by Frank Tayell
It lay in the road, its feet in the flooded gutter, but its torso on top of a mass of rotting leaves. The wound in its head was neat, and it was fresh. There was a rustle, then a bang of a bin falling over somewhere behind the houses.
“Bran?” Chester called.
He got a reply, but it wasn’t from Bran.
“Don’t reach for that gun,” Barclay said. “Slowly, turn around.”
Chester did. Barclay stood twenty feet away in the doorway of a two-storey house, a rifle in his hands.
“I don’t know you,” Barclay said.
“I know you,” Chester said. “Your name’s Barclay. You worked for Quigley. You held my friend hostage.”
“Do you mean Eamonn or Isabella? Eamonn? So you’re from London?”
Chester’s fingers tightened around the handle of his mace. Anger bubbled up from deep inside. It was a rage that had been festering for years. At times it had masked itself as fear, at other times frustration, but now it was just raw fury. Bran had once told him that stopping power was a myth. He was going to put that myth to the test.
“You were worked for Quigley. Did you know Cannock?” Chester asked.
Barclay smiled. “You know him?”
“He was a—” Chester hesitated. “I grew up with him. It is one of my deepest regrets that I didn’t get to kill him myself. You knew him, then? You’re one of those people. One of Quigley’s acolytes?” His eyes on Barclay, he bent his elbow so the mace began to swing back and forth.
“Cannock’s dead?” Barclay asked. “We all thought he might be, but I honestly didn’t dare believe it was true. Well, that is a good piece of news to end a bad day. Where’s Web?”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Branofski, where is he?” Barclay asked. “I saw him chasing me. You don’t know?”
“I know this,” Chester said, as he dropped his shoulder low, spun his arm up, and threw the mace at Barclay’s face. The renegade soldier pulled the trigger once as he ducked, but Chester heard three shots. He felt something tug at his arm. Barclay felt nothing as the two bullets hit him, one in the head, one in the neck. He fell, dead.
Bran stepped out of the alley opposite.
“You stepped into my sights,” the soldier said. “I had to work my way around the building.”
Chester laughed.
Bran frowned. “You didn’t see me?”
“Hadn’t a clue you were there,” Chester said. There was the sound of glass breaking further down the street.
Bran shook his head. “We can talk later. There are zombies coming. Let me see your arm.”
“You mean the horde? I heard on the sat-phone,” Chester said. “If we can find somewhere a helicopter can land in the next half hour, they can collect us. Otherwise we’ve got to keep running east until they have time to refuel.”
“It’s just a flesh wound. You’ll be fine. East is that way.” He pointed ninety degrees to the direction Chester had been travelling.
“Hang on,” Chester said. He walked over to Barclay’s body, and picked up his mace. “Say hello to Cannock when you see him,” he said to the corpse.
“How many did you get in the car park?” Chester asked, as they jogged through the streets.
“Four died two streets from the warehouse,” Bran said. “I got two inside the car park, one immediately outside, two more a couple of streets from here.”
“Add Barclay, and the four I got, and that makes… fourteen.”
“Thirteen. You winged one, didn’t kill him,” Bran said. “And thirteen is all there were.”
“Unlucky for some,” Chester muttered, “but not for us.”
A zombie staggered out of the broken door of a narrow terraced house. Bran brought his rifle up. The weapon clicked. Chester swung his mace, slamming the ancient metal into the creature’s skull. As it collapsed, he saw the other zombies behind. “There are four of them.”
“And no time,” Bran said. He pushed Chester on and away, pausing after fifty yards. “Give me your rifle. Mine’s jammed.” Chester handed it over. “Now run.”
They came to a halt when they reached Frederick Road. It was full of dozens of stalled cars, but more than twice that many of the undead. There was no access to the motorway a hundred yards to the east, so it was possible the vehicles had been trying to reach Aston Park whose southern entrance was to their left.
