Bannon’s gaze fell on the ghoul. He watched with fascination. The zombie came down a short set of steps and it suddenly dropped to its knees. It was hunting something.
Or someone.
For long moments, Bannon lost sight of the ghoul in the dark shadows that enveloped the house. He peered hard, eyes wide and stood perfectly still.
“Do we go on?” he breathed the words from the corner of his mouth, his lips barely moving.
Sully shook his head. “We go quiet,” the man hissed.
The ghoul appeared again suddenly, coming to its feet by the front fence of the property as if it had crawled across the lawn on its hands and knees. Bannon felt his heart skip a beat. The zombie had once been a middle aged man. Its skin was white and bloated, the stomach a huge hairy obese bulge that hung heavily down over his hips. The ghoul was completely naked, and it moved in slow stalking bursts, almost birdlike, as it edged closer.
There was an open front gate and a driveway beside the home, bordered by high trees. The ghoul reached the gate and then turned away suddenly, sprinting along the driveway towards the rear of the home. Bannon felt himself sigh a slow breath of relief.
“Now,” Sully muttered.
They came from the alcove and crept forward. The sidewalk was broken concrete pavement. Their steps were soundless. They covered another twenty feet before a deep hole of shadow at the back of a building beckoned them.
There was trash strewn across the ground. They were standing under some kind of awning over a door. It was probably the rear entrance to one of the main street shops, Bannon guessed. He pressed the palm of his hand against the timber. It was solid wood, and locked.
To his left and right he could see jumbled shapes of junk and rubbish. The stench of rotting food was strong, overpowering everything else. Sully stood like a statue. Only his eyes moved slowly in his head.
Bannon could sense the big man’s sudden tension.
“You hear something?”
Sully nodded.
Bannon tried to focus his hearing, straining to separate individual sounds amongst the bedlam and chaos that surrounded them. Then something dark scurried across his boot. He snatched his foot away and felt himself cringe with a shudder of skin-crawling revulsion.
“Rats.”
Sully nodded. The darkness beside where they stood seemed to be moving – writhing. Bannon stared hard until slowly several shapes emerged.
The rats were feeding on something – probably a pile of garbage, or maybe a corpse. Bannon didn’t want to know. He couldn’t smell the stench of bloated death… but perhaps his senses had been overwhelmed, or diluted by the strong odor of smoke. He shuffled a pace away, but another rat came crawling up his leg. He lashed out with his fist. The rat made a child-like screech of pain and fell away.
“Fuck this!” Bannon hissed. “Let’s get going.” He moved. He took three steps in the darkness towards the edge of a fence, and then stopped, as if frozen. He felt something give way beneath his foot.
He looked back over his shoulder. Sully was right behind him.
“Sully!” he whispered urgently. He had one foot suspended in mid air and he felt himself begin to teeter off balance. He had trodden on a body, lying in on the concrete in the black shadow of the fence. Bannon could see a sheen of firelight reflect from a wedge of torso flesh. He held his breath.
The figure hissed. Bannon’s eyes went huge with his horror.
He stumbled backwards. The figure he had stepped on came up onto its hands and knees. It was a woman. She was wearing the tattered shreds of denim jeans. Her upper body was naked. The woman hunched her back and snarled. Then she pounced to her feet.
Now she was upright, Bannon could see the undead woman more clearly. She had died young – maybe still a teenager. She had short blonde hair, dirty with filth and gore. Her face was desiccated, the eyes sunk deep into her skull, a flap of rotting flesh torn from one of her cheeks. She had been bitten on the shoulder. One of the arms seemed to hang like a broken wing, as if maybe bones had been shattered.
“Fuck!” Bannon gasped.
He threw up the pistol instinctively. The zombie drew back her lips, exposing snarling teeth that were chipped and broken and blackened. At the same instant she lunged her head at Bannon like a spitting cobra. He flinched away, felt the fetid rotting breath of the ghoul wash over his face. The gun in his hand was wrenched off target and he had to drag it back, costing him a precious split-second.
