The Suburban Dead (Book 2): Emergency

by Sorsby, T. A.

  When the zombies finally caught up with the field teams, they’d be faced with a narrow bottleneck formed by the hedgerows and fences, funnelled down towards the rear end of Rob’s massive truck and the bale-walls, impossible to climb over. I knew they wouldn’t last forever, the zombies would literally rip the bales to pieces, but there were more bales where they came from, and every step of the way, they’d be harassed by more of the old “pitchfork to the face” technique.

  The last of the hay was hastily being arranged into a miniature barricade, only about three feet high, but forming a stumbling block around the mouth of the lane that a person wouldn’t struggle to climb over, but a zombie would. In a few minutes, this final layer of defence would be manned by a whole load of folks with more picks, forks, hammers and hatchets, not to mention guns and no reason not to use them.

  Hale planned for defences to fall. But he also planned what to do when they did, how to make the enemy pay for every inch of ground, pulling back as they advanced, conserving our numbers as theirs dwindled. So far, this was actually all going to plan.

  Emile and Reg returned to the side gate and took up their positions once more, John seeming relieved to give the shotgun back.

  ‘How’d it go?’ I asked.

  Emile made a non-committal grunt and shrugged. ‘No está mal.’

  ‘But not exactly good either?’

  ‘The ghouls are definitely here,’ Reg said, ‘and they’re making the zeds smarter.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How they waited at the edge of the light is one thing, but the way they attacked the defences out there was coordinated. Not sophisticated you understand, they don’t have any battering rams or siege towers,’ he said, ‘but when one found a loose board, they combined their efforts to pull on it. They cooperated. Of course, this just meant they were buried under the soil, but then their fellows began to clamber up the slope, and well, here we are. We had to abandon the fields.’

  ‘Once a wall fell, the dead at the other walls moved back, heading for the breaches,’ Emile said, ‘the ghouls do not just direct the horde, as if they were throwing their own rocks at us, they control the horde. Commanding it like an army. Like…’

  ‘Muerto Compaña.’ I said.

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ Reg asked. We were going to have to make up an info pack on it at this rate.

  ‘It is a Rojasin folk tale, an old tradition, like your Samhain.’ Emile said. ‘A night where we light bonfires and wear masks. It is said that the bonfires come from the burning of bodies during times of plague, and that the masks were to scare off the evil spirits that brought the disease. I’m beginning to suspect that the origin of the tales was no ordinary plague.’

  ‘How far back do these traditions go, Officer?’

  ‘Thousands of years. Some modern twists were added, like the drinking, because why not? But the fire, the masks? Santa Compaña? That has always been there.’

  ‘What are Santa Compaña anyway?’ I butted in. ‘It wasn’t really covered in my Rojasin at school.’

  Emile shrugged. ‘Some say angels, good spirits, driving out the bad. Others think they were early doctors who could cure the disease.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think that if Muerto Compaña was an army of the dead, zombies led by ghouls, or worse…then Santa Compaña was us. An army of the living. Those who can fight, and those who can understand the plague. Us.’

  ‘I don’t feel much like a folk tale right now.’ I told him.

  ‘I bet the first didn’t either. But here we are, standing against the Company of the Dead. We can pray for Santa Compaña to help us, or we can become them. Be our own saviours.’

  ‘Ooh, I like that...’ Reg said.

  ‘Would make a good tagline.’ I agreed.

  ‘If we make it through tonight, we will have time to speculate if we are mythical folk heroes later,’ Emile said, ‘right now we have enemies at the gate.’

  ‘And if we keep killing them, they’ll just keep piling on top of each other. Suggestions?’ I turned my head and met everyone else’s eyes, opening the floor to discussion.

  ‘Fire?’ John said, but backtracked immediately, shaking his head.

  ‘There’s a gap between the bottom of the gates and the road,’ James tried, ‘could move the bales and drag the bodies through.’

  ‘How big is the gap?’ Reg asked.

  ‘Less than a foot, more than six inches?’ he replied uncertainly.

