“Have you completely lost it? I’m fine. What’s wrong with you?” He looked to the other’s for support, but found them backing away from him towards the car. “Come on. Don’t fucking do this to me. You’re killing me.”
“Walk away now. They’re getting closer. We have to move, and we are not taking you with us.”
There was a moment as he weighted up his chances with one working arm against a man with a crow bar, and the support of four others, then he turned and ran in a direction that had the least sound of advancing dead.
They piled into the car as quickly as they could. Jose was last there, and was surprised to find that the only space left was behind the wheel. There was no time to think. He took it, and reached down to find the key in the ignition. A check in the rear view mirror showed four people piled on top of each other in the back. He started the engine and slammed his foot own. He wasn’t ready for the lack of noise, but was satisfied as the car shunted forwards. The road ahead looked clear, but as he looked side to side he saw dozens of people closing in on the car. He begged the car to give him some speed, but with the weight in the back it was slow to comply. A body bounced off the rear passenger side, but fell back as they accelerated. He tried to look in every direction at once. No one in the car seemed to be breathing.
As they picked up speed they soon built a lead on those who’d chosen to chase them. In the straights they pulled clear. On corners they lost a bit of ground as they stuck to the road instead of taking shortcuts through people’s gardens, but within a mile they started to feel safer again.
“What happened back there?” Becky asked of the sole survivor of the third car.
“I don’t know. We were driving behind you and nothing was happening. I must have fallen asleep, I woke up when Sam started swearing at Tim. He’d turned into one of them, and he was biting into Jason’s neck. Jason must have been asleep and not noticed Tim turning until it was too late. I couldn’t see any bite marks on Tim, but there was blood soaking through his trousers, so something must have got him in the legs. Anyway, as soon as he heard the noise up front he attacked the driver. That’s when we ran into the back of you.”
“How did Tim get infected without anyone noticing? Who was with him when we were looking for the cars?” Jose asked.
“We split up to speed things up,” Phil said. “When we regrouped he was wearing those stupid Grandad trousers. His own were soaked in some old woman’s blood and brains. His legs must have got cut and let the infected blood in.”
“Does the infection work like that?”
“How the fuck should I know. I’ve seen the same fucked up shit as everyone else. I’m scared of everything right now.”
“Does anyone else have any cuts that we should worry about being infected?” Jose asked. The question was met with silence, but he didn’t expect anyone to give an honest answer if they were at risk. Short of ordering everyone out of the car and stripping down he had no idea how to be sure. They all looked tired, but didn’t have the kind of lethargy that Tim had shown. That had to be a good sign at least. While he thought, he nearly ran into the back of Jed’s car. He slammed on the brakes and stopped just in time. A well tooled up Jed approached, and he wound down the window to meet him.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Jed whispered. “Where are the others?”
“Tim was infected. He got the others in his car. They ran into the back of us. We saved who we could, and sent everyone else away. It’s just us now.” Jed looked at the crowd in the back of Jose’s car. He lowered is voice even further, “You sure they’re safe?” Everyone was close enough to hear.
“No one here’s been bitten. Tim got cut up, then some old dear’s brains got smashed over his open wounds. If we’d known we could have left him with Mark. The fucker kept quiet about it.”
“How’s your car for juice?”
“It’s dropping fast. It was supposed to do 80 miles, but we’re through nearly half of that already.”
“We’re the same. The M25 is only a couple of miles from here. Once we’re past it should be safer. We’ve been looking at a map and there should be a way under on a little back road. Shouldn’t be many people gone that way. Stay close to us. Once we’re clear of the London area we’ll look for somewhere to hide out.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, heading for the car as soon as he finished his sentence. Jose was just glad he was being told to follow rather than take the lead. Every decision he had been forced to take since the crisis had started seemed to have been a no win situation. Always there seemed to be someone dying. Following was easy, so he complied. Jed’s de-facto leadership of the group now seemed to boil down to the fact that he was the one who never shied away from making a call, even when all options were bad. Jose was glad to have his self-assurance to fall back on. He may disagree with Jed’s decisions, but it was a relief to have someone making a call.
It was dark, but they drove slowly with only their sidelights on. It was hard to see where they were going, and he was afraid that what lights they had would be visible from miles away. He wished he had suggested holing up somewhere until morning when he’d had the chance, but it was too late now they were moving. It was follow or strike it alone now. He followed.
When they passed the M25 he didn’t know. He never noticed the road. At some point there must have been a bridge or a tunnel or something. All he knew was that the surroundings became a bit more rural. He was struggling to stay awake, and the car kept drifting across the road as he lost concentration. The car’s battery was looking similarly drained. Both car and driver were going to struggle to make it more than a couple of miles further. He was not sure how to indicate to the car in front how much he needed to stop, but he didn’t have to, as he saw the vehicle swerve abruptly off the road. Jose’s first instinct was that some catastrophe had occurred, similar to the situation in their third car. He advanced cautiously, until it became clear that they had pulled onto a barely visible driveway.
