‘You two, come on!’ Bailey commanded, putting a hand on my shoulder. I reached out and grabbed Claire’s hand too. We’d know if any of us fell or were attacked as we ran back to the barn doors.
A burbling, throaty scream filled the night.
With the buildings around us, the rain, I couldn’t place where it had come from. But just like last time, I had a good idea what had made it.
Then it came again.
And again. All together. Overlapping.
All around us, repeated, I don’t know how many times, echoing through the concrete courtyard, cutting through the whispers of the falling rain.
‘Uh, Katy, Sergeant?’ Claire stammered as we reached the front of the barn.
‘Not now!’ Bailey told her, as we rounded the corner. ‘This is not the time!’
Four SySec soldiers stood in a loose grouping around the door, weapons aimed in different directions, lights scanning for movement. Bailey began barking orders immediately, raising her voice enough to be heard inside the barn.
‘Beta secure the farmhouse, Charlie, sweep the courtyards! GFPD, guard the barn! Alpha, you’re with me, perimeter sweep, this may be an attack!’
The SySec soldiers split themselves into three-man teams, with Bailey making Alpha up to four.
‘Katy,’ Claire said, insistently, tugging on my hand. ‘Was it just me, or did that shouting sound like…words?’
I turned to face her, seeing her eyes, wide and watering, her skin gone pale. I tried to play back the sound in my head.
She may not have been wrong.
‘What did you think they were saying?’
Her voice came out, barely more than a whisper.
‘Run.’
The sound of breaking glass came from the farmhouse, heavy, shattering window panes, lights began blinking on in the upper two storeys as the soldiers of Beta squad rushed across the yard to see what the hell was going on.
Claire and I slipped back into the barn in the wake of GFPD leaving, most of them still pulling on coats and weapons. The soldiers had been up and ready at a moment’s notice, but they were probably drilled for that. Cops might have worked long hours, but they tended not to start them off with an air-horn alarm, so I tried not to judge them too harshly.
The cops, with their shotguns and pistols, formed a semi-circle around the front of the barn, the only entrance, keeping us medics and civilians safe inside.
‘What’s going on out there?’ someone asked us, seeing we’d just come in from the rain.
‘A man’s dead-’ I tried to answer, but the questions came in thick and fast.
‘Is it the infected?’
‘A ghoul?’
Someone began to laugh, low and anxious.
‘Where have the soldiers gone?’
‘Are the others back yet?’
‘Bloody shut up will you?!’ Claire shouted, trying to stop the panic before it got started.
Most of the chatter died away, leaving only the nervous laughter, and one loudmouth civilian.
‘We’ve got a right to know what’s going on!’
‘I was trying to tell you, but I can only answer one question at a time.’ I told him calmly, folding my arms. ‘A police officer has been killed, possibly by a ghoul. Sergeant Bailey has gone to see if there are any zombies present and she’s sent the soldiers off to sweep the area and secure the farmhouse.’
The laughter began to take on a different edge.
‘It’s not funny,’ the man I’d been speaking to said, turning to look for the source, ‘what are you laughing at?’
This was apparently hilarious.
A few others began to laugh, most of them near the back, but one of them close. The barn door was open wider than before, letting in as much light as the rain would allow.
I looked to a woman standing just a little apart from the rest. She had a hand on her hips, smiling, but with her mouth hidden behind a hand. Her skin was pale, her hair lank and dark. She wore a green scrub top and bottoms, but as my light scanned up her body, I saw they were both liberally stained by red-brown spatter.
I recognised her. I’d seen her before, back at the checkpoint, curled in the foetal position under a window in the first cabin. Playing dead. She looked back at me, cocked her head to the side, and smiled broadly, manic.
The ghouls struck in a sudden, coordinated surge of violence. They tore into necks with their teeth, throwing arterial spray across the crowd, gouging eyes with their fingers, letting out that unearthly scream as they went.
