by Wood, J N
‘Okay,’ Ali said, as she put the Honda back into drive. ‘Next left turn.’
‘You still leading the way Ali?’ Roy asked.
Ali shrugged, and then the Honda accelerated away from us.
‘Guess so,’ Jack said.
The next left was just a few miles further along. We followed the Honda’s rear lights down the road. A couple of miles later, after passing five or six more short lanes leading to homes, we came to a sharp right turning. The Honda sat in the middle of the road in front of us, the brake lights still on.
‘I think this turn takes us away from the border,’ Beth said, using the internal lights in the Chevy to look at the map. ‘We’ll be better off going back and trying one of those houses we passed.’
‘Turn us around Roy,’ Jack said. ‘They’ll soon figure out what we’re doing and follow us.’
We headed back down the road, the Honda trailing behind us. Thirty seconds later, and we were parked in front of a house. Behind it a few farm buildings were visible, the headlights only just reaching them.
‘Shall we all go in and check?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Jack quickly said. ‘Beth, you wait in the car.’
‘I can take care of myself,’ Beth said. ‘You can’t protect me every second of the day.’
‘It makes sense to leave someone in the car,’ Roy said.
‘You stay here then,’ Beth said to him.
‘Okay,’ Roy replied. ‘I’ll stay here.’
Two knocks on Beth’s window got everyone’s attention. Ali was stood outside, peering in and looking confused. Beth rolled her window down.
‘What are you doing?’ Ali asked. ‘Are we going to go and check this place out?’
Jack opened his door. ‘Yep, come on then. Don’t forget your knife if you’re coming with us Beth.’
Jack distributed torches out to Theo and Beth. Ali and I still carried the ones we had earlier in the night. Everyone else would stay with the cars.
The house was a two storey building, with the front door on the far left. The rest of the ground floor was mostly taken up by four large windows. Five windows filled the front of the first floor.
I walked up to the window closest to the door, and pointed my torch inside. The hallway inside looked like any normal, looked after home.
‘It looks empty,’ I whispered.
Jack, Ali and Theo were looking in through the other windows.
‘All clear here,’ Jack said.
‘Yeah, here too,’ Ali added.
‘Clear,’ Theo said.
‘Going in then?’ I asked, walking to the front door. I tried the handle and found it locked. ‘Break a window?’
‘Wait,’ Ali said. ‘Try around the back. Might not be locked.’
Jack looked back to the cars, and signalled that we were heading around the back of the house. Ali led the way, so she arrived at the back door first. With a twist of the handle, the door opened into the house.
Smiling, Ali glanced back to us, before walking into the house, her torch and new crowbar held out in front of her. ‘We clear downstairs first,’ she instructed, moving through the kitchen. ‘Then we do upstairs.’
After searching the entire house we discovered it was empty of life, and death. Once everyone was inside, we barricaded the back door with the huge fridge freezer, and found somewhere to sleep. The three bedrooms upstairs were quickly taken, leaving me and Roy to sleep downstairs on the two sofas.
The agreed plan was to have four hours of sleep, and then we would walk over towards the border.
Hopefully we’ll find some weaknesses that will allow us to very easily slip into Canada.
As well as the sun’s early rising, the sound of distant helicopter rotors repeatedly woke me up.
DAY TWENTY TWO
Chapter 26: Idiot
There was a slight crack in the curtains, so the sun shone into the living room. I looked down at myself. A two inch wide strip of light ran all the way down my body.
I’m pretty sure that was the sound of helicopters I’d heard last night. The Canadians must have been flying around out there.
Roy was still fast asleep on the other sofa, and nobody else seemed to be awake.
I guessed the four hours of sleep we’d allowed ourselves hadn’t elapsed yet. Just then the alarm on Roy’s watch started sounding.
Bollocks. I was looking forward to some more sleep.
Jack, Ali and Pete soon appeared from upstairs, and were now sat with Roy and me in the living room. We ate some of the energy bars I’d found, and the jerky Charles had given us.
