4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (29 page)

I exchanged a glance with Bob, then nodded. The thought of going into those woods again made me feel sick to my stomach, but what choice did I have? Bob wordlessly started getting his gear together while I looked in on Jim and Tommy. Jim looked barely alive.

I told them what was happening. Jim tried to get up and almost passed out with the effort. He was distraught at having to miss out on a trip up Hungry Hill. “Goddamn, sonofabitch moonshine,” he croaked.

“I’d better stay with him,” Tommy said sheepishly.

I nodded. To be honest, I was relieved he wasn’t coming with us. The shape he was in, if things went bad, he would’ve been more hindrance than help.

Two hummers rolled out of camp with twelve men armed to the teeth crammed into them. Franz lay across my lap, breathing his meaty breath in my face. More than once during that journey I thought I was going to puke. Hooch hitched a ride with us. He talked nonstop. I switched off listening after a few minutes. Jim had insisted I take his AK-47 and I occupied my mind by admiring its genius simplicity. Forget Tolstoy and Lenin, as far as I’m concerned Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov is the greatest Russian ever.

The sun was hot and high by the time we reached Hungry Hill. My mouth was sawdust dry as we started up the trail behind the farmhouse. Cutshaw and a Ranger named Nash led the way. A guttural moaning drifted out from under the trees. Nash raised a hand and we raised our guns.

The zombie, when it appeared, was almost comical, a real pathetic specimen. Some half-starved wild animal must have had a go at it because both its arms were missing and its guts trailed over the ground like a string of sausages. Cutshaw dropped it with a single shot. The corpse was quickly doused and set alight.

“Keep close together,” said Nash as we started moving again.

It was gloomy and silent as a tomb beneath the dense forest canopy. Every sound we made felt like a violation of a sacred silence. I concentrated on taking controlled breaths, fighting a creeping sense of claustrophobia.

Franz barked suddenly, pressing his nose to the dirt and pulling tight on his lead.

“He’s picked up their scent,” whispered Bob.

We found the boy half a mile further on. His skull had been smashed open like a hard-boiled egg and the brains scooped out. The flesh had been stripped off his bones by teeth hungry for marrow. There was no chance of him turning, but we dismembered his remains just in case. It was grisly work.

Franz snuffled about until he picked up the scent again off to the left of the trail. A compass reading was taken and we headed deeper into the woods.

We hadn’t gone much further when we found the dead zombie. Half its head had been blown away. A trail of dried blood led away from it. Franz growled, back roached, fur bristling.

“What is it, boy?” said Nash.

“Look,” hissed Hooch, pointing. I glimpsed a flash of grey fur moving through the gloom thirty or so metres to the west.

“Wolves,” said Cutshaw.

Hooch cupped a hand to his mouth and gave out a high-pitched howl, which was greeted by a chorus of plaintive howls and yips.

“They’re all around us,” said a man with popping blue eyes who’d travelled up from the south with Hooch.

“That ain’t nothing to worry about, Lyle,” said Hooch. “They ain’t hunting us.”

“They’re hunting something,” Bob said.

We followed the blood-trail, moving with even more urgency than before. Every so often Cutshaw bent to examine a spatter. After about three-quarters of a mile, he said, “It’s wet.” The words were barely out of his mouth when a shot rang out nearby. The woods suddenly came alive with howls that were reflected and scattered by the tree trunks until they seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

Franz dragged at his lead. We hurried after him. Shadowy forms moved with incredible swiftness through the closely packed trees on either side of us.

“Hold your fire,” shouted Nash when Lyle squeezed off a couple of shots at them.

Cutshaw signalled for us to halt. He advanced a couple of steps into a sunny clearing with a white pine at its centre. Dean was slumped against the base of the tree. About five metres away from him was the corpse of a huge wolf.

“Stay back,” Dean called out.

“Are you infected?” asked Cutshaw.

Dean levelled his rifle at him. “I said stay back.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t my fault. The sonofabitch came out of nowhere.”

“Where did it get you?”

After a pause, taking a shuddering breath, Dean said, “My leg.”

Nash immediately started circling around to the right of the clearing. I turned my back, knowing what had to happen. Everyone else stood grimly fixated. Hooch licked his lips as if he was hungry. An echoing shot rang out. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Dean was fallen to one side.

