"I'm not going to tell you again. Now bloody drive!"
"The hell with you. Some of us are still human," Richards snarled and stomped on the brake, bringing the vehicle to a stop. Before the sergeant could lean across and grab him, he tore open his door and stepped down onto the road. The chill evening air cut through his cotton jacket and rain glued his shirt to his chest. Out here the sounds of the approaching dead carried further, their footsteps dragging along the ground in unison, the moans seemingly coming from every direction, reflecting off the surface of the Thames below them. The youngster marched quickly over to him, gulping in deep lungfuls.
"Thank Christ," he said quietly, putting a hand on Richards' shoulder as he bent double to recover. "I thought I wasn't going to make it..."
"It's OK. You'll be all right. You'll be safe now." The driver turned at the sound of boots on tarmac, and saw a handful of squaddies take up a position at the head of the truck, sighting their rifles on the throng of ghouls that were growing nearer. There was now perhaps only a hundred or so yards between them.
"Clear a path for us," Perrington instructed his men from the passenger seat, glaring at Richards. "Since we've lost our momentum, we'll have to thin them down a bit so we can plough through."
The guns barked rapidly as each soldier selected his target and fired, the deadheads at the front dropping face down with each impact, brains squirting out of their skulls. Their kin behind them hardly reacted, merely took their place and walked into the wall of bullets without a glimmer of fear or understanding. The bodies stacked up almost instantly.
"Sarge?" a voice called out. "Something weird here..."
"What do you mean?"
"Fuckin' pusbags are muzzled. Every one of 'em."
Richards looked back at the kid, puzzled, his mouth dropping open as the youngster yanked an automatic from his belt, hidden beneath his shirt.
"Game's over for you, old man," Hewitt said with a smile as he put a slug between the driver's eyes.
19.49 pm
Gabe ordered his team to move in immediately, with the intention of overpowering the soldiers while they were still dealing with the gaggle of deadheads. The half-dozen triggers jumped out of the Bedford van they'd been tooling up in and began to move across the bridge, the van coasting slowly alongside them, providing cover. Time was of the essence; it wouldn't take long for the military to deal with the stiffs, and they had the advantage of numbers and superior firepower. If Gabe's squad were to have a chance of pulling off the hijack successfully, it would mean attacking when their opponents were otherwise engaged. He clicked the safety off on his pistol and followed the others.
As he reached the scattered remains of the zombie distraction lying in a tangle on the road, he fleetingly looked at the bridles that were wrapped around their jaws. It was a ruse that he'd adopted on several occasions in the past, and he had found it was an effective means of instilling panic in the enemy. They rarely saw that the mouths had been clamped shut before it was too late. Even so, despite the muzzles, there was always a lack of volunteers to play the 'victim'. Gabe had made sure that Hewitt had drawn the short straw, a result that the kid had responded to furiously, but the older man had felt this was just the brush with danger that could encourage a little responsibility in the youngster.
The rattle of gunfire echoed through the still night air, ear-splittingly loud. The army men had formed a cordon around the truck and were shooting at will; the last of the ghouls were now only a few feet away, but a handful of the military had switched their attention to the bushwhackers. One of Flowers' enforcers - a bear of a man named Duvall - let rip with a full automatic, punching holes in the lorry's windshield and passenger door. Each time the squaddies cowered from the rapid-fire assault, the team advanced, tightening the circle, forcing them to retreat. Gabe scanned the haze of smoke for Hewitt, who should've infiltrated their defence, and spotted him putting his gun to the back of a soldier's head and pulling the trigger at point-blank range. He'd told each of them he wanted the minimum of casualties, with deaths acceptable only as a last resort, but the kid was drilling humans without compunction.
Gabe began to jog over towards him to pull him back before the whole operation became a slaughter. He stopped when he caught sight of what was behind the truck: a military escort vehicle that was unloading armoured-up soldiers but not deploying them, remaining hidden at the rear. Gabe guessed the strategy; they were drawing the hijackers forward, giving a false impression of defeat, before doubling their defence. The robbers needed to even the playing field a touch.
