Dead Frost - 02 (19 page)

He took a deep
breath and turned the doorknob. As he did, the sound of movement on
the other side of the door reminded him that if he wasn't careful, he
too would be lunch.

As the door opened
a little, he turned and raced the way he came. At first, he heard
nothing. He paused, trying to listen, striving to hear if they had
taken the bait. Perhaps they had lunged for the door so maniacally
that instead of opening it, they had fallen against it and slammed it
shut once more. Wouldn't that have been just goddam-fuckin' typical?

And then he heard
them, slobbering through the corridor, growling and moaning. It was
the sound of four hungry lurkers, previously captured in order to
find a cure.

But there was no
cure. There was no saving the infected. There was only lurkers,
weapons, deadly and hungry.

And headed for a
feast.

*

Darkness finally
came, and when it did Shane found himself wishing for the morning,
for in the morning they would be back on track, back on the road to
find his family.

Without Jared...

Outside, the wind
howled and the snow peppered the windows like a thousand tiny,
skeletal fingers trying to get in. The thought sent a shiver through
Shane; Marla noticed, and decided to break what had become a very
awkward silence.

'Are you okay?' she
asked. 'You've been staring out of that window, now, for almost an
hour. You never seen snow before?' She smiled, but he didn't turn
to see it.

'I'm fine,' he
said, fighting back tears. 'I just want this to stop so we can get
back out there.'

Marla got to her
feet and placed a cold hand on the back of his neck. He didn't
flinch, although the way in which he closed his eyes at her touch
made it obvious that her freezing fingers had affected him.

'As soon as we
can,' she said. 'You know that we'd be out there now if it wasn't
for this godforsaken weather.'

Shane sighed. 'I
know. It's just, things have changed so much. I hardly recognise
myself anymore. What if we find them, and they don't like what I've
become, what I've had to become?'

Marla stroked his
hair, the way a mother would comfort a child with a scraped knee.
'If they're still out there,' she said, realising that it was
probably not the best way to start, but it was too late to retract,
now. 'They'll love you, even more than before. I've seen what
you're capable of, what you would give to have them back.
Shit
,
Shane, you were in prison a few weeks back, and even then I saw it.'

'What did you see?'
he asked, turning to face her. When he met her eyes, he immediately
looked away. They were like emeralds, glistening in the darkness.
If he stared at them for too long, he knew he would be hooked.

'I saw a man who
was willing to risk everything for the people he cared the most
about.' She placed her cold, trembling hand beneath his jaw and
turned his head; he had no choice but to stare into those wondrous
gems. 'I saw a man that I could care for, in another place, another
time.' She broke off, shaking her head as if she had said something
out of turn. 'Listen to me. I sound like a
real
idiot.'

Shane blinked away
a tear and smiled. 'No, you don't. Marla, this whole nightmare
should have sent us all spiralling towards madness, I know, for a
fact, that we should be raving, cannibalistic psychopaths by now.'

She laughed, as did
he.

'And do you know
why
we're not like that? Why we still have our senses when we
shouldn't? It's because we still have something to hold onto,
something that makes us
feel
. You're the reason why I'm still
here.' He placed a gentle hand on top of hers and squeezed
ever-so-slightly.

She knew what he
was trying to tell her, and it hurt. He had a wife – a
daughter – and he loved them so much that he wouldn't dream of
doing anything to hurt them. There was nothing powerful enough to
stop him from reaching them, and she loved him for it.

As snow bounced off
the window, they both turned to glance outside. Terry muttered
something from the corner, though he didn't wake. The sleep that he
had yearned for had finally come to him, and with the bible balancing
precariously on his belly he snored, grunted and slept the troubled
sleep of a haunted man.

TWENTY-THREE

It was perhaps not
the smartest thing he could have done, but it was too late now. If
there had been another way to cover up for his idiocy, he would have
taken it.

The beasts were
loose; and he was as far away from the massacre as possible. He
climbed two flights of stairs, and by the time he reached the top he
was practically doubled over.

'Fuck!' Colburn
gasped, sucking in great big lungfuls of freezing cold air as if it
was going out of style. After a slight pause, he continued, racing
the next two flights without taken a single breath.

Would he hear them,
screaming, begging for mercy? The silence of the night was sure to
offer him some sort of audio when it happened. The thought made him
laugh, hard, but then he realised that there was very little to be
happy about.

He had fucked
up...
bad
. The reason why he had unleashed the captive lurkers
was to make amends. Put like that, he realised he hadn't given it
much thought.

He reached the
roof-door and lunged through, using his thigh on the push-bar. He
was exhausted, but safe.

The night was,
apart from the freezing cold and the heavy snow, quite nice. He had
not had time to prepare warmer clothes; then again, he hadn't known
things would have gone tits-up so fast. Subsequently, he needed to
find somewhere warm to hanker down, somewhere to wait for the
helicopter, somewhere that would keep him alive for the next few
hours.

The thought of
freezing to death on the roof had never occurred to him. He was
still sweating from the quick escape, but in a few hours – it
wouldn't be much longer than that, would it? - he would be so cold
that body-parts would need to be surgically reattached, or so he
thought.

