by Frank Tayell
Chapter 24 - The Middle of the Road
On the road, about a mile from the beach, it looked like two columns of vehicles had collided. It was hard to tell if that was exactly what had happened as, in a field near the middle of the long line of traffic, was a crater at least twenty feet wide. The blast had blown half of the cars and trucks onto their sides, and a quarter onto their backs. Broken glass, twisted metal, and burned rubber carpeted the road and the verge either side.
“I think I know where we are,” Lorraine said. “Heather mentioned something like this. She said she saw the crash, the crater, and came ashore to check for radiation. If this is the same place, then Llandudno is that way.” She pointed beyond the stalled vehicles. “Bangor is behind us.”
“Ah. Then we’re going to the wrong way,” I said.
“But Bishop’s going the right one,” Lorraine said. “Except he won’t have gone to Llandudno, he’ll have gone inland.”
We both turned to look at the sweep of fields and the verdant hills beyond them.
“Were there any boats and fuel left in Llandudno?” I asked.
“Not since August,” Lorraine said. “We collected all that was left. There wasn’t much, I guess because Bishop had been taking it. We’ll find bicycles, though. Maybe we’ll find them before we get to the town. We’ll have to head inland to avoid the caravan site. Maybe we’ll catch up with them.” From her tone, she didn’t think it was likely. Nor did I.
“Maybe,” I said. We continued walking, but neither of us made any effort to hurry. “I wonder if the survivors of this column made it to the caravan site.”
“If any made it to Anglesey, they didn’t say,” Lorraine said. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? That we’re still all strangers to one another.”
Glass crunched loudly underfoot, and then came an echo of the sound from ahead. I stopped, listened, and heard it again. Beyond a dented Land Rover, and an upturned two-seater whose engine had been shoved almost into the boot, was a white panel-van skewed at seventy degrees to the road. I couldn’t see what lay beyond, but I could hear the sound of the undead shifting and moving. Our approach had woken the creature from its sedentary torpor, and now it waited for us on the other side of the van. It, or they? I wasn’t sure, but was certain there would be more further along the column of wrecked vehicles. If anything other than the caravan site lay behind us, I would have insisted we turn around. We’d lost Bishop, that was clear, but he was no longer the most immediate danger to Anglesey.
I gestured to Lorraine, indicating she should go to the right, and that I’d go to the left, around the van. As there was no way of walking quietly across the carpet of broken glass, I hoped that sounds coming from different sides would confuse the creature. Lorraine nodded, slung the submachine, and drew the knife from her belt. I edged forward, around the Land Rover, then around the partially crushed ruin of the sports car. It was one of those seven-figure models I’d occasionally seen in London, but which wouldn’t be left unattended even in Mayfair. With a slight pang of regret that I’d never get to sit behind its wheel, I eased past it, and towards the van’s cab. I couldn’t hear the zombie. I glanced around, saw Lorraine at the van’s rear. I gave her a nod, and moved around the cab.
I’d taken four steps before I remembered that zombies don’t lie in wait. I looked up and saw Bishop’s juror. He’d been on the roof of the van. He launched himself at me. I didn’t have time to step out of the way, let alone swing the tyre-iron. The man hit me hard. The force of the impact knocked me from my feet. I managed to grab a fistful of his coat as we fell, but took the brunt of the impact as we hit the ground. For a moment I was stunned. Either I let go of his coat, or he pulled himself free, but in the second it took me to regain my senses, to roll to my knees, he’d grabbed the revolver from my belt and stood up. The barrel was six inches from my eye.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why do you follow him?”
“It’s written,” the juror said. “Seven shall judge.”
“It was written by Bishop,” I said. “I wouldn’t place your personal salvation on anything that man taught you.”
“No,” the juror said. “It’s written that the kingdom shall fall. The fires will cleanse. Out of the ashes, a new world shall begin, but only for the righteous. And they shall be judged by the—”
His words were cut short by a single short, sharp retort as Lorraine fired. The bullet passed straight through the man’s head, spraying me with blood and brain as his lifeless corpse collapsed.
