by Thomas Hall
‘Thanks,’ he said as she put a cup of black coffee down in front of him. He picked it up and sipped it while it was still far too hot to drink.
She sat down and waited for him to broach the subject. It didn’t take long.
‘Have you thought about what you want to do?’ he said.
Beth shook her head.
‘Because if we’re going to do anything, we need to do it soon. People are getting settled here.’
‘I know.’
‘The winter’s here. It’ll be hard on the roads, dangerous.’
‘Are you saying you think we should stay?’
Russell shook his head. ‘I’m just giving you the facts. If we stay, we’ll have to watch ourselves.’
‘I don’t think they’re dangerous,’ she said.
‘Beth, they kidnapped you.’
‘They won’t even kill zombies,’ she said. ‘I think they’re pacifists.’
Russell snorted. She had to agree. It seemed unlikely that such people could have survived for as long as they had.
‘They could have killed me,’ she said. ‘They know we’re here so they could have come in the night and killed all of us. I don’t think they’re going to hurt anyone.’
‘So you want to stay?’ Russell said.
‘I need to think about it,’ she said.
‘And in the meantime?’
‘Find Darrel and tell him we need food. If we’re staying or going I don’t want us doing it on starvation rations.’
‘Anything else?’
Beth shook her head.
He downed the last of his coffee and got up. She watched him walk to the door and saw that he’d developed a limp in his right leg. She might have asked him about it, if she hadn’t had so much on her mind already.
Beth ventured out of the house shortly before noon. The sun was high in the bright blue sky and the light that reflected off the snow was blinding. She was wearing two coats and a pair of thick waterproof trousers, but she still felt cold.
In the distance she could hear the sound of children playing, but as she walked carefully along the street, the only evidence of them that she found was a number of snowmen.
She wasn’t sure where she was going, she certainly had no intention of returning to the town hall and paid enough attention to her surroundings to avoid Margaret’s people, who she was sure were out there watching her. Beth just walked and thought and considered the problem at hand.
Suddenly there was movement and she turned towards it. There was nothing there now, but she was sure that there had been. Sure enough to draw her pistol and release the safety.
The area was quiet, but she could see motes of snow drifting lazily in the gentle breeze. Beth walked forwards, conscious of how exposed she was and the terrible crunching sound of her boots made on the snow.
She got it another three steps before she felt the world suddenly spin. She hadn’t been moving quickly, but the patch of ice caught her by surprise. She went up like a trapeze artist and seemed to hang in the air for a moment before she felt herself falling.
It wasn’t the ground that broke her fall.
The super zombie gently put her back into a standing position and then stepped away.
Beth turned to face the creature. It seemed cruel that it was standing naked in the cold, but it didn’t appear to be suffering. In fact, it seemed to have improved a great deal since she’d last seen it; the peeling skin and exposed muscle had healed and it looked almost whole again.
‘You scared me,’ Beth said.
The creature nodded and bowed its head.
After a moment Beth turned away and started walking. She could hear the super zombie lumbering along behind her, and was glad to have the company.
If Margaret’s people were watching her, she wondered what they made of the creature. The super zombie was obviously not human. Would it reassure Margaret’s people, or make them more determined to get rid of the convoy? She didn’t know and, for the time being, she didn’t care.
They walked until they came to a gate set into a wall. It was open and on the other side she could see a statue of some long dead man and a bandstand. Obviously this had been a park at some point in the past, but the unbroken snow suggested that few people came here now. On the other side of it she could see the red brick of the town hall.
She walked to the bandstand and climbed the steps. The wood echoed but the roof had held and there was no snow on the stage. Beth sat down and the super zombie sat opposite her.
Neither of them made a sound.
Somewhere in the distance she could hear birds singing and, if she closed her eyes, she thought she might be able to convince herself she was somewhere else. That she was someone else and didn’t have to make this decision.
She opened her eyes again and looked up at the super zombie. It was sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor and seemed at ease.
‘They want us to leave,’ Beth said.
The super zombie couldn’t actually talk, but she had taught it a few basic forms of communication. Now it looked at her and appeared to have forgotten them all.
‘They were here first and I suppose that gives them some rights to the place, but the town’s big, and we could help each other.’
When she had first spoken to the super zombie she had felt ridiculous. It wasn’t like talking to herself, which would have been bad enough, it was like talking to a stuffed toy. It had made her feel like a five-year-old playing imaginary games, but it had helped and she’d soon gotten over her feelings.
‘If we go on the road again it will be much harder. We’ve already lost people and I don’t want to lose anyone else.’
She shook her head and the super zombie just looked at her.
‘I don’t even know if there’s anything better out there. Maybe the people in the next town we find will try to kill us.’
It was certainly possible. They had been lucky that Margaret hadn’t sent soldiers to kill them in the night, they wouldn’t have stood a chance against such a surprise attack.
