by Haywood, RR
‘Go on, Roy!’ Henry urged, motioning with his hand to speed up. I saw Roy drop down a gear and felt the thrust as Carmen clamped a hand on my shoulder to stop me sliding off my chair.
Charlie was already ahead of us all. Having spurred Jess on the second we heard the shots. ‘Horde ahead!’ her voice crackled into the radio. ‘Round that last corner, Tappy! Drive straight into them. I’m going for the front.’
My word it was very tense. We rounded the last corner with Tappy holding a central line and the van close in behind while the SUV went out wider. Then a second later the SUV was braking hard and tucking in to avoid the infected in the road ahead. Roy slammed the brakes on too. Giving the SUV room to get between us and the Saxon just as Tappy ploughed into the back of the horde. Popping bodies apart and sending limbs and gore spraying out to the sides.
‘Jesus,’ Roy said with a flinch as a bunch of wet innards splatted into the windscreen. Henry didn’t blink. He just stared ahead and cursed softly when Roy used the windscreen wipers to smear the blood over the glass.
But we could hear the gunshots coming fast and frantic. Loud deep shotguns and fast sharp rifles and pistols, and I realised even I had become conversant enough to discern the different sounds.
‘GOT THEM!’ Charlie said. ‘Through the trees. Small track. Industrial estate. I can see the survivors... they’re cops or soldiers by the looks of it. THEY’RE GETTING OVERWHELMED!’
‘I’ve got the track,’ Tappy said, veering off into the treeline into the backs of the infected. The SUV close behind and the van doing the same as we gripped on in the back while Henry told Roy to speed the hell up.
‘URGENT ASSISTANCE!’ Charlie yelled to a backdrop of firing as our hearts pounded.
‘I’M IN!’ Tappy shouted, braking hard to slew the end of the Saxon around, coming to a stop with the rest in the back debussing a split-second later. Pouring out with axes up as we saw Charlie in amongst the horde. Swinging her axe down left and right.
Howie was out a second later. Running hard with Dave, Clarence, Frank and Bash. Joan and Carmen went out the sliding door with Roy grabbing his bow and arrows and vaulting to get on the van roof, pausing only to grip Joan’s wrist and pull her up behind.
I couldn’t see a damn thing so I yanked the charge cable out from the drone and had it flying out of the sliding door a few seconds later as the monitor blinked with the live feed, but the view was not good.
The horde was big, and the defenders - men and women of either police or military bearing firing whatever collection of weapons they had. Old shotguns. Rifles and handguns - had a score of survivors behind them pinned against a wall to one of the industrial units, and there was no place else to go.
They were hemmed in and doing what they could while that relentless horde kept coming. Impervious to pain and ignorant of that heat, whereas I could see the exhaustion on those survivors faces. They must have been running and fighting all night and all day. Burning the town as they fell back to try and kill the infected behind them, but against such numbers they never stood a chance.
Roy and Joan did what they could as the survivors clocked the arrows coming in and gained a burst of hope.
But the horde rallied and surged in. Taking a woman down. Then a man. The defenders compressed again. Shooting their own mates as they screamed in agony from the bites and cuts.
Back they went. Compressing tighter as they fired while Joan and Roy gave what cover they could. Tappy couldn’t use the Saxon for fear of driving the horde harder into the defenders. Nor could our team lay down sustained fire as the rounds would whip through and hit the defenders.
Instead, Howie, Dave and Clarence carved a path through the ranks. Slicing them down to try and reach the front while Charlie hacked at the compression going against Blowers and the others.
Good god it was frantic, and I willed Howie to get there. I willed it with every ounce of my being, but another defender went down. Then another until only four were left. Four people protecting a dozen. That’s all they had, and they knew it was over. I could see it in their faces as the horde howled and gave that final push just as Howie broke out and turned to slam back into the front line. Dave beside him. Then Clarence. Then Blowers and Cookey and Nick. Danny and Mo. Mads and Booker. Tappy and Paula and Marcy. Carmen and Bashir too. All of them absorbing the weight and fighting out with axes, blades and machetes.
