Текст книги "Fear the Dead: A Zombie Apocalypse Book"

Автор книги: Jack Lewis

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

Chapter 12

The vice around us tightened with the infected on one side, and Torben and his hunters on the other. Without any clear escape and certainly no chance of winning a fight, I was struggling to work out what we could do. I knelt down in front of the shelf and tugged at Justin’s coat. He got to his knees.

Torben turned the corner and entered checkout area of the warehouse. One of the hunters walked next to him, and two others hung behind. From their faces, and their lack of curiosity about the place, I got the impression they’d been here before.

“You reckon they’re still around?” said one of the hunters. It was the driver of the pick-up truck. He was tall and his belly pressed tightly against his shirt and spilt over his belt.

Torben looked down and spat on the floor. “I imagine that on foot and with nothing to eat, they won’t get far. Come on, let’s load up and head out. I want to be back on the road before it gets dark.”

The driver shoved his hands in pockets. On his left arm he had a tattoo sleeve, but I couldn’t make out any other detail of it in the dark other than the fact it covered all of his skin. “Not many shelves left.”

Torben brushed his thumb across his moustache. “Just find one with food and take it all. I don’t want to kick my heels here when I could be out there finding them.”

Listening to Torben talk about us like that made it hard to stay hidden. I’d never let a man make me hide before, and doing it now was like swallowing glass. All things being equal, I could take Torben. That was the problem though; nothing was equal. The gun slung around his neck and the three guys he had with him guaranteed that.

I looked at Justin. “We can’t hang around,” I whispered.

Justin turned away from me and looked back at the shelf. The food crates were twenty feet up at the top. “We’re not going to get another chance like this. Look at it all, it’s enough to last a month.”

“A month of food is no good if we’re going to die in a few minutes. We need to leave.”

Across the warehouse Torben’s footsteps echoed up to the rafters. He coughed, cleared something from his throat and spat again on the floor. He turned to the driver. “They’re still around here, I know it. Lancashire’s a big place, and they won’t have left it yet.”

“What if they don’t want to be found?”

“Just cause someone doesn’t want to be found, doesn’t mean they can’t be. “

He was talking about us, I knew, and he was right. There was no way on earth I wanted him to find us, but then again, that didn’t mean he couldn’t. This was a prime example – here he was, just metres away. We were both here by coincidence and with the same goal, but nonetheless it showed how easy it was to slip up.

Fifty yards behind me, toward the back of the warehouse, I heard the faint cries of the infected. The ones from the yard were piling in now, and it wouldn’t be long before they reached us. With them on one side and the hunters on the other, we didn’t have the luxury of choice or time. We either fought our way out of either side, or we found another way to escape.

I turned back to Justin.  “You see any other way out?”

He looked around him, but his gaze drifted back to the food behind us. “No,” he said.

“Forget about the tins,” I said.

In front of us, Torben pulled a torch from his belt and turned it on. The beam of yellow cut through the shadows and moved through the shelves like a search light.  The driver walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Torbs,” he said, “It’s been two months. Think we gotta accept that Alicia and Ben are gone. I’m not saying they’re…no longer with us…, but if they’re still breathing then they don’t want to do it around us no more.”

The familiarity of the name ‘Torbs’ as well as the hand on the shoulder told me that these two men were friendly. Yet when Torben turned his face toward the driver’s, there was a definite look of scorn.

“I’m not giving up on my wife and son,” he said.

My head span. The driver mentioned searching for someone for two months. Justin and I only met Torben a day and a half ago, and if he’d been tailing me for a couple of months I’d know about it. Now there was the mention of his wife and kid. What the hell was going on?

Who was Torben looking for? Justin and me, or his wife and son? I hadn’t just imagined him telling me he was going to hunt us.

Either way, I knew that if he saw us, he would kill us. That much was obvious, and I wasn’t staying here to chance it. We were going right now, and no matter how screwed we were by leaving empty-handed, we would deal with the consequences later.

I turned to look at Justin, but I saw that he was gone. I looked back at the shelf with the food on it, and I saw that he was already halfway up.  I felt my face start to heat up. He’d done it again; he’d disobeyed me when I specifically told him to do exactly as I said. The kid was a cheeky little bastard and a liability, and I was done with him. I clenched my fist and felt the blood drain out of it.

