by Mark Morris
'We have to get out,' she said.
Rhys tried his door, but it was buckled and jammed up hard against the vehicle they had collided with. 'I'll have to get out your side,' he said.
Gwen threw her door open and scrambled out, clutching her gun and gritting her teeth against the pain in her hip. She looked around, and was horrified to see that the front doors of houses were now opening up and down the street, and that local residents were venturing out to see what the commotion was. Even as she watched, Gwen saw two zombies go blundering up a garden path towards an old lady who was silhouetted in her doorway. Wearing a pink nightgown, the lady held a cat in her arms, and seemed to be rooted to the spot in terror.
'Back inside, all of you!' Gwen yelled. 'And lock your doors! This is an emergency situation!'
As if to emphasise the fact, the zombies reached the old lady and grabbed her. The cat fell yowling from her arms and streaked away as one of the zombies, a fat man in a blood and grime-stained traffic warden's uniform, tore her throat out. People began to scream. Some fled inside and slammed their doors. Just as many, however, ran away from their houses, as if intending to rush to the old lady's aid.
Gwen fired her gun into the air. The sound was shockingly loud in the suburban street.
'Go back inside!' she shouted again. 'Secure your doors and windows, and stay there until you're told it's safe to come out!'
Behind her, Rhys had scrambled across the front seats of the car and was now sliding forward out of the passenger door, hands reaching down to the ground to support his weight.
'Er. . . Gwen,' he said.
She turned and saw a zombie appear around the back of the car, a tall, thin woman with an untidy beehive of black hair, wearing what appeared to be a silk ball gown. Part of the woman's bottom lip had been torn away, which made her look as though she was baring her teeth like a dog. Another three steps and she would have been close enough to Rhys to grab him.
Without hesitation, Gwen raised her gun and fired. The woman was thrown backwards as a hole, leaking thick, blackish blood, appeared in the centre of her chest. As Gwen pulled Rhys out of the car and helped him to his feet, the woman pushed herself awkwardly upright once more. Gwen shot her a second time. This time the bullet hit her in the shoulder and spun her around. Once again, however, like a boxer that keeps getting hit but won't stay down, she clambered to her feet.
'You have to shoot them in the head,' Rhys said.
Gwen blinked at him. 'What?'
'That's what they always do in the movies. To kill them you have to shoot them in the head, destroy their brains.'
'This isn't the movies, Rhys,' Gwen snapped.
'Just try it,' he ordered.
She made an exasperated sound, but as the woman lurched towards them again, she raised her gun, aiming higher this time, and pulled the trigger.
The top half of the woman's head blew away, taking a good chunk of her beehive hairdo with it. With a look almost of surprise, she crumpled to the ground, a dead weight. Her body twitched for a moment and then was still.
'See,' Rhys said smugly.
'Don't gloat, Rhys,' Gwen replied. 'It's not attractive.'
She ran towards the police car, gun held out before her. Zombies converged from all sides, but Gwen twisted and turned, shooting them in the head. Rhys ran along behind her, crouching low, wishing he had a gun too. He had never fired one in his life, and wasn't even sure whether he would be able to bring himself to point one at a person – even a dead person – and pull the trigger, but he wished he had one all the same.
A crowd of maybe three dozen zombies were still milling around the wrecked vehicle, but as Gwen and Rhys approached they started to peel away, to turn round, alerted by whatever weird senses they possessed to the proximity of live meat. Calmly and methodically, Gwen began to take them out one by one. Her reactions were fast, her movements fluid, but even so the sheer number of the creatures, slow though they were, was forcing her and Rhys to retreat.
'We've got to find a way through,' Gwen muttered between shots.
Rhys's ears were ringing from the gunfire, but he heard her words and knew how desperate she was to help the policemen. Enough of the zombies had peeled away from the vehicle now, however, for him to be able to see inside it. It was abundantly clear to him that both officers were way beyond help. There was very little left of either of them.
'It's too late,' he said softly. Gwen appeared not to hear him. She was still firing, her teeth clenched, dark eyes full of fury. Rhys put his hand on her shoulder and raised his voice. 'It's too late, love. They're both dead.'