People rushed forwards, shoving us out the door and into the backs of the police, who’d set up to defend from the outside, not from within. There was no room for them to fire their weapons, and so much blood covered the crowd that there was no telling the living from the undead.
I had no time to turn around, pushed out on the tide of fear, desperately trying to backpedal to stay upright. I lost my footing, tripped over backwards, catching a foot in the ribs and then another in the gut, the crook of my arm, on my shin, pain blossoming everywhere as terrified, jabbering people trampled over me in the rush to escape.
A towering shape appeared, its simple presence enough to divert the last terrified people in the stream of panic around me.
‘Up we get.’ Dave grunted, lifting me to my feet, hands under my armpits.
I didn’t have time to say thanks, before he shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder, and stalked towards the barn door, flanked by two of his colleagues with little SySec machineguns, salvaged from the mess at the checkpoint.
Looking around, people had scattered all over the courtyard, stopped before they could reach the farmhouse by the three soldiers of Charlie squad, who had been sweeping the grounds. Caught between the soldiers and the ghouls, some folk had run to the side gate and begun hauling themselves over the top, the back of the gate having enough footholds to work as a ladder. They were quick though, fit, and for all I knew, they could have been the ghouls, slipping away before they were found again.
Or maybe the ghouls were still here.
‘Hey! Listen up!’ I called, leaving the cops to the barn, trying to fix the problem in front of me. ‘Calm the fuck down, and get on the ground. Everybody, on your knees! Hands behind your heads!’
I was tired, angry, and sore all over. There were muddy bootprints on my jacket. Also I still needed to pee. I put all that urgency into my shouting, channelling my inner Mrs Lowe, and people listened the fuck up. Everyone bar Charlie squad knelt down on the cold, soaking concrete and put their hands behind their heads.
A couple of under-barrel lights from Charlie’s guns flickered in my direction, getting a good look at whoever was now, apparently, in charge.
‘Charlie squad,’ I called out, quieter this time, ‘split up and go from person to person. If they can’t say their name and whose farm they’re on, shoot them in the head.’
A string of protests went up from the crowd, but I cut them off without Claire’s help this time.
‘We haven’t got time to argue! Answer the damn questions, prove you’re alive and you don’t get shot.’
As if on cue, muffled shots and frantic shouting rang out from inside Rob’s farmhouse. One of the civilians cried out to the Gods for help, standing and making a run for the side gate.
Heads turned to watch him go, Charlie’s lights all flickering towards him, just in time to see Tony rise up and whack him on the back of the legs with his baton, sending him sprawling in one of the many puddles forming on the concrete.
Tony himself had angry red marks on his face, and was holding one of his eyes closed against the glare from the flashlights, or possibly the discomfort of nearly having his eye torn out. When it became apparent the guy he’d taken down wasn’t going to stand back up again, he took a knee next to them.
‘The ghouls have probably already gotten away, but we need to be sure. Everyone stay calm, this will all be over in a minute.’ I said.
Charlie squad hadn’t moved up, they w
ere still looking at me from across the sea of kneeling heads, their lights wavering uncertainly from me, to the people, to the dark corners of the courtyards.
‘Are you authorised to give these orders, ma’am?’
Well, shit. This was it.
I’d avoided getting involved with leading this shitshow because I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be with my fiancé, my friends and my fucking bike. But if getting involved was going to save even one life, then I’d have to roll my sleeves up.
‘I worked directly with Dr Lines on the quarantine ward. I’m the closest thing you have to an expert right now. So get a move on, or give me a gun and I’ll do it myself.’
Twenty Seven
We gave the remaining civilians the once over, Charlie helping as I instructed. We asked everyone in turn what their name was, something which Aaron Gorezka, the kid from the ambulance, had struggled with. I was pretty sure that’s how you got a ghoul – having a stomach full of infected blood, just like Aaron had.
