"It smells of old in here," Rick moaned.
"It smelled of old in the house too. We’re not really going to get away from it unless we start staying in better places and stealing better quality cars."
"As soon as we get a chance we’re stealing a Land Rover. Always wanted one of those things."
I couldn’t begrudge him that—I wouldn’t mind driving around in slightly more luxury and a bit less stink. At the moment, though, the only important thing was the radio. I sifted through the medium-wave stations until a male voice came through the static. I shivered a little with excitement. There were people out there. Organised survivors. The auto-tuner missed the station and I swore, taking over with manual tuning and clicking through until the voice came back through. We craned our ears to the nearest speakers, hanging on every word.
All survivors welcome. We have food and shelter. We are behind walls. We can keep you safe.
Safety. There was a novelty I was never going to put any faith in. If this place was where Austin had headed, he was either mistaken, or the radio message was a ploy. It was a looping transmission. There was no mention of the military, so we scanned through the channels three more times, desperate to pick up any other signal. There were none. I poked around in the glove box and plucked out a pen and the service booklet for the car, which easily doubled as scrap paper now. We jotted down the scant directions, though they weren’t really needed. This place sounded easy enough to find. We were both so focused on task that we had forgotten the amount of noise we’d made leaving the house. Rick screamed in fright and I almost shat myself, as a corpse threw itself against the driver-side window. It was a boy. His head barely came halfway up the glass, though the bits we could see were horrific enough. Someone had made a meal of his eye socket, and the gouged hollow oozed a dark red pus.
"Shit! Let’s get out of here!" I turned in my seat, mainly for an excuse to look away from the boy before I lost my bowels. Rick didn’t need asking twice, turning the engine over without a fuss and squealing the tyres as we pulled away.
"That was fucking close," I heaved.
"Wouldn’t have been so bad if you hadn’t shut the boot so fucking hard."
Rick sounded shaken. My eyes rolled briefly around before I forced them back to the road. Silence settled over us, the near miss doing nothing but charging the air with even more apprehension. I think we were both getting a bit fed up with each other. We wouldn’t have voluntarily sought each other out in a time of crisis. Carla had been the common bond that brought us together, and once we found her, I doubted I would want to stick around for much longer, being the third wheel on their tricycle. I kept my eyes out of the window, looking out for zombies or survivors, and mostly seeing the former. The main roads were empty. The edict of the government to keep the major routes free for the emergency services had been short-sighted in the extreme, but it made it much easier going than in suburban areas, where we found ourselves mounting the pavement to work around car wrecks and traffic jams that would never end. Sure, there was the occasional abandoned car, but the passengers were long gone and we weren’t in any danger of being attacked. I felt like a bored child, but I knew perfectly well how far away our destination was and was not going to antagonise Rick by asking him how long we’d take.
Having spent so long in isolation on the pier, I was trying to piece together what had happened out here from the random desolation of the landscape. There were pillars of smoke dotting the distance on most sides, although I hadn’t seen anything even bordering a severe fire. It had to be the case that the main infrastructure was holding, though that could only be for so long. I wouldn’t be surprised if workers had decided to barricade themselves in some places. I’d driven past a few of the older coal-fired power stations in the north and they were gigantic places in isolated locations. With a stocked canteen and a relatively low density of population in terms of the workforce, it would have probably been a much safer bet to bed in at work than risk going home, if you had the balls for it. This thought jerked my memories back to the day I had fled London. I hadn’t had anyone that I was attached to in the capital, and whilst I did have a lot of passion for my work as a journalist, it wasn’t something I was going to risk my skin for. What’s the worst they would have done to me, if it had all been a false alarm? Suspended me without pay for a bit? Not a problem. Sacked me? Their loss. People less insecure in themselves or their work may have taken their journeys across the city still, and it would have been to their doom. The CCTV footage I had seen at Carla’s had been stomach-churning, and despite all of my encounters so far with the undead I hadn’t yet seen first-hand the disgusting results of a live person being completely dismembered by a rabid mob.
The sudden braking of the car caught me by surprise—screeched slightly as the car came to a sudden halt. "What the hell’s going on?"
"Look. With your eyes. Have you been asleep or something?" Rick bawled at me sarcastically. I had no idea what he was going on about, and told him as much. In answer, Rick jammed his thumb in the direction of a field just parallel to the country road we had been traversing. At first, I couldn’t make out what had him so excited. There was another husk of something in a field, perhaps a tractor or some kind of harvester, abandoned in the early apocalyptic melee. As I squinted into the distance though, ignoring the moving blots on the landscape that might have been infected, I thought I could make it out: a helicopter.
"Fucking Jesus."
I scrambled for the door handle, tripping over the trim in my rush to get out of the car. I let out a yelp as I fell to one knee, but I didn’t let that stop me. Rick, too, had already rushed out and was sprinting towards the field. I followed him, all concern for the infected gone. We were in the middle of nowhere; the last abandoned car was some few miles down the road, though we didn’t think about the cars that might be left around the unseen corners ahead. The figures staggering around were far in the distance and didn’t look like they posed a threat. That chopper was the focus of our attention, and neither of us would stop sprinting until we got to it.