The dog in amongst them. Tearing infected off their feet. Henry at the back, firing single shot into heads with Frank. Joan and Roy on the van, then Charlie broke through with Jess rearing up on her back legs and that huge beast dominated that tiny stretch of ground between the infected and the survivors. She whinnied loud and long while Charlie screamed her war cry because the infected just lost. They just picked a fight with the wrong people and out they went. The whole team fighting charging with Jess thundering back into the ranks. Decimating them to create gaps for people like Dave and Mo and Clarence to exploit. Giving them room to work.
A few moments and it was done.
Another sea of bodies. Another scene of death, but at least we’d saved a few, and what’s more, it had given us another valuable boost of energy.
‘Hey! look at me,’ Howie called to the survivors all weeping with the four armed people now slumped back in silent shock that it was finally over. ‘I said look at me!’ Howie shouted, striding towards them. His face pouring with blood and sweat. His arms and hands dripping with it. ‘Did you come through this estate?’
‘What?’ a woman asked. Dressed in worn and torn camouflage soldier clothes with the bearing of a squaddie. Her face gaunt. Her eyes nearly glazed over.
‘The estate!’ Howie said. His tone harsh and demanding.
‘Howie, ease up,’ Paula said.
‘We don’t have time to ease up,’ Howie snapped, turning on the survivors. ‘Did you come through this industrial estate. Yes or no?’
‘We did,’ one of armed men croaked.
‘Okay. Fan out,’ Howie called to his team. ‘We need to check for survivors. Paula, get some water into these people.’
‘Stop!’ Henry shouted as Blowers and his team started to move out while I brought the drone back into the van. ‘Howie, what are you doing?’
‘Survivors, Henry!’
‘What about them?!’ Henry snapped, striding over the bodies towards Howie. ‘They’re right there. We can see them,’ he added, pointing at the people behind Howie.
‘In there!’ Howie said, pointing into the estate. ‘There might be more infected and more people hiding.’
‘So what!?’
‘We don’t leave people, Henry!’ Howie shouted back as the row erupted from nowhere. The heat. The running. The adrenalin. The pressure and the whole of it giving them fuel to go at one another again as everyone else braced. ‘I said fan out!’ Howie added.
‘And I said stop,’ Henry shouted over him.
‘Henry. I am not fucking doing this with you again. We do not leave people! End of.’
‘Then more people will die you idiot!’ Henry roared at him. ‘If we go back to look we will let that CP get further ahead. We have to go after it.’
My word. I was not expecting that, and I looked out from my van door to see Henry’s face etched with passion because the game had finally hooked him.
‘They can look,’ Henry said, pronouncing every word with grim deliberate care while pointing at the survivors huddled behind Howie. ‘While we track and negate the CP before it takes another school. Just bloody listen for once in your life you stubborn idiot. I am not working against you here.’
‘Howie,’ Carmen then said as everyone looked at her. ‘Henry’s right. We need to push on right now.’
‘Speak to your XO,’ Henry said, looking at Paula.
‘I’m not tactical. That’s Reggie’s bag,’ Paula said as they all turned to me while I thought this whole gruelling bastard of a day had been a walk in the park compared to what was to come.
But that was the ga
me, and that was the hunt, and so I glanced up to that cheap painted sky and looked out to that sea of bodies and nodded at Howie.
‘We need to push on,’ I said, and for all his faults, for all of his stubborn pride and his rage, Howie trusted me and so he took a breath and nodded at Henry.
‘Fine. Load up. We’re moving out. And Henry? That town we just went through. That’s what the world looks like if we lose.’
38
Diary of Charlotte
Mr Howie then told Henry that Southwater was how the world looked if we lost. I think it was flippant comment made in the heat of the moment, but it was also very profound, and it made us all stop and think because what we’d seen so far was that the towns and villages were mostly unscathed.
For instance. When thirsty we could simply get into the nearest dwelling and take water from the tap. Or find tinned food in the cupboards and we could use those buildings for shelter, or to find fuel to make a fire. The roads were still full of vehicles, from which parts could be taken and used.
