“Get down,” I said, sliding down in my seat.
I stomped on the accelerator and got the Rover up into fourth gear as we sped along the road. Ahead, the dark bulk of the armoured personnel carrier blocked the road. On the right, a green Land Rover was parked in the dirt. On the left was a small gap. Standing by the APC were three soldiers.
Judging by the surprised looks on their faces, they hadn’t been expecting a Land Rover to come speeding towards them.
Two of them threw cigarettes down onto the road. The butts sparked orange before dying.
Three thuds from the back of the vehicle told me we’d been hit. It sounded like the bullets tore into the back panel. I still had control of the wheel so at least they hadn’t hit the tires.
The APC grew in the windscreen as I increased our speed.
The soldiers fumbled for their guns.
I wrenched the wheel and we left the road. The steering wheel shook in my hands as we hit undergrowth and uneven ground.
The dark green metal armour of the APC passed by my side window.
I pulled the wheel to the right and we slammed back onto the road.
In the rear view, I saw two of the soldiers running for their Land Rover.
They pulled onto the road behind us and the passenger leaned out of his window, aiming his assault rifle and sprayed us with a hail of bullets.
We weren’t going to make it to the coast.
nine
“Put your foot down!” Mike shouted at me.
I had the accelerator pushed down to the floor. We were doing nearly a hundred miles an hour. The scenery flashed past the windows like a streaky oil painting. The sounds of shots from the soldier’s gun were like exploding firecrackers. I looked in the rear view. They were gaining on us.
“Why don’t you shoot back at them?” I said, indicating the gun on Mike’s lap. “Try to hit a tire or something.”
“Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen.”
“Give me the gun,” Lucy said from the back seat. “I’ll do it.”
He looked back at her. “You know how to shoot?”
“My dad’s in a gun club. I go to the range with him all the time.”
Mike looked surprised. He passed the gun back to her.
I heard clicks as she checked the magazine and slid it home. “Colt M1911,” she said. “Only five rounds left.” Cold air rushed into the vehicle as she slid the window open and leaned out, facing backwards, gun raised.
She fired.
And missed.
“Stop moving all over the road,” she demanded. “I need a steady shot.”
I kept the wheel steady.
She fired again. In the rear view, the military Land Rover swerved.
Lucy came back in and closed the window. “You’re going to have to outrun them, Alex. Shooting from a moving vehicle isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies. We can’t waste these bullets.”
I nodded and kept the pedal to the floor.
The road twisted around the mountainous terrain and I had to hit the brakes at every bend, gearing down to take the turn before flooring the accelerator again. The soldier driving the chasing vehicle didn’t seem to be any more familiar with these roads than I was. They dropped back on the tight turns and the distance between us and them increased.
I followed the road signs for Swansea, knowing I would have to take a different route to the coast once we got near the city because of the huge number of zombies that must be in that area.
I had no idea how we were going to be able to stop the Land Rover and find a boat before our pursuers either killed or caught us. That was something we would have to think about once we got to the sea.
Mike had the same thought. “What are we going to do when we have to stop, man?”
“I don’t know. We may have to run for a boat.”
“This is a bad idea, man.”
“Any other suggestions?”
“I can’t be put in one of those camps,” Elena said.
After what we had seen, none of us wanted that.
The soldiers had stopped firing on us now, content to follow and wait. We couldn’t outrun them forever.
Mike pointed at the road ahead. “There’s another checkpoint, man.”
I saw the dark shape of the personnel carrier as soon as he said it. Maybe that was why our pursuers were staying back; they knew the soldiers at the checkpoint ahead would take us out.
Except there were no soldiers at the checkpoint ahead.
The APC sat alone and unattended.
As we got closer, I could see bodies strewn around the area. On the road, at the side of road and in the trees. Soldiers and zombies. The checkpoint had been attacked. The soldiers were dead.
I slowed down and drove around the personnel carrier. The road felt slippery beneath the tires and I tried not to think why. If it hadn’t been for the soldiers driving behind us, we could have stopped and taken much-needed guns and supplies.
Although salvaging items from the carnage would have been a nightmare. Everywhere we looked, horror stared back at us. I kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead, trying to ignore the twisted and ripped bodies I saw through my side window. The stench of guts and death drifted into the Land Rover as we drove past and made me nauseous
Crows perched atop the APC, ragged pieces of red flesh dangling from their black beaks.
We drove on and as soon as we got past the mess of bodies, I pressed the accelerator and didn’t look in the rear-view mirror until that place of death was out of sight.
Then I checked the mirror several times; the road behind was empty.
“The soldiers aren’t following us anymore.”
Mike looked over his shoulder. “Maybe seeing their dead friends spooked them.”
I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t feel right that they were letting us go.
“That was unreal, man. We need to get on a boat and leave this shit behind.”
Mike seemed to think that a boat would solve all our problems. It would solve some of them. We would be able to sleep safely at night. We could spend days out on the sea, away from the zombies. But we still needed to eat. There would be food runs, during which we would have to land the boat, or at least row to shore and raid the houses, villages and towns along the coast. We couldn’t ‘leave this shit behind’; we could only try to survive it.
