After the Fall (Book 6): Bridge of the Dead

by Stephen Cross

  Terry took a shape intake of breath.

  “Stay close lad,” he said to Nate. He put his arm around his son, who buried his head into his dad’s side. Even after all the young boy had witnessed, the sight of horror before them was too much to bear. He let out a small moan and Terry squeezed his arm. “It’s alright lad. Just keep your head down.”

  One by one, each member of the group sounded their realisation.

  Terry walked forward slowly and kneeled next to the nearest mound. A faint smell of burning permeated the air. Within the black crystalline shell he made out an arm, a protruding leg, and a twisted torso. Bent against the torso at an unnatural angle was a head with a calcified face containing a hole, no, a mouth caught in the throes of agony. Embraced within the calcified body was another smaller body, a child.

  Each of the devilish sculptures was crowned with a screaming face, enveloped in the black glass-like material, like a garish photograph taken at the point of death.

  Terry stood up. The road to the bridge was covered in hundreds, maybe thousands of the fossilised bodies, like a petrified forest of burnt meat. It reminded him of pictures he had seen on TV of dried lava flows on new islands; all black and thick and solid. Except within this lava flow were the stories of a thousand terrified deaths.

  David came to stand next to Terry. “What do you think happened?” he said.

  Terry shook his head. “I don’t know, but it looks like it was quick. Can’t have been a fire, people would have spread more.”

  “Look,” said David, pointing to the cliff by the road. The rocks and trees were seared back, crystallised in solid towers of carbon, like the bodies.

  “Could have been a bomb,” said Terry.

  “A firebomb? Look at the area, would have to been some crazy firepower to cover all of this… The army?”

  “Or the air force,” said Terry. His eyes drifted to the sky, as if expecting to see a pair of bombers screech from beyond the cliffs and bear down upon them, guns blazing.

  “Come on,” said Terry. “Let’s get across this bridge.”

  “We still crossing?” said David.

  Terry didn’t answer but motioned the rest of the group on. “Just be careful. Try not to touch any of them, could be… Well, just try not to touch anything.”

  Terry took his son by his hand. They moved forward cautiously, threading their way carefully through the carbon statues, each step getting closer to the bridge that now seemed so much more distant.

  Silence. No one spoke. A walk through a terrible graveyard, where the bodies were buried above ground, their pain and terror frozen in the open for all time.

  “What happened to them Dad?” said Nate.

  “I don’t know son. Try not to think about it, let’s just get to the bridge.”

  A crow landed on one of the bodies up ahead and picked with its beak at the carbon monument.

  “Leave it…” said Amy under her breath.

  The concentration of bodies got thicker closer to the bridge. It was hard to tell where one finished and another started as they melded into one thick river of charred life. In some places the road was barely visible and they had to step on the carbon remains. Terry grimaced as his feet crunched on the burnt flesh. He slipped and his foot cracked though to the body below, soft and bouncy like a bed of moss. He pulled his foot out and a black dust waved through the air.

  It took thirty minutes to reach the bridge. Once there the group stopped, they had no choice.

  The road to the entrance of the bridge, thick with bodies, was blocked. Strange black glass walls, ten foot high, sectioned off a square around the entrance to the bridge. Disfigured black carbon bodies crawled up the sides off the barrier, their petrified hands grabbing onto the bulbous protrusions of the glass, a thick liquid frozen in time, a snapshot of its spill. It joined with the bodies, threaded through them, in places encased them.

  “What the hell is it?” said Amy.

  “Sand,” said Terry.

  “What?”

  “It used to be sand, now it’s glass. You heat sand and it turns to glass, that’s what we got here. This wall used to be a barrier of sandbags. Then something melted the fuck out of it.”

  “Air force,” said David. The others looked at him. “It has to be. Look at the area covered, look at the bodies. Whatever hit, hit fast, these people, this barrier, were burnt in seconds. Some kind of bomb, it had to be, nothing else could do that.”

