“No movement,” he muttered, “but I can’t see much from here. What do you want to do?”
Bannon looked blank. “Do?”
“Go?” Sully’s voice became hard. “Where do you think we should go, damn it?”
Bannon’s eyes were glassy, his gaze distant and remote, as he drowned in his own despair and gut-wrenching loss. Sully reached out and shook him brutally. “Hey!” he shouted into Bannon’s face. “Fucking wake up! I need you, man.”
Bannon flinched and slowly closed his eyes. He took a deep shuddering breath, and when he opened them again his gaze was cleared, less clouded. He looked like he was waking from a dream…
… or a nightmare.
“Forget the harbor,” Bannon said, thinking furiously and talking at the same time, playing out possible options and then discounting them just as quickly. “There’s no way we could get ‘Mandrake’ back out through the heads.”
Sully cut him off. “What about my boat,” he said abruptly. “She’s tied up at the end of the far jetty, alongside the game fishing boats. We could make it through the wreckage with her. She’s only twenty foot…”
Bannon thought about that. A small cruiser like Sully’s fishing boat might be able to navigate the carnage and floating debris they had seen as they cruised through the heads. He was about to agree, and then stopped himself.
“No,” he said, frowning thoughtfully. “The foreshore is going to be too dangerous. Remember that sound? That fucking noise that we heard?”
Sully nodded, like he remembered, but wasn’t happy about the decision. “So?”
“So I’m not risking the chance that we might run into a whole horde of these fuckers,” Bannon spat with sudden conviction. “We need to get as far away from the waterfront as we can – not move towards it.”
“But, we saw nothing!” Sully’s temper flared ferociously.
Bannon shook his head. His expression was grim, his mouth set in a hard, determined line. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he went on gravely. “They’re over on the waterfront, Sully. I know it. And besides, the harbor will be a minefield of wreckage by now. You saw all the boats burning. You saw them drifting from their moorings. No boat is going to get safely in or out of Grey Stone for a very long time.”
As if to confirm Bannon’s warning, there was the sudden percussive sound of a shattering explosion that boomed in the air and shuddered up through the ground. Both men flinched and ducked their heads instinctively. The roar of the blast seemed to linger on the breeze for long seconds, and then they heard the distant sound of crackling flames. Sully edged the glass foyer door open a couple of inches and stared, aghast.
“Holy mother of God,” he gasped in a voice filled with incredulous shock. “The whole fucking complex has just exploded.”
“The buildings?
“Every one of them,” Sully croaked. “The restaurants, the café… everything along the marina has just been destroyed.”
Bannon pushed past Sully, standing in the driveway as though drawn into the open against his will by his fascination and astonishment. He stared gaping towards the harbor, the entire scene embroiled behind a screen of black ruptures of smoke.
Slowly, Bannon turned his eyes back to Sully. “The propane tanks?” It was more of a question than an explanation. There were two huge propane tanks in a bricked off area discreetly concealed by trees, near the loading dock of the marina complex.
Sully shrugged his shoulders, awed to silence by the sheer magnitude of the explosion and the devastation it had wrought. All along the waterfront, leaping flames flickered through dense smoke as the buildings burned in an inferno.
“There’s nowhere safe to hide,” Bannon shook his head, his tone definite. “And there’s only one road out of town. We need to find a car.”
At the rear of the complex there were six parking spaces – one allotted to each unit of residents who lived in the apartments. Bannon and Sully ran.
There were only two cars parked within their spaces: Maddie’s compact green hatchback sat forlornly in its allotted space, the car low on its springs, the paintwork faded. At the other end of the lot was a silver SUV, parked in the space given to Evelyn’s top floor unit.
Sully went for the SUV.
Bannon went towards Maddie’s weary old hatchback.
“This one!” Sully barked. The SUV was just a year or two old with dark tinted windows and large chunky tires. There was a steel nudge bar fitted to the front of the vehicle. Sully reversed the rifle and smashed the driver’s window open with the butt of the weapon. Shattered glass sprayed across the upholstery.
Bannon cried out to him. He was flinging the door of the hatchback open. “This one!” he insisted. “I know where Maddie kept the spare key.”
