I called it an accident but to see Penny the way she was as a result of a shooting was all kinds of confusing. Was she shot by someone outside? By someone inside? They had taken Daisy’s ancient shotgun and a box of cartridges when they left. Brian had looked after that and he still had the two shotguns we had taken from Lanchcombe when we left there.
I was never going to know the answer to that question, especially as the chances were, they were all dead. I hadn’t noticed blood anywhere else in the horsebox or around the area so maybe the rest got away.
Pointless speculation I told myself.
The only person I knew what had happened to was twenty yards away and closing fast, her arms now raised at right angles to her body, affecting her balance, making her stumble even more.
“What do we do, Frank?”
I looked at the sunken, misty eyes, and the oozing white pustules on Jean’s face and said the only thing that seemed logical at the time.
“Kill her, Daisy. Knock her over. She shouldn’t have to be like that. We haven’t got time to bury another one with the other Groaners approaching. The best we can do is put the poor woman out of her misery.”
Daisy nodded grimly. I nodded back. It felt like the right thing to do.
Once the engine started, Daisy engaged the gearbox and the tractor shunted forward, moving slowly as we approached until, with an audible clang, we ran into and bumped over Jean and put a merciful end to her undead life.
I comforted myself by repeating the mantra that she had already died well before the bucket hit and the huge back tyre rolled over her head.
I didn’t check the wing mirror until we had turned the corner onto the lane we had intended to follow.
All I could see were distant shabby figures aimlessly trying to catch up with us until they too went out of sight as we turned the first bend in the road.
“Thanks, Daisy,” I said quietly, “for doing that.”
I felt the tractor slowly come to a halt, and I turned to look at Daisy. She was crying silent tears, so much so that I guessed she couldn’t see well enough to keep us on the road.
I really didn’t know quite how to deal with a woman crying like that, beyond my pathetically limited skill set, so I did nothing more than rest my hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Frank. Stupid really.” She wiped the sleeve of her jacket across her eyes.
“Not stupid at all, Daisy. I’m sure everyone who has survived will have a moment or two like that.”
“Have you, Frank?”
I hesitated a moment wondering if my stunted emotions would ever allow me to have a moment. I didn’t know. That was the truth. Maybe I would, maybe not. Some people don’t feel things like other people. I suppose that might leave me open to accusations of being cold, but I have never been the type to allow my emotions to overflow. Stiff upper lip and all that.
“Not yet,” I said, and I truly hoped I never would.
“Right.” She did one of those unavoidably big, snotty, post-crying sniffs and got us on the move again.
I didn’t say anything to her because I didn’t want to worry her, but I was concerned. If somebody had done something to the horsebox from outside, that meant there were people already out there with guns who were prepared to use them, if I discounted the possibility that a member of the group shot Penny. God knows what happened to Joan or why the horsebox was where it was?
We were two people, all alone, and while the tractor might offer a bit of protection, it wasn’t unstoppable, and the glass was certainly not bulletproof.
In the end I couldn’t see the point of keeping my concerns to myself. Daisy was as much a part of this as I was, so it was only right and fair that she got a say on the matter.
As we rumbled along the single-track road—I was so grateful we didn’t meet anything coming the other way—I explained, as calmly as I could, my concerns.
“Bloody hell, Frank, calm down a bit. You’re making me nervous,” Daisy said after I finished. Evidently what came out of my mouth didn’t sound as calm as it was in my head. “So, you think we need guns?”
“I think it would be a wise precaution, yes.”
I’d been around guns all my life. I’d never shot anything mind you, that was the gamekeeper’s job, but I wasn’t bad at clay-pigeon shooting and I could handle a shotgun safely. I’d used a rifle a few times, target shooting, and I had an airgun somewhere, back at Lanchcombe, allegedly for despatching the mice and rats that had colonised the place over the years, but I could never bring myself to use it on them. Give me a trap any day.
The prospect of having to use a gun against a person, living or undead didn’t give me undue cause for concern. I was determined to get as far away from people and Groaners as I could, and if someone decided they wanted to get in my way, then if it wasn’t Daisy with the tractor, it was going to be me with a gun that persuaded them they had picked on the wrong people.
“About ten miles away there’s a place my dad used to come to. It’s on one of those industrial estates built on a farm when everyone decided farming didn’t pay.”
“Really? I only saw the one gun at your place.”
“He used to go for all his country gear, wet weather clothes, all that sort of stuff. It was the nearest place to us that wasn’t in the town. He hated going into town, always said it was full of townies and tourists. Not my kind of place at all,” she said in a gruff voice which I assumed was an impression of her father.
“Was he Welsh?”
“Who?”
“Your father. That sounded Welsh to me.”
“No, it did not.” She laughed when she saw the weak smile I managed.
“Ten miles. But we have to get past the M4 first. If the A4 was anything to go by there’ll be cars everywhere and Groaners galore.”