He signalled to Hanner, who had a small grenade-launcher holstered across his back, and pointed over the truck, indicating to drop the explosive behind it. It would scatter the reinforcements and hopefully disorientate them enough for his squad to surge ahead. Hanner nodded, unslung the weapon and sighted the necessary angle. But moments before the grenade powered from the barrel, a bullet slammed into his shoulder, pushing him backwards, his finger squeezing instinctively on the trigger. It threw his aim off, the missile ricocheted against a bridge stanchion and fell short, hitting the truck's bonnet and igniting its engine. The front of the vehicle exploded in a ball of orange flame, pulsing out a wave of heat that knocked Gabe to his knees. Others were flung sideways, some toppling into the icy waters of the Thames below. Seconds later, the petrol tank blew, and the blast was deafening, throwing the lorry upwards a couple of metres as everyone within its radius shielded their faces from the white-hot blaze. Gabe's ears rang as he woozily watched fire lick the starlit sky.
19.52 pm
They heard the noise even in the depths. It vibrated through the water, accompanied by a rapid succession of loud splashes. There was not enough rational thought left in their core cerebella to assimilate what the sound indicated, or its cause; but one instinct that still reverberated within them was that when the silence was broken, it meant life was close by, and where there was life there was flesh. It had been a theory that had been proven right time after time, to the point where they sought out the living through some primitive radar rather than by any other kind of recognition.
They were crossing the riverbed, their hungry search forever unfulfilled. Fluid flowed in and out of their still lungs with the ebb of the tide, their already cold skin untouched by the immense chill. Their surroundings meant nothing to them, just terrain to travel. But once they heard the sounds, they suddenly had direction. As one, they turned and waded through the silt and darkness towards the bank, the crackle above them leading them like a beacon.
19.55 pm
"Oh Christ."
The words snapped Gabe free from his trance. He shook his head, trying to reboot his senses. Everything was as it had been a minute before: the truck was still burning in the middle of the road, and the injured were crawling away from it, clothes and limbs blackened. The odd burst of gunfire still erupted now and then as each side tried to take advantage of the confusion, but Gabe - hunched against the bridge wall - was trying to hear what somebody was shouting about. Duvall was looking out beyond the thoroughfare and pointing. Gabe followed his gaze and attempted, by the light of the flames, to make sense of the black shapes that were emerging from the water. There were hundreds of them, dripping silhouettes that rose from the deep and were shuffling up a causeway towards the bridge. Realisation slapped him seconds later. All he could think was: The dead are coming. We've awoken the dead.
"We gotta get out of here," Duvall yelled. "We can't fight that number. Abandon the operation."
Gabe nodded slowly, and began to call for his team to retreat. The soldiers had spotted the zombies coming their way by now too and had all but stopped firing, watching with horror as the shambling dregs of the river came ever closer.
"Move it," Gabe cried. "Grab what injured you can and go."
They stumbled backwards away from the truck towards their own vehicles. Gabe made a vain effort to count how many of the squad were missing, but couldn't keep track. He looked around fo
r Hewitt, who must've been near the lorry when it went up, but couldn't see him. He began to run, knowing that personal survival was now imperative.
Then the bullet caught him in the leg.
He gasped with shock, and collapsed onto his front, grit stinging his hands and face. It had come from behind, and passed through his calf, shattering the bone. Agony lanced up his knee and thigh as he felt his trouser filling with blood, but even so he tried to crawl, desperate to get away. He kept hoping that one of his comrades would spot him and drag him to safety, but nobody seemed to be around. He tried to scream, but couldn't find the voice.
His leg was numb now, and every movement was torture. He slid, inch after painful inch, refusing to give up. He didn't want to die at the hands of the dead; he couldn't accept such a fate. He felt for his gun, but it had gone. Desperation clawed at his mind to escape, but fatigue and blood loss were swamping his muscles, slowing him to a standstill.
He closed his eyes, an image of Anna framed against the window his last thought before he lost consciousness.
