When There's No More room In Hell: A Zombie Novel

by Luke Duffy

  “Ah, Steve, I was just telling them about how it all went. I came back to make sure that everything was okay and to let them know about the new arrival.”

  Lee, without a word of warning, launched himself from over Steve’s shoulder and planted a punch straight into the centre of her plump face. It landed with a wet thud and the bone cracking under the impact echoed around the room as she was knocked backward and onto the floor. Bright red blood spurted from her smashed nose and Lee moved in and stepped over her, cocking his arm for a follow up.

  Steve grabbed him and pulled him back. “Don't Lee, that’s enough.”

  He stepped in front of him and crouched by the sobbing Stephanie who sat, spread legged on the floor with a stream of blood dripping over her fingers as she was unable to stop the flow.

  “Tilt your head back; it'll clot and stop bleeding that way.” He spoke calmly and he leaned in closer as she angled her face to the ceiling. “Now then, listen to me Stephanie, I warned you not to cross me.

  “You put the entire group at risk with your little stunt down at the gate. You heard me tell Jake on the radio not to open it, but you went ahead and did it. Not only that, you ran away, leaving Jennifer and Jake to deal with the infected that got in.” He shook his head and looked down at the ground with a sigh.

  Stephanie followed him with wide and scared eyes as she kept her head back, with her hand still pressed to her nose. The lack of emotion in his voice and his calm approach made her feel uneasy, more so than if he had been ranting and screaming at her.

  “Now luckily, they were able to deal with them without being hurt. Imagine what would happen now if they had been hurt? For a start I wouldn't have stopped Lee. But now I'm having a dilemma, what do I do about you? You clearly don’t want to play along and be part of the team, and anyone that isn’t a part of the team, I consider as a part of the opposition. So, that means I now have to look at you as a serious threat, Stephanie.” His voice was still calm and monotone. There was no anger or excitement in his words, they were just cold and composed, and it terrified Stephanie.

  Her eyes widened still and she began to cower away, pushing her legs out in front of her and forcing herself backwards. Steve hobbled on his heels, still crouching, after her.

  He leaned in closer, his eyes now glowering with rage, and hissed, “You're a piece of shit. Do you know that?” He checked over his shoulder to make sure he couldn't be heard. “I'm going to feed you to the dead, Stephanie.” Her eyes bulged and she whimpered at his words.

  He left it at that, leaving her unsure and wondering what would come next as he stood and walked across the room to the rest of the group and the new arrival.

  “I'm Steve and I hear your name is Tony?” He held out his hand and Tony accepted it.

  “Yeah, my name’s Tony. Sorry about the hassle down at the gate.” He nodded to the fat form, still seated on the floor with her head held back.

  Steve shrugged, “It wasn't your fault. She made her own choice.”

  Tony was led away by Gary to undergo the usual check over for bites and any injuries suspected of being caused by the infected. He went without question and as Steve stood and watched him leave, the rest of the group dispersed, except Lee. He approached him and spoke into his ear.

  “I don’t like him, Steve,” he whispered.

  Steve screwed up his face and turned to him. “Eh? You've only just met the bloke, Lee.”

  “There's something about him. And I'm sure he was the same cop that did me for being half a point over the limit five years ago. I got an eighteen month drink driving ban, and it really fucked me up, especially work wise. And you try being a grown man having to go shopping at the supermarket with your Mum every week. The staff at Tesco must've thought I was a right Mummy’s boy.”

  Steve snickered. “Look, we’ll just keep an eye on him for now. He could turn out to be an okay bloke, just give him a chance. It’s that fat bitch there,” he nodded at Stephanie who was now seated at the table and crying into her hands, “that we need to look out for.”

  Lee grunted, “If it were up to me Steve, I’d feed her to them fuckers down there.” He gestured toward the gate with a sideways cock of the head.

  Steve nodded and hummed. “Yeah, that's what I said to her. If it was just me, I would do it mate.”

  A week went by. Tony was integrated into the group pretty easily. Everyone seemed to get along with him and actually liked having him around. He was pleasant and helpful, especially when it came to entertaining the children.

  Only Lee kept his distance, and as suggested, he also kept an eye on him from afar.

  The first day he arrived, he had seemed quite protective over his people-carrier; something that Lee couldn’t understand considering he wasn't likely to use it again. He had climbed in and taken it for a drive around the park to ‘find his bearings’ as he put it, and he refused all offers of people to sit in the car with him and show him around. Instead, he insisted that he always preferred to explore new places alone and without distractions and that way, he could get a feel for the place. Most people just shrugged it off, understanding his point of view, but Lee saw something sinister about it.

  He watched him from the window of the house as he drove away in the direction of the Information Centre and restaurants. There was still something wrong, and it was really starting to annoy Lee what it was.

  An hour later and Tony returned his attitude to other people approaching his car had completely changed. He no longer hovered around anyone who went near it, and he even donated it to the house, adding the keys to the pile as a group vehicle.

  No, Lee really didn't like the guy.

  25

  “What do we do now then?” Ian asked as he bit off another piece of Slim Jim that he pulled from the ration pack.

