Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel (11 page)

I sprinted over to the collapsed
shelves. My heart juddered like a drill, and the adrenaline shot that had been
dumped into my bloodstream was so intense it felt like I was on speed. Just
before I reached the shelves I heard a voice above me. I looked up.

In the ceiling, his head poking out
through an air vent, was Justin.

I opened my mouth to speak.

“I’ll explain later,” he said, cutting
me off. “Meet me out front. And don’t forget the food.”

I found the crate of tins on the floor
and heaved it onto my shoulder. My body was so jacked up that I felt like I
could have carried six of them. I left the moans of the infected and the cries
of the hunters behind and ran toward the manager’s office. As I grabbed the
door handle and started to turn, I heard a familiar voice.

“Didn’t expect this to be over so soon,”
he said.

I span round and saw Torben stood there,
his gun pointed at my chest. Behind him was the body of the giant hunter who I
had let get attacked by the infected. The monster that had bitten his shoulder
was dead, its head completely crushed, but two other infected had taken its
place and they dug through the hunter’s stomach with their hands and shovelled
parts of him into their mouths.

Torben stood in as casual a posture as
you could imagine, oblivious to sounds of the monsters eating his friend and
the danger of the other infected that moved through the darkness.

“How about we pause the game,” I said, knowing
I didn’t have many options open to me but to buy a little time.

Torben raised his rifle at my face. He
was fifteen feet away, and something told me that there was no chance he’d
miss.

“I think not. I promised I’d hunt you
down, and I’ve done it. I hope the boy isn’t dead yet though; he looked like he
had potential.”

He moved his finger to the trigger and
was about to pull it, when the driver ran up to him. His shoulders were tight
and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Torbs – we gotta get out. Mick and
Bailey are dead, and there’s about forty of the fuckers coming in.”

This was my chance to leave. The
manager’s office was behind me, and through it there had to be an escape. As I
was about to turn I heard a gunshot and felt the impact of something hit the
front of me, knocking the wind out of me. I dropped the crate of cans to the
floor. I couldn’t breathe, and for a second, I couldn’t even think. I’d been
hit. This was it.

Only, I wasn’t dead yet. And while I was
still living, I wouldn’t let him get back. I turned and stumbled into the
office, slamming the door behind me. From the warehouse I heard the cries of
the infected and Torben’s gun fired again, but this time it wasn’t in my
direction.

In the manager’s office I stopped to
catch my breath. I looked down at my chest and expected some gaping hole from
the gun shot. Instead, I saw red spaghetti stains splotched down my shirt.
Torben’s bullet had hit the food crate.

I let out a long sigh, and then
collected myself.

I followed a series of doors that took
me out of the manager’s office, and sure enough they led me out of the
warehouse. When I got outside and the sunlight hit my eyes I felt a wave of
relief. I squinted and let my eyes adjust to the sun shine.

“Kyle!”

I looked up. Justin was perched above me
on a ledge about thirty feet in the air. His eyes were wide, and he shook
slightly as he stared at the ground.

“Get down, we need to move,” I said.

He held the ledge tightly. “I can’t do
it,” he said.

I didn’t have time for this. Right now,
the hunters were occupied by the infected. This was the best chance we would
have to get out of here.

“Kid, get the fuck down or I’ll leave
you. That’s your choice – jump or die.” I turned my back on him and started to
move away from the warehouse, my pulse racing and my lungs struggling to take
in enough air.  I had to get away.

I heard Justin let out a cry behind me,
and then there was a thud as he hit the floor. He screamed. I snapped round,
and saw him on the floor.

He led on the floor like an injured
footballer, clutching his ankle and groaning.

“Can you walk?” I said.

He put his hand on the floor and tried
to move his weight onto it. I walked over, put my hand under his armpit and
pulled him up. He tried to take a few steps on his hurt ankle, but he winced
with each one.

“Think I’ve done it in,” he said.

