by Remy Porter
‘Looking for us, no doubt,’ I said.
‘It was that fuck Jefferson driving as well. Never trusted that man. Deserves all he has coming,’ Lester snorted.
‘We need to take our time with this thing, don’t we? Or we all die.’
At first light we moved. I picked the most obscure footpaths that led from the village into the woods. It took an hour, but eventually we fought our way through the trees and brambles to get close to the farm check-point without being seen. Lester raised an antique pair of binoculars to his eyes. ‘Amazing what one can find,’ he said.
It looked like they had beefed up security. I counted six armed men at the entrance to the farm track. In the distance there were figures walking the fields and around the tower. ‘Armed too. And can’t see Summer anywhere,’ Lester confirmed. The farmhouse was guarded from every side.
‘How are we going to do this thing, Lester?’
‘Carefully, and not today,’ he answered. ‘I got some ideas, don’t you worry about that. We’ll get her back alright.’
Picking our way to the signal box, we made the last leg over the railway footbridge a mad dash. To be spotted now would be a disaster. I felt sure that if Jack or Griffin got their hands on me then what happened to Toby would be nothing. Sinking back into the gloom of the living quarters I paced nervously up and down in the cramped room, smashed plates crunching under my feet. Lester lit a candle.
‘Too many guns Lester, they’ll cut us down before we even step foot in that farmyard. God knows what they’re doing to Summer down there,’ I said, hacking a blunt tin opener into a beans can I’d found in the cupboard.
‘You forget old Lester is germinating a plan up here,’ Lester said tapping a finger on his temple.
We ate, and still Lester wasn’t for sharing his plan. Over the months, I’d got used to his idiosyncratic ways. I trusted the guy now, whereas back in the day all I’d seen him as was a nuisance, or an easy arrest for drunk and disorderly. Times had changed, and he had too. He’d turned into the brains of this operation.
‘We need a canoe,’ Lester said at last. ‘And some damn fine luck.’
When the sun went down, we were back outside. ‘I know a place from when I was scavenging. There’s a nice old Canadian canoe waiting for us. Beach house, not far from the water,’ Lester said.
‘What the hell are you thinking exactly?’ I said. He had to tell me twice before I believed him.
Fifteen minutes of creeping through the shadows and we got the house. An odd-looking place, that looked like it sat on stilts under a triangular roof. Trust Lester to take us to the strangest house in the village. It must have attracted him like a magnet. The garage door lifted up a terrible shriek of scratching metal. I looked around terrified that somebody had heard us. There was nothing there but the outline of swaying trees and the rush of water from the incoming tide.
‘Christ this is heavy, Lester,’ I said, as we heaved the Canadian canoe out of the garage. We put it down on the driveway and went back for the paddles.
‘Leave the life jackets, they’re all too bright. Last thing we want to do is stick out like a sore thumb on the water. Hope you can swim okay, Lester.’
‘Like a fish.’
The canoe was an old wooden thing, and must have weighed sixty kilos easy. As we dragged it into the rising water I thought of Mark and Phillip, and all the dead heads sunk in the sand. The freezing water was up to my knees before the thing floated enough for us to get in. The chill on the air didn’t help, and I wished I’d worn more clothes. The moon seemed horribly bright, making me feel very exposed out on the water. The tide dragged us towards the silhouetted railway bridge in the distance. Lester sat in the back digging his paddle in, trying to steer.
‘Paddling back will be a bitch,’ I said, trying to make a joke as the bridge loomed up ahead. Suddenly it was clear just how fast we were travelling, and how big the buttresses on the bridge appeared.
‘Steer for the middle,’ I shouted. I could see we were heading straight for one of the stone supports. I could hear the tearing power of the water against the stone, and see the channels turning into torrents. If we capsized, the undertows would drag us down. Our bodies would be broken on the rocks below.
I dug my oar in hard with Lester’s and tried to turn us. The current had us and the canoe slammed against a buttress sending wood chip splinters exploding into my face. We rocked and spun out of control, as the hard spray from the cauldron of water hit repeatedly. My paddle tore out of my grasp, and I readied myself to be flung to the depths. Then all at once, we were out of the vortex and on other side of the bridge, colliding with something in the water with a dull thud. I looked down and saw a reaching body in the water.
