After the Fall (Book 6): Bridge of the Dead

by Stephen Cross

  “Shut it,” hissed Dalby, shaking his head and putting a finger to his lips.

  They retraced about twenty feet up the path until they went around a bend.

  Dalby crouched down and called everyone around him. “There’s a smallish horde on this side of the bridge. We can’t get past them. We’ll have to sit it out. I reckon they’ll walk on if they don’t hear any fuss. For now let’s just sit tight.”

  The soldiers dispersed and took seats on the path. Some of them took off their backpacks, rested their guns on the floor. One started to untie his boot laces.

  “Wait,” said Chris. “Wait a minute, what do you mean sit it out?”

  The nearest soldier glanced at him. The others ignored him.

  “Come on, my friends are on that bridge, they’re trapped! We need to help them,” said Chris, his voice getting louder.

  Dalby pointed hard at Chris, “I said shut it, right?” he said. “That horde hear us, and we got a whole new world of trouble. We don’t have any chance of helping your friends then.”

  Chris went to open his mouth, but closed it again, the steely glare from Dalby suggesting he would regret speaking.

  Dalby took out a map and began studying it. Shadows of sun danced through the leaves.

  No one was watching Chris.

  He ran.

  He sprinted up the path’s steep embankment into the neighbouring field. Muted shouts followed him, and he thought he felt a hand grab at his ankle, but the adrenalin rush was high, and he ran on. It was like the first drug run he did, on his BMX years ago with a bag of coke in his backpack.

  He tripped out onto the field, on overgrown meadow with long yellow green grass growing in clumps.

  Chris dared to glance behind him. He saw movement at the border of trees. He nearly tripped again, but recovered and continued to run. The shot he feared never came, nor did the soldiers give chase. He reached the other side of the field, and pushed through the thick hedgerow into the next.

  He crouched behind the hedge and took his breath. He peered back the way he came. No one was following him.

  “No time to rest kidda,” he breathed to himself. He got up and ran towards the road at the bottom of the field.

  Just beyond the trucks, the road dipped sharply, cracked and holed from ordinance explosions, guessed Terry. A wide T-junction was blocked by army trucks, sandbags, and a cliff face. To the right, a quickly emptying pool of zombies shuffled and moaned. They had spotted him straight away.

  It was only the second horde that Terry had seen, and they terrified him. Something about so much death concentrated in one place. A morbid wave of decay, wiping out all life in its path like a giant undead swarm of driver ants.

  And it was heading for him.

  It would only have took one to see him. The zombie telegraph would spread the news in seconds. There must have been a few hundred at least, in a mix of civilian and army clothing. Each rotting in their own special way; gaping broken jaws, missing and torn limbs, gouged torsos with swinging intestines.

  Terry realised he had been staring, frozen to the spot. They were fifty yards away, he needed to move.

  He dropped to the floor and crawled back under the truck.

  The others realised something was wrong the second they saw him. His fast, panicked movements, his pale skin, his fast breathing, his garbled words.

  “Hundreds, they’re coming, we have to go, hundreds.”

  “What’s happened?” said David.

  Terry took a few breaths. “A horde, on the other side of the truck. They’ve seen me. They’re coming. We have to go, now.”

  A howl of noise exploded from behind the trucks, moans mixed with hissing mixed with clicking; Terry saw the fear in his companion’s eyes, terrified even though they hand’t seen what was on the other side.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  The group turned and ran as fast as they could, back along the bridge, back towards the corral of black glass.

  Chris ducked behind the wall at the end of the field. He was fifty yards from where a group of large groups of zombies shuffled mindlessly by the bridge. They were gathering there, as if something was holding them up.

  Chris ran across the road, watching the melee of undead carefully, but none of them turned in his direction, none of them saw. He jumped over a barrier on the other side of the road and slid down the steep hill that led to the cliff. He struggled to catch his footing as branches scratched his face and rocks bruised and bloodied his skin. He reached out and grabbed a small tree branch, holding on tight.

