Yet it wouldn't have been right for the son of the CEO to miss out on the generous bonuses that his hard working colleagues received. It was these that paid for his house in the country and, if any of his former co-workers had survived, they would say it was these bonuses that had rather unfairly saved his life.
He had been fortunate to have taken a long weekend and to be at his house in Oxfordshire when the virus was released. After a few days of holing up at home, he had needed to find food. His luck held out when he found the local shop empty and the house connected to it stockpiled with supplies. It was enough food to last for weeks. Longer if it hadn’t been for the smug bitch he met, who insisted she take half of the food.
He often wondered what happened to her. She had been the only person he had seen alive in the time since the outbreak and finding Zone G.
Had she left him all the food, he could have held out for longer, rather than put his life in danger by having to leave the village to find more supplies. In the long days of running and hiding, he had thought of all the things he would do to her if he ever saw her again.
Weak and nearing starvation, Lady Luck struck once more when he stumbled across a military patrol who were out looking for survivors. They had bought him to Zone G, and he had lived here ever since.
At first, he had tried to integrate himself into the established leadership. He had believed that his experience from years of networking in the city would give him valuable skills to help the zone thrive. But it was under military control, and his suggestions were not welcomed. Instead, he was given a menial job in the stores. He watched for years as the supplies came in almost equal measure. He noted with unrelenting apathy, that bounty from harvests was celebrated greedily, rather than stockpiled for the future. He was, perhaps, one of the first to realise that if a harvest failed the zone would be in trouble.
Yet he said nothing. Instead, he used his position to curry favour with people that might be of use to him in the future.
Surreptitiously giving them more than they were due, with a wink and a grin, he would tell them they had earned it. He played the long game, and he eventually won.
When the crops were destroyed following a harsh winter, he did not speak out publicly against Curtis, the previous leader.
He simply made a few comments and asked some seemingly innocent questions in the right ears. As he had intended, this led to gossip and speculation. Dissent spread like a virus, eventually consuming the entire zone. When the time was right and he stepped forward with a carefully constructed plan to return the zone to its previous prosperity, his ideas were welcomed and embraced. The old leader was out, he was in.
Curtis accepted his ousting with a calm dignity, offering to return in a few days, after Brian had settled in, to answer any questions from his successor. Brian had begrudgingly accepted and at first, it had been amiable. Until they discussed the plans Brian had so vocally boasted about, and Curtis pointed out the flaws. Brian defended them vehemently, refusing to listen to reason. He had already known that the plans were not achievable without significant sacrifice, and that they contained no contingency in the event of another bad harvest.
But he did not want some jumped up failure to remind him of this. The discussion turned into an argument and ended in Curtis storming out of the meeting, threatening to tell the zone the truth.
A few days later, Brian had visited Curtis at home, intending to reason with him. But Curtis would not listen.
In a fit of rage, Brian had attacked Curtis and strangled him. Staging the murder as a suicide had been easy. When his body was found, no one questioned the events that had led to his death. It had been clear that Curtis was unable to live with the guilt of so many dying of starvation when he was in charge.
Brian had got away with murder and developed a taste for blood.
With Curtis out of the way, everything settled down. Brian sent teams out to beg other zones for help. They had all returned with extra supplies and more importantly, information on the zones themselves. This extra food was sufficient to see them through to the next autumn. Rationing meant that they could stockpile some of that harvest.
Then those Nozos arrived, and after that, everything turned to shit.
The story that had filtered back to the residents was not the complete version of events, but he had rewarded the guards on duty that day handsomely for their silence. When the random acts of sabotage began, he knew that they were down to the Nozos. But unable to catch them, he had needed to lay the blame somewhere to appease the angry residents.
It was unfortunate that he needed to give more rations to his allies to buy their support and silence. He was aware of the divide this would create in the zone. But needs must. If the zoners ever heard the truth, there would be a mutiny. The zone was failing, there was not enough food, and not enough supplies to rebuild.
He knew what needed to be done. He needed to take over another zone.
Weeks ago, he had set the wheels in motion by arranging for the zebs to be caught and contained, creating his own army of the undead. In another few weeks, they would have enough. Now he needed to build up anger against the other zones so that the people would want to fight. With Jay's update today, uniting the zone in anger might also distract the residents from any impending coup.
He smiled. He knew exactly what he was going to do.
Chapter Seven
Annie wakes me as the sun is beginning to rise. I dress quickly and race downstairs, where everyone else is already up and eating breakfast.
“Morning, Joe, Tom, Dick, Harry,” I say brightly as I pull out a chair to sit on.
The room erupts into laughter, and I look around at them, “What?” They don't respond, too busy laughing at me. I flatten my hair down and wipe my sleeve across my mouth. They continue to watch me, chuckling.
“Have I got something on me?” I ask. This sets them off into fits of laughter again.
Eventually, Annie stops laughing, “Sammie, this is Simon and Andy, not Dick and Harry.”
I feel a flush of embarrassment creep up my cheeks, “Tom,” I wail, “You’re an idiot,” but I smile to let him know that there are no hard feelings. “Why did you tell me they were called Dick and Harry?”