I didn’t say anything to Mike. No need to slap him around the face with a cold dose of reality. He had been through enough today. We all had. I envied his ability to dream of an escape, to actually think life could be good again.
It was a probably a result of his life experience so far. Mike had it easy. He was good-looking, physical, charming. He might not be the sharpest tool in the box but he was a man’s man. His poor school grades were the gateway through which we met. I helped him do a math assignment at school. At the time, I did it because I thought Mike was going to beat me up if I didn’t. Later, we discovered that despite our social differences, we shared some interests. Mike liked to play video games when he wasn’t playing sports and once he saw my collection of titles, he realized I wasn’t just a game player, I was a game geek.
I introduced him to the online worlds and therefore also to my world. In return, he invited me to events that were outside of my comfort zone. He didn’t care what his friends, mainly jocks, said about him bringing a geek to parties. As far as Mike was concerned, we were friends and that was that.
He was good like that.
If it weren’t for Mike, I wouldn’t be alive now.
I would never have gone to Doug Latimer’s barbecue. That led to coming to Wales in a desperate attempt to speak to Lucy Hoffmeister. If I had stayed at home, I would most likely be dead. I owed Mike my life.
So instead of saying, ‘No, Mike, we are never going to leave this shit behind. Even if we get a boat we are still going to be in the shit because we have needs like every human being and if those needs aren’t met, we die,’ I looked across at him and ga
ve him a thin-lipped smile.
“Don’t worry, Mike, we’ll get a boat.”
But first we had to get to the coast. I couldn’t understand why the soldiers had stopped chasing us. If they had friends at that checkpoint, why not chase us down and come back later? It wasn’t like any of those soldiers were going anywhere.
Or was that it? Had they stopped to make sure their friends weren’t going anywhere? The bodies had been in pieces but that didn’t mean some of them couldn’t be in a zombie state. The two soldiers had probably pulled over to deliver head shots to any infected.
That gave us a chance to get away.
“Mike, look out!”
Lucy’s voice snapped me back to reality. Ahead on the road, two cars lay across both lanes. It looked like they had ploughed into each other at high speed. The bodywork was mostly wrecked. Carpets of glass lay twinkling in the sunlight all across the road. I couldn’t see any survivors. There was no way around the wreckage.
Unless we moved it quickly, we were trapped.
ten
I stopped the Land Rover but kept the engine running. As soon as I got out, I could smell petrol and burned flesh. A white Ford Focus lay on its side across the road. Its tail was facing us so I couldn’t see if there was anyone inside. A dark blue Chrysler Cruiser sat on its wheels but its front was destroyed, the engine sticking up through a gash in the bodywork like an erupted boil.
The air bags had inflated so we couldn’t see the driver.
I leaned into the Land Rover. “Lucy, hand me the gun.”
She passed it to me. “The safeties are off,” she said. “Be careful.”
I nodded. “Keep an eye on the road behind us in case those soldiers show up.”
Holding the gun in my right hand, muzzle pointed to the ground, I strode across to the crash site. Mike joined me, brandishing a large branch he had found at the roadside. I hoped his clubbing would be more accurate than my shooting. I had never fired a real gun in my life.
We approached the Focus first. As soon as we got close, the smell of death became overwhelming. Mike grabbed my arm. “There’s no one alive in there, man.”
He was right. There had once been a family of four in that car. Now, every inch of unbroken glass was tinted red with blood. Through the broken windows we could see the bodies. Still buckled in by their seat belts. All of them had turned. They glared at us with their yellow eyes and began to emit that eerie moan of hunger.
We stepped back instinctively even though they were trapped in there. I wondered if they had been infection-free when they crashed. Maybe the same zombies that had killed the checkpoint soldiers had come upon this family in the overturned car and gone to work on them. Or maybe the family had simply died in the crash and then turned because everybody turns after death. That was how it worked in all of George A. Romero’s movies, anyway, as well as in a few TV shows.
But the air bags were inflated so I assumed it wasn’t the crash that had killed them, it was roaming zombies.
We moved away and went to the Cruiser. The driver was dead. And human. His face rested on the air bag as if he were simply lying on a pillow. He was in his fifties, balding, and wearing glasses that were still intact. There was no blood, no wounds. What had killed him? A heart attack?
On the passenger seat, a road atlas lay open. The hospital in Brecon was circled in red pen.
A sudden movement from the back seat surprised us. I raised the pistol automatically, peering through the window.
A grey-haired woman sat on the backseat, dressed in a white nightgown and green bath robe. She had turned. Struggling against the seat belt that held her in place, she gnashed her teeth at us and growled.
“Fuck,” Mike said.
“Looks like he was taking his wife to hospital and she turned in the back seat. He had a heart attack and crashed into the Focus. They got turned before they got out of the car. There must have been zombies in the area.”
“So why didn’t they turn him? He looks normal.”
“He was already dead. The virus wants to spread itself. There’s no point infecting someone who isn’t going anywhere.”
