‘Thanks,’ I said and strode off.
‘Do you want me to come?’ asked Flick.
‘No. Stay here in case he comes back,’ I said without turning around.
At the foot of the track, Stewart slunk around to stand in front of me, forcing me to stop. ‘Sophie,’ he began, ‘are you prepared for what we might find?’
‘I’m prepared to find Misfit,’ I said.
‘Sweetie, what he means is –’
‘I’m going to find him!’ I shoved past Stewart and headed up the track.
At the top, we were back on the level that ran alongside the railway line, a tall wire fence between us and it, with the track looping back around to the left to where we started.
I saw a group of five zombies staggering along the train line from the direction of the tunnel that ran through the tall chalky hills to the left. When they set eyes on us, they changed direction and lumbered towards the fence. They hooked their rotten fingers through the wire and rattled the chain link in their desperation to have us. One of the zombies was missing most of its right hand, probably chewed off by the zombie that infected it. It beat at the wire with its stump, bits of crusty black scabs falling through the gaps like cheese through a grater.
We turned to the right, the zombies lurching along after us, struggling to keep up, and followed the track until it ended. Ahead of us, a gentle hill, thick with undergrowth and trees, rose upwards and away from the train line and would eventually lead to a bridge that crossed the railway line to the woodland and hills on the other side.
‘What’s that?’ said Kay, pointing at something a little way up the hill. I could see what looked like booted feet protruding from behind a large bramble bush.
I ran forwards, up the hill, slashing at the undergrowth with my claw hammer, trying to shake off the weakness in my legs and the churning in my stomach. I knew the others were right behind me; I could hear their feet pounding the earth and the swish of long grass.
I stopped beside the bush. I knew straight away, now I could see the edges of the trousers, that it wasn’t Misfit. Misfit wouldn’t wear snow washed denim. I stepped over the feet, peered around the bush and saw the body of a zombie laying on its side in the undergrowth. I kicked it over onto its back and saw that the zombie had been expertly killed with a small, neat stab wound to its temple. The trickle of thick black blood which had oozed from the hole in its head had dried on its gaunt cheek.
‘He’s been here,’ I said. I wanted to shout his name but I knew that would attract more zombies.
‘And there,’ said Stewart, nodding further up. I looked up and saw another zombie laying on the ground on its stomach, a small patch of black stained grass around its head. We headed up towards it.
That’s when I saw them, just a few metres up the hill where it levelled off, staggering out from the trees. Zombies. I guessed there were around fifteen to twenty of them. But that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was the black backpack I saw laying on the ground at the entrance to the wood. Misfit’s backpack. I lost sight of it as the approaching zombies shuffled past it on their way down to us.
‘NO!’ I yelled and I charged at the zombies. I raised my claw hammer and drove it into the frontrunner’s face, bashing out a chunk of skull and brain, followed by a shower of thick black blood. I ploughed forwards, swinging my hammer at the zombies as they surrounded me. The cold, hard metal smashed into the top of another zombie’s skull, even before the first one hit the ground.
I heard grunts and the sound of slashing flesh from behind and I knew Kay, Stewart and Charlotte had joined me in the fight. As she drew up beside me, I saw Kay slam her axe between the eyes of a zombie, creating a zombie-split.
I grunted as I swung my hammer at a zombie almost two foot taller than me, with long wisps of curly grey hair and a long grey beard. I hit it in the jaw, taking most of its lower face off, but, with its brain still intact, it carried on towards me, its eyes bulging from its gaunt face. I jumped in the air and slam dunked my hammer into the top of its head, and it crumpled to the ground.
As my feet touched down, I saw a zombie reach its ravaged hand towards my right arm. Too late to swing my hammer at it, the zombie managed to wrap its fingers around my forearm, preventing me from using my hammer at all. I struggled to free myself, but the zombie held on tight. With my left hand, I pulled my knife from my belt, slid it into the zombie’s left eye, and it released me.