  “Why would the air force kill them all?” said Anita.

  “They must have been zombies,” said Terry.

  “Zombies don’t carry their kids,” said Amy.

  “You saying these were normal people?” said Terry.

  Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. Just zombies don’t carry their kids.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Anita. “The army were trying to save us.”

  “It don’t matter,” said Terry. He walked forward to the glass barrier, like a black insect tower, its solid darkness like the end of the world.

  He placed his hand on it. Smooth, cool. He walked around the barrier; three edges, each about ten metres long, surrounding the entrance to the bridge. Half way along the first edge he felt a bump. He looked more closely. A long thin piece of metal protruded from the side, elongated and strung out, as if it had been stretched and pulled towards the ground.

  A melted gun barrel.

  He carried on walking. The wall took a ninety degree turn to run parallel with the entrance to the bridge. It cast a thick shadow, as cold as it was dark. Terry felt like it was alive, growing, slowly gnawing at the road and one day would climb the cliffs.

  Stop being bloody stupid…

  There was a gap half way along. Small and thin, but enough for them to squeeze through.

  “Hey,” he shouted, “round here.”

  The others appeared, threading slowly through the crusted bodies.

  “We can get through here.”

  “Is it safe?” said Anita.

  They were uneasy, scared even.

  “Ok, wait here.” Terry went to squeeze through.

  “Dad,” said Nate, his voice high. He looked at his dad with wide, scared eyes.

  “It’s alright lad,” said Terry, smiling. “Nothing’s going to happen to your dad. You just wait here with Amy.”

  Amy took Nate’s hand.

  Terry fought the fear, determined to keep the smile on his face as he squeezed through the gap in the glass wall. “Back in a minute lad,” he called.

  The black surrounded him, and for a second he felt he was being sucked into another dimension. A terrible black and empty world waiting for him on the other side.

  He popped out the other side and sighed in relief. His heart beat fast, his skin tingled. He quickly looked up and around. The same grey sky, the same cool wind. A bird flew above, indifferent to the world below.

  “Stop being such a fucking idiot,” he said to himself quietly.

  The bridge stretched across the gorge, a hundred yards of steel cable, joists and tarmac. The suspension towers stood tall like a pair of stone sentinels.

  Charred bodies covered the road until they met the cover of the suspension towers; the mass of bodies stopped in a near perfect line. Beyond the tower were green army vehicles; jeeps, cars.

  A bank of sandbags ran across the road half way under the tower. Machine guns lined the top of it. Dead bodies lay over the top of the sandbags, clad in camouflage green.

  “Terry, you ok?” It was Amy. Her voice sounded a hundred miles away.

  “Yeah, I’m good. It’s safe, come through.”

  The rest of the party squeezed through one by one. They emerged with the same confused and slightly scared look on their faces that he had. Nate ran over to this dad and hugged him tightly. Terry rubbed his back gently. “Told you I wasn’t going anywhere lad. You stay close to me and we’ll be right.”

  “Soldiers,” said David. He kneeled by one of the charred bodies and pointed at what looked like t
he remains of the gun next to him.

  “Zombies don’t carry guns either,” said Amy, casting a glance at Anita.

  “Let’s just get across the bridge,” said Anita. “This place is giving me the creeps.”

  Terry walked towards the Suspension tower, and paused ten yards away. The evidence of the fire stopped under there, like a line. The charred bodies turned merely into dead bodies, reclaiming their form and shape. No more huge black mounds, just jeeps, machine guns, sandbags, radio towers.

  He jumped as several black birds launched into the air, their flapping and sudden calls breaking the air like glass. His heart thumped against his chest. “Just birds,” he whispered to himself.

  Terry turned back to the group, all watching him, waiting for his command.

  “Ok, let’s stick together. It’s about a three hundred yards across. Let’s just be quick.”

  They moved as one towards the tower.