“I count thirty zombies on the road,” Bran said. “There’s more behind them. At least a hundred. They must have come from the motorway. We’re not going to be able to cross it here.”
“So we can’t go any further east,” Chester said. The zombies were drawing nearer, though the closest from that pack was still sixty yards away. “The rumbling of the horde’s getting closer. I can feel the vibrations through the soles of my feet. Either we head southwest and find a route around the motorway, or get air lifted from Aston Park.”
“Call Anglesey. Find out if the helicopter is still in the city,” Bran said. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as Chester made the call.
“We’re at Aston Park,” Chester said the moment the call was answered. “Can we be collected?”
“Stay on the line,” Bill said.
Chester could hear the background noise of Anglesey, and what sounded like an infant laughing, an exasperated woman asking why, a kettle boiling, and music playing. He heard a deathly sigh from far closer. He spun around, and saw the zombie crawling out from underneath the abandoned Volvo. He stepped forward and was already swinging the mace one-handed before he’d time to properly register the creature’s torn yellow and brown uniform. The mace slammed into the zombie’s skull. He knew that uniform. It was from a fast food place, wasn’t it? All restaurants were shut during the weeks of rationing, so how come the young man was still wearing it when the country had been overrun? He must have run out of anything else to wear. That was depressing. Bran fired again. Chester raised the phone back to his good ear, almost blocking out every other sound.
When he’d killed that zombie, he’d had to step close to the car. Close enough that the second crawling zombie was able to reach out from underneath and claw its hands around Chester’s boots. The creature pulled as its grip tightened. Chester almost fell over, dropping the phone as he dragged his foot free of those necrotic hands.
“Get off!” he yelled punching the mace down at the decayed arm still caught around his left leg. He stepped back, and looked for the phone.
“Time to move!” Bran yelled.
“I dropped the phone,” Chester said. He couldn’t see it. “It must be under the car.” As he bent down, the zombie with the wrecked arm kicked its way free of the vehicle.
“No time!” Bran said, pushing Chester towards the park. “Run!”
They did, for a hundred yards until they were on a wide avenue surrounded by partially flooded grassland dotted with massive bare trees. Even the evergreens seemed to be dying.
“You told them where we were?” Bran asked. He had the rifle raised to his shoulder, and was pivoting to the front, back, left, and right. “They’re following, but I can’t see any ahead. There may be some behind that screen of bushes. You told them where we were?”
“Yeah, yeah, I told them,” Chester said. “I said we were in Aston Park. I asked if we could be picked up from here. They didn’t have a chance to reply.”
“This way,” Bran said, pointing away from the entrance through which they’d come. “If the helicopter is still in the city, we’ll hear it before we get to the park’s far side. If we don’t hear it, we’ll keep going east. We’ll have to find a way across or through or under the motorway. Watch the left.” He raised the rifle, but didn’t pull the trigger. The zombie was thirty feet away. The creature slipped in the mud, splashing to its knees.
“East it is,” Chester said.
The grassland was frequently flooded, occasionally overgrown, but often withered and dead. The wide pedestrian thoroughfare was carpeted with a thick blanket of leaves and fallen branches,
interspersed with pecked-clean, off-white bones.
“Do you have any spare ammunition,” Bran asked.
Chester checked his pockets, his pack. “Just the one magazine.” He looked for the sidearm Bran had given him earlier in the day, but then remembered he’d given it to the older Isabella.
“How are your legs?” Bran asked.
“My legs are fine, it’s my knees that are the problem,” Chester said. “You’re limping a bit.”
“I know,” the soldier said. “We should hear the helicopter soon.”
Ahead of them was the centre of the park and Aston Hall, a seventeenth-century wide-windowed mansion that had become a museum. Parked outside were a score of heavy-duty vehicles. Trucks, lorries, vans, flatbeds, all were civilian, and explained where the abandoned cars outside the park were trying to reach. The boards nailed to half of the exterior ground-floor windows explained why they were trying to reach here. That only half of the windows were boarded-up told him what they’d been doing when they had been overrun. It had happened quickly, and a long time ago, judging by the decaying skeletons lying in the open doorway.
