Overtime (After the Fall Book 3)

by Stephen Cross

  “When you reach my age, anyone under thirty is a kid, that includes you. I need to make my decisions based on keeping the most of us alive.” said Allen.

  “I don’t know how much more I can take sir.”

  Allen put his hand on Lewis’s shoulder. “Dig deep lad. We’re army. We’ll always find what we need.”

  They both jumped at a loud thump on the door. The wood around the handle chipped.

  “Come on, we need to go.”

  Chapter 10

  Eighteen, including the soldiers, survived. They stood in the dusk of the dying day, on the main road that led into the peninsula of Cornwall. The office building that had been their brief prison stood in silhouette a mere few hundred yards away. Noise from the surrounding hoard of zeds vibrated in the background, like the constant hum of a distant motorway on a summer’s day.

  Allen guided them to a field on the other side of the road, behind a large hedge. They were tired, scared, thirsty, and hungry.

  “We’re going to have to keep going through the night,” said Allen with resignation. “We don’t have a choice. If we find somewhere we can hold up, we will. Then as soon as we have a base, we can find some food.”

  The soldiers passed round their canteens. What little there was, was shared.

  Lynsey called over Allen. She was sitting with Neil, an older chap, must have been in his mid sixties, thin and frail looking. The past few months of constant moving and low calories hadn’t been good to him. “He’s hurt his leg in the drop.”

  “It’s nothing too serious, Sarge,” said Neil. He had an trustworthy northern accent and always managed a smile. Allen liked him. “Just a knock, I’ll be good soon enough.”

  Allen inspected the man’s ankle, his trouser leg rolled up to reveal a red swelling. “We don’t have time for soon enough. Can you walk?”

  “Get me a stick and I can,” said Neil. His smile faltered, just for second, but Allen was attuned to people’s micro-expressions after years of dealing with unruly grunts. He knew Neil was scared.

  “Good enough for me,” said Allen.

  Allen searched the nearby field, whilst Singh and Lewis kept look out to be sure the hoard across the road didn’t make any moves their way. Once he had found a reasonable walking stick for Neil, they were on the move, west towards Cornwall.

  It was near one o’clock in the morning when they came to a petrol station in a lay-by off the road.

  “Wait here,” said Allen in hushed tones to the group. “Singh, come with me, let’s take a look.”

  The forecourt had one car sitting in it, an old army jeep. Blood was splattered on the windows, and both doors were open. The front windscreen was shattered.

  “Army,” said Singh, a question hovering in his voice.

  Allen nodded as they walked slowly past the vehicle.Army - Allen didn’t know whether that was good or bad these days, ever since his own unit had splintered in the first days of the Fall.

  “Let’s check out the petrol station first, we’ll look at the jeep later.”

  They shone their torches against the darkness of the petrol station’s shop interior. Beachball wide circles of light revealed empty shelves, broken windows, turned over newspaper displays. Dust hung in the air, the micro particles floating gently in the bright beams.

  It looked abandoned, like everywhere else, but you could never be sure.

  Singh opened the door quickly and Allen moved into the building holding his sledgehammer up, and his torch ahead. A noise from the left alerted him to movement. A zed was on the floor in army fatigues, a hole in its chest, the lower torso covered in blood. Its left leg had been gnawed to the bone, leaving it unable to stand.

  The zed pulled at the floor, its fingers dashing uselessly off the smooth tiles of the floor, moaning in frustration. Allen brought the hammer down hard on its head. It smashed with a dull thump. Skull and blood and flesh squeezed out the side of its head like a novelty sized tube of toothpaste.

  “Careful,” said Allen. “Something went down here.”

  They spent the next five minutes checking the shop carefully, finding no other occupants, alive or otherwise.

  Amongst the scavenged shelves, however, they were a few packets of crackers, a few tins of cat food and several out of date chocolate bars. “Enough for a feast,” said Singh, laughing without humour.

  They moved the civilians in.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” said Allen. “We can take the watch in turns, an hour at a time if we have enough volunteers.”

  A good number of hands shot up. Neil took the first watch, even offering to do extra hours. He was obviously conscious he was slowing them down.

