by Jack Parker
"How do you know that this 'Sanctuary' isn't going to be like this place?" Paul asked. "And furthermore, how the hell do we get there? Are you seriously suggesting we walk?"
John merely nodded, shrugging Paul's questions off. As irritated as I was that the evacuation point had drawn a blank, I had to hold onto some kind of hope, some little hint that everything would be fine.
If there's no hope, what's the point?
Chapter Thirteen
Day Six (26th December – 4:56PM)
Over the rooftops, the sun was nearly set, casting a gentle orange glow down onto the city. However, it wasn't a warm light as it should have been, it was the final light of the day, darkness was inevitable now as we stood around the abandoned military evacuation point.
My mind was still surging with anger, pulsing with electric rage.
We had decided to leave the city behind and make for the countryside in-between the two cities, a concept which didn't seem to bother me one bit. I held no love for this city now, my memories buried in charred concrete and debris.
My surroundings were unfamiliar; I barely ever left the other side of the city, besides to go shopping in the centre. The only time I ever saw this side of the city was when I came here just over a year ago. Surprisingly, I hadn't left nor planned to leave the city at all this year, not even for Christmas.
I missed my life, my friends and my shitty little apartment on floor nine. I missed the tedious paperwork and the long nights sat at my desk, my face painted various colours from the glow of the monitor. It all seemed so warm in memory, so red.
The world as it was now was cold and cruel, full of screaming and blood; so much blood stained my hands now. I gritted my teeth together, shouldering my bag as everyone talked amongst themselves.
"We can't just leave the city as we are, can we?" Claire asked John, who seemed to be gazing at me for some reason, perhaps wondering what brought on my anger.
"I suppose not, we'll need more stuff." John muttered, adjusting his hat.
He was right, to survive out in the wilderness beyond the city, we'd need more supplies; we'd need tents, pots and pans, gas cookers. I had no idea where to acquire any of that, my mind drawing a blank as usual.
I felt kind of useless, to be honest.
"If I remember rightly, there's a camping and hiking store not that far from here, a few blocks that way, I think." Dave said, pointing to the left of where we stood.
We were currently in a fenced-off area just below the on-ramps that lead to the motorway connecting this city to other places. The sun hung very low in the sky as it slowly disappeared a little more each minute. Our valuable light time was running out.
"Let's make a move before the night comes." I said sternly, starting to walk off in the direction that Dave had pointed in; the others jogged a little to catch me up, John taking the lead once more.
Passing an empty car, I slowed my pace a little to match John's. This is the way we did things these days, nice and slow. Moving quickly made more noise, and noise drew the infected. And the last thing we wanted was another horde.
But it was kind of fun, slicing and dicing.
I dismissed my thoughts quickly with a shake of my head, focusing on the task at hand. Was I slowly starting to change? Why did it seem like nothing really mattered?
Several birds flew past us as we turned a corner onto another street, where they had seemingly been pecking at a corpse slumped against a wall.
It was a disgusting sight. The man appeared to be in his late thirties, dressed casually. His cause of death was suicide, from what I could gather, since there was a handgun in his hand and a large splatter of blood across the wall. John leant down and pried the weapon from his hand, handing it to Dave.
"Seems we're all getting one of these, one-by-one eh?" Dave chimed, examining the weapon in his hand for a minute as we continued walking, before placing it carefully into one of his pockets.
"S'best to be armed, mate. Anything beats a little knife, right?" John said, a look of concern still visible in his eyes.
"I guess. Don't know how good I'll be with it though." Dave sighed, taking out his cleaver as he paced forwards.
"It's not that hard, it's just point and shoot. Simple" I sneered, from what little experience I had with my handgun, I seemed capable of firing it accurately, despite never having used a gun in my life before this, besides the time I shot my dad in the foot with an air rifle by accident when I was a kid.
"For some, maybe. Hey, that's the place there." Dave said, pointing to a store across the road from us.
It wasn't the largest of stores, small with a blue sign spread across the wall above the door, which hung ajar ever so slightly as though someone had left in a big hurry.
SMITH'S CAMPING SHOP
Rather generic name, but it didn't matter in the slightest. From what I could see, the store was packed full of goods. It seemed that nobody had raided it yet, though not many other people would be leaving the city like this, so it made sense in a strange sort of way.
"Right, we'll do this quietly, in case there's some of them inside." John whispered as we crept up to the door, silently swinging it open.
We spread out across the store, grabbing big backpacks for hiking, portable gas stoves for cooking and other little things like sleeping bags and decent torches.
"Mmm.. This place has it all" John called, examining a cane that was probably used for hiking.
