by Ryan Casey
But still, Riley leaned over to the pillow of the bottom bunk. Rested his head onto it. Closed his eyes.
As the armoured vehicle rocked from side to side, he couldn’t escape the last look he’d had into Pedro’s eyes before the creatures completely overwhelmed him …
Another victim of the Dead Days.
Another loss.
CHAPTER ONE
Ivan rushed down the corridor with Nick and Abigail behind him and prayed to God he’d made the right decision.
The mass of zombies was still thick and strong outside. He could hear them scraping away at the doors to the apartment block they were staying in. The stench of them was even stronger out in the corridor, too. It reminded him of when Wilson had dragged in a rotting body for storage in the freezer room back at the barracks. He’d beat Wilson around the face, told him what a fucking idiot he was for even thinking they could think about eating a body in that condition.
Wilson had backed down.
Ivan made sure he was one of the next soldiers to be executed for storage.
Wow. How things had changed.
Ivan tried turning the handles of the apartment doors on the opposite side of the building. He knew it was easier to get out that way. Easier to climb down from one of the balconies and onto the roof. He never used to use it because of the clear views of the city in the distance it gave. It exposed him way too much.
But now the zombies were all gathered outside the front of the apartment block, he didn’t really have a choice.
“Where are we gonna go?”
Nick’s voice made the hairs on Ivan’s arm stand up. He moved on to another door. Tried the handle. “I … We’ll find a way out,” he said. “Somewhere safe.”
“You always said that before we found this place,” Abigail said, cynical tone to her voice. “And now we’re leaving this place too.”
Ivan looked at Abigail. Saw she was frowning at him. Damn, she was tuned in. “Fair point. Can’t really come back from that. You’re just gonna have to trust me. We’ve made it this far.”
Ivan tried another door—still locked, and he didn’t want to go making a big noise by knocking it down. Fuck. He could hear the zombies bumping right up against the front of the apartment downstairs. Soon, there’d be so many of them compressed against it that they’d just tumble through.
Spill inside.
And maybe Ivan would be able to take down one or two or fuck—maybe even a hundred of them.
But there was way more than a hundred.
And his ammo was very, very limited.
He moved onto the next door, turned the handle. No luck.
And then he moved onto the next. Again, no luck.
Jesus fucking Christ. Fuck this automatic keycard locking system.
He was about to try the handle of the penultimate flat door when he heard an ear-splitting crack from down the stairs.
That crack was followed by the sound of split glass raining against the floor.
The sound of groaning bodies tumbling into the apartment entrance.
Ivan looked down the corridor. Looked over to the stairs. The zombies were inside. They’d find their way upstairs. They’d be in this corridor at any moment.
“Quick,” Abigail said. She backed up beside Ivan. “Just … just get us away.”
Ivan’s heart raced. He tried the handle to the next door as the groans got closer, as footsteps plodded up the stairs, damp and slippery from all the blood that’d spilled out of their bodies.
No luck with this handle.
“Fuck it,” he said.
He lifted his gun. Pointed it at the handle. Fired.
The handle blasted into pieces with the first shot. The bang was louder than even Ivan expected. He turned around and looked back down the corridor, expecting the first of the zombies to pile their way up there.
Nothing yet. No sign.
But they were getting closer.
“We need to go in here and be extra quiet,” Ivan said. He took a few steps back. “We climb out of the window then out onto the roof. Find a way down. There’ll be zombies outside though. But we can deal with them. Okay?”
Nick and Abigail kept on stepping back, eyes fixed on the stairway. The shadows of oncoming zombies drifted closer, slowly but surely.
Fuck it. Back’s bad enough as it is, nothing a barge can possibly do to make it worse.
Ivan lowered himself. Took another step back.
And he ran at the door with all his strength.
The weight of the door surprised him. Instead of barging through the door, a sharp pain split through his shoulder, set his already-aching back on fire. His head spun and his ears rang.
The door was still shut.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“Quick,” Abigail said. She put a hand on Ivan’s leg, then took it away. “We … I think they’re getting closer.”
Ivan knew Abigail was right. He could hear the zombies’ guttural cries, just metres away from them now.
He had one shot. One more shot at barging this door down.
One final damned shot.
He held his breath and he ran at the door again.
More pain in his shoulder and neck.
More dizziness, more ringing in his ears.
Still, the door was shut.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ivan said. He booted the door with his right foot, stubbed his toe extra-badly in the process. But not even that did any good. The door stayed shut. So all he had now was a broken handle, one less bullet and a shitload of zombies climbing up the stairs.
No. He couldn’t let the zombies find them. He had to hide. They all did.
“Come on, kids.” He put his rifle over his shoulder and grabbed Nick and Abigail’s hands. He pulled them down the corridor, headed back to his flat.
And then he stopped.
The zombies were spilling their way out of the opening at the top of the stairs.
One of them, its skin loose and droopy and the bones in its forearm on show, looked down the corridor to the right.
Ivan stayed rigid.
