The crate was filled with the snap of excitement, the crackle of anticipation, and the pop of Geldof’s nervous bowels. Somehow he found a little reservoir of Chinese he’d yet to evacuate and delivered it down Scholzy’s back. Scholzy, utterly focused on the doors, didn’t move a muscle. Vomit clogging his nostrils, Geldof closed his eyes and waited to die.
15
Lesley and Jack ran in the direction they judged to be the exact opposite from where the bellow had come, but in all honesty Lesley had no idea if they were blundering toward the enraged beast or away from it. The near-absolute darkness made their headlong dash even more petrifying. Any second she expected to see a pair of red eyes appear out of nowhere as a precursor to receiving a sharp horn up the jacksie. She could hear the thud of hooves and the occasional snort and bellow. It sounded as if they were growing closer. She could tell Jack wasn’t running at his full speed, instead remaining by her side. She found his moral support simultaneously incredibly endearing and completely fucking stupid.
“Run faster!” she shouted. “One of us has to get out.”
The effort further knackered her lungs, which were already protesting that she should have joined the joggers in Central Park instead of expending energy locating the elusive spots where she would be the requisite distance from public buildings and aggressive nonsmokers to spark up. Jack ignored her plea, grabbed her hand, and half dragged her along. The waves seemed louder now, which meant they were probably running toward the sea. If they could get into the water, they might be safe. Even if bulls could swim, she was pretty sure her doggy paddle would outpace a cow paddle. She chanced a quick glance backward and saw the thundering outline of the bull for the first time. It couldn’t have been much more than ten meters behind them. Praying that the water’s edge was just up ahead, she willed her aching legs onward.
In answer to her prayers, the grass disappeared into a darker area up ahead. They were going to make it. She lowered her head, sure her ankles would be splashing through the surf any second. Instead Jack yanked her off to one side, screaming “Shit!” at the top of his lungs. What she’d assumed was the sea was in fact the edge of a cliff. Lesley’s legs swung out over the void and her upper body began to follow suit. In the shock of having the ground yaw away, she couldn’t even will her heavy limbs to scrabble for purchase to defy the insistent pull of gravity. Fortunately Jack had somehow managed to find a handhold and held her up. She dangled there, staring back at the hooves coming straight toward them.
She closed her eyes, expecting any second to feel the weight of the bull crash into them and carry them all over. What she heard was a surprised moo. She snapped her eyelids open in time to see the rear end of the massive beast plummet past. The moo continued all the way down, getting quieter and more plaintive, until a meaty thud silenced it. Jack hauled her forward until her legs were on solid ground. They lay there together panting. Eventually, they crept forward and peered over the drop. She could just make out white foamy waves dashing against the rocks and what may have been a bull-shaped splodge.
“That’s one way to tenderize a steak,” Jack said.
He started laughing, and Lesley joined in, although her gasped hiccups sounded suspiciously like sobs. Once they’d calmed down, they sat together and stared out at the horizon. Lesley thought she could detect a slight lightening where sea met sky.
“Think there are any more bulls in this field?” Jack said.
“Doubt it. They always keep them on their own.”
“Then let’s wait here until the sun comes up. I don’t want any more nasty surprises.”
They watched the clouds dissipate and the sun, weak and yellow, lethargically spill its first rays over the rolling surface of the sea. As the adrenaline faded and their bodies cooled down from the exertion, Lesley’s teeth began to chatter. She was still wearing a flowery knee-length woolen dress and a yellow cardigan, both embossed with splotches of mud and grass stains, but neither garment was enough to keep out the cold. Jack, also shivering, edged closer. “Mind if I steal some of your body heat?”
A young couple sitting on a cliff top watching the sun come up was so stereotypically romantic that Lesley couldn’t help but make that association. Her first instinct was to refuse. Terry was back in their apartment, no doubt frantic with worry. Cuddling up to the handsome man who’d just saved her life felt like a betrayal, no matter how small and no matter how fragile her relationship with Terry. Then again, she was bloody freezing. She leaned into Jack. The sense of betrayal grew stronger when his nose brushed against her ear and sent a delicious shiver down her neck.
