by Mark Morris
They all looked at Sister Helen, who said smilingly, ‘Oh, we all have free will. I cannot possibly speak for Him.’
Dani looked at Purna and nodded slowly. ‘Then I come with you,’ he said.
Chapter 9
LOW-LIFE
‘HOLY CRAP.’
Sam’s tone was almost reverential. The sight that greeted them as they turned the corner on to the main resort street was both terrifying and awe-inspiring.
The infected were everywhere. In a hideously grotesque parody of consumerism, they were shuffling up and down the long main street as if window shopping. Some of them were even wandering aimlessly in and out of the stores and bars and restaurants, presumably looking for food.
If anyone was still alive in the buildings, however, they were keeping well hidden. There were a few eviscerated bodies, or parts of bodies, strewn about like roadkill, which Sam guessed must belong to people either lucky or unlucky enough to have been so badly torn apart that there was no chance of them coming back, but there was no sign of anyone actually alive – no survivors sitting on roofs with ‘Help’ signs, or peering out of upper-floor windows.
As for the infected themselves, they were made up almost entirely of holidaymakers and resort staff. Many were dressed in nightwear or brightly coloured holiday clothes; some were wearing the uniforms of hotel staff or retail assistants. They were of all ages and colours and creeds, and they almost all bore the evidence of bites or other, more serious wounds. Sam could see one old man constantly stumbling on his own intestines, slick pink loops of which were hanging out of a rent in his stomach and trailing around his feet like a tangle of dead snakes. Other zombies were missing limbs or feet or hands; some, unable to walk, were dragging themselves along, their fingernails torn and bleeding. Yet others were missing parts of their face – one man had had his entire lower jaw torn away and his fat, blackening tongue was plastered to his throat like a feeding leech. The majority of them were smeared with the remains of recent meals, hands and faces caked in drying blood and clots of raw meat.
So far, despite the noise of the van’s engine, Purna, Sam and the others had been ignored – further evidence that Sam’s theory was correct and that the infected only responded to what they could eat, blanking out everything else.
‘You reckon they can smell us in here?’ Sam said as the van idled at the intersection.
Purna shrugged. ‘Maybe they don’t need to smell us. Maybe if they just catch sight of us, that little “food” sign will ping in their heads.’
‘So where is this police station?’ Sam asked, half turning to Dani, who was crouched in the back of the van, hands curled around the headrests of the front seats to stop him being shaken about too much.
‘About half-mile that way,’ Dani replied, pointing left along the main drag. ‘Big white building. We park at bottom of steps and run up. There is … er …’ He mimed pressing buttons.
‘Keypad?’ suggested Xian Mei.
‘Yes. Keypad outside door. Four-number code.’
‘You’d better tell us what it is,’ said Purna. ‘Just in case of unexpected developments.’
Dani nodded. ‘Is four-two-seven-four.’
‘Four-two-seven-four,’ repeated Purna. ‘Everyone got that?’
Sam, Jin and Xian Mei all nodded.
‘OK. Let’s do this.’
They had already discussed the plan – get the guns first, then drive round the back of the main supermarket to the delivery warehouse, where it would hopefully be quieter. Jin had explained there was a pharmacy outlet within the supermarket itself, which had a prescriptions counter, so with luck they would be able to get Mr Owen’s Nadolol there. If not, they would have to make a separate trip to the bigger pharmacy, which was further up towards their resort hotel. Purna remarked sourly that at this rate they’d do so much backtracking that eventually they’d end up in their hotel rooms.
She eased off the brake and edged forward slowly, the silver-grey van nudging into the main street. It struck Sam that the van was kind of like a shark, cruising slowly through the shallows of a sea packed with holidaymakers – except in this case the tourists, and not the shark, were the predators. The infected milled about in front of them, ignoring the van and each other. They even ignored the van when it bumped gently against them, nudging them out of the way.
