by Frank Tayell
I skipped back a pace, and another. I looked at the pack. There were eight or nine all close together, all close to me. I didn’t waste time counting properly. Behind Them came the rest, and it suddenly looked like a lot more than thirty zombies. There was another shot.
Focus, I told myself. I skipped back another step. I glanced back to Sholto. So far all the zombies heading down the drive were heading towards me. That was good, I told myself, as I skipped back again. I could lead Them away and my brother could thin Them out. There was another shot. I risked a glance over my shoulder. The stone wall stood twenty yards away. I could make it. It was going to be OK. I repeated the words over and over, in the hope that would make them true. Suddenly, my earlier stoicism evaporated. I really, really didn’t want to die.
Another shot. Climbing the wall was going to be the tricky part. Then three shots in quick succession. I glanced over at my brother. I could no longer see him. The undead were in the way. But there didn’t seem to be so many, not right in front of me. There were seven. Or was it six? There was another shot then three, then a burst and I cursed. Sholto should be saving his ammunition, making each shot count, not wasting them like that.
But he would know that. He must be in trouble. I had to help him. I’d have to climb over the wall and run down the length of it, to where he was. Another single shot and this time there were definitely only six, and how did my brother get the angle for that last shot? I didn’t have time to work it out, because that creature with the scalped head, the one marginally faster than the others, was out in front again, only six paces away.
I swung the pike up, spear point forward, and skipped a half step to change my footing. I plunged the pike forward. The point smashed up through the zombie’s cheek. Its skull almost seemed to crumble as the creature collapsed, dragging the pike with it. I barely managed to keep my grip. In the half second it took to pull the weapon free, the pack kept advancing and now they were a pushing shoving scrum of arms and teeth, barely a pike’s length away. I skipped backwards, and again. I was in the middle of the road. If I wanted to get to the wall I needed to get some distance from Them. There was another shot. A zombie collapsed. Another shot. There were four zombies left, in front of me. Then a rapid burst, and there was only one. I stopped retreating.
I swung the pike up, scoring a line through a faded flannel shirt. The creature didn’t notice. I swung again, the blade bit deep into the zombie’s neck and stuck there. The zombie fell, brown pus spraying out onto the asphalt, and it took my pike with it. The shaft hit the ground as the zombie toppled forward. The wooden handle splintered and broke.
I pulled out the hatchet. The nearest zombie was at the top of the drive, but moving back towards the house. I stalked towards it, but only managed three paces before there was a shot and it collapsed. There was a volley, then another. I looked over at Sholto, half thinking that he must have had more ammo than he’d thought, but his gun was lowered. There was a third volley and I realised the shots had come from the safe house, and the pack was now heading back there, towards the sound of gunfire.
Hatchet in hand, unsteady from an excess of adrenaline and a lack of sleep, I followed.
As I got closer, I made out five rifles pointed out of four windows on the upper floor of the main building. Then the volleys stopped. There was one last single shot and a zombie wearing the remains of a lurid pink tracksuit, collapsed. Then all was silent except for the hammering of undead fists against wood and stone.
When I’d climbed the incline to the main gate, I realised why. What I’d taken as a dark band of paint ringing the house at about the level of the ground floor ceiling was actually the shadow from a ledge. It was about three feet in width, and judging by the window boxes, had held a profusion of trailing plants. Now, it prevented the people in the house from firing down at the undead immediately underneath them.
“There were more around the other side than we realised,” Sholto said, walking up to join me. Two dozen zombies lay dead in the car park and out on the road. About the same number two or three deep, were once more gathered around the house, beating and clawing at the walls.
I could just make out faces in the window, and thought that their expressions seemed expectant. It was Sholto who worked out what it was that they were expecting. He started shouting, bellowing out the words to some old protest song. Even under the circumstances, I thought that was in bad taste.
I stayed silent. He was making enough noise for the both of us.
Heads at the back of the pack slowly began to turn. By the second chorus, seven zombies were heading towards us and another dozen were faltering at the packs edges uncertain as to whether we, or the house were the more enticing prey.
The closest of those seven was fifteen feet away, when there was a ragged burst. They fell. Only one tried to get up. Its jaw had been shot away, its head nodded back and forth as if it couldn’t understand why it could no longer bite down. Sholto aimed, pulled the trigger. His rifle clicked, empty. I darted forward, swinging the hatchet up and then down. The movement was enough to get another four moving away from the house. Sholto had stopped singing, and I clearly heard, coming from the house, the words ‘Aim first, Donnie. Remember to aim!”
There were four shots. The zombies fell.
There was a brief lull. The undead had all returned their attention to the house. My brother started up singing again, but without the same vigour as before. Only three creatures moved far enough from the building to be shot.
There were about fifteen left when, at the same time as she started climbing out onto the ledge, a woman called out, “Get Closer! Keep singing. Shout!”
“Get back in Carmen,” another woman, still inside, called out “It won’t take your...”
The ledge cracked. It split. Amidst a shower of splinters and stone, she fell down into the pack of undead.
