by Perrin Briar
She approached the door-window, the mattress strapped firmly to her back. She stepped up to the gap Hugo had inadvertently created. She let go of the mattress, letting it sit comfortably behind her, covering the hole. Then she removed the machete from the sheath she kept on her back.
She looked down at the undead as they crawled toward Hugo and Poe, who edged toward the lake. The undead followed them, unable to follow on their feet at a good pace. They resorted to crawling on their hands and knees. It turned out to be a very effective system, one Hugo and Poe ought to have been using too.
The bedroom door finally gave up the ghost, the wood splintering, the hinges holding on tight to their buttresses. They came away smooth and cleanly. The undead were right behind her. Now was the time to jump.
Dana leaped, attempting to control where she fell. She aimed her machete and brought it down on the first unsuspecting undead she came to, burying it in the back of its skull. Dana was swallowed up to her shins. She pulled at her legs to work them free, but the swamp only sucked at her feet.
This was going to be a lot harder than she thought.
A grunt over her shoulder caught her attention. Another undead was heading toward her, leaping forward on its hands and knees. Dana dropped down, held out her machete, and waited until the creature was within swiping distance.
She let rip, slicing the creature across the face, spilling thick claret to the marsh. She didn’t expect the strike to stop the monster, and it didn’t. Dana was already bringing the blade around to deal another blow. She swiped again and again, hacking at the creature until its neck was rent from its head.
Dana turned and crawled through the mud toward the writhing backs of another pair of undead. They were gaining on Hugo and Poe, now at the water’s edge. A wave of undead were descending on Dana’s position. She wished she could fight them all, but where they were, in this place, just one false move, and she would be doomed. They would fall upon her and rip her to pieces. It wouldn’t matter what special Resistant gene her blood had then, not when her limbs had been torn from their sockets and a hundred swarming undead filled their bellies with her entrails.
She focused on moving her limbs together, first the left side, then the right, like a lizard across a water’s surface. Against the wild fluctuations of the undead, she was gaining on the creatures within seconds.
Something tore loudly above her. High up, from the second-floor bedroom window, the mattress had been ripped open. It fell to the marshy ground, the sharpened ends of the springs embedding themselves in the writhing bodies of the undead. Then the undead began to tumble through the door-window. Bodies caught on the protruding beams, widening the doorway further. A cascade of undead breached, a waterfall from hell. They splattered across the ground, spreading, already in the pursuit of their prize.
Dana kept moving. The lake was their only hope now. She caught up to the undead ahead of her. One man, half her blonde hair stained with the putrid brown mud of the swamp. The other undead was a tall skinny man with the well-worn muscles of a farmer.
“Hey!” Dana shouted. “Hey, hey!”
The two figures turned to see her. The woman wasn’t much interested and continued forward. Hugo and Poe must be close if she ignored Dana like that. The man, however, saw her as an easier meal. He turned on powerful arms used to this terrain. He bore down on her hard and fast.
Too fast.
Dana’s right hand held the machete. She moved slower than she was capable of, but she wouldn’t risk being unarmed with these things in their midst. A band of creatures barreled from behind her. Dana passed her machete to her left hand. It was the direction the big man was coming from. If Dana wanted to stop him she’d need to do it quickly.
She waited for the opportune moment, letting him get close enough where she couldn’t miss. She thrust. The creature slipped. It was lucky it did, as Dana’s blade sliced through its chest rather than its bulging eye. Dana twisted the blade and lifted it vertically and across, in an attempt to slice the creature’s neck, but it had already shifted to one side, moving sideways like a crab.
Damn!
Dana shifted position. She darted a glance over her shoulder. The wave of undead were getting close. Too close. She needed to get past this creature or she wouldn’t stand a chance. Time was not on her side.
She edged sideways, turning in the opposite direction to the creature, away from the approaching horde. Now, her back was in the direction of Hugo and Poe, the creature at the head of the approaching horde.
Dana had never run from a fight before, had never turned tail. But she knew these things did not feel the same, did not feel anything. There was no honor in them. They simply attacked to feed. That was all. There was no need to fight them if you could get away.
“See you,” Dana said.
She turned and raced in the direction of Hugo and Poe, who were now standing at the lake’s shoreline. What were they doing? Dana thought. They should have been in the water.
Except they were waiting for her.
Idiots! If they thought she would have done the same for them and waited, they would be sorely disappointed.
Dana scuttled across the surface, catching up fast with the blonde undead. The zombie was getting to get feet now, closing on Hugo’s position. A swift movement from him and the blonde hit the dirty deck with a splat. Hugo finished off the job with another thrust to the woman’s temple. There was no way he was going to leave her able to come back and wreak bloody revenge on them.
“What are you doing?” Dana said. “Get in the water! Now!”
“We were waiting for you,” Hugo said.
“Swim!” Dana said.
She wasted no time in throwing herself into the muddy water.
“Poe can’t swim!” Hugo said.
“He seems to be doing fine to me,” Dana said.