“We need a few minutes,” Bran said. “Somewhere to catch our breath.” He looked around. “One zombie behind us. Two in the grassland heading this way.”
Chester couldn’t see the distant living dead. He was grateful for that. There was a clatter from inside the mansion’s open doorway. A figure lurched out of the shadows and into the courtyard.
“We can’t rest here,” Bran said. He fired. The zombie collapsed.
They walked on in silence. Beyond the main part of the house was a one-storey extension. Its steep, sloping roof was only ten feet above the ground.
“Up here,” Bran said.
“You sure?” Chester asked, looking back and around.
“After this, we won’t be able to rest for at least two miles.” Bran raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot towards the grassland, then another, and then two back the way that they’d just come. “I think we’ve got five minutes.”
Chester reached up, and grabbed hold of the gutter. He hauled himself up, then reached down, and helped Bran onto the roof.
“Five minutes? The helicopter’s not coming, is it?” he said.
“No,” Bran said. “We’d have heard it. We’re on foot, and that means we’ve got to run through or under the motorway. We’ll have to—” He stopped. A sound had come from the far side of the roof. The extension was ten metres wide, but fifty metres long, creating an open space on its far side. That space was full of the undead. The zombies had heard their voices and were slowly rising to their feet.
“Back the way we came,” Chester said wearily.
Bran shook his head. “They’re coming across the grassland. I count ten in sight. There were more in the ground floor of the house coming out of that door.” He ejected the magazine from his rifle and checked the load. The first of the undead had reached the wall of the low extension. Its hands slapped into brick.
“I’ve got forty rounds,” Bran said. “We’ll need them.”
Another creature had reached the wall, then a third, a fourth. The building began to shake as fists and faces, feet and legs beat and kicked against the brick. In the distance, Chester was now sure he could hear the rumble of the approaching horde.
“The worst part of this,” Chester said, “is that even if we were to make this our desperate last stand, killing these zombies won’t make a blind bit of difference to anyone.”
“They’re starting to spill around the side of the building. Ten seconds,” Bran said. “Then we jump and run.” He pointed southeast. “ One hundred yards that way, then turn and sprint northeast.”
Below, glass shattered and wood splintered as a window broke.
“Are you ready?” Bran asked.
Chester closed his eyes and fixed Nilda’s face in his memory. He wanted that to be the last thing he’d think of. “I’m ready. It was a pleasure knowing you, Bran.”
“It’s not over yet.”
The building shook. Bricks tumbled from around the broken window frame as the undead pushed and clawed at the masonry. The roof sagged.
Gripping the mace tightly, Chester crossed to the edge of the roof. He could see two zombies that had made it around the edge of the extension, and four more indistinct figures approaching across the grassland. He was glad he couldn’t see the rest.
“Here we go,” he said.
“Wait!” Bran grabbed his arm just before Chester jumped.
“What?”
“The helicopter!” Bran said. He twisted the silencer free of the rifle. “You don’t have any flares? Matches?”
“Nothing,” Chester said, turning to look into the sky.
“Then wave your arms,” Bran said, as he fired the rifle into the mass of the undead. “I don’t know if they’ll hear the shots over the sound of the rotors, but they should notice the zombies.”
They did. Twenty seconds later, Chester heard it. Ten agonisingly long seconds after that, the helicopter appeared from over the ancient house. It hovered fifty feet above.
“Now what?” Chester yelled. The helicopter edged to the left, then to the right, slowly getting lower as it moved away from the mansion.
“Further along! To the edge of the extension!” Bran said.
Hearing the sound of the helicopter, the undead below had grown furiously active. The roof shook. It sagged above the broken window. With a thunderous crack, five feet of roof collapsed.