“Oh joy,” I said, trying to stretch my legs out a little. The tractor had been a great idea, but we were only less than twenty miles from the farm, and my legs were killing me. I stopped feeling sorry for myself when an image of Penny’s ruined face, and the sound of the clang and bump of Jean’s body being crushed flashed across my mind.
The road to the M4 was virtually clear all the way. Only one car, left stranded with all four doors and the boot wide open in the middle of the road, needed shunting out of the way, a job the tractor coped with admirably. Where the people who were in the car had disappeared to, I had no idea, and I wasn’t going to hang around for long enough to find out.
As we approached where the road climbed onto a bridge to cross over the motorway, more and more Groaners started to show their hideously ugly faces. Whether they were ugly as people, I wasn’t the one to judge but in their undead state they certainly were. I remembered seeing one of the early news reports about them, saying that the virus responsible for all the mayhem going on right now began to deform the facial bones of the undead a few days after infection, as well as reigniting just the basest of human functions.
What made the Groaners want to eat human beings I never quite found out, but it was clear from the Groaners we passed rather than ran over, that eating us was almost the only thing going through their minds. I had a lucky escape when one particularly acrobatic Groaner swan-dived face first at the glass in the passenger door. His face didn’t survive being run over by the back wheel.
Once Daisy had shovelled her way through the crowd at the end of the bridge—I assumed they came out of some of the cars on the motorway we trundled across to almost halfway—we stopped to look at the view.
For as far as the eye could see in either direction, all we could see were cars and a few lorries. There were cars in the lanes of the motorway, cars on the hard shoulder, cars straddling the crash barrier in the centre of the two lanes, and cars whose drivers had evidently tried to drive along the grassy banks and had come to a disastrous halt. One or two cars were upside down, others were facing the wrong way altogether.
Looking in the direction I was looking, back toward London, I could see one car i
n the near distance with a crowd of Groaners, with their accompanying cloud of black flies, scrabbling all over it. I assumed somebody was left alive inside but there was no way of getting to him or her to help. The road was blocked completely, and we could never have reached it to rescue them. Between undead bodies I could see a figure waving. Whether it was at us, or just in panic, I will never know because I turned away and looked fixedly ahead instead.
“There’s a man down there,” Daisy said so nonchalantly that I assumed she meant an undead man.
“Nice.”
“Should we help him?”
“Why would you want to help a Groaner?”
“He isn’t a Groaner. Look.”
I leaned forward, so I could see past her, and sure enough there was a man. He was sitting on the roof of a large lorry belonging to a well-known frozen food company.
He had done a good job of hiding as the lorry had no Groaners anywhere near. It was on the other side of the motorway, so Daisy boosted the engine and trundled toward the truck with a now waving man on top of it. When we got level with the lorry it was a lot further past the bridge than I’d thought, maybe fifty feet or so along the motorway, so no chance of us being able to reach him, even with the backhoe. More to the point, even if we did rescue him what would we do? The best we could offer was to drop him somewhere safe and out of the way. There was just no room in the tractor for another long-term passenger.
All of those thoughts and more, including a big dollop of guilt for even thinking we should just up and drive away, were roiling around in my brain when events were taken out of my hands by Daisy.
“Oi, Oi, mate,” she yelled out of her freshly wound down window. “I can’t reach you from here, but if you can get down and up the bank I’ll clear it and give you a lift if you want?”
The man shouted back but I couldn’t make out what he said over the sound of the engine. I started worrying then if being in the cab for so long was going to damage my hearing. Then I mentally kicked myself for being so self-centred.
Instead I started worrying that the Groaners at both ends of the bridge were now starting to pay us a lot more attention than they had been. Engine noise, shouting, more engine noise. Probably not the best way to quietly go about your business and not attract attention.
“Daisy!” I said, nodding forwards.
“I see ‘em. The guy on the truck is going to climb the bank and meet us at the end of the bridge so we need to clear the buggers anyway.” I’m sure she enjoyed this bit. I mean we’d skittled a few of the Groaners over on the way, the odd straggler, as evidenced by the flies that had gathered around the bloody bucket. And I know I keep mentioning the flies, but I hate the things. Have I said that before? Well, no matter. And that wasn’t me swearing either, the bucket was covered in blood and other body parts too revolting to discuss.
“How will we fit him in, Daisy?”
“Somehow. We can’t leave him there, Frank. Where would you be now if I hadn’t come along back in Newbury?”
That stopped me in my tracks. Mainly because I hadn’t thought of it quite like that but also because I’m not normally like that. Selfish. In normal times I would help anyone out if I could. But these weren’t normal times. These were deadly, risky times.
“Right then, you beauties. Time to meet your makers,” Daisy said, then she revved up the engine, and we rolled forward.
The Groaners on the road never stood a chance. In just a few seconds we had hit the group. The impacts made the tractor shudder, but the resistance a half-dead ex-human body offered against the best part of five tons of metal plus a solid steel bucket, was somewhat limited.
Or none.
Once we had battered our way through the puny beings, Daisy pulled up next to a metal gate that led into the field next to the motorway, and we waited. And we waited. Daisy looked nervously in the rearview mirror at the crowd that was now approaching us, not too many, I saw when I looked over my shoulder, but enough for us to drive away rather than hang around if push came to shove.