The closer I got, the more became clear. The damned helicopter from that horrendous last encounter on the pier was standing abandoned in a field, completely unblemished. That was a relief to my increasingly burdened heart. If this had been abandoned, it could have been for a good reason, and Carla might still be safe. If we’d found it on its side in flames, we could well have been avoiding facing the probable truth, rather than rushing to find it out.
Rick stopped dead in his tracks, and I slowed my pace as I caught up. I bent over to take a breath and saw what had brought him up short. There was a body, face-down on the burgeoning grass and weeds, completely unmoving. Rick started edging towards it, but hesitated. I placed a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back, and took the steps forward myself. I don’t know why he didn’t have the balls to look; Carla had always been in my life, but he’d only come onto the scene to piss us all off a few years ago. Selfish bastard.
Truth be told, I was pretty sure the body wasn’t Carla’s. For a start, it was mostly bald. Unless Austin had a fetish that started with shaving women’s heads, then I was reasonably sure my sister was fine. I was more concerned with infected potentially hiding or stuck in that hunk of inanimate metal, and my sister may well be amongst those. If that was the case, I had no idea what I’d do next, especially without any bloody weapons. The closer I got, the angrier I became. This thing was never taking a cluster of survivors off the pier. The one that had followed it hadn’t been much larger, either. I was no expert, not even nearly, but this was the kind of craft that looked like it belonged on the cover of a pleasure-flight catalogue. It wasn’t built for any kind of mass-transit, not even if the entire pier had been populated by Smurfs. Austin had taken us all for fools. There hadn’t been many of us, but we’d been surviving together, and we’d had options. Austin was never going to allow us any options, though. He’d never intended to save everyone; he had simply been making plans for his o
wn survival, waiting for the right leverage to come along—my sister—before making good his escape.
The benefit to it being a small helicopter was I could see the majority of the inside. Unless they were hiding underneath the seats, there was nothing here other than the corpse.
"Who is it?" Rick bellowed, unnecessarily loud. I twisted round on my heel, hissing at him to be quiet. He recoiled, shutting his mouth but didn’t muster the balls to come any closer, not yet anyway. I waved my arm at him in disgust as I turned back to the task at hand. The body was male. That was evident now, baldness aside. He was dressed in some plain denim with some solid hiking boots, and a red plaid shirt. Standing proud from his neck was a set of ear defenders. I held my breath, watching him for a few heartbeats. He wasn’t moving, and this wasn’t a trap. For good measure, I kicked at him with my foot. The corpse, stiff with rigor mortis, rocked slightly before going still again. Nothing. I pushed harder this time, rolling the body completely over with my foot. The man’s face was pale, his mouth open in protest, his brow slightly furrowed even in death. I didn’t look up at Rick, just waved my arm in a scooping motion, beckoning him closer.
"Who is it?"
His hissing was closer to my ear this time; at least he listens to advice. "Christ knows. Look at the things round his ears. Pilot, maybe?"
"Why is he dead?"
"My best guess, Rick, is that they stopped needing this hunk of metal," I pointed at the dead chopper, then down at the body. "So this guy became irrelevant. We already know from experience that Austin doesn’t like carrying excess baggage. Well, apart from around his waist."
"Really? This is the time you find for sarcasm?"
"There’s always time for sarcasm, Rick. It helps keep me sane."
"Well, try to keep it to yourself, because it’s driving me mad. I suppose we just get back in the car now and keep on driving around the countryside hoping to stumble across some survivors?"
"Let’s at least take a look in the damn thing, see if there’s anything we can use."
A brief check over the sparse cockpit yielded absolutely nothing, so we trudged back to the car, our heads down and our failing morale flagging even further. We slammed the doors shut, not caring about the noise. There were no infected nearby. We shared a simple look that shared more in silence than words would manage, though a simple summary would be ‘fuck’. Rick turned the ignition and we started off again. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, willing myself to sleep. Anything, just to break up the monotony of boredom and death.
* * *
My body swayed, drifting me awake as Rick completed a figure S, avoiding a small flurry of stranded vehicles. I lifted my eyes to the world outside as our own car glided past in an almost reverent silence, the only noise coming from the tyres as they ground broken glass further into the tarmac, and I turned to see the burned-out husks of two fire engines and an ambulance. It looked like one large collision between all of them. The simplest conclusion to draw was an infected driver, or at the very least an infected and disruptive passenger. It was easy to imagine someone fevered and slumping over the wheel. Desiring more drama, I instead daydreamed about a young fire fighter finally succumbing to a hidden bite and devouring the cheek of a colleague before launching himself over a seat to bite the neck of a driver. In shock, hands still on the wheel, the driver spins the first truck into the ambulance; the ambulance spins and the second fire truck in the convoy slams into it, too close or too fast to do any different.
"Something interesting up ahead, Warren."
"Is Kelly Brook wandering around naked?"
"No."
"Is it my sister?"
"Okay, fine, not that interesting. Take a look. I can’t make it out so good."
