by Ryan Casey
Jim Hall kept on holding his hand out. Held his smile. “Ready to see what the new world looks like.”
CHAPTER THREE
Pedro held his gun over the top of the back of the armoured vehicle and realised how damned much he missed the safety of four big fuck-off walls already.
The roads out of Manchester were packed with abandoned cars, which was becoming all too familiar a sight. Crows swooped down and pecked the eyes out of a human carcass like it was nothing more than dropped breadcrumbs at a park. There was a constant stench of rotting in the air. A rotting that Pedro had got so damned used to he’d forgot it was even there.
But now he’d been inside the Manchester Living Zone, smelled normal, non-rotting air, he longed for it again. Like a scuba-diver longed for air when their oxygen was running out.
He’d been stuck below the surface for way too long.
“How far?”
Tamara was the one to speak. She’d been like frigging Donkey off Shrek for the last half hour or so of the journey. Poking herself over the back of this truck, picking off goons when they got too close. Or in some cases, when they didn’t get close at all.
Pedro could feel the anger inside her. The grief. The pain at losing her son.
He wanted to tell her that using violence to get the grief out wasn’t all that great an option after all. But who was he to advise her on parental bullshit?
He was the one who’d sworn to look after her son, protect her son.
He was the one who’d failed her.
“Just a couple miles up the road,” the driver, a woman called Lesley, said. She had a gruff voice and short purple hair underneath that goggled hat of hers. Also in this truck was stutter-machine Harry, as twitchy as ever.
But he was alright. There were worse people out there. Much worse.
Tamara let off another shot over the back of the open topped truck. Pedro still wasn’t keen on this setup. Sure, the sides of the truck covered all their bodies. But there was just something about being out in the open again.
Like being in a plane with your best mate flying it.
Best mates aren’t supposed to pilot planes. Because you know all their flaws, all their little failings.
Which made for a fucking terrifying journey.
Pedro moved over to Tamara’s side. She kept her gun rested on the truck as they tumbled over all sorts of debris on the road. Lesley was an out of control driver, but hell, she seemed to be doing the trick of getting to their destination fast. “You okay?” Pedro asked Tamara.
Tamara focused on a trio of goons wandering through a little green park. Popped three shots out of her gun, only hit one, and only hit that one in its arm. “Just … just want to get there now. Just want to—”
“You should save your ammo,” Pedro said.
Tamara looked at him. Although she had her goggles on, he could see right through them. He felt uncomfortable. Like he didn’t belong anymore. Felt his cheeks going red.
He nodded. Looked back out at the trio of goons.
Lifted his own gun and took them out.
One.
Two.
Three.
“Or at least get some shooting practice before we get there.”
“Fuck off,” Tamara muttered.
Pedro sensed the joviality to it, but there was a seriousness there too.
He stepped back over to her. “I’m serious,” he said. “See that one in the window there?”
“Course I do. I’m not blind.”
“Good. Then lift your gun.”
He put his hand on the front of it. Lifted it slightly.
“Take a deep breath in.”
“I don’t need a crash course from an army thug on how to—”
“Take a deep breath in.”
Pedro heard her sigh. Then take in a deep breath.
“Good. Now focus. We’re moving to the left of the goon, so you want to aim just to the left.”
He edged her gun over to the left so it was pointing at the next window, and then the next, as they continued to fly down the road.
“Now fire.”
Tamara squeezed the trigger.
Something crunched beneath the armoured vehicle and Pedro felt himself flying.
He didn’t have time to understand what was happening. Just a feeling of sheer dread, as he tumbled out of the back of the vehicle, listened to the sounds of metal crunching and screeching, of Lesley shouting.
Felt the hard concrete smack him in the face.
Heard his shoulder crack.
He let out a shout and then stopped when he realised he was on the road. He was out of the armoured vehicle. Out of safety.
He looked around. Tried his damnedest not to hurt his shoulder anymore. Smoke coming from just ahead, filling his lungs and reminding him of all those battle zones in Afghan and Iraq.
And then he saw the vehicle. Upturned. Smoke billowing out of it.
A sickening feeling punched him in the gut.
Tamara.
He tried to drag himself along the road towards her but his shoulder ached like mad. He took a few deep breaths. Gripped tight hold of his gun. Steadied himself, then lifted himself up. Shit. Must’ve dislocated it. Must’ve fucking dislocated this weak-ass shoulder yet again.
He stumbled across the concrete towards the armoured vehicle. It was on its roof. It’d hit something. Tumbled over something. Tamara, Harry, Lesley, they’d all be inside. Slowly suffocating on the fumes of the engine.
And then frying when the vehicle exploded.
He ran a little faster, heart pounding.
It was only when he reached the back of the vehicle that his mind caught up with his instincts.
The armoured vehicle. It’d hit something.
Flown over something …
He didn’t hear the groans but he remembered the goons he’d seen outside the MLZ. The ones that didn’t make a sound.
The ones that frigging power-walked.
He swung around and he saw what the armoured vehicle had hit.
There was a mound of bodies right in the middle of the road. Arms. Legs. Partly burned, like some kind of sicko’s barbecue. Flies buzzed around it, feasted on their meal, nobody stopping them.