“Come on,” Sholto roared, but I was already limping forward as fast as I could, my eyes fixed on the woman, even as, zombies crowding around her, she disappeared from view.
There were a few shots from inside, bullets skittered on concrete and smacked into the stone wall of the barn. A few undead fell, a few more spun backwards before renewing their efforts to reach the prone woman. Then there was a long drawn out burst. The woman had been lucky, she’d managed to hold onto her rifle. She emptied the magazine into the creatures around her. Two of Them collapsed on top of her which, with the remains of the ledge, offered her some temporary protection from the clawing hands of the pack.
Sholto reached the undead, his machete cleaving up and down and left and right, about the same time as the door to the house flew open. Three men came out. One held a sword, one a rifle and another a short handled spear. I didn’t have time to take in any more details because I’d reached the edge of the pack. With the woman on the ground, with Sholto yelling and ululating, the creatures didn’t even notice me. The hatchet came up and then down. I swung. I hacked. I pushed and kicked and punched and hewed. It was all a blur, a great mass of gore, interspersed with brief moments of clarity.
The hatchet stuck in a creature’s forehead. The blow hadn’t done enough to kill it, so I was warding it off with one hand, whilst trying to pull the axe free with the other. I’d just turned my head, and saw this second creature just inches away. And then, out of nowhere, the man with the spear appeared, stabbing it through the zombie’s eye. Then he pivoted and turned with a graceful brevity of movement. His spear sliced right alongside the cut my axe had made in the first creature’s head, cutting through bone and sinew as if they were butter. The zombie fell, its head cleaved in two, and I’d barely enough time to register that this man was old, not just aged by recent experience, but genuinely old, before there was another zombie in front of me. My axe went up and my hand went out and the fight went on.
And then, moments that seemed like years later, it was over. My eyes darted around, my hands moving up and down, looking for the next opponent, but They were all dead.
> I glanced over at my brother. He was doing that same jerking back and forth, scanning the ground for threats. He’d lost his machete at some point and had resorted to using the M-16 as a club. The barrel was bent, the butt covered in gore. He stared at it for a moment before throwing it away in disgust. He shook his head, as if remembering, then ran over to the side of the house and the woman who’d fallen from the ledge.
“Carmen? You alright?” the old man called out.
“Fine. Fine. Bruised my ego, that’s all,” the woman called out from under the bodies, as Sholto started dragging Them off her.
I looked around. The man with the sword was young, with a scraggly red beard that matched the colour of his sunburnt scalp. Wearing a camouflage jacket and carrying a rifle slung over his back, he might have looked intimidating if he’d not been moving erratically from body to body, the sword waving in a haphazard figure of eight, brown pus dripping from its edge, as he looked for the still living dead. He looked like I felt, shocked and dazed.
The third man, the one who’d come out of the house with a rifle and still held it with a calm professionalism that just highlighted how the rest of us were still just experienced amateurs, took pity on him.
“You are alright, Donnie. It is over.” He spoke softly, enunciating each syllable in a cultured Parisian accent. With a face that had more creases than lines and erratic patches of grey in his hair, I’d safely guess he’s on the wrong side of forty. His body on the other hand had a wiry athleticism that mine had never even approached.
“Yeah. Right. Thanks Francois,” the young man, Donnie muttered in an Irish accent with that transatlantic lilt of a Dubliner.
“Good. Now put that sword down and go and help that man with Carmen.”
I watched, unmoving, seeing it all but not really taking it in.
“And how about you?” the old man asked. I’d not noticed him approach. “Are you alright?”
“I’m...” I raised a hand to wipe the sweat from my eyes but saw it was covered in blood and gore. I’d cut it somehow. I looked at the blood and saw the cautious concern in the old man’s eyes. “...immune.” I finished.
“Ah,” he relaxed. “Me too. And it was a shock finding out. Like being born again, ‘cept into a nightmare you can’t ever be sure isn’t Hell. George Tull.”
“Bill.” I’d half extended my hand in that old familiar gesture before I remembered.
“Later,” I said. “After I’ve had a wash.”
“Well we’ve water enough for that. And thank you, Bill. For your help. I’m grateful.”
“It doesn’t look like you needed our assistance.”
“Unexpected help was rare enough in the old world, out here it’s about the only thing of any worth. So, thank you. Introductions then. Carmen’s our wannabe acrobat, Donnie’s the chap who didn’t realise that even though the dead are walking, you still have to use sunscreen. Up at the window that’s Marcy, our doctor, and that’s Francois.”
“I... We...” I didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t like meeting Kim, nor like when we found the girls, nor even when we found Barrett and the others. This was something different. It was as if we’d walked into someone else’s story. I put it down to the shock of suddenly realising I was still alive. Then something the old man had said registered.
“You have a doctor?” I asked him, but he didn’t get a chance to answer because there was a shout.
“Mister Tull!” It was Donnie. The old man stiffly walked over to him.
Sholto had pulled the bodies away. The woman, Carmen, was now sitting with her back against the wall, my brothers hands clutched tightly around her thigh.
“We need some bandages. Something to clean the wound.”
