Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse

by Nicholas Ryan

  Samantha smiled and her expression was almost dream-like. “Does that mean hot water for a shower?”

  Cutter shrugged. “I don’t know,” he smiled. “Maybe. We’ll have to be careful with water. But I remember the area around Eden Gardens being good farmland. So maybe it means we can plant a vegetable garden. If the land around the house is fenced or fortified.”

  Samantha slowed the car and diverted her attention quickly back to the road. There was a burned out vehicle across one lane. Thin wisps of black smoke still climbed lazily into the morning sky. Next to the car was the dark charred shape of a body. Cutter checked the Glock and wound down the window. “Don’t stop the car,” he said. “Pass the body on this side so I can get a clear shot if I need to.”

  Samantha obeyed. The car crept past at a crawl. The blackened body never moved, and as soon as they were past, Samantha built up speed again.

  “Is it a big house?”

  “What?” Cutter’s mind was still on the remains that lay dwindling from sight in the car’s side mirror.

  “The house we’re going to. The fortress. Is it a big house?”

  Cutter frowned. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But the man said he had come into Newbridge to try to rescue his mother. I think she was old, or ill. He never reached her in time – but that must mean the house has a couple of bedrooms at least. Maybe more, because storing six months of food and water, and weapons takes up plenty of space.”

  Samantha made a sound like a wistful sigh and then drifted into thoughtful silence once more “What do we do when we get there, Jack?”

  Cutter frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what do we do?”

  “We wait,” Cutter said. “It’s all we can do. We stay there until the virus burns itself out.”

  “Will it?”

  Cutter nodded. “Eventually,” he said. “It has to. The undead rise and they’re slow, but they become faster as the virus reaches to all parts of their bodies – but they’re still undead. They’re decomposing. We’ve both smelt the stench. Their bodies are rotting away. Sooner or later, it has to reach the point where they are no longer a threat.”

  Samantha stayed silent, and Cutter felt compelled to reassure her in some way. “Or maybe the army will move in,” he said. “If they have a good defensive line and the infection hasn’t spread past the eastern states, then maybe they will mobilize the military and begin cleaning up. One way or another, this has to end eventually. We just have to reach Eden Gardens and wait it out.”

  As they drove on towards the town of Guthrie, the road gradually became choked with more abandoned cars, and more dead bodies. It became harder for Samantha to navigate the obstacles and keep the car on the road. She stopped the hatchback on a bridge and they got out cautiously and peered ahead.

  The bridge was a rickety old timber structure that had been built back before the Second World War, when the farms and towns surrounding the city of Newbridge had all been linked by dirt roads. Cutter and Samantha went to the railing and peered down into the river. Bodies were floating downstream, rolling and floundering in the eddying water as it washed under the bridge.

  “Where does the river go?” Samantha asked.

  “The ocean,” Cutter said. “It starts in the hills outside of Guthrie and winds its way south, past Newbridge and eventually runs all the way to the coast. In the old days, farmers used to send their produce to the city on barges.”

  Cutter went and stood on the hood of the car and swept his eyes carefully north and east.

  The road cut through patches of woodland as it meandered towards Guthrie, and there were trees lined on both sides of the road. He squinted his eyes. There was smoke on the horizon.

  He turned and looked south, and frowned.

  “We must be almost there,” he said cautiously. “The turnoff to Eden Gardens can’t be much further. He pointed to the skyline. “There’s smoke on the horizon, maybe seven or eight miles north,” he explained. “That’s most likely the township. And the turnoff to Guthrie is a couple of miles before you hit the town outskirts – so we can’t be far from safety.”

  They climbed back into the car and Cutter got behind the wheel. There was an overturned Ford sedan blocking the road ahead and he was forced down off the road and into long grass to get past it. The Ford’s roof had been crushed and he saw a small broken body trapped in the wreckage.

  He drove on.