I was going to have to drag Justin off the shelf and pull him out of the building by his hair. After that, I didn’t know what I would do with him. But I couldn’t trust him to do what I said, and that made him a danger to me. I’d already broken enough of my rules by taking him with me, and now it was time to stop.

As I got to my feet I banged my head straight into the shelf next to me. A metal clang rang out into the acoustics of the warehouse, and I saw Torben’s head snap in my direction. Out of instinct I ducked down. My head stung from where I had hit it, but for the moment my heart was beating so quickly that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.

Torben flicked his torch in my direction and the beam of light hit my eyes. I squinted and ducked my head.

“Boys,” he said with joy in his voice, “They’re here. The hunt is on!”

There was no point in subtlety now. I ran over to the shelf, not caring about the sound my boots made on the floor. AS I ran I could just about make out the bodies of the infected as they shuffled closer toward us. When I got to the shelf, Justin was already at the top of it.

He looked down at me. “Kyle – heads up.”

Adrenaline shot through my body.  Trying to keep track of both the scuffling of the oncoming infected and the scrambling movements of the hunters as they ran toward us fogged my brain, and I couldn’t comprehend what Justin was saying.

“Stop screwing around.” he hissed. “Catch!”

When the crate was halfway through the air my brain cells fired and I realised what he meant – he wanted me to catch the crate of cans that was hurtling down toward me. I took a step back, tensed my muscles and readied myself. As the crate hit my forearms I felt my thigh muscles buckle a little, but I steadied my feet and stood firm. I put the crate down on the floor next to me. My face felt red with the strain, and I realised I was badly out of shape.

“Flank them,” said Torben somewhere behind me. “Trap them in, and if they come at you, don’t kill them.”

The footsteps scattered out from all directions. Although opening the delivery doors had let in a little light, the warehouse was still too dark to make out anything but the most immediate space around me, so I couldn’t see where the hunters were coming from. The only person I was sure of was Torben, and that’s because he had his torch pointed in my direction. Above, on the top shelf, Justin looked down and waited for me to tell him what to do.

I needed to do something. This was no fair fight, and if all four of them managed to corner me then my odds would drop to zero.

I looked to my right. The shelves were all arranged in rows, and they were all so close that if one fell, it was possible the rest could topple. If I could get a domino effect going, maybe I’d get lucky at hit one of the hunters. Maybe this was a ridiculous plan, but in my head I could see the shelves toppling. At the very least, a bunch of giant metal shelves falling in front of them ought to slow them down.

“Hang on,” I said to Justin.

I walked to the row of shelves next to us pushed against it. Although the shelves of this one were empty it was still a twenty-foot high metal construction, and I wasn’t exactly in a peak physical state. It took a lot of straining, but soon I managed to get it moving. As I kept my weight on it and shoved, the shelf started to rock with its own momentum. Soon it tipped so far forward that for a second I thought my plan was going to work.

When it turned the other way and rocked back in my direction, I felt my chest flood with panic. I moved out of the way and watched it fall. It was going to hit Justin’s shelf, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“Jump,” I told him.

I was too late. The shelf leaned back like a tower block blasted with a demolition charge and it smashed into Justin’s shelf. Both metal structures made a creaking sound and fell to the floor, spraying metal and loose cans around the warehouse.

“Justin!” I said. I couldn’t see where he had landed.

The hunter’s footsteps were closer now, but I still couldn’t see them. To my left the moans of the dead were getting louder. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Justin’s body, nor could I hear him. This worried me; if he had fallen and hurt himself, I would have heard him shout about it. Injuries meant pain, and pain meant screaming. Screaming meant you were still alive.

Silence could mean anything.

I was about to take off to my left when I heard the stomp of a boot to the right of me.  I turned my head and saw a hunter in front of me. He was a giant guy; six foot three, completely bald and he had a butcher’s knife in his hand.

“Got ‘im!” the man shouted.

There were a few acknowledging shouts, and footsteps started in our direction.

