Rain

by Shaun Harbinger

  seven

  We hit the main road and I turned right. The roads in this area were never busy but now they were deserted and it felt eerie. The tarmac stretched off into the distance and all we could see was rain, mist, mountains and trees. There were no other vehicles. It made us feel conspicuous being on the road alone.

  “Why the hell didn’t they follow us?” Mike asked from the passenger seat. He had found a road map in the door pocket and was looking for side roads that might lead us out of the area. If we stayed on the main road too long, we would hit an army checkpoint and be right back where we started; headed for a Survivors Camp.

  I pulled over onto the side of the road, keeping the engine running. The farmer must have filled the tank before he fell ill because the fuel gauge read ‘Full’ and there were two jerry cans tied to the metal roof rack. I hoped they weren’t empty but I wasn’t about to leave the safety of the vehicle and check. I felt like we were exposed out here.

  “I don’t know why they didn’t come after us,” I said. “The ones that came into the house didn’t follow us out of the back door either.”

  Mike tracked his finger along the map. “There’s a right turn up ahead, man. That takes us to Swansea. It’s a main road but we can get off here and take the back roads.”

  “Why do we want to go to Swansea?” Elena asked. “We should stay away from cities. If there are loads of those things out here, imagine how many of them there are in the cities.”

  “We don’t want to go to a city,” I said. Then a thought occurred to me. “Maybe we should go in that direction, though. Swansea is on the coast. If we head south-west, we’ll come to the sea.”

  Lucy knew where I was going with that thought. “A boat,” she said. “We can take a boat.”

  Mike grinned. “That’s a sweet plan, man. Those things would never get us on a boat.” He slapped his leg and laughed. “Fuck yeah, let’s go.”

  “There’re a few miles between us and the sea,” I said. “We don’t know what we’re driving into.”

  “Alex,” Mike said, looking at me, “you’ve had a downer on this trip ever since we left home. Lighten up.”

  “Lighten up? I just nearly got eaten by fucking zombies.”

  We all laughed. The relief of getting away from the farm hit us and we expressed that emotion in laughter. Despite the fact that we were anything but safe, we forgot for a moment that the area was crawling with the undead. It felt good. A moment of the old world creeping into this new fucked up one.

  I pulled back onto the road and set off slowly, looking for the right turn and keeping an eye out for checkpoints. A few miles along the road, we reached the turn and I took it. The road ahead looked clear.

  “Dude, put your foot down,” Mike said. “We want to get there before it gets dark.”

  “It’s only two o’clock, Mike.”

  “And you’re doing ten miles an hour, Alex.”

  “If we see a checkpoint, I want to make sure I have time to stop before we crash into it and get caught.”

  “Let me drive.”

  “No, I’m driving.”

  “We’ll never get to a boat at this rate.”

  “Mike,” Lucy said, “Alex knows what he’s doing.”

  I felt a sudden flush of pride. It was nice to have Lucy on my side.

  Five minutes later, my strategy was proved right.

  In the distance, I saw a dark bulky shape on the road. Slowing to a crawl, I pulled into the trees and killed the engine. “Looks like a checkpoint.”

  Mike turned to the girls. “Elena, pass the binoculars out of my rucksack.”

  She rummaged in the top pocket and handed him a small pair of binoculars encased in green rubber. He got out of the Land Rover and crept through the trees. Once he broke cover, he got onto his belly and crawled through the mud to the edge of the road.

  He raised the binoculars to his eyes and studied the area along the road.

  By the time he climbed back into the Land Rover, his jacket was smeared with mud and he had a worried look on his face.

  “There’s an armoured personnel carrier on the road and six soldiers standing around it. There’s a Land Rover as well but I couldn’t see if there was anyone inside it.”

  I looked at the map. I couldn’t see any way to get out of the mountains and to the coast without hitting a main road somewhere along the way. If all the roads were blocked like this, we were screwed.

  I opened my door and got out, needing fresh air. The rain was letting up, slowing to an insidious drizzle and we were sheltered in the trees. Everyone got out of the Rover to stretch their legs. We were stuck here anyway. We couldn’t go any farther up the road without being spotted.

  “Any ideas?” Mike said to no one in particular.

  We were silent.

  “Not unless we’re willing to go on foot from here. But it’s about forty miles to the coast and it isn’t only the army we have to worry about.” I didn’t want to proceed on foot. The Land Rover offered at least some protection. And there was no way we could hike forty miles before nightfall. I wasn’t even sure I could hike forty miles at all.

  Also, I didn’t hold out much hope for our chances of survival without a vehicle. There must be thousands of zombies between here and the coast. We couldn’t outrun them all.

  The only other plan I could come up with involved driving around the roadblock. The Land Rover could handle the terrain by the side of the road but we couldn’t exactly drive up the side of a mountain, which meant the soldiers would see us and start shooting. If we got past the bullets, they would probably chase us. I may be good at racing games on my consoles but in real life I didn’t think I would manage to outrun solders in a high speed chase.

  Lucy interrupted my thoughts. “Can you hear that?” She seemed to be listening to the forest.