  For some reason he had been expecting a big billboard sign by the side of the road with pictures of apple trees and beautiful gardens written in flowing italic script. The reality was very different. The turnoff to Eden Gardens was a small green sign with simple lettering:

  ‘Eden Gardens 2 miles’

  The sign had been peppered with buckshot so the paint had flaked and rusted around the impact dints. Cutter shrugged. He turned off the main road and the little hatchback bounced on its springs as the surface became a narrow dusty track that was grooved and rutted by years of use by heavy farm equipment.

  They drove through a small grove of trees and then the land around them on either side of the trail opened up into lush farmland, fenced and furrowed into a huge patchwork of greens and browns. Cutter wound down the window and the air was fresh. There were mailboxes clumped in groups along the side of the road and more dirt tracks branching left and right towards isolated farmsteads that sat hunched in the distance, well away from the roadside. Samantha read off the numbers with a growing sense of excitement and anticipation.

  “Twenty four and twenty six,” she said. She pointed out through her window. One of the mailboxes was an old four-gallon drum. The other had been made of wood into the shape of a tiny house. Underneath was the name ‘Rogers’ painted in the big imperfect letters of an amateur.

  Cutter drove on. The river followed them. It cut through the land like a fat silver python, reflecting the midday light and shimmering under the sun.

  “Thirty,” Samantha said suddenly. Cutter tore his eyes away from the river and glanced through the side window. Beyond the mailbox, he saw a dirt track leading towards a run-down clapboard house about two hundred yards from the roadside. There were a couple of rusted out trucks parked in front of the homestead and a post and wire fence leading all the way to the horizon.

  Cutter slowed the car. Ahead was a rise on the ground, like the gentle undulation of a wave. He nodded. “Over that crest,” he said. “The Garden of Eden.”

  Impulsively Samantha clutched at his hand and squeezed tightly. Her face was flushed and her eyes alive with hope and excitement. Her hand felt warm. Cutter didn’t want to let it go.

  He took a deep breath and checked the car’s mirrors instinctively. There was a drifting haze of dust behind him from where the car had disturbed and kicked up dirt. Beyond the haze, the road was empty.

  He took the car slowly up the rise and felt himself craning forward in the seat, anticipating the first glimpse of Hos’s fortress that was to become their home together.

  The hatchback went up the slope and at the top of the rise the lay of the land opened up before them. The river was to their left, beyond a quilt of green fenced fields, and narrow trails. And just off the road – maybe two hundred yards ahead – was a flat grassy strip of fenced-in land, surrounding an abandoned country church.

  The church had a stone foundation and the rest was clapboard painted white, with three short timber steps leading up to solid wooden doors. The windows had been boarded over. It had a steep roof over the nave and a square tower with a bell.

  Behind the church was a scatter of weathered gravestones, enveloped by a rusted wrought iron fence that wrapped around the edges of the property. The gates sagged open and tufts of long stringy grass grew around the support posts.

  Cutter glanced at Samantha.

  Samantha wasn’t moving.

  She wasn’t breathing.

  With a gut-wrenching sickening slide, Cutter suddenly realized why.

  The car had rolled to a st
op beside a mailbox: number thirty-four. It was Hos’s fortress.

  Cutter followed the trail that broke away from the road as it weaved a hundred yards through a tree-studded field and ended abruptly in front of the burned out blackened shell of a destroyed house.

  The roof had collapsed, and the grass around where the building had stood was burned. Only one sidewall of the building remained. The rest had been utterly, totally destroyed.

  Fifty yards away from the house was another burned out building. It might have been a barn – Cutter wasn’t sure. He felt the crushing weight of total despair suck the breath from his lungs and drain away the blood from his face.

  He stared, desolate, for long seconds, and there was the sound of a wild roaring in his ears.

  Beside him, Samantha sat small in the shocked silence. She was weeping.

  There was no Eden.

  * * *

  Cutter shook his head in disbelief, and then swore bitterly. He punched at the dashboard with his fist. He felt cheated – betrayed. He flung himself out of the little hatchback and stood staring at the ruined buildings.