  He pulled himself up and rested against the tree. He had fallen about fifteen feet from the top of the road. Another ten feet and he would have poured over the cliff edge. Chris stared at the drop, breathing fast.

  A gunshot from the bridge. A mass of movement. A second horde was crossing from the other side.

  Terry, his gun in one hand, and Nate’s hand in the other, reached the suspension tower. He stopped. The gap in the glass they had squeezed through was no longer a gap; the squirming body of a zombie was pushing through.

  It popped through and fell on its face. Another zombie appeared at the gap.

  The one on the floor pulled itself up and marched slowly towards the group.

  Terry raised his gun and pulled the trigger. The zombie’s head exploded in a mist of red.

  “Save your bullets,” said David.

  Terry turned to face David, ready to tell him to shut it, but what he saw behind David, further back on the bridge, left him with standing his mouth hanging open.

  The bridge was full of zombies. The horde had pushed through the sandbag barrier and was moving towards them, slowly with unerring purpose, like a shark.

  Amy followed Terry’s eyes and screamed.

  Nate clung to his dad, his eyes wide with fear, “Dad…” he said nervously.

  “What do we do?” shouted Anita. She ran back towards the glass, then stopped and ran towards the bridge. She turned to Terry, “Shoot them!”

  Terry just stared at the approaching wave, like a man on the shore, tracking the inevitable arrival of a tsunami.

  Chris scaled along the steep hill towards the bridge, pulling himself along tree roots and rocks that sprang from the unforgiving terrain. Ahead, the bridge grew out of the ground like a concrete beast, its tall suspension tower solid and thick in its lofty ambition. As Chris got closer, he noticed the wall of the bridge was dotted with jutting bricks, an elaborate pattern that probably meant something fancy to the architect, but to Chris looked like foot and hand holds. A means to scale the twenty foot wall to the section of bridge that spanned the road and suspension tower.

  He saw movement on the bridge.

  “Hey! Amy!” he shouted, so hard his throat hurt. “Heeeeeey!”

  There was a chorus of moans from above him. He looked right to see zombies appear at the edge of the road he has just been on. A thin wire fence, the only barrier between their grabbing mouths and the fifteen foot drop down the hill to Chris, wobbled precipitously under the growing pressure from the zombies. No telling how long it would hold.

  “Hey!” he shouted again.

  “Chris?” said Amy to herself. She was sure she had just heard his voice, somewhere above the cacophony of the two groups of zombies. She moved away from the group, towards the side of the bridge.

  Terry tried the doors of the suspension tower, but they were locked. He raised his gun to shoot at the locks.

  “Wait,” said Amy.

  “What?” said Terry.

  “Wait, I hear something.” She ran to the edge of the bridge and looked over. “Chris?” He was standing below her, on the steep embankment that housed the bridge.

  “What the hell are you doing down there Chris?” she said, almost smiling.

  Chapter 10

  Amy appeared at the edge of the bridge. Chris let out a sigh of relief.

  “What the hell are you doing down there Chris?” she said.

  “You can climb down
, come on hurry!” he shouted, throwing an anxious glance at the billowing wire fence above, barely containing the mass of undead flesh pushing against it.

  Terry appeared at the top of the wall. “Chris? What the fuck?”

  “Come on, we can talk later, you need to move now. Climb down, you can use the bricks on the walls.”

  Terry stared at Chris for a moment, then looked down the length of the wall below him. “Ok, we’re coming.”

  Terry disappeared from the wall.

  There was a metallic clang from above. The wire of the fence broke away from one of its supports and a small gap opened. A moaning and hissing of renewed vigour accompanied the small break, as if they knew they were almost through.

  “Hurry!” shouted Chris.

  Terry, the two boys, David, and Anita came to the wall. Anita’s face turned up in disgust. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Just fucking climb,” said Terry helping Nate over the wall. Anita shot Terry a sharp glance, before clambering over the wall.

  “Come on lad,” said Chris as Nate balanced precariously on the protruding bricks. “You’re alright, I can get you if anything happens. But nothing will happen.”

