Great Bitten: Outbreak

by Warren Fielding

“It was just two roundabouts. It’s not a big place. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking, I just.…”

  “Shh it’s okay Anna.” I ran my hands through my hair, trying to maintain my composure whilst trying to resist the impulse to throw her out of the driving seat and take the wheel myself. “We can’t turn back the route now, we just need to work around the problem we’ve got. Now if we already know the station is a dead zone, we need to figure out another way. There’s a turning coming up on the left that goes over the tracks. We just need to go up that way and we’ll be on a virtually straight road back to the main road.”

  “Oh yes, I know. I know where we are now. I’m so sorry Warren it’s just I’ve never liked driving and this is just so strange and so stressful, and I feel so tired.”

  “We’re all tired. We just need to get somewhere safe and then we can all rest. Just take the turn and then we’ll be back on the right route.”

  Anna indicated as she started approaching the turn. I chuckled hysterically that a woman who had driven so badly so far when the world itself was still collapsing around us could still keep the mechanical basics of road use in place. In her manic state she understood why I started, and couldn’t keep back her own ironic mirth. For about 5 seconds, we all had a little chuckle to ourselves. Then we took the turning we needed. We saw the barriers across the train line were down. We saw the train carriage straddling the tracks. We saw the carriage full of dead bodies, beating at the windows.

  She stomped on the brakes and we all jerked forward and back hard in to our seats. We were all mesmerised by the sight in front of us. What had been outlines before were now embossed in the beacon of our headlights, and that really bought us some attention from the undead denizens of the train. We could see fevered hands pumping against windows that weren’t designed to hold the strain and at one end of the carriage it didn’t take long for the window to begin coming out of the old and degrading seals. They flopped over each other in a desperate bid to escape the claustrophobia of their cylindrical coffin. One or two were caught underneath a torrent of bodies and I watched in horror as the sheer weight and pressure literally pushed one figure in half, the upper part of the bloodied torso sliding gruesomely down the side of the train.

  “Start reversing Anna.”

  “But that leads to town!” she squealed.

  “We haven’t got too many options left. Just get us away from the fucking corpses!”

  Dan echoed what we were all thinking, but none of us wanted to head towards the seafront. The places we had been eyeing up as refuges were turning out to be dead ends or routes to doom; there was no telling what the town centre itself would hold for us.

  Right at that point though, we didn’t exactly have a range of choices. Anna reversed and shrieked as she threw the car around. Their boy must have gone catatonic at this point; he was just sat clutching his father’s shirt now, rocking slowly and staring out at nowhere. As the car spun; a handbrake turn that would have sat proudly on the cutting room floor of any Top Gear show, we hit another zombie side-on. There were more runners now emerging from the side streets. I craned my head around, starting to appreciate just how built up the area we were in was.

  “Is town the only way?”

  “We could go back the way we came?”

  “Is it safer?”

  “Based on what we’ve just seen on the way here, we’d have to go to the seafront and through residential a lot of the way. Big fifty-fifty chance if we still want to head for the Downs. They’re only a mile or so from where we are, we’re just stuck in the centre of Shitsville and our compass isn’t quite up to scratch at the moment.”

  “Just keep heading onwards then Anna. As long as we’ve got those eerie fuckers well behind us I don’t think I care where we’re heading at this point.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be saying that if we end up sandwiched between a full deck of them.” broke in Dan. “Take the main road down to the seafront then. It’s risky, but hopefully most of the activity will be in the centre of the town. There’s no real safe route between here and the road back north; we’re right adjacent to the train track so there’s no telling how many zombies have spilt out along this road.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea Dan? I mean as long as we’re not getting their attention, we should just be able to sneak past them on this road the same as any other, right?”

  “I really don’t know Carla. I don’t want to be leading this outfit. I thought your brother or your man was in charge, but if you need me to lead I will.”

  “I don’t know the area well enough,” I broke in. “I can’t lead blind, that’s just suicide. I’ll welcome anyone taking the reins at the moment as long as we get out of this town alive.”

  The car was trickling along at a pace to outstrip the ambling dead, but not quickly enough for us to run out of road before we could make any decent decisions. There were a few intersections, and we all tried to see what we could. It was more of the same everywhere; dark houses and abandoned cars. There were however more and more of the slow zombies crawling out on to the street. They were still freaking me out, but they weren’t even vaguely as threatening as the sprinters that had been pelting at the car before. If we came across a horde of those in the road, I’m pretty sure we’d be overrun and devoured. I still didn’t know what made one zombie quick and another slow. I was hoping to get somewhere to spend some more time researching, but at the moment getting quite so much alone time seemed like some impossible wish.

  “If all we’re trying to do is avoid clusters of infected, and the only routes we’ve got are both going near them, then we need to pick the route which has a Plan B. We keep going wrong because we’ve got no backup plan. Does the seafront have anywhere we can bail if things go wrong?” I was immediately greeted by a unanimous chorus of ‘the pier’. Dan turned to look at Carla and Rick. Carla looked stunned at first but then quickly became animated.