  “We need to get back in the Land Rover,” I said. If there were zombies in the trees, I was getting us out of here.

  “No, it’s voices.”

  I listened. I heard it too. A lot of voices. Talking. The terrain sloped up steeply to a ridge. The sounds were coming from the other side.

  “We should check it out, man.” Mike was already heading up the slope.

  I looked at the girls and shrugged. There weren’t any better options coming our way so we might as well see who was making all the noise. Maybe if it got louder, it would distract the soldiers at the checkpoint and we would be able to drive past, unseen.

  The slope steepened as we climbed and I had to hold on to pine tree trunks to prevent myself from slipping over on the carpet of pine needles on the ground.

  When I finally got to the rocky ridge, I was out of breath and my lungs hurt.

  “You won’t believe this, man.” Mike stared down the slope on the other side, his eyes wide.

  I looked over.

  A wide area had been cleared in the trees and a settlement of green tents huddled together there. A wire fence surrounded the tent city and along the perimeter, wooden guard towers had been erected complete with search lights. There were four towers and each had two soldiers standing lookout by the searchlights. Soldiers patrolled the fence in pairs, some with dogs on leashes.

  Inside the fence, civilians sat by the tents or paced the area between them. They looked miserable, as if they had lost all hope.

  This was man’s defence against the zombies.

  A Survivors Camp.

  eight

  I looked down at the misery and shuddered. What were the army hoping to achieve by caging up human beings like this? I had seen the broken fences at the farm and knew the wire surrounding the camp would be useless as protection against a zombie horde.

  How long were they intending to keep people locked up like this? Even up here I could smell the camp’s stink of human waste and fear. Lucy, Mike and Elena looked down at the scene with just as much horror as I felt.

  “Maybe they have food down there,” Elena said. Our supplies were low. We had only brought enough gr
anola bars and packs of instant noodles to last us for two days of hiking and camping. The meal at the farmhouse had been a bonus but we had left so quickly that we didn’t have time to grab food from the cupboards. Besides, Brand and Cartwright would have known we were planning to escape if we stuffed our rucksacks with cans of beans.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but do we really want to go down there and find out?”

  Mike pointed out a tent that had been erected outside the fence, near the trees. “I bet it’s in there.”

  This was a bad idea. If we even tried to get down there we would get caught. I couldn’t think of a worse way to spend the apocalypse than locked in a cage like cows in an abattoir.

  Mike pulled us back from the rocks and looked at us solemnly. I knew that look. It meant Mike was trying to convey that what he was about to say was serious. “We can go down there, steal some food, and be gone before they even know it.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “There are going to be much easier places to get food than from a Survivors Camp. The place is crawling with soldiers.”

  “Why are they keeping people locked up like that?” Elena glanced back at the camp.

  “They’re trying to separate the infected from the uninfected. All they need to do is cage everyone up and see who turns. The ones who don’t are clean.” It sounded simple but even as I said it I realized that explanation didn’t make sense. We had seen Cartwright turn in a matter of minutes. If the virus’ incubation period was so short, all the people in the camp must be uninfected, otherwise they would have turned by now.

  Unless the soldiers knew something we didn’t.

  “What about the food?” Mike looked eager to go down there.

  “I’m not going,” I said. “When we get to the coast, we can find an abandoned house and raid the pantry. We don’t need to risk our lives like this.”

  “Alex is right,” Lucy said.

  “For fuck’s sake, Alex is right,” Mike mocked. “That’s all I hear from you two… how right you are and how wrong I am. The Alex and Lucy mutual appreciation club.”

  “We were right about something going wrong with the world,” she said calmly.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’m coming up with a plan to get us some food…”

  “It’s a bad plan,” I said.

  He glared at me. “What do you know about plans, Alex? Unless it’s a plan to storm an enemy castle in Warcraft, you don’t know shit.”

  “Thanks for that, Mike. Well, unless you haven’t noticed, there’s a fucking zombie apocalypse going on and I’m still alive.”

  “Only because you came away with me for the weekend.”

  “Really? I seem to remember it was me who got the keys to the Land Rover.”

  “Boys, please,” Elena said, holding her arms up in a halting motion. “We’ll all be dead if we keep arguing like this. We need to be quiet, remember?”

  She was right. Not only were there soldiers around, there could be nasties in these woods.

  Mike dropped his voice to a whisper. “I’m just saying that we should consider going down there and getting some supplies.”

  “It’s a bad idea, man,” I said, using the term of address he used all the time.

  A growling erupted from the camp. That growl was neither human nor animal. I had heard that sound before, on the porch of the farmhouse. We clambered up to the rocks again to get a better view.

  The sound drifted from one of the tents. A painful growl. The people in the vicinity of the tent panicked, tried to run.

  But there was nowhere to run.

  A nasty burst from the tent, grabbing the nearest victim it could find, a man in a neat black suit who looked almost surreally out of place in the camp, and bit his neck. Discarding his bleeding body, the zombie staggered towards a girl who looked like she could be maybe ten years old.

  A woman in her thirties jumped forward between the girl and the zombie, telling the girl to run. Before the woman had a chance to take her own advice, the zombie had its teeth clamped around her shoulder.

