Dead Stop

by Mark Clapham

  I was about to open my mouth, but he waved me silent.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a gun.’

  As Mike opened the gun cabinet and started to pile kit onto the table, I made my own quick assessment. I’d managed to kill one of those things with a glorified stick, and now I had both a new, living, ally and some heavier weaponry. Things were looking up.

  In spite of my own miserable nature, I was beginning to entertain the possibility that this might actually work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MY OPTIMISM EVAPORATED the moment we caught sight of the lab complex.

  We approached it from over a slight rise near the farm, and I found myself looking down on a cluster of drab, artificially-lit buildings set in a shallow valley. It could pass for any university science park or business estate at night, tarmac and prefabricated concrete punctuated by half-hearted patches of shrubbery.

  From up on the hill I could hear the low hum of generators and aircon, the ominous buzz that breaks the countryside silence when the noise of daytime activity has stopped overnight. Anyone who’s walked around the outskirts of a town at night will know it.

  There were other noises overlapping with that hum. The low moan of the figures I could see shambling between the buildings, following the well-lit paths as they probably had done in life.

  Then a harsher noise still: gunshots, echoing across the valley. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from, but somewhere to our left I could just see that the road I’d crossed earlier curled around to meet the fence that surrounded the site, the entrance somewhere out of our sight. Was someone fighting their way out?

  ‘Do we need to go around there?’ I asked Melissa, pointing that way.

  ‘How would I know?’ said Mike. ‘We used to avoid coming this close. Thought there’d be cameras everywhere.’ He snorted. ‘Didn’t know they’d got their eyes on us anyway.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, glancing past him at Melissa, who was standing a little back from us, staring pointedly into the valley.

  ‘That’s the main entrance,’ she said. ‘If it’s clear, it’ll be the easy way in. But those gunshots don’t make it sound easy.’

  ‘Worth a try,’ I said, looking at Mike as if I wasn’t talking to a ghost. No need to wind him up further; so far, he was having a worse day than I was.

  Mike shrugged, non-committal. So I started to lead the way around the ridge.

  As we circled around, we got a look at the entrance to the complex. It was, as I had hoped, wide open: double gates pulled back, plenty of space to get in and out. The whole area was well-lit even compared to the rest of the site, arc lights mounted around the entry area creating an intense pool of light.

  The company hadn’t gone halves on security, which wasn’t really surprising for a Secret Evil Secluded Base. There were security huts either side of the entrance, and they looked well fortified, at least on the sides which were flush to the wire mesh fence. Were those narrow firing slots, like a World War II bunker?

  Unfortunately for whoever was in those huts, the attackers weren’t coming from outside. The area was swarming with zombies, surging and bustling around the entrance. I saw two or three fall in time with the echoing gunshots as we stood there looking down, but far more were circulating to take their place.

  Whoever was shooting from within that hut, they weren’t getting out.

  And with that many zombies around, we weren’t getting in that way either.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Mike, which just about covered it.

  ‘I know another way in,’ said Melissa. ‘Come on.’

  She didn’t say I told you so, which was nice of her.

  WE SKIRTED THE complex, going back the way we came, staying high up on the ridge, just beyond the light from the perimeter fence. We eventually reached a part of the perimeter where the fence was further away from the buildings and intersecting paths, and most of the lights had gone out.

  It was easy to see why the power might have been lost, as a truck was embedded in the fence. It hadn’t got very far, but it had pulled down sections of the fence either side.

  ‘Squeeze around by the side of the truck,’ said Melissa. ‘Watch out, the fence might still be live.’

  ‘Live?’ I hissed. Mike had drifted off slightly, so I could speak a little more freely, just not very loud.

  ‘The fence is electrified,’ said Melissa. ‘In the case of emergency, the voltage goes up to illegal levels for containment purposes.’

  As she said this, I heard a loud crackle from behind me. I swung around to see a smoking zombie hanging from the inside of the fence twenty or thirty feet back.

  A breeze carried the nauseating smell of scorched flesh my way.

  ‘You did not tell me that fence was electric,’ said Mike, holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose.

  ‘Good job you never tried to get too close,’ I said. I indicated the section that had come down around the truck. ‘This part looks dead.’

  ‘You first,’ said Mike.

  ‘I don’t suppose you can see electricity?’ I asked Melissa.

  ‘No,’ said Mike, baffled.

  ‘No,’ said Melissa. ‘But I can tell a broken circuit when I see one. This is down, right the way to the next post.’

  The next post was perilously close to where I was going to have to squeeze past the truck. Great.

  I tried to distract myself as I raised my foot to stand on the flattened electric fence, as if not thinking about being electrocuted would somehow make it less painful, as if I were just pulling an Elastoplast off.

  Melissa certainly knew a lot about the site’s security arrangements for an accountant, dodgy or otherwise. My suspicions were growing, but I was committed now. I had to trust that at least her self-interest in keeping me alive was real.

  My foot came down. I stood warily on the fence.

  I didn’t die.