They had crawled maybe a hundred metres without incident when they encountered a girl in a white Christian Dior T-shirt and denim shorts standing directly in front of them. The girl would have been pretty if it wasn’t for her glazed and milky eyes, and the red gruel of blood and offal clotted in her shoulder-length blonde hair. She was just standing there, her head tilted vaguely upwards, as if distracted by something in the sky whilst out for a morning’s shopping. As the van glided towards her, engine rumbling softly, she lowered her head with a slow, almost creaky movement and stared through the windscreen straight at them.
At least, she seemed to. Sam held his breath as her dead eyes regarded him unflinchingly. Beside him, Jin and Xian Mei, crushed into the middle seat together, were rigid, barely daring to move. Speaking quietly through compressed lips, Jin asked nervously, ‘You think she sees us?’
‘I don’t know,’ murmured Purna, moving her hands as slowly as possible as she eased the van to a halt.
The vehicle came to rest with its front grille only an inch or so from the girl’s sun-bronzed thighs. The girl continued to stare at them for several more seconds, mouth half-open, face slack. Then she took a stumbling step forward, bumped into the front of the van and veered off in a different direction. Sam breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Man, that was—’ he began.
He jumped in shock as something slammed into the passenger window, inches from his face. He turned to see the girl’s suddenly enraged, screeching face, her dead eyes glaring into his own. She was scrabbling at the glass with hooked fingers, leaving smeary marks.
‘Shit,’ said Purna as other zombies began to turn towards them, alerted by the commotion.
Swiftly, but without panic, she put the van into gear and depressed the accelerator. It slid forward as a dozen or more of the infected converged on them from all sides. The blonde-haired girl’s hands squealed down the outside of the window, leaving greasy imprints, and then she was gone. The van’s forward momentum left most of the initial group of suddenly alerted zombies in its wake, but already others were turning in their direction as if a psychic signal was sizzling through their reanimated brains like a mental Mexican Wave.
‘Hold on!’ Purna shouted as the van picked up speed. The infected were running at them from all directions now, in such numbers that in a matter of seconds it was going to prove impossible to avoid hitting them.
Jin screamed as the first collision jolted them in their seats. A corpulent, dark-haired woman in her early thirties was knocked backwards with such force that she all but flattened a small boy in Batman pyjamas who was running up behind her. The van rocked from side to side as the infected began to throw themselves at it like human battering rams. Most of them bounced off, though one – a young man in a checked shirt – managed to leap up on to the bonnet, where he skittered like Bambi on ice for a couple of seconds, screaming in at them through the windscreen, before tumbling off and going under the wheels. The van gave a tremendous lurch as it drove over him and Sam clung to the door handle, convinced for a horrible second they were going to tip over. Fortunately the van righted itself with a crunching jolt, surging ahead as all four wheels regained the road. It slewed from side to side, Purna trying to manoeuvre a way through the throng as more zombies thumped and battered at the van’s bodywork. There was another crunch, then another, as two more of the infected were smashed out of the way. Sam gritted his teeth and wondered how much punishment the van could take before it gave up the ghost. If it stalled or crashed they were fucked. They’d be like meatballs in a can, waiting to be plucked out and devoured.
It was difficult at times for Purna to see beyond the
screeching faces and scrabbling hands, but somehow she kept going, her face set and determined, her hands and feet deft on the controls. The windscreen and side windows were smeared with blood, but luckily the glass had so far survived intact. Sam wondered briefly how crumpled and dented the van’s bodywork was – not that it mattered, as long as it held – and how much further it was to the police station. As if he could read Sam’s thoughts, Dani, who had been clinging on for dear life to avoid being thrown around in the back like a shirt in a tumble dryer, jammed his face between two of the front seats and gasped, ‘Police station just up here. Two hundred metres on right.’
Because the infected were not cunning or organized enough to arrange an ambush and so had simply run at them from all directions, Purna had now managed to break through the first wave of attackers and surge ahead. However, although the chasing pack was currently falling further behind, they were still too close for comfort. Close enough, at least, to be on them before they’d have time to park the van, get out, run up the steps to the police station and punch in the code to open the doors.
‘We need to draw them away,’ Sam said.
‘Already ahead of you,’ replied Purna, glancing in her wing mirror.
