by Casey, Ryan
Hayden listened to the sounds of the oncoming footsteps, smelled the scent of death, and he readied himself for another bout of running.
* * *
Ally walked down the centre of the country lane and he knew the dead couldn’t be too far ahead.
The stench of them was still strong in the cold winter air. Smelled like shit. No: way, way worse than shit. Rotting shit mixed with rotting piss smelled with all kinds of awful.
But he knew the living had been here, too.
He walked along the road, Bob, Sammy and the gagged bitch whose name they still hadn’t figured out beside them. The sun poked from behind the thick grey clouds, which were like smoke from an addict’s lungs. The zombies were like a cancer that hung over their every living moment.
He could go places with similes and metaphors, especially when there was jack all else to do these days.
They stopped beside the Range Rover. Ally recognised it right away. The bonnet had got a bit dusty and muddied, and there were things inside—tins, cans, stuff like that—which weren’t there beforehand. He could smell burning from the engine. Always did mess up like that. A problem he’d had ever since he first bought the thing.
Luckily for him, he knew how to fix it.
He turned to Bob, Sammy and the gagged woman and he pointed at the car. “Throw her in the boot. I’ll get this up and running.”
The brunette’s eyes widened as Bob and Sammy opened up the boot of the Range Rover and tossed her inside. He heard the crack of her face against the hard laminate flooring he’d put in there. He kind of liked it.
Used to throw Claudia in there when she pissed him off. Locked her in there for the night. He’d had it custom fitted so a little section acted as a cage. Trapped whoever was in there in complete darkness.
He used to go to sleep to the sounds of her crying and screaming.
Didn’t matter. Lived way out in the countryside. Bitch could scream all she wanted.
Bob and Sammy closed the boot and walked over to Ally, who leaned on the bonnet.
“What d’you think it means?” Sammy asked, reluctance in her voice.
Ally looked up at her as he reached into the engine. Smiled. “It means they’re on course for Warrington. And it means we’re gonna be there to welcome them.”
Nineteen
They ran further and further through the woods, and it didn’t take them long to get lost.
Hayden stopped and rested his hands on his aching knees. The sound of the cold wind whistled through the trees as Clarice and Newbie panted beside him. Hayden had never been the fittest of people. Probably the healthiest period of his life was back in high school when he was actually forced into doing physical activity. But even then, he found ways to worm out of the classes. Stubbed toes, dodgy knees, things like that.
He regretted the day he’d ever lied about having dodgy knees now he knew what actual knee ache felt like.
“Sounds like we’ve lost ’em,” Newbie said. It threw Hayden to see him standing still for once. He’d kind of got used to Newbie powering onwards, no matter what. He could sympathise with Newbie’s plight to find his daughter. Sympathise, but lament it at the same time.
“I’m not so sure being lost is such a good idea,” Clarice said. She looked around, examined the trees as they shook in the whirring wind. Hayden tried to listen for gasps, groans and footsteps, but there was nothing.
And sometimes, nothing was the eeriest sound of all.
Newbie took a few deep breaths and carried on walking. “We can’t be too far off route.”
“I admire your confidence,” Clarice said, as she started to hobble on after Newbie.
“I never insisted you joined me,” Newbie said. “I never forced you here.”
“Let’s not go there again,” Hayden said. He struggled to catch his breath and tried not to tumble over with how dizzy he was feeling. “We just … we just need to focus on getting to Warrington now. And getting there in one piece.”
“We’re already torn into pieces,” Clarice said. “Sarah isn’t here.”
Clarice had a point. Hayden had been trying not to think too much about Sarah. About what she’d given up to try and help the rest of the group. It was a sacrifice he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make given the opportunity.
A sacrifice he’d make for nobody but his family.
They waded through the trees and over the fallen leaves, which crunched beneath their feet. “Newbie’s right,” Hayden said, trying to change the subject. “We … we can’t be too far from Warrington. Even if we went way off route, I’m pretty sure we were still heading in the same direction as we were on the road.”