Except some of these bodies were alive.
Well. Undead kind of alive, anyway.
Pedro lifted his gun and fired at the bloke in the checkered shirt that stumbled towards him. And then he moved on to the woman with the burned skin and missing an arm, fired at her. He backed up to the armoured vehicle. The goons, it’s like they’d come from nowhere. But they were slow ones. Slow and dumb.
Which meant they were manageable.
He crouched down when he had a free moment. Crouched by the side of the upturned back area.
He could see someone under the vehicle.
Tamara.
“Tamara, I …”
And then he felt something scrape against his shoulder and push him to the ground and he swung around and one of the goons was on top of him.
Fear and dread smashed through Pedro’s body. An ugly fucker. A man with half his balding head missing, charred by the flames. He dug his fingers into Pedro, but those same burned fingers just crumbled away right down to the sharp, yellowing bone.
He lowered his teeth and Pedro prepared to smack the crispy shit in his face when he heard a blast and felt smouldered gunk explode all over him.
When he’d blinked the dust and gore out of his eyes, he saw someone was standing over him with her goggled hat down.
Tamara.
“That a deep enough breath for you?” she asked.
A flicker of embarrassment came over Pedro as the memory of how many times Tamara had bailed him out flashed into his mind. He pushed aside the remains of the charred goon, threw it onto the floor. “Guessing it’s Harry stuck under here, then.”
“That’s—that’s right,” a quivery voice said from the opposite side of the vehicle. “Just the guy you don’t happen to have a cr
ush on. Should’ve put a woman’s voice on. Might’ve—might’ve saved me quicker. Now get me out of here.”
Pedro couldn’t deny Harry had a point.
He stepped around the side of the truck. The metal debris crunched under his feet. He did his best to hold his breath as the smoke and steam came out of the vehicle.
Harry was trapped underneath the vehicle from the knees down. He tried to pull himself out, but the sides of the vehicle had come right down on his legs.
“Gonna hurt in the morning,” Pedro said, as he got to one side, lifted the truck. But then a shooting pain rattled through his shoulder. Not as bad as before—must’ve sorted itself out on the collision with the road thanks to the goon. Not dislocated, like he’d thought. Still, it hurt a bit. Tamara joined him at the other side. Helped him lift.
“Yeah well,” Harry said, wincing and ouching. “A dead leg’s better than an undead leg.”
Pedro lifted with all he had, making sure most of the weight was on his left. “Fair point.”
Harry wriggled out from underneath the truck. Took a little longer than Pedro liked, like he was taking the piss, but hey, he was free. He was safe.
They let go of the truck and stood up, looked around the road. Abandoned blue Renault Clio, the windows smashed in. Glass and metal scattered around the road.
Body parts and blood like paint from the brush of an impressionist artist.
“How about—about Lesley?” Harry asked.
Pedro crouched down to look through the window of the driver’s side.
Lesley was upside down. Her head was pressed up against the smashed window. A stray shard of long, sharp glass pierced through her neck, which blood dripped out of and hit the car roof.
Although Pedro didn’t know Lesley, he felt like he’d been punched in the chest. Because life was all over for Lesley, all in one moment. One lapse of judgement and your life was over in this world.
All that fighting for a good cause and you died for no cause at all.
Pedro stepped away from the driver’s seat. He looked at Harry, who’d joined Tamara in pulling his goggled hat off now, and nodded with a straight face.
Pedro didn’t have to speak. He knew they knew what he meant.
At the end of the world, everyone knew what the death look meant.
“Guess we—we power on?” Harry said.
Pedro looked right down the road. Right between the apartment blocks. Noted the sign that said Trafford: 1 1/2 miles. “I guess we do. But we should stick here first …”
He was going to suggest searching the back of the armoured vehicle for any loose weapons, ammo, supplies. Or searching the area for a new vehicle.
But of course, the sound of footsteps and gasps came from a shuttered Dominos Pizza takeaway just across the road.
Ten, twelve, fifteen noisy goons all tumbled out, staggered in Pedro and co’s direction.
That familiar sinking feeling.
“Scrap that thought. Maybe we shouldn’t stick around,” Pedro said.
Without consulting one another, the three of them jogged down the road and into the unknown.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Riley saw what was outside the white-tiled room, he squeezed his eyes shut again and opened them, convinced he was dreaming.
But no. This new world. This wonderful new world. This impossible new world.
It was here.
It was real.
He walked down the concrete pavement and looked all around. There was a family of three just ahead—a father, a mother, a little girl. All of them holding hands. All of them smiling. The windows in the apartment blocks and the flats were all intact. Riley could see people behind them. People in their living rooms.
Live people.
He walked some more. Alan wheeled at his side, Jim Hall walked at the other side. The white coat and the goggle-wearer were behind him. None of them spoke. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. Riley wouldn’t hear them.
Not with these surroundings.
There was no broken glass on the road. No blood. The car windows were intact. Sounds of children laughing somewhere in the distance. And the smell of … Oh God was that turkey? The thought of it made him salivate, made his stomach rumble.