  Chapter 7

  Chris ran through the wet grass, jumping over roots and dead branches. Cutting across the field would bring him to the cliff tops over the road Amy was on, but he would have to be quick; she would be out of sight in five minutes or so.

  He had nearly lost Amy and the others a week ago. They had got up early, or he had slept in. He had panicked, ran like a mad thing, nearly got ghosted by a bunch of zombies. Careless.

  That was the hardest, making sure he didn’t miss them in the mornings. It meant he had to get up early, his battery alarm clock a shrill break to his slight hours of sleep. As a consequence, he was always tired, angry, hungry, and he didn’t know why he was even following them. Fuck Terry, and fuck Anita. Pair of fucking dickheads. If not for them, everything would have been ok. He could have talked David and Amy round.

  So why was he following them?

  “You’re scared on your own,” said his Nan, a few days ago.

  “No I’m fucking not.”

  “Mind your language. I know you lad, you forget I’m your Nan. I know you inside out. You’re scared on your own, you don’t want to be on your own.”

  “Pack it in Nan. I want to make sure Amy’s safe.”

  “Don’t tell your Nan to pack it in. Amy’s with Terry, she’s not bloody interested in you. You need to get that through your thick head.”

  “Fucking shut it Nan!”

  His Nan hadn’t replied to that one. She hadn’t spoke to him for days now - one thing she hated was bad language, the F’s and the C’s anyway.

  He didn’t care, she had been turning into a bit of an old nag, always having a go at him, telling him he was useless and all that. Even his Nan was turning against him. She could go fuck herself. Everyone could go fuck themselves.

  He skidded to a halt at the edge of the cliff top, and looked down through the tangled brown branches, their dropping leaf cover exposing the road.

  There they were.

  “What the fuck?” said Chris quietly. He got down on his belly and moved as close to the edge as he dared, pushing through low and dead brush, ignoring the damp seeping through his clothes. He took out his binoculars and spied to the road below.

  It looked like one of them dried lava flows he had seen on Nan’s nature programs. David Attenborough and all that. Except the lava wasn’t a smooth flow; it was lots of little mounds of black, twisted together to form a near complete blanket coverage of the road.

  He watched Terry thread through the black stuff, forging out a path. Nate followed, with Amy just behind. They were heading to the bridge. Things got weirder at the bridge. A big black square of shiny black shit surrounded the entrance.

  “What the fuck is going on…” said Chris.

  He spied with his binoculars further along the bridge. Big fucking thing it was. Full of army shit. Looks like they would be going across that.

  “Bollocks,” he said. He would have to find a way down, and quick.

  He crawled up onto his knees and stopped dead. Something was pressing against the back of his skull. Something hard, small and cold.

  “Easy mate,” said a voice, quiet and steady. “You have a gun against the back of your head. Stand up slowly, very slowly, that’s it.”

  Chris eased himself up, the barrel of the gun never leaving his skull. His breathing speed up, his heart beat like a crazy metronome. Fucking zombies all over the place, and he was going to get taken out in a field by some fucking loon with a gun.

  He got onto his feet, and stared out across the valley. He raised his hands slowly. The pressure of the barrel against his head disappeared.

  “Now turn around, very slowly,” said the voice.

  Chris did as he was told.

  Four men stood in front of him, in tired army fatigues. Each with a gun. Each looking as bedraggled and dirty as he no doubt did.

  One thing, though, gave him hope. They didn’t look crazy.

  Chapter 8

  The wind blew hard through the valley and across the bridge. It was cold on Terry’s face, biting, gripping. An eerie wail accompanied each gust, like the call of some prehistoric monster living further down the valley.

  Terry took the front as they made their way across the bridge, winding their way through scattered military vehicles. Small piles of sand bags, some with machine gun placings, were posted in-between the vehicles. Bodies lay everywhere; on the tarmac, leaning over sandbags, hanging out of vehicles. Rotted skin, faces contorted in agony, strange pale grey complexion.

  Flies buzzed around the carcasses.

