only those who he really needed back on the ship. He checked his thinking, realising that he was being a little too harsh in his judgement of the man. He was cold and ruthless, but he was not a complete monster.
“Look,” he began in an attempt to prevent her from tumbling into hopelessness. “Stan rarely takes chances, and he is always a hundred steps ahead of anyone else. He probably knew that your guy would be dead within minutes, so he did him a mercy. Dragging him out of there could’ve cost more lives. Stan is my friend… Nobby’s too. He needs you, along with that Paul fellow back there. He won’t leave us here to die.”
She nodded, hoping that the old man was speaking sense and not just suffering with over-optimistic thinking, or the early stages of hypothermia.
“Where did they come from? Why didn’t the advance group warn us?”
“Bad comms? They only have those shitty little, short range radios in the SUVs,” Charlie shrugged. “Or maybe there was no sign of them when Taff came through this stretch. They were obvi
ously following that herd of animals we saw. Probably been stalking them for years and never managing to catch up with them. If they were coming through the trees, I doubt anyone in the lead vehicle would’ve been able to see them.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
She looked back at the mass of people who were sitting crowded together in the rear of the vehicle. It was dark, and all she could see were large, black clumps where people had squeezed themselves together. It was hard to believe that so many of them had managed to cram themselves into such a small space. With all the windows smashed out, the temperature inside the vehicle was no higher than it was outside, but at least they could share their body heat. The children were gathered into the centre with the adults surrounding them for comfort and warmth. The remaining wounded were at the very rear, and two more of them had since died, needing to be dealt with and separated from the rest. She doubted that they would ever get the chance to give them decent burials now.
The black mass of bodies shifted a little and a few low groans of protest emitted from deep within as individuals were disturbed by the person beside them adjusting their position and allowing the cold to creep in and drag them from their fitful slumber. From out of the dark a figure came hobbling towards Tina and Charlie, moving in a crouch and mindful of where it placed its feet.
“What’s happening out there?” Frank asked, groping his way forward through the gloom to where Tina was sitting.
“Not much. They’ve gone pretty quiet, but they’re still there. How’s Tommy?”
“Bad,” Frank replied with regret. “I think all the activity earlier on has sapped the last of his reserves and accelerated the sickness. He’s not doing well at all. Paul is with him, but he’s asking for you.”
“You’d better go take a look,” Charlie advised her. “At least be there for him when the time comes.”