He looked at me and a smile spread across his lips. “The man who catches the pig usually gets first choice of cut,” he said.

I thought about reaching for my own knife, but judging from the size of this guy there was no chance of me beating him. I looked over at the collapsed shelves. If Justin was buried underneath them there was no way he’d be coming out of nowhere to help me, like he had back at the barricade. I hoped he wasn’t buried. Wherever he was, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.

As I desperately tried to think up any solution that didn’t result in my complete surrender, an unseen ally came to my rescue. Behind the hunter, the head of an infected appeared, and he had his eyes set on the human flesh in front of him. I could have warned the man, I could have told him what was happening, but I said nothing. The sight of the infected made me instinctively flex my hands, but this time I kept them at my sides.

The infected sank its teeth into the hunter’s shoulders and tore at the skin and flesh that covered his shoulder blade. The man screamed, and blood splashed all over his clothes and onto the floor. He made a sound that was almost a gurgle as the infected dragged a stringy sinew of skin off his back. He turned and tried to fight it, his eyes wide with sheer panic.

This was my only chance. Torben and the others would be here in seconds, and the other infected were closing in. I looked across to my left and saw a sign for a manager’s office. Surely there would be a way out through there?

The only problem was that escaping now meant leaving Justin behind. I still didn’t like the kid, but there was a chance he was still living. And if he was, it meant that he’d feel it when the infected found him and started to tear shreds off him.

I couldn’t abandon him to that.

I sprinted over to the collapsed shelves. My heart juddered like a drill, and the adrenaline shot that had been dumped into my bloodstream was so intense it felt like I was on speed. Just before I reached the shelves I heard a voice above me. I looked up.

In the ceiling, his head poking out through an air vent, was Justin.

I opened my mouth to speak.

“I’ll explain later,” he said, cutting me off. “Meet me out front. And don’t forget the food.”

I found the crate of tins on the floor and heaved it onto my shoulder. My body was so jacked up that I felt like I could have carried six of them. I left the moans of the infected and the cries of the hunters behind and ran toward the manager’s office. As I grabbed the door handle and started to turn, I heard a familiar voice.

“Didn’t expect this to be over so soon,” he said.

I span round and saw Torben stood there, his gun pointed at my chest. Behind him was the body of the giant hunter who I had let get attacked by the infected. The monster that had bitten his shoulder was dead, its head completely crushed, but two other infected had taken its place and they dug through the hunter’s stomach with their hands and shovelled parts of him into their mouths.

Torben stood in as casual a posture as you could imagine, oblivious to sounds of the monsters eating his friend and the danger of the other infected that moved through the darkness.

“How about we pause the game,” I said, knowing I didn’t have many options open to me but to buy a little time.

Torben raised his rifle at my face. He was fifteen feet away, and something told me that there was no chance he’d miss.

“I think not. I promised I’d hunt you down, and I’ve done it. I hope the boy isn’t dead yet though; he looked like he had potential.”

He moved his finger to the trigger and was about to pull it, when the driver ran up to him. His shoulders were tight and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Torbs – we gotta get out. Mick and Bailey are dead, and there’s about forty of the fuckers coming in.”

This was my chance to leave. The manager’s office was behind me, and through it there had to be an escape. As I was about to turn I heard a gunshot and felt the impact of something hit the front of me, knocking the wind out of me. I dropped the crate of cans to the floor. I couldn’t breathe, and for a second, I couldn’t even think. I’d been hit. This was it.

Only, I wasn’t dead yet. And while I was still living, I wouldn’t let him get back. I turned and stumbled into the office, slamming the door behind me. From the warehouse I heard the cries of the infected and Torben’s gun fired again, but this time it wasn’t in my direction.

In the manager’s office I stopped to catch my breath. I looked down at my chest and expected some gaping hole from the gun shot. Instead, I saw red spaghetti stains splotched down my shirt. Torben’s bullet had hit the food crate.

I let out a long sigh, and then collected myself.

I followed a series of doors that took me out of the manager’s office, and sure enough they led me out of the warehouse. When I got outside and the sunlight hit my eyes I felt a wave of relief. I squinted and let my eyes adjust to the sun shine.

“Kyle!”

