by Mark Gordon
Chapter 43
Extract From Sally’s Journal:
“Sliding under the broken roller door into that dark warehouse was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. If I had waited another second I don’t think I could have gone in. Knowing Dylan was right behind me helped, but not much. Sure, I guess the warehouse could have been empty, but in my heart I knew it would be full of the sleeping zombies.
After I felt around in the dark on the concrete floor and found my gun and flashlight, I stood up and tried to look around in the gloom, but all I could see was blackness. Then almost immediately Dylan was standing beside me and we waited together as our eyes adjusted to the dark. We didn’t need our sight, though, to tell us that the warehouse had become a motel for zombies – the smell was horrendous. It was a malodorous cocktail of “human” waste, rotten food, body odour and dried blood. Lucky for me I’d already puked earlier, and there was nothing left in my stomach. I looked at Dylan, who was nothing more than a vague shadow beside me and I could tell that he was waiting for me to make a move – this was my mission, after all.
I tucked my pistol into the waistband of my jeans and used my hand to cover the flashlight, which I turned on. The weak light showed a recessed concrete loading dock with the warehouse floor in front of us at eye level. We could see immediately that there were creatures lying there in hibernation mode. Nothing moved and the only sound we heard was the beating of our own hearts. We couldn’t see the whole warehouse from where we were standing so I knew we’d have to go up onto the upper floor to get the whole picture. I swung the flashlight around the loading dock and saw a metal ladder attached to the wall that led up to the main level. If we climbed it, we’d be on the same level as the zombies. To be honest, if Dylan had turned to me right then and said “Let’s go back”, I would have been out of there like a shot, but he didn’t so I knew I had to go through with my investigation. I motioned for Dylan to follow me and headed over to the ladder.
I kept the flashlight turned on and tucked it into my pocket so that I had two hands to climb with. The metal rungs were cold and it took all of my willpower to keep moving up those few steps to the main floor, but I was soon standing with the warehouse spread out before me. The flashlight in my pocket was throwing only the smallest amount of light but it was enough to see that the floor was covered in “sleeping” zombies. As Dylan reached the top of the ladder and stood beside me, I looked at the mass of figures all around us and thought of Bonnie standing outside in the sunshine waiting for us. I turned and looked back at the small square of daylight shining below the busted roller door and realised that I wanted to be out more than anything - not trapped in this shadowy world of the half-dead. I took the flashlight from my pocket and aimed it into the main part of the warehouse. I don’t know how Dylan felt at that moment, but I was chilled to the bone. As far as the light allowed us to see, zombies lay side-by-side covering every inch of the warehouse floor. Neither of us said a word as the enormity of this new development sunk in. As I played the beam of the flashlight back and forth across this putrid sea of once-human flesh, I noticed that there was not a single movement among them. It was like looking at corpses, and maybe that was appropriate, because I could no longer think of these things as humans. They had moved on to a new stage that we couldn’t understand yet. When Dylan reached over and tugged my shirt I let out a little squeal of surprise and almost dropped the flashlight. He motioned silently with a movement of his head that we should leave and that’s exactly what we did. Quickly.
When we wriggled back out from under the roller door, Bonnie’s relief was palpable and she hugged us like we were long lost friends, even though we’d only been in there for a few minutes. The sun and fresh air felt like very good drugs and despite the horror we’d just witnessed I felt pretty happy with myself that my hunch was correct. Dylan told me that I’d done well. He said he would never have thought to work out where the zombies would be resting and that it must be because I had a more analytical brain. I just said I was smarter than him and left it at that. When we described what we’d seen to Bonnie she didn’t sound surprised at all. “I don’t think that’s their final destination, though,” she said calmly. “I think they’re on the move.”
When Dylan asked her to explain what she meant, Bonnie said that she thought they might be gathering together in larger groups for strength through numbers. She said that the ones in city would find it easy to form collectives and hide from the daylight in large buildings, but the zombies that weren’t in the cities would need to join with other smaller groups to find the same kind of strength. She had a theory that the creatures from Mount Edward had some kind of animal instinct to go to a particular place and become part of a larger collective. Somewhere they could settle and get organised. When I asked, “Organised for what?” she just shrugged her shoulders. She said they were just resting before continuing their journey once the sun began to set.
Dylan didn’t sound completely convinced, but he said it didn’t matter anyway. He said, "Whether they've reached their final destination or not they're not going any further." When I asked why, he stated matter-of-factly that we were going to kill them where they lay. I thought he was joking at first, but the determined look on his face convinced me otherwise.
I didn’t understand his logic. Any attempt to massacre these creatures, no matter how pleasing it might be, would only put us in danger. We’d estimated that there were around a thousand creatures in that warehouse so there was no way we could shoot them all and if we only succeeded in annoying them by killing a few, the rest would overrun us easily, and I didn’t feel like becoming a light snack for a zombie.
Dylan had no intention of shooting them, however. He said all we had to do was block the exit and set fire to the warehouse and, with their escape route blocked, they would die a painful death - an idea he seemed to get some satisfaction from. I saw a side of Dylan right then that scared me a little. I guess I’m falling in love with him but occasionally I see something in him that seems hidden and secretive. I’m not suggesting he has a dark side but his intense hatred of these creatures bothers me a little.
“Can’t we just leave them and keep going to Millfield?” I asked.
“No,” he said quietly. “These things have to be destroyed. This is a great opportunity. They’re totally at our mercy. We can’t just drive off and leave them here. Whether we like it not, we’re in a war with these things. They might have us outnumbered but we’re smarter than them. If you want to live in a world that belongs to humans, you have to make a stand now. I’m going to kill them anyway, but I’d rather we stood together.” Or something like that.
Dylan waited for our answer with an expression on his face that bordered on the manic, but Bonnie and I knew he was right. His motivation may have been more fanatical than ours, but there was no mistaking his logic that these things were a very real threat to humanity. The idea that the world could ever belong to these zombies, and relegate thousands of years of human culture to oblivion made my skin crawl.
“Come on Sally,” he said. “Let’s burn those fuckers.”
Bonnie nodded at me and said, “I think we have to try.”
I guess my silence was seen as approval because Dylan smiled and said, “Okay then, here’s the plan."