  They were looking out onto a flat, open, green plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. It finished in a stark line where the clear blue sky took over and stretched high above them. The heat waves shimmered from the ground and the birds in the sky squawked and dived into the long grass of the open steppe.

  Marcus shrugged as he eyed the ground ahead of them. “We crack on, I suppose.”

  They were now in Serbia, north of Belgrade, and stood watching the dust trail of the car as it faded into the distance along the dirt track. Yan and Sini had departed in an old Soviet-made white hatchback they had found at a farm, and now headed for their home town. Marcus and the remainder of the team were forced to say a regrettable farewell to them and watched as they disappeared over the horizon.

  For weeks they had hidden, sneaked, and scavenged their way across the Middle East and into Europe. Turkey had been hard. The army had tried to lock the country down, throwing up checkpoints at every major junction. Marcus and his men were forced into a battle of wits and cunning. Using the maps they had recovered after the border attack, they were able to bypass the main troop concentrations and major checkpoints. They hid during the daytime and made a run for the crossing at Istanbul over the Sea of Marmara in the dark hours, scavenging and raiding as they went.

  As much as possible, they left no trace behind them. They didn't want to attract the attention of the Turkish army down on them by leaving a trail of bodies in their wake for anyone to follow. The infected were everywhere, but it wasn't difficult to avoid them due to their route selection. The dead that they come across tended to be individual stragglers and small groups from villages close by.

  It was decided that all contact with the living should be avoided if possible. They were headed for the coast and with very few options on how to get across, the last thing they needed was someone giving the security forces up ahead advanced warning of their approach.

  They gave wide berths to the large towns and cities and kept themselves to the interior of the country and the less densely populated areas as much as possible. Sticking to mountain tracks and river roads, they crept from one village to the next, stopping each time to scout the ground in front of the
m and moving on once they were confident they could continue undetected, siphoning fuel from broken down or unguarded vehicles as they went.

  At the end of each night they had to find a lie up position that provided them with cover from view while they rested during the day time. They found themselves in caves, woods, barns and dried up riverbeds. The process had been repeated over and over every day until they had reached to within five kilometres of the coast and sat watching the Northern Faith Bridge that spanned the Istanbul Straits.

  Marcus had expected it to be much like the border with Iraq; heavily defended and an unavoidable battle to get across. But it seemed that during their weeks in the wilderness, Turkey also had a hard time of the plague and now the bridge lay open before them.

  Marcus and the rest went firm on the high ground to the East that overlooked the Northern edges of the city on the East side of the straights and where the start of the bridge was situated. The main highway that linked onto the road that fed across the stretch of water came up from the South and joined onto the bridge road directly ahead of them in a tangle of ramps, slipways and flyovers that formed a spaghetti junction.

  From where they stood, they could see the faint plumes of blue and black smoke from the obvious fighting that had taken place there within the past few days. Hundreds of cars and other vehicles sat bumper to bumper, crammed into the area of the junction. The road that led up to the bridge was much the same. Stu, using binoculars, pointed out destroyed tanks and other armoured vehicles as well as aircraft amongst the wreckage.

  “What do you think happened?” Stu asked as he pointed to more of the carnage.

  Sini took the binoculars from Stu’s hand and peered through them, scanning the area for himself. “Looks to me like they didn't get along and ended up turning on each other. There must've been a battle for the bridge. Maybe one lot wanted to keep everyone in Turkey and the other lot, like us, wanted to make a run for Europe and the open? Either way, it looks like our job is gonna be a little easier than we thought.”

  “Don't be too sure.” Marcus pointed further along the road toward the bridge and then shifted his finger to the destroyed and smouldering buildings at the outer edges of the suburbs to the North, close to the highway. At both points, thousands of black figures could be seen, staggering around the buildings and out into the road, making their way from one vehicle to the next as they headed for the bridge.

  “Looks like there must've been thousands killed, and now they're all up and at `em.” Stu blew a low whistle under his breath as he took in the number of reanimated dead before them. More and more were piling into the road, headed for the bridge.

  Marcus made a face. “Why they all headed for the bridge?”

  Ian shrugged, “Maybe that's where they were headed before they were killed and it’s a left over memory or instinct, or something?”

  “Shit,” Jim hissed through his teeth as he lowered his own binoculars. “That bridge is gonna be packed tighter than a whore’s cunt in a gang bang if we wait too long, then we’ll never get through.” He was shaking his head as he said it.

  Stu glanced from the corner of his eye at him. “Lovely choice of words there, Jim.”

  “Hey, that's about as best I can describe it. I dropped outta school when I was in eighth grade, what you expect?”

  “Ah right, because when I was thirteen, my vocabulary consisted of words like ‘cunt’ too. I mean, they hadn't taught us anything else like History and Maths at school by then, just the basic profanities at that point. We moved on to insulting hand gestures in the next term.” Stu grinned, taunting him.

  “Fuck you, College boy,” Jim replied and held up the middle finger.