  A shot from outside the fence cracked the air.

  The zombie’s head burst open, black blood spewing from its pierced skull.

  The woman screamed.

  The monster fell heavily to the ground.

  The man in the suit sat dazed, dabbing at the wound in his neck with a handkerchief.

  Outside the fence, two soldiers unlocked the gate and stepped inside.

  The little girl who had been saved rushed forward to the woman, crying. She flung her arms around her and buried her head against the woman’s neck.

  The soldiers reached the scene of the attack and one of them kicked the zombie’s body, making sure it was dead.

  The woman and girl sat hugging on the ground.

  The suited man looked up as one of the soldiers approached him.

  The second soldier walked over to the woman and girl. Pulled the girl away.

  Dragged the woman to her feet.

  She sobbed, looking at the girl. “My daughter!”

  The little girl went to run forward to her mother. An older woman in the crowd held her back, her own eyes filling with tears.

  The first soldier pulled the man in the suit up and led him into the tent the zombie had come from.

  The second soldier followed, bringing the crying woman.

  A moment of silence, then two shots rang out from the tent.

  The old woman clutched the little girl, letting her cry, rubbing her back to comfort her.

  I turned away from the scene.

  I didn’t want to ever think again of what I had just seen but I knew it would haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life.

  The sound of boots on the rocks to my left made me whirl around in that direction. A soldier stood over us, handgun pointed at me. He grinned humourlessly. “Don’t even think about running.”

  He seemed to be alone, probably part of the checkpoint detail sent out to patrol the woods. He looked fresh and strong. The army were obviously looking after their own while the general population lived like caged animals. With his gun still trained on us, he unclipped a radio from his belt and brought it up to his mouth. “I’ve got four civvies up here. Over.”

  A static-filled reply, probably from the soldiers at the checkpoint, said, “OK, we’ll be there in a minute. Over and out.”

  Mike cracked. I don’t know if it was because of the scene we had just witnessed or because of the entire situation we found ourselves in, but he leapt at the soldier.

  Surprised, the soldier went down, Mike on top of him. They rolled down the slope, struggling against each other.

  The gun went off.

  A black cloud of starlings flocked from the trees at the sharp sound.

  Mike and the soldier lay still.

  I went down to see if my friend was still alive.

  Slipped on the pine needles.

  Slid to the two bodies.

  Mike pushed himself away from the dead soldier. He picked up the pistol.

  A dark blood stain covered the soldier’s combat jacket.

  I didn’t care that a man was dead, I had seen what they were doing to the people in that camp. I only cared that my friend was alive.

  Mike looked down at the dead body. He held the handgun loosely in his right hand.

  The soldier’s radio crackled from where it had been jammed beneath a tree root during the struggle. “Peterson, we heard a shot fired. Confirm. Over.”

  I grabbed it and switched it off. Stuffing it into my coat pocket, I put a hand on Mike’s arm. “We need to go, Mike.”

  His eyes never left the dead soldier. “Yeah, man.”

  Lucy appeared at my side. “There are more soldiers coming.”

  We could hear them coming through the woods below us, twigs cracking beneath their boots. If they found out we had killed one of their number, they might not even put us in the camp. A cold-blooded execution by the roadside was possible. In this society where the army kept citizens i
n cages and killed the bitten before they turned, what was to stop these soldiers from killing us in cold blood? The fate of the girls might be even worse than that.

  “We need to move,” I said, vocalizing my thoughts. “This way. We can follow that stream down to the road and get to the Land Rover.”

  “Then what?” Lucy asked as we slipped and scrambled across the slope towards the stream that trickled down from the higher rocks.

  “We have to go through the checkpoint. We don’t have a choice now.”

  We climbed down carefully. The water gurgled over rocks and fallen branches in its unchanging course down the slope. Like this stream, society had forced its way constantly forward, cutting through barriers in its way until it got to the point it was at today. Perhaps the virus was inevitable, the result of what we had done to the planet, to other species, to our environment.

  Maybe this was payback and all that lay at the end of our road forward was death. Unless survivors came out of this apocalypse unscathed, all that would be left of mankind would be a few shambling, rotting remnants.

  How long would they last before they rotted away for good? The zombies would eventually die out just as humanity had and all that would be left of us would be dust.

  The virus had chosen a host that was simply a collection of blood, bones, tissue and bacteria. The host would eventually rot and then the virus would be killed.

  A memory entered my head but it meant nothing. It was something I had seen on TV once. A fish swimming in the shallows of a river being picked up by the hunting beak of a heron.

  Why had that come to mind? I tried to remember more about the show but being chased by armed soldiers wasn’t conducive to remembering old TV programs.

  We managed to get down the slope without breaking any bones and found the Land Rover. I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The smell of petrol as the engine roared to life was comforting.

  The girls climbed into the back and Mike slid into the passenger seat.

  “Hit it, man.” His shock at killing the soldier seemed to be gone.

  I slammed the gear stick into first and guided us out onto the road. In the rear-view mirror, I saw two soldiers break from the trees. They dropped to a kneeling position, bringing up their rifles.