I saw Stewart swing his sword in long arcs, slicing off the tops of several zombie heads in one go. Charlotte kicked and punched her way through the zombies. She grabbed one by the arm, lifted it from the ground and swung it over her head, where it crashed onto its back behind her. She spun around and slammed her cleaver between its eyes before it had chance to haul itself from the ground.
I continued to battle zombies, cold blood splattering my warm skin as my claw hammer flew into heads. I checked each rotting face before my hammer smashed them, or my knife slashed them, praying that Misfit’s zombiefied face wouldn’t appear before me.
As the last zombie fell, I stood, weapons at my side, panting. I had my head bowed, staring at the disgusting, withered body of a dead zombie on the ground before me. It was less horrifying to look at than what I knew waited for me at the opening of the wood.
Misfit’s abandoned backpack.
I couldn’t put it off any longer. I slid my knife through my belt and, keeping hold of my hammer, staggered the rest of the way up the hill. The others had made the climb already. Kay held Misfit’s backpack in one hand and rooted through it with her other. ‘How many knives does he have?’ she asked me as I drew up next to her.
‘What?’
She sighed, frustrated at my inability to grasp the simple question. ‘Misfit. How many knives does he take out hunting?’
‘Oh, er, he has the one he carries and another … um … four in his backpack,’ I said.
‘Well, the four in his backpack are all here,’ she said, dropping her arm to her side so the backpack hung near the floor.
‘OK, but we know he still has a knife so he’s armed and –’
‘Guys,’ said Charlotte. We turned to look at her, just inside the sparse wood. She stood in front of the body of a zombie. ‘No, he’s not,’ she said and she stepped aside to reveal a hunting knife sticking out from the zombie’s eye.
‘No! No!’ I said at the thought of Misfit out there unarmed.
‘I think we should head back to camp,’ said Stewart, the tip of his sword resting on the dusty ground while he looked at me with a pained expression. ‘There are too many zombies about.’ As if on cue, I saw five more staggering between the trees deeper inside the wood. I didn’t care.
‘There’s no such thing as too many zombies,’ said Kay, raising her axe and making a move towards them.
Stewart grabbed her elbow and held her back. ‘I hate to be the one to say it but this is a waste of time,’ he said, staring at me.
‘No!’
‘Sophie, his stuff’s here – all of it. You saw how many zombies were here when we arrived. He must have been bitten.’
‘No! NO! Not Misfit. He’s not dead!’
‘Sophie, I don’t know what else to say that would explain him leaving his stuff other than he’s been bitten and turned,’ said Stewart. ‘This wood is teaming with the buggers, I don’t know how anyone could survive out here unarmed. I’m sorry, but he’s gone.’
I fell down onto my knees. Between the trees I saw a couple of zombie bodies laying on the ground a few metres inside the wood and I envied their long awaited oblivion. I lay down on the cold, dusty earth as though this was nursery school and it was nap time. More shadowy zombies approached from the gloom. Let them come, I thought. I’m too numb to feel the pain of teeth against my flesh.
Entry Three
I don’t even remember the journey back to the camp. One minute I had the hard, earthy floor of the wood underneath me and the next I stood by the dead camp fire. Kay, Stewart and
Charlotte busied themselves around me, closing up the fence panel, collecting firewood, building up a new fire. Just as the smell of smoke wafted into my nostrils, I felt an arm around me, I don’t know which of them it was, a body trying to guide me somewhere I didn’t want to go. I stood firm and stared into the freshly lit flames as they crackled and rose to feed on frosty logs.
I had no concept of time at that point. But after a while, and still clutching my hammer, I turned and staggered to the dilapidated Martello tower that stood within our camp. I welcomed the silence and security of the cold, dark interior, the acrid smell of damp strong in my nostrils, and made my way up the steps to the top floor.
The tower had been in the process of being renovated before the outbreak. Whoever was working on it hadn’t got very far and apart from new windows in the lower part of the building and a new staircase, the rest of the structure remained a shell. On the top floor, the last of the day’s sun filtered through the gap in the boarded up windows that ran around the top of the circular building. Me and Sam had removed that board, back when we used to come up here to be alone.
