Either the chances were higher than he thought, or it was just an unusual stroke of luck; the door was folded open, and when he stepped inside and approached the driver’s seat, he spotted the keys dangling beside the steering wheel and exhaled a breath he didn’t know he had been holding.
Kingsley knew there would be a decent amount of fuel in the tank because there were no pumps at the bus park, meaning all of the buses would have to be fuelled up and ready to go before they stopped here. Though that didn’t stop his smile from growing bigger as he pressed the clutch, turned the key and felt the vehicle rumble to life.
He turned to face his friends and share another moment of celebration.
But as he turned, there was a wild flurry of movement that stole his attention.
A person rushed at Eric from behind, a black object in their hand. Held like a weapon. The person must have been hiding at the back of the bus when they entered.
Kingsley’s alarm showed on his face; Eric spun around, clocking the danger just in time to duck below the swinging weapon.
In the split-second shift of momentum as the attacker missed and had to quickly adjust their course of action, Kingsley saw that it was a woman – dark hair, olive skin, police uniform, the weapon a black police baton.
Then Eric’s foot shot up into her stomach and sent her flying back, striking the armrest of a seat as she fell.
Before Eric had time to straighten up, a second woman darted out from behind a seat on the left. She floored him with a kick to the face and was about to strike Kingsley with the spanner she was holding when Sammy shouted, “Don’t you dare!”
The woman froze, glaring over Kingsley’s shoulder at Sammy. He turned to see the crossbow level with the woman’s face, shaking slightly in Sammy's hands.
“Move another muscle, and…” Sammy didn’t finish the threat.
There was no need. The woman's spanner clattered to the floor and, still glaring at them, she said in a small voice wet with spite, “This is our bus.”
3.
“What makes it your bus any more than ours?” Kingsley asked, returning the woman’s angry stare.
“We found it first. It’s ours.” Her eyes were small but intense, like the rest of the features on her round, mousy face.
“I don’t think it works like that anymore,” Sammy said. The woman in the police uniform gave her a quizzical look at that.
Eric picked himself up off the floor, groaning, and snatched the police baton from the woman’s side where she sat lax against one of the bus seats. Kingsley saw the red mark of a bruise beginning to form on the right side of Eric’s face where he had been kicked, spreading from cheekbone to temple. As he bent down to retrieve the spanner, he gave Kingsley a disgruntled smile that said, I’m fine – worry about those two, not me.
“Where did you get those weapons?” the policewoman asked; of course she would be interested in their illegal weaponry.
“The dark web,” Kingsley said, remembering what Darren had told them and not wanting to go into more detail.
The women both looked like they didn’t quite believe him but also had no idea where else you could obtain those sort of weapons.
Kingsley changed the subject. “Look – I don’t know about you, but we really need this bus. Now, there’s more than enough room for all of us, and I would be happy to share. Only it doesn’t seem like you two are quite as willing.”
“We don’t know you,” the mousy one said. “You might try something, try to backstab us.”
“True,” Kingsley admitted, thinking the women might do the same to them. “But why don’t we get to know each other? I’ll start: my name’s Kingsley and my friends here are Sammy and Eric. We’re trying to get to Kelvedon to find Sammy’s parents, and we came here looking for a vehicle. Will you tell me your names?”
The mousy one stayed silent, glaring. But her friend spoke up. “I’m Kara and she’s Rebecca.” Kingsley nodded, and then was surprised when Kara continued. “We’re just trying to get out of Braintree. There are too many infected people in this town. We have no plan other than that. My parents are on a cruise in the Caribbean, and I have no partner or children. Rebecca has family here but… well, she had family here.”
Kingsley looked at Rebecca with sympathy. “You… saw it happen?”
Rebecca shut her eyes. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. And neither am I. I hated them.”
Kingsley didn’t know how to respond to that. Luckily, he didn’t have to say anything because Eric spoke.
“Let’s make this easy for all of us. We still need to pick up some supplies we left in a camping store at the shopping centre before we leave. So here’s what we’ll do: me and Sammy will run back there now and you’ll come with us, Rebecca, while Kingsley stays here with Kara in the bus. It would be stupid to drive further into town when the noise could attract snappers and get us swarmed. And we can’t drive through the shopping centre, anyway.”
“How is that supposed to make things easier for everyone?” Kara asked.
“Because neither you or Kingsley are gonna try to steal the bus when you’re both waiting for us to return.”
“Right. So we’re supposed to just agree that we’re sharing the bus now?”
“I didn’t say that. But, like it or not, we’re the ones with the weapons and we are taking this bus with or without you.”
The crossbow in Sammy’s hands had lowered slightly, no longer aiming at the women’s heads. However, when Eric said those last words she raised the crossbow to head height once again.
“I’m not sure I can agree to share, Eric,” Sammy protested.
Kingsley knew that Eric was trying his best to avoid more senseless violence after yesterday’s chaos, and he voiced his support for him. “It’s the dead we should be worried about. The dead are already trying to kill us. There’s no need to antagonise the living as well.”