  Mike following, I edged closer to the truck, sliding between the cabin and the live section of the fence less than a foot away. I decided to keep my back to the truck and my face to the fence post, as I didn’t want the shotgun strapped to my back to make contact with any electrical charge. I didn’t think any contact with that fence was a good idea, but figured that introducing a large piece of conductive metal to it would be the worst possible scenario.

  In the dark—we didn’t want to use torches out in the open; this area seemed to be relatively zombie-free for now—I could make out a dark patch on the windscreen of the truck. I wasn’t sure in the dim light whether it was on the inside or outside. Neither seemed good.

  I squeezed past, and Mike followed. Melissa was already ahead, standing in an open area, pointing to where we needed to go next.

  Then there was an explosion. It wasn’t nearby, we couldn’t see it, but it was an enormous bang.

  Mike jerked backwards in shock, and slammed into the truck. The door clicked open as he bumped into it, and he swung back again, raising his gun.

  A limp arm fell out of the open door, hand dangling.

  Mike screamed and fired in its direction. He had the shotgun cradled loosely in his hands and the kickback knocked him off balance.

  He stumbled back a step, and hit the live section of the electric fence.

  Unlike the zombie further down, he didn’t seem to suffer a full charge, instead keeling over screaming, to lie convulsing and twitching against the live fence.

  I froze for a second, staring at the open truck door. The hand was completely limp.

  That wasn’t a zombie.

  Nevertheless, I kept my eyes on that hanging arm as I began to edge towards where Mike was slumped, jerking and twitching.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Melissa. ‘If you touch him you’ll be shocked too.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Shit. I need something insulated, don’t I? Where can I get something?’

  ‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘They’re coming. They must have heard the shot, or the scream.’

  Melissa w
as pointing down the curve of the fence, back towards the entrance.

  She was right, about the zombies at least. I could see a dozen or so of the things shuffling forward. They were close enough that I could see there were both types I’d seen close up—the ones who looked just sick, and the ones in a deeper state of decay. They all moved with the same jerking motions.

  ‘We can’t just—’ I protested.

  ‘We can just,’ Melissa snapped back. ‘He’s already dead. If we don’t get you up off the ground you’ll be the same. Follow me.’

  She didn’t give me a chance to answer back, running away towards some low, temporary looking buildings.

  I glanced down at Mike. He was flat on his back, still occasionally spasming, eyes rolled back in his skull. He didn’t look well. But he was still clearly alive.

  Then I looked back at the approaching zombies. They were moving faster than their movement would suggest was possible.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, glancing down at Mike once more. ‘Fuck.’

  Then I left him and ran, following the ghostly light of Melissa.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I WAS SO busy watching out for the zombies advancing around the edge of the complex that I nearly ran straight into the arms of one stumbling out of the shadow of a hexagonal building.

  This one was a woman, dressed in what might have once been sweats or a tracksuit, but which were now stained and torn. It was in an advanced state of decay, and something was dripping from its outstretched hand as it reached for me.

  I stopped in time and changed course, and the swiping hand missed me. As I caught up with Melissa, I snapped at her: ‘I thought you saw everything.’

  ‘More or less,’ she replied, unfazed. ‘But I still need to be looking at it. I can’t concentrate on everything at once. Now shut up and climb.’

  I was never that good at PE or gym class or whatever you want to call it, and saw with some alarm that I was expected to scramble up onto the roof of a low, prefabricated building.

  ‘There must be a better way in than this,’ I said.

  ‘This is the quickest way off the ground,’ Melissa replied. ‘You won’t get far if you don’t get up high, and I can guide you from here.’

  ‘Shit, okay. Watch my back.’

  There were windows sort of level with my head, but the roof must have been ten, twelve feet off the ground. I looked around for a ladder or a bin or something to help.

  Low moans were getting closer. Even with Melissa as lookout I would be in trouble if I was surrounded, or at this rate when I was surrounded.

  I put my hands on the bottom window ledge, braced my feet and tried to scramble up. It didn’t work—I felt a little tension between the soles of my shoes and the panels that made up the wall, but it didn’t last; the panels were too smooth and slippery to climb up. My arms ached and I let go quickly.

  I dropped to the ground and stepped back. I didn’t need to turn around to see the zombies were close, I could smell them.

  No time to puke, I could do that later.

  One last try, and if that didn’t work I would do a runner and try elsewhere, sod Melissa’s special route or whatever it was.

  I ran at the wall and did a kind of running, jumping scramble up, the toes of my trainers just scraping against the wall but giving me a little boost upwards.

  I grabbed on to the top of the window frame, which was precariously slippery. My arms screamed at me straight away, my elbows feeling like they were about to dislocate—I couldn’t hold myself like this for long.

  Looking back, I could see four or five zombies closing in, including the gloopy female that just missed me.

  Not today, madam.

  I scrambled blindly until my feet found purchase on the window ledge, then boosted myself up, clinging for one brief second to the top of the window frame with only one hand.

  For a moment I was slipping, both losing my one-handed grip and my footing, about to fall backwards straight into the loving arms of the zombies below.

