Kara shook her head.
“I already thought about that,” she said. “It could take hours for them to lose interest and we don’t have hours. We can’t afford to waste time.”
Rebecca huffed in dismay, then sat down and crossed her legs. Her hands ran through her short hair, combing it back repeatedly – a stressed tic of hers, Eric observed. Kara crouched next to her friend and rubbed her back, attune to her despair.
“Keep your cool,” Kara said. “We’ll find another way.”
“This is hopeless. Are we really fooling ourselves into thinking we have a chance at saving Sammy? You do realise Mark’s just going to kill her anyway once we give him what he wants, right?”
“I don’t intend to give him what he wants,” Eric said. “I’m not gonna play by his rules.”
“Then don’t go to Greenwood Crescent. How are you hoping to save her? You might think you’re some kind of hero, but you almost got us killed on the bus, and this situation is out of your control.”
“I am not about to give up on my friend.”
“Well, she already gave up on you,” Rebecca said. “She gave up on us the moment she left. We should just find another car, drive away and never look back.”
“I won’t waste any more time arguing with you. Unless you have something useful to suggest that will help us get off this scaffolding, please shut up and let me think.”
Rebecca was thankfully quiet after that… for about a minute, after which she mumbled a string of misandric comments that Eric ignored. Kara consoled Rebecca in her usual way, reminding her to think of Sammy and the kindness she’d shown them both.
To Eric’s surprise, Kara then held Rebecca’s cheeks, turned her face toward her own and kissed her on the lips. They held the kiss for several seconds.
Eric was taken aback, not only because he hadn’t realised there was any romance between the two women, but because he suddenly registered how little he’d been paying attention to them.
With nothing but survival on his mind, was he turning into an emotionless robot? His best friend had left him to wander a dying world alone. Had his stoic attitude pushed Kingsley away?
Weirdly, the sight of Kara and Rebecca kissing triggered a memory of something he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
He found himself remembering his first and only kiss; he’d been in high school then, year eleven, and had never had a girlfriend. He hadn’t really wanted one. But to his sixteen-year-old brain, it seemed that pretty much everyone in his year had a significant other, and everyone had experienced their first kiss.
Everyone except for him… and Sammy.
They were both in the same boat, both wanting to have their first kiss because they felt left out. And a naive part of him had hoped the act of kissing another person would snap him out of whatever it was that made him uninterested in having a girlfriend.
Eric and Sammy were just friends. But both found the other attractive enough that the thought of kissing each other wasn’t an awful one, if a bit odd. So they decided to give it a go. Just once, just so they could say they had done it.
There was no spark of romance or connection during the kiss. Nothing came of it. Only later in life had Eric learned that aromantic people existed and that he was one of them.
However, Sammy confessed to him after the kiss that she actually had felt a romantic attraction to him, had hoped they would become more than just friends. And Eric felt awful telling her that he didn’t feel the same way.
Sammy had looked upset at first. But then a remarkably adult resolve settled over her. She assured him she would get over it and she wouldn’t let it affect their friendship. And it didn’t. There was nothing awkward at all between them afterwards, as Eric had feared there might be. They both just acted as if it’d never happened.
That was special for a teenage friendship, he decided as he sat there on the scaffolding, the memories toying with his heart. That they were all still great friends now – Kingsley, Sammy, himself… James – that they hadn’t allowed distance to break them up when they’d moved away from one another to attend different universities and lead different lives, was special.
Eric would protect Sammy and Kingsley with his life, and he knew they would do the same for him. That would never change, even in the most difficult and uncertain times.
Oh, how I’m going to kill you, Mark. For Sammy, for Kingsley, for James. I swear I will snap your neck like a piece of plasterboard.
*
The wind was picking up. It hurled itself at the survivors on their high perch in great intermittent gusts, never quite drowning out the snap of so many pairs of teeth. It seemed to be whipping the snappers into a bit of a frenzy, the ladder jostling and rattling against the scaffolding boards as they clamoured hungrily below.
Eric studied the wall of the house behind them for a little while, squinting up at the roof slates. At the square frosted-glass window under the eaves, too small to climb through. At the smooth beige wall stretching out to the left of the scaffolding where there was a second window about an arm’s length from the edge of the platform; just beyond the right-hand edge, the beige wall ended and the red brick wall of the next house began.
About a metre from the scaffolding was a tiled awning that ran along the entire front of the red-brick house.
Eric studied the awning at length, thinking about how sturdy the tiles would be… how much grip his boots would have on them… But no, the idea was too ridiculous. The three of them could never traverse the awning and hop down on the other side before the snappers surrounding the scaffolding moved the distance of a house front.
Checking his watch, he saw that it had been twenty-seven minutes since they’d spoken to Mark on the radio. By Eric’s estimation, Greenwood Crescent was a fifteen-minute walk from here – which left them with eighteen minutes to find a way down. And that wasn’t accounting for the very real possibility that they would run into more trouble with snappers on their way to Greenwood Crescent, which would slow them down further.
Desperation tightened its icy hold on him. They had to try something soon or they would never make it to Greenwood Crescent in time.
Eric was about to look elsewhere when a suggestion from Kara prompted a new idea.