  Before the crowds could build up anymore, Marcus decided on racing for the other side, opting to plough through the mass of bodies that had already accumulated, rather than wait for the bridge to become completely impassable with them. It was early morning and the sun was on the rise, but they couldn't afford to wait and their path to be blocked. They had to act there and then.

  There was no resistance from anyone living, and it was clear that anyone that was capable had fled the area completely, leaving it for the dead. They bobbed and weaved their way through the tangles of smashed and destroyed vehicles and the piles of broken bodies that littered the roads, hammering their way across from the junction and toward the bridge. At first, they had been slowed by the roaring crowd of infected as they all turned and assaulted the convoy. But, once again, they manned the machineguns in the turrets to cut them a path through the infected and crushed them below their heavy armoured wheels as they fell.

  It took them less than five minutes to cross the bridge that spanned nearly a kilometre across the straits, from the moment they hit the junction leading to the bridge, to their wheels hitting European tarmac.

  Once across, they had kept on going, putting as much distance as possible between them and Istanbul. They pushed along the highway, crossing over onto the opposite carriageway, to avoid the piles of stalled and wrecked traffic crammed together at the toll booths for the bridge. The road on that side was completely deserted. It seemed that everyone wanted out from the Middle East, but no one wanted in.

  They continued along the road for another ten kilometres before they hit a junction and turned North, following the lesser roads that led them through the central part of the Istanbul Peninsula and toward the border with Bulgaria.

  They raced across the country, sticking to the back roads and remote areas as they had done in the East. They managed to get to within sixty kilometres of the Bulgarian border, but it was getting dark and the team members were about ready to drop. They had been on the move for almost forty eight hours and the lack of sleep and rest was starting to take its toll.

  They found an abandoned farm complex to the East of the large city of Kirklareli and after clearing out the stray bodies that meandered around the buildings, they hid the vehicles in the barn and bedded down for the night, deciding to push on through the daylight hours.

  Except for when they passed close to cities and large towns, the dead were sparse on the roads and the team encountered mainly long columns of refugees headed West until they closed in on the border. The closer they got, the more they began to see Army units that seemed to be retreating away from the coastal areas. Long stretches of tanks and vehicles carrying men and supplies lined the roads, creeping along in a never ending snake as they made a strategic withdrawal.

  Marcus surmised that they were headed to join forces with other units from other countries, such as Bulgaria and Macedonia, in an attempt to create a new defensive line further inland. It looked as though the Middle East had been written off completely and left to die.

  The soldiers stared at them as they passed by. Some just gazed, the horror of their experiences etched across their faces as they looked through and beyond the men of the team. Others looked quizzically and began speaking excitedly to each other and gesturing toward the SUVs as they zipped by.

  Ian, still riding in the front vehicle as the lead scout, spoke over the radio. “Marcus, we’re getting a lot of eyeball action from these troops.” He sounded nervous.

  Marcus replied, “Roger that Ian, but we’re committed now and if we turn back, we’ll lose ground and also give them reason to take more of an interest in who we are.”

  Stu broke in on the conversation over the speakers. “We should bluff it like we did in Tikrit that time with the Americans. Whack on the sirens and flashers and maybe they'll think we’re carrying someone important from the government, or a General who needs to get to the front.”

  Marcus nodded to himself as he remembered the ruse. “Roger that, Stu. Ian like he said, let’s go noisy and we’ll brass it out.”

  “Roger,” Ian replied. Marcus, travelling in the second vehicle, began to hear the loud wailing horn of the sirens up ahead of them. He flicked the switch in front of him and looked across at Sini and winked, as their audio warning systems began to blare their o
wn rising and falling high pitched tone.

  They stormed along at breakneck speed, horns blasting and the red and blue strobe lights attached to their bumpers flashing alternately, looking to all intents and purposes, very much like a group of people with important and immediate business further up ahead. They just had to hope and pray that nobody would actually have the audacity to wave them down; they would have no choice then but to start the shooting and Marcus knew it would be a one-sided battle with the amount of men, armour and air support in the area. He counted on their guts and the confusion of the moment to carry them through. After all who else, other than an important official of some sort, would be driving around with sirens and lights in an armed escort with men waving guns?

  Once they got to the border, to their amazement, they were waved through and sent on their way without having to even slow down. They kept their speed up, turned due North at the first possible chance to break away from the military units that were massing in the area, and headed inland toward the central hilly peaks and mountains that ran across the width of the country, and then followed it East toward Serbia.

  It took them three days to cross Bulgaria. Each night, after pushing hard on the road, avoiding groups of infected or just smashing through them, scrounging and bartering for fuel, they bedded down wherever they could and tuned in the Codan to speak with Steve and to see what other information they could pick up from other transmissions.

  Mostly, the situation worldwide seemed grave. Between the team, they could speak a number of various languages and it was when Sini and Yan recognised their native tongue over the radio signals, they learned that the situation in Serbia and most of the Balkans had already pretty much crumbled into chaos. Most of the military forces were destroyed, deserted or had broken away to become independent rogue armies. The more that Yan and Sini interpreted to the rest of the men, the more they realised that crossing that part of the continent wasn't going to be easy and they were more than likely headed directly into trouble.