As we sped across the water, cold salty spray flew into my face. I turned my head so I was looking behind us and I saw the Big Easy and Lucky Escape sitting out in deeper water. Lucy stood leaning on the Big Easy’s railings, watching the Zodiac cut through the sea towards land. From this distance, I couldn’t see her face but I was sure her gaze was expressionless.
Sam saw me looking back the way we’d come and shouted so I could hear him above the splashing water and the growl of the motor. “Don’t worry about her, man, she’ll be fine.”
“It isn’t that,” I told him. “It’s just that she was really down on us helping those soldiers. That isn’t like her at all.”
He shrugged. “She’s been through a lot, man. We all have. She’s allowed to feel down whenever she wants.”
I nodded. “Yeah, of course.” I didn’t expect Lucy to be happy all the time—given the circumstances we found ourselves in, it was a miracle we found any moments of happiness at all—but I was worried that she was isolating herself from the reality of our situation. Whenever going ashore was mentioned, whether for a food run or to help someone like the soldiers who had called us on the radio, she became cold.
I didn’t know if it was because each time we went ashore we might never return or if she was trying to forget what was happening on the mainland and focus her thoughts only on the relatively comfortable and safe world of the boat.
If that was the case, I really couldn’t blame her; we all wanted to feel safe and the boat was the perfect haven from the zombie-infested mainland. But I found it impossible to remain in the bubble of protection afforded by the Big Easy when I knew someone needed help. Maybe that was where Lucy and I differed; she could ignore a cry for help where I could not.
“There’s no movement on the shore,” Tanya said, still peering through the binoculars. “And we’ll get a choice of vehicle; I can see plenty of cars parked near the harbour. No boats, though. They were probably used to get everyone from the village to safety.”
“Things are looking good so far,” Sam said, ever the optimist. He throttled down as we got closer to the harbour and guided the Zodiac to the wooden jetty.
Tanya grabbed the mooring rope and jumped onto the jetty before securing the Zodiac to a cleat. I picked up the duffel bag of weapons from between my feet and tossed it to her. Then, followed closely by Sam, I climbed out of the boat and onto the wooden planks of the jetty.
Opening the bag, Tanya selected a Walther PPK handgun and an M16 rifle, which she slung over her shoulder. Sam and I did the same. The weapons were courtesy of the government when they’d recruited us to deliver vials of vaccine to a number of army bases and had come in handy on a number of occasions. The only problem was, we were running low on ammo.
In consideration of this fact, we’d also brought three baseball bats with us. In close quarters, they were just as useful as a gun. Actually, they were our weapon of choice because they didn’t make any noise. A gunshot would attract zombies from miles around.
Brandishing a bat each, we left the empty duffel bag on the jetty and walked slowly and carefully to the shore. Tanya hadn’t seen any obvious movement through the binoculars but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t be hiding in one of the buildings nearby or that there wasn’t a horde of zombies around here, standing dormant until they heard a sound.
“This place is creepy,” I whispered. “It’s like a ghost town.”
The road from the harbour climbed the cliff and was bordered by a number of houses but all of them seemed empty. A small car park near where we stood was full of cars. This was probably the place where the residents parked their vehicles since there wasn’t any space on the narrow road outside the houses.
“They definitely didn’t drive out of here,” Tanya said. “Maybe they all sailed away.”
“Or the army took them,” I said. Since the apocalypse had begun, the army seemed hellbent on rounding up all the survivors and placing them in military camps. They even used a government-run radio station, Survivor Radio, which urged everyone to go to their nearest camp.
My dad and brother were in one of those camps but I had no desire to join them. The last place I wanted to be was trapped behind walls and fences, reliant on the military to protect me from the nasties.
At least out here, I could choose my own destiny and even help others when the opportunity arose. It was a far cry from my former life as a nerdy gamer working a dead-end job and living off fast food.
We reached the cars and Sam pointed at a silver Nissan X-trail. He went over to it and tried the driver’s door. It opened. Sam leaned inside and gave us a thumbs up. “The keys are inside.”
“I guess the owners knew they weren’t coming back,” Tanya said, moving around to the passenger side.
I got in behind Sam and placed my weapons beside me on the back seat.
He started the engine and inspected the gauges on the dashboard. “Half a tank of petrol. More than enough for our needs.” He put the vehicle into reverse and backed out of the parking space, spinning the steering wheel so we pointed in the direction of the road.
Tanya took a map out of her pocket and opened it. She pointed at it and said to Sam, “We’re here.” She traced her finger along the paper and stopped at an area she’d circled with a red pen. “We need to get to here.”
“No problem.” Sam put the X-Trail into gear and drove steadily to the car park’s exit. Then he turned onto the road that wound past the houses and up to the top of the cliffs.
As we rolled past the houses, I watched their windows for signs of life. Or maybe ‘signs of movement’ would be a better term since life wasn’t required for something to be moving in those buildings now that the apocalypse was here.
After seeing nothing behind the windows, I sat back in my seat and relaxed a little. The village appeared to be completely deserted.
“How long until we get to the Land Rover?” I asked.
“A couple of minutes,” Tanya said. “It isn’t far.”