It wasn’t the most sophisticated swimming style, consisting of a mixture of doggy paddle and breaststroke, but he wasn’t struggling. The water’s surface was calm and without crease.
“We’ll never swim to the other side!” Hugo said. “It’s too far. And we’ll never even get to come out again if those things follow us.”
“We’re not heading for the coast,” Dana said, treading water.
“Then where are we supposed to go?” Hugo said.
“Toward that light,” Dana said.
“What light?” Hugo said.
He turned to look in the direction Dana was heading. A white-yellow light, a little brighter now in the dimming sunlight, blinked at them. It had to be something, something solid they could cling to until the danger had passed.
Looking back, Dana could see the undead waiting at the water’s edge, lacking the will to enter and swim. It was an instinctive reaction for them, not a psychological one. Some part of their primitive brain knew the water was dangerous. They would not enter.
And so, Dana, Hugo, and Poe were, for the moment, safe.
Chapter Ten
Dana was exhausted. She couldn’t keep going. The longer they kept swimming, the farther and farther away the light seemed to get. Perhaps it really was heading away from them. Maybe it was a boat but now it was heading for the opposite coast. Had the crew seen them coming and decided they didn’t want to be Samaritans?
Dana cast another look over her shoulder. The undead had begun following them around the coast, but as they kept swimming, heading farther and farther away, the zombies couldn’t see them. The creatures that followed them dwindled until there were none.
Still, the people on the boat—if that was indeed what it was—might have thought any distance was too close. Dana couldn’t blame them, but it made getting to them a whole lot more difficult.
Dana was about to suggest they cut their losses and head across to the coast when she noticed the light had stopped moving. Poe may not have been much of a swimmer but his instincts were good. He alternated between swimming on his front, which was faster and tired him out, and swimming on his back un
til he got his breath back again.
The problem with swimming on their backs was not seeing where their quarry was and where they ought to head next. They seemed to veer left more than going straight and then overcompensated when they tried to fix it.
Dana considered heading to the coastline, but there was simply no telling what was out there. Exhausted as they were they would stand no chance if the undead converged on them.
They finally reached the origin of light. It was indeed attached to a boat. It was a fairly large one, far too big for them to scale it. They would need someone to toss down a rope or ladder to ascend. They were already exhausted from their swim to the middle of the lake. They couldn’t tread water all night.
“Hello?” Hugo shouted up to the deck. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Dana swam to the boat and beat on the side with the fleshy part of her hand. Hugo kept shouting. No one responded.
“This is great,” Hugo said. “Just great. We swim all the way here and there’s no way for us to get on board.”
“What did you expect?” Dana said. “Champagne and a queen-size?”
They swam, making a round of the boat. The only way up was via the anchor chain, and that was not going to be the easiest climb, especially with their arms and legs aching the way they did. Dana was the strongest of the three. She would need to be the one to make the ascent. First, she needed to gather her strength. She took hold of the anchor chain. She floated there, relaxing as the chain bore at least some of her weight. It was going to take a few minutes for her to recover enough strength to begin climbing.
“Do you think you can do it?” Hugo said.
“I can try,” Dana said. “What other option do we have?”
“Who goes there?”
The voice came from the boat’s deck.
“There are three of us,” Hugo said. “We were on the shore, sleeping in a house for a nap when the zombies came and attacked us.”
“They attacked you?” the voice said.
A light swung around until they located them clinging to the anchor line.
“Have you been bitten?” the male voice said.
Now there was a difficult question.
“No,” Dana said, choosing instead to answer the question they were really asking: Will you turn anytime soon?
“We just need a little time to rest,” Hugo said. “We have our own food. You can keep a close eye on us, keep your weapons on us. We just want to get to land and continue on our journey.”
Silence for a few minutes. They were no doubt discussing their decision right then. Dana hoped they would hurry up. They were not moving or swimming, and the water suddenly felt very cold.
The people onboard never told them their decision, but instead dropped a rope ladder over the side. Hugo was the first to begin swimming toward it, ensuring Poe got to climb up first.
Dana went up last, legs shaking as they took her weight. She rolled over and collapsed on the deck of the boat.
“Thank you,” Hugo was saying, teeth chattering.
The man and woman grabbed Dana’s clothes and body, checking for weapons. She supposed it made sense for them to do it while they were weak and weary. Dana would have done the same in their shoes. They could use her own sword or machete to gut her like a fish right there and then, and then toss her ass overboard. She couldn’t have provided much more defense than a caught fish.
Dana hoped for the best even when the strong stench of fish filled her nostrils when her hands were tied behind her back, when she was dragged into the belly of the boat. She was much too tired to do much else.
For a glimmering moment, right before Dana passed unconscious, she thought that perhaps, heading for the coast hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.
Chapter Eleven
When Dana finally awoke, she found herself sitting with her legs stretched in front of her, her arms behind her back. She felt odd shapes behind her, before realizing they were a set of grimy fingers. She turned her head to one side to find it was Hugo, not Poe, she was tied to. The door was a thin yellow outline from the light on the other side. Their window was a small porthole that let in a thin stream of moonlight.