“Actually, I think it’s time to get moving,” she said, pulling away and getting to her feet. “Time for you to display your boy scout credentials.”
Jack squinted at the sun. “We’re obviously on the east coast somewhere, since the sun’s coming up over the sea.”
“Well, that narrows it down to about six hundred miles or so.”
“No need to be snarky.”
“It’s my default setting,” Lesley said. “Look, can I make a suggestion?”
“Sure.”
She pointed back across the field, to where a little hamlet had appeared in the growing light. “Why don’t we head toward that village over there and see if we can spot a sign?”
“Won’t it be full of infected?” Jack said.
“Probably. But what choice do we have? We need to find a phone or a computer if we’re going to get this story out. Anyway, don’t they teach stealth tactics in the scouts?”
“Sorry, I didn’t get my ninja badge.”
They squelched back across the field, getting lower and slower. It was a sleepy little village that could have been anywhere along the coast of Britain, all winding strips of tarmac and one-story buildings built from large gray stone blocks. There appeared to be no sign of life. They crouched behind a bush and looked through the fence.
“Should we go in?” Jack said.
“It looks quiet enough, I suppose.”
No sooner had Lesley spoken than an elderly man with a thick mop of gray hair and a bent back came out of the door of a house about fifty meters away. Propped up with a cane, he shuffled onto the road to stand looking up at the sky.
“He doesn’t look like much of a killer,” said Jack.
“Just wait until he gets a whiff of you. He’ll probably try to intrude anally with his walking stick.”
“I’m all up for new sexual experiences, but I think I’ll pass on that one. What do we do?”
Lesley looked around, wondering if they might be better striking off farther into the mainland, although she had no idea what they might find there. Her gaze fell on a large mound of bullshit. A rather disgusting thought occurred to her. “Have you ever seen The Walking Dead?”
“No.”
“How can you not have? It’s been all over the TV the last few months.”
“Yeah, and did you wonder why they’ve been showing that and lots of other reruns of zombie films on every channel?” Jack said. “Dehumanization. Makes it easier to swallow when they’re all killed.”
Lesley, all too aware she’d played a part in this dehumanization, moved the conversation on. “Anyway, there’s a scene where they smear themselves in zombie intestines to hide their smell so they can walk amongst the dead. It might work for us.”
“Are you suggesting we kill him and stick our heads in his guts?”
Lesley shook her head and pointed at the dung. Jack groaned. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“Very funny. Look, I know it’s nasty, but if we’re going to survive we need to find a way to get around without being set upon every couple of minutes. This is a perfect test environment. I think even I could outrun him if it doesn’t work.”
“Fine,” Jack said. “In that case, you go first.”
Lesley crawled to the brown heap and, her face twisted, dug her hands in deep. She started on her bare legs, smearing it all the way up to her thighs, and stuck her h
ands up her dress to rub it on her stomach and breasts. Next, fighting the gorge rising in her throat, she slapped it onto her armpits and neck. “Think we need to do the face, too?”
“Definitely,” Jack said.
She got busy, trying to pretend she was putting on a mud pack in an expensive spa.
“How do I look?” she said when she was finished.
“Like crap.”
“You can stop with the shit jokes now. It’s your turn.”
“Actually, I think one person is enough for the purposes of our experiment. Off you go and talk to him.”
Lesley scooped up a generous handful and lobbed it at Jack, who ducked. “Hey, it was your idea. I promise I’ll do it if it works.”
“Arsehole,” she said and got to her feet.
She clambered over the fence and approached the old man, who was still seemingly lost in thought. Eventually he noticed her approach and turned to face her. As she came to a stop at a healthy distance, his nostrils twitched. She braced herself for the cane to come swinging up. He remained still.
“Fit like?” he said.