I felt a mounting sense of anticipation and fear. We knew the Land Rover had been attacked by zombies. Those same zombies would still be hanging around. And more would be arriving, attracted by the sound of gunfire.
Not to mention the soldiers Sergeant Locke had warned me of. They would also be on their way to the area. We were driving into a hotbed of activity.
We reached the clifftop. The road levelled out and then intersected a larger, main road. Sam turned left and we drove south. This road was lined with low dry stone walls and beyond them, I could see fields. In the distance, figures moved through the grass with slow, stumbling gaits. They were zombies and they were also moving south.
A couple of minutes later, I was jerked forward against my seatbelt when Sam hit the brakes suddenly.
“Looks like this is the place,” he said.
The road ahead was crowded with shambling zombies. They seemed to have got onto the road by pushing through the dry stone walls because there were stones everywhere and the walls were destroyed. I guessed that this pack of creatures had been wandering in the fields when Echo Six’s Land Rover had broken down. It had probably only taken a couple of minutes for the undead to stagger onto the road and surround the vehicle.
I could see Echo Six’s Land Rover in the middle of the horde. The tailgate was open but no gunfire issued from the vehicle so I assumed everyone inside was dead.
Almost in unison, the zombies turned to face our vehicle. Their skin was the mottled grey-blue of dead flesh and the whites of their eyes had turned yellow. Many of them bore wounds that told the tale of their manner of death. Some had missing limbs, others deep scratches that had ripped their flesh apart.
Their clothes were ragged and torn, probably as a result of the undead corpses wandering around the countryside without regard for obstacles in their path.
“If I reverse back along the road,” Sam said, “maybe I can lead them away from the Land Rov—”
His words were cut off and I leane
d forward to see what had made him stop talking mid-sentence. Through the windscreen, I saw the zombies shambling towards us but nothing more.
Then I realised Sam was looking in the rearview mirror. I turned in my seat and saw two military Land Rovers behind us on the road. These must be the soldiers Sergeant Locke had mentioned, the ones he warned must not get their hands on whatever it was Echo Six had stolen from them.
“There’s no going back now,” Sam said.
3
Instead of backing up, Sam slammed the gear stick into first gear and pressed the accelerator pedal gently. the X-Trail crept towards the zombie horde.
“Hold on,” Sam said. “I’m going to try and bully my way through.” He increased our speed slightly, keeping the vehicle in first gear. The zombies in front of the car didn’t move so Sam simply plowed into them. Their bodies made sickening crunching sounds as they hit the radiator grill or went down beneath the tyres.
Undead hands slammed against the windows as the zombies who weren’t in our path tried to force their way into the car. I peered out of my window at dozens of faces staring back at me with hateful yellow eyes. They wanted nothing more than to break my window, pull me out of the vehicle and rip me apart with their teeth and nails.
The hatred in their eyes sent a chill rushing along my spine.
I directed my attention to the two army Land Rovers behind us. They didn’t move forward. Instead, they sat on the road, engines idling, waiting for something.
“They’re not even shooting at us,” I said.
Tanya turned in her seat and looked out of the rear window. “They don’t know who we are and they have no idea Echo Six contacted us. As far as they know, we’re just a group of civilians out on a day trip.”
I thought about that. If the soldiers didn’t know who we were, that gave us the element of surprise. They didn’t know we were here for the contents of Echo Six’s Land Rover so maybe we could use that to our advantage.
“What’s the plan?” I asked the others.
“First we need to get through this horde of walking corpses,” Sam said. “Then we need to either take out those soldiers behind us or get to the stuff in the Land Rover before they do and escape without getting shot.”
He sped up slightly. We were moving at a speed slow enough to not plow into the zombies ahead of us at high speed and damage the car but fast enough that they couldn’t break their way into the vehicle. That was a luxury Sergeant Locke and his team hadn’t had. It was clear from the state of their Land Rover—which we were passing now—that the nasties had broken their way inside.
All of the windows were smashed and the tailgate was open. I tried to see inside the back of the vehicle but my view was blocked by zombies clawing at my window.
“I guess the guys inside will be hybrids now,” Sam said.
The military had run a vaccination project to protect their personnel from becoming zombies if they got bitten. It had backfired spectacularly. If a vaccinated soldier was bitten by a zombie, instead of becoming undead, he would isolate himself for three or four days. This was an incubation period during which some sort of metamorphosis occurred.
After the incubation period, the soldier became a hybrid. Hybrids weren’t animated dead corpses at all; they were much more dangerous. They were fast and strong and consumed by a murderous rage. Because they were alive and not made up of dead flesh, they didn’t avoid rain or water or anything else. They were savage killing machines.
“They will be soon,” I said, thinking of Sergeant Locke’s voice on the radio. He’d trusted me to do what was right and now, thanks to a simple bite, he was turning into a monster much worse than he could ever have imagined.
We drove past the Land Rover and Sam increased our speed, taking us past the horde and onto clear road. Some of the zombies staggered after us but most turned their attention to the other two Land Rovers.