  “No Neil, we’ll all do an hour,” said Allen. “Let’s make sure we all get some sleep.”

  They settled around the floor, keeping tight together. Everyone was comfortable enough now to sleep close and preserve warmth. There was no coyness after the Fall.

  Allen dragged the dead zed out of the shop and studied the insignia. He called Lewis and Singh out. “Look, from our unit.”

  “Dalby’s been here?” said Singh.

  Dalby had been their Lieutenant at the time of the Fall. The man who had ordered the mass slaughter of civilians at the London Barrier.

  Allen didn’t answer, but walked over to the jeep. A standard army issue, dirty and rusted around the wheel arches. The door was wide open. He shined in his torch. The inside was covered in blood, the site of a slaughter. The seats, the dashboard, the doors, all thick with deep red and sticky blood, glistening like varnish in the light of Allen’s torch.

  “It’s fresh,” said Allen. “Can’t be more than a few hours old.”

  The three men suddenly felt awake, a heightened state of alert capturing them all. Allen felt his senses light up, a invisible switch pulled in his mind, one that he didn’t know how to turn on or off, but always came on at the right time.

  “Let’s kill the lights,” he said.

  But as turned off his light, something caught his eye and it froze in red freeze-frame on his retina against the darkness. He flashed his light back on.

  On the floor of the jeep.

  A piece of clothing. Allen swallowed. He reached in and picked it up.

  “What is it Sarge?” said Singh.

  Allen held it up. A child’s t-shirt with a Tomcat F14 fighter jet on the front. It used to be white, but was now splattered with red, like a hippy tie-dye experiment.

  Allen felt hollow, his breathing fast and sharp. He looked in the neck of the T-shirt.

  Adam Allen. Written in thick marker on the label.

  Adam’s T-shirt. His favourite T-shirt. The one he had wore the last time they had been in Cornwall together. The memory of his ten year old boy, running in the surf, jumping through the waves, laughing with delight, was the ice-clear vision that had kept him alive this past three months. It was the dream he played over and over.

  “Sarge, you ok?” said Lewis.

  Allen felt his legs go from under him. He sunk to the ground, his knees folding.

  “Sarge, what is it?”

  Allen reached into his chest pocket and fetched out the picture, holding it up for Lewis and Singh to see.

  The two soldiers looked at the image, confused faces at first, but Lewis noticed it first. He pointed out the T-shirt to Singh, who closed his eyes.

  Lewis put his arm on Allen’s shoulder. “It doesn’t mean… well, you know, doesn’t mean anything,” said Lewis, faltering.

  Lewis’s arm on his shoulder made him uncomfortable.

  “I know,” he said.

  He pulled himself back up, his legs still feeling weak. He had never felt like this before. The only word he could use was incapacitated. The thought that drilled at the back of his mind was that his boy was dead. He had spent the past three months believing that Adam was alive, that somewhere, somehow he was alive, he had made it. Now he was faced with hard evidence that his son was gone.

  But there was no body….


  The pragmatic part of his mind that had kept him alive through numerous tours of Afghanistan and Iraq kicked in. There was no body. That meant he could still be alive. Adam had to still be alive.

  “Sir?” said Lewis from the distant real world.

  Allen forced himself to return to the darkness of the garage forecourt. The silent cold world. Lewis and Singh were staring at him.

  “Lewis, continue securing the area,” he said. “Singh, get back in the shop and make sure everyone is good and safe. We all need sleep, we've got a long way to go.”

  “We still going to Cornwall sir?” said Singh.

  “Of course we are.”

  THE END - THANK YOU!

  Seriously, a huge thank you for reading Overtime – I really hope you enjoyed it. Without readers, then there's no point to my writing, so just having one person read and enjoy my work is a whole world of awesome.

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  You find out how Sergeant Allen survived the Fall, along with seven other zombie novelettes in...

  SURVIVING THE FALL

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KBPYRFM

  How England died. The story of the first few days of the zombie apocalypse, of those who lived, and those who died.

  Surviving the Fall collects eight non-stop terror tales in one action packed volume, which together tell of the panic filled dawn of a new, undead world.

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KBPYRFM