by Adam Millard
Suddenly, its head turned in their direction. Its expression changed, its mouth fell open and a rumble from deep within its throat emerged.
For a moment, it did nothing but look at them; maybe it was working them out, or maybe it was trying to figure out the best way to attack so many delicious treats.
'Can we run now?' Marla whispered, not knowing or caring if the tiger heard her. It could see them, which was enough.
'Don't move a muscle,' Shane said out of the corner of his mouth. 'Not yet.'
The tiger grunted again, huffed as if it was pissed off beyond belief, and took a step towards them.
Terry wished he hadn't let Moon take the shotgun. One shot from that would have probably been enough to bring the beast down. The .22 that Shane was clinging to would do the job, but it would take a lot more than one shot unless they got lucky.
The tiger suddenly lifted its head; up until then it had been skulking. Its mouth open wide, it roared, and then it started to run, racing towards them, covering the space between them in less than a few seconds.
Marla was already running down the street, Terry hot on her heels. She was screaming something incomprehensible as she ran. Shane was a few feet behind, but he was running backwards, trying to get a shot off.
The pistol recoiled in his hand, followed by a deafening blast. If it was shot, the tiger didn't show it. There was a row of bicycles chained up in the road, which it leapt over in one bound. Shane fired again, and this time the tiger yelped as the bullet tore through its hind leg. It skidded for a few feet through the snow, slammed into a fire-hydrant and buckled over, pained and confused.
Shane turned and started to run, not looking back. The tiger would have been all over them by now if he hadn't fired true. Marla and Terry were twenty-five feet in front, rounding a corner. Shane heard something groan from the side, and immediately thought that he'd made a big mistake in turning his back on the beast.
Then, he saw them, lurkers everywhere, attracted to the noise of the pistol. As they shambled into view, a sea of undead, Shane heard the tiger begin to roar behind him.
He raced around the corner to find that Marla and Terry were holding back a little. The truth was, he wouldn't have been mortally offended if they had decided to run for their own lives.
'Look!' Marla screeched. She jabbed away to the road behind, to where the lurkers had appeared.
The tiger was wounded, limping on its back leg ever-so-slightly, but that didn't stop it from going after the cadavers as if they were a herd of antelope. It lunged amongst them, and they began to crowd around it, unaware that the beast would tear them all into pieces.
It just proved that the lurkers were so vacuous, so intent on only one thing...
Feeding.
But the tiger was hungrier.
Shane, Marla and Terry watched, dumbstruck, for a few seconds before they turned and ran, none of them looking back to see the carnage.
*
The moment they noticed her, they began to stagger towards her, groaning, arms outstretched. She wasted no time in killing the first one, decapitating it with the adeptness that she had somehow taught herself. As the creature fell aside, another two were immediately after her. She wasn't sure whether to take them on, or run for it. What good was it to fight them? There would never be a last one, at least she didn't think there would. It was like trying to fight off an intrusion of cockroaches; sure, you might get the first wave, but what about the one that followed, or the one after that?
Regardless, she sliced the freezing air with the machete, lopping body-parts off the cadavers as if they were made of straw.
More came, a lot more, and she suddenly found that even if she wanted to turn and run, she couldn't. Her path was blocked, the only gate she could see was now teeming with the undead.
What the heck, she thought as she fought for her life.
*
'This way,' Marla said, ducking into a darkened alleyway. Once away from the street, she doubled over, trying to catch her breath. As Terry and Shane caught up, they did the same.
It was amazing how unfit they all were; the world had gone to shit, and so had they. Shane made a mental note to start working out when they returned to the barracks. Better chance of survival if he didn't get a stitch every time he ran more than twenty metres.
'See,' Marla said, straightening up, though still breathless. She was pointing to a fence at the side of the alley. Barbed-wire twisted around the top of it, but nothing too difficult, not with the padded jackets that they each wore.
There were wooden panels just on the other side of the mesh; a clever tactic to obscure the museum fence from intruders, though if Marla knew about it, then the chances were that everyone did.
'I'll take a look, first,' Shane said. He handed Terry the pistol. 'If you see a fucking tiger, or a bear, or anything that's got more legs than me, you have my permission to shoot it.'
'I was gonna,' Terry said. 'I ain't kidding you, that tiger scared the holy fucking shit out of me. I mean, really...'
Shane began to scale the mesh. It rattled as he climbed, chunks of snow fell from the spaces between the wire. His boots barely fit through the holes, which caused him to falter a few times. Marla gasped as he slipped, and then relaxed when she realised that he was still clinging on with his fingers.
Once at the top, he pulled himself just high enough to peer over. You never could be too careful, not since the outbreak. Riflemen might have taken up refuge in the museum, posted sentries up on the roof. It sounded ridiculous, but didn't everything nowadays? Shane knew to never take anything for granted, and so assumed there would be a sniper somewhere over the fence, just waiting for a head to pop up. The trick was to give as little to aim at as possible.