I looked up. Justin was perched above me on a ledge about thirty feet in the air. His eyes were wide, and he shook slightly as he stared at the ground.

“Get down, we need to move,” I said.

He held the ledge tightly. “I can’t do it,” he said.

I didn’t have time for this. Right now, the hunters were occupied by the infected. This was the best chance we would have to get out of here.

“Kid, get the fuck down or I’ll leave you. That’s your choice – jump or die.” I turned my back on him and started to move away from the warehouse, my pulse racing and my lungs struggling to take in enough air.  I had to get away.

I heard Justin let out a cry behind me, and then there was a thud as he hit the floor. He screamed. I snapped round, and saw him on the floor.

He led on the floor like an injured footballer, clutching his ankle and groaning.

“Can you walk?” I said.

He put his hand on the floor and tried to move his weight onto it. I walked over, put my hand under his armpit and pulled him up. He tried to take a few steps on his hurt ankle, but he winced with each one.

“Think I’ve done it in,” he said.

I looked at Justin nursing his ankle and I wondered if things could get any worse. The hunters knew exactly where we were, we were leaving without any food and after his injury Justin was going to slow us down even more.

The world had it in for me.

Chapter 13

Waves rippled out from one end of the reservoir to the other. The water beneath was murky and gave no clue as to the depths it held, and the darkness inside it seemed to hold the promise of dark secrets. I wouldn’t have liked to swim in there.

The path to David’s ran alongside the reservoir and span out into a country side full of knobbly hills and, further on, patches of forest. This particular route had once been used by seventeenth century merchants who shipped wool across Lancashire, and years ago, Clara and I had walked it on sunny Sundays afternoons when we wanted to get out of the house.

Justin sat by the smouldering fire. The smoke drifted up into the sky in patches, and the embers glowed red. He had his right legged crossed over his left and he was tying a sock around his ankle.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He looked up at me and blinked. “It’s for support.”

I had to take a deep breath. For the last two days since leaving the wholesalers it had been tough to keep a handle on the burning feeling that rose in my chest. My fists were constantly clenched and my whole body was so tense I felt like I was going to snap in half.

Back at the warehouse Justin had done what he swear he wouldn’t; he’d gone against my instructions and done his own thing. I told him to stick with me and we’d escape, but instead he climbed to the top of a twenty foot shelf to get food and tried to be a hero. Now he’d screwed up his ankle and he was walking like a damn cripple, and the journey to the reservoir had taken us two days when it should have taken six hours.

I should have just left him. Why should I support him and set myself back days because hop along can’t match my pace anymore? He did this to himself.

But I couldn’t leave. He knew where the farm was, and I wasn’t giving up.

My face was starting to get red again. I walked over to the fire and stomped on it. The embers hissed under my boot and sparks shot out from the side. I ground my teeth and then spoke, trying my best to keep my tone level.

“What did I tell you, Justin? What did I make you promise to me?” I said, losing the fight to keep the contempt out of my voice.

He lifted his head a little. He looked ashamed. “To listen.”

“So why didn’t you do that, damn it?”

 I took a deep breath. I curled my hands into a fisted and pressed the middle of my palm with the tip of my fingers. It was a technique Clara had shown me to calm me down, but this time it didn’t work. I looked at the kid in front of me and all I could think was how he’d broken my GPRS and forced me to take him along, about how he’d ignored my instructions at every turn and got us in such a mess that we weren’t getting to the farm this side of Christmas. I looked at the boy and all I saw was someone who was ruining everything for me. A stupid little kid who didn’t know what he was messing with.

Everything I did was for my promise to Clara, and he was fucking it up.

Who the hell did he think he was?

My veins pulsed, and my skin felt hot. I started to feel my head go fuzzy and knew I wasn’t going to be able to think properly because the anger was taking over. I raised my right boot in the air.

“God damn it!” I screamed.

I kicked what was left of the fire and sent red embers flying in all directions. Justin twisted his body away and moved back to avoid being hit. His eyes were wide and his face started to drain white. As the last of the red embers turned black and fell to the earth, I picked up my bag.

“We’re moving.”

