Dead Frost - 02 (27 page)

She wondered how
many bullets she had, before realising that she was better off with
the machete, at least for now.

She clicked the
safety back on and shoved the gun into her coat-pocket.

*

Shane stopped
jogging as the gunshot echoed around the grounds. It sounded as if
it came from everywhere, all at once, though he knew that it was
close.

Was someone firing
at them? Had Shane been right about the snipers? The shot sounded
close, but not near enough to have been meant for them. There were
no holes in the snow around them, either, which meant that they were
not the intended targets. Either that or the sniper was the worst
fucking shot in the world.

'Shane, that was
close,' Marla said. She looked like she might start to cry any
moment, though that might have just been the freezing-cold wind
making here eyes water.

'Lurkers don't fire
guns,' Shane said. 'Which means there's a survivor.'

Terry nodded.
'Yeah, a survivor with a gun who could quite easily confuse us for
lurkers in this half-light.'

He was right, but
they had to find other survivors, didn't they? That was one of the
reasons they had returned to Jackson, to search for living souls, to
locate and help the uninfected...

'It must have come
from the front,' Shane said, largely clouded by the white-fog that
was his breath. 'The street.'

Marla sighed. She
already knew what Shane was thinking; it was in his nature to get
involved, and the more time she spent with him, the more she noticed
her own fear dissipating.

Without another
word, they moved slowly towards the museum.

There were no more
gunshots.

*

She dodged the
maniacal lunge of one creature, but found herself amongst several
others who appeared to have been expecting her. The machete whooshed
through the air as she stumbled backwards; the blade embedded in one
of the cadavers' throat, and a geyser of dark, putrescent sludge
spewed forth, painting the surrounding snow.

She tugged at
the machete, hoping to get it free from the looming creature's neck.
At first, nothing happened. It was wedged somewhere between its
collar-bone, and no matter how much she struggled to pull it free, it
remained firmly stuck. For now, she was controlling the corpse,
keeping it at a distance, making sure that it didn't succeed with its
advances and take a chunk out of the top of her head.

Why did I have
to be so small?

With one, final
almighty yank she managed to pull the blade free. There was an
audible squelch; the unfazed corpse looked like it might drop, but
managed to compose itself, its head hanging half-off, its eyes
bulging from their sockets.

She swung the
machete, severing the head completely, and now the cadaver dropped to
the snow, squirting a sickeningly dark torrent from the stump.

She scrambled
back, hoping to make enough purchase on the snow to give herself some
space. They were coming thick and fast, and although she knew she
could run at any moment, she had come to the conclusion that it would
do no good.

Sooner or later
she would have to fight them.

Why not now?

Why not here?

She couldn't
think of a reason to run, anymore.

*

They stood at the
corner of the building, the blizzard whipping against them, the
half-light of the approaching morning doing very little in the way of
comforting them. It didn't matter if it was day or night. Those
things weren't nocturnal, it wasn't as if they went away when the sun
rose, the way they would if they were fucking vampires. But weren't
zombies part of the same mythology? They used to be, but apparently
not any more.

They were real;
vampires remained firmly encased in the realms of fiction. Though,
nobody had ever expected the dead to rise and eat the living, so you
never know what the future might have in store.

Shane was the first
to see the horde, and immediately knew that he had made a serious
mistake. There were too many of them, way too many if you considered
the gun-to-survivor ratio. There was a way past them, but that
involved running, a lot of running, and they were already chasing the
next breath as if the air was pure carbon.

Shane was about to
suggest trying to find another way around – perhaps the other
side of the museum offered more in the way of shadows and less in the
way of flesh-eating corpses – when Marla gasped and slammed her
hand to her mouth hard enough to loosen teeth.

'I see him,' Terry
said, straining his eyes through the gloomy half-light. 'In the
centre.'

Shane had no idea
what the two of them were talking about. All he could see was
lurkers, a fuck-load of 'em.

'Shane, there's a
person in there,' Marla said, pointing across to where the majority
of the cadavers were accumulating. 'Don't you see?'

Shane took a step
to the side, to where Marla was standing. She had to jab a
freezing-cold finger in the direction of where she was seeing this
so-called survivor, but it made it a helluva lot easier for Shane,
who spotted the guy amongst the gore-drenched crowd.

'Holy fuck, you're
right!' Shane gasped. 'I don't think we can do anything to help
him.'

It was the truth;
there were just too damned many of them, and Shane couldn't speak on
behalf of the others, but he wasn't feeling up to much in the way of
fighting. The cold had sapped his strength to the point where
collapse might not be too far away.

And then, the
stranger jumped up, and Shane saw that it wasn't a man at all.

It was a child.

A girl.

'Shit!' he gasped.
'That's a fucking little girl in there.'

He was already
loading a new clip into the gun. Marla was hopping anxiously from
one foot to the other, not knowing what his decision was going to be.
She had an inkling, though.

With the gun
loaded, Shane glanced across to where the girl was fighting for her
life. She must have been no older than eight, about the same age
that Megan would be...

