by Frank Tayell
11th July – 3pm.
It's too hot to be outside now. What I wouldn't give for air conditioning. What I wouldn't give for ice and a fan and something cold to drink.
I went out first thing. Not for food, there's more than enough of that here, but there's so little else, and so much I need when my worldly possessions amount to nothing more than what I can carry on my back. Clothes, bandages, matches, thread, a map, a torch, books, water, toilet paper, medicines, every time I sit down I find there's something I’m missing.
There's a storeroom downstairs, behind the bar. Whatever was in there had been looted long ago, but at the back of the storeroom was another door. I didn't notice it at first, not with the stack of posters, banners and sandwich boards stacked up in front of it. The door led to a pantry. That's where I found the food. Half a dozen catering sized tubs of instant soup, some beef, some tomato, some mushroom, instant coffee, tea and enough ketchup and mustard to sauce a thousand hot dogs. There'd been biscuits too, but those had gone mouldy.
It's interesting that the rats and mice didn't get in there. I wondered why until I remembered the footprints of an uncountable number of feet. A huge swarm of millions of the undead, trampling the countryside. Either the rodents flee before it, are crushed under foot, or, for all I know, have barricaded themselves in their holes, hiding like the rest of us.
After I found the powdered soup, half of the immediate problems were solved. The other half, that's the lack of water. It's been nearly a week since it last rained, and that wasn't anything more than a light shower. Now it seems like a heat-wave is setting in. Finding water is a daily task. Toilet cisterns, hot water boilers, long forgotten bottles of water left in glove boxes. It's out there, but each day, I have to go further to find it. Then it's back here, to boil it up. It takes all morning. Getting it from the river is very definitely not an option. Typhoid, cholera, who knows what disease that water is carrying.
I don't want to stay here, but there is nowhere nearby that is any better. Besides, I won't be here long. I've enough water for today at least, so until tomorrow, and whilst there's still daylight I might as well make use of it.
We were in the car, heading north. Once I had worked out the rhythm of the road, driving became easier. It was a case of drive on the left, then swerve to the right, then straight on for twenty metres, then swerve to the left, then straight on and swerve and so on. I managed to avoid head-on collisions, but still I kept hitting the undead with the side of the car, and it was taking a real beating.
After ten minutes we lost the right wing mirror. After fifteen we'd lost the left. After twenty five minutes I was starting worry that the sides were going to be so dented we'd never open the doors if we needed to escape.
For all Bill's talk of plan B and plan C and plan X, Y and Z, I didn't think we'd make it more than a few more miles, let alone to the M4. I was just concentrating on the road, hoping we could get close enough to the river that we could run the rest of the way.
“I'll take the wheel for a moment,” Bill said suddenly. “You wrap up your face. It's OK. It's a straight bit.”
“Why?” I asked, but I was already pulling my scarf around my face leaving only my sunglasses uncovered.
“You too, Liz. I don't know that these windows will take much more.”
In the rear view mirror I watched her wrap her head in one of the blankets covering the spare fuel-cans.
“What's coming up, Bill?” I asked, as I retook the wheel.
“Nothing,” he said, looking at me, and I knew he was lying and he knew I knew. “We're coming up to the bridge in about three miles. Try not to stop, but if you have to, throw the car into reverse and just go backwards as fast as you can.” He pulled out the pistol and half turned in the seat. “Liz, you've got the back. If the windows break, just push them away. Don't waste your time trying to kill them, OK? Right. You've got a weapon?”
In the rear view mirror I saw her hold up a cleaver, the blade and handle covered in neon-pink plastic. It wasn't ideal under the circumstances, not a proper butcher's tool, but the kind for the home kitchen where every utensil had to “match”. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up just at the thought of her waving it around in such close quarters.
“This isn't going to be pleasant,” Bill said,” but it is going to be quick. We'll get through to the other side then it's just a short drive to the river. The zombies around the motorway, they'll have heard the truck, they'll be heading that way.”