It was all the time the ghoul needed.
The undead woman flung herself at Bannon, fingers clawing at his shirt so he felt the tug and then the tear of fabric. He reeled away, hopelessly off balance, and there was a cry of utter horror in his throat as he fell hard to the ground. The Beretta was flung from his nerveless fingers and went skittering away into the black night.
The undead woman lunged, but Sully was suddenly there, swinging a mighty fist that connected with the ghoul’s jaw. The sound of bones breaking was sickening. The woman’s head was wrenched round, hair swishing in the air like ragged tails. She crashed against the fence and hung like a rag doll, stunned for an instant.
Sully stood protectively over Bannon’s body. The ghoul hissed at him, making greedy gulping motions, her evil slanted eyes blazing with poisonous hatred and her tongue stabbing obscenely from between her lips. She came warily from the fence, circling around to the opposite side of the narrow path. Another rat scurried somewhere in the darkness, and as Bannon heaved himself shakily up onto his knees, one of the vermin scrabbled onto his shoulder. Bannon thrashed wildly, revolted by the touch. His flesh crawled as clawed filthy feet brushed over his cheek.
His flailing panic incensed the rage of the zombie woman. She attacked again, hurling herself mindlessly forward. Sully snatched the woman up by the neck and squeezed. The ghoul made wretched clotted sounds of fury, kicking its legs in empty air. Sully threw the woman down to the ground beside where Bannon sat dazed, and pinned her to the concrete.
“Find a weapon!” Sully hissed.
“A weapon?” Bannon was numb, senses reeling. The woman writhed and began to screech.
“A fucking stick. A knife. Anything!” the big man’s voice was a raw rash of violence.
Bannon got to his feet and staggered. There was a ragged old broom leaning against the fence. He snatched it up and passed it to Sully.
“Break it!”
Bannon put the handle across his knee. The sound of the wood shattering made him wince. He thrust the shortest piece of broken wood to Sully’s outstretched fingers.
With his hand clamped like a steel brace around the undead ghoul’s throat, Sully raised the splintered end of the handle high overhead and then stabbed down. The jagged edge went through the zombie’s eyeball. The ghoul screeched. The woman was clinging to the stick with both hands, kicking frenetically out with its legs. Sully twisted the handle to grind it deeper through the skull, and finally felt it grate against bone. He twisted, wrenched the handle with all his might until the shaft plunged deep into the thrashing woman’s infected brain. Watery ooze dribbled from the burst eyeball and then the zombie went limp, finally dead.
Bannon tore open his shirt and stared down at his chest. His lungs were heaving. Sweat ran in rivulets over the lean muscles of his abdomen. He turned to Sully, his expression bleak and wrought with ominous dread.
“Do you see anything? Am I scratched?”
Sully peered close. Bannon made a half-turn so that he was caught in the flickering glow of the burning buildings on the opposite side of the narrow street.
Sully’s face was rigid, his expression fixed. He shook his head slowly. “You’re okay,” the big man said.
Bannon sighed, and went soft with relief for a moment. His hands were trembling. One of the plastic bags that he had waterproofed the emergency beacon with was tattered. The little black box had saved his life.
Sully’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”
Bannon started to answer, and then some
instinct warned him. He choked his reply off and buttoned up his shirt hurriedly. “I’ll tell you later,” he grunted.
Sully became suspicious. He opened his mouth to say something more, but suddenly Bannon remembered the Beretta.
“The gun!” he blurted. “I lost it in the darkness.”
“Forget it,” Sully snapped. “We don’t have time to look. Use the other one.” Behind Bannon’s back he had seen a flicker of distant movement. “Right now we have more important things to worry about… and run from.”
Sully stabbed his finger into the wavering shadows.
Chapter 9.