CHAPTER FOUR
The river glittered with the early-morning rays of the sun as the Mondeo pulled onto Westminster Bridge and parked several feet away from the smouldering ruins of the military truck. Two men stepped out of the car and walked up to the sooty, skeletal shell, giving cursory glances to the mass of bodies lying the length of the road. One of them stopped and pulled a semi-automatic from his shoulder holster, turning his gaze back and forth as he kept watch, flipping open a pair of shades from his shirt pocket to protect his eyes from the glare coming off the water. The other sauntered slowly around the burned-out vehicle, peering into the cab and the remains of the truck bed, occasionally nudging a charred piece of chassis with his toe. He stood for long moments staring at the wreck with his hands on his hips as if lost in thought, or studying it as though it were about to reveal some great mystery.
Eventually he strode back to his companion, pausing to kneel next to a Returner corpse and examining its wounds: much of the right side of its head was missing, its jellied contents sprayed across the tarmac. He straightened and crossed to a uniformed body, the torso peppered with bullet holes, and lifted its right arm: the fingers and thumb of that hand had been gnawed off, recently enough for the stumps to be still weeping. The man put his own digits to the soldier's cheek, gauging by his skin temperature how long he'd been dead, and put the time scale at about eleven hours. He guessed the victim had died of his gunshot injuries before a passing maggotshit had sensed enough warmth in the cadaver to munch down on. Once a body went cold, the zombies paid no attention, hence the reason they never tried to eat each other. It had been theorised that if the stiffs caught a human and began to consume him alive, they would feed for about an hour or two before their hot lunch cooled off and they lost interest. By that point, the meal had been so disassembled that resurrection was impossible; in fact, uninterrupted they would probably be down to the bone marrow at that stage. The man wondered briefly why soldier-boy here hadn't got up and walked, but then saw the small neat hole in his temple. That would do it, he concluded.
He stood and gingerly hopped over the corpses to the bridge wall, looking out across the Thames, the light wind ruffling the river, wavelets lapping against the embankment. He tugged a mobile from his jacket pocket and swiftly dialled. The voice at the other end answered with a brusque acknowledgement.
"Well?"
"It's a mess. Truck's a barbecue, nothing to be salvaged from that. Complete write-off. And we're talking sheer carnage here - must be close to forty bodies, both deadheads and living. Well, they were living."
"Any of them ours?"
"Yeah, I recognise a couple. Collins and Stokes are here, looks like they took a few hits to the head each. How many we missing all told?"
"Five, including O'Connell."
"Nah, there's no sign of the others. Could've resurrected, I suppose, and staggered off - either that or done a runner." He leaned out over the parapet, peering down at the river's surface. "Or they went for a dip," he added.
"The rest are... what? Army?"
"Yep, standard government troops. Put up quite a fight by the looks of things." He paused. "There's something else, Harry. The kid was right; there was a second vehicle. There're tyre marks behind the truck as if they sped away in a goddamn hurry. Could've taken some captives, I guess."
There was silence for a moment, then Flowers said: "Put Hewitt on, Patricks."
The man held out his phone to his companion. "He wants to talk to you."
Hewitt shouldered his gun and retrieved the handset. "Harry."
"Son, I want to make sure you've got your story straight." The boss sounded remarkably old and weary to his ears, the most vulnerable he'd ever heard him. Maybe it was a trick of the line's tinny timbre, but it was as if Flowers was reeling from a blow he had taken himself. "You saw O'Connell go down?"
"I saw what I saw. After it all went to shit, things got fucked up. The truck exploded and knocked me to the ground, but it also sent the army assholes running. They had reinforcements in this escort SUV that had been tailgating the target vehicle, and that started reversing the fuck out of there. Once I got my wind back, I attempted to carry on with the objective but then the earth just opened up and spat out every deadfuck from here to creation." Hewitt paced backwards and forwards with the rhythm of his account of the night's events. "I heard O'Connell tell everyone to get the hell out of there, and I headed towards him but he went down, took a hit. Seconds later, he was surrounded by uniforms. The smoke that was coming off the wreck was enough to allow me to sneak past 'em and hook up with what remained of the team."