I looked at Justin nursing his ankle and
I wondered if things could get any worse. The hunters knew exactly where we
were, we were leaving without any food and after his injury Justin was going to
slow us down even more.

The world had it in for me.

Chapter
13

Waves rippled out from one end of the
reservoir to the other. The water beneath was murky and gave no clue as to the
depths it held, and the darkness inside it seemed to hold the promise of dark
secrets. I wouldn’t have liked to swim in there.

The path to David’s ran alongside the
reservoir and span out into a country side full of knobbly hills and, further
on, patches of forest. This particular route had once been used by seventeenth
century merchants who shipped wool across Lancashire, and years ago, Clara and
I had walked it on sunny Sundays afternoons when we wanted to get out of the
house.

Justin sat by the smouldering fire. The
smoke drifted up into the sky in patches, and the embers glowed red. He had his
right legged crossed over his left and he was tying a sock around his ankle.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He looked up at me and blinked. “It’s
for support.”

I had to take a deep breath. For the
last two days since leaving the wholesalers it had been tough to keep a handle
on the burning feeling that rose in my chest. My fists were constantly clenched
and my whole body was so tense I felt like I was going to snap in half.

Back at the warehouse Justin had done what
he swear he wouldn’t; he’d gone against my instructions and done his own thing.
I told him to stick with me and we’d escape, but instead he climbed to the top
of a twenty foot shelf to get food and tried to be a hero. Now he’d screwed up his
ankle and he was walking like a damn cripple, and the journey to the reservoir
had taken us two days when it should have taken six hours.

I should have just left him. Why should
I support him and set myself back days because hop along can’t match my pace
anymore? He did this to himself.

But I couldn’t leave. He knew where the
farm was, and I wasn’t giving up.

My face was starting to get red again. I
walked over to the fire and stomped on it. The embers hissed under my boot and
sparks shot out from the side. I ground my teeth and then spoke, trying my best
to keep my tone level.

“What did I tell you, Justin? What did I
make you promise to me?” I said, losing the fight to keep the contempt out of
my voice.

He lifted his head a little. He looked
ashamed. “To listen.”

“So why didn’t you do that, damn it?”

 I took a deep breath. I curled my hands
into a fisted and pressed the middle of my palm with the tip of my fingers. It
was a technique Clara had shown me to calm me down, but this time it didn’t
work. I looked at the kid in front of me and all I could think was how he’d
broken my GPRS and forced me to take him along, about how he’d ignored my instructions
at every turn and got us in such a mess that we weren’t getting to the farm
this side of Christmas. I looked at the boy and all I saw was someone who was
ruining everything for me. A stupid little kid who didn’t know what he was
messing with.

Everything I did was for my promise to
Clara, and he was fucking it up.

Who the hell did he think he was?

My veins pulsed, and my skin felt hot. I
started to feel my head go fuzzy and knew I wasn’t going to be able to think properly
because the anger was taking over. I raised my right boot in the air.

“God damn it!” I screamed.

I kicked what was left of the fire and
sent red embers flying in all directions. Justin twisted his body away and
moved back to avoid being hit. His eyes were wide and his face started to drain
white. As the last of the red embers turned black and fell to the earth, I
picked up my bag.

“We’re moving.”

Justin didn’t move. He had his knees
drawn up to his chest and rested his head on them.

“Get up. You’ve wasted enough of our
time.”

He still didn’t move. I took a deep
breath and walked over to him. Was he crying? I couldn’t tell. I felt a pang in
my chest, and the hot feeling that was burning through me started to fade. This
wasn’t me. It was just the situation making me feel like this. It was like
everything turned to shit at the slightest opportunity, and my options were
narrowly dwindling away.

We had no supplies, no energy and we had
a group of hunters close on our tracks. Now the only thing we could do was get
a car, and to do that I had to go see my brother-in-law, David.