The way Bill said “through to the other side” struck me as strange, then I understood what we were about to do. My mouth went dry.
“How far?” I asked.
“About two miles,” he said.
I stretched in the seat. Trying to get in a better position, hunching forward slightly. Flexing my shoulders, gripping and ungripping the wheel. The number of undead in front of us thinned out. We'd entered the dead zone that lay before the motorway.
The road bent, and then I saw it, the M4. Inside and in front were the undead. They were too far away to make out any details, but it looked nothing like the scene he had described. Where he had described a quiet, waiting mass, now it heaved and shoved and pushed as it headed towards where the truck must have crossed. As, with each second, we got closer, the sound of our little engine was drowned out by the pummelling, moaning, bone-cracking crescendo of thousands upon thousands of zombies that we were heading towards. I tried to focus on the road ahead and nothing else.
Then I saw the bridge, but it was the motorway that went over it. Our road went through a tunnel underneath. I didn't say anything. Bill knew, and what Liz didn't know, she couldn't scream about.
“Good luck,” Bill muttered quietly.
“Same to you,” I replied.
We were five hundred metres away, when the movement of the horde started to change. Slowly at first, in ones, then fives, then tens, the undead in front of the motorway began to stalk our way.
I glanced at the fields to either side. Thousands of feet had turned them into a crater pocked landscape. I looked behind. The road was packed. There was no going back, around or to the left or right. There was nothing but going forward through the tunnel. I tried to evade them, twisting the car left and right and left again, keeping around twenty miles an hour, wanting to go faster, but afraid we'd crash if I did.
Then we hit a zombie. It was a glancing blow on the side of the car that made the whole vehicle shake. Gritting my teeth I pulled my foot up and off the accelerator. Fifteen miles an hour. We hit another. The lights on the left hand side of the car smashed with the impact, the body rolled up over the bonnet and thumped into the window before sliding off and down.
Now we were less than two hundred metres from the tunnel. We hit a third, it was dragged under the wheels, and the car thumped and skidded as we drove over the living corpse. Then a fourth, then a fifth, then their hands were swatting and scraping at the paintwork as we drove over and into them. The windows cracked. The roof buckled as one rolled up the bonnet and over the car. The exhaust rattled and coughed as it thumped against the still grasping hands of a zombie, knocked down by the scrum as the mass of the undead tried to reach their prey.
A hundred metres before we reached the tunnel we hit a zombie square on. The front bumper hit its legs, smashing the bone, and flipped the creature onto the bonnet. The momentum carried its head through the windscreen.
“Close your mouth and eyes,” Bill shouted as he levelled the gun and fired. The sound was immense. I felt the splatter of gore and bone over my covered face.
Liz was screaming, I remember that. I think she'd been screaming for a while, but I just hadn't noticed. I opened my eyes. With the dead creature obscuring my view all I could see was the fence around the motorway. It was starting to bow and flutter like a sail, as the zombies inside pushed and tore and were crushed against the concrete and chain link by the pressure of those behind.
I put my foot down, as Bill pushed the dead zombie out of the way. S
peed would kill us, or it would save us, but right then and there I knew that dying in a crash was infinitely preferably to being forced to stop. There was no going back, no evasion, no retreat, nothing but death unless we kept going on.
Liz screamed again as one of the side windows smashed. I kept my eyes ahead, swerving the car to the left, then to the right, accelerating into them whenever there was a slight gap. In my peripheral vision I saw Bill turn with the gun pointed into the back, but Liz must have dealt with that threat because he didn’t fire.
Then we were under the motorway. Automatically I flipped the lights on. Nothing happened. They were all broken. All about us was darkness. I sped up once more, my eyes now fixed on the thin light at the end of the tunnel.
