Dying to Live (15 page)

“Lanie, MOVE!” Jo screamed. She had looked up too late. The repugnant thing took her sister in its grasp. Kenco lunged at it, as the girl screeched in pain.

Jo watched in defeat, as her sister screamed. Bao tripped on a loose rock whilst trying to see what was happening to the girls. He fumbled around trying to reach his fallen gun and hold off the rabid, foaming creature.

“Help me!” Lanie squealed. Jo didn’t know what to do, but Kenco already had a mouth full of the Zombie’s leg and was pulling hard. His rippling muscles gave him an advantage, and the zombie snarled in frustration as it lost its grip on Lanie’s arm, gouging deep, red trails in her skin. Anger flared in the fiends eyes when the dog yanked again, shaking its head and pulling the struggling monster to the ground.

“Get my gun!” Bao thundered, still unable to reach it himself.

Lanie was shaking and showed no sign of moving, she just watched in fear. The dog was wrestling with what looked like a skeleton with skin draped roughly over it. It had a puffy, bloated stomach, probably stuffed with human flesh, and obvious strength despite its appearance.

Jo made a dash around the van. Bao looked to be weakening but his arms were managing to keep his attackers teeth just inches from his neck.

“Quickly, girl!” He yelled. She spotted the gun and raced to pick it up. As she rose, she heard a howl that could only have come from Kenco. Tears spiked her eyes and she spun her aim to the ugly miscreation that was looming over Bao. She fired a shot that penetrated one side of the creature’s neck and carried on out of the other side. A mist of blood was enough confirmation for Jo and she didn’t stay to be sure that it was dispatched. Jo ran back to where the howl had come from.

Poor old Kenco was trying his best, fighting to save his family. He had pulled several chunks from its neck, exposing the bone, but it was still very much alive. The zombie he was stood over had already clawed him badly in several places, now it reached up and thrust a hand at his stomach. With one quick movement a mound of intestine dropped out of him in a wet gush. They trailed over the delighted creature and Kenco collapsed on top of it. The zombie shrugged the body off of itself and lurched back to its feet.

The nightmare wouldn’t end for Jo, she looked down for only a second to pull back the hammer on the gun she held, and when she looked back up her sister was under attack again. She heard two simultaneous screams, as Bao succumbed to the zombie attacking him, the one that she had failed to kill, and Lanie found herself back in the others undead clutches.

Bao was in a bad way. When the bullet had torn through his assailant all it had done was give it a quick shock. When it recovered, his strength failed him fast. His attacker had leaned right down and sank its teeth straight into his cheek. The agony was indescribable and the torrent of blood that gushed from it was astonishingly severe. The pain crippled him and his helplessness meant that death followed swiftly. The zombie held Bao’s head between its decaying hands before jerking it backwards, it repeated the motion over and over, cracking his head on the ground. Thankfully Bao lost consciousness long before his skull cracked like an egg shell. Upon hearing the satisfying crunch the zombie gurgled and pulled his victim forward. It used a hand to claw at the bloodied wound on the back of Bao’s head. Skin peeled backwards and shards of bone were visible beneath. The repulsive creature plucked out the broken fragments of skull, sunk its fingers into the hole, and used sheer strength to break open the top of Bao’s head. There was so much blood, as though a massacre of ten people had occurred rather than just one man. It kept snapping off shards of bone until it had made a hole big enough to just reach in and lift out the pinky-grey matter revealed underneath. With Bao’s brain in its hands it lost all interest in anything else. It got to its feet and staggered back the way it had come from, holding the brain like a prize and licking the sticky goop from it as it went.

Lanie panicked in the grasp of the hideous dead man.

“Shoot it, Jo, shoot it!” she shouted desperately. Jo was worried about hitting Lanie instead of the monster. It clutched her shoulders and leaned menacingly close. It was pressed against her, her arms between them pushing against its chest.

“I...” Jo was going to say she couldn’t, but Lanie let out a screech.

“Just shoot it!”

Jo couldn’t look, she aimed and then shut her eyes and hoped for the best. She let off three shots. The first sounded like it hit the van, there was a scream before the second one and the third followed fast behind. Jo opened her eyes.

“Lanie?” She asked pleadingly.

The walking corpse had collapsed to the ground. Some stroke of pure luck had landed a bullet in the things skull. Jo let out a relieved breath before moving her gaze to her sister, who had slumped to the ground.