‘We’re going to have to be really careful in the daylight, and really quiet,’ Ali said. ‘It’s only a few miles to the border. Hopefully we won’t encounter another swarm.’
‘So we’re just going to walk over there, and take a look?’ Roy asked.
‘Yep,’ Jack replied. ‘And if there’s no way to cross when we get there, we’ll have to walk a few miles along the border as well.’
‘But at a distance though yeah?’ Pete asked.
‘Of course,’ Ali told him.
‘Did anyone else hear helicopters last night?’ I asked.
‘Yeah I did,’ Jack said.
‘Me too,’ Pete agreed.
‘Keep an eye out for them as well,’ Ali said. ‘I doubt they’ll fly into America though. Why would they do anything to us anyway? We’re not going to try and cross the border today.’
Before we left, Jack and Ali quickly ran upstairs to tell everyone we would be back in a few hours.
We left the farmhouse and walked up the short lane to the road. On the other side of the road, thick woodland spread out in front of us, filling the horizon. We entered the woods, the thick underbrush making it hard going.
‘It should only be a mile or so of this,’ Ali said. ‘Then it’s open fields to the border.’
Roy slashed at branches with his machete, saying, ‘At least there won’t be any zombies in here. They’d just get stuck.’
‘Open fields don’t sound too good for sneaking across borders,’ I said.
‘Let’s just have a look,’ Ali said. ‘I think if we go east, the border originally went through the woods. Although I’m guessing the Canadians felled a lot of the trees, like they did north of Blaine.’
As we battled through the low lying branches, Ali and I were a little behind the others.
‘Hey Ali,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want to talk about this, you don’t have to.’
‘Okay’, she replied, sounding suspicious.
‘How did Steve end up back on top of the bus?’
‘Oh right,’ she said. ‘It’s okay, I can talk about that. We’ve discussed it, my sister and my cousins and me, but nobody knows. None of us saw him run off or anything. You were there, it was a bit crazy. It was hard enough to take care of yourself. One second he was running alongside us, the next we were at the container, and he was back on the bus.’
‘Okay, I was just wondering,’ I told her.
‘I think he panicked and ran in the wrong direction. And by the time he found his bearings, there were too many of the dead around him. I don’t know. It’s easily done. Jack said you got lost.’
‘I didn’t get lost. I fell over and ran in the wrong direction for a couple of seconds.’
‘That’s probably all it’d take to make someone panic.’
‘Yep, probably,’ I agreed.
It was hard and sweaty work, but we were soon seeing more blue sky at the edge of the trees. We could also hear a quiet hissing.
We stayed as low to the ground as possible, and crept to the edges. Large industrial looking farm buildings sat in the middle of overgrown grass fields.
I looked left and right, using the binoculars. On the other side of the field in front of us, as far as I could see, a mass of zombies pressed against a chain link fence. It didn’t look far from the border wall, still being constructed behind it.
‘We’re not getting through there
anytime soon,’ Pete said.
There seemed to be a lot of movement on the Canadian side, but they were being incredibly quiet. Occasionally the sound of the concrete blocks being lowered into place, just about made its way over to us.
Surely it’s not all being done by hand?
‘There are a lot fewer zombies than I was expecting,’ Roy said. ‘I thought these fields would be full of them.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘There’s a fair few by the fence, but maybe only twenty deep.’
‘Hopefully there will be none further along,’ Jack said. ‘There can’t be construction work going on everywhere.’
Ali started to step backwards into the trees. ‘Come on then guys. Let’s go east a couple of miles, see if it’s any better.’
We followed the tree line for as long as we could. It was angled towards the border, so it wasn’t long before we had to head back into the woods to avoid getting too close to the zombies. It did look like the dead were thinning slightly as we moved further east.
Ali was right. A huge amount of woodland had been felled close to the border.