‘FUCKING PADDLE LESTER!’
The push of the tide eased the further we went down the bay, and we took turns with the one paddle we had left. We travelled the two miles we needed in little over an hour. It was perhaps the most scared I had ever been. I squinted in the moonlight and tried to navigate around the bodies we kept seeing. The walking dead caught out by the tide. They bobbed and floated. Sometimes we felt a scrape on the bottom of the canoe. I wanted to think it was just deadwood or a sand bank, but in my mind, I knew it was more bodies. They didn’t all float, some were sinkers, reaching out for us through the black water. We were far beyond the safety of the fence line now; we were deep in their territory.
‘We head for that peninsula,’ Lester said pointing.
From pulling ashore, it was a straight scared-to-death run off the beach. I rushed climbing a wooden stile and fell flat on my face onto the sand at the other side. My palms burned where I grazed them. I looked up to see the unmistakeable gait of a body above me, then it fell as well.
‘Come on, we have to move,’ Lester whispered, the short lead pipe in his hand clumped with brain.
We crossed the main road in a hurry, and found the track. The ground was uneven and covered with potholes and puddles. The smell of rotting flesh hung in the air. We were deep in the dead zone.
‘This is it,’ Lester said, panting and coughing up phlegm. I pulled the torch out of the pocket and switched it on. Lester looked in bad shape; we were both exhausted. The sign he was leaning on read, ‘BEWARE: HEAVY QUARRY TRAFFIC.’
We climbed the padlocked gate and started up the dirt road into the quarry. Ahead the outlines of great excavators lay dormant and quiet. I felt for a second like we’d stumbled into the land of the giants. Lester seemed to know where he was going; I followed a pace behind.
‘You going to be able to run if you have to?’ I asked him.
‘Fight or flight my friend.’
Lester went to a portacabin that sat next to the main entrance to the quarry warehouse. ‘Wait,’ I said, too full of myself. I twisted the corroded handle open and stepped up. The smell brought back memories of the shot foot and mouth cattle, left too many days in the baking sun waiting to be incinerated. The bulbous body lurched out of the shadows and caught my clothing, his mass sending me careering backward into a filing cabinet. Something sharp dug in and cut open my shin. I wanted it not to be teeth.
‘Lester! Get in here!’
I felt myself pushed slowly off-balance and down. His weight was smothering, and it was taking all my strength to stop that awful mouth from clamping down and ending me. A dull clunk-crack and the fat man’s head was a broken water melon. Lester’s lead pipe was buried in deep, sticking out of the fat man’s cranium like busted drainpipe. He didn’t drop though, and turned on Lester. The teeth had a finger off, then two. Lester screamed, and I staggered to my feet. The pipe was in my hands, and I drove it deeper into the brain, pulling and stirring at it as if it was thick porridge. The body dropped at last, Lester’s howls filling the silence.
‘We need to stop the blood,’ I said tearing a strip off my own trousers.
‘Jesus Johnny, two fingers gone in the fat man’s mouth. It hurts like a mother fucker.’
I wrapped the improvised band
age tight around the exposed bones and torn skin. Lester’s blood covered me before I even thought about infection. I wondered how quick the change would come for him, and how I was ever going to rescue Summer alone?
‘I found the keys,’ I told Lester. ‘They were in fat man’s desk.’
Outside I expected more company, but the quarry was still as desolate as before. We crunched our way further into the quarry. To our left the rock face was in view; two hundred foot of limestone cliff.
‘Have you been here before, Lester?’
‘Used to work here believe it or not. Fired me for drinking on the job,’ he said through gritted teeth.
Finally, there was a steel container half the size of the portacabin, surrounded by wire fencing. Lester had been right when he’d told me we’d never break in, The place looked like a miniature Fort Knox. Heavy bolts on the outer gate gleaming new steel. Above our heads was a set of CCTV cameras on a high pole. We moved through the gate and I wrenched open the heavy doors in the container.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked, and flicked the torch onto Lester’s face. I expected to see signs the virus was taking hold. There were none. Lester was unchanged.
