Dead Island (8 page)

Purna was looking straight ahead, face set, jaw clenched. When she caught Sam’s eye her features softened slightly. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘My arm
is
pretty tired.’

Sam gave a nod and stepped in front of her. They were descending the stairs below the landing to floor three when he halted, holding up a hand.

‘What is it?’ Purna asked.

‘This time I
do
hear something,’ Sam said. ‘Listen.’

They all stood still and listened. From a flight or two below them came a shuffling, snorting sound.

Immediately Logan was reminded of a football camp his mom and dad had sent him on when he’d been twelve or thirteen. One night he and a couple of guys had gone camping up in the hills and had been awoken in the early hours by a bear snuffling around their tent, looking for food. Logan had been shit-scared, but like the other guys he’d scrambled out of the tent and run at the bear, yelling and waving his arms. The bear, which it turned out had been only a cub, had taken fright, turned tail and fled. Logan and his friends had stayed awake the rest of the night in a state of nervous excitement. Next day, back down at the camp, they had bragged to the rest of the guys about how they had faced down a full-grown grizzly and survived.

Logan knew that the thing below them now was not a bear, and nor would it run if they yelled at it. For the first time he wondered how much of a survivor he truly was, and how far he would have to push himself, both mentally and physically, in order to get through the coming ordeal. Could he bash the brains out of a little kid or snap the neck of a fatally injured woman like Purna had just done? True, he didn’t give much of a shit about anyone but himself, but that didn’t automatically mean that he’d be prepared to do anything to save his own skin. He usually liked to leave the dirty jobs to other people, to operate under the radar, so to speak. However, he had a feeling that wouldn’t be an option from now on. Like he’d told Sam, it was a dog-eat-dog world now; kill or be killed.

All the same, there was nothing to be gained in
inviting
trouble, or rushing headlong into it. Sidling up to Purna, he whispered, ‘Maybe if we stay quiet, that thing, whatever it is, will go away.’

Purna, still spattered with the girl’s blood, shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. It’s coming towards us.’

Sam turned and glanced briefly at her. ‘Maybe it can smell all that shit on you.’

‘Let’s head back upstairs then,’ said Logan. ‘We can go through the door and wait in the corridor. Maybe it’ll lose the scent.’

‘I’m not going backwards,’ said Purna. ‘If we keep hiding from those things we’ll never get anywhere.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Sam, and hefted his multi-pronged coat-hanger weapon. ‘Let’s do this.’

Leading the way, he descended towards the sounds of movement, step by careful step. Reaching the curve of the banister, he whispered, ‘Y’all ready?’

Purna nodded. Logan tried to think of something scathing and witty to say, but both his mind and his mouth were dry.

Sam braced himself, then swung around the corner on to the next flight, Purna shadowing him. A second or two behind them, the first thing Logan saw was a hulking figure eight or nine steps below. For a split-second he thought it was a bear – a bear dressed in human clothes.

The figure looked up and Logan saw that it was only a man after all. It was even a man he recognized, one he had seen already this evening. It was one of the two security guys who had turned up with the cute Chinese girl after they had been attacked by the woman in the rest room. Beneath his buzz cut, the man’s pudgy, round face was smeared with blood and clots of matter. He resembled a giant baby after a particularly grotesque meal.

The mess down the front of his padded black jacket made it look as though he had had a bucket of animal guts thrown at him. He looked too as if he was wearing red gloves, albeit ones that were liquefying. In his fat right fist he was clutching a lump of raw meat that looked as though it might have been torn from a thigh or even a buttock. As soon as he saw Sam, Purna and Logan standing above him, however, he lost interest in the meat, which slithered from his hand and hit the floor with a wet splat, and lurched towards them, snarling.

It was only once he got closer that Logan realized that under its coating of gore the collar of the man’s jacket was shredded and a sizeable chunk of meat was missing from the left side of his neck. Indeed, the entire left side of the man’s head looked as though it had been savaged; his ear was gone completely and many of the stringy muscles and tendons beneath what would normally have been his cheek could clearly be seen. Additionally the missing flesh had revealed the teeth in the left side of his jaw, which gave the impression he was bestowing them with a wide, lopsided grin.