But in Southwater we’d seen a different future of a broken and charred landscape where there was nothing left to use.
Granted, it appeared that the survivors had burnt the town out as they fell back, and they’d done a remarkable job. I wish we could have stopped and spoken with them. Or given them time to recover and taken the remaining soldiers into our team. But we did not have the time, and likewise, it didn’t matter who or how Southwater got destroyed. Only that it was.
The other very important factor was that the infection was still evolving. What was to stop it using such tactics to eradicate humans?
As profound as it was, we still had work to do and so we rushed to scrub the filth off as best as we could. Our clothes were soaked and coated in gore, but we couldn’t do anything about them. We had no spares.
We couldn’t even find a hose for Jess and Meredith and had to use large bottles of water to cool and scrub them down before we got the horse back into her air-conditioned trailer.
A few minutes later, and once Paula and Blowers had given the survivors some ammunition and supplies and told them to head for the fort, we once more became hot bodies in hot tins cans.
‘Yay,’ Tappy said weakly from the front with sweat pouring from her nose. ‘The Saxon on the blacktop speeding through the backdrop.’
We all felt the same, but as exhausted and as hot as we’d become, we were all still very committed because Henry was right. We needed to find that CP and kill it because the horde it controlled was decimating that area.
One positive was that the elders had finally opted to travel in the van with Reginald, which meant more space in the Saxon, which in turn meant I could return to my seat and avoid any jokey expectations of sitting on Cookey’s lap.
I did catch him shooting glances at me, but I found myself avoiding his gaze. It was becoming obvious he did not find me attractive or see me as a potential partner and that I had massively misjudged his signals. That was fine. Well, no. It wasn’t fine, but of course I had to respect his choice and so I withdrew into myself a little to recover my energy, and in a way, although I still longed for the day to be over, I was also glad it had become so frantic because at least it left no room to dwell.
Carmen
I was back in the SUV. But only because Henry wanted to jump in the van with Reginald, which was what Howie, Dave, Clarence, Paula and Marcy also did, which meant there was no space left.
I guess I could have crammed into the back and nobody would have said anything, but to keep life easier I jumped back into the SUV with Frank, Bash and Joan.
‘Don’t even think about trying to massage me,’ Frank said as I got in the front.
‘Ew,’ I said, thinking it would be like massaging your own dad. But then I had no clue who my real dad was. Hashtagbrokenhomeusualstorywhogivesafuck.
‘What a day,’ I said with a sigh as I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Joan leaning forward with a look on her face. She smiled grimly. I offered one back and covered her hand with mine. We didn’t need to speak. She’d killed survivors in one of the other towns, and I’d just done the same.
Bashir said something then frowned before tutting and grabbing his radio as we heard Mo’s voice coming back.
‘Carmen? It’s Mo Mo innit. Bash said that was fucked up, you get me. What you had to do in that school. He said he did it before his family left for the fort. He was out getting supplies and a lady got bit then some of the blood went in her kid’s mouth. Bash took ‘em both out with his knife cos he couldn’t risk the gunshot being heard. He said it hurts his heart, but he said it had to be done and it’s why you were put there in that school cos otherwise those people that got bit would kill more.’
I listened intently. We all did. Even Frank stayed silent, and I stared at Bash as Mo relayed the message and looked into his soft brown eyes and the creases in the corners. I looked at his moustache and his wispy beard and the gaps between his teeth when he smiled. And, as much as it horrifies me to admit it, I finally looked past his ethnicity of an Afghani to a young soldier feeling a need to share his experience.
I reached out to touch his arm.
‘Soldier,’ I said.
‘Soulja,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Welcome,’ he said in heavy broken English. Which is when Frank farted. I tutted and smacked his arm as Bash burst out laughing while Joan leaned away and wound her window down.
‘You’re disgusting,’ I said as the vehicles set off.
‘Guess what?’ Frank asked, leaning over to do another one.
‘Frank! Jesus. I wish I’d gone in the van now.’
Paula
It was odd because the second we set off I kind of wished I’d stayed in the Saxon.
I think maybe the whole H & H thing had jaded me a lot. It had been a brutal day already and I was fed up trying to play referee between their egos.