And then the zombie looked to the left and even though its eyes didn’t focus—couldn’t focus—it saw them.
There was a moment of pause as the zombie looked at Ivan, as Ivan looked back at it.
And then the heads of the other four, five, six zombies all turned around, all looked at him too.
“Get behind me, kids,” Ivan said.
Nick and Abigail stayed frozen to the spot by Ivan’s sides.
Ivan let go of their hands. Reached for the rifle on his shoulder. Pointed at the zombies as they edged closer, groaned with interest.
“Kids, get the hell behind me right this—”
Ivan didn’t finish speaking because the first of the zombies started staggering towards him. Blood oozed out of a deep bite wound on the side of its belly, the white shirt that it had once worn torn away and dirtied.
Ivan pulled the trigger and fired at the zombie. More of them were coming, now. More of them were flooding up the stairway, drifting in their direction.
“Get back!”
Ivan pushed the kids back and edged down the corridor. He fired at the heads of the oncoming zombies. They weren’t quick ones, which was something, but there were still loads of them. Way too many to deal with one pesky gun and limited ammo.
He had to get out of here. Find a way out.
Or find a place to hide, at least.
He kept on firing as he walked backwards down the corridor. He knew there was the metal door to an emergency exit shaft somewhere behind him, but that was no fucking use when he was trying to get out of this place. It led right out to the front of the apartment block, right out to the middle of the horde of zombies outside, and set off a fucking alarm the one time he’d stepped through it.
But fuck. They had to go somewhere. He had to do something.
He picked up his pace and kept on firing as the zombies filled the corridor. They’d passed his
apartment room now, and they were crammed into the narrow corridor so there was no way he was going back.
It was the emergency exit or nowhere.
“Through the fire escape,” Ivan said, between firing bullets at more of the zombies.
“But—but the alarm—”
“Just open the door!” Ivan shouted.
Abigail complied.
Ivan fired at the zombies some more. They were just a few metres away now. If their teeth didn’t kill him, their smell definitely would.
“It’s—it’s stuck,” Abigail said.
Ivan turned around for the briefest of moments, but he couldn’t for long. He couldn’t lose sight of where the zombies were, of how far away they were. “What d’you mean it’s stuck?”
Abigail winced as she tried to push down the metal handle in the middle of the emergency door. Nick pushed it too, tried to help her, but he wasn’t having any luck either. “It just won’t budge.”
Ivan backed right up against the little wall at the side of the fire door. Fucking odd. The door had worked the last time he’d been through it. Maybe he’d auto-locked it or something when he’d gone outside and set the alarm off last time. Maybe it stayed locked shut until a code was entered, some crap like that.
Either that, or it was a pretty damned awful fire escape.
He lifted the gun and pointed it at the head of a female zombie at the front of the group. One of her fingers was missing, and her neck was tilting to one side like it’d been snapped.
He pulled the trigger to blast her head off its shoulders.
Nothing but a click from the barrel of the gun.
Ivan’s stomach sank. He knew he was low on ammo, but not that low.
He tried to fire at the woman again. Tried to fire at the grey-haired man on his knees beside her.
Click. Click.
Nothing.
He spun around. Smacked his hands against the emergency lever. Pressed it with all his weight, but it was stuck. Completely stuck.
He turned back around. Looked at the zombies, just four metres away, three metres away, two metres away.
He felt his knees turn to jelly.
Listened to the sounds of Nick and Abigail shouting and crying, banging their hands against the lever and screaming for help.
He waited for the first bite.
CHAPTER TWO
Tamara looked up at the roof of the armoured vehicle and tried to clear her mind of what had happened.
But that was exactly the problem. Her mind was already clear. Way too clear. Blank.
Numb.
She’d heard Jordanna speaking to her. Heard her telling her that they were going to be okay, that Pedro had done what he’d had to do to save the whole group, to secure the future of humanity. But she just didn’t get it. Jordanna didn’t understand that Pedro was her future.
That there was no future for her without him.
She could hear Riley and Jordanna talking, now. Beyond that, the sound of the tyres against the road. She didn’t know where they were. She didn’t really care.
All she cared about was that hatch on the roof of the armoured vehicle.
The hatch that Pedro had climbed through.
The hatch that he’d walked away from her through.
She grabbed the quilt cover and rolled over onto her side. She was still feeling tender from what the bikers had done to her. She preferred not to remember that. Preferred to keep that well out of her mind.
She knew it would come back to haunt her again someday. She knew she’d never truly recover from it.
But she’d executed some of those bikers.
She’d got some of her revenge.
The hard part about Pedro’s death was there was nobody to blame for it but him.
Tamara closed her eyes and thought back to how she used to cuddle up to Pedro after they’d made love. The light hint of booze on his breath, of aftershave on his neck. The prickle of his beard against her skin, and the feel of his chest hair underneath her fingers.
The warmth of his body.