“Dunno," he shrugs, grinning broadly. "Thought it would be funny, that’ll teach you to introduce yourself when you meet someone.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t work out you were joking last night,” I moan, then reach over for a slice of bread. “So when are we leaving?”
“Soon as we’re done eating,” Joe tells me, “You ready for this?”
I nod, mouth full of bread, then chew quickly and swallow, “Yep.”
“Just remember everything you’ve learnt, and you’ll be fine,” Annie tells me unnecessarily. I’m not nervous at all; in fact, I am keen to go. There can only be so many zebs outside that factory.
After we finish our breakfast, Annie, Joe and I repack our kit, while Tom, Simon and Andy head out to the paddock to catch the horse and get the carts ready.
Annie and I climb into the same cart as yesterday, and we travel in silence for a few minutes.
“You know that it’s a huge compliment that Tom played a joke on you, don’t you?” Annie asks me.
“What? Why?” I ask in confusion.
“It means he sees you as one of us. If he thought of you as an outsider, he wouldn’t have done it.”
“Oh, is that good?” I ask.
“Yes, Joe told us about the zeb landing on you yesterday and how well you handled yourself.”
I’m stunned by this, I thought I had messed up big time and ruined my chances of passing this assessment.
Annie obviously knows what I’m thinking because she adds, “We all get ourselves into sticky situations, but it’s the way we handle them that matters. Many people would have frozen in fear, but from what I hear, you didn’t panic or scream out, you just handled it quickly. I’m proud of you.”
I turn to her, mouth open, but her eyes are fixed
resolutely on the road ahead of us. Annie isn’t normally someone who gives compliments, so to hear she is proud of me makes my heart swell.
“Thank you,” I reply. She nods curtly, and once again we both fall silent.
It doesn’t take long for the scenery to change from the pretty countryside to urban ugliness. Every mile we travel, the dilapidated buildings seem to become bigger and more crammed together. Without being told, I pull an arrow from my quiver and rest it across my knees. I see Annie glance at it, but she doesn’t say a word.
I continue to stare out at the streets. The old roads are easy to make out, but they are cracked, with weeds rising through holes. There’s a lot of debris on the roads, and the journey is bumpy.
The cars here are different from those we saw yesterday. Most of them are still intact but covered in rust. I wonder why the metal hasn’t been scavenged from them. Within seconds I get my answer. Zebs.
The carts are quiet, and the sound of the horse's hooves is muffled by the soft weeds on the road, but we are not silent, and it’s not long before the zebs start to appear from the shadows. We hear them before we see them. Already their groans are so very familiar. I lift the bow, but Annie places a hand on my arm and shakes her head.
“They can’t keep up with the speed of the carts,” she tells me.
I look around, at the approaching corpses and see that she is right. By the time they hear us and stumble out of wherever it is they’ve been lurking, we have passed them. They follow the cart, but they are moving slowly. So we soon leave them behind.
“Won’t they keep following us?” I ask Annie.
“Yes, but we’ll lose these ones easily enough. When we’re closer to the factory, we’ll need to take out any that have kept on our trail.”
I carry on looking back the way we came. The cracks in the road cause the zebs to stumble frequently.
When they fall, they seem to struggle to get up quickly. I make a mental note of that, it’s useful to know. Watching their slow gait as they give chase, I wonder how it has come to this. From what I’ve been told, cars can travel really quickly, so why didn’t people just drive away.
“Were they always this slow?” I ask Annie, “I mean, in the early days, surely we should have just been able to get away from them?”
Annie sighs, “You don’t understand what it was like back then. Over sixty million people lived in the UK. There were over thirty million cars on the road. Can you imagine even just a fraction of them trying to escape? How much traffic that put on the roads? Besides, where would they run to?”
Those numbers are simply alien to me. In Zone E we have around ten thousand people, and it feels crowded. I have never spent a lot of time thinking about what happened during the outbreak, but now I try to imagine what it must have been like. If there were infected in our zone, people trying to flee. I shudder.
Annie looks over at me, “It was horrible, but they do seem to be getting slower. For years we waited for them to rot and die. In the early days, no one imagined they would last this long. Maybe finally they are decomposing,” she watches a zeb stumbling its way to us, “Or maybe we are just getting faster?”
“What? How could we be getting faster?”
“Back during the outbreak, people weren’t as fit as they are now,” she explains, “Everything was available to us with little effort on our part, sure there were lots of healthy people, but obesity was common. Nowadays, everyone has to work, and there isn’t enough food for people to be greedy. Not to mention that what we eat today is all fresh and wholesome. Unlike the processed crap that most of us used to eat.”
I stay silent as she reminisces. I can’t decide whether she misses the old days or not. I’m about to ask when I get distracted by the most massive structure I have ever seen. I stare at it with my mouth open in awe. Large concrete pillars stretch up into the sky, topped by metal struts that seem to arch towards the centre. It seems to go on forever. As we follow the natural turn of the road, we come to what must have been the front of the building.
The rough concrete gives way to glass, although most of the panes are broken or missing, some remain intact. The front is such a stark contrast to the back that I find myself turning to check its all the same building.
“What is that?” I ask Annie.