He was surprised to see a place looking so isolated so close to home. It was the furthest he had been from London since he went on a school trip as a kid, but they were still within spitting distance of the capital. This looked like one of the farmhouses he’d seen a few days earlier when he’d been looking for a new life away the crowd he was now so inexorably tied to. No light came from the house, but the car in front had flicked on its full beam lights to illuminate the scene. It felt risky, but nothing moved except a couple of rabbits on the lawn.
Three people emerged from Jed’s car. He stayed behind the wheel. The people crammed in the car with Jose had woken up, but none of them moved. “Someone go and speak to Jed. Find out what the plan is, and tell him our battery is nearly dead,” Jose asked. No one moved. He realized that he should have directed this as an order to a specific person if he wanted someone to follow his instructions. They could all avoid hearing what he said with the way he had worded it. There would not have been this hesitation in Jed’s car. He wanted to keep the car ready to roll, and felt that he had done more than his share of the work since this crisis started. Before he could think of a way to re-word his request Becky said, “Fine, I’ll go.” She handed the dog that had remained on her lap to the girl that was sat next to her and got out of the car. In the meantime the three from Jed’s car reached the front door, and finding it locked, broke in through the glass panelling.
Becky spent a couple of minutes talking to Jed through his window, then came to report back to Jose. “They’re checking to make sure this place is safe. They’ve got the guns to take care of anything inside. We’re staying here tonight,” She said. “Neither car is going to make it much further, so we’ll need to look for something new in the morning. Jed says that petrol won’t be such a problem now as we’ll stay well away from any cities and the noise won’t be a problem.” The end of her speech was punctuated by a gunshot, shortly followed by two more.
“Get in the car.” Jose directed to Becky. “We might need to make a
quick getaway.” She did as asked, and was met by an enthusiastic licking by the dog that had no concept of the seriousness of the situation. They waited in silence, the dog eventually recognizing the mood of the people around him. After a few minutes the three who had been sent in emerged from the front door. A fourth person was with them, but from the cars they couldn’t tell much, except that it was a woman. One of the guy’s waved, a gesture that had clearly been agreed with Jed to indicate that the house was safe, as they saw him get out of his car, leaving the headlights on. Jose and his passenger’s followed his lead.
“Let’s get the stuff out of the boot before we go in. I don’t want to be coming back out later when the car lights are dead.” Jose said. Jed, looking back in their direction apparently approved of the plan, and somehow issued instructions to a couple of the guys who had just cleared the house to go back and do the same.
Within ten minutes they were all inside, crowded in an expensively furnished lounge lit by a couple of clusters of candles. Heavy black out curtains were drawn to hide the light from the outside world. The changed situation had momentarily eased their fatigue. The woman they’d found was probably in her early thirties, but was looking much older. She was shell shocked, but held it together as she described how her husband and daughter had gone into London for a gymnastics class. When they came back her daughter had been bitten by some lunatic and was feeling ill. They had bandaged her up properly, gave her some pain killers and put her bed. They had wanted their Doctor to come out and take a look, but it had been impossible to get hold of anyone at the surgery. At some point in the night her husband had gone to check on their daughter, but was not back in their bed when she woke up in the morning. At first she had hoped that it meant that breakfast was being made and would be delivered to her, but the only sounds seemed to be a crashing about in their daughter’s bedroom. She got up, assuming the girl was recovered and practicing what she had learnt the previous day in the cramped confines of her room. When she quietly opened the door to look in she saw her family wild eyed and blood soaked. They had tried to attack her, but she had managed to lock herself in the cellar. She didn’t have her phone to call for help, but over the radio she had learnt what had happened. The lights had gone out soon after she went down there, and after she had lost all track of the passing time. She looked at her rescuers like they were angels, rather than the bunch of degenerates they were in reality. They were in her house, but she made every effort to adapt her behaviour to fit in with them A terror of being left alone again had gripped her, and they were the only people available to her. For several days her house offered all of them a safe refuge.
Birstall
Hannah wandered through the woods alone until it got light. She had no sense of the direction that she was travelling, and would have been the easiest of targets if attacked. Only luck kept her alive that night. In the darkness all she could see was the image of Phil being torn apart. The coming of daylight didn’t ease the situation. It just highlighted her fatigue as an additional torment. Not knowing what else to do she collapsed in the undergrowth, pulling a couple of fallen branches over herself and curled into a foetal position. She hoped that the oblivion of sleep would be an escape from her torment, but all she achieved was a shallow slumber, plagued by fitful dreams of what had happened, and worse things that could happen.
At midday she gave up trying to sleep and crawled from the little nest she had built around herself. She was stiff from the night’s walking, and the uncomfortable sleeping position. She was not built for physical exertion, and had no way of dealing with the emotional trauma she’d suffered. If there was an easy way of killing herself there and then she would have taken it. Back at the lab there would have been plenty of drugs that would offer an easy and reliable way out. Here the options seemed to be throwing herself out of a tree, with an uncertain success, or finding a group of zombies to feed herself to, which was too horrible to consider. She started walking again, the stiffness in her muscles gradually easing as she moved.
