by Ryan Casey
“Think you’re gonna need a fucking bath sometime soon,” a voice to his right said.
He swung around, readied himself to take on whoever it was.
His muscles slackened when he saw them.
Newbie and Sarah stepped out of the hedges. Newbie was holding a thick metal baseball bat while Sarah held onto a long knife almost as lengthy as her legs. They both smiled at Hayden. Smiled and nodded.
“What …” Hayden said, as blood and eye gunk dripped from his body. “What are you …”
“We got cabin fever,” Newbie said. He stepped up and went to put a hand on Hayden’s shoulder, then backed away in disgust when he saw that Hayden was completely drenched in blood.
“We’re here to help you,” Sarah said, stepping up beside Newbie. She smiled. “Help you find your family. Now can we get the hell on with it or what?”
Thirty-Four
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” Hayden said, as he, Sarah and Newbie walked down Harrison Road. “You shouldn’t have come after me. You were safer where you were.”
“We were safer,” Sarah said, walking beside Hayden. “Military came stalking around the woods right after you left. Looked like they were setting up some kind of blockade. We thought about moving on, but it looked like we were gonna have to take another route. So we followed you.”
“We shoulda come with you in the first place,” Newbie said. His head was lowered. “We … we need to stick together. If there’s one thing we can’t afford anymore, it’s leaving others behind. All of us—we need to stay close.”
Hayden nodded at Newbie. He appreciated the gesture. Truth was, the real reluctance he was feeling was the responsibility he felt for Newbie and Sarah’s lives now they were with him.
But he hadn’t been the one to convince them to follow him. They’d followed him of their own accord. That made him feel a lot better about everything.
They stepped out of Harrison Road and onto the T-junction at Willington Lane. There was a strange silence to this road. Crows swooped overhead. Bungalows, hundreds of them, stretched right down the road and to the motorway. A couple of them still had cars in their driveways, but most of them looked empty. Like model homes, never again to be visited.
“Wonder where they all went to,” Sarah asked, as they walked down the pavement at the side of the road.
Newbie pointed up ahead. “Think that might be our answer right there.”
Hayden stopped. The motorway bridge that went right over the top of Willington Lane had been split in two, like someone had brought a giant sword down on it and sliced it in half. Cars had spilled over the edge, crashed into a pile of debris and wreckage below. Debris and wreckage that blocked the path to Hayden’s parents’ house.
“Shit,” Sarah said. “Poor fuckers. Poor, poor fuckers.”
They got closer to the motorway bridge—or what was left of it. It was clear what had happened. A missile had struck it. Blown it to pieces. Stopped the fleeing cars from escaping the quarantine zone that was Preston. Up on the right of the motorway, cars were piled back for miles, but Hayden could see through the smashed windscreens that some of those drivers had borne the brunt of the missile strike. Blood covered the shattered glass. Charred remains of humans dangled out of the passenger doors, desperate to flee their inevitable fate. There was a smell of barbecued meat in the air—a smell of burning human flesh. It was so intense that Hayden could almost hear the screams of those who’d burned to death.
Sarah shook her head as they continued towards the motorway bridge. “It’s … it’s just not right. It’s sick. It’s—”
“It’s desperation,” Newbie said, looking straight ahead at the mass of fallen cars blocking their way to Hayden’s parents’ house.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “Are you trying to defend this?”
“I’m not trying to defend anything. I’m just saying. The government are obviously terrified to resort to such measures. They’re clueless on how to contain this … this infection. So worried about the ramifications it might have on the rest of the country—or even the rest of the world. So worried that they’d resorted to this. It’s … it’s desperate. That’s all I’m saying.”
Hayden saw a blue booster seat in the back of one of the fallen cars. The car was crushed under the weight of the other vehicles that had dropped from the motorway. The window next to the booster seat was shattered and covered with blood and small chunks of flesh. He didn’t even want to contemplate who might’ve sat there, or the pain they’d experienced in their final moments. Sarah was correct—this just wasn’t right.