"I can’t make it out, either. Remind us to check out a Specsavers for you in the next town we get to. Lucky for you the DVLA don’t need to know about that kind of thing anymore."
"Fuck off, I don’t need glasses. Just tell me what’s up ahead."
I had to squint myself to be fair to Rick, but up ahead there was a thick plume of black smoke. It suggested an oil fire or similar, and I was worried it would be a blockade in our path and some kind of trap. "I can’t see what it is, but I don’t think we want to risk getting any closer." As I said this, we passed a sign for a junction. I recognised the roads, and we could easily cut up and around whatever might be ahead. I suggested it to Rick.
"I’m game. I’m curious what it is though. What if it’s a double bluff?"
"What, like we think that there’s something dodgy up ahead, so we turn off at an admittedly convenient junction and drive into the actual trouble?"
"Precisely." Rick looked in his mirrors and started pushing on the brakes. "There’s nothing around us. Let’s not rush into this. I don’t want to go gung-ho into some post-apocalyptic stick up. I don’t think we’re exactly set up for that kind of shenanigans."
"Between Andy, Austin, and Matt, and all the zombies we’ve managed to plough through, I’m sure we could face the majority of domestic post-apocalyptic shenanigans, but I see your point." I had a quick look around us for my own piece of mind as the car finally came to a stop. I could see nothing interesting besides the ominous smoke plume, so I turned to give Rick some credible attention. "So what’re our choices? This is like the someone tells the truth and someone always lies thing, isn’t it? We’re going to keep double guessing ourselves until we make our noses bleed, and we’ll end up making the wrong choice because we’re just not that bloody lucky. Could we double back and see if we can pick up another vehicle? One can take the main road, one the junction, and we can try to meet back on the main road later on?"
"But what if one of us was caught up? The other wouldn’t know until it was too late. Do we agree to double back?" Rick sounded panicky about anything involving solo work.
"I’d say no. At least then there’s one of us to carry on and get to Carla."
"That’s a bit dark. I didn’t plan on copping out of the apocalypse this early. It was just starting to get fun." Rick sounded like he was injecting some false bravado into his words.
"Fun? On an abandoned a-road in a car that smells of fart and cabbage? In a country that was bad enough anyway, but now your neighbours want to literally chew your arse off?"
"Okay, okay stop being such a miserable fucker. What shall we do?"
"I must admit, I’ve scared myself a little bit thinking too much about the double bluff thing. Splitting up makes a certain amount of sense. It’s just that neither of us are superheroes. What would you do if a big group held you up with guns? I’d probably shit myself. And yet, what if it’s nothing? Just a car fire from a late wreck? What if it’s not even a car?" I’d started rambling, and rammed my mouth shut.
"The colour of that smoke? If it’s not a car then someone’s just set fire to something toxic for shits and giggles. I definitely wouldn’t like to meet them."
We frowned at each other, reaching a coward’s standoff. The nervous tension ratcheted up a couple of levels. I looked anywhere but directly at Rick, trying to figure out what I would be more confident doing. I eyed the smoke plume again. It really did look like oil, or maybe a tyre fire. It could be anything to the untrained eye, and I was by no means a veteran of the post-urban landscape. What we could hope for on the main road would be a route around, or perhaps even a charge at whatever might be blocking us. If the military had set up the major roadblock like they’d said, then I guessed all the routes ahead of us were fucked, and why not get it over and done with sooner rather than later. A little part of me screamed inside that I was being reckless and insane, but it was drowned out by the adrenalin and completely quelled by the erratic response to the mundane boredom of the last twenty-four hours compared to the preceding days.
"Oh screw it. Let’s see what’s up ahead. We’ll approach it slowly, but the chances are if they’re taking anything seriously then they’ve probably seen us and we’re doomed anyway. If you’ve got a g
ood argument for the Mystery Junction, I’d be happy to listen to it."
Rick screwed up his mouth in a fashion I took to mean ‘you’re probably right but I don’t want to look too eager’. Without another word, he shifted the car back into gear and we started lurching forward, though this time not so fast. I wasn’t daydreaming out of the window this time. Seatbelt undone, I leaned forward onto the dash, straining my eyes into the distance to see what we would be up against. Before we got much further, I wondered about how accessible our weapons actually were. In a moment’s cloudy-minded confusion, I forgot which bags I’d put them in. Then I realised I’d wanted them close to hand, and popped open the glove box to reveal our tried-and-tested homely househusband weapons of destruction. I placed one in Rick’s lap, blade facing down. He grunted thanks, not wanting to take his eyes off the road. I knew how he felt.
It seemed tedious, this crawling wait. I wondered if the slower undead felt any semblance of jealously at their sprinting brethren, always making headway and getting to the best bits of the corpse first. I started to fidget in my seat, but quickly annoyed even myself and tried to calm it down a notch. The plume didn’t seem to be getting much larger beyond the perspective of our approach, which was a heartening sign. Whatever we were approaching was under control. I backtracked. Perhaps that wasn’t exactly a good thing. A controlled fire in this kind of environment was likely a planned fire.
Great Bitten (Book 2): Survival Page 4