“Talk to me, are you okay?” Jo rushed to her sisters side and knelt beside her.

There was blood.

Just above Lanie’s left breast there was a bite. It didn’t look to be particularly deep or serious but there were distinct teeth marks.

“No,” Jo denied, trying to contradict her eyes. She shook her head. “You’ll be okay, Lanie.”

Lanie was crying hard, bitter tears and reached a hand up to Jo’s cheek. “No, Joby. It’s the bite that turns people and I can feel it in me now.”

Jo began to cry in earnest, great sobs heaving from her chest and fat, salty tears racing down her cheeks. “Lanie, I love you. Please, don’t let it take you, I’m scared,” she begged.

“Hey, shush now,” Lanie soothed through her own tears. She stroked Jo’s cheek and said, “I’m scared too, but I can’t stop it. You need to get to safety before it turns me. Please, look after Evan. Promise me. I know mom and dad will, but it would mean a lot if you would be there for him in the same way I was. Tell everyone I love them. I love you too.” 

“Oh, Lanie.” Jo could barely speak but she choked out the words. “I’ll take care of Evan, I promise. I know I failed you, but I won’t fail him. I promise. You’re the best sister, you know, I always looked up to you.”

A sad smile curled Lanie’s lips and she shut her eyes. “You have to go now, Joby... Please, go.”

“I can’t, I won’t leave you,” Jo told her, holding tightly to her sister, who’s hand moved from her cheek to push feebly at her.

“Please,” Lanie whispered. But Jo would not. She stayed there clinging to her sister until the last breath left her lips.

With her sister and Bao both dead, one distracted zombie in the vicinity and her sister about to revive at any moment, Jo felt a terror set into her mind. She scrambled to her feet, picked up the gun she had dropped beside her sister and ran for the van. She hadn’t the heart to shoot her own sister and instead she yanked open the driver’s side door of the van. When she had climbed up into it, she slammed the door behind her, thumbed down the lock and slumped down into the seat with her hands over her eyes and cried long and hard.

12.

‘I’d hoped that it wasn’t a sign of our luck that the laptop was broken, and I can’t honestly say that I wasn’t daunted by the thought of going back onto the base, but we had to keep going. We didn’t sit and make a solid plan for going and retrieving another computer. The rough outline that we formed was to: get down there, get into whatever offices Lucy pointed out, get the first computer that we could carry, and get out of there. We talked somewhat about tactics too. Who would be armed with what and what roles we would play. Me and Frank were going to be the ones doing the carrying. If it wasn’t a laptop that we found, it could be heavy and so we had the hold all’s that would fit a small monitor and small tower inside if push came to shove. Me and frank would only have hand guns seeing as our hands would be too full for anything else. Lucy would basically be a guide so that we could get in there and get out again afterwards. She was too nervous to take a shotgun so she only had her handgun, but it was accompanied by the machete I had taken before. Xin, Fiona and Zack were each going to have a shotgun and they would cover us while we packed up what we needed and carried it back. We worked out the kinks and a few other details like the walky-talky’s and Bao and Harry’s job remaining at the cabin, but decided that it was best not to leave it until the next day. Fiona and Zack said goodbye to their family and we were off...”

Pete and Xin took the lead in their car and the squad car followed behind them. The journey down to the base was easy enough. There were a few more walkers than before, usually in small groups, but they were easy enough to manoeuvre around. Some would give chase for a while but were quickly outdriven. The closer the team got, the more nervous they became.

“I think that the zombies are getting more desperate now that there’s nobody left alive on the base,” Pete contemplated out loud as he drove around another small herd. “It seems that they’re venturing further in the hopes of coming across a food source.”

“Is that what we are now? A food source?” Xin asked, looking out of the passenger window at the tattered and dehumanized shapes. Their heads snapped up and they gave chase, at a groggy, stumbling run. It struck Xin that these zombies seemed stiffer and slower than the ones before.

“I know it sounds unfeeling,” Pete continued in response to the question, “but the natural order has changed now. The food chain doesn’t have us at the top of it anymore.”

Xin was barely recognising what Pete was saying and a sudden thought occurred to her.

“Pete, we are calling these things ‘zombies’! The first thing about zombies is that they’re dead! They’re alive again but they died!” Xin was in a hurry to share her revelation.

“Umm... Where are you going with this?” Pete chanced a sideways look at Xin.