He stared out across the museum grounds. A hundred metres of untouched snow lay between them and the building. The fact that the white sheet was pure and untainted came as a relief. The rear of the museum was just visible through the blizzard, a largely grey structure that could have been an asylum if you didn't know better.
'What can you see?' Marla whispered from the safety of the ground. When he didn't respond straight away, she called his name with a hint of impatience.
'We're good to go,' he said. And no fucking snipers, he thought but didn't add. He pulled his body the rest of the way up and tossed his legs over the fence beyond the mesh.
Marla began to climb, hoping that she didn't make a complete fool of herself in the process. It had been her idea to take the shortcut, which made her all the more careful in her ascent.
Terry struggled at first, but once he got his footing he was over the fence quicker than Marla. Landing on the other side, he wiped his rust-stained hands on the front of his coat.
Marla came down a few seconds later, and had never been more grateful to find her feet planted in freezing-cold snow.
'Come on,' Shane said, turning and breaking into a jog.
Marla offered Terry a cursory glance before they joined Shane.
She couldn't stop thinking about the tiger, the way it had immersed itself in lurkers. What bothered her more, though, was that the tiger would have won that particular fight.
And unless Shane knew of another way back to the bus, they would meet the beast again.
*
They attacked as a pack, which was something she hadn't seen before. Maybe they were getting smarter. Perhaps they had evolved, regained a portion of their brainpower, and working together for their food was just the start.
She evaded three of the cadavers, rolling away to her left. As she scrambled to her feet – it didn't pay to lie down for too long, although she suddenly found herself exhausted – she swiped the machete at the legs of one creature. Tendons tore, and the thing went down like a broken marionette. She was back on her feet, now, and making her way slowly towards the gate that led onto the street.
She turned and saw that it was only partially blocked by the creatures; some of them had continued to shamble towards th
e building, while others had paid no attention and awkwardly made their way across the grounds in search of an easier meal.
One of the things, a female cop before the virus had stricken her, groaned and landed in the snow a few feet away from her. She could see the creature's holstered gun, and was immediately confronted with a tantalising thought.
I could take it, she thought. She had never had the opportunity to fire a gun before, and why would she? They rarely handed out weapons like that to girls of her age, despite what foreign countries thought. The fact that she hadn't fired a gun before did very little in the way of dissuading her, and she stepped forward, slammed the blade down into the back of the corpse's head, and waited for it to stop moving before freeing the pistol from its holster.
It was heavy; a lot heavier than she had anticipated. She would have to use two hands just to keep it steady, and even then she was unsure that she would be able to pull the trigger without being propelled through the air backwards.
She slipped the machete through the loops of her backpack and stepped back, enough distance between her and the nearest corpse to have a practise-shot.
Using both hands, she lifted the gun and aimed it at the approaching creature's face. She pulled the trigger, and when nothing happened she panicked momentarily, before noticing the red dot on the side of the gun and the tiny switch next to it.
Safety was still on.
She flicked the switch, levelled the gun at the cadaver's head, and pulled the trigger.
She didn't fly back through the air as she had half-expected, but her arm did recoil as the bullet exploded from the weapon at a thousand feet per second. It tore through the corpse's face, lifted the top of its head off and exited, leaving a hole roughly the size of a tennis ball at the back. The creature immediately toppled over.
She wondered how many bullets she had, before realising that she was better off with the machete, at least for now.
She clicked the safety back on and shoved the gun into her coat-pocket.
*
Shane stopped jogging as the gunshot echoed around the grounds. It sounded as if it came from everywhere, all at once, though he knew that it was close.
Was someone firing at them? Had Shane been right about the snipers? The shot sounded close, but not near enough to have been meant for them. There were no holes in the snow around them, either, which meant that they were not the intended targets. Either that or the sniper was the worst fucking shot in the world.
'Shane, that was close,' Marla said. She looked like she might start to cry any moment, though that might have just been the freezing-cold wind making here eyes water.
'Lurkers don't fire guns,' Shane said. 'Which means there's a survivor.'
Terry nodded. 'Yeah, a survivor with a gun who could quite easily confuse us for lurkers in this half-light.'
He was right, but they had to find other survivors, didn't they? That was one of the reasons they had returned to Jackson, to search for living souls, to locate and help the uninfected...
'It must have come from the front,' Shane said, largely clouded by the white-fog that was his breath. 'The street.'
Marla sighed. She already knew what Shane was thinking; it was in his nature to get involved, and the more time she spent with him, the more she noticed her own fear dissipating.
Without another word, they moved slowly towards the museum.
There were no more gunshots.
*
She dodged the maniacal lunge of one creature, but found herself amongst several others who appeared to have been expecting her. The machete whooshed through the air as she stumbled backwards; the blade embedded in one of the cadavers' throat, and a geyser of dark, putrescent sludge spewed forth, painting the surrounding snow.
