Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel (10 page)

“Jump down, we need to get the hell
out,” I said.

“What’s wrong, we need to –“

“Just get down!” I shouted.

My heart was pounding and my body was
covered in sweat. From the other end of the warehouse I could hear the infected
moaning. It didn’t matter how dark it was in here; their hunger was so powerful
a drive that they would find their way to us eventually. If we stayed, we would
die.

Justin looked back toward the shelf, but
I grabbed his arm and pulled him along with me. I wasn’t taking any chances. We
just had to get out, and we’d figure out what to do later.

“Kyle!” Justin said, and he stopped. I
tugged at him again, but he wouldn’t budge.

“What is it?” I said

“Listen.”

Despite the blood throbbing in my
eardrums, I listened. That’s when I realised how screwed we truly were. From
the front entrance, our only way out of the building, I could hear laughing and
voices. One voice was louder than all the rest.

It was Torben’s.

Chapter
12

The vice around us tightened with the
infected on one side, and Torben and his hunters on the other. Without any
clear escape and certainly no chance of winning a fight, I was struggling to
work out what we could do. I knelt down in front of the shelf and tugged at
Justin’s coat. He got to his knees.  

Torben turned the corner and entered checkout
area of the warehouse. One of the hunters walked next to him, and two others
hung behind. From their faces, and their lack of curiosity about the place, I
got the impression they’d been here before.

“You reckon they’re still around?” said one
of the hunters. It was the driver of the pick-up truck. He was tall and his
belly pressed tightly against his shirt and spilt over his belt.

Torben looked down and spat on the
floor. “I imagine that on foot and with nothing to eat, they won’t get far.
Come on, let’s load up and head out. I want to be back on the road before it
gets dark.”

The driver shoved his hands in pockets.
On his left arm he had a tattoo sleeve, but I couldn’t make out any other
detail of it in the dark other than the fact it covered all of his skin. “Not
many shelves left.”

Torben brushed his thumb across his
moustache. “Just find one with food and take it all. I don’t want to kick my
heels here when I could be out there finding them.”

Listening to Torben talk about us like
that made it hard to stay hidden. I’d never let a man make me hide before, and
doing it now was like swallowing glass. All things being equal, I could take Torben.
That was the problem though; nothing was equal. The gun slung around his neck
and the three guys he had with him guaranteed that.

I looked at Justin. “We can’t hang
around,” I whispered.

Justin turned away from me and looked
back at the shelf. The food crates were twenty feet up at the top. “We’re not
going to get another chance like this. Look at it all, it’s enough to last a
month.”

“A month of food is no good if we’re
going to die in a few minutes. We need to leave.”

Across the warehouse Torben’s footsteps
echoed up to the rafters. He coughed, cleared something from his throat and
spat again on the floor. He turned to the driver. “They’re still around here, I
know it. Lancashire’s a big place, and they won’t have left it yet.”

“What if they don’t want to be found?”

“Just cause someone doesn’t want to be found,
doesn’t mean they can’t be. “

He was talking about us, I knew, and he
was right. There was no way on earth I wanted him to find us, but then again,
that didn’t mean he couldn’t. This was a prime example – here he was, just
metres away. We were both here by coincidence and with the same goal, but
nonetheless it showed how easy it was to slip up.

Fifty yards behind me, toward the back
of the warehouse, I heard the faint cries of the infected. The ones from the
yard were piling in now, and it wouldn’t be long before they reached us. With
them on one side and the hunters on the other, we didn’t have the luxury of
choice or time. We either fought our way out of either side, or we found
another way to escape.

I turned back to Justin.  “You see any
other way out?”

He looked around him, but his gaze drifted
back to the food behind us. “No,” he said.

“Forget about the tins,” I said.

In front of us, Torben pulled a torch
from his belt and turned it on. The beam of yellow cut through the shadows and
moved through the shelves like a search light.  The driver walked up to him and
put a hand on his shoulder.

“Torbs,” he said, “It’s been two months.
Think we gotta accept that Alicia and Ben are gone. I’m not saying they’re…no
longer with us…, but if they’re still breathing then they don’t want to do it
around us no more.”

The familiarity of the name ‘Torbs’ as
well as the hand on the shoulder told me that these two men were friendly. Yet
when Torben turned his face toward the driver’s, there was a definite look of
scorn.

“I’m not giving up on my wife and son,”
he said.

My head span. The driver mentioned
searching for someone for two months. Justin and I only met Torben a day and a
half ago, and if he’d been tailing me for a couple of months I’d know about it.
Now there was the mention of his wife and kid. What the hell was going on?

Who was Torben looking for? Justin and
me, or his wife and son? I hadn’t just imagined him telling me he was going to
hunt us.

Either way, I knew that if he saw us, he
would kill us. That much was obvious, and I wasn’t staying here to chance it. We
were going right now, and no matter how screwed we were by leaving
empty-handed, we would deal with the consequences later.

I turned to look at Justin, but I saw
that he was gone. I looked back at the shelf with the food on it, and I saw
that he was already halfway up.  I felt my face start to heat up. He’d done it
again; he’d disobeyed me when I specifically told him to do exactly as I said.
The kid was a cheeky little bastard and a liability, and I was done with him. I
clenched my fist and felt the blood drain out of it.

I was going to have to drag Justin off
the shelf and pull him out of the building by his hair. After that, I didn’t
know what I would do with him. But I couldn’t trust him to do what I said, and
that made him a danger to me. I’d already broken enough of my rules by taking
him with me, and now it was time to stop.