There was a deafening cannon of gunfire as Bill fired again, this time without warning, and this time Liz didn't scream. All I heard was a meaty thump of dead flesh. I was half deafened and three quarters blinded by the explosion of gunpowder. I couldn't tell where Bill had been aiming, whether he had hit anything or what was going on in the back. I tried to grip the steering wheel tighter, I tried to accelerate, but we kept hitting the undead, the collisions rocked the car. Liz swore and I was actually relieved to know she was alive. I tried to focus on the light ahead, I remembered thinking, one way or another, it would be all over soon.
The car lurched suddenly to the right as one of the tyres blew. I over corrected, and we started to skid, the rectangle of daylight shifting to the right. I took my foot off the pedal, turned the wheel, but I over-corrected. I turned the wheel again, this time the rectangle of light was back in front, and much larger, but we'd slowed to little more than a walking pace. I put my foot down again.
The gun fired. Liz screamed. The light got brighter. The driver side window broke. An arm came in. The gun fired. The arm disappeared. The engine coughed. Bill fired. I hit another zombie, the body rolled up the bonnet, lodging against the window. I couldn’t see the sky. I couldn't see the road. In the sudden darkness I couldn't see anything except a thin thread of brownish ooze trickling down onto the steering wheel.
Bill shoved at the body, pushing at it until it fell away. I could see again, and I saw that we were out of the tunnel and the road ahead of us was almost empty of the undead.
Carefully, conscious of the flat tyre, I eased my foot down and we picked up a little speed. Bill was twisting this way and that in his seat, checking the sides, checking behind.
“We're clear,” he said, what seemed like an hour later, but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.
“We're clear,” I repeated. “Tyres gone,” I added, and now that the blood had stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the metallic scrapping of the exhaust dragging along behind us. I raised a hand to the mirror, to where the mirror had been. At some point it had fallen off. I turned in my seat, looked behind and saw the motorway. I saw the fence. I saw it give way. I watched as thousands of the undead fell, pouring down one after the other onto the road behind us. Thousands and thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Every time I close my eyes that image is all that I see. There's a line from some song or poem or something that I learnt at school, and that's only way I can think to describe it. “I turned and I saw, the gates of Hell had opened, and darkness poured through.”
I glanced down at the dashboard. The plastic was fractured, the speedometer was stuck on 100 and the needle on the fuel gauge was stuck on empty.
“Which way to the river,” I asked.
“We want to take a right in about five miles,” Bill said, as he reloaded the pistol. “Then it's about three miles to the boat house. You think the car can make it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I replied. “I can run eight miles. Can you?”
“You run, don't worry about me, I'll be following. What about you, Liz,” Bill said twisting in his seat, “you ever done any marathon's... Oh hell.”
I turned and saw Liz was holding up her hand. She'd thrown a hasty bandage around it, but there was no mistaking the blood, nor what it meant.
We made it to within a mile of the boat house before the exhaust finally fell off, another half a mile or so and the engine started to splutter and die. Bill had spent the drive with the gun in his hand staring at Liz. For her part, she had said nothing. She wasn't catatonic, but had the silence of the condemned about her.
“Out,” Bill said, unnecessarily, when the car chugged to a halt. I grabbed the rifle, the ammo and my pack. Bill grabbed his pike and his bag. Liz stumbled out of the car, clutching nothing but her injured hand. I took a moment to load the rifle, then slung it on my back. I looked at the fuel-cans, but there was no way of taking them with us.
Then we ran. We didn't bother to stop to kill the undead. Bill on the left, me on the right, Liz in the middle, we ran.
We didn't look back. What would have been the point? We were about ten miles from the motorway, two hours ahead of that horde. Time was against us.
We saw the truck first. That beautiful yellow beast. Between it and a low building on the water's edge were the undead, eight or nine of them, but they hadn't seen us.
Then I heard the voices, coming, I was sure, from inside the building. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognised Annette's strident protest. Then an engine started. They'd found a boat.