But he also knew where Sammy’s hostility came from; even as he spoke, the image of a crossbow bolt sticking out of James’ eye surged through his mind.
4.
Jogging through the shopping centre, Eric, Sammy and Rebecca took care not to attract a trail of snappers that might get them cornered in the plaza as terraced buildings hemmed them in on both sides. They took out every undead that noticed them and snuck past the rest.
Eric swung the chain mace at a snapper that lurched out from behind a souvenir stand before they could pass it. The spiked mace head ripped open the snapper’s neck and shoulder, flinging gore in its wake, the force throwing the undead to the ground and leaving it in a temporary struggle to pick itself back up.
Eric was beginning to get the hang of swinging the chain mace around. He found that it was all about moving in synchronicity with the weapon, leaning into the arcs and not fighting the velocity of the mace head. You had to be certain that you wanted to do damage before swinging it.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t killed the snapper because they slipped out of sight around a corner just ahead before it could pick itself back up.
Eric could see the sign of the camping store they had slept in last night halfway up the next stretch of the plaza.
There was only an armful of food supplies in there, meat left in a cooler box in the stockroom where they had shut themselves away for the night. But it was important because it was the only meat they had.
Getting the right nutrients to stay healthy and functioning from a plant-based diet had been tricky enough before the apocalypse. With the limited food options in the world they now lived in, it would be much harder. They would need meat in their diets, no way around it. The only problem was that the undead also had an insatiable hunger for meat, flesh and blood.
The snappers were a drain on the meat supply. They needed to take as much as they could get before they had none left.
The camping store was in front of them now, and two snappers jittered toward them as they approached it, coming from
the entrance of the store. Did we leave the door open? Eric wondered as Sammy and Rebecca stepped forward to deal with the snappers.
Sammy fired the crossbow at the farthest one, but her aim was too low and the bolt lodged in it’s chest. Fighting her nerves, she managed to reload and aim the weapon without shooting too quickly and missing again. The second shot speared through the snapper’s grey forehead and it fell flat on it’s back.
Rebecca was less lucky with her knife, going for the eye of the other snapper but instead getting her blade stuck in it’s jaw, just below the cheekbone. She gritted her teeth and slammed her foot uselessly into the dead man’s crotch.
Sammy was tugging the bolts from the dead one’s body when she noticed the other woman’s struggle and looked up at her. “Go for the back of the neck! Stab it in the spine!”
Rebecca cast an angry glare her way – but nonetheless followed Sammy’s instructions, ripping her knife from the bloody, snapping face in front of her and stabbing madly at the back of the snapper’s neck.
“No, not like that,” Sammy began. “You have to push it—”
She stopped when one of Rebecca’s wild stabs hit the right spot and severed the spinal cord. The snapper’s body slumped in her arms and she let it crash on the paving.
Eric would have interfered and killed the snapper himself while Rebecca was struggling with it if he hadn’t been distracted by the trail of blood leading into the shop. And the pieces of meat scattered along it.
“Look,” he said to the others, nodding at the blood. “Be alert. There might be some of them in there.”
There was even a severed pig’s trotter laying in the trail. Something about that sent a shiver up Eric’s spine.
They went in quietly. Rebecca stopped at the front and turned around to peer out the windows at the empty plaza. Sammy kept an eye on her while Eric crept to the back of the store, toward the stockroom, nudging a bit of fleshy debris with his foot and noting with unease that the trail led right up to stockroom. The door was half open, and he was pretty sure he could hear movement in there as he got closer.
It was definitely not in the same state as they had left it this morning; they had stacked a few boxes in front of the stockroom door before leaving to make it harder for anyone or anything to get in there and find their food. But those boxes had been toppled over.
Eric hadn’t thought that a snapper would be capable of pushing the boxes as they were fairly heavy, containing tent heaters and other camping equipment. Then again, the undead could be very persistent when they knew there was fresh meat nearby.
Pressing his back to the wall, Eric leaned into the door frame, trying to see inside. But the lights were off and it was pretty dark in there. He could hear something, though – a wet, sloppy sound.
His hand inched along the wall and found the light switch. He kicked the door the rest of the way open as the room burst into light, and the snapper that hunched over the cooler box tearing into their meat supplies straightened up, twisted it’s head toward him. Blood was smeared over it’s sagging face and matted in the ends of it’s ragged hair.
The blood wasn’t from the snapper’s body, but from the raw pork chops it had been feasting on.
It stood and came at Eric, who pulled out his knife and rammed it up through the snapper’s chin and all the way into the brain.
Those pork chops had been the bulk of their meat supplies. Eric walked up to the cooler box and looked inside. The pack of bacon Kingsley had brought with him when they went camping was missing. Glancing around, he spotted the torn, empty pack on the floor next to the cooler.
Not wanting their trip to have been for nothing, Eric decided he would find something else useful to take back to the bus.
He slung a bagged tent over his shoulder, then scooped up a few sleeping bags in one arm. While he was looking for a new portable cooler that hadn’t been touched by infected hands, he heard Sammy call out.
“Rebecca! Come back!”