“The alien they tested on couldn’t die, but people can. What if the experiments didn’t stop people from dying, they just brought them back? Did you not notice that the group we just passed were slower? They were stiffer too and their skin is changing. They look like...”

“Like they’re wasting away...” Pete said, finally understanding.

“Decomposing,” Xin stated bluntly.

“Doesn’t that mean that a cure isn’t going to help them?” Pete queried.

“It complicates things. I mean, it certainly means that they could probably never be the same again, and the sooner they were treated the better their chances would be. But while they’re still alive there is still some hope. We don’t know anything for sure, we don’t know what the cause of their aggression is either. It is possible that people all react differently to the new genetics.” Xin’s mind was full of questions. “What if the alien genetics aren’t the problem? If that’s not the problem, then maybe that will keep them alive when we find a way to fix the rest?”

A lot of what Xin was trying to explain to Pete didn’t make sense to him. He was a simple man, intelligent, but no scientist. In his eyes if these things were dead and rotting then that was that, case closed, no helping them.

It became apparent that this trip would not be as easy as the last. When the cars drew up to the car park it was swarming with the dead. Even the six of them combined could not take them all on, there were at least twenty of them although Pete thought it looked closer to thirty.

“What now?” Xin asked. Pete looked through the windshield and reluctantly shrugged. The car idled, so far unseen, on the very edge of the car park. Xin almost jumped out of her skin when there was a knock on her window. It was Lucy, who gestured for them to unlock the back doors. When Pete reached around and opened the door for her, she jumped quickly in and shut it behind her.

“I’ve left Frank to drive the other car so I can direct you guys. We can’t fight our way through all of these, we’re not ready for that,” Lucy breathed heavily.

“So, there’s somewhere else?” Pete enquired.

“Everyone who worked further into the base had their own car parks. This was the one I always used, but I’ve worked near the other ones, so I know where they are.” Lucy paused. “We need go that way.” She leaned between the front seats and pointed through the windshield.

It looked as though she was pointing at a group of five zombies, but looking beyond them there was a gap between the buildings. It wasn’t possible to tell that there was a road there from where they were parked. Cars and zombies blocked their view, but they were willing to take Lucy’s word for it and didn’t have many other options.

“We aren’t going to be able to avoid them all, you know,” Pete told the girls as he set the car into drive. “I can try but we may hit a couple.”

“We’ve had to kill them before,” Xin reminded him. “We can’t save them all, even if we come up with a way to make them better.”

“At this point it’s about survival,” Lucy said firmly, more to assure herself than anyone else. “Kill or be killed.”

The dead were too preoccupied and oblivious to move out of the cars way. Upon seeing live people, some of them even threw themselves into the cars path. The best way for them to proceed was to drive as fast as they could manage. If they went too slow the zombies would attach themselves to the cars or climb onto them to try and get at the people inside.

Pete traversed around the parked vehicles that blocked their path on the car park’s outskirts. Once they were clear they sped towards where Lucy had indicated, leaving a path behind them for the other car. The straight stretch was teaming with wandering bodies and it felt unnatural to speed up rather than slow down. Xin and Lucy flinched, Pete wore a look of concentration and determination. The worse part of ploughing through the zombies was not the bloody impact splatters that bloomed on the bonnet and windscreen, it wasn’t even the bodies that went spinning and flying through the air, or the limbs that disconnected and banged on the roof above them. The worst part was the noises. Grunts and groans instead of screams of pain, and the crunching, snapping sound of breaking bones. The car bounced up and down as if they were driving over speed bumps and Lucy closed her eyes in the back seat.

“It’s just speed bumps, it’s just speed bumps,” She chanted to herself.

“It’s okay, we’re almost clear,” Pete reassured her. “Last one.”

The car rocked again and there was a metallic clattering as a body rolled up the bonnet and over the roof. Pete glanced into the rear-view mirror and watched as the body hit the tarmac and disappeared under the wheels of the bloodied police cruiser.

“Where do we go now, Lucy?” Pete asked.

“Just keep straight,” she said, still not opening her eyes. “When you get to the crossroads go right and after a way you’ll see it.”

Nobody wanted to talk. Xin sat in nervous anticipation; she couldn’t wait to be back at the cabin, and fought against the part of her that reminded her she might not make it back. Lucy spent the time feeling angry that she was such a coward and trying to build herself up for what was to come. Pete just kept his eyes on the road, focusing on where they were going and occasionally swapping looks with Frank in the rear-view mirror.