She tugged at the machete, hoping to get it free from the looming creature's neck. At first, nothing happened. It was wedged somewhere between its collar-bone, and no matter how much she struggled to pull it free, it remained firmly stuck. For now, she was controlling the corpse, keeping it at a distance, making sure that it didn't succeed with its advances and take a chunk out of the top of her head.
Why did I have to be so small?
With one, final almighty yank she managed to pull the blade free. There was an audible squelch; the unfazed corpse looked like it might drop, but managed to compose itself, its head hanging half-off, its eyes bulging from their sockets.
She swung the machete, severing the head completely, and now the cadaver dropped to the snow, squirting a sickeningly dark torrent from the stump.
She scrambled back, hoping to make enough purchase on the snow to give herself some space. They were coming thick and fast, and although she knew she could run at any moment, she had come to the conclusion that it would do no good.
Sooner or later she would have to fight them.
Why not now?
Why not here?
She couldn't think of a reason to run, anymore.
*
They stood at the corner of the building, the blizzard whipping against them, the half-light of the approaching morning doing very little in the way of comforting them. It didn't matter if it was day or night. Those things weren't nocturnal, it wasn't as if they went away when the sun rose, the way they would if they were fucking vampires. But weren't zombies part of the same mythology? They used to be, but apparently not any more.
They were real; vampires remained firmly encased in the realms of fiction. Though, nobody had ever expected the dead to rise and eat the living, so you never know what the future might have in store.
Shane was the first to see the horde, and immediately knew that he had made a serious mistake. There were too many of them, way too many if you considered the gun-to-survivor ratio. There was a way past them, but that involved running, a lot of running, and they were already chasing the next breath as if the air was pure carbon.
Shane was about to suggest trying to find another way around – perhaps the other side of the museum offered more in the way of shadows and less in the way of flesh-eating corpses – when Marla gasped and slammed her hand to her mouth hard enough to loosen teeth.
'I see him,' Terry said, straining his eyes through the gloomy half-light. 'In the centre.'
Shane had no idea what the two of them were talking about. All he could see was lurkers, a fuck-load of 'em.
'Shane, there's a person in there,' Marla said, pointing across to where the majority of the cadavers were accumulating. 'Don't you see?'
Shane took a step to the side, to where Marla was standing. She had to jab a freezing-cold finger in the direction of where she was seeing this so-called survivor, but it made it a helluva lot easier for Shane, who spotted the guy amongst the gore-drenched crowd.
'Holy fuck, you're right!' Shane gasped. 'I don't think we can do anything to help him.'
It was the truth; there were just too damned many of them, and Shane couldn't speak on behalf of the others, but he wasn't feeling up to much in the way of fighting. The cold had sapped his strength to the point where collapse might not be too far away.
And then, the stranger jumped up, and Shane saw that it wasn't a man at all.
It was a child.
A girl.
'Shit!' he gasped. 'That's a fucking little girl in there.'
He was already loading a new clip into the gun. Marla was hopping anxiously from one foot to the other, not knowing what his decision was going to be. She had an inkling, though.
With the gun loaded, Shane glanced across to where the girl was fighting for her life. She must have been no older than eight, about the same age that Megan would be...
And then he saw the pigtails either side of the girl's head, swinging with each swing of her machete.
Megan.
He raced into the battle, not caring what happened to himself. His daughter was alive, and she was a damn good fighter.
Marla screamed after him, tried to make him see reason, but it was too late. They could only stand and watch
as the nightmare unfolded in front of them.
*
When she heard the gunshot she immediately thought the worst. She must not have put the safety on properly, and now the gun had gone off in her pocket. She braced herself for the pain, hoping that the bullet had gone in another direction. She was fighting with a small, fat corpse which was missing its nose, ears and lips, and she swiped the machete twice through the air, hoping to take something else. She missed, but then its head exploded as another loud bang came. She knew then that it hadn't been her own pistol that had fired, which explained why she hadn't felt any pain as the bullet ripped through her.
It hadn't.
The creature flew backwards, thumping into the snow.
She turned to see if she could make out where the shot had come from, and didn't have to look too far, for the man was coming towards her, shooting everything that moved. He took out seven corpses as if they were nothing but a minor inconvenience. She could tell by the look on his face that he was determined not to die out here tonight, which was more than could be said for herself. She'd practically resigned herself to the fact that it was the final battle, and now she was being saved by a man she had never seen before in her entire life.
*
All Shane could see was Megan. The lurkers around her were just background, blurs that needed to be taken care of. It was like looking through a fish-eye lens where the only point of focus was extremely sharper than its surroundings.
He fired again, and again. Lurkers fell as bullets tore through their heads, through their brains. Fragments of skull and chunks of flesh landed in the snow, creating a strange mosaic of gore and decay. Behind him, he heard Marla screaming frantically, but he didn't turn, he didn't stop, not even for a second, because his daughter was still alive and she needed his help.