Justin didn’t move. He had his knees drawn up to his chest and rested his head on them.

“Get up. You’ve wasted enough of our time.”

He still didn’t move. I took a deep breath and walked over to him. Was he crying? I couldn’t tell. I felt a pang in my chest, and the hot feeling that was burning through me started to fade. This wasn’t me. It was just the situation making me feel like this. It was like everything turned to shit at the slightest opportunity, and my options were narrowly dwindling away.

We had no supplies, no energy and we had a group of hunters close on our tracks. Now the only thing we could do was get a car, and to do that I had to go see my brother-in-law, David.

***

We crossed the road and walked by the side of the reservoir. Something about the pool of water and the way the hills were positioned around it collected the wind and made it snap around our heads. My ears started to hurt, and I could see Justin’s turning red.

“Put your hood up,” I said.

He reached behind him and lifted his hood over his head, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t spoken since I had gone mad and kicked the fire. For me, there was nothing wrong with the silence. But I couldn’t have him in a mood. I needed him to listen to me and do what I said, so I needed to snap him out of it.

We reached the merchant’s pathway that turned away from the reservoir. If we followed it for ten minutes, we would reach the old building that David had taken as his home sometime after Clara died and we went our separate ways.

“Sit down a minute,” I said.

I sat down on a bench next to the reservoir, and Justin did the same. Behind us the waves gently lapped. Today would have been a perfect day for wind surfing.

I looked at the kid. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his face was drained of colour. “I’m sorry,” I said.

He looked up at me and arched his eyebrows quizzically.

“It’s important to me,” I said, “Getting to the farm. And when you do something to fuck it up, I can’t help but get a little upset.”

He cleared his throat. His voice was the quietest I’d ever heard it. “What’s so special about it? You obviously can’t stand having me around, so what’s so good about the farm you put up with me to get there?”

His voice sounded hurt, and I knew everything he said was true. If I could have had my way, the GPRS would be working and Justin would have been back in Vasey. But things hadn’t worked out like that, and you had to work with what you had. Besides, there were some things he could do that came in useful, I guess. He wasn’t a total pain in the arse.

I looked at him and I suddenly saw him for what he was; just a lonely kid with no family. He wanted an escape route, and when he saw me, he took it. He knew he didn’t belong with the people in Vasey, that he was different from them all. Maybe Justin and I were similar after all.

I thought about his question and what to say to him. It was hard, the feeling of having to share something, but the hurt in the boy’s voice stung me. It wouldn’t kill me to tell him a little more about the farm.

“I promised someone very special to me that I’d get them there. It was a few years ago, after all everything kicked off.”

“Who was it?”

I took a deep breath. “My wife. The farm was her father’s. We didn’t live up North; we’d driven here to visit his farm when all of this kicked off. That’s why I still had it programmed into the GPRS.”

“You’ve got a Northern accent though.”

I smiled. “I was born here, but Clara and I left Lancashire and moved to London. My mates never forgave me.” I smiled to myself when I remembered the stick my friends would give me for becoming what they called a ‘London yuppie’.

Justin wiped his nose. “So you’ve been to the farm before then, if it was her dad’s?”

I shook my head. “All the time I knew her – Christ, a decade – Clara never spoke to him. No family meals, no birthday cards, nothing. They couldn’t stand each other, and it was over something so damn petty. And then one day, completely out of the blue, he picked up the phone.  So we loaded up the car and drove up here.”

“How come you didn’t make it?”

I looked into the water of the reservoir and tried to see to the bottom, but it was too dense to make out anything but a dark brown tint. The wind nipped at my ears.

“Before we got there,” I said, “the world ended.”

There was a few seconds of silence as we both stared into the pool of water. Somewhere above, a bird squawked.  I turned my head to Justin. The boy was leant forward with his elbow propped up on his leg and his chin resting in his palm. His eyes were deep and engrossed in thought.

I cleared my throat. “I made a promise;  I told Clara I’d get us there; that whatever state the farm was in, we would fix it up and make it our own. It wasn’t the greatest plan in the world, but it was the best we had. Better than living day to day with a target on your back. We could get crops plants, fix the farm up. We’d never need anybody every again.”

