by James King
“Yours...?” she asked.
Matt nodded, “mine...”
“Ah, shit...” Becky said; her voice now strengthened by retrieved breath and desperation, “ah fuck...”
“Yep...” said Matt, “my thoughts exactly...”
“What do we do?”
“Well...” Matt offered another glance at the car, up and down the roadway, and at the surrounding cornfields. Then he said: “...we could try going up to the car and politely asking the - er – zombies if they would kindly move aside while we retrieve our car. They might agree to it, given that, with a clear road, they are better placed to do their zombie walk unimpeded - ,”
“Oh, ha, ha funneee,” said Becky, “– that’s a great big non-laugh coming from me. An absolutely huge fucking anti-laugh.”
“– or we could just get the fuck out of here, and - ah – rethink our situation. Given everything that’s happened so far – the shop, what we saw on the high street and the rest – I think that that’s probably the best option.”
Becky glanced away from Matt and back toward the car. Matt followed her gaze, and once again saw his vehicle, standing there abandoned on the roadside, so near and yet so far. The zombies were idly milling around the car, some pushing and pulling at the vehicle, as though in a futile attempt to turn it over, some clawing at the glass of the windows and peering into the interior of the car, as though they thought they might be able to see somebody in there, while yet another was pulling at the open door, seemingly fascinated by the fact that it could turn on its hinges. Other zombies had forsaken the car, and were roaming across the road, walking in the same seemingly purposeless arcs and loops that he’d seen them perform on Sycamore Avenue. Matt briefly wondered why the zombies hadn’t detected them yet, and started to pay interest. Well, firstly there was the car that had captured their interest for the time being, but the more compelling reason, Matt realised, was that the wind was blowing away from them and toward Matt and Becky. It brought the stench of the monsters toward them – rotting, deathly – but at least it was carrying his and Becky’s scent away from them.
Becky was saying something and, having fallen into a reverie, Matt had missed it. “Huh?” he said, turned around to her.
Becky sighed in exasperation, “I was saying: that I agree that we need to get the fuck out of here, but where?”
“Oh, yeah, right, well... can’t go forward because the road’s blocked with – them – and we can’t go backward because backward takes us to Alchester, and we both know what’s waiting for us there. So the only option that I can suggest is - ,”
Matt was cut short in his suggestion by a sudden noise. It came loud and vibrant in the morning air, perhaps distant, but undeniable none the less. The single shot of a gun.
“What the fuck was that?” asked Becky.
“Gunfire,” Matt returned.
“Duh – yes, I know it was gunfire. What I meant was whose gunfire? Is it the army? Have the cavalry arrived?”
Matt didn’t answer. Instead, he glanced across at the zombies down by the car. Some of them seemed to have stopped their vehicle examination, and were gazing in roughly the direction that the shot had been fired from: their heads cocked, their eyes blank, their mouths running black drool. They still didn’t seem to have noticed Matt and Becky, but Matt supposed that it was only a matter of time before they did.
“Don’t know whose gunfire it was,” Matt said at last, “but somehow, I don’t think that it’s the military. What I do think however is that we should maybe go check it out. If someone’s got a gun, then that could be useful to us, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, possibly,” Becky replied, “depending on who they’re firing it at.”
“Good point. We’ll have to be careful. Come on, let’s go see what we can find out.”
Matt offered the far end of the lane – the end that they had travelled down – a brief, worried look, but it was empty for the moment. It seemed that their pursuers from Sycamore Avenue had given up the chase for now. Perhaps they had found richer fare elsewhere. He shuddered at the thought. Then, turning form the road way, and careful not to make himself visible to the zombies down by the car, Matt crept across the roadway, and to the hedge at the far side of the road. A gate was set into the hedge, and he carefully peered over it. Becky joined him, and they both gazed over the gate’s iron struts at what lay beyond.
The field that stretched beyond was a cornfield, but it wasn’t the same field that the helicopter had crashed into. That field was the next one over. This field was large and broad and full of swaying barley, and was happily free of either crashed aircraft, or any tottering, burning figures that might have crawled out of it. That notwithstanding though, the sight of the field still gave Matt a chill, causing gooseflesh to crawl along his arms. He supposed that maybe the sight of a cornfield at the height of summer would always have that effect on him. Beyond the field stood a house – large, stone built, three storied. The Devlin Farm House, no less, staunch and proud and isolated amongst its fields. One of the upper windows was open, and leaning out of the window was a man with a gun. The man was sighting along the gun at something down in the far side of the field, and Matt didn’t have to think too hard to guess what the man was firing at. He didn’t have to guess to hard either as to the identity of the man: large, heavily bearded, leaning out of a window of the Devlin farmhouse...
“Bryan Devlin,” said Becky, “shit, I haven’t seen him in ages.”
As they watched, Bryan sited once again along the gun and pulled the trigger. There was a brief flash, visible even in this bright day, and the report boomed across the fields like distant summer thunder.
“Christ, he ain’t taking prisoners,” said Matt.
“You think we should try getting over there to him?” Becky asked.
