Dead Frost - 02 (24 page)

She pushed
herself back onto her haunches and stepped behind another pillar.
This one had a scale-replica Pterodactyl egg balancing on it; she
knew that because she had read the gilt plaque upon which it sat
several times earlier whilst she was bored shitless.

'Come on!' she
screamed using her best war-cry. Her face was contorted, just like
William Wallace she thought, and her eyes bulged from her sockets as
if she was ready to be measured for her special white jacket now.

She picked up
the fake dinosaur egg and pitched it as hard as she could at the
closest creature. It connected with the thing's temple and sent
loose flesh flying through the air. The creature – a woman in
life, but the farthest thing away from one now – hardly
responded. If anything, it spurred the thing on, and she ran a few
steps forward, her momentum doing most of the work.

Raising the
machete, she whipped it through the air in front of the thing. The
creature didn't flinch, not immediately, but then it stopped
entirely. It was almost as if it had something very important to
say, the way its mouth opened and shut. As thick, black drool strung
down from its mouth, its glassy eyes rolled up, and then the head –
or most of it – slipped off the body.

She had been
lucky with that one; if it hadn't have lunged at the precise moment,
it would have probably been on top of her right now, chowing down.

The other two
creatures were unsure of what the best approach was. One of them was
staggering around the side of the room, but she didn't think that was
intentional. It was simply the direction its feet had taken it.

The other one –
who looked a lot like one of her old schoolteachers, Mr Daniels –
lunged, growled, and basically fell to the ground all at once. She
jumped back, evading its flailing arms, and managed to bring the
machete down into the back of its head.

If it was Mr
Daniels, she thought, then that's what he deserves for all those
boring Science lessons.

She twisted the
machete; there was an audible crunch, and then a sound like a wet
surface being rubbed down with a dry towel. The back of its head
erupted upwards, like a terrible geyser. It twitched spasmodically
for a few seconds, but as she yanked the machete out it fell still.

She was still
trying to figure out if the creature on the floor in front of her had
once worn a baseball-cap to school, just to fit in, when she felt the
cold, putrid breath of the third creature on the back of her neck.

She was mid-turn
when a hand grabbed her shoulder, and now it was her turn to moan.
The snapping jaws of the thing were so close, so very real, that she
could feel its beard running up and down the side of her face. She
managed to put an elbow between the creature and herself, which just
about kept those terrifying teeth from biting her ear off.

She felt sick.
All of a sudden, her stomach decided to somersault and a pang of pain
ripped through her entire body. Maybe it was a combination of the
attacking putrescence and too many sodas. Whatever, the thing was on
her, forcing her downwards.

She had no
choice; she couldn't hold it off all day.

The creature's
face was only an inch in front of hers. Warm, dark spittle dripped
from its chin and landed on her shoulder, but she tried not to think
about that.

The way in which
they were tangled made it impossible to get enough of a swing with
the machete, so instead of doing what she hoped for, the blade merely
poked and prodded the creature's side, as if it were nothing but a
recalcitrant pet and she was the wielder of a rolled-up newspaper.

She felt a claw
– talon? It sure felt like one – try to tear through her
coat, but she had prepared for such an attack, and her layers were
enough to keep a pack of wolves from ripping her to shreds.

They landed on
the floor with a thud, together, as one, and the creature made what
was, ultimately, the worst move it could possibly have made.

It dropped down,
tearing at her coat, trying to get to the meaty goodness inside. The
sound its nails made as they scratched away at the material was
horrific, the kind of noise that sets your teeth on edge, like nails
down a blackboard or cutlery scratching a plate.

She knew that
she had very little time, and so managed to get the machete beneath
the creature's chin as quickly as possible. She sliced, pulling the
blade to the right so fast that her arm almost fell from its socket.
The gargled moan that came from the thing was enough proof that she
had managed to slit its throat, the explosion of putrid liquid as it
fell down onto her coat merely confirmed it further.

The creature
flapped its tongue around, aimlessly, as she pulled the blade through
to the left, and this time she heard a loud thump as its head came
off and rolled onto the priceless rug beneath them.

The full weight
of the thing came down on top of her, and she felt the air rush from
her lungs to accommodate it. After a moment of struggling, she
managed to crawl out from beneath it. For the first time in days she
had actually broken into a sweat, and it was not unwelcome.

She wiped her
coat down with what she had available – it just happened to be
a piece of ancient tapestry that nobody would ever be able to
appreciate again – and when she was satisfied that she wasn't
going to become infected by her own clothes, she began to breathe
again.

It didn't occur
to her that there were others – lots of them – roaming
the museum like bored attendants at a thimble-convention.

But there were;
she could hear them, scratching, moaning, trying to figure out where
that wonderful stench of death was coming from.

Her options were
limited, and for once she realised that she had made a massive
mistake in choosing the museum. Sure, with its bright lights and
constant heating it was attractive, but they
knew
that, they
must
have
known it for so many of them to wander off the beaten track.

Another mistake
that she suddenly became aware of was escape-routes, and her lack of
them. She had never, not once in the last month, entered a building
without scoping for each and every door, window, skylight. Never.
Yet the museum had tricked her, somehow, with its magic and awe, and
the fact that she had access to whatever junk-food she could raid
from the vending-machine.