Instead of speeding up, she slowed down a little, allowing the infected to get closer, but not close enough to catch up. Ignoring the white building that Dani had pointed out to them, she kept going, heading along the street for another hundred metres or so before taking a right at the intersection. Checking that the infected were still following, she took the next right and hit the accelerator. By the time she had completed a circuit that brought them back on to the main street, most of their pursuers had been left far behind. The instant the van screeched to a halt at the bottom of the white stone steps outside the police station, Purna and Sam threw open their doors. Two seconds later, all five of them were running up the steps towards the main door.
Although many of the infected had been lured away, there were still enough of them wandering around to cause trouble. The moment Purna, Sam and the rest emerged from the van, zombies began to swarm towards them, like wasps attracted to a picnic. Xian Mei and Jin ran up the steps with Dani while Purna and Sam turned to fight a rearguard action. Calmly Purna picked off the closest and most agile zombies with the shotgun, swiftly and unfussily reloading after each double blast, while Sam held the stragglers at bay with his flare pistol, distracting them by igniting their clothes or hair.
‘We’re in,’ Xian Mei shouted a few seconds later. Abandoning their positions, Purna and Sam turned and bounded up the steps, taking them three at a time. Xian Mei was waiting anxiously at the top, holding the door of the station open with one hand whilst urging them on with the other. Seconds later, with the infected just metres behind them, Sam and Purna reached her. All three of them slipped into the building, Sam, at the rear, slamming the door behind them.
They stood for a moment, recovering their composure and their breath. They could hear the infected outside, not exactly pounding on the door, but blundering against it, as if unable to work out why there was suddenly a barrier between themselves and their meal. The police station was a modern, clinical building, the vestibule area with its reception desk, low sofas and potted plants more like the waiting room of a private hospital than a law enforcement agency. The cop shops back in Sam’s old New Orleans neighbourhood had been run-down grimy places with wire mesh over the bullet-proof glass in the windows and a constant procession of low-life streaming in and out. Sam guessed that the cops here in the resort area of Banoi, however, had a much easier time of it. The worst they probably had to contend with were traffic violations, the odd public order offence, maybe an occasional bout of shoplifting. He doubted the cells – if they even had them – were ever full and that before today there had ever been much (if any) call to break out the heavy artillery. It was clear, from the fact the station appeared to be deserted, that the local authorities had been totally ill-equipped to deal with the events of the past twenty-four hours. The only cop they had seen had been the one in the graveyard – infected and mutilated, his right leg nothing but a bleeding stump.
Beyond the vestibule area was a corridor on their left, which led deeper into the building, and a staircase on their right. ‘Weapons this way,’ said Dani, pointing to the staircase. They ascended two flights to the floor above and passed through a set of double doors into a corridor leading to an open-plan office which contained eight desks, a drinks machine and several filing cabinets. They were crossing the office when three dark shapes – one on either side of them and one directly in front – rose up like shadows, guns in their hands.
Immediately Purna started to raise the shotgun, but the man to their left barked out, ‘Try it and you’re dead.’
She froze, as if assessing her chances, then reluctantly lowered the weapon.
‘Put the gun on the floor,’ the man said. ‘The rest of you, drop your weapons too.’
When they had complied, Sam slowly raised his hands, showing the men his palms. ‘Easy, guys,’ he said. ‘We don’t want no trouble.’
‘So what do you want?’ said the man directly in front of them. He was weaselly, twitchy, with a sparse beard and pockmarked cheeks. He looked pale and ill, like a junkie in need of a fix. In his hand was a chunky silver handgun, which he was pointing at them side-on.
Before anyone else could answer, Dani said, ‘We here to get more guns.’
The man who had first spoken sniggered. In contrast to his skinny colleague, he was powerfully built and clean-shaven, his skin a light shade of brown. His features were heavy, pugnacious, and he had a tattoo of what looked like an eagle on the left side of his neck, the tips of its outstretched wings stretching across his cheeks like the shadow of a hand. He had more tattoos on his bare arms and was pointing a hunting rifle at them.