Matt licked his lips, glancing about, “I don’t know. If he’s got a gun – or maybe several guns – that could kill these things then that would be useful. But we’ve got to be careful. If we approach the house openly from the front, then he might think we’re zombies and kill us. I think we need to approach the house from the rear, stay out of the range of fire, and then try talking to him – all while not getting our guts torn out by any zombies that might be in the vicinity. Ah, shit, the more I talk about this the less I’m liking it, but – fuck!”
“What?”
But then Becky gazed in the same direction that Matt had been gazing in, and she saw them. Zombies. A whole huge, new hoard of them, possibly the ones from Sycamore Avenue that had finally caught up with them, maybe even the entire good town of Alchester, died and risen again all on one sunny morning, and now here they came along the road: hungering and drooling and blank of eye. Matt glanced in the other direction and saw that the zombies down by the car were shambling toward them, likewise eager and moaning, their howls climbing upward into the blue firmament of the sky.
“Okay,” said Becky, “I kind of think that our decision has been made for us. It’s the cornfield or bust.”
Matt nodded, “yep, let’s get the sweet fuck gone.”
Quickly, eagerly, they scrambled over the gate, wincing at the metal beneath their flesh, which had become scalding hot beneath the intensity of the sun. They dumped themselves down into barley on the other side of the fence, and Matt was hit with a sudden and horrible moment of déjà vu, flashing back to the moment, only a couple of hours or so ago, when he had performed this very act after he had seen the helicopter crash. He almost expected to see the helicopter burning and smoking there in the middle of the field, its pilots crawling out of the flames, staggering upward, their flesh hanging like barbecue meat from the scorched kebab skewers of their bones.
He pushed the thought away – shoved it to the back of his mind. There was no helicopter. Not here. That was in the next field over, invisible from here. And as far as the living dead were concerned – they were all in the lane right now, not in the field. Matt steadied himself, looked across at Becky, and
they both nodded.
And then they were both running.
Running once again, fleeing once again from the hoards of stinking death. But at least this time they had a definite objective. At least this time there was a proffered salvation that was greater than just the next step that carried them away from doom. They skirted the field, trying their best to stick to the weed raddled track that ran around its perimeter, and mostly out, as far as they could, of the tall, clutching, impeding barley. That wasn’t entirely possible though, and their flight was slowed by something more than tiredness. If only they could skirt the field, Matt reasoned, then they would be able to approach the farm house from the rear, assess any danger, creep around the walls, and then speak to Bryan. If only they could speak to him, then he might see reason and let them into the house, and in on any other weapons that he might have. Matt knew Bryan’s reputation for being eccentric, so he might not see reason – might indeed have parted company with reason long ago – but it was worth a try. Better than being eaten alive by zombies out on the lane, anyway.
Speaking of which... Matt paused for a moment, and glanced back at the gate. A few of them had made a stumbling entry over the gate, and were now lurching through the corn about two hundred meters or so behind them, but most had not. The lane, and wherever it might be leading, seemed to have held a greater allure for the majority. Good deal. The ones who had made it into the field were being slowed down by the corn, even as Matt watched, one lost its footing and stumbled, wallowing for a moment within the golden ears of the barley. Matt allowed himself a brief smile, then turned and ran onward, trying to catch up with Becky who had run ahead of him.
They had almost completed their circumference of the field, and were only about a hundred meters from the rear of the farmhouse, when they heard the sudden sound of an engine. Deep, roaring, revving, monstrous: the sound of a mechanical leviathan awakening from its slumber.
Matt and Becky stumbled to a halt, once again clutching knees and gasping for breath. Then Becky straightened up and threw a frightened glance toward Matt.
“Do you hear that...?” she asked.
“Yup... sure do...”
“What?”
But before more questions could be asked and more debate made, the source of the engine noise made its appearance. Jutting out into the centre of the field, about fifty meters or so in front of them, was a small copse of trees, leafy and verdant now in the middle of summer - leafy enough to have obscured from their sight the monster that lurked behind them. Now the monster emerged from its lair, roaring, belching exhaust fumes; the sun glinting from its dusty yellow metalwork.
The combine harvester was an ancient one. Matt recognised it immediately. When he had been a child, he had developed a sudden and perhaps inexplicable fascination with combine harvesters, and had spent many a happy hour stood at the edge of a field, watching the machine go about its slow, dusty business. And it was – he knew – this very one that he had watched. Cab-less, its cutters relatively small by modern standards, the sound of its engine old and cranky, but still effective, its body work a faded yellow, the letters – once bright red now faded to pink – NEW HOLLAND printed on its side. It was the combine harvester that old farmer Ron Fernihough had used since time immemorial. Matt could remember all of the regulars down at the Wheatsheaf exhorting farmer to buy a newer model, but the old man had never done so.
And now here the combine was upon this strange and violent day, moving slowly out from behind the copse of trees, its cutters in their raised position, but still turning and chattering, biting the air with mechanical hunger.
“Uh-oh,” said Becky, “this doesn’t look good...”