They stopped at the edge of the fallen cars. It reeked of hot metal—or maybe that was just the smell of blood from all the people who had been crushed in the fall. Overhead, the sun was getting lower. There was probably only half an hour of sun left. No matter what happened, they weren’t leaving Preston in daylight.
“So what’s the plan, Batman?” Sarah asked.
Hayden stepped right up to the cars. He looked up at the motorway bridge. Pieces of loose concrete were still tumbling down from the edge. Pieces big enough to crack their skulls if one of them were unfortunate enough to stand under them. The metal of the cars creaked in the breeze. It was a mountain, and every mountain was climbable. But with every mountain came a risk.
“We’re going to have to go over,” Hayden said. “There’s not enough time to divert.”
He grabbed the top of a blue BMW and pulled himself onto the side of the cliff of cars.
“Wait,” Sarah said. “Surely there’s—”
“You chose to follow me,” Hayden said. “You aren’t my responsibility. Sorry, but you made the call to come after me. And I’m grateful for that. I really am. But this is the way I’m going. If you want to divert, then you two can divert. That’s not my call. It can’t be my call.”
He stepped onto the roof of the BMW, which creaked under his weight, and grabbed the wing mirror of a green Honda Jazz.
Sarah and Newbie looked at one another and shrugged.
“Hayden is right,” Newbie said. “We made the call to follow him. So it’s our call right now. I think it would probably pose less of a risk to climb over this right now and get to Hayden’s family home faster than the risk of taking another route and getting caught up in the darkness. Or worse.”
Sarah shook her head. She looked back down the barren expanse of Willington Lane. In the distance, the silhouettes of zombies moved in the glow of the low winter sun. “Whatever. Whatever.” She grabbed hold of the side of a car and lifted herself up. “Y’know, I think I preferred you when you were a pussy, Hayden.”
Hayden didn’t respond. He was too focused on climbing the cars, too focused on working his way up the side of the mountain. Metal creaked under his feet. Every now and then, he found himself staring at the face of a crushed human sat in the front seat of a car. Or someone with glass wedged through their chest, or the seatbelt wrapped tightly around their neck.
He swore he saw a few of the people move, but he didn’t have time to stop. He had to power on.
He looked up. He was just three feet from the top now. A couple more steps and he’d be up there.
“Okay down there?” he called.
“Define ‘okay’,” Sarah said. Newbie just winced, kept on climbing.
Hayden turned around. He readied himself to lunge for the car roof at the very top of the mountain. His hands were aching and stinging, and his knees were weak. It was getting darker, visibility reducing by the minute.
He shifted his weight onto the edge of a car window and he felt his foot slip away.
His feet gave way. His grip loosened. He felt himself falling. Imagined cracking his skull on the road below. Struggled and scrapped around to get a grip on something.
And then his fingers clutched the edge of a car roof and he stopped falling.
“Holy shit, man,” Sarah said. “Watch yourself.”
Hayden gripped the side of the car. His head pulsated a
s blood rushed through it. He steadied his breathing, then climbed up the side of the mountain of cars once again, being careful not to slip and almost fuck everything up once more.
Just push a little further, Hayden. Almost there.
“See anything yet?” Newbie asked.
“Almost there,” Hayden said, yanking himself up onto the final car roof. Soon, he’d have a clean view of the run to his parents’ house. The final stretch of his journey. “The road looks …”
He stopped talking when he peeked over the cars and saw what was on Willington Road at the other side.
“What is it, Hayden?” Sarah called. “What do you see?”
But Hayden couldn’t speak. He couldn’t speak because he couldn’t face what he was looking at. He couldn’t accept it or believe it.
There was a crowd of zombies waiting for them at the foot of the hill of cars.
Dozens of then, all scraping at the foot of the mountain, all stretching their dead arms up to reach them.
All blocking the way to his parents’ house.
