Dead Island (23 page)

Aside from the few villagers who had had the luck and foresight to head for the only safe direction – straight up, into the trees – it was obvious that the Kuruni tribe had been decimated by the attack. Between the edge of the jungle where Purna, Sam and Logan were crouching, and the trees providing temporary sanctuary for the survivors at the far end, was a scene that resembled the aftermath of an explosion. Dozens of mutilated bodies were lying in pools of blood along the dusty street, many of them missing limbs, or with their flesh stripped down to the bone or their stomachs ripped open and their entrails exposed to view. Most were permanently and mercifully dead, their remains crusted with fat and feasting flies, though there were a few that had been resurrected by the virus and were now wriggling pitifully in the dirt, trying desperately to re-animate bodies that were damaged beyond repair.

Sam swallowed, his mouth dry, his mind reeling at the sight of this fresh atrocity.

‘Fuck me,’ Logan whispered. ‘Guess we’re a little late, huh?’

‘We still have to help those people,’ whispered Purna. ‘We can’t just leave them up there.’

‘I hear ya,’ Sam whispered. ‘But how?’

Purna was silent for a moment, her eyes restless as she took note of the terrain ahead and their available resources. Eventually she said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘Make it a good one,’ replied Logan.

She outlined her plan to them, pointing out the landmarks she was referring to. When she had finished Logan laughed quietly. It was an incredulous laugh rather than a happy one.

‘You’re fucking crazy, you know that?’

A brief smile fluttered at her lips. ‘That’s why you love me.’ She tapped Logan’s backpack. ‘Lucky we brought plenty of ammo with us.’ After a couple of deep breaths she said, ‘Ready?’

‘No,’ said Logan. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’

‘OK. On the count of three. One. Two.
Three!
’

Readying their weapons, they broke cover, each of them running as fast as they could. Purna and Logan to the right, Sam to the left, like a
SWAT
team spreading out to cover the area. They were halfway to each of their individual destinations when they were spotted. Sam, the pounding of his heart filling his ears, was aware of heads turning in his direction, shapes peeling away from the crush of semi-naked bodies crowding around the trees at the far end of the village and lurching towards him. When several of the infected let out blood-curdling shrieks in unison, prior to breaking into shambling, long-legged sprints, the shock was almost enough to make him lose his footing. A jolt went through his body, powerful as electricity, and he felt himself stumble, his right knee crumpling at the sudden unexpected weight.
No
, he told himself, and the sheer terror of what would happen to him if he went down was enough to keep him going. He turned and let off a few shots, felling the most rapidly advancing of the zombies, before darting between two huts. Just beyond them was the tree Purna had pointed out to him, and Sam saw immediately that she had chosen well. Swinging the rifle over his shoulder on its adjustable strap, he leaped at the lowest branches of the tree and began to haul himself up. He found his hand-holds and lifted his right leg to a higher branch, and was just about to lift his left foot too when it was seized from below. He looked down to see a woman, her eyes glaring and yellow, her face demonic with rage, clutching his blood-stained Reebok in both hands. Then he felt pain as her head darted forward and she sank her teeth right through his jeans and into his calf.

‘
Fuck!
’ he yelled, the bright white shock of the pain enough to give him a surge of adrenalin. He wrenched his left leg upwards with such force that his foot popped clean out of its shoe, leaving it clutched in the zombie’s hands. The zombie regarded the empty shoe almost comically for a second, then allowed it to drop to the ground. By the time she raised her head and clawed up towards Sam, he was out of her reach.

He found a branch wide enough and strong enough to take his weight and lay across it for a moment, leaning back on his backpack, panting and shaking. Below him, through a shifting canopy of leaves, he could see zombies already congregating, snarling in what he fancied was frustration, their bloodied fingers scrabbling ineffectually at the tree trunk.

He might have lost a shoe, but at least he hadn’t lost his gun or his pack full of ammo – or, indeed, his life. His calf where he’d been bitten was stinging like fuck, though, enough to make him feel ill and faint. He wrapped his arms around the branch he was draped across and clung on desperately, fearful for a moment that he might pass out and plunge to the ground below. His forehead was oozing sweat and his heart was like muffled but persistent thunder in his ears. It took several seconds before he realized that someone was shouting his name.