Victor won't be
long
, he kept promising himself. The mood the Captain had been
in before leaving suggested he was on a mission, likely to find the
Jeep, kill the thieves, and return to base. No dilly-dallying, no
niceties, for they had forfeited such things when they had stolen the
Snatch. It would all be over before they even knew what had hit
them.

Colburn walked the
length of the roof, almost slipping on the snow as he went. There
was very little shelter in sight, and why would there be? It was a
roof/helipad.

He found a recess
that was partially covered by an old, copper pipe. As he wedged
himself into it, he muttered incoherently to himself about what he
was going to tell Victor when he returned.

'The old bag, yeah,
she went for a snoop, you know what she's like. She must've found
the locker and heard something, yeah, that nosey-old bitch.'

Would Victor buy
it? Did it really matter? Victor would be pissed, but it was also
partially his own fault for gathering the lurkers in the first place.
It was the hero-complex; Victor was attempting to formulate a cure,
or at least figure out how to tame the poor bastards. It had been
more curiosity than anything else. If a cure had indeed been
possible, Victor would have gone down in history as the man who saved
the world. Henry Colburn could see where the temptation to
try
came from. There was method behind the madness, at least to begin
with.

But those lurkers,
the ones stuffed in a mysterious room with its door concealed by a
locker, had long been forgotten. Colburn couldn't recall the last
time Victor had even mentioned them, let alone paid them a visit.

In the beginning,
he had been up there twice a day, sometimes three. He and David Moon
would drag one out using nets, but that had been when they were still
in possession of sedatives. The testing would take place in the
adjacent room, away from the rest of the survivors, away from the
other lurkers. It was safe, and if it had come off the way Victor
had hoped, it would have been highly lucrative for all involved.

Plus, it gave
Victor somewhere to dispose of the dead folk. Why waste good meat
when you could feed the test-subjects? It made perfect sense, and in
a way the lurkers were doing them a favour; there's nothing worse
than the smell of a rotting corpse. Once you've smelt one, you never
forget it. The incarcerated creatures had been grateful for the
delivery-service, and Victor, in turn, had been grateful to them for
getting rid of the recently deceased.

Win-win.

A flurry of snow
whipped into Colburn's face; the wind howled for what seemed like
forever.

And then came the
first scream from downstairs. He craned his neck and turned his
frozen ear in the direction of the door. No, he wasn't mistaken.
There were others, screaming and shouting as the realisation of what
was happening finally sank in.

Colburn smiled and
waited for the chopper.

*

They came from
everywhere, before anybody had a chance to realise what was
happening. Yet it couldn't be real; there was no way they could have
gotten into the complex. Security-measures,
strict
security-measures, had been taken to prevent so much as a stray cat
from getting into the facility.

Obviously not.

The first three
came dawdling through the doors as if they were just visiting. Once
they saw the spread that had been laid out for them, though,
everything changed.

A woman, Becky
Dawlings, was the first to scream. She was the closest to the door,
the closest to the shambling undead piling through it. As she
screamed, her husband tried to yank her away, but it was too late.

One of the lurkers,
who looked as if he might have been a vagrant while he had been
alive, lunged for her, slobbering black-teeth, growling. It clamped
onto her arm with both hungry hands and pulled her back. Within
seconds she was on the ground, covered by the tramp and an
accomplice. The husband raced, screaming, in the opposite direction.
As he screeched for the far side of the hall, he glanced across his
shoulder to discover that his wife's arms had been torn away from her
body, and though she was still alive there was nothing left of her to
save.

'Take her!' Maggie
Cox screamed to Susie, who was standing with a look of extreme
puzzlement painted on her face. Kelly couldn't see past the tent,
but she knew that something very bad was happening, something that
made her heart leap up into her throat and tears stream down her
face.

Susie grabbed onto
her daughter's hand and yanked her in, cloaking her as if she was a
precious book that needed protection from a downpour.

'Where?' Susie
cried, trying to comprehend the unfolding madness.

Maggie pushed her
away, as if that was enough of an incentive. 'I don't know,' she
gasped. 'Just try to get her somewhere safe. This is bad...
so
fucking bad.'

For once, Susie
didn't feel the need to reproach the old woman. It
was
fucking bad, and she didn't mind her daughter hearing it.

'What about you?'
Susie said, never once taking her eyes from the carnage.

'I'm too old,'
Maggie said, with a hint of indifference. 'Even if I could run, I'd
be nothing but a hindrance. Now,
go
, get out, get anywhere
but here.'

Susie plucked her
daughter up – God, she was
heavy
– and moved away
from the tent. She counted eight lurkers, but there would be more
soon. If the ones on the ground, the survivors who had been alive a
moment ago, were not beyond reanimation, then they would add to the
numbers.

Susie rushed for
the side of the room. The main bulk of the survivors were in the
centre, some still emerging from their tents to see what all of the
fuss was about. One man had barely popped his head out before a
lurker bit into the top of it; it made the sound of a ripe apple
being bitten into before blood dripped down into the man's eyes,
blinding him from the monstrous events. As his scalp came away, his
mouth lolled open, the part of the brain that controlled
motor-functions had been torn away by the lurker's savage teeth.

Susie looked away.
In her arms, she felt Kelly sobbing. Despite everything that was
happening around her, it was the rhythmic cries of her daughter that
hurt the most. Everything was helpless; even Kelly Bloom could sense
it buried deep in her mother's arms.