“Again, your blind faith impresses me,” Clarice said, as she stepped over a pile of broken twigs. “I wish I could share it.”
They walked further. It felt like hours, but in truth it could only have been minutes. They tried to stay headed in the same direction, but it was hard to keep track when there were nothing but trees around them, sky above them. Hayden tried to use the sun as some kind of marker—he knew it rose in the east and set in the west—but he couldn’t even keep track of that right now, as it peeked through the grey clouds directly above them.
He had to face the truth. Accept the truth, as a cold shiver wrapped around him.
He was lost. They were all lost.
What felt like another hour later, Clarice asked if they could take a breather. But Newbie insisted they had to keep pushing on. They couldn’t hang around. It was afternoon, it was winter and it was Britain, which meant that the sun would be setting in a matter of hours.
They didn’t want to get caught out here when night fell. That was good for nobody. Nobody but the cold.
And the zombies.
They were walking for a while longer, Hayden’s legs feeling like they were going to shatter to pieces with every step, when Newbie stopped.
He lifted up a hand and halted Hayden and Clarice’s progression. Hayden swore he could hear Newbie’s pulsating heart cutting through his raspy breaths. Hayden stayed still. Waited for Newbie to reveal what it was he’d stopped them for. He looked at the trees as they rustled in the wind. He saw patterns. Patterns, shapes, all moving. He thought he heard gasps, thought he heard footsteps.
Keep your cool. Just keep your cool. All okay. Nothing in here.
“What … what is it?” Clarice asked.
“Up ahead,” Newbie said. “Look. Do you see it?”
Hayden squinted and once again wished he’d paid a visit to an optician before the world went to shit. “I don’t—”
“That … that house. The red brick. A detached house. Like … like my ex-wife’s house. Like Amy’s house.”
Hayden could hear the crackling in Newbie’s voice. He turned slowly to his sister and she raised her eyebrows, and Hayden raised his eyebrows in turn. He looked back at where Newbie was looking and this time, he saw it—saw the new-looking wooden fence surrounding a back garden, saw the red brick of the modern house that had obviously been designed to look like it was from another era. In the upstairs window, he saw an England football flag, except there wasn’t just the red of the England flag cutting through it—there was the red of blood splashed over the white material.
“It’s … is this Warrington?” Clarice asked.
Newbie stepped forward. “My Amy. There was a house like this on her road. Lots of houses like this. And … and there was a woods. There was a woods. I have to go find her. I have to go—”
“Wait,” Hayden said. He caught up with Newbie. He couldn’t believe their luck. And that’s part of what made him feel doubtful about all this; what gave him a niggling sense of unease of something not quite being right. “We need to go slowly out of the woods. We need to …”
But then Newbie did something completely unexpected to Hayden.
He pushed away his hands and he ran.
Hayden didn’t know what to do at first. He just stood there, frozen, watching as Newbie sprinted out of the
woods towards the road where his family supposedly lived.
“Do we chase him?” Clarice asked.
Hayden sighed. He heard the shaking of the leaves, the pattering noises that were like footsteps. “I don’t think we have a choice.”
He took his sister’s hand and the pair of them ran after Newbie and towards the road.
The further they ran, the more Hayden noticed the trees around them thinning out. And as they thinned out, he could see more houses—houses and cars and gardens and a little winding cul-de-sac, all untouched, all quiet, but all undoubtedly dead.
He wanted to shout out for Newbie as he watched him run down the middle of the street and towards another clump of these modern houses. He wanted to, but he didn’t want to risk waking this sleepy road. Because the dead would come. The dead were somewhere, and eventually, they always came.
So he just had to run. Just had to follow Newbie. Just had to hope.