The drive gave them an appreciation for the sheer size of the complex, it took a full fifteen minutes to get to next car park.

“What are the chances that this car park will be overrun too?” Pete asked Lucy. They were still driving past enough zombies for Pete to be concerned.

“I doubt it will be as bad. Back there was the main car park,” Lucy explained. “The further in you get, the more privatised things are and so the car parks are smaller. Each zone has its own, so we have a fair chance with this one.”

“And the cabin’s cameras will still show us this far in?” Pete pushed.

“Not all of them. We’re still not really that far into the base in the grand scheme of things. The cameras in areas where private work was done won’t loop back to the cabin, but we should only need to look in the reception areas and they’re all monitored,” Lucy clarified. Pete nodded and shortly after spotted their destination. He was about to ask Lucy whether it was the right one, but he reminded himself that where they were, they weren’t likely to come across another one by accident.

Thankfully, Lucy was right. The car park was enclosed and marginally deserted. It had a tiny booth where access to the car park was controlled. There would also have been a rising red and white bar that blocked their way unless a security pass was scanned, however, someone who had been in a hurry to leave had obviously driven through it and snapped it clean off. Its broken fragments were scattered around the entrance. There were a few cars dotted about the various parking spaces and two monsters at the far end of the lot. They had obviously not found their way to the exit yet and were clawing at the chain link fence trying to get out.

Pete pulled the car up and parked across two parking spaces. Frank drove in after him and came to a halt beside their car. They turned the engines off quickly.

There was no point in lingering around. The walkers were completely distracted and didn’t seem to have even heard the engines.

Pete hopped out first, reached back in for his bag and then without thinking, slammed his door behind him. This caught the attention of the zombies, who stopped their clawing and, as though in a drunken daze, turned with their whole bodies towards the noise.

The others exited the cars quickly, as a look of realization dawned on the ghastly faces by the fence. One of the creatures was female, the other was male. The female started toward them first and, with a guttural snarl, the male followed. He graduated from a lurching walk to a desperate sprint.

Pete took out his handgun and put a bullet in him. His aim wasn’t perfect and it swayed the dead man backwards without stopping him. Zack and Fiona walked forward and into the path of the oncoming figures with their shotguns drawn. In almost perfect synchronicity, they fired, blowing holes into the assailants’ stomachs and sending them sprawling. With his own bag in hand, Frank walked past them to the zombies who were quickly gaining their feet. Without pause he raised his own handgun and, in quick succession, sent a shot into each of the creature’s heads.

There was a collective sigh of relief and the others headed over to join Frank, Zack and Fiona. Lucy headed for Frank and gave him a quick hug.

“Nice work,” she told him. “Stay by me? Please?”

“Sure thing,” he said giving her a smile.

“Right then, were to?” Pete asked, looking around. The car park was bordered on one side by an expanse of grey concrete building. There was a set of automatic sliding doors set into it and through the glass it appeared that they led into a white hall with a tiled floor.

“I wouldn’t bother with this building,” Lucy offered. “It’s just a sanitization suite.”

“Okay, so we head out of here and over to the next building?” Pete suggested.

“I don’t know the next building well enough to say for sure. I only know the places that I have worked in myself.” Lucy was starting to feel angry at herself. She wanted desperately to help but she was fairly limited. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes and she hastily scrubbed them away.

“It’s okay. Where’s the closest place to here that you have worked?” Pete asked patiently, looking around to make sure nothing was sneaking up on them.

“Ummm...” Lucy thought. “Oh! Wait I think I’ve got it. Come with me.”

Frank stayed by her side as she led the way. Zack and Fiona followed behind them with their shotguns in their arms. Pete and Xin brought up the rear. They kept a constant watchful eye out once they were outside of the security booth and out in the winding chain of roadways.

Lucy led them along the outer wall of the sanitization suite and then along a shaded pathway between the back of that building and the next. The pathway joined with another, wider one.

“We need to go right here,” Lucy turned back and told the others.

“We’ll check it’s clear,” Zack said, with a look at his wife. “You take that way and I’ll check this side,” he told her, gesturing the corners of the buildings.

They worked well together. He and Fiona took opposite sides of the pathway and with a nod, guns at the ready, stepped slowly around the corners with their backs to each other.

“This way’s clear,” Zack told the others, as he turned back around. Fiona didn’t speak immediately. She fired twice, reloaded, and fired twice more.

“This way’s clear too,” Fiona said calmly, as she reloaded her gun.