Dead Island (17 page)

Semi-conscious, Sam writhed and muttered, his eyelids fluttering. His wrist poured with blood where the zombie had bitten into it, and while Purna stood guard with the shotgun, Xian Mei grabbed some more bandages and antiseptic ointment from a shelf to supplement the ones she had already put in her basket and quickly patched him up. By the time she had finished, he was coming round, rubbing his head and wanting to know what had happened.

‘Tell you later,’ said Purna. ‘You OK to walk?’

‘I think so.’

‘Here’s your gun.’ She thrust it at him almost brusquely. Scowling, she said, ‘From now on, we keep our wits about us at all times.’

They took the rest of what they needed and hurried back through the double doors into the warehouse. Xian Mei knew that Purna was angry with herself as much as anything; because of a split-second’s distraction back there, Sam had almost died. The Australian girl strode through the warehouse as if defying anyone to mess with her, and across to the broken staff entrance door, which they had pulled back into place as they entered. Pushing the door open, she checked outside, then said, ‘Right, open the loading bay doors. I’ll get the van.’

Two minutes later Purna had backed the van into the warehouse. She and Sam quickly filled it with boxes while Xian Mei stood guard. The car park was quiet and they were able to complete the task without interruption. Climbing into the van, Sam said, ‘How much of this stuff we giving to those guys?’

‘Just enough to carry in one trip,’ Purna said. ‘Somehow I don’t think the infected will stand by and watch us unloading box after box, do you?’

‘What if they decide they want more?’ said Xian Mei.

‘Then they’ll have to come out and get it themselves.’

They drove out of the car park and back round to the main street. The situation was pretty much the same as before, the infected congregating largely at the far end. As they parked at the foot of the steps outside the police station, a naked man in his early twenties wandered in front of them, his legs, buttocks and torso covered in bites. They watched him silently until he was about thirty metres away, then Purna unclipped her seatbelt and climbed over the front seats into the back of the van. She passed over two boxes of canned goods and a 12-litre plastic-wrapped pack of bottled water, before climbing over the seats into the front again.

‘We take one of these each, run up the steps and let ourselves in. Sam, once we’re inside, don’t let the guys know you’ve got a gun – just in case.’

He nodded.

‘Everyone remember the code number?’ Sam asked.

‘Four-two-seven-four,’ Xian Mei replied without hesitation.

They looked out of the windows and in the mirrors, checking every direction to ensure none of the infected was close enough to surprise them. Then Purna said, ‘Go.’

Throwing open the doors, they jumped out of the van and ran up the steps. With one hand curled around the provisions tucked under their arms and the other clutching their weapons, they felt weighed down, encumbered. The naked man spun towards them immediately, like a radar dish picking up a signal, and broke into a shambling run. Sam turned halfway up the steps, but paused a moment, not wishing to waste his shot. He allowed the man to get within five metres of him before pulling the trigger. The bullet hit the man in the jaw, shearing half his face away and spinning him round in a clumsy pirouette. He rolled down the steps, but at the bottom he picked himself up and doggedly started climbing them again. Two more of the infected were now homing in on the steps behind him, but Xian Mei had reached the door and, after putting her box of food down on the floor, tapped in the four-number code.

To her horror the red light failed to change to green. Thinking she must have done it wrong, she tried again, forcing herself to concentrate, knowing that all their lives depended on it.

Once more the red light remained constant.

‘It’s not working!’ she shouted.

Purna put down her own box of food and stepped forward, face set. ‘Let me try.’

Although she was certain she had done it right, Xian Mei knew this was no time to argue. She stepped back and allowed Purna access to the keypad. A few feet away Sam pulled the trigger of his gun and out of the corner of her eye Xian Mei saw the naked man’s head become a crimson spray. As the zombie pitched backwards down the steps, Purna punched in the four-number code. It gave Xian Mei no satisfaction to see the light remain stubbornly red.

‘Shit,’ Purna muttered and stepped away from the door. She turned to assess the situation, raising the shotgun.