Shops lined the streets. A little Spar, a jolly woman behind the counter wearing a Santa hat, one of the customers wearing reindeer antlers. A baker’s, puffing out the most delicious sweet smells—pastry, dough, sweet cakes.
Smells Riley swore he’d never experience again.
Smells that had him licking the drool from the corners of his lips and struggling to believe any of this was real.
“How…” he managed. But he couldn’t continue. The world. This was the normal world. The normal world, just like it was before the fall. Before the rise of the creatures. Before the Dead Days.
Had the cure come into action already?
“Merry Christmas, first and foremost,” Jim Hall said.
He plonked some antlers atop Riley’s tender head, and Riley just let them rest there.
He looked up at the sky. Squinted at it, blue with very few clouds. Maybe they were in some kind of glass ball. Or heaven. Was this heaven? Was he dead?
“We chose this place six years ago, when the first real concerns about Apocalypsis started to spread.”
“The infection,” Alan cut in, wheeling himself along. “The infection is called Apocalypsis.”
Jim Hall shook his head. “Right. Sorry. The infection. It originated in Iraq. The source of the conflict back in 2003. I’m sure your friend Pedro will inform you fully when he returns. But what you should know now is that this place is completely safe.”
Riley couldn’t keep the awe inside him. His lips and hands shook. “But … but how did … how did you build it?”
Jim Hall smiled like he’d told this story a hundred times before. “Six years ago, like I said. We cordoned off large sections of various parts of the country, this being one of them. There are others like this in Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Cardiff. But I always had a soft spot for this place. Anyway, we prepared walls. Huge walls, in case Apocalypsis ever did break out. Which it did, of course, just under two months ago. Got into the hands of the very people our governments went to war to get it out of the hands of.”
The words just bounced around Riley’s head. He kept on blinking, still not understanding, not truly comprehending. Apocalypsis. Terrorists. The source of the infection. The cure.
A normal world stuck behind walls.
Riley looked at the people in their homes, the people outside their front doors, all going about this idyllic life of theirs. A dark-haired woman and a bald man chatting, small-talking. Two old people sipping on mulled wine. It was dizzying. Staggering.
“How … All these people. How are they here?”
“They found us or we found them. Just like we found you.”
Riley wanted to tell Jim Hall about all the bad people outside the walls. People like Ivan, who’d killed his best friend, who’d butchered his own troops and frozen them to eat when food supplies ran low. People like Mike, who’d destroyed Heathwaite’s caravan park, who’d been responsible for Claudia and Anna’s deaths, the splitting of the group.
People like Riley.
The things he’d done.
The violent lengths he’d gone to to stay alive.
“It didn’t start off this way,” Jim Hall said, as they stopped at the corner of the street. “Started off with one hundred of us. Then population boomed.”
“How many now?”
Jim Hall smiled. Eyes twinkled. “Nearly a thousand.”
Riley felt tears clouding his vision. “A thousand. That’s …”
“Enough to pick up the pieces of civilisation again. And then add the other four Living Zones around the country to that number. Assume for argument’s sake they are at the same level as us. Five-thousand people. Five-thousand people working to fix the country. Working to restore humanity. Breeding. Starting again.�
�
The news made Riley’s brain feel like it was going to explode. He looked down at the ground as his knees started to wobble like warm jelly. “That’s a … a lot of people.”
Jim Hall just stood and smiled. Alan too. “A hell of a lot of people. And we’re growing all the time.”
“You knew Pedro, I believe?” Alan asked.
Riley stared up at the sky. He could see the walls Jim Hall referred to now. Tall, towered right over the city. Steel metal, like something out of a science-fiction movie. And that’s because he was in a science-fiction world now. A post-apocalyptic world.
Just seeing walls around a cordoned off section of humanity like this, there was a familiarity about it. He’d expected a place like this to feel claustrophobic when he’d read about them in books or seen them in films.
But this …
Birds swooping over the walls and back out again.
All this space. All this fresh air.
All this life.
“Riley? You know Pedro, don’t you?”
Riley tuned back into his surroundings. Looked at Jim Hall. “Yeah, he … We travelled a way together. In the early days. Got split up before I … before I met Alan.”
“A good man, Pedro?”
Riley thought back to the things Pedro had done. The sacrifices he’d made. The way he’d turned his back on Ivan and the barracks and joined their group. “Yeah. He’s as good as they get.”
Jim Hall puffed out his lips. Nodded. “Good. He’s outside dealing with an immediate threat to our safety right now. Out there with seven of our people. And one of the ones he got here with.”
“Chloë?” Riley asked.
Jim Hall looked at Alan and Alan smiled back at him. “No, not Chloë. Tamara.”
Tamara. Tamara. Name didn’t ring a bell. “No, I … I don’t know Tamara.”
He thought of the last time he’d seen Chloë.
With Mike’s group.
Holding a gun.
Firing it at Heathwaite’s, hitting Anna.
Killing Anna.
He wanted to believe Chloë was aiming for a creature or aiming for one of the men on Mike’s side.
But Rodrigo had killed her mum. Killed her right in front of her. So a part of Riley knew that she was firing at the very people that she saw responsible for the death of her mum.