  “Dad?” said Nate.

  “It’s ok son, you’ll be good. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Nate tentatively climbed down, placing his hands slowly and certainly on the bricks. Ollie descended beside him.

  Terry helped Amy over and soon they were all on the wall.

  Chris positioned himself about six feet from the wall, watching the two boys carefully. They were nearly down.

  “That’s it lad,” said Chris, “almost there, just keep it nice and steady.”

  A shriek of metal was the first warning. The loud and almost victorious moan was the next.

  A second gap in the fencing ripped open, and Chris watched in horror as a zombie pushed itself through the thin space between the post and the loose wire. A flap of skin on the zombie’s face caught on the wire and peeled back with a squelch as the zombie pushed itself through.

  “Come on!” shouted Chris.

  The zombie was through. It took a first tentative step on the steep hill, and then tumbled forward, rolling fast and hard towards Chris.

  Chris jumped back, away from the wall and the zombie tumbled passed him, its hands flailing uselessly at Chris. It was not concerned with stopping its fall, only at reaching Chris.

  More undead pushed against the fence. A second fell through the gap.

  “Nate!” shouted Terry.

  Nate fell and landed hard on the ground. He scrambled to secure himself on the steep ground. In a blur of movement and colour, he was gone, pulled down the hill by the falling zombie. He let out a high pitched scream.

  Chris’s world moved in slow motion. The zombie pulled hard on Nate’s feet and Nate let go of the tree branch he was holding, the two of them sliding helplessly onwards the cliff edge. Nate dug his hands in and managed to grab a rocky outcrop. He screamed.

  A heavy thump signalled Terry landing on the ground. He missed his footing and slid down the hill. Dirt sprung into the air as his nails dragged into the hard ground.

  Chris moved. He let himself slide down to the edge of the cliff, then pulled himself along the ground towards Nate. He held on tight to a small bush, its thorns digging hard into his hand as he trusted his entire weight to the small plant. He tentatively held out a hand.

  “Nate come on, grab my hand.”

  Nate’s face quivered in fear, his skin white, his eyes red and filled with tears. The zombie was clinging to his leg trying to pull itself up to reach Nate.

  “Come on Nate! Do it lad!”

  Nate let go of the rock and Chris grabbed his free hand. He pulled hard, his body wrenched between the bush and Nate. He was slipping.

  Then another hand grabbed his. He looked up to see Terry pulling. “Don’t you let him go!” shouted Terry.

  Chris pulled hard and together, he and Terry pulled Nate up over the cliff edge. The zombie squirmed and moaned. Chris struck out with his boot at the zombie’s head. “Fuck you mate!” He connected hard and the side of its head imploded. The zombie lost its grip on Nate and fell, silently, over the cliff edge.

  Terry slid down and grabbed his son, “You ok lad? You alright?”

  Nate cried, unable to speak, and buried his head in his Dad’s arms.

  “We have to go,” said Chris pointing up the hill.

  The fence gave way another foot and a third body slipped through the gap. It came head first down the hill, its arms waving manically and its teeth gnashing, reaching for Terry and Chris. It tumbled past, a few feet to their left, its teeth clicking with manic abandonment as it bounced over the edge of the cliff.

  “Where’s Amy?” shouted Chris.

  Terry pointed to the top of the steep embankment, the rest of the group were crawling quickly up and away from the bridge, and more importantly, away from the section of fence smothered by the horde.

  The fence swayed and rippled, and Chris’s only thought as he saw a wide section spring free from its supports was that he was glad it had lasted long enough for Amy to get past. A gap, a few feet wide hung open like an empty maw, vomiting undead onto the embankment.

  “Go,” shouted Chris, “let’s fucking go!”

  They pulled themselves along the edge of the cliff. Several zombies at once fell through the widening gap, pushing and pulling at each other, grabbing, trying to bridge the distance between themselves and their three live flesh targets. They tumbled past Chris, only a few yards away.

  “We got trouble,” said Terry. “We can’t go any further,” he nodded ahead.