Two zombies were coming up the steps towards them, an old man and a teenage girl. The old man was shambling, dragging his left leg behind him; the girl was running, almost scampering, lips drawn back in a snarl, the metal braces on her teeth clogged with blackening meat. Further away, other zombies seemed to be receiving the signal that there was fresh meat to be had here, and were turning round, sniffing the air, homing in.

Clinically, Purna took the girl out, the shotgun blast hitting her right in the centre of her face, reducing her features to pulp.

A few steps below her, Sam glanced round. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Those bastards must have changed the entry code,’ Purna said.

‘How they do that?’

‘They’ve got Dani, remember?’

‘Shit!’

‘We’d better get back to the van and rethink this,’ Purna said.

‘What about the food?’ asked Xian Mei.

‘Leave it.’

They were halfway back down the steps when a chunk of stone exploded less than a metre away from Sam’s foot. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for a split-second and then something whacked into the pavement below, causing a mini-eruption of stone chips.

‘Get down!’ Purna yelled.

Sam ducked instinctively. ‘What the fuck?’

‘They’re firing at us,’ she said, dropping to a crouch, spinning round and pulling the trigger of the shotgun all in the same movement. As the shotgun blast hit the building and Purna hastily reloaded, Sam was aware of Xian Mei, bent almost double, leaping down the steps to his left.

‘Go,’ Purna said. ‘I’ll cover you.’

Knowing – as Xian Mei had done before him – that there was no debating the matter, he ran down the steps, catching up with Xian Mei at the bottom just as she straightened up and fired her flare pistol at a zombie that was still fifteen metres away, but approaching rapidly enough that it would have reached them before they had chance to open the van doors and scramble inside.

The front of the zombie’s shirt burst into flame and a sheet of fire rose up and engulfed its head. It began to stagger around, arms waving like a kid playing blind man’s bluff, as its face browned and sizzled like barbecue meat.

The other zombies were still far enough away for them not to be an immediate problem. Keeping an eye on the burning zombie, Sam pulled open the passenger door of the van and shouted, ‘Get in.’

Throwing her machete into the foot well, Xian Mei dived across the front seat and scrambled upright. Sam climbed in after her, then immediately turned, pointing his gun up at the police station. The oldest of the three guys was at one of the upstairs windows, albeit trying to keep out of sight, the barrel of his hunting rifle resting on the sill. Purna was crouched down, trying to use the steps as cover. Although the nearest of the infected was still twenty metres away from her, they were closing in from all sides.

‘Come on, Purna!’ Sam shouted, and fired a bullet towards the upper window of the police station to demonstrate that he was now in a position to cover
her
.

She needed no second bidding. Breaking cover, she ran across to the van, Sam scooting along the seat to give her room to dive in and slam the door shut behind her.

As she was doing it, the door of the police station opened and the tattooed guy ran out, keeping low, and quickly dragged the discarded boxes of food and the pack of water bottles inside. Seeing him, Purna wound down the driver’s window a few inches and stuck the barrel of the shotgun out, but before she could fire he was back inside the building and had closed the door behind him.

‘Bastards,’ she muttered.

‘What—’ Xian Mei began. But before she could complete her question the gloating voice of the scrawny man called out from an upstairs window.

‘Hey, thanks for the food, guys. We’re real sorry that we’re no longer in a position to offer you anything in return. Oh, you can have your boy back, though. We’ve finished with him.’ There was movement at the window and the dead or unconscious body of Dani was dropped out. He hit the ground head-first, his limbs splaying in all directions. The men in the building cackled and whooped as though this was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

‘Think we’ll keep the girl, though,’ the scrawny man said after a moment. ‘We need us a little
recreation
.’ He sniggered again, then shouted, ‘You folks take care now. Make sure the zombies don’t get you.’

The window slammed shut – and their sight of the building was blotted out by a middle-aged man with thinning hair and a punctured eyeball, who lurched into view and snarled in at them through the driver’s side window. Without hesitation, Purna pulled the trigger of the shotgun and his head exploded in a gory confusion of blood, bone, flesh and brain. Yanking the gun back into the van, Purna wound up the window and turned on the engine. With zombies moving in rapidly, she drove away.