We’d sit by the gap and look out to sea and listen to the others chatting around the fire below, or Stewart playing his guitar. This is where Sam asked me to marry him. And I had said yes because I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. I sat now, my claw hammer in my lap, watching the sunset. Why couldn’t they have just left me in that wood, sleeping with the dead zombies – the dead zombies. The two dead zombies further inside the wood. None of us killed them, we hadn’t gone that far in.
The thought suddenly struck me. If Misfit had been ambushed in that wood, and the abandoned backpack and the large number of zombies at the scene would suggest he had, he must have escaped them. Because who else had killed those zombies further inside the wood? Unarmed or not – bitten or not – he had been in a fit state to kill more zombies. That meant there was still a slim chance he was alive.
I leapt to my feet and was about to run down the stairs and tell the others, when I realised they would never let me out of the camp. Not after my breakdown in the wood and not now the sun was going down. They’d make me wait until the morning. This couldn’t wait.
My eyes darted around the gloomy interior of the Martello tower. I couldn’t get out through the locked fence panel we usually go in and out of, but I wondered if there was a way out the back. I jogged over to the windows on the other side of the tower, the side that looks out across the road to the houses on Wear Bay Road. On my haunches, I worked my claw hammer between the boards, prising the corner of one of them away from the frame it was nailed to, careful not to make too much noise. When I had levered open a gap big enough, I peered outside. The space between the tower and the other side of the two perimeter fences was too far to jump from where I crouched, and the outer fence was too high to climb from ground level. But what I did notice was a pile of rubble, stacked up against the inner fence, just below me.
I considered removing the board and getting out through the window, using the scaffolding on the outside of the building to lower myself to the ground. But there would be a lengthy drop from the lowest point of the scaffolding and I didn’t want to risk a fall. I’d be as good as useless to Misfit if I got injured. Luckily, the Martello tower stood near the camp’s entrance, and its door faced away from the rest of the camp, so the others wouldn’t be able to see me emerge from the tower from where they were, by the fire.
I let go of the board slowly so it didn’t slam against the frame. It pinged back in place, and I stood, turned from the window and darted down the stairs. Opening the door only as much as I needed to in order to slide my body through, I crept around to the left and shimmied through the narrow gap between the tower and the fence and emerged around the back. I scrambled up the rubble, grasped the top of the outer fence and swung my body over … Freedom.
I followed the track around to the right, stopping when I got to the camp’s entrance. I paused to glance through the fence panel we used as a gate. No one was watching so I darted across and bolted down the track towards the Warren. If I had felt like a nervous parachutist before, I was now a fearless free faller. I pitied any zombies that got in my way.
It had grown dark by the time I came out onto the promenade. I could only tell the tide was out by the moonlight glinting on the water’s edge. I ran on, my feet pounding the concrete, having to negotiate the route by memory in the blackness. I kept close to the cliff in the place where I knew the promenade narrowed, to avoid slipping off the edge and falling the five foot drop onto the lower level of concrete. Before the outbreak, a man had died in that spot when, one evening, he lost control of his bike and went over, hitting the next level of concrete head first. I remembered reading about it in the local paper.
I stopped outside Flick’s shack and opened the gate. At the top of the steps I called out, ‘Flick … Flick!’ I heard a rattle and a scratching sound and the door opened. Flick stood in the doorway, illuminated by candlelight from further back in the tiny structure. The glow turned her ice white and honey toned hair a darker gold.
‘Sophie! What are you doing here after dark? Did you find Misfit?’
Adrenaline made me giddy. ‘Misfit … alive … I think … zombies … he killed zombies. In the woods. His stuff was there but there were bodies – fresh bodies – further back –’
‘Whoa … slow down. I’m not following. Have you found him?’
‘No. Not yet. We found his stuff … all his stuff, including all his knives in a wood. The others think he’s dead. But I don’t believe it, Flick. There were fresh bodies further in. I missed that when we were there but I remember now. He wasn’t killed in that wood.’
‘But … but he could have been bitten and –’
‘Please help me find him.’