  Samantha climbed from the car, made small and quiet by her despair, and the force of Cutter’s rage. She brushed at tears. High in the sky overhead, big black crows flew in lazy spiraling circles.

  Samantha closed her eyes, and Cutter thought she might be praying.

  He glanced away.

  Then he froze.

  The skyline was filling with hundreds of dark wavering shapes that seemed to rise up from out of the grassy fields beyond the burned out house. Cutter’s eyes went wide in appalled horror. Zombies were cresting the gentle slope and beginning to spill down the fields towards where they stood.

  Too many to count – a thick dark wall of snarling demented fury. Maybe still a mile away, but coming at them in a ragged serpentine wall.

  “Shit!” Cutter spat. Samantha’s eyes snapped open. She saw the terror in Cutter’s face and followed the direction of his gaze. She went cold.

  “Get in the car!” Cutter shouted.

  He gunned the little engine and it roared to life. He crushed his foot down on the accelerator. The car leaped forward. The track was narrow, but there was open ground a hundred yards ahead. Cutter sped towards the clearing and as soon as the car had room, he threw the wheel hard over in a sharp turn. The tires skidded, biting into the gravel and then losing traction. Cutter felt a moment of weightlessness and the steering wheel kicked viciously in his hand. The motor roared. Cutter crushed down on the brakes. But it was too late. The hatchback went off the road and teetered on two wheels for a perilous split-second.

  Then it rolled over onto its roof.

  The sound inside the car was a crashing roar in their ears. The roof collapsed. Dust filled the air and the car – and Cutter and Samantha were slammed from side to side, and then hurled upside down. Cutter felt the Glock dig into his ribs and a flash of blinding pain. He heard Samantha scream out in panic and then his teeth bit deep into his lip and there was a copper-like burn at the back of his throat that tasted like blood.

  Cutter groaned. The world was upside down. He kicked out hard at the crumpled door and crawled out onto the grass. Samantha was lying tangled, with her arm trapped between the seats. He hauled her out gently and wrapped his arm tight around her waist.

  “Nothing broken?”

  Samantha shook her head. “Your mouth is bleeding.”

  Cutter didn’t seem to hear. He reached back inside the wrecked car for the black carry bag and found the revolver still in the glove compartment.

  The zombies were closing quickly. They reached the burned building and swept down the hill unchecked.

  Cutter looked around in despair.

  “The river!” Cutter said. It was a few hundred yards away, down a gentle slope, directly away from the zombies. If they could get to the water ahead of the horde, they might be able to find a boat. He heaved the bag up onto his shoulder and the weight of it almost took his legs from under him. “Come on! Run!”

  “No!” Samantha said suddenly. “The church!”

  Cutter stared. “We can’t escape. They’ll be all over us. They’ll pour in through that gate – or knock the fence down. It’s abandoned Sam. It’s a wreck!”

  But Samantha had already started running.

  Cutter staggered under the weight of the bag. The zombies were raging down the slope to intercept them. The church was still fifty yards away when Cutter realized the first of the undead would reach them before they made it to the church. Samantha realized it too. Cutter was behind her. Samantha was close to the wrought iron gates. She snatched the Glock from her jeans and dropped to one knee.

  “Run!” she screamed at Cutter. He was sweating. His shirt was wet against the heaving swell of his chest. His legs felt like rubber. The bag was like a millstone around his neck. He felt his feet kicking up dirt as he staggered closer.

  Samantha turned back to the closest zombies. There were two mutilated rotting shapes that had reached the shallow drainage ditch on the opposite side of the road. Samantha took careful aim and fired. The first ghoul was flung backwards into the grass. The second threw up its arms and snarled. Samantha fired again and the bullet hit the zombie in the chest. The ghoul spun round in a circle and fell into the dirt.

  Cutter dropped to the ground beside Samantha. He threw the bag down in the dust and struggled up onto one knee. “Make every shot count!” he said. “We need to conserve the ammunition.”