‘Damn it Lester, you are immune!’
‘Beats winning the lottery any day,’ he smiled. ‘Not my fault you never believed me. Now help me with this box here. Careful like.’
We lifted it outside, deceptively heavy for its size. Lester peeled off the tape and opened the lid. Thirty grey sticks like candles, each capable of blowing the limbs from your body.
‘We’re in business now, ain’t we,’ Lester grinned.
CHAPTER 31
Jack Nation looked out of his bedroom window. There wasn’t much to see other than spot lights set up at the far end of the farm track. He could just make out the figures sitting around at the check-point. The night shift. Smokers and chin scratchers to a man. There would be words in the morning. Further right still was the faint silhouette of the fence. His master work, his legacy to the world. Sometimes after too many malts, he wondered what his Daddy would have made of it all? Would he think he was a good man, helping all these people?
A step back and he was looking at his craggy reflection, the bulbous, veined nose that wouldn’t stop growing out. They had dragged what was left of Toby Hanson all the way home. Nothing left in the end but a bloody streak of meat. He thought of what they’d done to Summer as well ...
‘Jack, are you coming back to bed?’ Alison’s nagging voice.
‘Right you are.’
Out of the corner of his eye something moved, drawing him back to the window. A light crossing the window, it was bright like a shooting star. The men’s shouts carried all the way from the check-point. Something was coming towards them, something on fire! In the orange flames, he could just make out the shape of a car as it hit the horse wagon and burst into a mushroom of fire, an explosion that lifted the men and scattered them about like dandelion seeds on the wind. Jack pulled away, grabbed his clothes in rough handfuls.
‘Stay put, you hear?’ he said.
‘Dad, what we do?’ Griffin shouted, bursting into the room. He face was ash-white.
‘Get the men, all you can find. Guns, lots of them.’
A second explosion, closer, making the windows shudder in their frames. Sound hitting like thunder. Jack ran back to the window and saw dirty flames lighting up a section of his fence. The hush of dead shapes pouring onto his land.
‘They’re coming, Griffin! Get everyone in the yard. Send them out, send them now!’
Jack threw on the rest of his clothes and grabbed his shotgun. He emptied two boxes of shells on to the dresser, spilling half on the floor. Jack’s hands were shaking.
‘What about me?’ he heard Alison say from the bed.
Ignoring her, he went out into the corridor. Half-dressed, half-asleep men and woman were coming out of their rooms, all full of questions. Jack pushed some, threw others towards the stairs. ‘Get out there and fight. Fight or die,’ he told everyone he saw.
The sharp blast and pop of gunfire already reverberated from the farmyard. Jack slipped into one of the vacated bedrooms to watch, unwilling to risk everything yet. Waves of putrid dead were flowing into the yard under a white blaze halogen lights. Two lines of the men, perhaps thirty in number, were cutting loose with their firearms. Jack drilled them for this day; he knew they were ready. The front dead fell, but others filled their place. The Land Rover petrol diesel tank exploded, lighting up the fields beyond. There was an endless queue of dead, all waiting patiently for their turn. There could have been a thousand, there could have been more.
‘Zulu,’ muttered out of Jack’s lips.
‘I seen ’em,’ Griffin said, rushing in.
Jack turned on his son. ‘I see ’em too. Hard to miss, son.’
‘Not them, not the bodies, the live ones who did this. I seen ’em sneaking around the back,’ Griffin pointed at the side of the old barn.
And there they were, clear as day. Officer Johnny and the vagrant, Lester, crowbarring the lock off the barn door. Jack looked from them back to the men at the front of the farmhouse, already scattered and disorganised. Half had fallen and were being devoured, their carcasses lost in the sheer numbers of the bodies. He counted at least five of his men dead and risen up against him. One still swung a gun, caught in the claw of his hand.
‘Get Jefferson and Sack,’ Jack barked. ‘We go out the fire-escape. We finish the fucking copper this time.’