Eventually, Newbie took a right and ran across the well-trimmed grass of a small detached house. He threw himself into the white front door and shook at the handle, then when he realised it was locked he stepped back and swung the axe at the window once, twice, three times, every blow louder than the last.
Hayden thought he saw movement in the corners of his eyes at the end of the street.
He thought he smelled death.
Newbie disappeared through the smashed window and Hayden heard his footsteps banging against the floor inside, heard him racing up the stairs. And he prayed for him. Prayed he wouldn’t find anything similar to what Hayden had found—one of his parents bitten and dying, another one already dead.
“I—I think I just saw something,” Clarice said.
She was looking to her left at a wire fence that had been ripped into two. There was a thick green hedge behind it, and beyond it Hayden got the sense that somebody was there, somebody was watching.
“They … they made it out.”
Newbie’s voice took Hayden by surprise. He swung around, realised Newbie was standing at an opened upstairs window. He had a note in his shaking hand. A note that was covered in blood. He was staring at it with wide eyes. “To … to the safe haven,” he said. “They left. They made it.”
Hayden definitely heard footsteps to his right. He heard the echoing of a groan, too. He didn’t see anything on the road, but he could see the faintest outline of movement in the lounge windows of the detached houses.
The awoken dead.
“That’s … that’s great,” he said, turning back to Newbie. “But you need to get out of there now. You … We need to push on.”
Newbie looked at Hayden. He half-smiled. Tears filled his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, gripping the note loosely in his hand. “Yeah. We do.”
He turned around and a zombie flew at him.
Newbie shouted out. Pushed at the zombie, tried to get it away.
But it wasn’t going away.
It stuck its teeth into Newbie’s shoulder.
Newbie tumbled back, fell out of the window, a shower of blood from his own bitten flesh sprinkling down with him.
He hit the concrete of the drive outside his house with an echoing crack.
He let out a pained moan.
Down the road, a window smashed open.
Twenty
Hayden could only stand and stare in shock as blood spurted out of Newbie’s mouth and trickled out of the bite wound on his shoulder.
But he couldn’t stand and stare for long because a group of zombies were heading down the road in his direction.
“Newbie!” Clarice shouted. Hayden could sense that all her inhibitions had dropped, and all she cared about right now was making sure that Newbie was okay. Well, not okay, but comfortable at the very least.
She threw herself in Newbie’s direction.
Hayden grabbed her arm.
“We … We have to go,” he said. Down the road, the zombies got closer, snapping away at the air, their pace getting faster. “We have to get out of here.”
She struggled with Hayden’s grip, smacked his hand away. Tears trickled down her cheeks. “Don’t … just don’t do your brotherly thing on me now. He’s … It’s Newbie, Hay. It’s Newbie.”
Hayden looked over at Newbie as he gasped and gargled blood. His face had turned a nasty shade of purple. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but one of Newbie’s arms had snapped completely and contorted to the right.
Contorted to the right with that little note he’d found in his daughter’s house—the note that filled him with such optimism and relief as he’d looked through the window and smiled—still in between his fingers.
The axe was in his other hand, but he’d been too late to use it.
But it could come in handy for Hayden.
Hayden looked back at the oncoming zombies. There were ten of them, and all of them were moving fast. All blood-soaked, all rotting, all powering down the middle of the road. Behind them, in the windows of other detached houses, Hayden could see more undead moving and scrapping about. Soon, they’d join the ten in the road and that ten would become twenty, that twenty would become thirty.
Which meant they had to act. Quick.
Hayden ran across the garden of Newbie’s ex-wife’s house and joined his sister by Newbie’s side. She was holding his hand and crying, muttering reassuring words to him. But the wound on his shoulder was bad. It was a bite wound for one, so that was bad enough in itself. A bite wound meant one thing and one thing only, and there was no escaping the outcome.
Newbie was bitten. Which meant he was going to turn.
Hayden crouched down beside Newbie and put a hand on his chest. The echoing cries of the zombies on the road behind them got nearer, and Hayden even thought he could hear more rustling from the opposite side of the road.