“Sounds like a great plan,” said Justin.

***

We walked through the merchant path. Years ago it had been a stone walkway that cut a clear trail through the grass, but after fifteen maintenance-free years it was covered in weeds and the stone was cracked. The hills to either side of us offered a little protection from the cutting wind.

As we got nearer to David’s house, my heart hammered. I hadn’t seen him in years, and the way we left it hadn’t exactly been friendly. I knew he’d be pissed off at me, especially when I came to him asking for his car. If I could have thought of any solution, no matter how difficult, I would have turned around in an instant.

 Justin kept his head down and walked, which hopefully meant his curiosity about me was satisfied for the time being. I still felt anger faintly twisting in my chest over what he’d done, but I knew it wouldn’t do us any good to take it out on him.

“Your steps are getting quieter,” I said.

He nodded.

I tried to smile at him. “Well done.”

Ten minutes later we reached what passed for David’s house. It was a red-bricked building that had once stored pumps that helped in some way toward filtering water from the reservoir. The pumps had been removed years ago, and ever since then the building had been left to fall apart. There were four windows cracked with dust, and at one side of the building there was a power generator, though it wasn’t switched on.  There was space at the back of the building for a yard, which is where his car would be.

Justin started to walk ahead, but I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Steady on, kid. Wait a minute.”

“Isn’t this where your brother lives?”

“Brother in law.”

“Whatever, what’s the problem?”

I scratched my chin. “You’ll see. David’s…not quite right.”

I stared at the building for a few minutes, trying to find a sign of life, but I couldn’t see anything. I looked at the generator again. Despite that it wasn’t humming right now, I knew it would be a working power supply. David was a genius at things like that, mechanical stuff. Electronics, cars, computers, power, you name it, he had a working knowledge of it. These days, that was a valuable skill to have. It was a pity his personality made people want to get a hundred miles away from him.

I opened my mouth and filled my lungs with air. “Let’s go.”

We walked down a path and toward the front door.  I knocked on it, three taps that shattered the stillness of the air.

“David?”  I said.

There was no answer. Maybe he had left.

I knocked again.

“David, you here?”

Nothing.

I turned the handle and opened the door. We stepped inside David’s home. It was a draughty one-floored building with a stone floor and walls that felt cold to the touch. In one corner of the room there was a pile of hay that was spread into a makeshift bed. There was a carpenter’s table with basin of water and a razor on one end, and some nuts scattered on the other. It seemed like this was his bathroom sink and his dining table all rolled into one.  Scattered around all over the floor were bits and pieces David had scavenged; batteries, smoke alarms, jumper cables, screwdrivers, copper wire, rope.

“What the hell?” said Justin from the other end of the room.

I walked over. There was a table and two chairs. On the table there was a mug with coffee stains on the sides, and across from it there was an ashtray with a single butt stubbed out. I saw what Justin was looking at, what had confused him.

In one of the chairs female mannequin sat. She had long dark hair so slick that it looked like it had been brushed every night.  In her left hand was a book, and it had been arranged so that it was open in the middle, as though she were reading it.

I shook my head. Had David really fallen this far? Was he pretending to have company?

“What is this?” said Justin. He ran his hand down the arm of the mannequin.

“I told you, David is strange.”

“Guess I believe you now. But why do this?”

I looked at the mannequin again. She was wearing a t-shirt that I swore was one of Clara’s. It couldn’t be, could it?

“Loneliness,” I said. “He misses people.”

Justin sat down in the chair opposite the mannequin. “Then why not go to town? What comfort can he possibly get from a doll?”

I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed. “David is scared of being alone, but he doesn’t trust people any more.” I looked down at the floor and tried to blot out the memory that was coming back to me, unwanted. “Someone let him down,” I said.

Justin stood up. “But why the pretend people? What comfort does a block of plastic give you?”

I was about to answer, when I heard the door open behind me.

I span my body round toward it and reached down to my belt for my knife, but it was no use. David was stood in front of me, and he had a shotgun pointed at my head. His arms were shaking and his eyes were wild. I couldn’t even tell if he recognised me.

“Sit on the floor. Hands behind your heads. And get away from Leila.”