Demise of the Living (34 page)

Colin shook his head. “Lock him
in a meeting room and slip his meals in under the door?”

No one replied.

“We could lock him out,” Sharon
suggested.

“What do you mean?” Liz
asked.

“Lock the stairwell doors. He’s
keen to stay in the plant room; why not let him?”

“Not going to work,” Billy
said. “He’ll just take the doors off the hinges. I know he’s an
idiot, but even he could manage that.”

“There’s nothing we can do,”
Colin said softly.

“
What if he attacks one
of us again?” Liz asked. “He might not stop at a bit of hair
pulling or a quick fondle.”

“Colin’s right,” Sharon
admitted. “There’s not much we can do.”

“There’s plenty we can do,”
Billy said. “I can go down there and kill him.”

“No you can’t, Billy,” Mo
said.

“Who’s going to stop me?”

“No one,” Mo replied. “But if
you kill him, who do you become? If you kill him, how do you think
we will react to you, knowing you’re capable of doing such a
thing?”

Billy’s eyes narrowed as he
obviously concentrated on what Mo had said.

He looked around at the faces
of the people in the room. Sharon with her hair still out of place
looked more angry than hurt. The other three, Liz, Karen and
Melissa, looked terrified.

He looked into the eyes of the
youngest girl, Melissa. He saw a fear and confusion in that child’s
face that he realized was the result of his rage and had little to
do with Thomas’ outburst.

He looked back at Mo and then
at the others.

“I swear I won’t let that perv
do anything to hurt you,” Billy promised.

“What are you going to do?”
Colin asked.

Billy shook his head, his lips
clamped tight. He took a snort of air in through his flared
nostrils as he mulled over the problem.

“Nothing for now, but if he
crosses that line again I will hand-feed him to those things out
there.” Billy pledged.

“
Colin, would you go and
have a talk with him? Try to calm him down a bit?” Sharon
asked.

“Me?” Colin said in
surprise.

“You’re good with people,”
Sharon explained.

“
I’ll go,” Mo
volunteered. “I wasn’t here for the scuffle, so maybe he’ll see me
as neutral in all this.”

Sharon nodded and Mo left the
office.

Colin sat down on one of the
heavy-duty plastic crates that now housed their supplies.

“Should we really be sending
him on his own?” he asked.

“
I don’t know,” Sharon
admitted. “If any of the rest of us go, we’ll probably end up
antagonising him.”

“I suppose,” Colin replied.

From outside a car horn
beeped.

Colin stood up and ran to
the back window overlooking the car park. “Is Thomas taking a car
and leaving?”

The car park was pitch black
now that the sun had set and Colin pressed his face against the
glass trying to spot movement below.

“
Surely not,” Billy said,
joining him. “Where would he go?”

“More to the point: will he
open the gates and let them inside?” Colin said.

“He won’t get the refuse bins
out the way on his own, will he?” Liz asked.

“
I don’t see him,” Billy
said, examining the darkened car park.

The car horn tooted again.

“Over here!” Melissa
called.

They all turned to see Melissa
looking out of the windows that faced the street.

“What is it—what’s going on?"
Liz asked, running up to Melissa.

In the street below, a
car was ploughing its way through the crowds of undead. Its
headlights were tinted pink from the blood smeared across them, but
it was making slow progress through the throng.

“It’s a car!” Karen said.

The others rushed over to
look.

“Way to go with the obvious
there,” Billy jibed.

“Shan?” Karen said with hope in
her voice.

The car backed up into some of
the space made by its wake.

Quickly the window wound down
and a head poked out.

“Is that Stephen’s car?” Sharon
said.

A torch flicked on and
illuminated the driver’s face.

“
It
is
Stephen!” Sharon
proclaimed excitedly.

“That dick,” Liz said
venomously.

“
He’s shouting something!
Open the window,” Sharon ordered.

Colin stood on a desk and
slipped the latches on the pane.