Matt made no immediate reply. Instead, he watched as the combine inched out of its shroud of trees, and then made a violent and drunken left turn - toward them. The turn was so violent and drunken that the machine almost spilled over onto its side, but the forces of physics relented at the last minute, and machine righted itself, bouncing on its front tyres, its cutters still slicing the air. Matt looked up at the control platform, and there, clutching the steering wheel, sat a figure. The figure was hunched over the steering wheel, its head cocked as though it had just asked a very important question and was waiting for the answer. The combine was still at some distance, but Matt could tell who the figure was: young Nigel Fernihough who, with his father, ran the next farm over. He could also see that Nigel’s eyes were blank, that his mouth was hanging open, and that out of his mouth there drooled an endless stream of black slime. He had been turned – no doubt about that – but the really bad news was that he was currently at the controls of several tons worth of threshing, slicing, potentially murderous machinery.
The combine roared again as its engine was revved. It crept forward, slowly, but with gathering speed. Clearly Nigel hadn’t forgotten how to drive the thing.
“Suggestions?” asked Becky.
“Well...” said Matt, glancing at the combine, glancing at the zombies wallowing in the corn behind them, and then outward at the expanse of barley that lay between them and the Devlin farmhouse, “...if we go forward we’ll get harvested, if we go backward we’ll be eaten alive by the living dead, so it looks to me as though our only option is to cut across the field directly to the house.”
“And if Bryan decides to take pot shots at us?”
“Yeah, well, that’s just a chance that we’ll have to take. And to be honest, I like our chances better in that direction that in the other two. Come on.”
They turned from the weedy path and began cutting a direct course through the heavy, clinging barley. The weather had been parched for a long time now, so the corn was mercifully dry. They progressed through the swishing, hissing stalks with a fair degree of speed, running as fast as the barley would allow them, and doing their best to avoid the sharp green spines of thistles that jutted between the golden ears of the crop. Behind them, the combine once again revved its engines, and Matt risked a brief glance behind him. The harvester still lingered at the perimeter of the field, but Nigel was peering at them, straining across the control platform’s safety rail as he peered toward the two fleeing humans. Maybe he hadn’t figured out how to turn the harvester yet, or maybe his reactions had slowed. Either way, it was buying them valuable time. Once Nigel decided to roll, then time would certainly be at a premium. A combine harvester wasn’t exactly a Formula 1 racing car when it came to speed, but it could easily outpace two humans wallowing their way through the corn.
A sudden sound, a loud bang, and the ears of corn some five meters to Matt’s right trembled as something flew into them.
“Ah shit,” Becky screamed, “Bryan – he’s fucking shooting at us!”
Another loud report, more corn trembled, this time only a meter away. Bryan was honing his sights, getting closer to the target. Shit.
“Bryan,” Becky called in a breathless voice, “it’s us, Becky Chandler and Matt Dixon! We’re not – shit – we’re not zombies!”
Matt chanced a glance up at the window in the farmhouse. Bryan was sighting along his gun again, clearly unimpressed by Becky’s little speech. Maybe he hadn’t figured out yet that zombies didn’t, as a general rule, speak, at least not in words of more than one syllable. Or maybe the guy had gone completely nuts and was just shooting at anything that moved. Who knew? All that they could do was carry on running and hope to Christ that Bryan hadn’t spent a lot of time doing target practice while he’d been all alone out here on the Devlin farm.
Bang! Something whispered past Matt’s left cheek, a brief kiss from a deadly lover. Another three or four centimetres to the right and Matt Dixon’s head would have transformed into an upended bucket of blood and brains. A fission of terror coursed through him, gooseflesh that tightened not only his skin, but every muscle, bone, hair, fibre, internal organ, and toenail. It was as though his entire being had been transformed into a single convulsion of horror. He cringed downward, for a second wanting only to hide in the corn, or perha
ps to find some magic hole in the ground where he could cower and be away from all this horror. For a moment he almost did just that, merely burying himself in the corn in a foetal position, his need for self preservation overriding all rational considerations.
But then he heard the sound of mechanical roaring.
Matt threw his bugging gaze over his shoulder, and saw that Nigel was on his way. He had finally succeeded in turning the harvester around a full ninety degrees, and now the vehicle was making its way through the corn at top speed, bouncing and jouncing over the uneven earth. The cutters were still in their raised position, the reel turning, the augur whirling, and the cutting knives at the base of the arrangement a seething blur of destruction. Nigel still crouched on the control panel, hunched and predatory, his eyes blank, his mouth a streaming horror of slime, and even above the roar of the combine’s engine, Matt thought that he could hear Nigel moaning and howling, demented in his need for blood and for violence.
“Fuck,” Matt screamed, “run! Run now, for your fucking LIFE!”
And so, as if they hadn’t been running before – as if, Matt had time to reflect, they hadn’t been running all day – they ran now. Pell-mell through the corn, wading with a desperate and nightmarish slowness as roaring, whirring, slicing death bore down upon them. More shots rang out, the corn whickering as the bullets flew through them, and Matt cringed, and ran, and wondered what variety of death would get him first. The sound of the combine’s engine was like thunder now, less than ten meters behind them, seconds away from overtaking them with its mechanical annihilation. Yet more shots, and Matt was sure that he heard one of them ring off the metalwork of the combine. Well, he supposed that was good. If Bryan had decided to shoot at the combine rather than them, then they might just stand a chance.