  Terry paused by one of the sandbags and motioned for the others to hold.

  A body was draped over the sandbag, its green uniform torn in places, the flaps of ripped material waving in the the wind.

  “Careful,” said Amy.

  Terry nodded to her. He poked the body and jumped back, it didn’t move. Emboldened, he pushed the body. It fell to the ground, where it lay still on its back.

  “What are you doing?” said Anita, her voice higher than normal.

  A hand gun was in a holster around the soldier’s waist. Terry moved slowly to ease the gun free, constantly watching the dead soldier for any signs of movement.

  He turned to the others, showing them the gun.

  “You know how to use that?” said Anita.

  “Yeah, I do,” said Terry. He checked to see if it was loaded. It was. He tucked his baseball bat in his backpack, took the safety off the gun and continued walking. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  Chris fought hard to keep up with the tough pace of the soldiers as they ploughed down the steep dirt track. It weaved through fields with high walls, through woods, and in between tall climbs of bare rock, and would take them, promised Major Dalby, to the bridge.

  “How long?” said Chris.

  Dalby, who was running beside Chris, said, “Should be there in ten minutes. The path goes back on itself, but no other way down.”

  “Can’t we warn them any other way?”

  “No,” said Dalby, his blonde hair bouncing with each step. “We make any noise and we might spook them - they cross the bridge quicker. We just have to hope we get there before they reach the other side.”

  Chris’s heart battered against his rib cage and each breath stung his lungs. Although much fitter than he used to be, running for distance was still a struggle; this new world called for lots of short sprints: put a hundred yards between you and the zombies, and you were good to go. Anything longer and he was soon wheezing.

  “We discovered the horde about five days ago when trying to cross ourselves,” said Dalby in between breaths. He had no trouble with the pace. “Lucky we scouted ahead. The other side of the bridge is a natural trap with the cliffs against the road, and a major vehicle pile up in either direction. It looks like the army there before had moved some vehicles and sandbagged the gap to try and cut off the bridge… My guess is the horde is the left overs of a major civilian/soldier/zed cluster fuck. Now, they’re all stuck there, walking in circles, no place to go.”

  “Won’t Amy and t
hat see them though?” wheezed Chris.

  “Depends how careful they are. They get to the end of the bridge, find the sandbags in the way, move them, and boom, you got yourself a zed party.”

  The pace was hard, but that was ok. They needed to get there as soon as possible.

  Terry stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the end of the bridge.

  Walking slowly, it had taken them five minutes to get there, being mindful of each corpse, watching carefully for any signs of animation or movement. The bridge was a graveyard, though. Nothing moved.

  Two army trucks rested across the bridge, with a gap in-between. The gap had been filled with sandbags.

  “We pull it down?” said Amy, coming to stand next to Terry.

  “No,” said Terry. “Look how high it is, could come down on top of us. We can go under the trucks.”

  Terry walked to the nearest truck and got onto his hands on knees. He leaned down and looked under the truck.

  No movement, just more concrete, more road.

  “I’ll go look. Stay here until you hear from me.”

  He took off his back pack and got flat on his belly, gun in his right hand. He pulled himself along the cold road. The rusted underbelly of the truck hung above him like a dirty orange cave. Terry cursed as his coat was caught and ripped against some unknown piece of machinery.

  He pulled himself out the other side. He stood up.

  “Oh shit,” said Terry.

  Chapter 9

  The soldiers took position on either side of the path just before it met the main road. A thick tree covering stopped them from being immediately visible, but they could spy through the gaps in the leaves and hedgerow.

  Chris kneeled down at the back of the group whilst Dalby and another soldier creeped to the end of the road.

  A strange rustling sound pervaded the air; Chris thought it had been the leaves of the many trees around them, but as he listened more carefully, it sounded harder and more consistent than leaves.

  Dalby returned and motioned the soldiers back up the rocky path, the way they had came.

  “Why we going back?” said Chris.