Sully wavered. The SUV was the better choice, but it was no good at all if he couldn’t get the vehicle started. He stared for one more lingering second of hesitation… and then turned and ran towards the little green car.
From around the corner of the building a shambling shape suddenly appeared. Sully saw the figure from the corner of his eye and in an instant his mind made the calculations – he was too far away from Bannon to reach the car before the wavering undead shape could cut him off. He slowed… then stopped running. His heart was pounding in his chest. He threw the rifle up to his shoulder and turned to confront the dark figure. From the corner of his eye he saw Bannon slide into the driver’s seat of the hatchback and an instant later he heard the little engine cough and splutter to life in a belch of blue exhaust smoke.
The undead ghoul came shuffling out of the shadows, into the harsh daylight with a malevolent snarl thick in its throat. It was a man. He was drenched in blood. It stalked closer to Sully until the big man could see the yellow-tinge of infected madness in its eyes and smell the rotting carrion stench of it. The ghoul was decomposing. The flesh of its face was rotting, rippling with the movement of a thousand maggots so that the air became foul, putrid – almost poisonous. Sully gagged, and felt the acrid taste of his own fear in his mouth. He let the undead zombie come closer – so near that the barrel seemed almost to be reaching out to prod the figure in the chest.
It was just ten feet away, and hunting him with a peculiar predatory mindlessness that Sully found utterly unsettling. Sully took up the pressure on the trigger and raised the rifle until it was aimed between the ghoul’s frenzied eyes.
The moment became burned into Sully’s memory. The sounds of the shuffling, staggering feet, the appalling stench that thickened the air – the fine details of that infection ravaged face, distorted gruesomely by the decay and the incensed fury that seemed to compel the undead. Sully heard the engine of the little hatchback finally settle into a throaty roar and flicked his eyes for an instant to where the vehicle was parked. Bannon’s face was a white blob behind the windshield, glaring at him. The passenger door of the car had been thrown wide open. He need only to run to the car to escape.
If he could only get to the car…
The moment he looked away, Sully knew he had made a dreadful mistake. The ghoul erupted into frenzied attack, an explosion of violent rage as the sound in its throat rose to a triumphant snarl. It flung itself at Sully, jaws gnashing as the desiccated claw-like fingers gouged at the flesh of Sully’s arm and chest.
A scream of horrified shock died in Sully’s throat as the ghoul crashed against him. The crack of the rifle shot was loud in his ears, but his arm had been flung high and the bullet flew wide. Then it was too late – too late for anything other than a furious desperate fight for his very life.
The ghoul was a fury of flailing arms and lunging jaws. Sully threw his hands up to protect his face, but the zombie shredded at the flesh of his shoulders and Sully screamed in sudden pain. He lashed out with his fist: felt his knuckles connect meatily against the side of the ghoul’s head but it was in vain. The ghoul was voracious, threshing and snapping at Sully’s throat until, finally, its jaws bit deep, and Sully felt a single white–hot moment
of panic… and then crushing despair.
Blam!
The sound of the shot was cruel against the silence – a roar so loud that for an instant everything seemed frozen in shock.
Sully could hear his panted ragged breathing. He could feel his blood gushing from the savaged wound in his throat, spilling down his shirt and splattering the concrete. He was laying on his back, knees drawn up to protect his guts, with the ghoul heavy on top of him, crushing the last of his breath from his lungs. But quite suddenly the zombie was seized rigid – an inert weight without energy. Slowly, the undead toppled over and fell, unmoving, to the ground.
Sully blinked his eyes, and stared up at the silhouette of Bannon, standing astride him. The pistol was heavy in the man’s hand, and there was a grim, bleak expression on his haggard face.
Sully clamped a hand over the savaged wound torn across his neck. Blood oozed through his fingers. He felt his vision begin to blur and despite the radiant warmth of the parking lot on his back, a creeping cold seemed to seep through his body. He gazed up at Bannon and saw the terrible torment etched into his expression.
“It’s okay,” Sully whispered hoarsely. He felt an eerie sense of calm acceptance, and there was resignation and peace in his eyes. He was dying.