‘Come on then, you big motherfucker,’ Sam said, waiting for the dead man to get close enough. When he did, Sam lunged forward, jabbing his home-made weapon into the zombie’s face.

With the first thrust, one of the splayed metal spines entered the creature’s eye and punctured it. There was a faint pop, and the eyeball tore like a soft-boiled egg, releasing a gluey colourless substance that ran down the zombie’s cheek and mingled with the blood around its mouth.

Despite this, Sam’s attack didn’t even slow the creature down. Seemingly oblivious to pain, it roared not in agony but in rage and hunger and kept on coming, blood-stained fingers reaching out.

Sam thrust again, a knight with a splintered metal lance, and this time most of the spines went into the zombie’s mouth. They punctured its tongue and gums, scraped against its teeth, even skewered its top lip and tore a little of it away.

Yet still the zombie advanced, its sheer bulk and momentum driving it forward. Sam’s weapon at first bent beneath its weight and then began to snap, metal spines remaining in the zombie’s flesh, jutting from its cheeks, lips and gums like strange piercings.

Sam yelled in panic and anger as the zombie’s fat fingers closed around the sleeves of his jacket. It bore down on him, growling, its breath reeking sourly of blood, its torn mouth opening and closing as it snapped at him. Pushed backwards, Sam stumbled and fell, the steps of the staircase jarring the breath out of him, digging painfully into his back. He tried to bring his arms up to defend himself, but they were pinned to his sides, his weapon useless in his hand. Frantically, craning his head back to stop the zombie from tearing his face off with its teeth, he brought up his knee, ramming it into the creature’s fat belly. It was relentless, however, crushing him like a human steamroller. In desperation he lowered his head and thrust his upper body forward, head-butting the zombie in the face. He heard a satisfying crunch as its nose broke, but the only result was that his head and face was showered with rank, hot zombie blood.

Suddenly the zombie’s head snapped to Sam’s left as something smashed into the side of it. Sam felt the creature’s weight shift, its left hand tearing loose from his jacket, enabling him to move his right arm. Gripping his weapon tightly, he managed to work it free, then rammed it into the side of the zombie’s throat, where much of the flesh had already been torn away. The spines, some of them now either bent or foreshortened from having snapped off under the creature’s weight, passed easily through the ravaged meat, sliding forward until they scraped against bone. Unsure whether the bone was the zombie’s spine or the underside of its jaw, Sam withdrew the weapon then thrust it forward again, stabbing it back and forth in quick, short jabs. The spines peppered the exposed meat of the creature’s neck like wave after wave of buckshot, severing tendons and threads of gristle.

Meanwhile Purna moved into Sam’s peripheral vision on his right-hand side, clearly trying to find room and space to once again slam the splintered end of the chair leg into the side of the zombie’s head. Sam tried to aid her by withdrawing his weapon, his right hand now as slick with blood as the zombie’s own, and ramming it directly upwards into the creature’s throat, between its jaw and its Adam’s apple. Skewered on the end of the weapon, its torn neck stretched, the creature gave a gurgling snarl and tried to work itself loose. However, instinctively seeking its prey, it pushed downwards instead of pulling up, and so succeeded only in driving the metal spines in deeper. They slid up through the bottom of the creature’s mouth, harpooning the underside of its blackening tongue and causing congealed blood to burst from the wounds and spurt out from between its lips.

Seizing her chance, Purna slammed the end of the chair leg into the side of the zombie’s head again, and then again. After the fourth blow there was a gristly tearing sound, and like a hinged lid, the zombie’s head toppled over to one side, twisting Sam’s weapon from his hand with such force that it drew a strip of skin from his palm. The head swung down grotesquely in front of the zombie’s chest like a bowling ball in a stocking, held in place by nothing more than a few stubborn ropes of stretched skin and tendon. It swung, in fact, into Sam’s face, the prickly buzz cut scraping across his cheek, causing him to cry out in revulsion. Convulsively the zombie’s hands began to open and close, enabling Sam to free his left arm, and then, with Purna’s help, to scramble out from under the creature’s dead weight. Battered and bruised, and drenched stickily in the zombie’s foul blood, he watched numbly until the creature’s almost decapitated body ceased twitching and became motionless.