“Who’s Stephen?” Billy
asked.

“He works here,” Sharon
said.

“He dragged me and my children
from his car and punched me in the face,” Liz explained.

“Sounds like a delightful
fellow,” Billy commented.

“
Be quiet!” Sharon
snapped. “I can’t hear what he's saying!”

Sharon stood closer to the
window and shouted out, “We can’t hear you!”

“Open the door!” Stephen called
up.

“
We can’t!” Colin shouted
back. “There’s too many of them! They’ll get in!”

“Please, you’ve got to—it’s
carnage out here! I don’t know where else I can go!”

“We have to let him in,” Sharon
said.

“
We can’t,” Colin said.
“Those things out there will tear him to shreds and overrun
us.”

“The back gates,” Billy
suggested.

“There are only a handful back
there,” Colin reasoned. “If he can get round to the back alley we
can let him in that way.”

“
What about the bins? You
said they were blocking the way in,” Liz said.

“Maybe we can move them or
maybe he can climb over them,” Billy offered.

Sharon climbed onto the desk
beside Colin and hung out of the window.

“We’ll get you in, Stephen!”
she called out, but Stephen hadn’t heard her.

The empty space had quickly
been filled again and Stephen had to wind the window up. He was now
driving the car backwards and forwards, mowing down swathes of the
converging undead.

After a few moments of clearing
space, the car stopped and the window rolled down again.

“Open the door!” Stephen
screamed, pointing at the lobby.

Sharon called back,
“We’re going to get the back gates—”

Colin grabbed her by the
shoulder.

“Colin!” Sharon protested.

“Look at his arm,” Colin
said.

“What?”

Colin shouted out of the
window, “What happened to your arm, Stephen?”

“
Nothing! It’s just a
scratch! Now open the door!”

Colin jumped down from the
table to stand next to Billy.

“We’re going to let you in the
back!” Sharon shouted.

“Are you thinking what I’m
thinking?” Colin said to Billy.

Billy nodded. “There’s no
chance we can let him in here.”

“What are you two talking
about? Get down to the parking lot and get the gate ready,” Sharon
instructed.

Billy shook his head.

“Get on with it!” Sharon
barked.

“He’s been infected,” Colin
said.

Sharon shook her head. “We
don’t know that."

“I don’t think we can take the
chance,” Billy said.

“We can’t leave him out there,”
Sharon protested.

“What choice do we have? Do we
risk getting ourselves infected too?” Colin said.

Sharon looked nervously
at the two men. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Neither Billy nor Colin said
anything, but the message was clear.

“You’ll leave him out there to
die?” Sharon said.

“
He’s already dead,”
Billy said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Sharon shook her head.
“No.”

She turned her attention back
to the street.

“Stephen, have you been
bitten?!”

“
It’s nothing!” Stephen
shouted. “Now let me in! There’s nowhere else left! They’ve overrun
everywhere!”

“Have you been bitten,
Stephen?!It’s important!”

“What does it matter?!You’ve
got to let me in!”

Sharon looked down at Colin and
Billy. Both men stood with arms folded, looking stern.

She looked back out of the
window.

“We can’t,” she said.

“What?!” Stephen cried in
disbelief.

“We can’t let you back in,
Stephen!”

“You’ve got to!” Stephen
yelled.

He was forced to wind the
window back up as the undead again grew nearer.

Sharon turned away from
the street and eased herself down from the desk. She was crying
softly. Colin tried to put a comforting arm around her, but she
shrugged it off.

“It’s the only way,” Billy
assured her.

The car outside revved its
engine and started to pull away.

“What’s he doing?” Karen
asked.

Billy, Sharon, and Colin turned
back to the window to observe.

Stephen had backed up a few
metres, leaving a gap of undead where the car had been. Rather than
turning and driving off down the street, he accelerated into the
space and straight at the building.

“
Oh my God!” Colin cried,
“He’s going to ram the lobby!”