Bannon stood over Sully’s body and leveled the barrel of the pistol so that it was aimed at the broad expanse of the man’s forehead. He grimaced, watching the flickering spark of life slowly fade from Sully’s blank expression, taking up gradual pressure on the trigger so that the instant the big man became one of the undead, he could fire.
Bannon waited. Sweat beaded across his brow and ran in trickles down his back. Sully gave one long last gasp of breath – made a final gasping, gurgling sound, like the croak of a piteous soul suffering the final tortured moments of life…
… and then lay still in a growing pool of his own blood.
Bannon tensed. The chaos around him seemed to fade into the distance. The sounds of bedlam, of death and destruction blurred and then were washed away, as if carried on the wind until it felt as though the world had become eerily still.
Sully’s dead body began to alter. It was an imperceptible change at first, almost like a trick to the eye. The skin around the gaping wound began to ashen and as the flesh died, the pulse of blood slowed and began to congeal, turning dark muddy brown.
Sully’s eyelids fluttered.
Bannon leaned over the body and pressed the cold steel of the barrel against the dead man’s forehead.
Sully’s eyes opened.
And then he spoke.
“Don’t shoot,” Sully said softly. “Please, don’t pull the trigger.”
Bannon recoiled in alarm and incredulous disbelief. He snatched the pistol away, but still held the weapon extended, finger tensed on the trigger. “Sully?”
The crewman sat up slowly. His body seemed to creak and groan. He felt a heavy lethargy in his arms as if they were loaded with lead weights. He stared fixedly into space – and the view he saw of the world was somehow now tinged yellow and blurred out of focus. He screwed his eyes tightly and then opened them again, slowly lifting his face to Bannon’s.
“Say something,” Bannon growled, with an almost superstitious sense of eerie shock. He held the pistol at arm’s length, just a few inches from Sully’s head.
“That fucking hurt!” Sully groaned. He tentatively pulled his hand away from the lacerated flesh of his throat and held it up, inspecting his own blood that trickled through his fingers like thick oozing paint. He stared for a long time, frowning with bewilderment.
Bannon felt the gun in his hand waver a little.
“You’re supposed to be fucking dead,” he hissed. “When Peter and Claude got bitten, they turned within a few seconds. You’re supposed to be infected.”
Sully nodded his head slowly. His senses swam, his mind in a torpor of lethargy. He took a deep breath, feeling his lungs fill with air, and then slapped his bloodied hand across his heart.
“I still have a heartbeat,” he said in wonder… “But I… I can’t smell anything… and my eyes – they’re glazed or something. I can’t quite seem to get them to focus.” He rubbed his forehead and eyelids with his fingers. “And I can’t feel my legs.”
Bannon took a cautious step back, away from Sully, putting space between himself and the big crewman, still not trusting, not believing…
“What’s your name?”
Sully’s head turned slowly. “Huh?”
Bannon’s finger took up the pressure on the trigger. “I asked you what your name is.”
“Sully,” the man said clearly.
“First name?”
“John.”
“And what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a crewman on your fucking fishing boat,” he snapped irritably. He got slowly to his feet and took a testing step. Bannon backed away one more pace.
Sully’s balance was there, although his legs felt somehow numbed, almost like they were prosthetic. He stared down at himself, and shook his head with disbelief. He had lost a lot of blood – too much for a man to survive. His shirt and jeans were awash with it, and there was a dark stain on the concrete around where he had fallen. He stared down at the ground and then shifted his eyes to the undead ghoul that was crumpled at his feet. The contents of the zombie’s skull had been blown out the back of its head and sprayed across the parking lot in clumps of stringy hair and dead maggot-infested flesh.
Bannon scraped his hand down the side of his face, feeling the roughened stubble on his jaw crackle. “Why didn’t you die?” he asked. “And why didn’t you turn into one of them?” He thrust his finger out at the grotesque disfigured corpse on the ground.
Sully shook his head. “Don’t sound so fuckin’ disappointed,” he growled.
Bannon felt his expression begin to crack and crumble. He seemed to regret the words, for he went on quickly. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he frowned slightly in sympathy. “I just don’t understand it – how you didn’t… aren’t…”
Sully’s eyes went blank for an instant and he cocked his head to one side. For long seconds he stood unmoving, as if his body had frozen. When the light of recognition returned to his gaze, he was frowning and guarded.