As we retraced our steps, the mist rolled down behind us. The mere sight of it made my hair stick lankly to my forehead. Luckily, we reached the edge of the woods before it overtook us. We walked in file, like a funeral procession, each man making sure he didn’t lose sight of the man in front of him. The going was deadly slow. After what felt like a long time, the dark shape of the farmhouse loomed through the mist. We piled into the Humvees, breathing sighs of relief. Everyone was silent during the journey back to camp.

Jim and Tommy were full of questions. Bob answered most of them. I couldn’t bring myself to say much. “Jesus,” murmured Tommy when he heard about Dean. We all agreed that we’d move camp the following day. None of us felt like hanging around after what’d happened.

At sunup we rolled out of camp waved off by Hooch. He threw his head back, howled and danced a crazy little jig that cracked Jim up. Bob and me exchanged an uneasy glance. “That kid’ll be lucky if he survives the season,” said Bob.

We were heading for Camp 24, fifty miles to the south. It would take most of the day to get there. Jim was itching for some action. I was glad of the chance to rest-up after the exertions of the previous two days.

At noon we pulled over to eat. Jim got out of the Humvee. He could barely keep his finger off the trigger of his Kalashnikov. After a couple of minutes we heard him shouting.

We ran over to where he was stood at the edge of a field of scrubby grass. “Over there,” he said, gesturing at a weed-choked drainage ditch about 250 metres away.

I put the glasses on it and my heart missed a beat when I saw how fast the flesh-eater was moving. It’d caught our scent and its face was horribly contorted by its lust for living flesh.

“It’s a stage one,” said Jim.

“Stage two, just,” corrected Cutshaw.

“Better take it down,” Tommy said nervously.

Jim took careful aim and squeezed off a volley that punched the zombie into the air as if it’d been hit by a charging rhino. He lowered his gun, grinning.

“It’s not dead,” said Bob.

“What are you talking about?” retorted Jim. “Its head came apart like a rotten melon.”

“Look.”

Jim’s jaw dropped as the zombie struggled to its feet and started towards us again. Two thirds of its head must have been missing.

He shouldered his gun and fired a whole clip into the creature. This time it stayed down for a full minute before rising up and staggering forwards. Its face had been obliterated. We looked at each other in silent astonishment. Of course, the only way to make absolutely certain a flesh-eater stays down for good is to incinerate it, but to encounter one that can survive such a massive loss of brain tissue is almost unheard of.

The creature was less than 200 metres away now. “Get back into the Humvee,” said Cutshaw. We obeyed unhesitatingly.

Cutshaw took an RPG-7 out of a steel box and loaded it with a HE (High Explosive) round. He checked the back-blast area, sighted the flesh-eater, calmly waited until it was within optimum range and fired. The warhead detonated and when the smoke cleared the zombie was gone.

“Have you ever seen anything like that before?” I asked Cutshaw as he got into the Humvee.

“No.”

It gave me a bad feeling when he said that. I thought about Dean and Al and about all the improbable tales Hooch had told us and for a second I was tempted to suggest we call the whole trip off. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, though. I’d worked my balls off all winter for this chance. Besides, I’d never be able to look anyone in the eye again if I arrived home without a single kill under my belt. I glanced at the others, wondering what they were thinking. Jim looked dazed. He kept shaking his head and murmuring, “How?”

Bob seemed unperturbed. “I reckon it was a one-off,” he said, “nothing more.”

Tommy nodded. “Yeah, a one-off that’s what it was.”

I could see he desperately wanted to believe Bob was right, but there was little conviction in his voice. He looked to me for it.

“What do you reckon, Mikey?”

“I reckon Bob must be right,” I said, more because I didn’t want Tommy freaking out on us than because I believed it.

“I don’t know about that,” said Jim, “but I’m gonna get one of them RPGs and next time one of the bastards refuses to stay down,” he made as if taking aim, “ka-fucking-boom!”

There was little talk during the remainder of the journey. We stared at the changing landscape, lost in our own worlds. The pine-clad hills were gradually petering out into dusty plains and in the west there were mountains with patches of snow on their peaks. A vast turquoise lake fed by glacial melt-water lapped against their feet.

Camp 24 had its back to this lake. There were lots of serious looking characters in camp, men whose faces told dark stories. They gave us sly, appraising looks and quickly decided there was nothing we could tell them that they wanted to hear. It started to rain as we pitched our tents. We ate a miserable cold meal and hunkered down for the night.