The crapouflage is working, she thought, and considered what he’d said. The only time she’d ever heard that phrase was on a hen weekend to Aberdeen, when she’d mistakenly thought the ruddy-cheeked oil worker who said it was being too forward in expressing his appreciation for her figure and told him to fuck right off. She’d had to apologize when a friend explained it meant, “How are you?” She made it up to the oil worker by getting horrendously drunk and sucking his face off.
“Fine, thanks.” She expected him to say something further, perhaps comment on her unusual appearance and smell. He just stared at her with eyes that were the same color as the sky behind him, making it feel as if she was staring right through his head. “This is going to sound strange, but can you tell me the name of this village?”
“Aye. Portlethen.”
“Are we near Aberdeen by any chance?”
“Aye. It’s just up there a bit,” he said, pointing north.
Again, he chose not to ask any questions, such as where she’d come from, why she didn’t know where she was, and why she was covered in excrement. Lesley was beginning to wonder if he was senile. “I don’t suppose you have a phone we can use?”
“No.”
“Would anybody else have a phone?”
“The phones aren’t working. There’s no power. There’s nobody else here. All dead or gone to Aberdeen. Just me and my pet bull, Jamie.”
Lesley figured it best not to mention that, thanks to her and Jack, Jamie had taken a nosedive off a cliff. She’d killed somebody’s pet and only companion, zombie or not. Yet another success for the Lesley McBrien Death Curse. After issuing hasty thanks for the information, she went back to report to Jack. She felt the old man’s gaze on her back as she climbed the fence, but still he didn’t move.
“We’re near Aberdeen,” she said when Jack poked his head out from behind the bush.
“Why’d they dump us here?”
“Dunno. Maybe the helicopter took off from Denmark and this was the closest drop point. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, the shit works, so you’d better get decorating yourself. There’s nothing for us here. We need to get up to Aberdeen to see if it’s any better.”
Jack sighed and helped himself to the remnants of the dung. “Well, looks like you’ve saved the world. All we need to do is get everybody to cake themselves in cow plop and there’ll be no more trouble.”
“I’ll be sure to put that in the story.”
“So how are we going to get to Aberdeen? Walk?”
“There must be some transport in the village. The old boy said he was the only one there, so it’ll be safe to look around.”
They walked back into the village, nodding at the immobile local—who didn’t bat an eyelid at the appearance of a second swamp monster. There were plenty of cars, but none of them contained keys and all of the fuel caps had been pried open. After a while, they began breaking and entering. They slaked their thirst with tap water, but no food—or cigarettes, which Lesley still craved despite ten days of cold turkey—was to be found anywhere. Eventually they lucked out and found two Raleigh racers, circa 1970 by the looks of the rusty chains, in the garage of a bungalow. They were just the right height for Lesley, but Jack’s longer legs rose almost to his chin as they mounted up and set out along the main road toward the unknown dangers of Aberdeen.
16
The doors of the container creaked open and the engines of the quad bikes burst into life. Geldof opened his eyes to see three soldiers dive out of the way as Scholzy opened the throttle and sent the bike lurching into motion. They shot out onto the center circle of the stadium, right into a maelstrom of typical Glasgow stinging diagonal rain. The gray early morning light revealed soldiers humping sacks of food out of the dozens of crates, large and small, that the choppers had unloaded onto the rutted grass. Geldof expected them to reach for their weapons, but they just gaped at the four bikes tearing up the grass. The bikes sped toward the tall iron gates sitting open in one corner of the pitch, surrounded by old bricks and tangled metal from the seats and walls that had been gouged away to create a larger opening.