  ‘Probably not enough.’ I said.

  ‘Keep going until they do form a ramp, hoping we’ll have thinned the numbers enough to manage them?’ Reg tried.

  ‘The good part about not being in command,’ Emile said sagely, ‘is not having to make command decisions. Kick it up the line.’

  I gave him the radio, and let him chat to Hale while I looked out over the dead again.

  ‘Reckon the ghoul’s still here?’ I asked Reg.

  ‘I’m not sure. At the field barricades they were attacking structural weaknesses with singular purpose. Here, they’re just mobbing. Behaving exactly like we’d expect them to.’

  ‘It could be a distraction. Keep our eyes on this gate while they find another way in.’

  ‘They already found plenty of those…’ Reg trailed off, thinking. ‘So why aren’t they going to them? Like the others did? It’s a bit more of a walk from here, I know, but there are breaches in our perimeter. Why are they still attacking here, where we’re strong? You might be on to something.’

  ‘Emile!’ I called for his attention, between radio bleeps. ‘Get Hale to put a couple teams back on perimeter patrol. The ghouls are up to something.’

  I looked over to the abundance of idle people now milling around the defences forming at the lane, and stepped down from the bales.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ Reg asked.

  ‘Loads of soldiers about for reinforcements, and we’ve got wounded inside, I’m going to see if they need help.’

  ‘Good luck!’

  I got to Rob’s house just as Claire was leaving, a first aid bag over her shoulder. We almost bumped into each other in the doorway.

  ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, adjusting her bag strap. ‘How’s the gate?’

  ‘Sturdy. The wounded? I saw a lot of staggering.’

  ‘No amputations, thankfully. Just cuts and bruises. Swinging heavy objects around in close proximity to one another will do that. Some stitches and a definite concussion but they’ve got it all in hand. I was just coming to see your group actually. How’re you doing?’

  ‘The zeds are more of a problem right now than a danger, if you know what I mean. They’re not getting through that wall, but we can’t do much to get rid of them either.’

  ‘Zeds?’

  ‘Reg’s unapproved abbreviation but I kinda like it. How are you holding up?’

  Claire straightened her shoulders a bit. ‘I’m okay. No casualties so far, and nobody’s asked me to swing an axe. I’m really not looking forward to performing Tony’s autopsy tomorrow, but we can’t have everything.’

  I cast a glance back to the lodge. ‘Be a lot kinder to see to them now. Don’t suppose we can convince the guard to put them out of their misery a little earlier? Like now.’

  A shout came up from over in the other courtyard.

  ‘He’s probably too busy to stop us, but I’d rather not go behind his back like that.’ Claire said.

  The shouting continued, with distinct cries for water.

  We turned around, and it was hard to miss the tell-tale orange flickering. Something was happening. Rounding the corner, we saw the side gate was aflame, the hay bales alight, but it was hard to tell if the flames had taken to the wood yet. Emile and Reg were standing well back, looking for something to shoot, not letting this distract them from their job – the ghoul could have been playing us.

  They’d sent the civilians, James, John and Nat our way, raising the alarm. People were
quick on the uptake. They hadn’t fallen into panic just yet, but there was a lot of shouting, a lot of anxious casting about, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  ‘Alpha, head to the house, fill some buckets!’ Sergeant Baily commanded, voice rising above the rest. ‘Beta, there’s a hose outside the stables, see if it’ll reach the gate! The rest of you, stand your ground here!’

  I stepped forward, about to ask her what happened, see if we could help, but I was jerked violently backwards. Claire grabbed the back of my jacket, and hauled me stumbling back the way we’d come. Glass shattered, there was the whump of ignition, a wave of heat, and I found myself face down on the concrete. The air was hot and acrid, catching in my throat and making me cough.

  We helped each other back to our feet, choking on fumes. Claire’s white coat was filthy from the tumble on the dirty concrete, but we were alive.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ I asked, casting a look towards where Sergeant Bailey had been standing.