Thirty-Five
Hayden stood at the top of the mountain of cars and stared at the dozens of creatures blocking his way to his parents’ house.
They were gathered around the bottom of the cars. Some of them were pressed right up against the vehicles. One wrong push—or right push, from the zombies’ perspective—and Hayden, Newbie and Sarah would go tumbling down onto the road below. If they didn’t die from the impact with the concrete or get themselves crushed by the cars, they’d be nothing more than zombie food.
Or worse. The impact might not kill them. They might still be alive when they fell to the floor, legs and arms broken and contorted in all kinds of impossible positions.
They might be alive when the zombies sunk their sharp teeth into their flesh.
Newbie and Sarah were beside Hayden now. They looked down at the crowd of hungry zombies in silence. Hayden knew exactly what the silence meant. They were giving up. They were getting cold feet. They were going to suggest turning back while there was still a chance, Hayden just knew it.
Sarah was the first to suggest turning around in a different choice of words. “These … these cars aren’t gonna hold forever.”
“Then climb back down and turn back the way we came from.”
Newbie sighed. “Hayden, man, look ahead. Look down the road. There’s tons of the things down there. There’s no gettin’ past them. The second we drop onto the road, they’ll be on us. You know that as well as I do.”
“I didn’t ask you to come back to me. I didn’t ask you to risk your lives for me. But right now, my family need me. They need my help. Y’know, not once have they let me down. All my life, and not once have they let me down. They’ve always been there for me. Always, no matter what. So right now I owe it to them to help them when, just once, they ask for my help. I owe them that much.”
“Your loyalty is fucking commendable,” Sarah said, “it really is. But there’s a fine line between loyalty and stupidity. And right now you’re being plain stupid.”
“Maybe so,” Hayden said. “Maybe so.”
And then he lowered himself down the front of the mountain of cars.
“Wait!” Sarah called.
But it was too late. Hayden had already dropped down two cars. He heard the fragile metal of opened car doors creak beneath his feet. All around the bottom of the slope of crushed metal, about twelve feet below him, the zombies clutched at the air as his feet edged nearer, snapped at nothing with their chipped, shattered teeth.
Hayden slipped further down the side of the cars. He held the steel pole tight in his right hand. He knew it wasn’t going to be enough to take on all of the zombies down below. But fuck. He had a crazy idea. A crazy, perhaps even morbid idea. But an idea that was going to be the difference between survival—the survival of his family—and death.
Newbie stepped over the edge of the cars. “You better have something in mind here. Seriously.”
Hayden dangled himself just ten feet or so above the zombies. He could smell the sour remnants of passed body fluids, and hear nothing but the horrible, guttural gasps of death like a choir of dead angels. He turned around and looked inside the grey Mini Cooper, hanging from its passenger door. “I think I have an idea,” he said.
“You better have a fucking idea,” Sarah said, as she too dangled over the side and followed Newbie in his descent. “I must be insane to follow you. I must actually be insane.”
Hayden looked inside at the driver’s seat of the Mini Cooper. There was a man in there—or at least it looked like a man. His face had been pressed right up to the windscreen. His head had exploded. One of his arms had been completely severed by the collision. Blood was dripping down onto the car floor, every drop echoing inside the car.
“I’m gonna do something that might need you to drop down and run. Fast.”
Sarah tutted. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Hayden swallowed a sickly tasting lump in his throat. Flies were buzzing around the remains of this crushed man already. The smell of death that Hayden was growing worryingly used to was just as present in this Mini as it was anywhere.
He didn’t even think about what it was he was planning to do. Best not to overthink, or it would just drive him even crazier.
So he shifted his weight onto his feet and reached into the Mini. He wobbled a little at first, but soon he had his hand stretched right inside the car, and then his fingers wrapped around the loose arm of the dead man.