The car accelerated at full
power, throwing corpses high into the air like spray from a
puddle.

There was the sound of glass
shattering and metal screeching from the ground floor.

“Quickly!” Billy called as he
sprinted for the stairwell.

***

Mo knocked on the plant room
door.

“Fuck off,” came Thomas’ gruff
voice.

“
Thomas, it’s me,
Mo.”

“Fuck off,” Thomas
repeated.

“Listen, I know things got
heated up there, but we’re in this together,” Mo said through the
closed door.

“Fuck off, Mo!” Thomas shouted
back, more angrily.

“
This has been difficult
on all of us, yeah? We’re trying to make the best of a bad
situation. Tempers are going to flare. Everyone realises
that.”

There was no reply from the
plant room. Mo listened to the door, hoping to hear some kind of
friendly response.

“The others… well, they realise
they’ve been a bit harsh,” Mo said. “Would you come back up
and—”

Mo stopped. He had heard
something.

“Thomas, was that you?” he
asked at the door.

When there was no reply, he
continued, “Thomas, did you just make a—”

Mo stopped as the sound came
again.

“
Did you hear that?” Mo
asked. “Did you hear the car horn?”

Intrigued by the sound, Mo
listened more intently.

“It’s coming from the street,”
he said in realization.

He jogged through to the
lobby, keeping himself flat against the doorjamb to prevent the
zombies pressed against the glass from seeing him.

Through the grime-smeared
windows he could see a beam of light. He peeked round the corner a
little more to see the mob of undead silhouetted against it. The
crowd moved and jostled, not for a better place at the window, but
moving towards the light.

There was something going
on in the street. He could now hear muffled calls above the moaning
of the dead. Cautiously, he edged forward, making sure with every
step that he wasn’t attracting the attention of the creatures on
the other side of the glass. Tight up against the wall, he arrived
unseen at the glass-panelled facade of the lobby.

Nervously, he eased over to
look out the window.

“Mo?” came a voice.

Mo jumped back, his heart
racing.

“Thomas, you scared me,” Mo
admitted.

Thomas stood by the door to the
loading bay near the reception desk.

He asked, “What's going
on?”

“I think there’s someone out
there. Those things are moving away.”

“We getting rescued?” Thomas
asked.

Mo lent out and tried to peer
through the glass.

“
I can’t see a thing,” he
said. “The windows are covered in filth.”

“It looks clearer further up,”
Thomas commented.

Mo grabbed one of the chairs
for the visitors and pulled it over to the window.

“
Over there. It looks
clearest up there,” Thomas said, pointing at the window
pane.

Mo dragged the chair over, no
longer worried about being spotted by the zombies. The creatures
had been drawn to the lights like moths.

He stood up on the chair and
looked out.

“
There’s a car,” he
said.

“Let’s have a look,” Thomas
said, grabbing a chair for himself.

“It’s coming towards us!” Mo
shouted.

The light danced across
the darkened foyer, making the shadows of the corrupt creatures
stretch and twist into even more grotesque shapes. Above the moans
came the thrum of an engine and steady thump of bodies being
punched out of the way by a ton of accelerating metal. The shadows
drew narrower, the light more intense, and the whine of the engine
became a screeching.

The window shattered and the
car came crashing through. Thomas instinctively jumped out of the
way. As he did, all he could see was the after image seared onto
his retina of Mo being swept from the chair.

The engine noise faded to a
contented purr. A soft evening breeze found its way into the now
open foyer, bringing with it the smell of burnt rubber and putrid
flesh.

Thomas pushed himself up. It
was dark. All that he could see was the floating green silhouette
of Mo falling.

He shouted, “Mo!”

A ripple of excited moans
washed over the zombies in the street.

The car door opened and Thomas
heard feet crunching on the broken glass.

“Mo?” Thomas said, pulling
himself up.

As he did, he felt a foot
placed firmly on his shoulders. It pushed down hard, slamming him
back to the ground.