‘If he was bitten …’
‘Please.’
‘It’s dark, Sophie. This is madness. It’s dark and …’ I didn’t move. Flick stared at me for a moment, her brow creased. ‘Wait there. I’ll get my shotgun and a torch.’
‘Thank you.’
We reached the hill that led up to the wood. Flick swung the torch beam left and right as we made our way upwards, the light catching the bodies of the zombies me and the others had killed earlier. We both jumped as, with one swing to the left, the light caught a zombie just a few feet from us. It groaned and gnashed its teeth at us before starting its pathetic lumber towards us. I lifted my hammer and smashed it down on the zombie’s skull once it got close enough. I heard a little thud as the zombie fell … more aware of sounds in the quiet stillness of the night.
We saw another zombie, caught like a rabbit in the headlights in the beam of the torch. This one, Flick brained with the butt of her shotgun, held in her right hand, the torch in her other.
‘Here,’ I said when we reached the spot where we’d found Misfit’s backpack. ‘We found his stuff right here. One of his knives is in a zombie’s head just over there.’ Flick moved the torch beam in the direction my finger pointed in and I saw the zombie’s body with Misfit’s knife protruding from its eye. I walked over to the zombie, bent down and pulled the blade out, wiping black blood on my jeans before stashing the knife through my belt with my own. ‘But there are more zombie bodies right over there.’
Flick shone the torch over to where I now pointed. The bodies of zombies I knew hadn’t been killed by me, Kay, Charlotte or Stewart because we hadn’t gone that far into the wood, lay on the ground where I remembered them.
‘Their heads,’ said Flick as we approached the bodies. I could see what she meant, I noticed there was more blood than there’d usually be with one of Misfit’s clean, expert kills. The zombies’ heads were each a broken, crushed mess.
Flick swung the torch a little to the left at the sound of a groan. Three zombies staggered towards us from the trees. With Flick holding the beam for me, I strode over and brained each one in turn with my hammer: one through the eye, one between the eyes and one with a wallop to the top
of the head, just to mix things up a bit. Flick followed me and we crept further into the wood.
‘Look, another body,’ I said, pointing to our left. Flick shone the torch directly at it. I went over and crouched down on my haunches. With Flick holding the beam steady, I noticed again this zombie’s head looked like it had been crushed in a vice.
‘Sophie, another one,’ Flick nodded for me to follow the beam of the torch down to the bottom of a tall, steep bank that went down to the train line. I could see a dark shape laying not far from the track.
There was no fence between the bank and the train line here, the steep drop of the bank being deterrent enough to stay off the tracks. I put my claw hammer through my belt and Flick stashed the torch into the pocket of her thick jacket and the pair of us slipped and slid down the bank, me praying the body wasn’t Misfit’s. Chunks of chalk and stones rattled down the steep incline as we tumbled clumsily to the bottom.
‘You okay?’ Flick asked me as we both climbed to our feet, dusty and scraped.
‘Yes, you?’
‘I’ll survive.’ Flick pulled the torch out of her pocket and shone it at the body. Another zombie, its head crushed. Flick swung the torch up and held it out before us.
‘Motherfucking shit fuck!’ I yelled. There in the beam from the torch was a mass of zombies a few metres down the track. Each time Flick swung the torch from left to right, more of their writhing bodies could be seen, only to disappear back into darkness as the torch moved again. It was too dark to see what they were doing and the light, flicking erratically, made it hard to focus. But I could see that some of the zombies at the back had spotted us and were turning and staggering in our direction.
‘Shit!’ said Flick.
‘Turn the torch off,’ I said.
‘If I turn it off, we can’t see them.’
‘I think that’s for the fucking best!’
We both turned and grabbed hold of the bank, desperate to scrabble back up. But other than cause a mini avalanche of chalk and stones, neither of us could get any more than a couple of feet off the ground before we slid down towards the oncoming zombies. Flick turned and with the torch held before her in her left hand, she raised her shotgun in her right and blasted the nearest zombie. I got a glimpse of the exploding head, just before she swung the torch and shot at another.
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