He looked up groggily. At first his vision was nothing but a confusion of waving leaves and blinding flashes of sunlight. The sound penetrated the fug in his mind, enabled him to get his bearings, and eventually he shuffled upright and through a gap in the branches saw Logan sitting high up in his own tree about thirty metres away, behind a bunch of huts on the far side of the clearing.

‘Hey!’ Sam shouted, his voice thick and a little slurred.

‘Fuck, man,’ Logan yelled back, sounding pissed off, ‘what you been doing? Taking a nap?’

‘Kinda,’ shouted Sam. ‘I got bit. Think I phased out for a moment.’

‘You OK?’ shouted Purna, the direction of her voice enabling Sam to pinpoint her half way up a tree forty metres to Logan’s left.

‘I’ll live,’ replied Sam, and then almost laughed at the irony of his statement.

‘Yeah, but will the poor bastard who bit you?’ shouted Logan. ‘Oh, hang on. I forgot. That’s something he doesn’t have to worry about.’

‘It wasn’t a he, it was a she,’ shouted Sam. ‘And she took my fucking shoe.’

‘I’m jealous,’ Logan replied. ‘What
is
the secret of your success with the ladies, man?’

‘I guess you either got it or you ain’t,’ Sam yelled back.

Their loud exchange had at least caused the survivors at the far end of the village to stop bickering. Sam imagined them all perched up in the branches of their trees, shocked into silence at this unexpected intrusion into their village. One thing they ought to be grateful for, however, was the fact that the majority of the infected, perhaps realizing that their prey was inaccessible for now, were drifting towards the new arrivals, presumably in the hope of easier pickings. If so, then they were going to be disappointed – if zombies could be disappointed, that was.

‘OK, let’s do this,’ Purna shouted from across the clearing. ‘You ready, Sam?’

Sam unslung his rifle, raised it to his shoulder and pointed it down at the ground. ‘Ready.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Logan announced loudly, ‘we are just about to make a hell of a fucking noise. I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.’

Then they started firing.

‘Operation Fish in a Barrel’ Purna had called it, a name that was nothing but apt. Sam felt almost guilty as he sat in his tree, firing down at the milling hordes below. Oblivious to fear and danger, the infected didn’t run or seek cover; they simply stood there, allowing themselves to be picked off. For over five minutes, Sam, Purna and Logan kept firing and reloading, pumping round after round into the hungry dead, shattering skulls and destroying brains with the same clinical determination they might show if they were eradicating a nest of ants.

By the time it was over, the ground beneath Sam’s tree was a thick lake of blood, a swamp of pulped and fallen flesh. The stink that rose from it made him feel sick, and already he was wondering how he could possibly avoid having to wade through it when he climbed down. After so much activity the gun was hot in his hands and the shockwaves of the hundreds of rounds he had fired rippled through his body like a never-ending echo. He felt his hearing had gone into trauma, his jaw ached from having been clenched so tightly, and the double pulse in his temples seemed to prompt an answering beat from the bite-wound in his calf.

Aside from the throbbing of his own body, for several minutes after the shooting was over Sam experienced nothing but a deep, almost profound silence. He suspected that, like him, Purna and Logan were sitting quietly, alone with their thoughts, perhaps trying to come to terms with the oddly heightened reality of what they had just done, or attempting to make sense of the conflicting emotions of exhilaration and self-loathing battling for supremacy in their heads. Sam felt enervated, but at the same time so alert it was like a caffeine buzz. He felt heavy and weightless, centred and scattered, light and dark. Time seemed meaningless, and at the same time he was almost achingly aware of every passing second. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again it felt like the world had changed.

At last, slowly, he climbed down from the tree. When he reached the lowest branch, he shimmied along until it started to bend, and then he jumped. Despite clearing the base of the tree by a good five metres, he still landed at the very edge of the killing ground, his shoeless foot landing in blood that had the consistency of cold, partly set jelly. Grimacing, he trudged out on to the dusty main street, leaving a trail of red footprints behind him.