"We all need a tent, a sleeping bag and a torch, I'll deal with the cookers." Paul said as he cradled a set of boxes containing portable gas cookers, proceeding to look across the shelves for some gas cans.
After we had found what we'd been looking for, we set to work on putting everything in our new bags, which were decently sized; they were the sort you'd take on a mountain hike, with a section for tents underneath the bag itself.
Jamming my sleeping bag, food and water into my bag, I zipped it up and shouldered it as quickly as I could, climbing to my feet. John was busy stuffing his own sleeping bag into his bag, and Claire was checking our food supply.
"We've got beans, pasta, canned fruit and veg, spaghetti hoops and crisps. This won't last that long, we'll have to be careful with what we eat." She stated, lifting up the items of food as she spoke before placing them into her own bag.
A few minutes later, I was making my way back to the on-ramp with the rest of the group, the sun had pretty much set now and darkness was upon us. We switched on our torches as we stepped up onto the dual carriageway.
"So many cars, but we'll never get any of them past this gridlock." John said, casting a sad glances back to the rest of us, his face lit up by the torchlight.
"Just how far does this go on for?" Claire sighed, shining her torch into the distance; there were cars as far as the eye could see, some smashed into the others and some just sat there.
"Looks like everyone tried to leave the city in a rush." Dave said with a stern look on his face.
All this light, we were sitting ducks.
But what else could we do? Without light we were completely defence-less. But with light we ran the risk of attracting attention to ourselves, both from the infected and other people.
The infected weren't the only threat, we'd learned that the hard way with Lucas and the crazy guy at the police evacuation. People were hard to trust, at least with the infected it was simple. You just killed them or moved on, with people there was more to consider.
"And it looks like they didn't get very far before the infected got to them." I said coldly, pointing my torch at the ground, where a corpse lay across the tarmac, head split wide open. As soon as I pointed it out, the rest of the group suddenly became more alert, looking around for infected.
"You think there's some out here, Ethan?" Dave asked, raising his eyebrows at me.
"Almost definitely." I said firmly, glancing into a few of the cars as we passed them. As I peered into the inside of a car, an infected jumped up from the seat, pounding on the wi
ndow.
"Poor bastard.." Paul whispered, grimacing.
"What do we do with him?" Asked John, looking at the rest of us for some sort of answer. Looking into the car a little more, I noticed that the doors were locked. There was nothing we could do for the guy without drawing attention to ourselves.
"He's locked in, we leave him." I said, walking away from the car. After a few silent seconds, I turned around to see the rest of the group staring at me.
"What?" I asked, raising my arms into the air a little, shrugging my shoulders.
"Are you okay, man? You've been acting weird ever since the thing with that guy." John said, walking forward a little.
"Yeah, Ethan. We're worried about you." Dave said, his tone of voice conveying his concern.
"I feel fine. Don't worry about me." I stated as clearly as I could, shrugging my shoulders again. To be completely honest, I felt fine; a little short tempered, but otherwise fine.
I suppose I had a lot on my mind with all that had happened.
Two miles down the road, the cars had thinned out a bit as we reached the end of the gridlock. Peering across the dimly lit road, I spotted a car similar to the one we had used to start our journey.
Jogging over to it, I shined my torch inside the car, looking for infected. Fortunately there were none in sight inside of the car. However as I turned around to look back at the group, I noticed an infected woman crawl around the side of the car, staring up at me.
"Son of a..." I muttered to myself, pulling out my cleaver. The sword wasn't suited to attacking something on the ground, I could damage it if I wasn't careful.
The woman growled loudly as she sped up her crawling, lashing out with her arms as she did. I quickly pulled out the cleaver from under my belt. Raising it into the air and bringing it down as quickly as I could, the blade went straight into her head, killing her pretty much instantly.
I didn't even need to think about it any more.
An hour or so later, we were stood around a small fire in the middle of a field, all of us except for Dave, who was busy setting up everyone's tents.
"This how you imagined living your life? Camping in a field?" John asked sarcastically, throwing a few bits of wood on the fire while Claire fiddled around with the gas cookers, pots and pans.
"Heh, Dave seems used to it." I sneered, glancing over my shoulder at Dave, who had just finished erecting the last tent and was making his way over to us.
We sat in silence for about ten minutes as Claire cooked up some beans. We had acquired some plastic bowls and cutlery from the camping store we'd looted earlier.
I wasn't particularly fond of beans, but they'd have to do.
Earlier, we'd found the keys to the car in the pocket of the infected woman I'd killed. We'd driven it through the little maze of cars strewn across the dual-carriageway, stopping every now and then to manually push cars out of our path until we reached this field.
"So Dave, you been camping a few times then, I take it?" John called as Claire dished out everyone's food, handing us a bowl one-by-one.