She glanced at him, anguish on her face.
'And if we don't get away from here, we'll be joining them,' he added.
Gwen nodded, though not before shooting a blonde-haired zombie in a nurse's uniform, who was holding something red and oozing that was leaving a trail on the road behind her. 'I know,' she muttered.
Rhys grabbed her free hand. 'Then let's go.'
They ran back along the street, Gwen still shooting, Rhys dodging clumsily flailing arms and clutching hands. When they came parallel with the car, he stopped abruptly, almost yanking Gwen's arm off.
'Hang on a sec,' he said.
'What are you doing, Rhys?' Gwen demanded in exasperation. 'Come on.'
'I need a weapon too,' he said. 'Give me ten seconds.' He ran round to the back of the car and popped the boot open. Rummaging inside, he drew out what at first Gwen thought was a sword, but then realised was a golf club.
'See?' he said, hefting the club in his hand. 'Not a complete waste of money, after all.'
Gwen rolled her eyes. Rhys had bought the clubs on eBay, with the intention of taking up golf. After a couple of rounds at their local course, however, he had decided he liked neither the game nor the people who played it, and the clubs had been gathering dust in the boot of the car ever since.
He grinned at her, reached up and pushed down the boot – which revealed a bespectacled, middle-aged man with a rotting, greenish face. The man had shuffled up the pavement on Rhys's blindside and was now less than a metre away from him.
'Rhys!' Gwen screamed, but he didn't need the warning. Moving with remarkable agility for a man forty pounds above his optimum weight, he spun round and buried the business end of the club in the zombie's forehead.
The zombie's eyes rolled up and it collapsed, the head of the club coming free with a gristly tearing sound as it fell. Rhys stared at the creature in a kind of wonder, and then looked at the head of the club, which was covered with a mess of blood and grey-green gloop.
'Can we go now?' Gwen asked impatiently.
'Right behind you, sweetheart,' said Rhys.
Sophie and Kirsty were sitting in the back of a cab on Bute Street, en route to Oceana on Greyfriars Road. Both girls were feeling mellow, tapping their feet and moving their bodies to the seventies funk which filled the car. The traffic lights were on red and the engine was idling. The cab driver was called Winston, and he'd already told them all about his fortieth birthday a month ago, which he had celebrated by visiting his extended family in Jamaica. Now Winston was taking the opportunity to have a quick roll-up, blowing blue-grey smoke out of his open window. Drizzle sheened the streets and blurred the light from the overhead lamps. The pubs had shut and there were very few people around.
'You girls ain't too cold with the window open?' Winston said between puffs on his straw-thin cigarette.
'No, we're fine,' said Sophie, though in truth she was a bit cold; she had goose bumps on her bare arms.
'I'm never cold,' Kirsty said, and touched her forearm with the tip of an index finger, making a tsss sound. 'I'm always hot.'
Winston chuckled. 'I can believe it. So how come you girls are out partyin' so late at night? Ain't you got work in the mornin'?'
Kirsty leaned forward, resting her arm on the back of his seat. 'No, we're—' she began.
And at that moment a chalk-white hand with black fingernails reached in
through the driver's side window and ripped Winston's face off.
It happened in an instant. The hand seemed simply to dig its fingers into the soft flesh beneath Winston's jaw and peel off his skin like a balaclava. Winston fell backwards without a sound, sprawling across the front seats, his roll-up still held daintily between the forefinger and second finger of his right hand. Blood fountained from his severed jugular vein, an arterial spray which drenched Kirsty in an instant. She screamed and threw up her hands. All Sophie could do was gape in utter disbelief.
Then the door next to Kirsty was wrenched open, and half a dozen hands shot into the car, grabbed hold of the screaming girl and dragged her out. Sophie couldn't believe what was happening, couldn't believe that less than ten seconds ago she, Kirsty and Winston had been chatting and listening to music. She sat there, frozen in terror, as she heard Kirsty's screams rise in pitch and agony, until they became almost too unbearable to listen to. 'No!' Kirsty was screaming. 'No, please. . .' There was a final gurgling scream and then silence.
