by Luke Duffy
"I love you, too," he screamed back, trying desperately to be heard over the noise of the aircraft.
It was only after he had said it that he realised how ridiculous the words sounded when they were screamed into the face of a person.
Helen smiled and shook her head. Steve felt her body convulsing gently at his side as she laughed at his attempt at airborne romance.
'Superman never had this problem with Lois,' he mused to himself, comparing the romantic flights of the fictitious superhero and his girlfriend to his own.
He looked down at the ground and saw the southern wall of the Safari Park pass by beneath them. The contrast between the interior and exterior of the park was breath-taking. Just moments before, he had seen lush green fields sweeping below. They seemed endless and completely untouched by the ravages of the dead.
As they flew over the stone barrier that held the hordes at bay, the blissful landscape gave way to the grotesque and horrifying image of thousands of decaying bodies clustering around the walls of the park.
A sea of black miniature shapes carpeted the ground like a bubbling oil slick, and stretched out far beyond the perimeter of the park. It was impossible to see anything on the ground below their feet, as every available space was crammed with the bodies of the dead.
As the helicopter passed over them, their ghostly faces turned upwards in unison as though being prompted to do so or controlled by an unseen force. That same driving force was the instinct that told them that the thundering machine passing over their heads contained living people, with warm blood flowing through their veins.
The dark seething mass surged with excitement as they stared at the aircraft above them. In all directions, the mottled sea below swelled and rippled towards the area directly below the helicopter, as the dead trampled and fought one another in their desire to get closer to the thing that they coveted more than anything; living flesh.
Lee shuddered and instinctively adjusted his position on his seat, moving himself back a little, away from the open door. He looked down and checked his harness, giving it a tug, confirming that he was still securely fastened in and unlikely to fall out. He decided that he no longer needed to be so bold. He could still see the uncountable figures below and that was enough.
He checked his belt again and gripped his rifle close to his body.
He looked across at Steve and realised he had been watching the whole time. Lee smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
"You never know," he bellowed across to his friend against the scream and thump of the aircraft.
He tried his best to appear casual, but he could see that Steve also held the same concerns and remained seated away from the door.
Steve nodded and smiled, unwilling to waste his effort in having a conversation that would be mostly drowned out by the noise of the engine.
A few hundred metres further out, the people in the helicopter could see that the crowds had thinned substantially. It was now possible to see the ground between the thousands of shambling figures heading in the direction of the park.
Although they were more spread out, their numbers were still immeasurable. It appeared that every member of the un-dead from the surrounding towns and villages, even cities, were converging on the Safari Park. They staggered and stubbornly made their way across the fields, along the roads and through the streets.
It was an exodus of decaying flesh.
Marcus felt a tinge of panic rising within him as he saw the scale of their predicament. Everywhere he looked, the ground was teeming with them as they slowly swayed and lumbered forward. He knew that it did not take much to attract the dead. Even the dead attracted the dead, and all it took was for one of them to become animated, and the others around them would take notice, following them blindly.
A few kilometres later, Marcus looked at his map and craned his neck to see over the pilot's seat and through the cockpit window. A large built-up area was approaching. A housing estate with sprawling streets and rooftops stretched off in the distance to the east and rural countryside, and farmland to the west, a wide dual lane carriageway separating the two contrasting landscapes.
"Okay, Kelly," he said into the mouthpiece as he leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. "There's a major junction up ahead. Settle us there if you will, about fifty feet off the ground."
Kelly glanced back over her shoulder, unsure of why Marcus wanted her to hover in that area. She decided not to question it.
"Roger that," she replied.
At the given area, Kelly pulled back on the cyclic stick and reduced the lift on the collective lever, dropping the revolutions on the throttle. The angle of the rotors shifted slightly, allowing the aircraft to slow down and gently settle into a hover as they began to descend towards the ground.
Joey busied himself by checking the ground below them, calling out their altitude and making Kelly aware of any obstacles or hazards such as buildings and raised power cables.
Kelly concentrated on keeping the pitch of the aircraft level with the horizon, checking the instruments in front of her and using her own judgement as she looked out from the cockpit at the land around her. She continuously adjusted the cyclic and throttle lever to avoid stalling or descending too rapidly. At thirty metres, she pushed on the anti-torque pedals at her feet, manoeuvred the helicopter so that it was directly above the junction, and turned to face the housing estate to the east and into the wind.
"Twenty-five metres," Joey called through the intercom as he studied the ground below and kept Kelly informed of their altitude. "Pylons, one hundred metres to port, ground clearance good."
Kelly could see the streets of the housing estate beginning to fill with thousands of bodies as they became aware of the sound of the helicopter. They poured out from the buildings and houses, and soon they were staggering towards the junction, en-masse.
She began to feel nervous and remembered the mechanical issues they had suffered in the past with the old aircraft. Although she was confident in her ability to remain airborne and regain control of the machine from high altitude, she doubted that she would be able to recover them in time from just twenty metres above ground if they were to encounter a problem.