  Then my free hand caught the much more solid handhold that was the gutter running around the roof, and I hauled myself upwards, switching my other hand to grab it, moving my feet to the narrow top of the window frame.

  I almost slipped again, my toes failing to find purchase, but I caught the frame just long enough to push the top half of my body onto the rooftop, from which I scrabbled and slithered on further, legs kicking air and the gravel on the roof scraping my face as I desperately writhed forward.

  When I’d made it up, I lay there face-down, panting, aching.

  ‘Wow,’ Melissa said, standing over me, immaculate in undeath. ‘It’s great to see a real ninja at work.’

  ‘I’d like to see you try that,’ I said, rolling on to my back.

  ‘I just did,’ she replied. ‘I can’t fly, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t breathe either. Which can’t be nice, but... but in this case it’s a bit of an advantage.’

  For some reason, she smiled. And I smiled back. And her smile widened.

  I was in grave danger of dying, and she had died already tonight, and for some reason we were grinning like idiots.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, flicking her hair out of her eyes. ‘I’d give you a hand up, but... you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and had a flash of real sadness that this woman, who was smiling with me now, was already dead, and that all I could do for her was make her more dead.

  I stood up, and Melissa led the way. I resisted the temptation to look over the edge of the roof at the zombies below, but I could hear them down there.

  At the other end of the roof a wide wooden plank had been semi-hidden by gravel. Melissa had me unearth it and lay it across the gap between the flat roof and a window ledge on a taller building nearby. An uncomfortable shuffle across the ledge led to a fire escape, and I gratefully climbed over the rails onto something that was designed to be stepped on.

  I walked up a few flights then stopped at the fifth floor, holding on to the handrail and looking out across the complex. From up there I could see dozens of zombies milling around. They didn’t seem interested in other zombies, bumping off each other and changing direction as they did so, like a demonstration of particles interacting.

  ‘There are a lot of them down there,’ I said to Melissa, who was standing behind me. I could feel her impatience. We had had our moment, but it was past now.

  ‘How many people worked here?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot. But most of those zombies aren’t staff, they’re test subjects.’

  ‘Test subjects?’

  ‘Yes, test subjects. You don’t think they just happened to create some zombie-making potion by accident and also accidentally let it loose? The outbreak is an accident, but they’ve been working on these zombies for years.’

  Mike had said it too, hadn’t he? Asked who would make zombies. I’d skipped over the question because I didn’t know, and I suppose on some level as a person who saw ghosts all the time I’d just written off the zombies as another form of undeath I had to deal with, and not questioned how they came into being.

  Of course they weren’t a natural phenomenon. If zombies were naturally occurring, even rare, there would be incidents reported. Unlike ghosts, you didn’t have to have the sight—or whatever it was I had—to see them. They were pretty hard to miss.

  The thought that this wasn’t entirely an accident, but that the company had been trying to make these things, and had been experimenting on... on what? On corpses? Or on living people?

  I asked Melissa.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, and continued to walk up the fire escape.

  The living, then. Fuck.

  For an accountant, Melissa certainly knew a lot of what had been going on. And, judging by the route we were taking across the site, she was either a closet parkour fanatic or had set up and mapped out her own security-evading routes.

  I didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed by the fac
t that Melissa, the person I was depending on to get me through this alive, was obviously more qualified to be dealing with a situation like this than either I first thought or she had admitted.

  I’LL SKIM OVER most of our on-high traversal of the lab complex site, as not only was it uneventful but any account of, say, my crossing of a sky-bridge via the copper, curved roof would involve far too many usages of undignified phrases like ‘eyes closed’ and ‘trying not to cry’.

  So let’s skip to the part where we were descending a glass-enclosed stairwell in a building not far from the main entrance gates. The building we were aiming for was apparently at the centre of the site, a short dash from the fire door at the bottom of the stairwell, but there were a lot of zombies between us and our destination.

  ‘Let me scout ahead,’ Melissa said as we reached the bottom. While she had cautioned against entering the buildings themselves, the zombies had failed to bash their way into this stairwell. Nonetheless, I felt exposed in an area where three of the four walls were mostly glass, and retreated into a dark corner as Melissa walked out through one of the full-length windows.

  Crouched down in the shadows, I could hear my own breathing and, muffled by the glass, the moans from outside. In the distance, I could hear the occasional crack of a gunshot.

  How much gunfire had there been, when this outbreak started? Up at the diner, and walking up the road having abandoned my broken down car, I hadn’t heard a single thing, just the wind through the trees.

  The company had chosen the location for this lab well, secreted away so that even in the event of a disaster, only an unlucky traveller and a couple of poachers would stumble across what was going on.

  If the company were as efficient as Melissa seemed to think they were, they could have the whole mess cleaned up without the outside world ever knowing.

  What story would they tell to explain the deaths? A gas leak? A chemical explosion?

  A footnote in the newspapers, some bland corporate statements about health and safety, and then back to business as usual, dabbling with the undead for fun and profit, although who would want to buy a make-your-own-zombies kit I have no idea.