  “Why didn’t we think of that first? The pier! The pier could easily be made safe. It’s got those massive gates, the high struts. As long as there were no zombies on there in the first place, it would be easy to keep them out!”

  “And what if there were zombies there?”

  “Throw them in to the sea? Anything! It would be easy to get rid of those things from there. We have to drive by there at the very least and see what’s going on. I have a good feeling more than a few people will have thought of the pier. It might be the answer we’re looking for whilst we wait for things to calm down. Then when they have.”

  “Then we can regroup and head for the Downs?”

  “Exactly.” Carla grabbed Rick’s head and placed a kiss on his forehead, as if he were a clever child that had just given the right response to a parent. Well it wasn’t exactly the time for ardent fornication; that seemed to be the only movie stereotype we were avoiding at the moment. Which was almost a shame, if I hadn’t been in a car with two men, my sister, and a woman with less backbone than a blowfish.

  “The seafront then?” Anna asked uncertainly. Dan’s hand reached across and he grasped her leg firmly and reassuringly. “The seafront. Neither choice is good, but the pier, well that makes sense. Warren’s right. We keep reacting to things, not planning. This way, if the seafront route goes wrong we can at least try the pier. Even if there are some of those things on it at the moment it should be easily defensible.”

  ‘Unless it’s overrun’ I thought in my head. But at that point I thought it wise not to share my cynicism with everyone else in the car. This was the best idea we apparently had to clutch at, seeing as we didn’t appear to be able to run for the hills quite yet. Anna seemed confident now though, knowing exactly where she needed to go. That was a small boon at least. If she hadn’t have been such a wet lettuce we probably wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. She could have woken any one of us to make sure she stayed awake. What a cretin.

  “How far to the seafront?” I asked. If I was awake, I was at least going to tr
y to make some use of the time in this cattle wagon.

  “Just a couple of minutes hopefully,” Rick replied. “Why, what’s up?”

  “Nothing. Just want to keep an eye on the area as we move. You keep an eye out of your window and I’ll look out of the back. Carla, can you keep an eye out of your side?”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Anything useful. Signs of survivors. Signs of zombies. Piles of permanently dead people. And we’re definitely looking out for clusters of those fast things. I don’t know about you, but the thought of having a dozen of those running for us scares far much more shit out of me than a hundred shambling ones. I think we’d have a chance with the slow-coaches. I think we’d be dog meat with the others.”

  “I think you’re right.” Rick answered as his head drifted to one side. Dan was gently whispering to his son as I turned and knelt on the back seats, fully facing out the back now, boldly covering our rear and surveying the territory we were leaving. Nothing seemed to be changing around this monotonous town. Rows of shops followed by rows of houses. Blacked-out windows, abandoned cars, and streetlamps to set the whole lot softly aglow. As we were now apparently right by the town I was expecting a lot more. I was expecting packed hordes and people running around in the streets. I was expecting there to be fighting, or at least some kind of show of resistance. Perhaps there was in the city, where they had the police and the military to back their corner. But we weren’t in the city. We weren’t even in a big town. We were in a small seaside town that had steadily been becoming a retirement mecca. And in this English corner of solitude and death we all appeared to be hiding, and the country in turn were succumbing to the zombie infection. There would be no fight. We were retreating quietly in to the night and allowing our little pocket of the world to be devoured and destroyed.

  I saw a sprinting figure dart across the road. I was about to call it out to the others when I realised it hadn’t even been heading for us. There must at least be someone or something else getting the attention of the undead. Up to this point it had felt like all eyes were on us, at least in the very south. Perhaps from the windows of the living they were. I did catch glimpses of curtains falling and entertained that once or twice I had seen the flashing glints of eyes as they silently watched us pass, a solitary hearse in a doomed parade. This, though, was simply my imagination getting away with me. At least if any of the documentaries I’ve watched are to be believed. Human eyes don’t reflect light. Not the same way animal eyes do.

  Rick and Carla were an edgy quiet, the kind where you’re silent with nerves, not because you have nothing to say. Were they seeing little snippets like I was, and were too scared or nervous to mention them? Were these little things growing together to be some bigger picture that I was looking for? As we took what seemed like the umpteenth turn, Carla pulled at me. She wasn’t taking her eyes off the window.

  “Anna? Can you slow down for me, just a sec?”

  Anna eased off the accelerator a little and the car drifted more slowly. “What can you see?” I asked, with congenial curiosity, considering how calm Carla was.

  “That’s town, or at least one end of the top of town, down that street there.”

  “So?”

  “So we’d have gone quite near there if we’d have taken the other route. Squint and tell me what you see. And if you squint and still can’t see anything, I’ll just tell you what I can see, you blind twat.”

  I squinted. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to be seeing. It was as if my vision were fuzzy or blurred, like live white noise. Then I realised what that was. The end of the road, pooled under the distant lights, it was a writhing mass of bodies. They were like maggots, and that’s the size they seemed at this distance. But there must have been hundreds of them for them to be clustered together so densely. They were a heaving orgy of undead, though thankfully they were both quite a distance from us and didn’t appear to be moving anywhere with too much purpose.