As if by mutual consent, Purna and Logan emerged from between huts on the other side of the street at exactly the same moment and they all walked towards each other, like outlaws meeting for a noon showdown. No one said anything, though the looks that passed between them seemed to convey how they were feeling far more eloquently than words. As one they turned and walked towards the cluster of trees at the far end of the village, and as they got closer the survivors began to drop to the ground, one by one, like strange fruit.

Most prominent among them was a man with long matted hair, whose dark-skinned body was painted in swirling red and white shapes. He wore a crocodile-skin cape and when he walked the bone ornamentation adorning his wrists, ankles and neck jangled ominously. Showing no fear, he marched up to the three visitors to his village, drawing a ceremonial dagger from his belt as he did so. Purna tensed and half raised her gun, but the man halted a couple of metres from them, placed the dagger on his palm with the blade pointing towards his own chest and dropped to his knees. He tilted his upper body forward as though in supplication, his forehead all but touching the dusty ground, and stretched out his right hand, offering them the dagger.

Logan looked at Purna. ‘I think that means he likes you,’ he said.

‘
KORITOIA-OPE
.’

Purna slowly repeated the name and the witch doctor nodded delightedly. Despite his fearsome appearance he had been an amiable enough companion. They had been walking for several hours now, heading ever upwards. For the first three hours they had been hacking their way through thick jungle, but now they had risen beyond the treeline and were ascending the dusty, upward-sloping trail of a jagged-peaked mountain. Sam couldn’t decide whether he preferred struggling through dense vegetation, where at least the ground was level and they were sheltered from the sun, or toiling uphill, where they were unencumbered by trailing vines and ankle-entangling plants, but where they had to contend with the mercilessly beating sun.

At least they had set off at dawn, which meant that the sun had not been at its height. Even so, long before they reached their destination sweat was rolling down Sam’s face and his freshly laundered T-shirt was plastered to his body. The hiking boots that West had lent him (he hadn’t even bothered trying to locate his lost Reebok in the charnel pit of zombie remains at the bottom of the tree) were pinching a little, but he could cope with that. And at least, for once, he didn’t stink of zombie blood – which was always a bonus.

After making the acquaintance of the surviving Kuruni villagers yesterday, Purna, Sam and Logan had persuaded them – through a combination of gestures and basic vocabulary – to accompany them back through the jungle to where Mowen was waiting with the jeep. After getting over his initial surprise, Mowen had spoken to the witch doctor and, although their two tribal languages had not been entirely compatible, had at least been able to make him understand why the four of them had come to the village and what it was they needed. Perhaps in exchange for saving their lives, or simply because he had witnessed first-hand how frighteningly out of control the virus had become, the witch doctor – Koritoia-Ope – had eventually agreed to lead his people to the research centre and allow West to take blood samples from them in an effort to develop a vaccine. Furthermore he had agreed to take a party up to the sacred Kuruni burial site early the following morning, so they could get a sample of the stable form of the virus.

Sam had never before appreciated the sheer bliss to be found in what he had always thought of as the simple things in life – taking a shower, putting on clean clothes, eating a good meal, sleeping in a comfortable bed. It might have been only twenty-four hours since the outbreak of the virus had reached pandemic proportions, but by the time they arrived back at the research centre and he was finally able to enjoy a bit of downtime. He felt like he’d been fighting and running for days.

It was agreed that he and Purna would accompany Koritoia-Ope to the burial site at dawn the next day, while Logan and Mowen would monitor proceedings at the research centre and keep Ryder White up to date with developments. At first Logan had offered to go with Purna to give Sam more time to get over his latest zombie bite, but Sam had insisted that he’d rather be doing something than hanging around – and besides, although he didn’t say so, he was pretty sure that Logan’s knee would not be able to stand up to what Mowen had told them would be almost a full day’s hike there and back over pretty tough terrain.

It was obvious that the same thought was in the back of Logan’s mind too. Shrugging he had said, ‘Well, if you
really
want to go, man, far be it from me to spoil your fun. I’m more than happy to hang around here all day. Hanging around is what I’m good at. And if I get bored I can always pass the doc a test tube or something.’