"Marcus," she called through her mouthpiece, "we don’t want to be hovering like this for too long. This bucket is old and unreliable, at best."
"Understood," Marcus replied, "we won't be here long."
Joey looked back over his shoulder and saw Marcus climbing to his feet. He had no idea what the man was doing or what his intentions were, and he looked to Kelly with a raised eyebrow and motioned for her to check for herself.
Marcus was standing in the centre of the passenger compartment and lifting Stephanie to her feet. The woman's eyes were wide with terror as she was dragged over to the open door and forced to see the hordes of bodies approaching from the built-up area.
Steve looked across at Lee questioningly. He had no idea what it was that his brother was doing, and looked on as Marcus gripped Stephanie by the back of the neck and turned her face to his.
"You see that, Stephanie?" he screamed over the noise of the helicopter, her face just centimetres from his.
Steve, Helen, and Lee, could barely hear what he was saying, but Kelly could hear him clearly through the intercom.
"You tried to let them in, Stephanie. You tried to kill us all."
Stephanie trembled with terror and babbled away incoherently. She looked from Marcus, and then to Steve and Helen, pleadingly. Her eyes resembled a trapped animal's as she was completely at their mercy.
"You tried to kill us, Stephanie. My wife and kids are in that place and you, tried to fucking kill them all."
Marcus was red in the face and his words were accompanied with strings of spittle as his anger smashed its way through his composure. The veins and tendons in his neck protruded from his skin and his eyes flashed with wildness that Steve had never seen before in his brother.
"We're surrounded, Stephanie. There
are a million of those cunts outside our walls and you fucking led them to us."
Stephanie had become limp in Marcus' grasp under the onslaught of his tirade, and he had to use all of his strength to keep her from collapsing to the floor. He grasped her by the hair, pulling her up, and began screaming in her face.
Steve looked on, seeing the rage in his brother's eyes and noting that his knuckles had turned white as he tightly clung to Stephanie's hair.
Kelly and Joey watched in concern. They saw a man close to madness and capable of anything as he unleashed his rage against his captive. Kelly shuddered and attempted to attract Marcus' attention through the intercom.
He turned and glared at her, making her shrink back in her seat.
The others looked on as Marcus continued his tirade.
"What did you think was going to happen, Stephanie?" he bellowed. "Did you think you would actually get away with what you did?"
He gripped her harder by her scalp and dragged her closer to the door so that her head and shoulders protruded outside the aircraft.
Below them, the first of the bodies had arrived. They hissed and snarled up at the helicopter, reaching and clutching into the air with their bony rotting hands. More of them were arriving by the second, and soon the ground was covered by the creatures, all clambering for the living flesh that they could see hovering above them.
Stephanie was screaming. Steve could hear her even over the engine. She struggled desperately, but in vain, against Marcus as he continued to bombard her with a torrent of verbal abuse.
Lee watched, a wry smile of amusement subtly creasing his face as he saw the hated Stephanie squirm the way he had so longed to see.
"I should fucking feed you to them," Marcus screamed as he wrenched Stephanie back into the helicopter, planting her just a short step away from the door.
She remained there, on her knees, her face turned to her lap as her shoulders convulsed with sobs.
Marcus sat back in his seat, glaring at the pathetic figure kneeling before him. Her misery was now complete. She had languished in the cell, suffering from depravation and praying for death, but now, after believing that her end was imminent, she desperately clung to life with terror filling her every sense.
"Okay, Kelly," Marcus nodded, his expression settling back to his normal 'poker face', "take us up."
Kelly complied and increased the throttle. The aircraft soared into the sky in a vertical lift as the ground dropped away below them.
Lee looked across at Marcus, glancing at Stephanie as he did so. He raised an eyebrow in wonder. Marcus just nodded and continued to watch dishevelled figure in front of him.
Helen also eyed Marcus, concerned that he was beginning to lose his mind and composure. She nudged Steve at her side without saying anything, but he knew what her question was.
Steve looked back at her with a frown and nodded as his face changed to a slight smile, telling her that everything was okay and Marcus was fine.
The helicopter continued to rise.
Steve saw a sudden flurry of movement to his right and looked up to see his brother springing from his seat. With lightning speed, Marcus pivoted and placed his boot into the area between Stephanie's shoulder blades, and with a heave, launched her forward and out through the door on the starboard side of the aircraft.
"I told you I would let you go," Marcus shouted after her.
Stephanie flew into the air, and with a barely audible scream, tumbled towards the ground.
Marcus did not bother to watch her land, but he knew her fate. The thousands of reaching arms that awaited her would cushion her fall, and then her true terror would begin as she was torn apart and eaten alive by the rapacious creatures below.
He turned around and saw five sets of eyes staring back at him.
The only face that did not have complete horror etched into it, was the one belonging to Lee. Instead, he looked on with an expression of compliance and understanding that Marcus' actions had been well founded and necessary.
