Great Bitten (Book 2): Survival

by Warren Fielding

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The night was instead replaced with almost hallucinatory restlessness. More than once I heard feet on the gravel outside and resisted the urge to raise my head above our makeshift parapet of vinyl and steel to see what was happening. The lack of noise aside from the dragging of feet gave most of the game away. My spine crawled, and I re-enacted looking up into that mouth. In one not-dream I hadn’t reacted in time, and Rich hadn’t been there to save me. The jaws had opened impossibly wide, dislocating themselves the way a snake opens its mouth to invite in the largest of morsels. The undead took my skull in its mouth and closed its teeth down. I felt the pressure in my skull, the bite of each tooth as it first cracked bone, then began to sink into the soft and unresisting flesh and fluid of my brain. I woke up with a start after that one. Rich had thumped me in the leg. The night terrors were back.

  Another dream, we were stuck in an endless loop around the car. With an infected chasing us; this time Rich didn’t stop to face it because again. He wasn’t there with me. It was me and Carla, and the infected was Austin. He wouldn’t leave us alone. It was a morbid ouroboros of both him and the disease relentlessly chasing us down to devour and destroy us. No matter where we went, there was no escape. The only way to solve the problem would be for one of us to make a stand against him. When I finally got the balls to turn and do the deed, Zombie Austin had been joined by Zombie Gordon and Zombie Travis. I felt a pain in my ankle, and looked down to see Ma Deathly taking a chunk out of my flesh, tendons pulling away from bone as she lapped them up. I woke from that one finding that I had fallen asleep in an awkward position and, finally moving, had released a flood of pins and needles into my foot.

  There was more shuffling outside. Rich let out a bubble and a snore. I put my head back on the upholstery of the seat, straining my eyes to keep open. I could cope with fatigue better than I could the horrors of my dreams. Then I kept reliving the tears of Carla and Karen, and wished it would all just go away.

  I spent the rest of that night in the purgatory between asleep and awake. The kind of night where you think you’ve been awake for the whole thing, but there are blank spots and you know that, despite your knowledge, at some point your brain did shut off and unconsciousness did take you. It couldn’t be described as sleep because in no way did you feel rested, but the moniker was that a little of something would be better than nothing. I’ll find that person and give them a little typhoid—see if they change their mind after that.

  As the foggy tendrils of dawn began to stroke the car, I came fully awake. Rich followed suit soon after, our bodies now adjusting to the circadian rhythm of life without technology to force us to either stay awake, or wake up earlier than our bodies needed to. With my head still pounding I could have slept another day, but not in that copse and not in that car. This fact did not go amiss.

  "You look like shit." Rich smirked.

  I flipped him the bird. "Very shrewd. Start a detective agency."

  Rich was still laying down. With the breaking of the dawn, nature had come back to life. Sounds weren’t carrying as much as they had in the stillness of night, so we would be taking a risk when we brought ourselves back upright. We had to sooner rather than later. Needing to piss was one thing, but I had other needs to tend and I wasn’t going to do it in a car. And besides, along with the headache, my throat was raw from retching. I needed medicine and proper rest.

  I propped myself up on my elbows and tried to sneak a look out of the opposite window. There didn’t seem to be anything tall wandering around. That did not account for feral animals or zombie children, but in the safety of the car I was willing to take my chances.

  I sat up, and threw myself straight back down again.

  "What? What is it?" Rich asked.

  "How are you with children?"

  Rich frowned and I was starting to regret my offhanded comment about the juvenile undead. The copse was quite literally full of them. I hadn’t seen a bus nearby and they didn’t have a teacher with them, but it was quite likely the teacher hadn’t survived the attack that had also evidently taken out the rest of the class. My quick glance had shown me up to perhaps a dozen undead, all slow, and all under the age of ten.

  "Look outside, to your right, and do it carefully."

  Rich did, and hid back down with the same cussing I had used.

  "How the fuck did they get here?" Rich asked.

  "There was a load of noise through the night. Might have been animals, might have been infected. Whatever it was, it definitely got their attention."

  Rich looked over to me and was about to say something when his jaw slackened, his eyes glazing over at something above my shoulder and to the left. My ass clenched involuntarily and I resisted the impulse to look behind me. You never look behind you. As soon as you do the looking behind you, the thing doing the creepy lurking starts doing the teeth-gnashing and limb-tearing. Morbid curiosity won over and my head starting tipping inexorably back so I could see out the window behind my head. As I did, the infected that had been making its way to the car finally finished its journey, and a bloody stump of an arm slapped against the window. I rolled over and edged to Rich’s side of the car, forgetting that I would be in full view of the field trip of children staggering around the car park. As Stumpy kept beating feebly at the glass, the first of the little darlings flung itself weakly against the body of the car. I could barely see the top of a head over the bottom rim of the window. A few more thuds told me that we had been thoroughly noticed, and if the denizens of the house over the road didn’t think something was remiss over here before, having a cluster of undead around a car would change their minds.

  "Rich, we need to do something. Get us out of here!"

  "What if we’re seen?"

  "Because this isn’t going to be seen, sooner or later?"