She knew that the sun rose in the East, moved to the South, before setting in the West. Everyone knew that much when it came to navigating. She was walking for an hour before she realized that she was moving very deliberately in an Easterly direction. Setting off at midday the sun had been directly on her right, now it was slightly behind her, but still to the right. She was sure that a compass would have shown she was far from accurate in her reckoning, but it was clear that she had unconsciously fallen into following the plan she’d discussed with Phil. She was moving towards East Anglia, with its relatively low population of farmer types, and the long coast line presumably dotted with boats readily available to anyone desperate to flee the country. Phil had thought this the best chance of their both surviving, and she knew that he would want her to survive without him. Regardless of whether she wanted it, she would stay alive for him.
Her resolution to stay alive was sorely tested as the afternoon went by. After a couple of hours of pushing through ferns and bracken, and other assorted undergrowth she couldn’t identify she came across a path running North, South. It scared her, as a path suggested the possibility of people, alive or dead. For hours she had seen no signs of human existence. She considered crossing it and plunging strait back into the undergrowth, but, looking back at the trail she had left behind her, the path looked a better way of hiding her progress. And at some point soon she knew that she would have to find a source of clean water. The need for food was starting to feel pressing, but she was sure she could last far longer without eating.
After a few minutes the path split and offered a route going in a similar direction to the one she had been taking following the sun. She stopped at the junction for a while trying to assess its safety. The path meandered so she couldn’t see far ahead. The trees rustled in the wind, and squirrels were active in their branches, but otherwise she could hear nothing. She had no idea where she was, only thinking to keep heading East.
She took the path. After a few steps she stopped. It occurred to her that she was walking unarmed down a path with low visibility, in a country she knew was overrun with zombies. Her options were limited, but a decent branch had to be better than nothing. After a few minutes searching she found something to her liking. It was pretty straight, shoulder height, and pointy at one end where it had snapped off the tree. Even if it wasn’t effective as a weapon at least it made a decent walking stick while she travelled. Feeling more appropriately equipped she set off again. Unfortunately the forest couldn’t furnish her with a decent set of hiking boots, or a change of clothes that had not been trashed by the walking she had already done.
It was an hour later when she came to a car park. The ground was rough and full of pot holes. At the best of times it was probably only used by dog walkers. With the current crisis it was completely deserted. She was surprised that no one had used it as an isolated refuge from what was going on in the wider world. What she needed more than anything was some source of water, but the car park offered nothing. There was a bin, so she had a rummage through it. Mostly it was bags of shit, but near the top she did find a half full bottle of coke, long since gone warm and flat. She wished that she was in a position where she could be picky about this sort of thing, but she needed to drink.
The bottle was quickly emptied, and not enough to quench her thirst. Looking around the pot holes in the car park she found most were filled with muddy water. A few had the colourful sheen of motor oil. Choosing the cleaner looking puddles, she tried to fill the bottle, filtering the water through her torn clothing. The resulting liquid was cloudy and brown, but she drank it anyway. It would probably make her sick, but other options weren’t presenting themselves to her. She had a feeling that Phil would have had a better solution, or at least have had the confidence that they’d chosen the best possible option, but alone she was plagued with doubts. She longed for his optimism.
She tried to get the right balance of satisfying basic hydrational necessities, with
minimising the health risk of drinking dirty water. With no experience of roughing it she had to go on instinct, and had no confidence in anything that lacked proper scientific scrutiny. Almost immediately she was looking for symptoms of poisoning.
Trying to put any potential self-inflicted illness to the back of her mind she set off. In her right hand she had a shoulder height stick, in her left a coke bottle filled with slightly muddy water. Her clothes were torn and dirty, and the pain in her feet was making her limp awkwardly. In better times she would be the sort of person that she would have crossed any street to avoid. She was following the single lane road that led to the little car park she had found. She had considered avoiding it as a route to greater populations that could be a danger to her, but had to accept that she needed some kind of civilization to furnish her with food and clean water. If the road turned to proper tarmac she would reconsider, but, as it stood, she thought that any house she found would be isolated enough to avoid the hordes of undead that she needed to fear. Best case an isolated and uninfected farmhouse would offer her sanctuary. It was not likely. Everyone would be focused on looking after their own by now.
It didn’t take long for her to come across a small bungalow settled back away from the road. Despite her previous plans her first instinct was to avoid the place as too much of a risk. She didn’t know who, or what was lurking inside. She forced herself to act against those instincts. It was obvious that she couldn’t get far with just a branch and a coke bottle filled with dirty water, backed with a total lack of knowledge about how to survive in the wilderness. She was probably surrounded by edible stuff, but would soon starve to death without some instruction.
She approached the bungalow, trying to walk naturally so she wouldn’t be mistaken for one of the dead. She knocked rapidly, trying to make clear that it was not the mindless hammering of a zombie, but loud enough that anything dead inside the building would reveal itself to her before she risked entering. No sound replied to her knocking, either living or dead. She decided it was OK to break in.
The Farm Page 19