He ducked back into the shop and saw that the women were both outside in the plaza, the front door swinging closed in their wake. Stumbling after them, he halted in the plaza beside Sammy who had suddenly stopped chasing the other woman after realising what she was doing.
Rebecca ran at a snapper that had emerged from the shadow of an archway directly across from the camping store, following the strange trail of blood and littered flesh that led into the shop. There was fury and grit in Rebecca’s stride, in the white-knuckled grip that clutched her knife.
She shoved her blade through it’s eye, this time hitting the brain in one go. But as she walked, jaw clenched, back towards Eric and Sammy, a second snapper came out from the archway behind her… then a third. Then a fourth. Then more and more of them, all staggering towards the survivors, teeth snapping like piranhas.
Seeing Eric and Sammy’s glassy stares, Rebecca looked back at the archway and let out a gasp when she saw them. There were too many for them to fight – at least a dozen and still more coming.
As they fled the shopping centre and more snappers tottered out of the shops on both sides of the plaza to join the marching undead, the realisation struck Eric cold.
This was a trap, he thought. Somebody led the snappers here with that trail.
5.
It was Kara who broke the silence. Kingsley was content to not speak at all, to put all of his focus toward looking threatening enough to sway the policewoman from trying anything. Though he didn’t know what she could do with her wrist cuffed to the seat.
“Shouldn’t they be back by now?”
Kingsley said nothing, thought, Shit, I don’t even know.
After another minute of quiet, Kara spoke again. “I’m worried about Rebecca. We should go and look for them... This isn’t about the bus anymore. We’ll share the bus. You’re right – we stand a better chance of surviving if we stick together. But that’s why we have to go and make sure our friends aren’t dead already.”
Kingsley still said nothing, staring out the window at Kara’s back as though he was barely listening. But the nervous flicker of his eyes contradicted him.
“You can put that machete down. You won’t have to use it, and I know you don’t want to. I’ve met people who enjoy hurting others. Bad people. It’s part of my job. I can tell you’re not one of them. You’ll hesitate when it comes to using it and that hesitation will get you killed.”
“Just stop,” Kingsley said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop talking. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not working on me.”
“What am I trying to do? Get you to uncuff me?”
Kingsley shook his head. “Get me to talk.”
“Isn’t it working, then?” A half-smile appeared on Kara’s face.
“No. You want me to empathise with you, to see you as a person rather than an enemy, so that I’ll loosen up and let my guard down. Works on most people. We’re emotional creatures, not logical ones.”
“And it isn’t working on you because you’re... what? Emotionless?”
Kingsley scoffed and shook his head. Then he realised that he had lowered his machete while talking, his knuckles white from squeezing the handle. He raised the blade and continued to peer out the window. He had already said too much.
“Fine.” Kara sighed, looking tired. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll have to work together at some point if we are to share this bus. I mean, you can’t keep me as your hostage forever.”
“When we tried to take this bus, you said it was yours because you found it first – as if there’s some kind of order, some kind of law still left in this world that makes it so.” Kingsley didn’t know why he was talking, but he couldn’t stop himself. “You believe in law and order. Don’t you? That’s why you joined the police force, isn’t it? I bet you think the military are going to swoop in and save the world from this mess and scientists are going to find a cure.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing: I do think we’re going to
survive this. After all, the dead will rot, won’t they? Or they’ll starve to death or something. That’s why all the horror movies are unrealistic. Zombies are still only human bodies. We just need to find a safe place, gather loads of supplies, and wait for the dead to die again…”
Kara’s words trailed off as she noticed Kingsley staring with obvious alarm at something outside the window to her back. She twisted in her seat to see what it was.
The sight of Rebecca, Sammy and Eric all alive was a relief. But the fact that they were pelting towards the bus was worrying. What were they running from?
Kara stood up and slipped her hand out of the suddenly loose handcuffs. Kingsley spared a second to gawk in astonishment, as she showed him the spare handcuff key she had been hiding in her other hand. “I unlocked them five minutes ago while you were staring out the window.”
If Kara’s cuffs had really been unlocked for that long, that meant she’d had an opportunity to try something. She could have attacked Kingsley, stolen his machete and held him hostage, demanded that his friends let her and Rebecca take the bus for themselves. But she hadn’t.
Kingsley didn’t have time to think about it.
They both spun toward the bus door when they heard Eric yelling. “Start the bus!”
They rushed to the front of the vehicle, Kingsley jumping into the driver’s seat and turning the ignition without question. There was far too much urgency in Eric’s voice for hesitation.
The vehicle trembled awake and Rebecca, Sammy and Eric spilled into the bus. No sooner had Eric slung his baggage down on a seat than the first snapper stumbled around the corner where they had run from – this one a boy no more than ten years old, bites all over the body. It seemed to Kingsley that the snapper was leering at him, it’s broken arm twisted in some kind of malign gesture.
The snappers poured into the bus park in a fiendish current, building until there were more of them than Kingsley had ever seen before in one place – at least forty or so, and more drifting into view.
Thrive (Episode 2): Follow Page 2