“Run!” Bran yelled, but Chester didn’t need the encouragement. He was already sprinting along the collapsing roof. The two men staggered to a halt three feet from the building’s edge. The helicopter hovered, thirty feet above.
“Do they want us to jump?” Chester yelled, eyeing the landing gear. It was an impossible distance away.
Before Bran could answer, the helicopter’s door opened. An orange bundle attached to a rope fell. The soldier grabbed it as it hit the roof. It was a harness. As soon as Bran took hold, someone above began working the winch, retracting the rope.
“Hold on!” Bran said, dropping his rifle. Chester let his mace fall and wrapped his arms through the straps.
“This can support the weight of two people, right?” Chester asked.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Bran said.
The rope went taut. With a lurch, they were wrenched upwards. The helicopter began to rise even as the rope slowly ascended. Chester didn’t look down, not until the rope stopped moving, arms reached out, and hauled them inside the helicopter.
Chester collapsed into a seat, closed his eyes, and didn’t open them until there was a tap on his arm. It was the dark-haired woman. She handed him a headset. He put it on.
“Hi, I’m Kim. We’ve not properly met, though I think I know you already.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he smiled.
“We’re coming up on it, if you want to see,” she said.
“See what?” he asked.
“The horde,” she said. “We’ve got five minutes’ margin of fuel, and we’re going to use it take some pictures. It’s the satellites,” she added at his clearly confused expression. “With this cloud cover, they’re useless. We need to see what we’re facing.”
“Right, sure, of course,” he said. “Out there?” He turned to look out the window more to forestall any further conversation than out of curiosity. Now that the immediate danger was over, his body was reacting to the activity of the last few hours. He was getting too old for a night without sleep, and he’d not had a proper night’s rest since he’d left London. His knees were screaming in agony worse than after that skirmish by Tower Bridge. Had that only been two weeks ago? He’d lost track. His arm ached. For some reason it was bandaged, and he couldn’t remember why or when that had happened. His ears were ringing, though that might have been the thrum of the rotors. His eyes were refusing to focus on the window. Then they focused on what was outside. It was a sea of mud, mercifu
lly indistinct, flowing up and over the city.
“I’m glad I can’t see it,” he murmured.
“Here, I’ve some binoculars,” Kim said.
Chester hadn’t realised the headset’s mic was still on. “That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t need to know the details.”
“There’s not much to see, not really,” Kim said. “The reservoir is just below us now. Or it was. It’s gone. I don’t know if they’ve filled it with corpses or with dirt or mud or what, but they’ve obliterated the warehouse, the reservoir, everything. I think they’re moving in an almost circular pattern, spinning anticlockwise, almost like a hurricane and just as destructive. Roads, houses, hills, even towns, they’ve left nothing in their wake. Since we know Bran came to Birmingham from the west, and you arrived from the south, we think it came from the north. It’s levelling the city. That’s what I wanted you to see.” There was an edge of desperation in her voice.
He turned away from the window and looked at her. “Why?”
“It’s barely over a hundred miles to London,” she said. “We think it came from the north, which means it was heading south. If it can utterly destroy Birmingham, it’ll do the same to London.”
Now he understood. He closed his eyes again. Searching for Eamonn had been an indulgence, despite that they’d found him. Locke and Barclay had been a distraction. It was the undead that were the immediate threat. They couldn’t simply hope the zombies would beat and mill themselves to death in that massive throng. They couldn’t hope that the zombies would die. They had to plan for the worst, and that was the horde reaching London. He and Nilda had talked about it, of course, but it was always framed as simply another danger like starvation or illness. It hadn’t seemed so real, so imminent.
When he opened his eyes, Kim was gone. He looked about the cabin. It was a larger helicopter than he’d realised, with seats for over twenty people. The children were huddled between the pair of Marines, chewing enthusiastically on bread rolls. The three Isabellas sat together. Mother, daughter, granddaughter, reunited. The younger Isabella was battered and bruised, but her eyes sparkled as she held her infant child.