  The hill pulled up steeply, the soil breaking with steep rocks.

  “Once that fence goes fully,” said Terry, “we’re finished.”

  Terry clung to a tree, holding Nate close. The young boy was still crying, his face red, his body shaking with sobs. Chris looked around desperately, trying to find a way up.

  But there was no way. The hill was too steep now for them to climb, there were no more footholds and, being pushed further along the edge by the breaking fence above, it was only a matter of minutes before they either plunged to their death, or were pulled apart by a falling zombie-ball.

  As if to confirm his fears, another metallic ripping sound from above opened the fence further.

  He grabbed onto the same tree as Terry and the three of them clung together, determined to stay alive until the last.

  Chapter 11

  Chris had once been to the new year celebrations in Liverpool’s Chinatown, a few years ago when he was just sixteen. He had been carrying a bag of weed to some restaurant, but had been early so decided to stop for a beer.

  The celebrations had been crazy; all these mad Chinese dressed up as dragons, cymbals crashing, loads of fellas that looked like Fu Manchu.

  And the fireworks. Blues, reds, and yellows exploding in the sky, blossoming into the night like hundreds of flowers. He had nearly jumped out of his skin when firecrackers exploded next to him, just a few feet away. Some kid was setting a load of bangers off. Chris nearly smacked him round the head, but the sound and smell of gunpowder had enthralled him, and he forgave the kid, instead enjoying the spectacle.

  The sound those firecrackers had made, that was what Chris heard now. The air reverberated with a continuous salvo of bangs. No space for silence or peace, a heavy rapport that assaulted his ears and mind.

  Smoke filled the air at the top of the embankment. The smell of gunpowder drifted down and filled him with joy. The zombies were no longer pushing against the fence, they were turning to the road, and falling as they did so; their heads exploding in bright red smoke, chunks of matter splattering across the fence and down the hill.

  Nate stopped crying, he tuned to his dad. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” said Terry.

  “It’s the army,” said Chris.

  The other two looked at him.

  “I fou
nd some soldiers, I brought them here to save you guys.”

  Terry said nothing, but nodded at Chris.

  The shots died off, and a solider appeared at the top of the embankment. His beard was long and his tunic covered in dirt.

  “You guys alright?” he said.

  “Got a young lad down here,” said Terry, “we need to get him up.”

  “No problem.”

  A few seconds later a rope ladder was thrown down the embankment.

  Terry pulled himself up the rope ladder to the road, Nate on his back. Chris followed.

  The road was scattered with the rotten bodies of the dead, further decimated by the bullets of the machines guns.

  The soldiers kept a watchful gaze around the surrounding woods. Amy and the others had crowded round Terry and Chris. They paid little attention to Chris, most eyes on Nate. Chris didn’t mind, he was just glad that Nate was ok.

  Terry kneeled down by Nate, checking him over. “Are you ok, are you hurt?”

  Nate shook his head, but he was shaking, the poor boy looked terrified, white with fear.

  A shout cut through the circle of friends and Chris felt himself being pushed aside brusquely, nearly falling over. A soldier broke into the circle and raised his gun.

  “Step back!” he shouted. The gun was pointing at Nate.

  Terry looked up, his face first coloured by surprise, then quickly with anger.

  “You fucking kidding me mate, pointing that at my son? You’d better back off pal,” Terry stood in front of Nate, spread out his arms to cut off the solider’s line of sight. Terry was going red, his face creased in a furious frown. Chris moved away from the soldier.

  “Stand away from the boy, sir,” repeated the soldier, this time with more steel in his voice.

  Terry shook his head. “You’ve got a few seconds mate, before I fucking kill you.”

  More soldiers arrived, their guns raised. There were screams, Chris wasn’t sure who was screaming. The outcome was a circle of four soldiers pointing their weapons at Terry and Nate.

  Dalby stepped forward. “What’s this, Williams?” he said in an even voice.

  “Blood sir,” said Williams. “There’s blood on the boy’s leg, the leg that was being held onto by the zed. I suspect infection sir.”