Don’t get me wrong. Everything Henry said back in that department store was out of order. But Marcy was right, because to Henry we probably did look like crappy amateurs. But Howie was also firing up and inflaming the tension.
They just had that thing between them like two wolves prowling around each other to see who was going to be top dog, and in truth, if I had Clarence’s strength, I would have picked them both up and banged their bloody heads together. But by then even Clarence had seemed to withdraw from the H & H thing and was instead focussing on the job at hand. That showed just how bloody professional Clarence really is, albeit a very red-faced sweaty one. But then we all were, and the guys didn’t have breasts and if you’ve never had underboob sweat then you’ve no right to moan about being hot.
‘Right. Let’s consolidate our intel,’ Henry said as we set off. ‘What do we know?’
I braced and shot a look to Marcy who rolled her eyes with both of us expecting Howie to get sparked up over Henry’s choice of words.
‘Okay. We’ve got a big horde moving north east,’ Howie then said without any trace of sarcasm as Marcy and I shared another surprised look.
‘That’s good, Howie. Can we determine numbers from what you’ve seen so far?’
‘Er. Okay, I mean, Southwater was a big town, and it looks like they took the whole thing in one sweep through. Does that make sense? Like they hit it as one unit but left smaller units or whatever to deal with the survivors they found. Like the leisure centre and the schools. I don’t know. What do we think? Clarence?’
‘I’d agree,’ Clarence said twisting his bulk to look through the hatch as I clocked even Reginald looked a bit surprised.
‘Excellent. Well done. That’s good,’ Henry said, jabbing a hand towards Howie as he spoke. ‘In summary then. Big horde capable of breaking into smaller teams to deal with survivors. Sound about right?’
‘Yeah. I reckon,’ Howie said as Clarence nodded and shifted a bit more to get into the conference.
‘Numbers then?’ Henry asked.
‘Fuck. Er,
I’d say a lot,’ Howie said. ‘But it’s hard to be accurate.’
‘I absolutely understand,’ Henry said.
‘But at a push. I’d say the biggest one yet.’
‘Definitely,’ Clarence said.
‘More than Hinchley Point?’ Henry asked. ‘What was that? twenty k?’
‘Yeah, that was about twenty,’ Howie said. ‘But this is more. It feels like more. But I can’t quantify that.’
‘Trust your gut, Howie. You’ve been doing this non-stop for a month. Your brain is absorbing data you can’t quite express so instead it’s translating it into instinct.’
‘Yeah. Shit. That makes sense,’ Howie said.
‘But that means they’re going somewhere,’ Clarence said. ‘If it’s one big horde moving along with smaller teams breaking off then it suggests they’re heading towards a destination.’
‘Outstanding observation,’ Henry said, at which point Marcy and I were pretty much open mouthed at how they were all cooperating. ‘Okay. More than twenty k, but how many we can’t tell. We have a direction of north-east, but no known final destination. Right chaps. Makes sense to me that we get the drone up.’
‘Definitely,’ Howie said as Clarence nodded, and we all looked at Reginald.
‘It’s charging,’ he said.
‘It’s been bloody charging all day,’ Howie said.
‘No. It’s been flying over your head all day,’ Reginald said.
‘Reggie. We need aerial reconnaissance,’ Henry said.
‘Indeed. And if we had another drone then I would give it to you. But we don’t. We have that one and it needs charging. Howie!’ Reginald said sharply as Howie started poking at it.
‘Reginald, we need to see where the CP is,’ Henry said.
‘Okay chaps. Fine. Go ahead. Put the drone up. Roy, pull over please we’re launching the drone, and then when it crashes and you’re screaming out that you need help mid-battle and I can’t send Charlie or get Tappy to you because Howie’s gone too deep, or direct Carmen to survivors because Henry is still on the edge, or ask Roy and Joan to get fire into a specific point then don’t bloody moan. Yes, we need to know where the CP is, but right now, that drone is our single biggest asset when we fight, and I will not risk losing it. We will find the CP. Roy! I was being sarcastic. Don’t pull over.’