Shaking from head to foot, her sparkly top speckled with Winston's blood, Sophie reached for the door handle. At first she wasn't sure she even had the strength to turn it. Then the door clicked open and she all but fell into the road. She got up, sobbing, her legs shaky and weak, her stomach juddering, as if she was frozen to the core. She looked over the roof of the car and saw a group of. . . things, tearing at something that was covered in blood. Something that no longer looked human. Something that Sophie refused to believe had been her best friend less than a minute before.
Head spinning, her breathing coming in sobbing, shuddering gulps, she tottered away on her high heels. After a few steps she paused to kick them off, and then, with the chill wetness of the ground soaking into her stockinged feet, she ran.
***
'Left here, Jack,' Ianto said.
Jack swung the SUV into the sharp turn without even slowing. The tyres made a screeching hiss on the wet tarmac.
'Whoa there, Mr Testosterone,' Ianto said drily. 'There's no need to impress me with your crazy stunt driving.'
'Never walk when you can run, Ianto,' Jack said heartily.
'Never die when you can live,' Ianto muttered, and then added, 'Oh, I was forgetting – you don't.'
They were 'zombie-hunting', as Jack kept insisting on calling it, the monitoring equipment inside the SUV acting as a kind of 'zombie' satnav. Ianto was using the readings to give Jack directions; only problem was, the 'zombies' – whether by accident or through some kind of flocking instinct – tended to congregate in large groups, and that was something they were trying to avoid. They were in Trowbridge, on the trail of a quartet of the creatures, which appeared to have been stationary for the last five minutes or so. Trowbridge was an area of tight suburban streets and public housing, though it was presently undergoing something of a facelift. The 'zombies' – or at least their Rift traces – had been detected on a road with pre-war housing on one side and a building site (which would soon become desirable new dwellings) on the other.
'First right,' Ianto said, and raised his eyebrows when the wheels on the passenger side of the SUV briefly left the road as Jack took the turn. A dozen metres ahead, parked in the middle of the road, was a blue Passat with its lights on. Jack drove towards it at speed, as if he expected it to simply get out of his way.
'Brake,' Ianto said mildly.
Jack hit the brakes, and the SUV came to a halt mere centimetres from the Passat's rear bumper. Ianto was about to deliver a caustic comment when he saw what Jack had already seen. A man was lying in the gutter beside the car, whilst four figures – little more than dark, bobbing shapes – clawed and scrabbled and thumped at the vehicle, trying to gain access. Ianto supposed there was someone inside that the attackers were trying to get to, but from here he couldn't tell. Jack was already throwing his door open, drawing his Webley, Ianto only a couple of seconds behind him.
'Is this a private party or can anyone join in?' Jack shouted. He was grinning, but his gun arm was raised and ramrod-straight.
'Oh, my,' Ianto breathed as the group of figures clustered around the car turned to face them. It was the first time he had seen a 'zombie', but he had to admit their appearance was all-too familiar. Each of them looked as though they had stepped straight off the set of a low-budget horror movie. Ragged, stained clothes; discoloured skin; blank expressions – it was all there. The creatures ticked all the boxes, even in terms of their various stages of decomposition. One was almost skeletal, one ghostly-white, another greenish and bloated. Plus there was a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who looked as though she could have died yesterday. The girl, her chin and T-shirt caked in blood, her dead eyes sheened with an almost silvery glaze, hissed and crouched. The others moaned and shuffled.
'We'll take her,' Jack said to Ianto.
'Because she's the. . . prettiest?' Ianto ventured.
Jack shot him a look. 'Come on, Ianto, even I'm not that shallow. I was thinking more that she wouldn't smell as bad as her buddies.'
Ianto cocked an eyebrow, as if he didn't believe a word of it. 'What about the others?'
'We've got live people in peril here,' Jack said, nodding at the car, inside which they could now see a woman's terrified face peering at them. 'We take them out.'
'Just kill them, you mean?'
'Why not? They're dead already.'