The screeching snarls of the woman they had killed and the sounds of the life-and-death struggle had drawn more zombies. They gathered in a cluster in the middle of the street, backlit by leaping flames as the houses behind them burned. They were gnarled, twisted shapes cast as black silhouettes. Bannon drew the Beretta from the waistband of his jeans.
“How many do you think?” he asked in a whisper.
Sully shrugged. “Maybe eight. Too many.”
“What do we do?”
“If we run, you’re dead. They’ll catch you.”
“We could stand here and fight,” Bannon said grimly. Behind the ghouls, one of the houses suddenly collapsed. The roof caved in and the sky filled with a towering ball of flame and embers.
Sully turned his eyes to Bannon.
“This gun has fifteen bullets,” he showed the Beretta in his fist to Sully. “More than enough.”
Sully’s expression became sour. “You won’t hit anything.”
That was a point. Bannon wasn’t a soldier – he was a scared, tired, panicked fisherman. The chances of him shooting anything that moved in the head beyond a few feet of range were practically zero.
“So what do we do?” Bannon’s voice became strained and urgent. The horrendous crashing sounds of the house collapsing had masked the whispers of their words, but it had also pushed the undead away from the flames. They had come to the gutter, and milled close together on the concrete sidewalk. They were less than twenty feet from where the two men stood in the dark shadows of the doorway. “Can you stall them?” Bannon felt his panic begin to flutter in the pit of his guts. “Go out there and lead them away?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Sully turned on Bannon, and there was real malevolence and fury in his face. He snarled, and his words grated. “Because I don’t know what will happen if I get bitten again, or even scratched,” he spat. “Maybe it will be enough for me to turn completely. Maybe any more exposure to the infection will turn me into one of those fuckers. Did you think of that?”
Bannon hadn’t. He hadn’t considered the possibility that Sully was still in danger.
“Get the door open,” Sully muttered. His simmering outburst dissolved in an instant. “We’ll have to take our chances inside.”
Bannon looked appalled. Being on the open street had given him some small sense of security. The glowing flare from the fires had provided enough light for him to see danger coming. The interior of the building behind them would be pitch black.
Bannon opened his mouth to protest, but Sully intercepted him. “Think of it as a shortcut,” the big man said grimly. “The building has to open onto the main street. It must be one of the shop fronts. If we’re lucky, we’ll save some time getting to the woods along the headland.”
“And if we’re unlucky?”
Sully’s expression didn’t change. “If we’re unlucky,” he paused for an instant, “the building we’re about to break into is going to be filled with more zombies.”
Chapter 10.
“The door is locked!”
“Bust it open,” Sully growled. “Fuckin’ hurry!”
The undead had heard them. It was inevitable. As the house on the far side of the street crashed to rubble and the smoke and dust swirled high into the sky, the sound of the men’s voices – even hushed and strained – carried to the infected. They came snarling and lunging… and hunting.
Bannon took a step back and then launched himself, kicking out hard and striking the door an inch below the lock with the heel of his boot. The door exploded inwards and Bannon’s momentum carried him across the threshold. Sully came crowding after him, stepping into a world without light.
The darkness was absolute – a claustrophobic nightmare where every sense was subdued and made useless. Sully slammed the door shut and braced his back against it. Seconds later the hammering fists and outraged snarls of the undead came vibrating through the wood. The door bucked and lurched against Sully’s broad back.
“Hurry! Find something to barricade the door!” the big man hissed.
Bannon groped hopelessly in the blackness. His hands reached out blindly. He felt something like soft silk brush over his face and he cringed away. He shuddered. He could hear the wailing of the zombies undulating: rising and falling like waves crashing on a beach. The sound of their pounding fists became louder. He flailed his hands in hopeless desperation.
And then froze.
Bannon’s outstretched fingers brushed something that felt… familiar. His breath hitched in the back of his throat and jammed there. Slowly, fearfully, he crawled his fingers over something that felt like a face.