“Are you all right?” Lorraine asked.
“Fine,” I said, wiping my eyes. I stood up, and winced. My back would be bruised for weeks.
“Why didn’t he take to the fields?” Lorraine asked.
“If it was anyone else, I’d say that they wanted our guns,” I said, as I bent to pick up my tyre-iron. As I straightened, I got another wave of pain from my lower back. “With them, who can say?”
Lorraine picked up the revolver and held it out.
“No, keep it,” I said. “I’m a terrible shot anyway.” I looked at the corpse, then at the almost mile-long line of wrecked traffic ahead of us. “Bishop’s probably out there. Waiting for us.”
“I’m not giving up now,” Lorraine said.
We walked more slowly, more cautiously, eyeing each car in turn as a possible hiding place for the man, watching the roof of every tall vehicle we saw. There were a few vans and lorries where the grime around the handles had been smeared, suggesting someone had recently opened them to see what treasures lay inside. We checked each one, and after we found each one empty, I spared a glance back along the road. The undead would come, I was sure of it. A column of smoke billowed upward in the west, betraying where the house burned. The sound of Lorraine’s last shot would have carried. There was another possibility, that not all Bishop’s followers had died, and that they had heard that shot. Even now, they could be heading towards us. We had no choice but to go on, into what was clearly a trap.
A fist slammed against the closed rear window of a green hybrid. We both jumped. Lorraine brought her submachine gun to bear as the creature’s palm slammed into the window again.
“Don’t fire,” I said, just as a gunshot rent the air. It wasn’t fired by Lorraine. The front windshield of the car shattered. The bullet thumped into a seat. The zombie beat on the window more furiously as we both ducked behind the rear of the car. Another shot came. The bullet hit metal.
“Bishop,” I said.
“I guess they didn’t want our guns,” Lorraine said.
The car rocked as the zombie shifted inside, pushing and clawing at glass.
“There were about six more cars,” I said, “then a big-rig, the trailer partially on its side, then a mass of traffic right near that crater. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Five cars before the juggernaut, I think,” Lorraine said. The zombie inside the car had managed to turn around. It slammed its head into the rear windscreen. There was a soft pop as the top right-hand corner slid out of its seal. Another blow and the window came free. The zombie sprawled after it. I reared up, and slammed the tyre-iron down on its skull.
There was another shot. I ducked down, uncertain where the bullet had gone. I looked towards the hills. I thought I could see movement, but it might have been bushes moving with the wind.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “Fire a shot. Keep his attention. I’m going try to get closer.”
“You want the revolver?”
“Honestly, if I’m close enough to hit him, I’m close enough to use my hands. Keep him occupied, his attention on you.”
“On three. One. Two. Three.” She stood, and I limped across the road towards the line of cars on the other side. I heard a shot, and heard another in reply as I reached the rear of the first vehicle. Lorraine was right, there were five cars, stopped bumper to broken bumper. The rear wheels of the big-rig’s trailer were balanced precariously on the car at the front of that truncated line.
There was another shot. I think it came from Bishop.
“Your juror’s dead,” Lorraine called out. “He’s dead, Bishop. They’re all dead.”
Bishop fired another wild shot, and I eased forward, moving in a slow crouch.
“They’re dead, Bishop,” Lorraine called. “What does that say about the verdict? What does that say about your book?”
“The words that are written can never be erased,” Bishop called back, adding another shot as punctuation.
He was behind, or possibly inside, the cab of the big rig, and that was another sixty yards down the road.
I had to drop to my hands and knees as I passed a Mini whose roof had been crushed into the seats. Glass and gravel bit into my flesh, but I ignored it, focusing on the sound of the next shot. Seconds that felt like hours later, I reached the final car, half buried underneath the rig’s rear wheels.
“We’re erasing the words now!” Lorraine said. “No one will remember them. No one will remember you.”