“It’s nothing,” Carmen said, I could hear it now, the pleading disbelief. “It’s just a scratch.”
“Marcy!” the old man bellowed, “Marcy! Get out here.”
“I would if someone would help me,” A voice called back from inside.
“Donnie, go and help her,” George Tull snapped, and whatever had driven him over those hectic last few minutes seemed to drain away, making him suddenly seem little more than an old man wearing gore stained clothes.
A few moments later Donnie came back out of the house, helping a woman with a bandage around her ankle and a large blue bag hanging over her arm.
“Right, lower me down so I can see,” she said, after Donnie had helped her over the litter of bodies around the house. “Move your hands, please,” she said to my brother, the tone brusque and professional. “Right, I’ll have to clean it, bandage it. Carmen, look at me. Carmen? Have you been bitten before?”
“What? No. I mean...”
“Has she?” Marcy turned to look at the old man.
“No idea.”
“Anyone know?” she asked. Donnie shrugged, Francois just shook his head.
“Well, you haven’t turned,” the doctor said, turning back to Carmen. “So you’re probably fine. But we’re going to wait and see. That’s our procedure.” She glanced briefly up at Francois. The two exchanged a look that said they’d been through this before.
If I’d been looking for a sign as to whether we could trust these people, those words and that look were as close to one as I was going to get.
“I’m sorry...” I began, addressing Carmen, as the doctor began to clean and bandage the wound.
“You’re standing in my light,” the doctor said. I stepped sideways. I wished I could crouch down and address the injured woman at eye level, rather than towering over her like that.
“We had no choice,” I went on. “We’re low on food. But it’s more than that. We do need help. Medical help. There’s a baby, she’s sick.”
“There are more of you? Where?” the old man asked.
“A baby?” Carmen asked.
“What do you mean by ‘sick’?” Francois asked.
“He means is it contagious,” the doctor clarified.
“I’ve no idea. She’s not got a fever, and none of the rest of us got sick if that means anything. It might be smoke inhalation, but she was like that before the fire.”
“We were trapped in a tunnel,” Sholto interrupted, and I was grateful he did. I knew I wasn’t making much sense. “We set a fire to escape. We all got burnt, though Daisy was withdrawn before then.”
“Well, where is she?” the old man asked.
“Safe, about a mile away.”
“Safe? They’re not safe out here, not on their own. All of that shooting’s going to have carried for miles.”
I looked over at my brother.
“I’ll go and get them,” he said.
“Not unarmed you won’t,” the old man said, “Donnie, you give him your rifle. Francois, you go with him. Be quick now.”
My brother took the rifle, hesitated a moment, checked it was loaded, then fired a shot into the body of one of the undead. He nodded slowly to himself.
“Right, let’s go then,” he said, hurrying off towards the distant trees. The Frenchman followed.
“Not many children made it,” Marcy said. “There can’t be more than...”
“Twenty three,” the old man interrupted. “There are only a few hundred of us, but only twenty three children.”
“Where?”
“Ireland,” The old man said firmly before anyone else could reply. “We’ve secured a stretch of coastline, and a decent sized village. There’s an old school there. Every day, everyone sees it, the empty classrooms, and you can’t help but wonder about the future, and think on the past.”
“That’s all I can do,” the doctor said. “We just have to wait.”
“Not out here,” Carmen said. “Not if there’s children.”
“You and me, lass,” the old man said. “We’ll go into the barn and wait there, alright? Donnie, you want to give me a hand?”
Between them, they carried the woman into the barn, leaving me alone with the doctor. There was an awkward moments silence.
&nb
sp; “Dr Marcille Knight,” she said, carefully lifting herself up.
“Bill. It’s good to meet you, doctor.”
“Marcy, please. Snap.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The legs. How did you get yours?” she asked.
“Oh, that. Before the outbreak. I fell off a staircase. You?”
“Jumping out of a window a couple of days ago. Oh hell,” she added, “I forgot Leon.”
“Who?” I asked, turning to look. A man, rifle held across his body, was running down the road at a pace that would have won him gold in any marathon. He didn’t stop until he reached the top of the drive. He took one long sweeping glance around, taking in me, the bodies of the undead, and then the distant figures of Sholto and Francois.
“Where are they going?” he asked, in a French accent far gruffer than Francois’. He didn’t even sound out of breath.
“There are more of us. A woman and two children,” I said. “They’re going to collect them.”
“Ah,” he said nodding. “The old man?”
“With Carmen in the barn,” Marcy said. “She was bitten. Donnie’s helping him.”
“Ah,” he said, this time with a trace of sorrow.
“One of the children, it’s a baby,” Marcy added.
“Oh?” He seemed to think about that for a moment, then he looked around at the bodies once more. “I will go back to Gwen.” The words came out slowly each enunciated with meticulous care, as if he was unsure they’d be understood, but then he turned and started running back the way he’d come without waiting to see if we had.
“He and Francois, they’re French Special Forces,” Marcy said. “Or were. I was in Mali. At a refugee camp. They dragged me onto their plane. The last one out.”