“Where is he,” I asked under my breath.
“Come on, mate,” Daisy whispered, then glanced in the mirror again. “We haven’t got all day.”
Then I saw him, sauntering along the edge of the field, swinging a carrier bag back and forth like he was on his way for a gentle stroll in the countryside on a sunny summer afternoon.
He looked bigger than when he had been on the roof. Not so much taller, but more rotund would be a fair way to describe him. His T-shirt was struggling to contain its contents, particularly the large beer belly he seemed to be carrying.
Now, I was even more worried how we would all fit in the cab.
“Hello,” Daisy called out of her window once he got to the gate.
“Alright, love, where you headed?”
I pointed my thumb back over my shoulder.
“Away from that lot quick sharp.”
The man looked where I’d pointed. “Fair point. Have you got room for a little ‘un?”
Yes, I thought, we have, but we haven’t got room for a big-bellied bruiser your size.
“Hop in, mate, Frank will shift over a bit. Won’t you, Frank?”
“Of course,” I said, trying to keep my reluctance out of my voice. I’d now concluded that this wasn’t going to work. If we were going to be helping people out, we needed an alternative form of transport for them.
The large man made his way around to the passenger side where he grimaced at the rear tyre. I got a quick glance at the mush of meat and gristle that was stuck in the tread, bits of it slowly peeling off to splat on the road like a steak on a grill, and I understood why.
He soon had the door open and clambered up while I scrunched up as much as I could to make room for him.
“I’m Steve, Steve Simms,” he said, puffing as he climbed up. “Thought I’d better introduce myself as it looks like we’re going to be getting cosy.” He held out his hand and I twisted uncomfortably to shake it.
“Frank, and this is Daisy.”
He finally managed to squeeze in and get the door shut.
“Alright, Daisy. Thanks for this. I appreciate it.”
“Couldn’t leave you out there, mate.”
“I’m glad about that. Those things have been swarming around my truck 24/7 for the last three days. I’ve been staying in my cab with the curtains drawn around so they couldn’t see me, and sleeping in the bunk.
“You’ve been there for three days?” I was amazed, he seemed in decent condition for someone who had been stuck in a lorry for three days.
“Yeah. Got a bit smelly after that.”
“I bet,” said Daisy, “what were you doing, pissing in a bottle, and crapping in a bag?”
“Daisy!” I said, spinning my head around awkwardly.
“What? That’s what you blokes do, isn’t it?”
“’Fraid so, Frank. When nature calls and all that.” Steve said, wafting his hand in front of his face as if the cab smelled like his lorry.
“So, what happened to all the Groaners, Steve?”
“Is that what you’re calling them? I don’t know. I woke up this morning and they were all gone. Not far mind there were still a few around but not clustered around the truck, so I took the chance, wound the windows down to get a bit of air in, and threw out the bottles and bags onto the side of the road.”
I wrinkled my nose at the mention of Steve’s toilet habits again, but I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t the worst offence.
“Then I thought I’d climb up top and see what was going on. I’d only been up there half an hour when you trundled by, and I’m glad you did.”
“You didn’t hear anyone else while you were parked up?” I asked.
“Nope, nothing at all.”
“Nothing in the best part of four days?” Daisy asked, sounding surprised.
Steve shook his head sadly. “I reckon this virus has done for a heck of a lot of people.”
From what
I’d seen of things, I thought he might be right, but I was hopeful there might be others who had just locked themselves away and were surviving the best way they could.
“I wonder why we didn’t get it?” Daisy said quietly but not so quietly that I couldn’t hear her over the engine.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I watched something when the first reports started. They said there were always a few people who were immune. No matter what the disease is none of them are complete killers. The bloke on telly, you know one of those geeky professor chaps? He said it would be self-defeating if any disease did kill everyone, because it would effectively kill itself, unless it mutated to live in a different host. Mind you he was pretty scathing about some of the people working on man-made diseases, he didn’t think the same limits would apply, but if that’s what this is, it seems like he might have been wrong.”
“Bloody experts. Like politicians. All bloody useless,” Steve said morosely.
I couldn’t argue with his point of view. I’d met quite a few politicians and experts over the years, and most of them were really quite dull, and were seemingly far more interested in hobnobbing with the nobility than actually doing anything concrete to help people.
I wondered again how many were hiding out in bunkers while the rest of us had to cope with a world where everything had gone tits-up.
As we were driving along the lane, battering the occasional stray out of the way with a running commentary on each one from Steve, I noticed that he kept putting his hand in his jacket pocket, as if to check that something was still there. He was making a huge fuss over each Groaner we hit, laughing, and joking at their fate, but something was worrying me about him. When he caught me watching him as he dipped his hand in his pocket, his face took on a very different and worrying aspect from the friendly jovial lorry driver he’d been playing so well up until that point.
The One Percent (Episode 2): The One Percent Page 4