‘Then you’ve come to the wrong place,’ he said. ‘There’s no guns here.’
‘Yes,’ said Dani. ‘I know code.’
Loudly Purna said, ‘So why are you guys here?’
The weasel ignored her. Staring at Dani with narrowed eyes he said, ‘What do you mean, you know the code?’
Dani licked his lips nervously, realizing too late, that he had said too much. Deliberately the weasel moved his arm so his gun was pointing directly at Jin’s face.
‘Tell me now or the pretty girl loses her head.’
Dani’s eyes widened and his mouth opened and closed, but he was clearly too scared to speak. In a steady, almost casual voice, Purna said, ‘Dani installed the security systems here. He knows the code to gain access to the armoury.’
The third man whooped. He was older and heavier-set than the others, his hair thinning and his eyes small and piggy in his fleshy face. He had large sweat stains under the arms of his brown T-shirt, and like the tattooed man he was holding a hunting rifle.
‘Looks like we hit the jackpot!’ he cried.
‘What do you need guns for?’ Xian Mei said. ‘You’ve already got them.’
‘Best currency there is right now,’ the weaselly man said. ‘Guns. Ammunition. We got those, we can bed ourselves in here till all that shit out there blows over.’
‘Oh yeah? And what about food?’ asked Purna.
The weaselly man looked uncertain. Then over-confidently he said, ‘We’ll find enough to keep us going. Place this size, there’s bound to be plenty.’
Purna shook her head. ‘This is a police station, not a restaurant. If you’re thinking of bedding in here and waiting for help to arrive, then you’re going to need provisions.’
‘How about we send you to get us some?’ proposed the tattooed man.
Purna turned slowly and looked at him. ‘How about we do a deal?’ she countered.
The weasel sneered. ‘We don’t do deals.’
‘Then you’re idiots,’ said Purna calmly, looking him straight in the eye. ‘We’re not your enemies. Those things out there are your enemies. Think about it for a minute. Fighting is a waste
of time and energy. There are plenty of resources for everyone, and we’re in a position to help each other out here.’ She paused. ‘So – this is the deal. We get you food, you allow us access to the armoury. Food for guns – and plenty of both for everyone. Once we’ve both got what we want we go our separate ways. That sound reasonable to you?’
The weasel stared at Purna for a moment, then glanced at his colleagues. ‘How do we know you won’t just run out on us?’ he asked finally.
‘We want guns,’ said Purna simply. ‘One isn’t enough.’
‘You look hard enough, you can find guns anywhere,’ said the tattooed man.
‘We ain’t got time to go lookin’,’ said Sam.
The weasel thought about it, then eventually he nodded. ‘OK. But you get the guns after you get back, not before. And just so’s we know you won’t run out on us, we keep two of you here. As insurance. Him and her.’
He gestured casually with his gun at Jin and Dani.
Purna shook her head. ‘That’s unacceptable.’
‘That’s the deal,’ said the weasel. ‘Take it or leave it. But if you leave it, I reckon that’ll be bad news for you.’
He grinned, and looking into his eyes Purna knew exactly what he meant. But she tried not to show her anger or frustration; for now the weasel and his cronies were holding all the aces.
‘I’ll be OK,’ Jin said bravely.
Dani nodded. ‘I look after her.’
Purna glanced at Sam and Xian Mei. Sam raised his eyebrows. Xian Mei’s face was stony.
Sighing, Purna shrugged. ‘Guess we don’t have much of a choice,’ she said.
Chapter 10
AN ACT OF LOVE
‘BE CAREFUL.’
They approached the door cautiously, Sam in the lead. They could see that it had been separated from its hinges by a crowbar or something similar and then shoved roughly back into position. On the door a sign read: STAFF ENTRANCE ONLY. Situated on the far left of the huge back wall of the supermarket, the door was almost unnoticeable next to the big metal roll-up doors of the loading bay, which were five times higher and wider. It was here, adjacent to the currently empty staff car park, that trucks delivered goods in bulk to the warehouse. And it was here that Xian Mei had suggested they try to gain access to the building.