“I shall be remembered for eternity,” Bishop yelled. He fired again. He had to be running low on ammo, but so was Lorraine. I sidled quickly along the side of the rig, tyre-iron raised, wondering whether I should try to take Bishop prisoner. There were plenty of questions to ask him, but would we believe the answers?
I eased past the dented chrome, once lovingly polished, now mottled and pitted by months of exposure to the wind-carried sea-spray. I heard the man muttering. Most of it was unintelligible, a litany of books, words, seals, and serpents, but it told me he was outside, not in the cab. I took another step and my foot crunched on something plastic. The muttering stopped. I hurled myself the last few feet and around the front of the cab.
Bishop was eight feet away, shock on his face, but the gun was in his hand and that was pivoting around to point at me. My arm was still arcing around in a blow that would only hit the truck. I let go of the tyre-iron, hurling it at his head. He tried to move out of the way, but the tool hit him in the shoulder. The gun, a semi-automatic pistol, went off. The bullet went wide, and I dived the last few feet, grappling with the man.
He bucked his head forward, and brought his knee up. He was surprisingly strong, and I was unused to fighting people. His forehead hit my nose. A wave of pain washed over me, but I kept my grip on his wrist, trying to turn and twist and force him to drop the gun. He got a hand around my throat, but I twisted free, jabbed my left hand into his side. I hit something soft, vital. He tried to take a step back. It was my turn to butt my forehead into his face. It was a mistake. I saw stars, and he finally remembered the gun in his hand. He pulled the trigger. The bullet missed, but the recoil meant I lost my grip. Bishop staggered free, stumbling towards the mass of wrecked cars. As he brought the gun up, I charged into him, slamming him into the crushed vehicle.
I swear I hadn’t seen it. I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t even considered why Bishop had stopped at that particular spot, why he hadn’t gone any further.
As I rammed him into the car, arms reached through the crushed frame. The opening was less than a foot wide, the zombies inside were trapped, but they weren’t dead. They grabbed at his coat, four arms from at least three different creatures. They tried to grab me, but I backed away. Hands tugged at his chest, at his arms, pulling and twisting his gun hand down. He screamed, and before I could do anything, before I had time to decide whether I should do anything, a face appeared in the window. A hideous, twisted ruin of a face, missing eyes and nose, but still with that snapping, rending mouth. It bit into his arm. He screamed again. I reached for his shoulder, an automatic reflex to pull him free, but he dropped to his knees. The zombie bit again, this time into his neck. The screaming stopped. Bishop died.
Chapter 25 - A Welcome Patrol
“Is it what he deserved?” I asked as I picked up the tyre iron.
“Ask me that in a month’s time,” Lorraine said. “Do we kill them?”
As Bishop’s corpse had fallen to the ground, the undead face had disappeared and the arms had returned, grasping and clawing. The creatures were trapped in their car, at least for now, though it was rocking back and forth as they attempted to reach the oh-so-close prey.
“I’m down to four bullets,” Lorraine added. “I’m not going to try to search his body for more.”
Bishop’s gun had fallen under the flat wheel at the rear of the vehicle.
“Home,” I said. “Or Anglesey, at least. This isn’t over.”
“It isn’t?” Lorraine asked.
“Bishop didn’t come up with the idea of standing in the election,” I said. “He was put up to it. That woman, and the jurors, might have been true believers, but Greg and that guy with the spider-web tattoo weren’t. Someone else is behind this, and they decided to abduct us because we went to that pub on the same day. No, this isn’t over, not yet, so we have to get to Anglesey, and that means getting to Bangor.”
“Well, for now, that means continuing down this road, heading towards Llandudno,” she said. “Oh, maybe not.”
Heeding the siren song of screams and gunshots came the undead. Eighteen lurching figures, strung out in a line along the road, the nearest now at the furthest end of the wrecked convoy.
“The fields, then,” I said. “We’ll loop around the caravan site.”