“Fuck!” he cried out. He stumbled away, tripped over something heavy in the dark, and staggered to regain his balance. “They’re in here!” Bannon screamed, his voice filled with blind terror. “The place must be full of them!” He had the Beretta in his fist and he fired twice from just a few feet of distance. The roar of the shots was a detonation of deafening sound in the confined space. For a split second the black night lit up, and then the darkness came down again like a crushing anvil.
“Fuck!” Bannon gasped again. “I think I got it.” He was panting. His heart was racing faster than he thought humanly possible and there was a terrified feverish tremble in his hands. He blinked. The dark was swirling before his eyes. Pinwheels of light sparked across his vision.
Suddenly he remembered the cigarette lighter he had taken from the therapy office. He fumbled it from his pocket and took a slow fearful breath.
The lighter sparked, then flamed.
The pool of light was small, a soft wavering glow of weak yellow that spilled like a puddle around his feet. The light caught the edge of a row of shelves against the far wall, and turned the shapes around him into threatening shadows.
His hand was shaking. Bannon held the lighter close to him…
… and stared down at the ground.
The shop mannequin lay on its back on the floor, a ragged hole punched into the forehead of the figure, and another hole smashed through the shoulder.
Bannon’s expression became incredulous. He flicked a glance at Sully, and then held the cigarette lighter high above his head. They were standing in a dress shop.
“Good shooting, Annie fucking Oakley,” Sully sneered with derisive contempt. “You killed a store dummy.”
There was an open doorway near where Bannon stood. He held the lighter out ahead of him. It was a small office at the rear of the shop. He could see a foam coffee cup and a litter of invoices spread across a sturdy desk. He upended the desk and edged the heavy piece out through the opening. They braced the desk hastily against the back door of the shop and then piled heavy cardboard boxes on top of it.
“That will hold them – for now,” Sully grunted. The chorus of snarling cries from outside had diminished. He pressed his ear to the door for a long suspicious moment.
“Maybe some of them have lost interest,” he shrugged, his tone puzzled and unsure. There was still a ragged relentless beat of fists pounding through the door, but not so many, nor so frantic. “Or maybe they’ve found something else to hunt.”
Bannon crept between the racks of dresses and women’s fashion pieces, shielding the flickering light with his cupped hand. The floor was polished timber boards so that every step he took seemed an unnaturally loud echo. There w
as soot and flakes of black ash on the ground that had either been blown in through the doors, or maybe fallen down through the ceiling from the roof above as it had burned.
The front of the shop was plate glass – two big floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of a glass-fronted door. The windows were painted with ‘Sale’ and ‘Discount’ signs, and there was an arrangement of several more mannequins before each window. Some of the fiberglass figurines were standing in dresses. Others had been posed sitting on boxes and delicate chairs.
“Wanna shoot them too?” Sully gruffed dryly.
Bannon said nothing. He felt a flush of acute embarrassed heat on his cheeks.
In the middle of the shop floor was a sales counter, standing like a small island. There was a cash register on the polished counter top and several shelves underneath. Bannon crept to the counter and peered cautiously out through the shop’s display windows.
Nothing moved.
Far off, through the ragged black outline of distant trees along the headland, the sky seemed to be lightening with the first hint of the coming dawn. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was 4.30am.
He had just ninety minutes to reach Maddie, talk reason into her, and then get her back to the sports field for the rendezvous with the rescue helicopter. His expression became tight and grim.
“We need to get across the street and into those trees,” he said, pointing out through the darkened glass.
“No shit,” Sully said. In the weird light of small flame, the big man’s face looked ghastly – a gruesome mask of grey hanging flesh and the sharp lines of his skull showing as deep hollows and jagged highlights. His eyes were haunting – somehow soulless.
Bannon could smell the whiff of corruption. It wrinkled in his nostrils.
Sully got slowly to his feet and went to the front of the shop. There was a small bell fixed above the door. He unfastened it carefully, and then turned back to where Bannon hesitated. “Come on,” he whispered. “There’s no time left for hiding.”
Dead Rage Page 17