Stupid. She had
been very stupid, indeed.

She shouldered
her backpack after filling it with as much vending-machine rubbish
that she could. The severe cramps in her stomach would eventually
wane, and the sugar-content of the junk-food seemed to be keeping her
fully-alert, which was very useful indeed when it came to fighting
members of the undead.

She stood in
front of the splintered door and took a deep breath.

The
dinosaur-room, and the adjoining store-cupboard, had been her home
for only a fraction of time she had intended, but she still felt
remorseful, knowing that the warmth it had offered, and the momentary
respite, would soon be a thing of the past, relegated to memory.

She moved, her
machete swinging beside her, out onto the corridor and into the jaws
of death.

TWENTY-SEVEN

'There's a sign
coming up,' Shane said as he tried to keep the bus steady on the
increasingly slippery road. 'Can one of you try to see what it
says?'

Marla stood,
cracked her back in a less than feminine fashion, and said, 'I'm
hoping it says something about food.' She made her way to the front
of the bus, keeping a hold of the aluminium railings either side of
her. As she reached the front, she glanced out through the
windscreen at the blanketed road ahead. 'Shit, Shane, how are we
even moving?'

He sighed.
'Slowly. Very slowly.'

The snow was so
deep in places that the school-bus lifted from the road. Beneath the
bus, the soft noise of snow as it scraped the undercarriage was not
too comforting, but they hadn't beached, yet, which was probably down
to sheer luck rather than anything else.

The sign came up on
the left-hand side.
JACKSON - 3 MI
.

In his seat, Shane
shifted nervously. Although he had requested help with the sign, he
had managed to prise his eyes away from the road long enough to read
it himself.

Marla put a hand on
his shoulder. 'If they're there,' she said, softly rubbing his
collar, 'we'll find them.'

He sighed, an
amalgamation of relief and tension, which were the toughest
combination imaginable.

Terry was a few
seats back; he'd been given the unenviable task of cleaning Shane's
pistol, which in all fairness looked about ready for scrapping. When
he heard the whispering at the front of the bus, he reassembled the
gun in quick-time and headed up to see what was going in.

'We're nearly
there,' Marla said. Her look told Terry everything he needed to
know; the moment of truth was fast approaching; time to put up, or
shut up...

'I'm annoyed at
losing the Remington,' Terry said, unprompted. He was, of course,
referring to the shit-state in which Shane's pistol now found itself.

'Not your fault,'
Shane reminded him. 'You kept us alive by leading them away to that
room. I'm eternally grateful for what you did; losing the shotgun
was a small price to pay.'

Marla planted a
small kiss on Terry's cheek, which shocked him completely. 'Yeah,'
she said. 'We might never have woken up if it hadn't been for your
self-sacrifice.'

Terry had known the
risks, yet he hadn't considered himself a hero, not even when the
Captain and that fool, Moon, were getting devoured.

He didn't speak, or
couldn't. Marla's kiss had silenced him.

'So, this is the
first time we've been back to Jackson since jail,' Marla said. 'The
old gang, back together again, huh?'

Shane smiled. 'I
thought I'd put this place behind me for good,' he said. 'Just shows
how fucked up a thing guilt is.'

'We had to run,'
Marla said. 'If you remember, we were surrounded by fucking lurkers,
and that helicopter wasn't going to wait all day for us. It's easy,
thinking back, to say that you would have done things differently. I
don't think that you could have, under any circumstances. We ran,
we're still alive, and we're here now. If Megan and...' Shit, she'd
forgotten what his wife was called.

'Holly,' Shane
said, trying not to sound too annoyed at her for the
absent-mindedness – though maybe she had subconsciously forced
the name from her memory; her feelings for Shane had been made
apparent back at the school.

'If Megan and
Holly,' she continued, 'had been there, had seen what we were up
against, they would have told you to do the very thing that you did.'

Shane thought for a
long moment, then nodded. Marla was right, as always, and though it
pained him to admit it, he knew that there was nothing else he could
have done back then.

'Hey,' Marla said,
more excitable than she had been the rest of the journey. She jabbed
towards a small window above what looked like a strip-bar. The neon
lights were still working, even after a month; two flashing female
legs opening and closing incessantly. 'Guess who used to live in
that apartment?'

Silence.

Then Terry laughed.
'You didn't?'

'I
did
,' she
said, laughing along. 'Three years I had to listen to porn-music
from downstairs. It was back when I had been training for my
doctorate, and it was the only place I could afford at the time.'
She paused, trying to remember something, some little detail that
might have eased the tension further. Then, she said, 'The landlord
had been a right bastard. I remember his name, now. Jebediah
Crunt
.'

At first Terry
didn't speak. Instead he gave her a disbelieving look, testing for
holes in the story.

'I
swear
,'
she said, chuckling. 'I used to call him Jeb the cunt. Sonofabitch
wouldn't even give me my fucking security-deposit at the end. Said
I'd pissed all over the bathroom carpet, which I
hadn't
. How
can a woman piss on the carpet?'