  "They’re just children… can’t we… there must be some way of distracting them?"

  "I think we are the distraction. At least they’re the quiet ones. They’re not exactly making much noise, are they?"

  Rich was right. Aside from the various timid thumps against the bodywork of the car, there was very little by way of noise coming from our assailants. Silent creepy fuckers.

  "For now. What if they bring some of the quicker ones to us? The things have that weird sixth sense thing going on, remember? Where one goes, the rest of them tend to end up.

  Listen it’s early. I mean, it’s only just getting light. It’s got to be before six a.m. right? I don’t think Austin will be up, and even if he is, by the time he gets to a window we’ll be long gone. Just make sure we turn up a road that doesn’t lead back to the community, otherwise we’re well and truly screwed. Don’t think about this Rich. We don’t have a choice."

  He thought about it briefly before hoisting his seat upright and turning the ignition. The engine sparked to life without protest, and we were away. We moved slowly at first. Perhaps Rich was conscious not to get a little body tangled under the wheels. The little ones were long dead, but it would be a bitch trying to get one out from under a wheel arch. Stumpy didn’t register the change very quickly, and on his last throw of the arm missed the car and lost his balance, tumbling to the gravel. We pulled out from the car park, lined beautifully and peacefully with trees, as more of the shamblers broke cover.

  If we had woken up any later we would have been surrounded. By the looks of the numbers coming out of the trees, they might have even choked the exit road—our only route out—and we would have been trapped in the car until someone or something else came to steal their attentions. I almost spat out a sigh of relief as we began to gain speed. I kept a wary eye on the copse and then, when we turned out on to the main road, Austin’s new home. There was no guard outside, and I couldn’t see anything twitching curtains within. If any more of those slow undead arrived, he would have more than a rude awakening. I hoped he wandered outside for a piss and something ended up shredding his cock before he bled out.

  "Got a
ny bright ideas for our next hideout?"

  "I’ve got one."

  I gave him directions to get back to the main road where we had encountered Trish and her girls. Recent experiences were making me believe that they had little to no chance of being alive, but I had to see. I didn’t have anywhere to take them or any comforting words to give them, but they had been surviving outside on their own. Perhaps Rich and I could throw our lot in with them, at least for a short time, until we could find somewhere better. Rich’s wife had found somewhere, hadn’t she? It was just a matter of speaking to the right person or hearing the right announcement.

  As we pulled to the main road, I frowned. There was more wreckage than I remembered. I admittedly only had a fleeting memory of this place, Rick and I had been so focussed on getting to our end goal, but there were far more wrecks. I couldn’t see the tower of smoke either that had been our indicator that there was someone alive out here. I began to think the worst, as you would. The girls had had very little shelter either from the elements or the undead. I had felt incredibly vulnerable that morning and we had only been surrounded by a cluster of children and man without hands.

  "Shit, Warren, look at that!"

  Rich pointed out of the passenger window down towards a forested area which started maybe half a mile away from the main road. This must have been the other end of the nature park we had stopped by last night. There were infected wandering into it. It was reminiscent of the sea of undead I had gazed at under Worthing Pier, but this time they weren’t just standing around and moving gently with the tide. They were on their feet, and though the progress they were making was slow, they were steadily leeching over the landscape. I couldn’t count them from this distance, they were so small, but there just had to be thousands of them.

  "Fucking hell," I muttered. "We wouldn’t have stood a chance."

  "That’s one way of putting it. Where have they come from?"

  "A city? Who knows? We’re not exactly an under-populated country. I’d be more concerned about where they were going. Austin’s going to have a great alarm call this morning." I resisted rubbing my hands with metaphorical glee.

  "Not like he doesn’t deserve it. I hope they pick the place apart."

  "So long as there’s no one we like calling the guard duty outside." I muttered.

  "I don’t think Gordon will be trusting anyone we know or like with looking after his favourite exile."

  "Then let’s hope Austin gets eaten to the bone and is left to decompose in a ditch."

  "I’d drink to that if we had any." Rich gave me a mock salute.

  "Don’t remind me about drink," I moaned "I’m borderline drinking the remnants of my bottle, and at the moment it’s all piss."

  "I’ve already told you there’s nothing wrong with piss. Right that’s enough sightseeing. I don’t want any of the back markers seeing us and deciding that horde needs to change direction. Where are these girls you were talking about?" Rich asked.

  "Not a lot further up the road. It’s not looking good. We should be able to see them by now."

  We had come the wrong way up the carriageway to be able to return to Trish’s den the way Rick and I had originally approached it. The closer I got, the quicker my diminutive hopes drained away. The first trail of blood led from the front van. It was dry, possibly days old. They hadn’t had any rain to wash it away, it seemed. It was easy to spot from the distance we maintained. It must have been thick and heavy. I left the car, bringing a gun with me. I sniffed the air. There was a distant thought of a foul stench. That could have easily been the scent of the passing horde of undead drifting up to me on the wind. I couldn’t catch anything that would suggest there was an undead nearby, or a rotting corpse. That child had smelled bad enough, and the dog sixteen shades worse, and they had been trapped in a car. I followed the blood trail, hearing Rich come to tag along and cover me.