The four soldiers there had their backs to them and were busy trying to pacify a clamoring mob. Tears streamed down Geldof’s cheeks, partly from the icy wind that eddied around Scholzy’s body and partly from the icy certainty that he was about to die. For a fleeting moment, he regretted not having taken advantage of the working girl in Nairobi. Given his grandfather’s opposition to eulogizing the dead, his newspaper obituary would probably bear the headline, “Geldof Peters. He Died a Virgin.” The thought fled his mind as they drew closer to the bodies packed thick around the exit, arms undulating in the air and shouting for supplies. He saw no way they could get through the press even as they picked up speed, further churning up the once perfect football surface. Scholzy solved the problem by raising his automatic weapon and letting loose a burst of fire in the air. The crowd parted, falling over each other in their eagerness to flee. Scholzy led the wedge of bikes toward the thinnest part of the wriggling mass, but even as he did so the soldiers turned, hunkered down, and locked weapons to shoulders in one fluid motion. Geldof found himself wishing for a quick death. Better a clean shot to the skull than to be winged and sent sliding into the middle of the infected masses. Traditional zombies or not, he’d watched enough horror movies to know such situations invariably ended with intestines being tossed about like spaghetti. Those deliciously gruesome scenes had been his favorite moment of any zombie film; it was a very different matter when he would be the one providing the stringy pasta. The soldiers didn’t get the chance to fire. With short staccato bursts, the mercenaries sent their targets spinning to the ground, adding further impetus to the scrambled efforts of the crowd to get out of the way.
They thrust right into the middle of the chaos. Scholzy’s front right tire ran over the leg of a wide-eyed woman who’d fallen to the ground. The bike lurched to the left. Geldof started to slip, only managing to catch himself with a desperately flung hand on the side of the bike. Tilted out from the safety of his seat, he zipped inches by a forest of faces, close enough to see the whites of their eyes. Nostrils twitched, and suddenly the crowd was no longer fleeing. Hands reached for them, and the high-pitched screams of panic dropped several octaves into a rumble of anger.
Geldof brushed past a pinched-face youth in a white tracksuit, bottoms tucked into his socks, and a baseball cap with the rim pointing upward perched on his head.
“They’re nicking our fucking drugs,” the youth yelled. “Get the bastards.”
The bikes had too much momentum to be snarled up and pulled clear to bump down onto the road. Geldof chanced a look back. The mob—young and old, male and female, short and tall, and all ordinary looking save for the identical gnarled looks of focused hatred and longing on their faces—was now sprinting after them. Even with the growl of the engine thrumming in h
is ears, he could hear the throaty roar emanating from their twisted mouths. One of the army trucks came barrelling out of the gate. The throng of people pelting through the rain, now spread out across the whole road, slowed its progress, but a soldier leaned out of the cabin and aimed a weapon.
They were driving up the hill toward the M8 when bullets whined around them. Scholzy began zigzagging, the tires designed for biting into soft grass squealing for purchase on the slick tarmac. Geldof clung on like a baby koala to its mother. The truck had nosed its way through the mob by knocking many of them over and was now roaring up the hill, gaining far too quickly. The intersection with Paisley Road West, and beyond that the on-ramp to the M8, lay ahead on their left, but Scholzy bumped onto the pavement and took a gap between leafless trees throwing their twisted branches up in protest against the relentless rain. They raced across an empty patch of ground and rattled over another curb onto the dual carriageway.
At this hour of day, back in normal times, the street would have been full of buses and cars trundling to work. Now it was empty save for a few sodden cyclists, who veered off at the sight of the four quad bikes. Geldof heard the sound of tearing metal and looked back to see the truck, which must have mounted the verge at speed, sideswipe a parked car. The door of the truck swung shut, mashing the soldier who was leaning out to fire again. The truck tore free and kept coming. On an empty main road they had no chance of outpacing it, particularly since so much shit was strapped over the bikes.
Scholzy pointed left and swung the handlebars to travel in that direction. The quad bike power-slid onto a street flanked by identical tenement buildings. Up ahead was a T-junction. Standing in the middle of it was an old Glasgow wifey. Her blue-tinted hair was done up in curlers wrapped beneath a clear plastic rain mac. She was wearing a shapeless gray overcoat that came down to her knees. Underneath her tan tights, thick varicose veins were visible even at a distance. One arthritic hand was wrapped around a tartan shopping trolley, a two-wheeled contraption with a little black handle that grannies across Scotland used to run over people’s toes and jab the backs of the knees of anybody foolish enough to loiter in their way. It was a fearsome weapon in the right hands.
World War Moo: An Apocalypse Cow Novel Page 14