Seemingly oblivious to the weapons that Jack and Ianto were pointing at them, the creatures had now halved the distance between the car and the two men. Without further preamble, Jack raised his Webley and shot the skeletal zombie through the head. Most of its skull blew away like old tree bark and it dropped unceremoniously to the ground.
Gritting his teeth, Ianto shot a balding man with a ginger moustache and splotches of black mould on his greenish skin. The bullet hit the man in the chest, but he simply went down on one knee with a wheeze of escaping air, then stood up again.
'You need to finish them with a head shot,' Jack said, circling round to get a better aim at the third zombie, a chubby guy in what must once have been a nice suit.
'How do you know that?' Ianto asked.
'Believe me, when you've been around as long as I have, you get through a hell of a lot of movies.'
Ianto shook his head, but raised his gun and shot the balding man between the eyes. There was a spurt of thin blood and the man fell over backwards, his skull hitting the pavement with a sound like a dropped coconut.
'This doesn't feel right,' Ianto said. 'These were people once.'
'And now they're just animated cadavers,' said Jack, dropping the guy in the suit with a single shot. 'Think of them as glove puppets.'
'Thanks,' said Ianto. 'That makes me feel a lot better.'
'Hey,' Jack said, circling around to the other side of the car, head snapping from left to right. 'Where'd the girl go?'
Ianto saw a suggestion of movement in the building site across the road, a shadow flitting between the dumper trucks and excavators.
'There,' he said, pointing.
'I see her,' said Jack. He was already running, coat flying behind him. 'I'll get the girl, you look after the people here. Back in five.'
He was gone before Ianto could argue.
'Hang on,' panted Rhys.
He had fallen half a dozen metres behind Gwen, who stopped to let him catch up. His face was red and his forehead was beaded with either sweat or drizzle. His hair stood up in wet spikes.
'You all right, love?' Gwen asked.
He thumped to a halt beside her, putting out a hand to lean against the wall. Gasping, he said, 'You know me, sweetheart. I'm built for endurance, not speed.'
She smiled and rubbed his shoulder supportively. 'We'll have a breather. I reckon we're safe for now.'
They had run, and then jogged, from Bradford Street to Corporation Road, and across Clarence Bridge. Gwen had been hoping they'd be able to make it all the way along James Street to Roald Dahl Plass, where the Hub was located, bu
t on the opposite side of the bridge they had stumbled across a group of about ten zombies shuffling towards them. Knackered though he was, Rhys had been willing to batter his way through with his trusty golf club, but Gwen had decided there was nothing to be gained in taking unnecessary risks. So they had taken a detour along Clarence Embankment and through the tight cluster of residential streets which branched off from it. They were now in a quiet alley linking Harrowby Lane to Harrowby Street, high walls on either side of them.
Rhys leaned against one of the walls with a groan and mopped his brow. 'When I said I wanted some action this evening, this isn't quite what I meant.'
Gwen snorted a brief laugh. 'I wonder what's causing this,' she mused.
'In the movies it's always chemicals or radiation or something,' said Rhys.
She pulled a face. 'That's just daft.'
'This whole situation is daft, if you ask me. I mean, where are all these zombies coming from? Up out of the ground? Hospitals? Morgues?'
Gwen looked thoughtful, then pulled out her phone. 'I'll call Jack, see if he's found out anything.'
She fast-dialled him. He answered on the first ring. 'Hey, Jack, what's going on?'
'I'm zombie-hunting,' he said. His voice was hushed, but he sounded perversely as if he was enjoying himself.
'Where are you?'
'Somewhere in Trowbridge.'
'So you're not at the Hub?'
'What would be the point of zombie-hunting in the Hub?'
Gwen shook her head at the playful but unmistakable disdain in his voice. 'Yeah, sorry. Ignore me. My thoughts are all over the place.'
'Where are you?' Jack asked.
Quickly, Gwen filled him in on what had been happening to her and Rhys, and their present location.
'But listen, Jack,' she said, 'these things are everywhere. This is bigger than we can handle.' She hesitated a moment, then said, 'I'm thinking we need outside help on this. What about putting a call through to UNIT?'