As I got to my feet I banged my head straight
into the shelf next to me. A metal clang rang out into the acoustics of the
warehouse, and I saw Torben’s head snap in my direction. Out of instinct I
ducked down. My head stung from where I had hit it, but for the moment my heart
was beating so quickly that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.

Torben flicked his torch in my direction
and the beam of light hit my eyes. I squinted and ducked my head.

“Boys,” he said with joy in his voice,
“They’re here. The hunt is on!”

There was no point in subtlety now. I
ran over to the shelf, not caring about the sound my boots made on the floor. AS
I ran I could just about make out the bodies of the infected as they shuffled
closer toward us. When I got to the shelf, Justin was already at the top of it.

He looked down at me. “Kyle – heads up.”

Adrenaline shot through my body.  Trying
to keep track of both the scuffling of the oncoming infected and the scrambling
movements of the hunters as they ran toward us fogged my brain, and I couldn’t comprehend
what Justin was saying.

“Stop screwing around.” he hissed.
“Catch!”

When the crate was halfway through the
air my brain cells fired and I realised what he meant – he wanted me to catch
the crate of cans that was hurtling down toward me. I took a step back, tensed
my muscles and readied myself. As the crate hit my forearms I felt my thigh
muscles buckle a little, but I steadied my feet and stood firm. I put the crate
down on the floor next to me. My face felt red with the strain, and I realised
I was badly out of shape.

“Flank them,” said Torben somewhere
behind me. “Trap them in, and if they come at you, don’t kill them.”

The footsteps scattered out from all
directions. Although opening the delivery doors had let in a little light, the
warehouse was still too dark to make out anything but the most immediate space
around me, so I couldn’t see where the hunters were coming from. The only
person I was sure of was Torben, and that’s because he had his torch pointed in
my direction. Above, on the top shelf, Justin looked down and waited for me to tell
him what to do.

I needed to do something. This was no
fair fight, and if all four of them managed to corner me then my odds would
drop to zero.

I looked to my right. The shelves were
all arranged in rows, and they were all so close that if one fell, it was
possible the rest could topple. If I could get a domino effect going, maybe I’d
get lucky at hit one of the hunters. Maybe this was a ridiculous plan, but in
my head I could see the shelves toppling. At the very least, a bunch of giant
metal shelves falling in front of them ought to slow them down.

“Hang on,” I said to Justin.

I walked to the row of shelves next to
us pushed against it. Although the shelves of this one were empty it was still
a twenty-foot high metal construction, and I wasn’t exactly in a peak physical
state. It took a lot of straining, but soon I managed to get it moving. As I
kept my weight on it and shoved, the shelf started to rock with its own
momentum. Soon it tipped so far forward that for a second I thought my plan was
going to work.

When it turned the other way and rocked
back in my direction, I felt my chest flood with panic. I moved out of the way
and watched it fall. It was going to hit Justin’s shelf, and there was nothing
I could do to stop it.

“Jump,” I told him.

I was too late. The shelf leaned back
like a tower block blasted with a demolition charge and it smashed into Justin’s
shelf. Both metal structures made a creaking sound and fell to the floor,
spraying metal and loose cans around the warehouse.

“Justin!” I said. I couldn’t see where
he had landed.

The hunter’s footsteps were closer now,
but I still couldn’t see them. To my left the moans of the dead were getting
louder. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Justin’s body, nor could I hear him.
This worried me; if he had fallen and hurt himself, I would have heard him
shout about it. Injuries meant pain, and pain meant screaming. Screaming meant
you were still alive.

Silence could mean anything.

I was about to take off to my left when
I heard the stomp of a boot to the right of me.  I turned my head and saw a
hunter in front of me. He was a giant guy; six foot three, completely bald and he
had a butcher’s knife in his hand.

“Got ‘im!” the man shouted.

There were a few acknowledging shouts,
and footsteps started in our direction.

He looked at me and a smile spread
across his lips. “The man who catches the pig usually gets first choice of
cut,” he said.

I thought about reaching for my own
knife, but judging from the size of this guy there was no chance of me beating
him. I looked over at the collapsed shelves. If Justin was buried underneath
them there was no way he’d be coming out of nowhere to help me, like he had
back at the barricade. I hoped he wasn’t buried. Wherever he was, there wasn’t
a damn thing I could do.

As I desperately tried to think up any solution
that didn’t result in my complete surrender, an unseen ally came to my rescue.
Behind the hunter, the head of an infected appeared, and he had his eyes set on
the human flesh in front of him. I could have warned the man, I could have told
him what was happening, but I said nothing. The sight of the infected made me
instinctively flex my hands, but this time I kept them at my sides.

The infected sank its teeth into the
hunter’s shoulders and tore at the skin and flesh that covered his shoulder
blade. The man screamed, and blood splashed all over his clothes and onto the
floor. He made a sound that was almost a gurgle as the infected dragged a
stringy sinew of skin off his back. He turned and tried to fight it, his eyes
wide with sheer panic.

This was my only chance. Torben and the others
would be here in seconds, and the other infected were closing in. I looked
across to my left and saw a sign for a manager’s office. Surely there would be
a way out through there?

The only problem was that escaping now
meant leaving Justin behind. I still didn’t like the kid, but there was a
chance he was still living. And if he was, it meant that he’d feel it when the infected
found him and started to tear shreds off him.

I couldn’t abandon him to that.