A group of six soldiers dressed in camouflage jackets and brandishing SA80 rifles were getting out of the vehicles and assuming firing stances. “Keep going,” I told Sam. “They’re going to start firing.”
Sam floored the accelerator and the X-Trail sped along the road. As we drove around a sharp bend and the zombies and soldiers disappeared from view, I heard gunshots.
Sam hit the brakes and we came to a stop. He turned in his seat and looked at both me and Tanya. “What are we going to do? They’ll kill the zombies and get the prize.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw eight soldiers. Three got out of each Land Rover and the drivers stayed inside.”
“Eight of them, three of us,” Tanya said. “I don’t like those odds.”
It wasn’t only the odds I didn’t like. Those soldiers back there were human beings, just like us. Dispatching zombies and killing hybrids was one thing but taking the lives of men who were probably just following orders was something else entirely.
I cursed the fact that we’d wasted so much time on the Big Easy debating whether or not to come ashore. If we’d arrived here before the soldiers, we could have taken out the zombies and be long gone by now but their presence made things a lot more complicated.
“So what do we do?” Sam asked again. “I’m not going home until I know what’s in that Land Rover that’s so important.”
“Agreed,” I said. I’d promised Sergeant Locke I’d help and I wasn’t about to give up and go home. But I also didn’t want innocent blood on my hands.
Tanya was studying the map. She showed it to Sam and said, “If we follow this road and take the next left, it’ll take us to this crossroads here.” She pointed at a spot on the map. “Assuming they’re going to return the same way they came, we can set up an ambush.”
“Sounds good,” Sam said, putting the car back into gear and setting off again. “They deal with the zombies while we wait. Then we take the mystery box from them while they’re transporting it back to their base. Sounds easy.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “Easy? Those men back there are trained soldiers. If we get in a firefight with them, I don’t like the odds, whether we ambush them or not. And should we even be trying to kill them in the first place? They’re probably innocent military personnel following orders from someone higher up the chain of command.”
Sam frowned at me in the rearview mirror. “Dude, you’re the one who said they’re evil.”
“I never said they’re evil.”
He looked at Tanya. “Did he say they’re evil?”
“Not exactly.”
Turning his attention back to me, he said, “Well if they’re not evil, we should just let them take whatever’s in that Land Rover back to their base so they can continue Operation Dead Ground. Because that definitely doesn’t sound evil to me, dude. Sounds to me like they’re trying to save the human race with a name like that.”
“Turn here,” Tanya told him.
He turned left and we were heading north again, on a road that ran parallel to the one we’d just been on.
“So we’re going to ambush and kill them?” I asked. It didn’t feel right to me that we were planning to murder these soldiers just to get whatever they were taking from Echo Six’s Land Rover.
“Do you have a better plan, Alex?” Tanya asked.
I tried to think of something—anything—that would mean we could recover the items from the soldiers without any loss of life but nothing came to mind. Where Sam, Tanya, and Lucy were the gung-ho action heroes of our group, I was usually the planner, the thinker, the ideas guy. But right now, I felt totally useless.
Staring out of the window, I wondered if I could aim my gun at an innocent man and pull the trigger. The fields of grass undulating in the slight breeze and the distant shimmering sea had no answers for me so I turned away from the window and focused on my two companions.
Tanya was studying the map with emotionless dark eyes and Sam was staring at the road ahead.
“Hey,” he said, catching my eyes in the rearview mirror, “We’ve had run-ins with the
military before and you’ve fired a few shots. Why is this time different?”
“Those other times, it was self-defence.”
“So think of this as self-defence as well. If that guy on the radio was right, there’s some bad shit in that Land Rover and those evil soldiers are going to take it back to their base where it’s probably going to be used to end the world or something.”
“I didn’t say they were evil,” I reminded him.
He threw his hands up for a moment before returning them to the steering wheel. “Whatever, man. The point is, stopping these soldiers is self-defence against whatever shit they’re going to pull with the items on that Land Rover. And we’re not only defending ourselves; we’re defending the world.”
I sat back in my seat and let out a long sigh. I wished Sergeant Locke had given me more information about what his team had stolen from Camp Victor. As it was, we were simply taking him at his word. What if we had it wrong?
“What if Echo Six were the evil soldiers?” I said. “What if they stole something that the guys at Camp Victor were using for good? We might be about to kill the good guys.” But even as I said the words, they rang hollow. Locke had told me the items needed to get to somewhere called Bunker 53. That sounded like a government installation to me. If Locke and his team were trying to disrupt military operations, they wouldn’t be trying to get whatever they stole to the government unless they thought that what they were doing was right and they were trying to warn the people in authority about Operation Dead Ground.
“Come on, man,” Sam said. “We all know that doesn’t make sense.”
“Alex,” Tanya said, turning to face me. “We need you to be with us on this. The ambush isn’t going to be easy. We need to be at the top of our game, okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Okay.”
“And don’t forget, you’re the one who dragged us here,” Sam reminded me. “So don’t wimp out on us now.”
“I won’t,” I told him. “Don’t worry about me, I’m one hundred per cent on board with the plan.”
Undead Rain (Book 5): Survival [Revenge of the Living Dead] Page 2