  “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “They must be waiting for something. Animals don’t usually go running around the savannah in the hope they’ll stumble across dinner. They wait, and then they hunt.”

  “You’re suggesting those things hunt?”

  “No, but I don’t think they waste whatever energy they have.”

  “Good. Because the thought of them hunting would be enough to top me. How close to them would we have driven?”

  “Right past them. Even if it was just a crowd of slow ones, I’m not sure we could have got through a pack of them that dense. Good call with the seafront. I think we just missed a fatal blow.”

  Anna slumped her shoulders, hopefully in relief that something we were doing finally appeared to be going right. I wondered how catastrophic their day had been so far, and what had really driven them out of their home so early when most people still seemed quite content to batten down the hatches at home and see what damage the first few days of the storm would yield. We picked up pace again and as we turned one more corner, I saw flats on my right and on the left, nothing but darkness. We had reached the seafront.

  “How far from here to the pier?”

  “Well,” Anna said, picking up confidence, “if it were a normal day I’d say turn around and take a look. I don’t know if it’s a good sign or not, but it’s all dark. So either the lights have gone out – but then I’d expect that to be a town-wide problem – or someone has pulled the plug.”

  “Because they don’t want to be noticed?”

  “Exactly that. The pier would usually be lit up like a Christmas tree, no matter what the time of year. I can’t see a single thing – not even the rope lights. Someone has done a careful job up there, and I think we’ve got a good escape ahead of us. As for distance? Maybe a mile?”

  “Okay. What do you think about driving it dark? If it’s a straight road and we go slowly, we shouldn’t have too much in our way. We want to draw as little attention to ourselves as we can.”

  Anna seemed a little uncertain but after a brief hesitation and after seeking a reassuring glance from her husband, she killed the lights and dropped the speed down. I resumed my vigil out of the windows. There were lots of flats around here. They were nice. Not the high-rises I was used to seeing. Probably full of retirees. Even if their residents had been turned, I don’t suppose they’d be able to chase us down on legs that didn’t have much time left for the world anyway.

  “Is this pier in town?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I was expecting to see more of… well, more zombies. More something, at least. It’s already a ghost town around here. What’s that noise?”

  We all craned our ears. I could hear in the background an orchestral lilt, like classical music. Over the eerie quiet of night the sound was travelling well. Dan rolled down his window and even leant his head out a little to try to get a better listen. We weren’t mistaken.

  “That’s bloody well Land of Hope and Glory!”

  “Where the hell is it coming from?”

  “Fucked if I know. One of the flats?”

  We all looked up, but couldn’t see any lights, or any likely source of the noise. The lack of zombies said it was probably nowhere near where we were looking, but perhaps the disturbance did explain why there were so little zombies getting in our way.

  “You think someone is taking one for the team?”

  “There’s that, or they set the music off and did a runner.”

  “Either way, whoever they are, when this is done they deserve a Knighthood. Wonder how many of the town’s zombies they’ve got distracted?”

  “Enough to keep us alive this far. Do you think that horde were heading that way?”

  “That or distracted by something else. There might still be houselights, stereos, alarms; all sorts going off that we hadn’t considered. It’s not just sight that attracts them after all, they’ll be heading for any sound that grabs their interest.”

  “Was there looting in Bennington
?” asked Carla.

  “You know, if I hadn’t have lived near town I wouldn’t have known. The news didn’t even look at the smaller places, did it? But there was looting sure enough. Around the afternoon when it was obvious things were starting to go south, the shouting and the window smashing started. That’s when we weren’t sure whether or not we really wanted to stay put.”

  “Were the shop alarms going off?”

  “I think so why… oh of course! You think the shop alarms will be keeping the zombies off the seafront?”

  “Well can you see anything on the road?”

  “No I… ah shit. Well it was just a matter of time before we got to a roadblock.”

  “Can you see a way around it?” Anna asked. There was a smash in front of us. The cars had long since burned out, but there was no way we were going to be able to make our way through, or around. The bus that had piled in to the lot had made sure of that.

  “How far to the pier now?” I asked, completely disorientated.

  Dan looked around, trying to make sense of the buildings and gauge his surroundings. “I’m not sure distance-wise, but we’re over halfway. No more than a ten minute walk, and a lot quicker than that as I’m guessing we’re going to hustle.”

  “Well I’m not up for taking a midnight stroll in the moonlight if that’s what you’re asking. Can we go back and around?”

  “Most of these side roads will take us too close to the town. You saw that pack. I don’t want to risk running in to it, or anything like it. The route we were going to take back up north takes us past heavy residential areas and shops that, now we’ve pointed out the alarms, might have zombies clustered around them. I vote we get on the sea-side of the road and march it to the pier as quickly as we can.”

  “I stick with that. We’ve got our gear in bags so we can bring our own stuff with us. How much can you carry?”

  “We have some small cases that we can put some things in. We’re going to have to leave most of it behind, but I don’t think that can be helped. Hopefully there will be more people there and we can pool resources. We’ll be right by town when things calm down, too.”