‘Thanks,’ he muttered finally, glancing at Purna.

She gave a brisk, brief nod. ‘Don’t mention it.’

‘Did it bite you?’ asked Logan, sitting on the stairs a little above them, like a spectator watching a football game from the bleachers.

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Just bled on me a little.’

‘Zombie blood is probably contagious,’ Logan said.

Sam scowled. ‘In that case, I’ll try to resist the temptation to lick myself clean.’

‘Just saying,’ Logan said.

With more than a little distaste, Sam placed his foot on the zombie’s almost-severed head and yanked his now bloody and mangled weapon from its throat. He held the weapon up ruefully. ‘Soon as I get the chance, I’m gonna trade this motherfucker for an Uzi.’

‘You want me to take point again?’ asked Purna.

Sam glanced up at Logan, narrowing his eyes. ‘Ain’t it his turn?’

‘He’s only got one arm. Plus he got bit. Which means he’s not exactly in the best of health.’

Logan did his best to look contrite and apologetic. Sam grunted. They continued on down the stairs, trying not to slip in the zombie’s blood, which was fanning out from beneath its body, overspilling the edges of the stairs and dripping on to the steps below. They reached the ground floor without further incident, halting at a door marked
RECEPTION
. Already they looked a pretty battle-weary bunch, wounded and spattered with blood.

‘OK,’ said Purna. ‘We need to be ready for this. We don’t know what’s out there.’

‘What if there’s hundreds of them?’ said Logan.

‘There won’t be. Lucky for us, the outbreak only reached this part of the island when most people were already in bed.’

‘You reckon that guy who called us up was telling the truth? That there
will
be someone waiting to help us?’ said Sam.

Purna shrugged. ‘Who knows? Let’s just take it one step at a time.’

‘Who was that guy anyway?’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘You really want to discuss this now?’

‘Guess not,’ he said.

‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Logan.

Unhesitatingly Purna said, ‘We’ll take it nice and slow. No point drawing attention to ourselves. You guys ready?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ muttered Sam.

‘I’m
always
ready,’ said Logan laconically, swinging his chair leg.

‘Then let’s go.’

She pushed open the door just wide enough to ensure there were no zombies in the vicinity, then stepped forward, gesturing to the others that it was safe to emerge. The door to the stairs was situated at the end of a short corridor to the right of the main reception area. From here they could see most of the lobby, including the main doors about fifteen metres away to their left, and the long reception desk just beyond that, occupying the wall directly opposite them. In the centre of the wide expanse of carpet was a fully grown palm tree, encircled by a number of curved, interconnecting leather seats, which gave the impression the tree was at the centre of a giant black wheel.

Although the area was quiet and currently deserted, there were several indications this had been anything but a normal night. There were streaks of blood across the surface of the blond-wood desk and the light-coloured carpet – streaks long enough and dark enough to suggest that this had been heart-blood jetting from a severed major artery. There was more blood on the inside of the hotel’s glass frontage, including a smeary handprint. Most distressing of all, there was the body of what they could just about make out had been a young Chinese woman, dressed in the hotel’s staff uniform of white shirt, red tie and red skirt, lying on her back close to the central seating area in an ungainly sprawl of limbs.

The young woman had been attacked so savagely that she was almost unrecognizable as human. She had been almost ripped apart, as if by a mob. Her left leg was attached to the rest of her body by nothing more than a shred of skin, her right arm was missing completely from the elbow down, and her intestines had spilled from a jagged rent in her stomach and were now lying on and around her in glistening purple-grey loops.

Seeing her, Logan said, ‘Excuse me,’ and promptly threw up into one of two small potted palms flanking the doors of the lift a few metres away. Purna patted him on the back and glanced up at the lift indicator. It was frozen at floor 5, and she wondered for a moment what terrible dramas had unfolded up there.

‘You OK?’ she whispered as Logan straightened up.

He looked more ghastly than ever, his complexion deathly pale, but he nodded.

‘Thought the girl might be … well, the one who checked me in, and was with me when the woman attacked us … but I’m not sure.’