Obviously, my tone does little to hide my amazement at the scale of the building, because she chuckles before she replies, “That’s Twickenham Stadium, they used to play rugby there.”
“It’s huge,” I say, stating the obvious.
Annie laughs again, “It needed to be, it could seat over eighty thousand people.”
“Woah,” once again I am struggling to comprehend the scale. I would love to stop and have a look around, but I won’t dare ask Annie as I can imagine her response. If I ever find myself back this way I am definitely going to explore.
We continue past the stadium, and I keep staring at it until it has gone from view. When I turn back to face the front, I notice that Joe’s cart has slowed down and Simon is holding a single finger up.
“We’re about a mile away from the factory, so from now on if you see zebs behind us you need to take them out with your arrows,” Annie says.
“Joe’s team will take out the ones in front and to their sides. You just need to pick any off that come from behind us or any they miss.”
“Okay,” I nod, grinning. I rearrange myself in my seat and nock the arrow. There is just not enough space to draw, “I’m just going to pop in the back,” I tell Annie. Throwing my bow and quiver into the back of the cart, I climb over my seat. I hadn’t accounted for how bumpy it is in the back. Poor Simon and Andy, they must be aching by now.
Choosing a position that gives me a clear view of both sides and the rear, I crouch down in readiness. A zeb stumbles out from an alleyway next to a terraced house. A black iron gate swings open and closed in the wind, another few seconds, and it would have made its way out of the alley and into the road. Instead, the zeb reaches the gate when it is closed. The force of its body stops the gate from swinging open. It lets out a series of loud groans, reaching its arms in our direction but for now, it is trapped. I decide to save my arrows.
It’s not long before another zeb comes into view. This one doesn’t get stuck and follows us up the road. I nock the arrow and draw back the string, I breath out as I release the arrow.
It misses. By about two feet. I am good at archery, one of the best in my class, but standing in a field shooting at static targets is very different from being in the back of a bumpy cart, aiming at stumbling zebs.
I nock another arrow, this time adjusting my aim for the movement of the cart. Once more I draw back the string and release. I miss. Again. This time it wasn’t my fault. The damn zeb tripped on something in the road and fell. My arrow soared above it and clattered to the floor a few metres behind my intended target.
Cursing I try again. This time the arrow hits it above the left eye. It drops heavily to the road, “Ha,” I shout triumphantly, “Got one.”
“Great, kid, don’t get cocky,” Annie says to me, then starts to chuckle.
I turn to her, “What?”
“Star Wars,” she says happily, as though that is explanation enough.
“Right …” I reply, elongating out the word and sound like a petulant teenager. Another zeb wanders onto the road. I take it down much more easily this time. I notice other fresh corpses on the side of the road, Simon or Andy must be having a bit more success than me. So far they haven’t missed any.
I realise I’m disappointed by this, turns out I am enjoying it, and probably more than I should be. I carry on shooting the zebs appearing behind us. By the time we come to a stop, I have killed eleven zebs. It feels good. I’ve been waiting my whole life to make a difference and although it's small, that is eleven zebs eradicated. Eleven zebs that won’t hurt anyone ever again. I’m grinning broadly as I jump out of the cart.
Then I turn around, and the smile falls from my face. We�
�ve reached the factory.
There are zebs within the compound.
Lots and lots of zebs.
Joe and Annie are staring into the enclosure. Simon, Andy and Tom are facing out into the road, arrows nocked and ready if any zebs come our way. I walk over to join Annie and Joe.
“There’s a lot,” I say.
“Yep,” Joe replies.
“Any ideas?” I ask.
Joe turns at me, his eyes twinkling and that familiar grin back on his face, “It’s your mission,” he states simply.
Annie stays quiet. Her face is screwed up in concentration. I turn and face the factory compound.
Metal chain link fencing encircles a large car park, with dozens of cars sitting abandoned.
In the centre of the car park stands an ugly grey concrete building. The few windows on the ground floor are intact, and the door to the building is closed.
I step back and look at the fence, which is topped with rolls of barbed wire. Weeds have woven their way in between the metal links. One quick shake tells me it is sturdy. We aren’t in any immediate danger of the zebs that have started to stumble their way over. A few hundred yards away I can see what looks to be a gate.
“Hang on,” I say to Joe and Annie and jog towards it. The handle to the gate has a lock, and the big metal latch is thick with dusty orange rust. We can’t go over the fence, and even if the gate is unlocked, it’s unlikely to open with that much rust. Hmm.
Butterflies flutter in my stomach, making me feel a bit nauseous. This is my one big test, and the fear of failing overwhelms me. I step back a few feet and once again look up and down the fence. Then at the zebs, which are now gathering near where Annie and the others are standing. None of them have headed in my direction.
I grin and in an instant the butterflies have gone, and I run back to Annie and Joe.
Smiling broadly at them, I announce, “I know how we’re going to get in.”
Chapter Eight
Luca whistled as he dragged the knife across a whetstone, then he looked across at his Dad quietly cleaning the knife that Luca had just sharpened. He smiled happily. It was good to see him out of the house. He just wished he had thought of it sooner.
Safe Zone (Book 2): The Descent Page 7