‘It seems so stupid. I mean, how many people are actually left? And we’re turning against each other. Haven’t the zombies killed enough people without us doing it too?’
The super zombie still didn’t react and, for a strange moment, Beth wondered whether she had offended it. After all, it technically was a zombie, even if it didn’t look or act like one.
‘But then what’s the point of staying if they don’t want us here? We’ll never be able to properly settle down, we’ll never be able to relax. I think we have to leave, don’t you?’
She hadn’t expected a response and she didn’t get one. The super zombie just looked at her and she looked back at it. It seemed strange to see Dale’s eyes in its head, but comforting at the same time. They could never have a proper relationship, but it was nice to feel as if a part of him was still with her, still looking out for her.
‘You think we should stay, don’t you?’ she said.
The super zombie didn’t respond.
‘Maybe if I try talking to her again, she might see sense? We could leave when the weather turns, maybe that would help?’ She shook her head. ‘But by then we’ll be even more settled. I think we should go.’
The super zombie stared at her with those familiar eyes and she realised that, if she had been a different person, they could have made her hate it.
‘You’re right,’ she said, although the creature had done no more than sit there and listen to her, and she had no way of knowing how much it had actually understood. ‘We can’t keep running. This could be our home. We should stay.’
The creature said nothing but she didn’t need it to. Beth felt as if she had made up her mind and now there was nothing else to do except return to the convoy and give Russell the news.
The super zombie accompanied her for a while, but then one moment she turned around and it was gone. There was no sign of where, and that was even more remarkable as they had a line of visible fo
otsteps stretching all the way back to the park. One set, hers, continued right up to where she stood, the other set stopped about a hundred metres behind and it looked as if the creature had simply vanished.
CHAPTER 8
BETH LOOKED OUT AT THE COLD DARKNESS AND wondered what she was doing there. Although she was the leader of the community she had insisted on taking a turn on watch, now though, as her fingers turned to ice and she struggled to breathe in the cold air, she wondered if she should have been more selfish. It was a week since her encounter with Margaret and nothing had come of it. If the Townies, as she had started to think of them, were planning to stage an attack, they were taking their time.
There was nowhere to rest on the street, but she found that if she didn’t keep moving, the cold became unbearable. That was next on her list of things to sort out. The weather just seemed to be getting worse and, judging by the length of the days, they still had a long way to go before the depths of winter. More people had been moved into the houses with working fireplaces and the one in Kathy and the children’s house now ran through the night.
It wouldn’t be enough to keep them safe if things got really bad.
Fortunately, it hadn’t snowed again, but there was a thick layer of ice on the ground which made walking far more dangerous. She had considered sending Darrel to find boots with spikes for them all, but the roads were likely to be just as bad and she wouldn’t risk anyone’s life for the convenience.
Beth kept walking, there wasn’t anything else she could do. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour and then she could finally go home to a warm bed. It seemed like a lifetime away.
At the end of the street she stopped and paused before turning back again.
She stared into the darkness and she could feel him there. The super zombie had been close in the past week and she wondered if that proved it could understand more than she’d thought. It clearly believed she was in danger if it was hanging around to protect her all the time.
There was no sign of it now, but she knew it was there. She turned with a little more confidence and walked back down the street for the hundredth time.
When the morning finally arrived she was met at the front of his house by Russell holding two steaming cups of coffee. She took one gratefully and held it in her hands until feeling began to come back into her fingers.
‘How was it?’ Russell said.
‘Uneventful,’ Beth said, and even in that one word she couldn’t help shivering. The cold seemed to run to her core and she wondered whether she would ever be warm again.
‘That’s good though, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
He looked at her as if he had more to say. Then he shook his head. ‘You’d better come in, you’ll freeze if you stay out there, coffee or no coffee.’
Beth shook her head. ‘I need to get home and check on Dawn.’
‘Suit yourself. We need to talk though, I’ll stop by later.’
She downed the rest of the coffee and handed him back the cup. ‘Later,’ she said and walked away.
Dawn was in the kitchen when she got home. She could smell something sweet cooking and was surprised when she walked in and found her sister making pancakes. Well, trying to make them. There was flour and powdered egg mix all over the work surface and footprints in the mess on the floor.
She stood at the door and watched without alerting Dawn to her presence. It was, somewhat, humbling to see her little sister in such an environment. With her dark hair pulled back and covered with pancake mixture, Beth wasn’t sure whether she was a child pretending to be a grownup or a grown up playing like a child.
Perhaps that was the point. The incident with Toby should have shown her that Dawn was growing up, but she still couldn’t think of her sister that way. But the time was fast approaching when Dawn would be able to make her own choices about what she did and where she went.
Beth thought that some lessons in gun control might make a good Christmas present this year. If she could work out when Christmas was.
‘Beth!’ Dawn said, startled. She put a hand to her chest in a heart breakingly grown up gesture. ‘You scared me.’