And then he saw the
pigtails either side of the girl's head, swinging with each swing of
her machete.

Megan.

He raced into the
battle, not caring what happened to himself. His daughter was alive,
and she was a damn good fighter.

Marla screamed
after him, tried to make him see reason, but it was too late. They
could only stand and watch as the nightmare unfolded in front of
them.

*

When she heard
the gunshot she immediately thought the worst. She must not have put
the safety on properly, and now the gun had gone off in her pocket.
She braced herself for the pain, hoping that the bullet had gone in
another direction. She was fighting with a small, fat corpse which
was missing its nose, ears and lips, and she swiped the machete twice
through the air, hoping to take something else. She missed, but then
its head exploded as another loud bang came. She knew then that it
hadn't been her own pistol that had fired, which explained why she
hadn't felt any pain as the bullet ripped through her.

It hadn't.

The creature
flew backwards, thumping into the snow.

She turned to
see if she could make out where the shot had come from, and didn't
have to look too far, for the man was coming towards her, shooting
everything that moved. He took out seven corpses as if they were
nothing but a minor inconvenience. She could tell by the look on his
face that he was determined not to die out here tonight, which was
more than could be said for herself. She'd practically resigned
herself to the fact that it was the final battle, and now she was
being saved by a man she had never seen before in her entire life.

*

All Shane could see
was Megan. The lurkers around her were just background, blurs that
needed to be taken care of. It was like looking through a fish-eye
lens where the only point of focus was extremely sharper than its
surroundings.

He fired again, and
again. Lurkers fell as bullets tore through their heads, through
their brains. Fragments of skull and chunks of flesh landed in the
snow, creating a strange mosaic of gore and decay. Behind him, he
heard Marla screaming frantically, but he didn't turn, he didn't
stop, not even for a second, because his daughter was still alive and
she needed his help.

He fired again.

*

She spun through
the air, the blade swinging from her hand as if it was nothing more
than an attachment of her arm. She lopped the heads of three of them
in quick succession. From out of nowhere she had found the will to
survive. It had something to do with the man with the gun, the guy
who had emerged from the shadows to help her, but she didn't know
what.

She fought,
taking as many of them out as possible, and soon she was standing
amongst a pile of rotten undead, breathing heavy but otherwise
unharmed. Her back was turned to the man, who had shot about the
same amount of corpses as she had decapitated, but she could sense
his eyes on her. She trembled, scared, for she didn't know what the
next few minutes held for her, just that they involved this strange
saviour. She heard a woman scream from off in the distance; the man
obviously had a team, and she had been too busy fighting to notice
them cowering in the shadows at the side of the museum.

She turned
around, slowly, and found herself staring into the sad, hollow eyes
of a broken man.

*

How had he managed
to mistake the girl for Megan? How could he have been so stupid?
Did he not know his own daughter at all? The girl standing before
him now was nothing like her; she didn't even have the same colour
hair as Megan, and yet her pigtails...in the half-light...they had
seemed identical.

The girl was
staring back at him, not knowing what to say, unable to find the
courage to speak first. What did it matter? Her words would mean
nothing to him; she was not Megan, and he had been so foolish to
think that she was.

'Shane!' Marla
screeched, running across the museum grounds with Terry in tow. 'Are
you out of your fucking mind?!'

And he
was
.
He knew now that he was completely off his rocker. He
must
be, otherwise he wouldn't have seen his daughter's face, her hair,
her fucking pigtails when the girl had been fighting with the
cadavers.

But he had been
convinced, so utterly mesmerised by the thought that she was still
alive...and now, now he was staring into the terrified face of just
another girl.

'Are you okay?'
Marla asked, taking the steaming-hot pistol away from him. He looked
like he had seen a ghost, literally. He was trying not to look at
the girl, for some reason, but failing.

'Fine,' Shane
muttered. The girl was still looking at him, trying to figure him
out, wondering why the man had risked his own life to save hers.
Terry trundled across to where she stood and crouched beside her.

'Are you okay?' he
asked, in a manner usually reserved for kind grandfathers. 'What's
your name, honey?'

The girl, for the
first time, allowed her gaze to drift from Shane to Terry.
'Rebecca,' she said. 'But my friends used to call me River.'

There was a story
behind that, of course, but this wasn't the time, nor the place, to
get into it.

'Well, River, what
you did was just phenomenal,' Terry said taking her by the arms and
pulling her towards him. 'How sure are you that one of them didn't
scratch you, sweetheart?'

Now she knew why he
was being so kind to her; he was simply making certain that she
hadn't become infected during the fight. She wasn't annoyed about
it, though. In fact, she would have done exactly the same thing in
their position.

'I didn't get
scratched, mister,' she said, although she was now checking herself
over to make sure that she was telling the truth. 'I would've felt
it. I always make sure that I keep their heads away from me, as
well, so they can't bite me.' She smiled, a thin, beautiful smile
which belied her age.