After breakfast we hired a boat with an outboard motor and took it across the water. Conditions were perfect. Not a breath of wind disturbed the lake’s surface which reflected a cloudless sky. All of us were in good spirits, even Tommy. It may sound like a cliché, but the rain seemed to have washed away our fear and uncertainty.

We moored at a jetty in the shadow of an imposing buttress of black rock and hiked along an unsealed road that led to an opencast mine on a high plateau. To one side of the road was a rusted railway track that’d once been used to transport millions of tons of coal a year to the coast where it was shipped to steel-mills in Japan, China, South Africa and Brazil. All around were signs of recent rock-fall.

About two miles along the road there was a stone-built bunkhouse. We let Franz sniff the place out before taking a look ourselves. The walls inside were scratched all over with names and dates, some going back more than a hundred years. Coats and hardhats still hung on pegs with steel-toed boots neatly arranged beneath them. I pictured miners fleeing barefooted as the Apocalypse came down.

“It’s like they were here just a minute ago,” Tommy said in a hushed voice.

Not far from the bunkhouse was a rusty old pickup truck with a flesh-eater sat behind its steering-wheel. Bob shot it through the glass. There was a moment of tension as we waited to see if one shot would be enough. When it became apparent that the creature was dead, Bob gave me a look as if to say, I told you so.

We shot three more on the way up to the mine. They lined up on a hump in the road like tin cans on a wall. Tommy took the first one, a grossly fat woman who toppled off the side of the road and bounced away down a thousand foot scree-slope. Me and Jim took the other two. I dropped mine cleanly. Jim chopped his into meat with the AK-47 going full tilt. We threw them both down the scree slope just for the hell of it.

Further on was a rail terminal to which coal was once carried by an aerial ropeway that ran for several miles down vertiginous slopes. We ate lunch in the terminal, which had been fortified for use by hunting parties.

Two hours of hard slog took us from the terminal to the mine. We looked out over the vast workings marvelling at what our ancestors had been capable of. The sheer scale of it was difficult to comprehend.

Cutshaw pointed to a bunch of shadowy forms emerging from a cave 100 metres to our right and almost 400 metres below us. There were four of them. Their mournful groans reached us faintly. We picked them off at leisure, making amazing shots. Jim smashed his PB by 55 metres. We finished the last one off by rolling a huge boulder into the hole, cheering when it scored a direct hit.

The walk down felt easy. We motored across the bay, taking turns at the wheel. Back at camp, as the evening breeze soothed our sunburnt faces, we cracked open bottles of beer and congratulated each other on the shots we’d made. We all agreed it’d been the best day’s hunting we’d ever had.

At daybreak pretty much the entire camp was on the move. A line of hummers kicked up dust on the road south like a wagon-train out of an old cowboy movie. Jim was keen to follow them. Tommy wanted to stay put. We put it to a vote and Jim came out on top, so we hit the road. Mountains reared up on every side as we crossed an immense dustbowl. The wind whipped in from the east, stirring up clouds of reddish-brown dirt that shrouded the sun.

After we’d been going about six hours, Cutshaw slammed his foot on the brake. “There’s something in the road up ahead.”

I squinted through the glass, but it was impossible to see more than twenty paces. “Stay here,” said Cutshaw when I picked up my rifle. He unfolded the stock on his Micro-UZI and got out of the Humvee followed by Franz. We fingered our weapons as the dust cloud swallowed them.

After a couple of minutes he reappeared, grim-faced, and hauled an ethanol canister out of the boot. We all knew what this meant. “One of you come with me,” he said.

I was first out of the Humvee. I hurried after Cutshaw, shielding my eyes from the dust-laden wind. After thirty metres I saw a dim form that gradually revealed itself as a Humvee with its front end smashed in. A scene of carnage unfolded. All around the Humvee lay dead flesh-eaters, their oily blood pooling on the hard-packed dirt. A couple of them looked like stage ones. Grave-wax had only just begun to form on their cheeks (for those of you that don’t know, grave-wax is a crumbly, white substance that starts to form on those parts of the zombie’s body that contain fat within a month of turning). Inside the vehicle were three corpses in hunting gear. All of them had been decapitated.