"Yeah.. Used to go out hiking with my wife and kid back in the day. Fresh air and all, good to get out of the city every now and then." he replied in a sombre tone, obviously thinking back on some memories. I patted him on the back briefly before tucking into my meal.
"You never done any camping, John?" Paul asked, also starting to eat his beans.
"Camping? Not that much, I did some survival training when I was a teen though, mate." he replied, looking up from his bowl.
"Survival training?" I asked after swallowing a mouthful of food.
"Yeah, you know.. A week in the woods, no food, no shelter. Gotta fend for yourself against the weather and wildlife." John said, having a mouthful before he finished what he was saying.
"It's a lot harder than what we're doing now though, this is like a walk in the park, even with the infected." he concluded.
The next day, we were on the road again. We had to drive pretty slowly to avoid all the cars, corpses and other miscellaneous objects that lay on the motorway in front of us.
Eventually, we came across a few cars that blocked the road ahead; Dave and I hopped out of the car into the cold wind to move the cars, pushing them as far away from each other as we could.
"Man, this is tough. This one's barely budging, give me a hand will ya?" Dave called over to me after I had moved a small car out of the way.
"Sure, where do you want me?" I asked him, glancing at the car, which was also similar to the one we were using.
"I'll push from the back, you open the door and steer while pushing." he requested of me, to which I nodded and walked over to the drivers side, opening the door and grabbing the wheel.
On Dave's signal, the two of us began to push the car into a better position, a sizeable gap opening up between the cars. We'd been at this for a few hours now, only getting a few minutes of driving time before we had to get out and push other vehicles out of the way.
"Alright, alright. Back in the car, for another few bloody minutes." Dave muttered between breaths, clearly becoming tired with all the physical exertion we'd been doing over the last few hours.
We'd slept in a bit longer than we'd wanted, due to not having an alarm. John had awakened three hours later than he usually did and it had taken us another hour to eat breakfast and pack our stuff into the car.
The sun was already on its way down to set once more as we drove slowly along the road. Trees and small fields passed us by at a snails pace.
"We need to find somewhere to rest. Somewhere near trees, we need wood for the fire." John said, turning the wheel slightly to steer the car around a car that lay on the road.
"That's true, there was barely anything but twigs in that field." Dave said from the passenger seat at the front. It was me, Claire and Paul in the back of the car.
We drove for about twenty more minutes until we found a little exit from the motorway onto what appeared to be a field surrounded by a forest.
It was ideal.
So we set up camp and got a small fire going to keep us warm through the cold winter nights. I felt worried again that the fire might draw attention to ourselves. We had found ourselves on a hill of sorts, and the city could be seen in the distance, distinguishable from the darkness by the small lights scattered across it, buildings burning and lights flickering.
Talking for a couple of hours around the fire, we sat and ate again; this time was spaghetti hoops instead of beans. Great, something I could actually tolerate.
I crawled into my tent after putting out the fire and slid into my thick sleeping bag. My mind filled with thoughts about this 'Sanctuary' place.
What would it be like there?
Was it safe?
Was it.. still there?
And with that last thought, I fell into a sleep haunted by the events I had experienced over the last week. People laughing and infected screaming, shadows playing across the walls and burning red eyes.
Chapter Fourteen
Day Eight (28th December – 7:35AM)
Freeze frame.
I'm falling in slow motion, the wind coursing through me as I plunge into the darkness, the sky fading away above me. Everything's black for a moment until I drag myself to my feet and take in my surroundings.
The building above me is crumbling to the ground, chunks of concrete and glass rain down around me as I turn around on the spot, observing the spectacular destruction before me. I'm back home, watching it burn once more.
Finishing my rotation, I'm met with a distorted face, barely distinguishable from the darkness around us. It bares its teeth at me and begins to swipe at me with its hands, seemingly elongated into claws. I leap back to avoid the furious attacks, planting a kick firmly to the stomach of the infected man; turning around, I start to run away from the crumbling complex through the ever-so-familiar streets.
What was I doing here again? Where were the others?
"Dave! John! Where are you guys!
?" I shout at the top of my lungs as I speed down a street, side-strafing to avoid another infected, who stares at me with his red eyes as my own finally begin to adjust to the low level of light.
Behind me, the two infected were in pursuit, sprinting as quickly as they could. But I was quicker, my body felt insanely light and easy to move as I ran down the street, avoiding a couple of infected pounding on a door.
"Guys!? Anyone!" I shouted again, calling into the night.
The moon hung low and large over the darkened cityscape that I found myself traversing once again, a labyrinth of long roads and short alleyways, winding through the darkness towards who knows where.