After we must have been walking for an hour, the amount of zombies had been slowly decreasing, and was now at zero. There was no building work going on, and all that stood between us and Canada was a barbed wire topped fence, and heavily armed mask wearing soldiers, stood on the other side. They looked similar to the four soldiers we’d met a few weeks ago from Colorado. Silent jeeps constantly patrolled up and down behind the fence. Large guns were mounted on the back of them.
‘We’re not getting through there anytime soon,’ Pete said, again.
‘There must be shift changes and…other things?’ I said desperately.
We were well within the woods still, hiding behind the trees and bushes. It looked like there was only thirty feet of tree stump filled ground from the edge of the trees to the fence. A soldier was positioned every twenty feet along the fence.
Another jeep silently zipped past.
‘It doesn’t look good,’ Jack said.
‘No you’re right,’ I grudgingly agreed.
‘We need to head back,’ Ali said. ‘We told them we’d only be a couple of hours.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ Pete said. ‘Watch for any weaknesses.’
‘You can’t stay here by yourself,’ Ali told him.
‘I’ll wait with you Pete,’ Roy said. ‘I’ve nothing better to do.’
‘Okay,’ Ali said. ‘Just for a few hours.’
‘How about I come back in four hours?’ I suggested. ‘I’ll swap with one of you?’
Jack looked at his watch. ‘It’s taken an hour and a half to get here. But realistically it should take less than an hour, forty five minutes maybe. We did dither around for a bit.’
‘Dither?’ Pete asked.
‘Not important Pete,’ Jack told him. ‘I’ll come back with you Chris,’ he offered, before turning back to Pete and Roy. ‘Then both of you can head back and get some rest.’
‘Deal,’ Pete agreed.
‘Keep an eye out for us,’ I said, passing the binoculars to Pete. ‘Because we’ll probably not be able to find you.’
Jack looked into the trees behind us, and then to me and Ali. ‘Can either of you guide us back to the house from here? Or do you think it’ll be safer to go back to where we first saw the border?’
We all looked around at our surroundings.
There was no way I could get us back.
‘Back the way we came?’ Ali suggested.
Jack and I agreed, so we started walking along the tree line again.
When we reached the point we’d first stopped to look at the construction going on, there seemed to be a lot of commotion happening on the Canadian side. We could now hear loud machinery, and the hissing’s intensity had definitely gone up a notch or two. The amount of zombies seemed to have increased where the majority of the construction was happening.
I could hear helicopters in the distance, rapidly getting closer.
We watched from the edges of the trees again, not far from where we’d been a few hours previously.
‘Do you think they fly in and shoot the zombies?’ Jack asked.
‘They’ll probably use the helicopters to draw the zombies away from the fence,’ Ali replied.
‘There they are,’ Jack said, pointing to the horizon. ‘Two of them.’
Two large military looking helicopters were flying close to the ground, heading straight for the fence, directly in front of us. They quickly reached the semi constructed wall, but then slowed as they got closer to the fence, hovering above the zombies. The dead creatures were mesmerised and stared upwards. Then the helicopters started flying out over the fields, towards us.
‘Jack, remember that scene from Jurassic Park?’ I asked him.
‘Oh shit yeah,’ he said. ‘They’re flocking this way.’
Ali started to back away. ‘Yeah, let’s go.’
We turned and started to run as fast as was possible in the thick underbrush.
‘Pete and Roy will be okay. Won’t they?’ Ali asked as we ran.
‘There’s no zombies there,’ I said. ‘So no reason for helicopters to go there.’
We ran all the way back to the farmhouse, only stopping to walk when we reached the short lane.
‘The helicopters won’t bring them all the way out here will they?’ Jack asked, sounding out of breath.
‘Dunno,’ I replied. ‘Hopefully not. But it’s not like it’s a huge swarm. They won’t carry the cars off or anything.’
Sandra let us in through the back door. After we’d explained where Pete and Roy were, and that they were hopefully safe, we told everyone to get upstairs. Just in case.