It wasn’t an easy journey. The fields meant that we were able to see the undead coming, and come they did. Lorraine saved the last of the bullets, and that meant it was work for knife and tyre-iron, hacking and cutting through the creatures that had been heading towards the vehicles and which now were following us.
We reached a road, and found bicycles in the third house we looked in. That helped, but even then, the journey was almost a fatal one. Both of us dehydrated, wounded, and utterly exhausted, we pushed on, cycling through the undead when we could, but twice we had to stop and fight.
Darkness was falling when we saw a sign for Bangor, and it had almost settled when we cycled straight into an armed patrol. I’m thankful we were cycling, because otherwise they would surely have thought we were undead.
“Lorraine, is that you?” a woman asked.
“Gloria!” Lorraine said. “Where’s Heather?”
“Looking for you,” the woman said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Long story,” Lorraine said. “And not one with a happy ending.”
I took the proffered water bottle.
“Zombies are following,” I said after I’d swallowed the entire bottle. “About an hour behind.”
“Call everyone back to Garth Point,” Gloria said to another of the patrol, “and we better call Heather.”
With an armed escort surrounding us, I finally began to feel safe.
“So what happened?” Gloria asked.
“It was—” Lorraine began.
“We can’t say,” I said. “We won’t say, not yet. Not until it’s over. And it’s not, not yet. Trust me, trust us.”
“I don’t think Heather’s going to settle for that,” Gloria said, but she didn’t ask any more questions.
Garth Point, at the utter northwest of the city of Bangor, had become a fortress since my first visit. The roads were barricaded. The ground floor windows had been boarded up. I counted a dozen people, but didn’t recognise a single face. Lorraine did, but said nothing until we were inside the pub that had become a command centre for this odd little outpost. From the assortment of equipment inside the pub, they were making a concerted effort to strip the university and city of anything useful and irreplaceable.
“Heather’s on her way across,” a man next to a radio said. “Where’ve you been?”
“I only want to tell the story once,” I said. “We’ll wait for Heather.”
I don’t think we waited for long, but I actually fell asleep.
“Lorraine!” Heather called from the door, waking me from my shallow slumber. She ran across the room, stumbling to a halt when she saw the state of Lorraine.
“Someone get her some new cloth
es,” Heather said.
“And some soap,” Lorraine said.
“What happened?” Heather asked.
“That’s a long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the boat ride to Anglesey.”
“Bill?” Heather asked, finally noticing I was there, too.
I stepped in close, so only Heather Jones could hear. “I need to get to Anglesey, to Markus’s pub, and I need everyone that you’re sure you can utterly trust with your life. With Lorraine’s life, too,” I added. “Oh, and I need a gun.”
Chapter 26 - The Last Candidate
22nd October, Day 224, Anglesey
It was almost three a.m. when I hammered on the Inn of Iquity’s door. The lights were still on, but it took almost two full minutes before I heard footsteps.
“What?” a gruff voice asked.
“It’s Bill Wright,” I said. “I need to speak to the candidate. It’s urgent.”
I waited, and as I did, I took a moment to look behind me at the dark and apparently empty streets. I resisted the urge to wave.
“Fine,” the man said. I heard bolts being pulled. The door opened, and I saw the older, bearded man who was never far from Markus’s side.
“What’s this—” The man stopped speaking as he properly saw me. Unlike Lorraine, I hadn’t changed. My clothes were travel-stained, brain-smeared, and blood-coated from the battle in Wales. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“That’s a long story,” I said, “and as I have to tell Markus, I’d rather only tell it once.”
“Then you better come in,” he said. “You alone?”
“Yes,” I lied.
I was let inside. The pub wasn’t like when I’d first seen it. In fact, it didn’t look like a pub at all. The bar was still there, and there were a few bottles on the shelves, but half the room was filled with placards and posters. The other half was taken up with recently asleep people. I couldn’t tell if they were election workers, bodyguards, or something halfway between the two.