‘I
THINK
I might know a way.’

Purna and Sam looked at Xian Mei. Once again they had parked in the car park at the back of the supermarket, having needed to find somewhere quiet where they could talk over what to do. In the back of his mind Sam had been worried that Purna might take the hard line, dismissing Jin as a casualty of war and proclaiming that, though the situation was regrettable, it was not worth risking all their lives simply to rescue a girl who was not even prepared to handle a weapon.

However, he had underestimated her. Unless she had some ulterior motive (the stash of weapons in the armoury maybe?), she wasn’t entirely the hard-nosed pragmatist he had taken her for. True, she had told them earlier that she had joined the police force because she wanted to help people who couldn’t help themselves, but Sam had assumed her noble aspirations had waned in the wake of her dismissal from the force and the general disillusionment with life that she had suffered since. It was good, therefore, to see her so outraged, so impassioned, so concerned for Jin’s fate.

‘We’ve got to get her out of there,’ she had said. ‘If those fucking animals harm her I’ll never forgive myself.’

When Xian Mei said she thought she might know a way to get into the police station, Purna leaned forward eagerly. ‘How?’

‘In the hotel where I worked,’ Xian Mei said, ‘there was an old sewer outlet in the basement laundry. Someone told me that the tunnels ran right under the main street, and that at one time you could gain access to every building from below if you wanted to.’

‘At one time?’ repeated Purna. ‘You mean you can’t any more?’

Xian Mei shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert. But this is the
old
sewer system we’re talking about. I guess whoever’s in charge of these things eventually decided it was unsanitary to have sewage constantly flowing directly underneath people’s homes and either diverted the flow or built an entirely new system. It could be that the old tunnels are impassable now. They could have been blocked up or the access to certain buildings might have been sealed. There have been a lot of renovations to some of the buildings over the years. Extensions, new walls and floors, maybe even new foundations in some cases …’

‘It’s worth a try, though,’ Purna said. ‘The vulnerable parts of buildings are always either above or below. And unless you can climb walls like Spiderman or you’ve got access to a helicopter …’

She let her words hang in the air. Sam nodded. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘We might be able to gain access from the supermarket,’ Xian Mei said. ‘We should look for the lowest point.’

It took them less than five minutes to find what they were looking for. The warehouse floor was concrete but inside the supermarket itself they found a fire exit tucked away behind the frozen foods section. Beyond this was a short corridor leading to a door that led outside and a set of stone steps to a basement area, which had not been used in a long time, except as a dumping ground for some old and rusting shelf fixtures. A couple of minutes’ searching resulted in the discovery of a circular iron manhole cover in the corner of the stone floor, crusted with moss and gunge.

Sam tried to lift it, but it was fixed solid. ‘We need something to lever it up,’ he said.

Xian Mei walked over to the shelf fixtures and dragged out a metre-long V-shaped metal bracket. ‘What about this?’

‘Perfect,’ said Sam. ‘There any more of those in there?’

Xian Mei found another two and they set to work, first scraping away as much of the slime and moss as they could from around the rim of the manhole cover, then ramming the metal edges of the brackets into the thin gap between cover and floor and applying their collective weight to the other ends.

After ten seconds, there was a creaking groan and the manhole cover started to rise. As the gap widened, they rammed their brackets in further to gain more purchase, and suddenly the cover tilted up and over like a hinged lid, clanging to the ground with such force that Xian Mei had to jump out of the way to prevent her foot getting crushed.

They all recoiled from the fetid smell that rolled up from the hole in the floor.

‘Jeez!’ Sam exclaimed, clamping a hand over his nose and mouth. ‘You think any of those things are down there?’

‘Don’t see how they’d get down there, or why they’d want to,’ said Purna. ‘They only tend to go where the fresh meat is.’

They peered into the hole, but it was pitch-black. ‘Anyone got a flashlight?’ asked Sam.

Purna pulled a face and shook her head. ‘They’ll probably have them in the store upstairs. Damn, I should have thought of that.’