CHAPTER 32
‘We’re in,’ I shouted across to Lester, a hard thing to do in the white noise of the war raging around us. It was like having your head inside a raging waterfall. I swung the barn door open and we ran inside. Both us were still panting from racing the dead to the farm. After we had fired the detonators, we’d been caught by surprise, never expecting the dead to come through so fast. All that pressure pushing on the fence had suddenly released, almost like champagne overflowing the neck of a bottle.
‘Summer!’ I shouted and Lester joined me. I pulled back plastic sheeting horrified at what I might find. I was horrified anyway, and thanked God she wasn’t there.
‘Lester, have some seen this?’ Stall upon stall of twisted sexual fantasy. Undead, naked woman bound down and writhing. Tearing up the flesh around straps binding their limbs, each one of them muzzled not to bite.
‘Sick minds in this playground.’
‘Griffin, no doubt. The boy ain’t right,’ Lester said.
‘Summer!’ I shouted again. My dragon light battery was low, the weak beam barely reaching the dark corners of the barn. The gunshots outside were more sporadic, one side was winning the war. The dead were beginning to grind against the side of the barn. They sensed us, I was sure.
‘We don’t have time, Lester, we need to find her now,’ I said. Behind me I heard the barn door slam shut. I turned, expecting dead faces, but out of the shadows came Jack and Griffin, then Bob Sack and the traitor Jefferson.
‘Quite a party you started,’ Jack said, flashing his own torch. The others aimed shotguns at my chest. I wondered how much it was going to hurt. ‘Throw the weapons down, if you can call them that.’
I tossed my lead pipe to the dirt floor. Lester’s machete followed it.
‘Won’t be needing these anymore,’ Griffin sneered, as he collected them. He stepped forward and pulled us both down. The wide barrels dissuaded me from making any kind of move.
‘What have you done with Summer?’ I asked, my throat dry.
‘It was a romantic gesture, I give you that. Destroying my fence, my farm, my people, for just a woman,’ Jack said. ‘And don’t worry, you’ll be getting the proper reward.’
‘My reward will be cutting your gutless heart out,’ Griffin added, showing his black teeth.
‘I’m sure you can patch a fence up, Jack; might even keep you out of trouble for a few weeks. You know, once upon a time, people that shagged corpses went to the prison with the padded cells. Maybe yo
u could build one of those next,’ I said. Griffin looked down for an instant. Bob and Jefferson appeared curious about the stalls. I had a feeling this was the first time they’d seen what Griffin did in his spare time. ‘Sick new world, isn’t it, gents?’
‘It’s for my brother, Dexter, really; a little company. Maybe I play a little too, it’s a free country,’ Griffin said, red tinges on his cheeks.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘whatever you do with me, just leave Lester out of it. He’s a good, clever man and you will need him around here. He was just helping me because he felt he owed me.’
‘No need to worry, son,’ Lester said, low and careful to me. ‘I made my peace.’
The clattering of dead against the walls of the barn was getting louder. I saw grey, dead hands reaching in through gaps in the wooden planks. ‘We need to make a move,’ Jack said. The bound zombies thrashed at their binds, sensing their brethren were close by. Suddenly Dexter was loose, his rotten ties snapping and trailing behind. The mouth still gagged, Griffin ran forward and tackled him to the floor. I darted left and a shot rang out. I heard Lester cry out and saw him bleeding on the floor, his stomach strafed with shotgun pellets.
‘You’re next, Johnny,’ I heard Jack shout, Griffin swinging his shotgun stock towards my face. Too quick to duck, it hit me and the world went black.
‘Finish him now,’ I heard Griffin screech, the words distorting in my swimming head.
‘No,’ Jack’s voice said. ‘We want to do him slow.’
Bob Sack’s fat hands were dragging me to the door, the cold wind on my face, as it suddenly swung open. Jack and Griffin started firing repeatedly. Heads exploded like over-ripe pumpkins. Splattering gore hit my face like rain. My legs were rubber and I had no strength to break away.
‘We can’t make the farmhouse,’ Jack shouted. ‘We go to the new build and lock in.’
More bodies fell with shots and clubbing blows. The half-finished breeze-block building loomed up as I fought to raise my head and not black out. Bob Sack threw me roughly through the entrance, and a heavy door slammed shut.