Mike nodded at the Focus. “They aren’t going anywhere either.”
“But they were alive so the virus could infect them, kill them and raise them from the dead. Now they have the potential to spread it by killing others.” I looked at the way the cars were blocking the road. If we could move the Cruiser, we should be able to make it past the Focus. “We need to see if there’s a tow rope in the Land Rover.”
We walked back to our vehicle and opened the back. A length of thick blue rope lay amongst various tools and a tire iron. Mike took the rope while I turned the Land Rover around so the back faced the Cruiser.
“Are there any survivors?” Elena asked as I performed the manoeuvre.
“No,” I said. “Everyone’s dead.”
I got out and Mike tied one end of the rope to the tow bar on the Rover. I found a piece of solid chassis on the Cruiser and tied the rope to it. Getting back in the Rover, I put it into first and slowly let up the clutch. The vehicle moved forward until the rope tautened. Then I gave it more gas gradually until it moved forward again, slower this time as it pulled the weight of the Cruiser.
I drove forward twenty feet, creating enough of a gap to get our vehicle through.
As I stopped and put the Rover into neutral, I told Mike to untie the rope.
“We need to move fast,” he said, pointing at the woods near the Focus.
There must have been twenty of them coming through the trees, lumbering towards the road. Maybe they were the group that had turned the family in the car. Our noise had attracted them and now they wanted our blood.
Mike went to work on the rope, untying it from the Rover. He went to the Cruiser but I stopped him. “Leave it, Mike. We don’t have time.” I waited for him to get back in the Land rover before I turned it so we were facing the right way. The zombies were all over the road, staggering towards us.
“Go, man!”
I stomped on the accelerator and we lurched forward into them. A nasty that had once been a young woman with long blonde hair went down under the front bumper. We drove over her and the Rover shuddered as her bones broke beneath the wheels.
Hands grabbed at our vehicle, sliding greasily along the windows as we drove past. Yellow eyes set in blue mottled faces stared in at us with hatred and hunger.
We got past them and I let out a breath of relief.
“If those soldiers are still following us, they’ll get a nasty surprise,” Lucy said.
I frowned. It was still worrying me that the soldiers had given up. We had spent long enough at the crash site for them to catch up with us if they were still coming this way. Maybe they had just been low on fuel and had turned back. No, they wouldn’t have a vehicle parked at a checkpoint with no petrol in the tank. It didn’t make sense.
“Mike,” I said, “check that map. Back where that last checkpoint was, I thought I saw a side road. Where does it lead?”
He picked up the map and traced back along the road we were on with his finger. “Yeah, it’s here. It cuts through some farmland and a couple of villages.”
“Does it meet up with this road again?”
He scanned the map and nodded. “Yeah, near the coast. There’s a crossroads. That road meets up with this one.”
They were going to cut us off.
I told the others. The soldiers were waiting for us ahead.
According to the road signs, we were only a couple of miles from the coast. At a speed of sixty miles an hour, which was the speed we were travelling at, we would be there in two minutes. Straight into an ambush.
There was no going back now. We had to get to a boat before nightfall. We needed safety, a place to sleep. These woods were dangerous. This area was crawling with zombies and soldiers. We had to take our chances at the coast. To stay here would mean certain death.
I increased our speed to eighty and peered
at the road ahead. The rain started again and I put the wipers on at full speed. The sound of the blades wiping rhythmically across the wet glass was like a countdown, ticking off the seconds until we reached the crossroads.
Daylight was fading and my hope seemed to be going with it. Were these our last moments? I couldn’t accept that. I pressed the accelerator and the speedometer needle climbed up to ninety.
“There they are, man.” Mike pointed at the crossroads ahead. The army Land Rover was parked on the side road, headlights cutting through the evening gloom. Positioned next to the vehicle were the two soldiers. They saw us coming and adopted firing positions.
“Where do the roads go?” I asked Mike frantically.
“This road heads down to a marina. The side roads just go along the top of the cliffs.”
We had to get to the marina. If the Land Rover could withstand the bullets they were about to spray us with, we might be able to get to the marina and onto a boat before they got back into their vehicle and caught up with us.
We were almost at the crossroads.
“Hold on,” I said.
The firing started.
Bullets peppered the Land Rover and I heard both tires blow out. The steering wheel juddered in my hand. I lost control.
We careened off the road and onto grass.
I fought with the wheel.
Elena screamed from the back seat.
I saw the grass disappear ahead. Disappear into darkness. The cliff edge.
The ground beneath the flat tires was rough, bumpy.
Then suddenly it was gone.
We were in the air, flipping and falling.
The rocky wall of the cliff hurtled by the windows. Below us the dark churning sea waited.
We hit the water like it was a concrete wall and everything went black.
eleven
“Alex!”
The voice came from far away. I felt hands on my shoulders, shaking me. Something very cold covered my legs. Wet and cold.
I opened my eyes. We were sinking. Waves lashed against the windows. Freezing water poured in over our legs. “Is everyone OK?” I asked.
Rain Page 6