  "Signs of life?" he called cautiously.

  "Not a chance," I replied, deadpan. I had wanted to find these girls alive, desperately wanted to confirm to myself that Rick and I had done the right thing by leaving them to their own devices. I had been wrong. They had been devoured. The blood trail ended at the barrel the girls had used for burning, and there was a lump of bone and flesh left there that might have once upon a time been human. I didn’t get close to it. There was no way it was rising to come and chase me, and that meant quite significant organs had been harvested and eaten. I didn’t need to see that.

  I saw that the doors for all the cars the girls had used before were open. There were no blood trails here, and I couldn’t see blood on the windows, which hopefully meant that none of them had perished inside here. Whatever had happened, it had happened quickly and there was only one body to show for it. It was big enough only to be Trish, which meant that the girls had either escaped, or they had been turned and were now shambling around with the rest of the socially castrated undead populace. Had this been the doings of the horde? I dismissed that straight away. With the numbers I saw down in that forest, there would have been more disturbances in this camp. The barrel would have moved, and the cars would have been pushed out of the way, unable to resist the constant tide of bodies hammering against it.

  "Well that doesn’t look very pretty."

  "I’m calling you Captain Understatement today. Watch my back."

  "What? Where are you going?"

  I skirted around to the cars, trying to keep the lump of meat in the corner of my eye, but avoiding contact with it as much as possible. "The girls practically lived out of these cars. If they got out of here in a hurry, and it doesn’t look like it was particularly that long ago, they might still have some supplies here."

  "What if they’re planning on coming back?"

  "Have you seen that body? They’re not coming back. Even if they are alive, they’d have more sense than to come back here."

  It sounded callous and I intended to keep that way externally. I was heartbroken inside. I should have saved these girls. I had tried to protect Isabelle—I hadn’t given her a choice about coming with me—but I had let her out of my sight and she had gone missing. I should have forced Trish and the girls to come with me, but I hadn’t wanted to force my will on anyone. I opened the boot and started rifling through what I found there. There had been an unexpected struggle here; they must have either left without thinking about it or been taken by the plague, because there were several days of rations left amongst the detritus of daily life. I shoved things around as I lamented on my actions. I had wanted to avoid forcing my will on people at the pier, and Austin had ended up killing most of them—almost all of them. He had come to the community and I thought justice had been done, so again I had taken a backseat instead of trusting my instincts. Now we found that Austin wasn’t just alive, he was being looked after, and Rich and I had been exiled under pain of death for those I loved. I couldn’t be responsible for the deaths of more people. My conscience couldn’t bear it. I pulled out a small child’s backpack and felt tears stinging at my eyes. I could have saved them. This didn’t have to happen.

  "You don’t know that they’re dead, Warren."

  "Oh just look over there, will you, Rich? You think a bunch of little kids survived something that did that to the woman looking after them then fine. Be an idiot. Lie to yourself. I’m done treating this thing with kid gloves. There’s no such thing as a happy fucking ending anymore. I was more concerned about injuring Trish’s pride or hurting her feelings than I was about the safety of these girls. I should have told them they were coming with us whether they liked it or not."

  "And if they had said no still? What were you going to do? Abduct them all against their will?"

  "I should have done something. I should have at least tried!"

  "You did try. They said no. You can’t be everything for everyone. I told you yesterday. You’re just a normal person."

  "Huh. A normal person that could be doing a lot better. I’ve got a lot of blood on my hands. I’m star
ting to lose count of the amount of people that are dead because I was too busy titting around and worrying about other people’s feelings."

  "They aren’t dead because of things you did. You’re one cause in a long line of effects. To be brutal, you’re being pretty fucking egotistical if you think you could have saved them. Would you have got them all to the community safely? You would have needed two cars, based on numbers. What if one of them broke down? You got into trouble? Then you got attacked by some undead and a few of the girls died then. That would have been your fault too in your head, even though you were trying to do the right thing then, too. Stop blaming yourself for things that are out of your control. The only thing you’re going to get out of that is madness. Fuck, it’s you that taught me that, Warren. I blame myself for not being there with Becky when the outbreak hit, and for all I know she’s doing better than I am. She was in a group, too. They were surviving well. They weren’t driven out of their home by the undead. They chose to leave. There is something out there for us; we just need to find it. And maybe, maybe that’s what happened to the girls. Have you actually been over there yet and identified that body? Do you even know it’s Trish?"

  "I… no I haven’t." I grimaced and swallowed. "I don’t even think there’s enough left of it to identify."

  "Maybe that’s for the best, and I’m not asking you to get your face down to it and try, I’m just saying. Remember what you told me. What if. That might not be her. Those girls might not be dead. And if they are, and we know sure as fuck that’s probably a likely outcome here, it is not your fault. You did not put a gun to their heads. They made their choices. And in this world, we live or we die by the choices that we make."

  I let the words hang in the air and waited to feel the taste of them on my tongue. They were sour, and I didn’t like the way they made my eyes water. But there was no falsehood in them, and I knew in my heart Rich was right, and he was repeating back to me truths I had already given to him.