“Dana?” Hugo said. “Are you awake?”
“Are you?” Dana said. It annoyed her she had awoken after he had.
“They put us in the belly of this boat,” Hugo said. “I saw three of them, but there could be more. One woman and two men. I also saw lots of children’s toys.”
“Where’s Poe?” Dana said.
“I don’t know,” Hugo said. “The last I saw him we were all together on the deck.”
“We’ll find him,” Dana said. “If we find it difficult, we’ll just need to wave him in the general direction of the undead.”
“What are you talking about?” Hugo said.
“He’s the reason the undead found us earlier,” Dana said. “He draws them like he’s a super delicious treat or something.”
Dana located a screw that protruded from the floor. It wouldn’t have been of much use if it wasn’t for the sharp ridges along its sides. She shifted her body so she could rub the fishing line against the ridges. They were not sharp, but they were rough. The line cut into her wrists, so she worked the cuff of her jumper down underneath to act as a buffer between the wire and her skin.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hugo said. “He didn’t attract them. How could they sense him? They weren’t even in the area when we first got to the house. It was just bad luck.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” Dana said. “Do you remember Swatter in the hospital? About how the undead seemed to keep attacking them? Even when they didn’t make a sound?”
“Vaguely,” Hugo said.
“I’m betting they’re having a lot easier time of it now without him there,” Dana said.
“You can’t know any of this,” Hugo said. “Where’s your evidence? It could be one of us that’s attracting them.”
“Sure,” Dana said. “We, who are getting more and more like the undead each day that passes, we who the undead can’t sense unless we get them riled up or attack them first. Sure. It’s plain as day it’s one of us.”
Hugo was silent a moment.
“There might be some truth in what you’re saying,” Hugo said. “But what of it? What difference does it make? Not a whole lot while the undead are out there and we’re in here.”
“He’s dangerous,” Dana said. “He draws the undead to him like a moth to a flame.”
“What do you suggest we do?” Hugo said.
“Leave him here,” Dana said. “He couldn’t be safer. He’s on a boat in the middle of a lake for God’s sake.”
“You can’t be serious,” Hugo said. “We don’t know the people here, if they’ll take him in. I mean, look what they did to us, tying us up like this. He’ll end up dying.”
“Better than us dying along with him,” Dana said.
“I suppose not of it really matters though, does it?” Hugo said. “I mean, we’re still trapped here too.”
Hugo’s loyalty to his friends never ceased to amaze Dana. Every time she had tried to get him to leave Poe behind he had flatly refused. He was willing to lay down his life for a chance to save Poe’s. And come the end of all this, that could very well be what he would have to do. Dana wasn’t sure if she should have been impressed or disgusted. She knew she would not have done the same for Hugo. The only person she would gladly give up her life for was Max. But she wouldn’t give it up cheaply.
“What are we going to do now?” Hugo said.
“We’ll work our bonds free,” Dana said. “We can try to open the door, but I suspect it will be pointless. They wouldn’t have put us in here without some decent security measures.”
“Who are these guys?” Hugo said.
“I don’t know,” Dana said. “I suppose it doesn’t really much matter. They’ve captured us.”
“Captured?” Hugo said. “Don’t you mean rescue
d?”
“What do you think these things around our wrists are?” Dana said. “Daisy chains?’
A loud squeal and the door lock was uncoupled. The door banged open. The warm yellow glow of the corridor lights flooded the small room they’d been held in. Two large men entered. One man was large and consisted almost entirely of squares. A rock-hard chin with etched-in stubble, thick arms larger than Dana’s legs. The other was smaller but wore a sword at his waist in a scabbard that looked extremely comfortable on him.
“Hello there,” the man with the sword said. “My friend and I would like to know what it is you were doing out on the lake in the middle of the night.”
“We already told you,” Dana said, still gently working her bonds. She had sawn through a few strands, but there were still a few left. She kept at it. “We were there to go to the mainland. Then we were set upon by a horde of undead.”
“It’s strange that you would take off to the lake when there were plenty of other places you could run to,” the large man said.
“We were cornered,” Dana said. “If we could have run somewhere else, we would have done.”
“You told us you weren’t bitten,” the man with the sword said. “Would you like to rephrase that answer?”
Dana knew what was coming next. They had found the bite marks on herself, Hugo and Poe. They would think, due to their appearance, they were well on their way to turning. The only hope they had was the fact these people hadn’t yet killed them. Which meant… what exactly?
That we still have a chance of escape.
Dana felt the final few strands of her restraints snap. Her arms gave a little but she dared not exercise them too much, or else risk revealing she was now free of her bonds.
The man with the sword stepped forward and reached down to pull back Dana’s top, revealing the bite wound from her beloved ex. Dana was ready for it. She smashed her knee into the man’s face. Then she grabbed the hilt of his sword and pulled it free.
The swordsman reached down to trap the hilt in the scabbard, but it was already free, and only served to slice open his hand. He hissed and grabbed his bleeding palm.