She remembered how much he broke down his macho walls when he was with her. It’d started months ago, way back when Josh was still alive, and he’d confessed to her what he’d done in Afghanistan. How it haunted him ever since. How he struggled to live with himself and accept what he’d done.
How he swore to protect Josh.
And Tamara blamed Pedro at first. For a few weeks, in the first stage of her grief, she held Pedro partly responsible for Josh’s death. A blurring of reality, sure, but butchering Cameron proved inadequate justice after what he’d done to her son.
But then she’d realised that really, Pedro hadn’t failed her or her son.
She saw how cut up he was. How much grief he was experiencing, too.
She saw how much he cared.
And that never went away. Not even as he stepped out of the hatch on the roof of the armoured vehicle and dropped down to his death.
He’d died to save them all.
He’d died protecting her, protecting Riley, protecting hope of a wider future.
But he’d sacrificed his and Tamara’s future at that expense.
And maybe that was wrong to look at it like that. Maybe it was a selfish view to have. Maybe it was awful to even think about wanting a future with Pedro in the bad world over a future with nobody in the good world.
But didn’t everyone have those thoughts, really?
Besides, there was something niggling at Tamara. Something that had been niggling at her ever since the MLZ got compromised by the infected. And that was this whole mission. This whole “cure” journey.
She knew Riley had been cured. She knew that had to be true because he’d been bitten. And she knew that the results of studies on him were right—he probably only did have weeks or days to live.
But she’d grown so used to failure at the last hurdle that she couldn’t accept that they were going to cure this thing through some fancy futuristic machine or other.
More likely that they’d get to Birmingham. Find the place in tatters. Find everyone dead.
Or maybe they’d find nothing at all. Maybe Jim Hall had just used this as a way to get Riley out of the way before he turned. Maybe everyone else was just collateral damage.
Tamara opened her eyes again. Looked up at the hatch on the top of the armoured vehicle. She knew she was being cynical. She knew she should have more hope, more belief. After all, the MLZ had sprouted out of nowhere and given them a safe haven, a safe shelter, for months.
But it was difficult having hope. Difficult accepting that there was a brightness ahead when darkness suffocated everything good in this world.
She put the hand with the two fingers missing on her belly.
Looked down at it, bouncing with a pulse.
With the minuscule pulse of another life inside her.
She thought about the pregnancy test she’d taken just before leaving. Thought about the smile on Pedro’s face that she’d never see. The news of being a father that he’d never get.
She thought about it, and she cried that he’d never be here to hold his baby in his arms.
***
Ivan held his breath and waited for the first teeth to sink into his flesh.
He watched the zombies get closer. Just two metres away now. He couldn’t breathe even if he wanted to, their stench was so strong.
Nick and Abigail shouted and cried, banged against the emergency exit.
He wanted to hold them. Tell them everything was going to be okay.
But he’d told enough lies in his life.
He gripped hold of the rifle and brought it in front of him like a bat. Least he could do was prolong the time it took for the zombies to get to Nick and Abigail. Beat as many as he could to the floor. Do anything he could to keep them alive just a little longer.
And then his mind flashed back to Riley.
Riley lowering his gun and letting him walk away.
Giving him that se
cond chance.
And then within the space of a millisecond, another memory flickered up in his mind.
The moment of complete loss of faith when he’d tried to hang himself and even fucking failed at that.
The moment he’d heard Nick and Abigail outside, screaming for help.
The moment they’d saved his life.
He couldn’t just let this happen.
They’d saved his life—given him a second chance. He had to fight.
He swung around. Smacked the gun against the metal bar of the emergency exit. He pushed it. Pushed no matter how much it wracked his back with pain, filled his shoulders with burning, shooting, stabbing sensations.
He bit his lip as the stumbling mass of the zombies came within a metre.
Felt the coldness from their bodies.
Pushed harder. Pushed through the agony in his back. Pushed with all he had.
He felt a hand grab hold of his coat.
Readied himself for the bite.
Pushed even harder …
The handle gave way underneath his weight.
He couldn’t stop himself falling through into the darkness as the door swung open.
He fell to the floor. Smacked his head on the cold metal of the emergency exit stairway. Heard a screeching pain ripple through his skull and realised it was the emergency alarm.
He looked up. Saw Abigail was beside him. Nick was on the floor. One of the zombies had his feet and was closing in for a bite.
Ivan forced himself to stand no matter how much it hurt.
He lifted the gun and swung the back of it against the creature’s grey, rotting head.
Swung and swung and swung until the softened skull gave way and its brains spilled out all over the floor.
“Get inside,” Ivan said.
Nick shuffled into the emergency exit area. Four of the zombies had found their way in too, and more would follow unless he shut the door—fast.
He turned his gun onto its side and charged at the zombies. Knocked them back with all the force he had. His back ached like mad and he knew he was just a flick away from crumbling to the floor, but he held his ground.
Pushed hard against the dead weight.
Knocked them right back into the corridor.
As they tumbled onto their dead arses, Ivan lunged for the door. Swung it around and slammed it shut.