  A furious blaze was spreading across the concrete, only a few feet behind us, but it may as well have been inches. I took Claire’s arm and ran further back from the flames. Foul black smoke poured into the sky as they raced in seemingly random directions across the concrete, following the grooves and imperfections.

  ‘Smells like a gasoline fire,’ Claire coughed, ‘I thought I saw something in the air, they threw something over the hedge.’

  ‘A firebomb?’ I croaked, still trying to cough the taste of it out of my mouth.

  It was hard to see anything in the courtyard, the flames weren’t towering high above the ground, but they were bright, gleeful little bastards and the smoke was thicker than winter fog. I could hear people though, some of them shouting for help, some of them shouting as they helped…some of them beyond help.

  The farmhouse door opened again, but before the gathering of scrubs and white coats could come out and assess the situation, Claire laid it out for them.

  ‘Petrol bombs! McGann, grab the fire blanket from the kitchen, now!’ she yelled, but McGann was already on it. ‘Everyone else, fold the sheets from the walls and get out here! Stop, drop, and roll!’

  ‘This way, there are horse blankets in the stables,’ I said, setting off at a run, feeling my lungs burn.

  ‘Has to be thick cloth, or it’ll just feed the fire!’ Claire called out, just a few steps behind me.

  I didn’t have the breath to go into horse blankets right now, but I was certain they’d be thick enough. Winters around here regularly put three feet of snow on the ground, and even in their stables the horses would need to wrap up to keep warm.

  We arrived at the stables to find the doors already open, but the lights were out inside. I fumbled for the switch, slapping madly at the wall where I was sure I’d seen it earlier.

  ‘Oh my!’ Claire gasped as the lights flickered on.

  The chestnut male I’d been fussing, Reg’s horse, lay dead just outside of his stall. It was at the other end of the stables, the other entrance, but that wasn’t far away enough for comfort. The other horses whinnied and reared in their stalls. I guess now we knew they didn’t like the ghouls either.

  There were two of them, kneeling over the horse and ripping at it with their bare hands. But they weren’t human hands. Not quite. I couldn’t see from here, but they looked more like claws. More capable of doing the damage I’d seen, slitting those bloody lines across people’s throats.

  She looked up first, and all objectivity went out the window. This wasn’t like the patient strapped down to the bed, or the hungry mouths at the gates. She wasn’t an it. There was too much of an awareness about her, she wasn’t just a mindless zombie, but something else, something worse.

  She was the one in scrubs, the one who’d played dead at the checkpoint and laughed at us in the barn. She’d been standing so close to me then. I felt a cold white wave begin to creep up from my feet, washing over my legs and freezing them in place.

  A red, blood-smeared grin began to spread across her face, as she raised herself up from the horse with an almost feline grace, slow and almost sensuous, savouring every moment. She cocked her head to the side and muttered something, her eyes still locked on us.

  The other ghoul looked over his shoulder, peering above the furry ruff of a winter coat. A strange part of my brain fired just then, telling me that he must have died wearing it, or pulled it on as a disguise – if the one in scrubs felt the cold, she’d have wrapped up too.

  He turned his attention back to the undead medic, hissed something sharp and nasty, a language I didn’t understand, but her grin only broadened. Without another glance at us, he walked around the carcass they’d been feeding upon, a very human walk, and disappeared into the night.

  The door shut behind him.

  Fear gripped my heart, tight in my chest and rooting me to the spot, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t scream. I could barely even breathe.

  Claire closed the other door.

  For a moment, I thought I’d been tricked. That she was working with the ghouls all this time. I managed to turn my head enough to see her pick up a shovel from where it rested against an empty stall door. She adjusted her grip and flicked her hair back.

  ‘Come on then!’ she shouted, facing the ghoul, but it wasn’t a taunt. It was a call to me. ‘I can’t do this on my own!’

  The ghoul stepped on and over the carcass, her shoulders hunching as she came forward, arms out to her sides, fingers flexing. The other one who’d walked outside, he was trying to pass as one of the living, but she didn’t have to, not here.