I know that it’s not a great sample size, just Aaron and the one that came for us in the basement, but it was all I had to work with. I’d have to extrapolate from incomplete data. I hoped that wherever Yanis was, he was managing to keep up his work. Gods know I wouldn’t be able to fill in for him, but I felt like I should at least try.
Still, we’d be fucked if saving the human race were down to me.
Ghoul-Aaron had struggled with speech, but that could have been a feature of him being recently turned, the virus still taking over parts of his brain and not yet operating at peak capacity. Yanis had said there was a theory that the longer the infection was present, the greater chance there was of seeing aberrant behaviour. If that was true for the zombies, it might have a parallel in the ghouls.
The bastards we’d just been attacked by were certainly older than Aaron. I recognised the one in scrubs from the checkpoint, where I assume it was…turned, for lack of a better word.
They could blend in with the living well enough to avoid immediate detection, and knew how to do a chilling laugh about as well as any moustache-twirling movie villain. I figure that level of development took place somewhere between Rob Grant having a look at the checkpoint last night, and us finding the checkpoint between noon and one o’clock. I hadn’t exactly been checking my phone a lot so didn’t have an exact timeframe to work with.
That tallied with my hunch – sorry, theory, I need to sound more professional – that the ghouls got smarter the longer they were up and about. So rather than just asking their names and whose farm they were on, Claire and I started mixing the questions up, and re-interviewing people Charlie squad had already done, in case the ghouls were smart enough to copy their answers from others.
‘What did we have for dinner?’ I asked one man.
‘I don’t know, some hot foreign thing. With chicken.’ He added, catching the serious look in my eye. SySec hadn’t given me a gun, but I was finding it easy to summon up a steely-eyed glare.
‘What hospital did we come from? Who is the SySec commanding officer? What animal do they keep in the stables?’ I kept on asking, going through the crowd and back again while Charlie finished up.
As we were working through, the GFPD officers who’d gone to sweep the barn came out, bearing bodies carried between pairs of officers. The civilians’ heads were turned the other way, so they didn’t see how many casualties we had.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a lot. But any number of dead had a chance of coming back and joining the other team. Our loss was their gain, if we didn’t do something about it.
‘What now, ma’am?’ a Charlie squaddie asked me.
It must have taken us less than ten minutes from start to finish, but that’s ten minutes kneeling on concrete, in the rain. These people needed to get back inside, if not for their health, then for safety, but I wasn’t sure if the cops were done with our barn.
‘Liaise with Dave, one of the GFPD officers. Find out if we can go back inside.’ I said, two soldiers jogging off to do just that, splashing their way through the puddles.
‘Can they stand up now?’ Claire asked me.
‘Sorry for the inconvenience folks, you’re all clear, on your feet.’ I said. I probably hadn’t won a lot of friends tonight, but I could live with that if it meant we got to see the morning.
Just then, beta squad came out of Rob’s house, carrying an unmoving form which, unfortunately, everyone did get a chance to look at. He was in SySec grey fatigues, which sent the bottom of my stomach falling. They carried the man around the side of the house, and I felt the urge to follow, to see if there was anything I could do.
‘Might be trauma, or infection,’ Claire said, ‘you go take a look, I’ll make sure everything ticks along here.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, truly grateful.
We’d gone from sleeping to running to being attacked. Throw in a bit of public speaking in front of a squad of het-up soldiers, and I was beginning to feel frayed at the edges. I felt myself leaning in, and before I knew what was happening, I’d given Claire a brief, tight hug.
The urge went just as soon as it’d come, leaving me to awkwardly break away and step back. Without another word, I chased after the soldiers and the body, seeing if there was anything I could do to help, and definitely not looking back over my shoulder. Most of the lights were on in the farmhouse now, so it was easy to find the path.
Around the back of the house was another garden, though this one was a little more of a relaxation garden than the presentation verge at front. It’d have been hard to tell in the dark, but security lights were flooding the barbecue patio with a warm, amber glow.