“Trouble,” he said in a wary whisper, the words so soft that Bannon barely caught them.
Bannon looked doubtful. “Can you hear something?”
Sully nodded his head.
The sound of glass breaking brought Bannon’s head snapping round. He glared over his shoulder and froze, his body tensing with alert awareness. He heard vague shuffling sounds, and a heavy thump. He glanced at Sully, then turned warily towards the corner of the apartment complex and threw the pistol up in ominous expectation.
“Get to the car,” Bannon whispered harshly.
“What about the rifle?”
“Take it.”
Sully bent for the weapon and then began to move, his steps uncoordinated as though he had spent the day on a bar stool drinking. Bannon followed him, measuring each pace carefully, holding his breath and wincing at soft rustled sounds of his clothes as he moved, and the scrape of his boots on the tarmac. He felt his body coiling like a spring, the tension compressing him so that he was poised and ready to explode into movement at any instant.
A great black dog stalked around the side of the building, its head rocking from side to side and its slathering jaws gaping. The coarse hair along the dog’s back bristled like barbed wire.
When it saw Bannon, the animal went stiff for an instant, and then its head swung low between the bunched muscles of its shoulders. It saw Sully move but ignored him. Instead it padded closer to Bannon, its eyes yellow and rolling – demented within the snarling face. Its snout was stiff and stained with dry blood, and there was more blood on the dog’s paws and caked in the coarse hair across its broad chest. The beast growled and thick ropes of foaming saliva drooled from its gnashing jaws. The lips of the dog were peeled back, revea
ling jagged teeth. The dog slinked forward two more creeping paces.
Bannon froze, sensing the slightest movement would provoke the infected animal to attack. He could hear the thumping race of his heart trying to break out of his chest. He could feel the blazing heat of the afternoon sun, as sweat trickled down his brow and into his eyes.
Sully had reached the hatchback. He raised the rifle, drawing a bead on the dog.
Bannon risked a step towards the car…
The dog lunged.
The beast exploded upon Bannon like a savage avalanche of black snarling muscle. It seemed to hang in the air, and then flinch as though punched sideways by an invisible fist.
Then it struck Bannon full in the chest, the crushing impact of its momentum hurling him off his feet so that he collapsed to the ground with the weight of the maddened animal crushing the wind from his lungs. He screamed in panic and fear and desperation. He thrashed his fists at the animal, twisting his head away from the putrid stench of the dog’s gaping jaws. He kicked out, and felt the toe of his boot dig deep into the animal’s unprotected ribs.
The dog didn’t move.
The dog didn’t bite him.
The dog was dead.
Bannon lay on his back for long seconds while his breath rattled painfully in his chest. The beast’s inert weight was like a bag of cement. He struck out and shoved it off him. He got to his feet, his legs trembling uncontrollably and his hands shaking so badly that he could not feel his fingers. He stared wide-eyed down at the dog, and then slowly turned his head to where Sully waited by the car. The big man was re-loading the rifle.
“Good shot for a guy with blurred vision,” Bannon said dryly, but though he tried to sound calm, the words squeaked horribly in his throat.
Sully said nothing for a long moment, and then set the weapon aside. “You’re assuming I was aiming for the dog…” he said with an acid growl.
Bannon threw himself behind the wheel of Maddie’s little car and slipped the handbrake. The hatchback leaped forward and he crunched through the gears, swerving the vehicle nimbly around the corpses of the dog and the ghoul, then gunning the engine as the car raced down the narrow driveway. Without braking, he swung the wheel hard as the car slewed sideways onto the blacktop, clipping the burned out shell of the vehicle they had seen as they crossed the road from the waterfront, before yawing on tired suspension. Bannon felt himself thrown around inside the car. It was fishtailing uncontrollably. He spun the wheel against the roll and tapped the accelerator. The hatchback’s tires churned in a squeal of blue rubber. Bannon wrenched the wheel to the opposite lock and the car settled, and then lunged forward bravely.
Dead Rage Page 7