  She lurched forwards in great long strides that ate the length of the stables all too quickly, letting out banshee wail that drove the horses into a frenzy, kicking at their stalls and whinnying in panic.

  Claire stepped forward to meet her, swinging the shovel around clumsily, but it was enough to force the ghoul to dodge backwards, out of reach.

  She stayed on the balls of her feet, and as the arc of Claire’s swing took her off balance, the ghoul lunged in again, staying low, grabbing Claire’s white coat and dragging her down to the uneven, straw covered floor below.

  The shovel clattered out of reach, not that it’d have done her much good down there anyway. Claire brought her arms up to protect herself from whatever came next, but there wouldn’t be a chance for that. The words hadn’t quite left my mouth…

  ‘Get away from her you bitch!’

  …before my boot was striking home against the ghoul’s skull.

  It was a big kick, the kind that soccer players do when they’re trying to hoof it right the way down the pitch. It connected under her jaw with a satisfying thud, snapping shut her open mouth and knocking her head back in a way that definitely wouldn’t have been healthy for a living person.

  With another wordless animal screech, she rolled backwards and sprang out onto all fours, staring up at me. She didn’t have the empty eyes of the zombies, the almost expressionless face. No, she wore a mask of pure hatred, of barely restrained rage.

  I looked about for another weapon, seeing the shovel too far away. All the real weapons had been taken for the fighting outside, but there was a broom off to my right, leaning against another stall. It’d have to do – but as soon as I made to lunge for it, she skittered towards it too, and I was forced to take a quick pair of steps backwards. I was damn near against the wall.

  With her fingers splayed out on the ground for balance, I saw that she’d chewed them down to the bone, leaving grey-white at the tips of her disfigured hands. It wasn’t a mutation, some quirk of the virus changing their anatomy. They sharpened their own fucking bones into claws.

  She came at me then, unexpected, faster than I would have thought possible from that position, barely giving me a moment to react. I tried to set my balance, to put a foot back and brace myself against the flying tackle that was coming, but all I succeeded in doing was having one foot off the ground when she hit me, shoulder in the gut.

  M
y back and elbows collided with the wall, hard. We struggled for a moment, the ghoul clawing – literally fucking clawing at my jacket and jeans, trying to sink her fingers into me. But the leather was tough, meant to keep my skin in place when hitting the tarmac at forty plus miles-per-hour. The jeans might not have held out forever, but she didn’t have the patience to shred away at them – that, or she was clever enough to change tactics.

  She dragged me down to the ground, striking at the back of my knee and pulling me forwards simultaneously. I made sure to be as cooperative as possible on the way down, trying to put some distance between me and her, rolling over as I went so I’d at least be face up and ready to fight, not face down and helpless.

  Pain lanced up my arm as I tumbled overhead, reaching out to control my fall. I’d gone down like this before, playing hockey. The ground had been softer, but my wrist had bent in just the same way. We had a name for it in A&E; FOOSH. “Fall on outstretched hand”.

  There was no time to cry over my sprained wrist.

  She was on me almost immediately, straddling my thighs. With a snarl, she pushed up the bottom of my jacket with one hand, and pulled back her other to strike, claws ready to sink into the all too soft skin of my belly.

  Suddenly, the air was filled with the resounding clang of iron on face.

  Claire stood above me, shovel in hand, but not for long. The ghoul was knocked off me, but she turned it into another roll and sprang back up ready to fight. Claire was ready first.

  Nameless, incoherent swearing and shouting, that’s all I could hear as she took step after step towards the ghoul, swinging and jabbing with the shovel, keeping the ghoul on the back foot.

  I pushed myself up with my right hand, keeping the left tucked in close to my chest. The pain was still fresh, arcing and crackling with every little movement like lightning under my skin. A break would have been kinder.

  I took up the sweeping brush in one hand, ready to do something, anything to help Claire. Distract the ghoul, bat at it like a cartoon housewife who’d seen a mouse, or maybe couch it under my arm and charge like a knight.