“The snappers are attracted to movement and sound, right?” she said. “So why don’t we try to shatter one of the windows across the road as a distraction?”
“What with?” Rebecca asked. “There aren’t any more bricks up here.”
“A can of sweetcorn, maybe. We have quite a few of them.”
Eric didn’t think it would work. He didn’t think a window breaking would be enough to distract all nineteen of the snappers he’d counted down there. Also, it couldn’t be movement and sound alone that guided the snappers; there had to be a sense of smell involved, too. After all, what about the ones they’d seen raiding the refrigerator aisles in supermarkets for cuts of raw meat?
Smashing a window wouldn’t be enough to get their attention.
But suddenly Eric thought of something else that would.
6.
“Sit back against the wall,” Eric told Kara and Rebecca. “I’ll give you a nod when it’s safe to go down. And don’t forget the duffel bag or the mace.” He gestured to the weapon and bag by his feet. There was no sense in trying to carry them while he climbed across the front of the neighbouring house. The awning tiles looked old and Eric wasn’t certain they would hold his weight as it was.
Best to leave the heavy things on the scaffolding, let Kara and Rebecca take them down the ladder when it was clear.
The plan was for Eric to carefully climb to the far end of the awning, then once he was there, make plenty of noise to lure the group of snappers over to him and away from the ladder. At his signal, the women were to get down off the scaffolding as fast as they could and start taking out the snappers at the back of the crowd while they were focused on Eric. The snappers would then begin to notice the two easier targets on
the ground and shift their attention again – or so they hoped – at which point Eric would jump down from the awning, and the three of them would make a break for the road where the bus had veered off through the fence.
“We’re ready when you are,” Kara said.
Eric nodded. He was as ready now as he would ever be. The plan wasn’t a fool-proof one, and he knew that if he spent too much time deliberating over it he might find more faults with it. It was best to go ahead with it before the doubt had a chance to sink in.
He turned to the edge of the platform. Took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, stretched as if he was warming up for a workout. Then he positioned himself for the small but treacherous jump to the awning.
Eric counted down from three.
On one, he sprang across the gap like a cat. Landed – and instantly slipped, falling against the sloped surface.
Twisting onto his back as he fell, Eric spread his legs and planted his heels in the gutter pipe to stop himself from sliding off the awning. A panicky moment passed where a tile shifted under him with a grating sound and he was sure they were all about to come loose and send him sliding down to the pavement.
But the moment elapsed and none of the tiles had dislodged from the awning. He was okay.
The wind groped at his shoulders, almost unbalancing him as he leaned forward to see how many snappers were following. Five had broken off from the pack surrounding the ladder. A sixth twisted it’s head toward Eric just as he looked back.
The tricky part was over; he pulled in a few steadying breaths.
Keeping his legs wide apart so his weight was spread out on the gutter, Eric shimmied across the tiles. His hands were grazed and stinging. The plastic creaked under his feet, drawing more pairs of undead eyes.
When he reached the end of the awning, half of the snappers had noticed him and were now congregating around the bay window.
“Hey! Up here you undead fucks!” Eric yelled at the nine remaining by the scaffolding. “Come get me!” Soon their vapid gazes were on him and they were shuffling to join the rest of Eric’s following.
He looked down at the knot of hands, teeth and frozen eyes below the awning, all the snappers focused on him. Then he looked over at Kara and Rebecca on the scaffolding – gave a nod. The women crept to the ladder and began to climb down.
Eric watched as they slipped down to the road with none of the snappers noticing, the duffel bag in tow. He waited for them to start taking out the snappers and drawing them away from the awning so he could get down.
But Rebecca only turned her back to the snappers and sauntered up the road, away from Eric. Abandoning him.
Kara rushed after her friend – no, her lover, Eric reminded himself – grabbing her arm and trying to stop her from leaving. But Rebecca kept going, tugging her arm from Kara’s grip, and Kara reluctantly moved with her down the road. It looked like they were arguing but Eric couldn’t hear what was being said as they were too far away. Kara offered one last guilty glance at him before giving up and going with Rebecca. The couple disappeared around a corner.
They were leaving him stranded and helpless.
Now that the snappers were fixated on Eric, he couldn’t get down without the help of Kara and Rebecca. He didn’t even have a weapon on him – not that he’d stand a chance in hell of fighting them on his own.
Eric’s rationality had just about run dry after the day’s endless challenges; he tried to formulate a new plan, improvise something from nothing, as he’d always done. But all he found was anger – anger at Rebecca, and anger at his own complete and utter helplessness.
That was when a loud bang came from behind Eric’s head, startling him. It sounded like a bird flying into a window.
Eric looked over his shoulder at a snapper inside the house, beating on the window behind him. And now he was angry at his jumpiness and his racing heart.
But Eric had jolted when the sound startled him – the sudden sharp movement enough to dislodge a tile from the awning. Next thing he knew, he was sliding toward the edge. The gutter pipe snapped as more of his weight shifted onto it.
It wasn’t a huge fall but it felt like he was falling for several vivid seconds, time moving slow enough for Eric to wish mid-air that he would hurry up and hit the fucking ground already. He was definitely fucked.