“Keep quiet!” I hissed to Bill and Liz. The temptation to tell them we were coming was immense, but we had to keep silent as long as possible to avoid alerting the creatures ahead of us.
Then Liz shouted. It wasn't loud, she was out of breath, and suffering from blood loss. I doubt it any of the others heard it, but the zombies did. Their heads swivelled our way, then the undead started their ponderously grim march towards us.
I shifted the axe and looked ahead, the doors to the boathouse would have to be locked or barricaded by the others. We weren't going to get in there, but we could make it down to the jetty, and get on the boat there. If we could just get through the zombies in front of us.
“Head straight to the river bank,” Bill said, thinking the same as me. He'd fallen behind slightly, whether by design or because of his leg, but now he pushed ahead, his pike shifting in his hands as he ran straight at the undead and the truck that blocked our way to the river bank.
I would have laughed. Even under those circumstances, I almost did. He was moving with this hoping sideways skip that seriously did him no favours. I almost laughed, until I heard Daisy cry. Then I picked up my pace too. I left Liz to fend for herself. It wasn't exactly everyone for themselves, but I wasn't sure that hers was a life I could save, whereas up ahead were Annette and Daisy.
Bill reached the zombies first. They were clustered together, an horrific clump with three in front, almost abreast of each other. He swung the pike up behind him, his left foot leaving the ground as he pirouetted in a three hundred degree twist. The blade scythed down in a huge arc, hitting the front three between shoulder and ear. The first two went down, not dead, but knocked over from the force of the blow, a thin brownish line scared diagonally across their dirt streaked faces. The pike had stuck in the third, buried deep in its neck.
I stopped watching him then, as I was now only a couple of metres away from one of the undead. Half its scalp was missing, on the other half, lank strands of red hair whipped across its face as its hands lashed out towards me. I swung my axe up in front, in a two handed blow that slammed the blade into the creature's chin with a sickeningly damp crunch of bone. The momentum knocked it from its feet. I didn't wait to see if it was dead. I changed my grip and swung the blade at another. It sliced through outstretched fingers and bit deep into its neck. I pushed back as it crumpled towards me and pulled the axe free.
In another couple of paces I was at the truck. I jumped up onto the truck-bed, and clambered onto the roof. Then I unslung the rifle and I began to fire.
I didn't have time to think. I barely had time to aim. There were now a dozen there on the jetty, another twenty or so coming up on us from the road and I don't
know how many pouring around the buildings to our south.
Bill was moving around too much. I remember pointing the rifle at the group near him, trying to find a target, but he kept getting in the way. I turned my attention to Liz. She'd been bitten again, but she was still alive, half crawling towards the truck. I fired. The head of a zombie about to drop on her exploded. I picked another target, and I fired again, and again. Liz reached the truck and I started firing at any target I could see.
Seconds or minutes later, I’m not sure how long it was, the engine noise from the shed changed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the boat edging out of the boathouse into the river, turning into the current. Liz started waving and shouting.
“Bill! The boat's coming!” I yelled. I took a step backwards, fired, and then glanced down at the distance I'd have to jump from the truck. I fired again, and as I reloaded I looked down at the fuel-cans still in the back of the truck. With the ones we'd left in the back of the car, they couldn't have taken more than nine with them onto the boat. Not enough, I was sure of that. Nowhere near enough if Bill and I were going to take some to drive the girls somewhere safe. There was no way I was going to be able to swim carrying one, but I thought, that maybe, when the boat got close to shore, I could throw a can on board. Fuel equals Speed equals Time equals Life, that was what I thought as I stood there, on the roof of the truck.
I fired again, glancing towards the river between shots. The boat was out of the boathouse now, its turn almost complete. I couldn't judge how close it was going to get. I could only afford to spare the briefest of glimpses, and they weren't nearly long enough to gauge how far into the water the concrete jetty extended. I knew we'd have to wade, and I was starting to think we may have to swim.