He took a few deep breaths and regretted them right away when flies buzzed into his face, and then he yanked at the arm. Yanked at the loose strip of tendon that still dangled onto his body. Heard a squelching noise as the flesh split into smaller chunks. He felt blood that was still lukewarm dribble down the side of his already blood-soaked hands.
But the arm didn’t come off.
“Hayden?” Newbie called. “Still working on whatever it is you’re working on down there?”
“Still working,” Hayden said. He pulled even harder on the loose arm. For a horrible moment, he considered that the man might still be alive in the wreckage of this car, and if he was, what made Hayden so different to the zombies in his butchering of another person?
He pulled again. More blood spurted out. More flies swarmed around the wound, landed on Hayden and rubbed their filthy little hands together.
Hayden heard a creaking from above.
“Shit,” Sarah said. He heard wobbling. “The cars ain’t gonna hold. Hayden, hurry the fuck up down there!”
Hayden tightened his grip around the arm. He thought of his mum. Thought of those words she’d uttered to him—those desperate, terrifying words.
“Help us, Hayden. Please, son. Please.”
His mum asking him for help. Something he never, ever expected to hear.
I’m coming for you, Mum. I’m coming for you.
He tightened his grip around the arm.
Yanked it back as hard as he could.
At first, when Hayden felt the shift in force, he thought he’d done it. He really thought the arm had come free, and that he was going to be able to chuck the loose body part down at the zombies and start a feeding frenzy.
But then he saw the silver car above slide down through the roof of the Mini and he realised that he was falling to the road below.
There was something in his hand, though. Something that he hadn’t had a chance to process as he fell to certain death below.
Something solid. Something heavy. Something …
He nearly let go when he saw that he was holding onto the arm that had split away from the body in the falling of the silver car after all.
And then he hit the concrete and the zombies surrounded him.
He saw Newbie and Sarah clambering down the side of the tumbling cars as the zombies gathered around Hayden. An old, fearful voice inside Hayden told him to give in. To wait for help. To let somebody else come and bail him out like they always
did.
But no. Fuck that shit. He had a family to save.
He raised the loose arm, blood still dripping from the wormy veins and sinewy tendons, and he swung it at the zombies. They looked at the trailing blood with glassy eyed confusion, unsure of whether to pay attention to it or to the person swinging it.
He swung it to the other side and he watched as the zombies followed it like dogs salivating over a treat. He was waiting for Sarah and Newbie to reach the road. Once they reached the road, he’d throw the arm and then he’d run in the opposite direction. He just had to hope the zombies stayed interested in the arm. He just had to hope he didn’t make a stupid botch job of this, not after how far he’d come.
The first zombie to break from the crowd and focus on Hayden over the poor dead man’s arm (thanks, by the way, Dead Man) was a greying bloke with teeth ground right down to the gums. He snapped at Hayden, and Hayden had to stick the arm between the man’s sanded teeth and give him a taste of the blood to divert his focus.
“We’re down, Hayden!” Newbie shouted. And at first, Hayden thought Newbie was just being stupid by diverting attention to himself. Then, when the zombies all turned around and looked at Newbie and Sarah, he realised it was intentional after all.
He backed away. Elevated to his feet. Swung the arm around like it was a fucking hammer throw event and not survival.
And then he let go and he ran.
Most of the zombies went for the arm the second it flew into the air, like wedding attendants trying to catch whatever the hell those things were called. Some of them rushed at Newbie and Sarah, but they dealt with them with their weapons, Newbie thumping one right across the back of its neck with his baseball bat, the sound of cracking bones splitting through the air. Sarah stuck her long knife into the side of another zombie’s head, squelched it around inside its brains and mashed up its insides before Newbie added the finishing, neck-cracking blow with his baseball bat.
Hayden stabbed the zombies coming for him wherever he could. He tried to aim for the throat so he could split the pole right through the back of their necks, and sometimes he swung hard at their mouths so that he could smash the teeth from their gums, but other times he settled for stabbing the zombies right in their stomachs and piercing their rotting insides.