"But you didn't see them finish O'Connell off?"
"Nope. There was gunfire, but that was the army boys taking care of the stiffs."
"So you think he's still alive? And that they took him with them?"
"If O'Connell had made it out of there in one piece, he would've been in contact with you one way or another, even if he was holed up somewhere, bleeding out. So, yeah, I think the government fucks have got him."
There was no immediate reply to that. All Hewitt could hear was Flowers breathing into the receiver as he mulled over what he had been told. He lifted his sunglasses onto his forehead and rolled his eyes at Patricks, switching the mobile to his other hand. How many times did the old fart need telling? Him and the other survivors had been up all night debriefing Harry and that long streak of piss traitor Ashberry on what happened; they were fucked off that they'd come away without the sample, but they hit the roof at the suggestion that one of their own was now in the custody of the military. It especially didn't look good when the guy that was meant to be leading the hijack was the one that fell into the hands of the enemy. O'Connell was one of the boss's right-hand men, had been with him since before the outbreak. That right now he could be sitting in some army compound singing about Flowers' set-up was giving the old geezer heart palpitations. He would've probably been less upset if they'd returned with O'Connell's eviscerated liver and told him that was all that was left after he got jumped by a gang of deadheads.
"OK," Hewitt's employer said at last with a heavy sigh. "We've got to accept he's a liability, and could compromise everything. If he's decided to change sides, then I want him found and I want him fed to a fucking pusbrain, feet first. If he's their prisoner, well... same rules apply. Can't take the risk on them getting any info out of him." A sense of resolve came back into Flowers' voice, in contrast to how pitiful he'd sounded a moment ago. "I want to you to find him, son. You and Patricks scour the damn city if you have to, but just seek him out and eliminate him before he causes us any more problems. Don't come back unless you got his balls for a brooch, you understand me?"
"Gotcha. Terminate with extreme prejudice."
The phone went dead. Hewitt flipped it shut and handed back to the other man with a smile.
"Well," he said, sliding the shades back into position. "Now things are getting interesting..."
Gabe flickered open his sleep-crusted eyelids, waited for the swirling to settle down, and watched a dull green ceiling coalesce into focus. He traced the cracks that ran along its surface as his fuzzy memory cranked into gear and he tried to remember where he was and what had happened to him. It took several seconds for him to recollect the events leading up to him passing out, and with the realisation came the ache. It started behind his knee and travelled up his leg, a fresh pain slotting into place as each new image of the battle on the bridge blossomed in his mind like a slideshow beamed into his skull. He reached out instinctively to clutch at his injury and shock cut through his agonised haze when he discovered that his arms were tightly strapped to the bed he was lying upon.
He woke up fast. He was dressed in just a T-shirt and jeans, the right leg cut away around the shin and calf to accommodate the bandage woven around it, and he could feel dried blood gluing the hairs of his thigh together. Predictably, he'd been stripped of anything else that he'd had on him. Gabe looked down at his bonds - knotted lengths of white linen - and tested their strength, his muscles straining against them, but they were firmly secured to the bed's frame. Adjusting his position to gain a better view of his surroundings brought a sharp stab of pain to his spine, and he slumped back prone, wondering how long he'd been unconscious and hog-tied like this. Every part of him seemed to be on fire, from top to toe.
He cast a wary gaze around him; it looked like a hospital ward or dormitory. Five other beds were lined against the opposite side of the room, all empty, the sheets flattened as if they hadn't been visited in many a month. It appeared he was the only occupant, but judging by the cleanliness of the floor and the bare walls he couldn't say he was surprised; this didn't look like a place where one could convalesce and regain one's health. It had a fatal air about it, a suggestion that the dying would be left here to see out their final moments. The plaster was grimy, darkened in spots, and the linoleum discoloured by a mixture of scuffed footprints, dirt and ancient body-fluids. A couple of fluorescent tubes were fitted to the ceiling, but they looked as if they had long since burned out, now grey and lifeless.
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