‘You look like you’re having fun,’ Beth said, walking the rest of the way into the kitchen and enjoying the warmth. If things got really bad, she thought, they could run the ovens with the doors open.
‘Noel was showing me how to make pancakes,’ Dawn said.
‘Does he actually know how?’ Beth said, looking around at the mess.
Dawn laughed. ‘I dropped a batch on the way to the sink.’
Beth nodded. It looked like a couple of batches, at least. ‘As long as you clear it up.’
She filled a glass with water and walked back to the door.
‘I’m going upstairs to get some sleep. Let me know if anything happens.’
Dawn nodded, Beth left the room. The house was a little warmer now than in the dead of night. Maybe they would all be better off if they switched to a nocturnal schedule. If they were awake through the night, they could move around to keep warm.
The problem of the worsening winter plagued her until she’d gotten undressed and into bed. She thought it was going to continue to do so, but had underestimated her tiredness. As soon as her head touched the pillow her eyes closed and she fell into blissful unconsciousness, until she felt Dawn urgently shaking her awake.
‘Beth!’ Dawn hissed, as if she was worried she would be overheard. ‘Beth wake up!’
Gradually Beth opened her eyes, expecting to find the room dark and cold. Instead brilliant rays of sunlight streamed across the room and illuminated the powder and dust that her sister had brought in with her.
‘Dawn?’ she said, her voice groggy and confused. ‘What’s going on?’
Dawn stopped rocking her and started pulling her arm.
Beth struggled against her sister and managed to pull her arm away.
‘What’s going on?’ she said, not bothering to keep her voice down. She sat up in bed and looked at Dawn.
‘We’ve got to go.’
‘Go? Where? Why?’
Dawn shook her head, she wasn’t equipped for whatever was going on and Beth began to worry. She could see fear in Dawn’s eyes and realised that she couldn’t treat her like a trained soldier, she wasn’t even an untrained soldier.
‘Where’s Russell?’ Beth said.
‘He’s downstairs, he sent me to get you.’
She got out of bed and grabbed her coat off the floor. She could already feel the cold seeping through the windows and filling the room. Although Beth had no idea what time it was, she expected that it was getting close to dusk.
Dawn followed her out of the room but Beth was barely aware of her now. She didn’t know what he thought he was playing at, but unless there was a very good reason for scaring Dawn, she was going to let him have it.
She found Russell standing in the kitchen with the stove top coffee maker on the hob. He looked so relaxed that she didn’t wait to see what he had come for to start laying into him.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Beth said.
‘Coffee?’ he said, apparently unaware of her anger.
‘You’ve scared Dawn half to death, this had better be good.’
He took the coffee pot off the stove and poured it into two cups. ‘You’ll want to drink this quickly, we need to get a move on.’
She looked at the black liquid that he handed her and couldn’t turn it away, no matter how mad she was. He knew her true weakness.
‘There’s been an incident,’ he said while she drank.
‘Zombies?’
Russell shook his head.
‘Who then?’
‘Your friends at the town hall. Terrified pretty much everyone on the street, they thought they were on their own here.’
The coffee settled uncomfortably on her stomach as contrasting waves of guilt and anger pulsed through her.
‘No one’s been hurt but you need
to see what’s happened.’
She nodded and returned to her coffee, not sure what Margaret’s people could possibly have done to scare her hardened convoy. She swallowed the last of the hot liquid and then nodded Russell towards the door so that he could show her.
The winter seemed to have lasted forever, but she hadn’t gotten used to the shock of stepping out into the cold. It felt as if all of the moisture on her face had suddenly frozen and every expression was tinged with pain. Russell seemed to show no discomfort as she followed him onto the street.
The only people who she saw were the bikers, standing together, leaning against their machines and talking. They stopped when she appeared and watched her walk towards them. Although there was no one else on the street she saw plenty of curtains twitching and knew that she was being watched. It was a sensation that she was becoming used to.
‘It’s just down here,’ Russell said
She saw his fingers twitching around the handle of his pistol, but he hadn’t drawn it yet. Whatever had happened clearly hadn’t been violent, but it was enough to make him nervous.
At the end of the street she went to carry on walking but he reached out and grabbed her arm. She spun around and was about to tell him off, but then she saw what the Townies had done.
In five-foot-high red letters they had spray painted the side of the end house. She couldn’t work out when they’d had a chance to do it, but that really wasn’t the point now:
YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE
And then below it:
LEAVE BEFORE WE MAKE YOU
She stared at the writing for a long time. Russell didn’t hurry her. As far as attacks went it was a minor one, but still threatening. She didn’t blame people for being scared.
‘What do you think?’ Russell said.
Beth shook her head; she didn’t know what to make of it. Clearly it was a threat, but she had met the Townies and, despite having been kidnapped by them, she didn’t feel like they were really capable of ‘making’ them do anything. Why else would they have stood by and done nothing while the zombies ran through their town?