Sliding doors led into the dining area, and I could see they’d been smashed open by someone – probably a ghoul – picking up a large stone flowerpot and tossing it through.
Rob, wearing a checked robe and no pyjama bottoms, was opening the doors to a large shed. Two SySec soldiers were holding the body between them, and it only took one look to realise it was just that, a body. Over his throat was the now familiar line of torn flesh, seen once in the basement, and again on Carmichael’s throat. That was how he’d died the first time, when he was human, and a he.
The second time had come when someone had caved in the top of it’s head with repeated strikes, probably from the stock of a compact SySec machinegun.
My brain must have been playing catch-up, as I only realised I’d been staring when the bare bulb flicked on inside the shed, casting harsh light over racks of tools, equipment and half-finished projects on the worktable that occupied the middle of the floorspace.
‘On the floor, there,’ Rob pointed, the soldiers setting the body down.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Woke up to the sound of breaking glass, grabbed me gun and saw this ghoul running down the hall. Shot it,’ he said, patting his robe pocket where there was a handgun-sized bulge, ‘but I’ve never been a great shot. Me boy came in an helped me hold it off while Sydow showed up to pull our arses out the fire.’
‘So it’s not one of ours?’
‘No,’ one of the soldiers said, shaking her head, ‘SySec uniform, tags, but he was killed and turned somewhere else. My guess is the checkpoint.’
‘It. It’s not a “he” anymore.’ I reminded her.
‘He was one of us. His name’s on his tags. We can still treat him with respect, even if we had to put him down.’ She said, glancing back to the body, and the mess they’d made of the head.
‘You respected him enough to kill him.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Would your respect allow an autopsy?’ I pressed her.
‘What? You can’t be serious. We know how he died.’
‘I might be able to confirm a theory, find out how the ghouls are turned, as opposed to the rest of the zombies. It’d be useful for us to know, and all I’ve got to do is cut open his stomach.’
‘Fuck me, are you serious?’ the other soldier blan
ched.
‘Captain Hale authorised the autopsy of your comrade we were forced to kill in the basement at County. I’m just asking to do the same.’
More swearing followed.
‘Captain authorised Dr Lines to do the autopsy. Where the fuck do you stand in this?’ she asked.
‘I, the fuck, am the person County chose to work with Dr Lines when he wanted the A&E’s best trauma nurse. So are you going to let me carry his work on, or not?’
‘If you go anywhere near him, I’ll put you on your arse, just like Sergeant Bailey did!’ The first soldier said, standing between the ghoul and me.
‘I didn’t see her coming, but I see you.’ I said, dropping my voice into a growl to match hers.
She might have been a foot taller than me, but if you’re willing to punch between the legs you can bring them down to your level quick enough, man or woman.
‘Easy, settle. Let’s be calm.’ Rob quietly said, standing just to the side of us. ‘Been a rough night. How about we wait an see what the morning brings?’
Tensions were high, and we were letting them get the better of us. I unclenched my fists and took a step back.
‘This is what they wanted from this attack,’ I said, ‘to fuck up our morale, or get us riled up enough to do something stupid. Rob’s right. Let’s chill the fuck out. Let Bailey decide what we do next.’
‘First sensible thing you’ve said.’ The soldier nodded, her shoulders relaxing.
I let that one slide.
‘I’ll get the kettle on.’ Rob said. His family might have been from the Islands, but he had the tea-stained soul of a native Greenfielder.
I was soaking wet from the rain and beginning to shiver from the cold, so before the kettle went on, I rushed to grab my bag from the barn, where Lydia was organising a clean-up effort to mop up the worst of the blood.
On top of killing a few of us and scaring the rest shitless, the ghouls had also managed to turn our sleeping area into a scene from a slasher flick. Nobody was going back to sleep tonight, not in there anyway.
The Suburban Dead (Book 2): Emergency Page 24