We needn’t have worried. They never got as far as the house. I imagined the majority of them probably got caught up in the woodland. I mentioned this theory to Jack.
‘We’ll have to go back a different way,’ he suggested. ‘It won’t be hard to find a way around them if they’re still stuck in there.’
‘We’ve just got to make sure we don’t go too far east before cutting in,’ I said. ‘Otherwise we’ll never find them two.’
We arranged with Ali and Theo to come and relieve us at ten o’clock, telling them of our plan to go back a different way.
Two hours later, with my bag stocked up with bottled water, energy bars and beef jerky, Jack and I headed back outside. We walked along the road until we reached the sharp bend, and then entered the woods.
It only took us forty minutes to reach the spot we both assumed we’d left Pete and Roy. We of course, couldn’t find them.
‘Pete, Roy,’ Jack hissed.
‘I’m pretty sure they were around here.’ I pointed to a part of the border fence in the distance. ‘We could definitely see that bit of barbed wire. Can you see where it hangs down slightly?’
‘No Pete, you can’t do that,’ Roy’s voice floated towards us from somewhere.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ I said. ‘I can hear them.’ I spun around trying to listen for them again. ‘Roy, Pete.’
‘All we need are some guns,’ Pete said.
‘Fucking hell,’ Jack said. ‘Why can’t they hear us, if we can hear them?’
‘Jack?’ Roy said. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ Jack replied. ‘Where the fuck are you?’
The sound of twigs breaking and leaves rustling made us both spin around. Roy’s head and shoulders poked up from within a bush. We walked over to them.
I glanced around us when we reached them. ‘Is this where we left you?’ I asked.
Pete raised his head up. ‘No, but there was more cover here. We’ve been watching for you coming from that way,’ he said, pointing behind him.
‘We had to come back a different way,’ Jack said.
I passed them a bottle of water each and some beef jerky. Jack told them about the helicopters and us running back to the house.
Jack pointed the way we had just walked. ‘If you walk
straight that way, you’ll reach open fields. Just turn right and you can’t miss the road that the house is on.’
‘Anything to report?’ I asked.
‘Nope,’ Roy said, passing me the binoculars. ‘Not a dickie bird.’
‘Dickie bird?’ Pete asked.
‘Nothing,’ Roy replied. ‘It means nothing.’
‘The soldiers haven’t moved at all,’ Pete said. ‘And I’ve been to take a leak three times.’
‘Not here I hope?’ Jack asked him.
‘No, I went down there,’ he replied, waving his hand towards somewhere behind us.
‘Is anyone going to come and swap with you?’ Roy asked us.
‘Ali and Theo are coming to do the night shift,’ I replied.
Roy and Pete left to go back to the house. Jack and I tried to get comfortable.
‘Why didn’t we bring some blankets?’ Jack asked.
‘Fuck knows. Hopefully Ali and Theo will bring something to keep them warm tonight.’
‘She’s not stupid,’ Jack said. ‘She’ll bring something.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked him. ‘If we don’t see any way to cross here by the end of the night, we move on to another spot tomorrow?’
‘Sounds about right.’
‘What if we have the virus?’ I asked.
Jack pulled his gaze away from the fence. ‘What do you mean? Where did that come from?’
‘What if we’re carriers, but can’t die of it? And anyone that survived the initial virus is also a carrier? So, if and when we get into Canada, we infect everyone over there?’
He looked back at the fence. ‘Nah, too much of a coincidence that me, you, Beth, and Roy all just happen to have the same something in our D.N.A. that only makes us carriers. And Sarah in fact. She survived the initial outbreak.’
‘Yeah, suppose so,’ I agreed.
Gunfire erupted from our left, making both of us flinch away from it.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I blurted.
The soldiers sprung into action, crouching down onto one knee, and firing their rifles into the woods. The fence started to wobble as the bullets flew through the links, occasionally hitting the metal.