  He fired at two more of the undead that were bursting through a low border of bushes on the opposite side of the road. One of them went down and stayed down. But the other got up, and Cutter had to fire three more times before he hit the ghoul in the head. He cursed.

  “I’m almost out of bullets,” he said.

  Samantha snapped off one more shot and then ripped open the zipper on the bag and dug her hands inside. She snatched a look up at the zombies. They were twenty feet away. She felt her fingers fumble over unfamiliar shapes inside the bag and she glanced down.

  “Cutter, there are boxes of ammunition in here!” she said in disbelief. And then her fingers felt deeper, and her eyes grew even wider. “And these!”

  In her cupped hands she held three grenades. They were shaped like miniature pineapples. Cutter stared in wonder. “Team Exodus. The guys must have put them in the bag.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Throw them!”

  Samantha had sat through enough war movies to know the basics. She clamped one hand over the safety lever and pulled the pin with the other. Then she jumped to her feet and hurled the first grenade into the milling mass of undead.

  She threw the grenade like a girl. It went twenty-five feet, wobbling in an awkward arc through the air, and landed amongst the zombies. Then suddenly the air was split apart by the sound of a deafening ‘crump!’, and the ground shook with the impact of the blast. Samantha was hurled off her feet. She landed on her back on the grass. When she sat up, shaking her head and her ears ringing, the air was filled with a swirling dust cloud.

  “Did I get any?”

  Cutter turned and glared at her. His face was covered in dust and there were clumps of grass and flesh in his hair.

  “Give them to me!”

  He took the second grenade and threw it high and long, and even before it had detonated, he had the pin pulled from the last grenade. The first exploded and he threw the final one at the same moment, tossing it into the closest of the undead who were clambering down into the muddy roadside drainage ditch. Cutter threw himself over Samantha’s body, pressing her down into the grass and throwing his hands protectively over his head as the final grenade exploded and ripped the soft earth apart.

  “Now run!”

  They got to their feet and staggered towards the church gates.

  Cutter didn’t know if there were undead behind them, and he couldn’t risk the split-second it would take to find out. He didn’t dare to stop running. He knew if he did, he was de
ad. He pushed himself on with the last dwindling reserves of his will and strength until he was hunched against the sagging church gate.

  The gate was wrought iron and eight feet high at its arched peak. It was about ten feet wide. Cutter dropped the bag and set himself the next task. The gate was rusted orange oxide and mounted on rusted old hinges. Cutter took a deep breath and threw his shoulder against the resisting weight.

  “Get in here!” Cutter shouted to Samantha. She heard his voice and turned. “Try to find somewhere to hide. It’s your only hope. These gates won’t hold them. They’re falling apart – and so is the entire damned fence.”

  Samantha ran back through the gate. There were zombies everywhere – a solid dark wall of rotting bodies. They pressed closer and the air filled with the stench of their decomposition. Cutter saw a hundred snarling spitting faces, each one hideous and ravaged and bloodied with demented mindless rage. He cried out and threw the very last reserves of his strength against the gate, just as the first of the undead spilled across the dusty road and began to funnel towards the opening where Samantha stood waiting like bait.

  The gate moved. Not only moved – the gate swung effortlessly on whisper quiet oiled hinges. It swung in a sharp fierce arc and slammed hard against the post. Cutter’s eyes went wide in bewilderment. He stood there staring down at his hands while the undead hurled themselves against the wrought iron. His hands were orange, but it wasn’t rust.

  He knew what it was. It was the one thing he did know about.

  It was paint.

  “Your belt!” Samantha shouted, her voice so full of panic that it cut through the fog of Cutter’s confusion. He looked up. She was standing a yard inside the gate, near the post. Undead hands clawed through the wrought iron bars at her. She fired once into the closest zombie and the bullet ripped the top of its skull off. The ghoul slumped against the bars, held upright by the press of raging madness behind it.