Unprepared for it, the landing might have been painful if the snappers weren’t there to break his fall. His feet struck hands and a shoulder and he flopped forward, crashing into two snappers and pinning them to the pavement under him. All he could hear was the clack-click-clack of snapping jaws, the smell of faded sweat, old blood and musty clothes engulfing him from inside a constricting cage of reanimated dead bodies. Hands with fingers that felt wooden dug into his back.
Eric had always thought when the time came for him to die he would embrace his fate and finally stop fighting. Rest, for once and for all.
Yet here he was in the thick of it, death quite literally closing in on him, and he was reaching for the tile that had come off the awning, intending to use it to defend himself; here he was, flailing at their arms, shrugging and pushing their mouths away as teeth made contact with his jacket sleeves, smashing the tile to splinters on their skulls, screaming at the top of his lungs.
In his hysteria, Eric didn’t even notice the first snapper go down with the tip of a crossbow bolt protruding from it’s eye. It was only when he heard the bark of a dog that he realised someone else was there.
A man appeared with a hammer and began caving undead skulls in. A snapper stumbled backwards and Eric saw the dog tugging it by the belt around it’s waist, growling. Then another snapper collapsed with a bolt in it’s neck – straight through the spine – and Eric spotted Kingsley through a gap between the encroaching zombies, lowering the crossbow and whipping out his knife.
Somehow Eric hadn’t been bitten yet. Both Kingsley and the man with the hammer were yelling at the snappers to get them to turn around, maybe because Kingsley had seen Eric struggling against them. Whatever the case, it was helping. The undead were diverting.
Maybe he wouldn’t die today.
Still clutching a thin shard of broken tile, Eric drove it into the nearest snapper’s eye socket. Then he crouched over the one with a crossbow bolt in it’s neck and tore it out, spinning to plunge the reclaimed bolt up through the chin of another.
“Eric!” He was surprised to hear Kara’s voice, and before he could even spot her in the chaos her police baton dropped out of the sky onto the chest of the snapper he had just killed with a meaty thunk.
He seized the proffered weapon and took to clubbing them down with a new fury, this one edged with hope.
There they all were – Eric, Kingsley, Kara, Rebecca, the guy with the hammer, and a dog – slaughtering the snappers from all sides, dividing the strength of the pack. Kara took up the chain mace and swiped out their legs, stomping on their heads to finish them off as they squirmed on the ground. Kingsley picked them off one at a time with his knife. Rebecca chopped at their necks with the machete, leaving them half decapitated and paralysed from spinal trauma. The hammer-wielding man held them back by the chest as he brought his weapon down in fatal blows, heaving in exertion.
Every square centimetre of skin on Eric’s hands was coated in blood by the time they’d killed the last of the snappers. Specks of crimson dotted his whole face and the front of his shirt.
Still, he was unbitten.
The survivors all took a few moments to catch their breath, wordlessly surveying the bodies piled around them with wide eyes. Rebecca avoided looking at Eric, and guilt emanated from Kara’s weary face.
He ignored them and went to Kingsley. “Sammy’s here,” Eric said.
Kingsley stared at him, his face blank as though he hadn’t heard. Then he swallowed, frowned and said, “What? Where?”
“She’s here in Colchester. But she’s in trouble, Kingsley. Remember how I told you I was pretty sure Darren’s friends tried to trap us
at the shopping centre in Braintree? Well, I wasn’t wrong.”
Eric explained to him how Darren’s friends had followed them to Kelvedon, how they had found Sammy alone and kidnapped her, how they’d continued to follow their group all the way here. He told Kingsley about Mark waiting for them by the bus with Sammy, holding a blade to her throat and demanding they hand over everything they took from Darren’s flat. And how their first interaction had been cut short by the dead.
Then he told him of the conversation they’d had over the radio, Mark laying out his terms.
“You need to help us rescue Sammy,” Eric finished. “You can go back to isolating yourself afterwards, but right now she needs us.”
Kingsley stared at the crossbow introspectively, turning it over in his hands. He spoke without taking his eyes off the slick hunting weapon.
“Until three days ago I hadn’t seen you, Sammy or James in almost two years. I thought things might be different between us after all this time, and I didn’t want that. But when the four of us got together again, being there at the campsite with you guys felt so… normal. Like coming home. Our group and the bond we all share is pretty much the only thing in my life that feels concrete, that I know will never change. We always seem to find our way back to each other.” Kingsley half-smiled, lifting his eyes from the crossbow. “You only needed to tell me Sammy’s in trouble. I’m here for her, as I am for you.”
Eric matched his friend’s half-smile with a shaky one of his own.
“Do you have a plan?” Kingsley asked.
“When do I not? Come on, we should start walking. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
The survivors began to trudge toward the cycle lane that led through the opening in the wall at the end of the cul-de-sac, where they had entered the street after ditching the bus.
However, the man with the hammer, whom Eric thought he recognised as one of the local homeless, didn’t follow them. With everything going on, Eric hadn’t had time to wonder what this man was doing with Kingsley.
Thrive | Season 1 | Episodes 1-5 Page 15