"Okay, Kelly," Marcus said through the intercom in a casual tone and as though the incident had never occurred.
"Let's go get Stu and the others. Head north-east on a bearing of nine six zero mils for seven kilometres until we hit the main carriageway, then follow it east to the car dealership that Stu was headed for."
Marcus sat back down and turned to look at Steve and Helen. Both of them stared back at him with shock and concern.
"We couldn’t let her live," Marcus hollered as he leaned closer to them. "You knew her well enough. She would've done anything to carry out her vengeance against us."
Helen nodded and after a moment of reflection, Steve did too.
Marcus was right. Though his actions were savage and brutal, Stephanie needed to die and they could not risk leaving her alive and capable of returning to the park.
Marcus sat back and buckled his safety harness, catching a glimpse of Kelly's bulging and nervous eyes as she watched him through her mirror at the front of the cockpit.
Marcus smiled at her as the helicopter gained speed and headed northeast.
Steve sat thinking about what Marcus had said and done. He then remembered the punishment that they had dealt out to Tony all those months ago.
It was a brutal world and only the brutal could survive in it.
15
Something was happening in the road ahead of him. It was quite a way off, but there was definitely activity. At that distance, with his deteriorating eyesight, it was impossible to tell what was going on, but he could see movement and hear well enough.
There was a mass of moving shapes in the centre of the long and straight stretch of road. The bundle of silhouettes and colours remained low to the ground and in continual jerking and swaying motion. Shrieks and howls accompanied the shapes as they bobbed and weaved on the surface of the tarmac.
Blood-curding screams of agony from a creature that was trapped and dying echoed around the low-lying hills of the countryside, being carried for great distances in the otherwise still and peaceful air.
The noises struck terror into him and he could physically feel the fear as it crept over his skin. It was like an army of crawling insects, penetrating deep into his core, making him want to turn around and leave the area as quickly as possible before he was subjected to the same pain and horror.
He had never heard a sound like it; each howl seemed to be filled with more excruciating pain, and lasted longer than the previous gut-wrenching shriek.
Andy stopped, afraid to move any further along the road and approach the unknown. Fear tugged at every fibre in his emaciated body, warning him of imminent danger and tearing at his festering soul to turn him around.
He looked to his left and then his right, searching the area with his cold and frightening unblinking eyes that masked his true, pleasant and caring, nature. High hedgerows sprung up along the road on either side of him. Stripped of their leaves by winter and filled with pointed thorns and sharp branches that would tear at his flesh and strip his delicate body to the bone; they created an impenetrable barrier that presented no possibility of him being able to negotiate.
He turned around and faced in the direction he had come. The memories of the destroyed city and the thousands of broken and burning bodies that now littered its streets tore at his mind. He could not go back. All that awaited him there was death and destruction with no hope of finding the beautiful things that he liked so much.
There were no trees left standing and no birds to flutter and sing in the skies above the ruined metropolis. They had been replaced by smoke and ash, clogging the air and turning the place into a twisted and grotesque reflection of the inhabitants that had roamed its streets before it was destroyed.
He had no choice but to continue. He could wait at the roadside for the howls to stop and the shapes to disperse, but he could be there for a long time, and there was always the chance of him becoming the next victim to disrupt the peaceful landscape with cries of anguish
and torture.
It had been nearly a week since Andy had left the ruined city. He had headed deep into the countryside, hoping to find a place safe and far away from the others like him. His hopes of finding the people who had spared his life, and set him free, were dashed when he came across their convoy of trucks, burning in the road. They were surrounded by the shadowy monsters that tore and feasted on the bodies that were scattered in a wide area around their doomed vehicles.
Since then, he had meandered through the country lanes, avoiding any contact with the lifeless shapes roaming the land. He stopped from time to time when a building or an object that stirred a memory from deep within him, a murky and sometimes confusing reflection of his previous existence, roused his curiosity.
For two whole days, he had staggered along the road, completely transfixed with the football that he kicked before him, staggering after it with an excitement and pleasure that made him want to continue punting the bouncing sphere for all eternity.
In the garden of an abandoned house, he had discovered the ball amongst other discarded items. At first, he had been baffled by the object and unsure of what to do with it but, despite his bewilderment, something inside him had urged him to remain holding it. It was not until he dropped the ball that a cascade of emotions suddenly flooded his decaying mind. Thousands of images bombarded him all at once, almost knocking him flat with the sudden force and vividness of them.
The football bounced once, then again and again, all the time moving away from him with each impact with the ground.
Andy groaned with recognition as he watched it move and saw the distant memories of vibrant figures, running around with the grace of birds on lush green grass, chasing the football ahead of them.
The ball came to a stop in a clump of long grass. He moved towards it, his eyes fixed on the small black and white leather globe. As he staggered forward, he instinctively threw his leg out in front of him, the toe of his right shoe making contact with the object and launching it away from him.