He looked into Newbie’s wide eyes and he felt himself tearing up. He’d pictured saying goodbye to his friend a few times, in those dreams that haunted his sleep, but it was always more Hollywood style. He had all the time in the world to say goodbye, to put down the ones he loved peacefully, in his visions. A swift blow to the head and then nothing.
But killing his mum had taught him that there was nothing romantic or dignified about death.
“I’m sorry,” Hayden said, as he reached over for the axe in Newbie’s weakened fingers. “I’m sorry but you … you know what I have to do. You know what I have to do.”
Newbie stared up at him, speechless, with tears in his bloodshot eyes. There was fear there too. Fear, but a weird kind of acceptance, as he coughed up more blood, winced with pain.
The zombies were just metres away now.
Hayden took the axe from Newbie’s hand and he lifted it over Newbie’s head. Clarice cried. She didn’t protest, she didn’t try to put up a fight, she just cried. Cried and apologised to Newbie, apologised for him being bitten, for them being separated, for him not finding his daughter, for everything.
Hayden held his breath as the horrid tingling sensation engulfed his stomach.
Just get it done with. Get it over with. Nice and quick.
And then he brought the axe swinging down onto Newbie’s neck as hard as he could.
He felt Newbie’s blood splash up over his face. Hayden grunted in horror, his heart raced and the fear of the lazy layabout he used to be reared its head all over again.
He heard Newbie splutter, heard a little whooshing sound as blood filled his windpipe, and then he swung the blade at Newbie’s neck again.
This time, he didn’t have any chance to feel any more fear, or even stick around to see whether he’d properly finished Newbie off.
It was only when he’d delivered the final blow that he remembered he had a gun in his pocket.
He stood up and turned around just as the first of the zombies flew itself at him.
He steadied his footing and swung the blood-splattered axe right into the side of its face.
And then another one, a shorter one, rushed for Hayden’s leg and Hayden swung dow
n on the back of its head and knocked it to the road.
He knew blows to the face and the head weren’t enough to deal with these zombies, but they held them off. And that’s all he had the time to do now—hold them off, keep them away.
A small gap formed between the first two zombies bleeding out on the road and the rest of the growing pack. More windows smashed and cracked, and more groans joined the choir.
“Quick,” Hayden said, taking his sister’s hand even though he knew she hated it. “Through the fence.”
“It’s blocked, it’s—”
Hayden knew what his sister was talking about when he looked at the opening in the wire fencing at the bottom of the road. There were three zombies all forcing their way through it. One of them, a ginger man with freckles all over his face, hadn’t quite grasped the way the fence worked, and was pushing himself so hard into the wire that it was slicing through his exposed stomach.
“We need to—to get inside,” Clarice said. “Get inside a house before—before it’s too late.”
Hayden swung around as another zombie pummelled towards him. He cracked it across the jaw with the axe, felt more blood cover his body, and turned to the house where Newbie’s daughter lived. “We need to get into a garden and over one of those fences,” he said.
And then with his sister’s hand in his, he ran.
Clarice veered in the direction of the house. “But there might be more at the other side of the—”
“They’ll find a way into the house. We’re just cornering ourselves if we go in there. They’ll find a way in. They always do.”
“But I … I’m scared, Hay. I’m scared.”
“So am I, Sis,” Hayden said, as the pair of them ran towards the gate at the side of Newbie’s ex’s house, the wooden fence at the back of the garden just low enough for them to climb over. “So am I.”
Hayden wanted to turn back and look at Newbie one final time. But he couldn’t. Not just because tons of zombies were nipping at their heels, but because he couldn’t see Newbie sprawled out on the driveway, his head dangling on by a few pieces of tendon. He couldn’t see Newbie that way, because that wasn’t the Newbie he’d been friends with. That wasn’t the Newbie who had stood by his side and fought together with him.