***

We crossed the road and walked by the
side of the reservoir. Something about the pool of water and the way the hills
were positioned around it collected the wind and made it snap around our heads.
My ears started to hurt, and I could see Justin’s turning red.

“Put your hood up,” I said.

He reached behind him and lifted his
hood over his head, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t spoken since I had
gone mad and kicked the fire. For me, there was nothing wrong with the silence.
But I couldn’t have him in a mood. I needed him to listen to me and do what I
said, so I needed to snap him out of it.

We reached the merchant’s pathway that
turned away from the reservoir. If we followed it for ten minutes, we would
reach the old building that David had taken as his home sometime after Clara
died and we went our separate ways.

“Sit down a minute,” I said.

I sat down on a bench next to the
reservoir, and Justin did the same. Behind us the waves gently lapped. Today
would have been a perfect day for wind surfing.

I looked at the kid. There were dark
rings under his eyes, and his face was drained of colour. “I’m sorry,” I said.

He looked up at me and arched his eyebrows
quizzically.

“It’s important to me,” I said, “Getting
to the farm. And when you do something to fuck it up, I can’t help but get a
little upset.”

He cleared his throat. His voice was the
quietest I’d ever heard it. “What’s so special about it? You obviously can’t
stand having me around, so what’s so good about the farm you put up with me to
get there?”

His voice sounded hurt, and I knew
everything he said was true. If I could have had my way, the GPRS would be
working and Justin would have been back in Vasey. But things hadn’t worked out
like that, and you had to work with what you had. Besides, there were some
things he could do that came in useful, I guess. He wasn’t a total pain in the
arse.

I looked at him and I suddenly saw him
for what he was; just a lonely kid with no family. He wanted an escape route,
and when he saw me, he took it. He knew he didn’t belong with the people in
Vasey, that he was different from them all. Maybe Justin and I were similar
after all.

I thought about his question and what to
say to him. It was hard, the feeling of having to share something, but the hurt
in the boy’s voice stung me. It wouldn’t kill me to tell him a little more
about the farm.

“I promised someone very special to me
that I’d get them there. It was a few years ago, after all everything kicked
off.”

“Who was it?”

I took a deep breath. “My wife. The farm
was her father’s. We didn’t live up North; we’d driven here to visit his farm
when all of this kicked off. That’s why I still had it programmed into the
GPRS.”

“You’ve got a Northern accent though.”

I smiled. “I was born here, but Clara
and I left Lancashire and moved to London. My mates never forgave me.” I smiled
to myself when I remembered the stick my friends would give me for becoming
what they called a ‘London yuppie’.

Justin wiped his nose. “So you’ve been
to the farm before then, if it was her dad’s?”

I shook my head. “All the time I knew
her – Christ, a decade – Clara never spoke to him. No family meals, no birthday
cards, nothing. They couldn’t stand each other, and it was over something so
damn petty. And then one day, completely out of the blue, he picked up the
phone.  So we loaded up the car and drove up here.”

“How come you didn’t make it?”

I looked into the water of the reservoir
and tried to see to the bottom, but it was too dense to make out anything but a
dark brown tint. The wind nipped at my ears.

“Before we got there,” I said, “the
world ended.”

There was a few seconds of silence as we
both stared into the pool of water. Somewhere above, a bird squawked.  I turned
my head to Justin. The boy was leant forward with his elbow propped up on his
leg and his chin resting in his palm. His eyes were deep and engrossed in
thought.

I cleared my throat. “I made a promise; 
I told Clara I’d get us there; that whatever state the farm was in, we would
fix it up and make it our own. It wasn’t the greatest plan in the world, but it
was the best we had. Better than living day to day with a target on your back.
We could get crops plants, fix the farm up. We’d never need anybody every
again.”

“Sounds like a great plan,” said Justin.

***

We walked through the merchant path.
Years ago it had been a stone walkway that cut a clear trail through the grass,
but after fifteen maintenance-free years it was covered in weeds and the stone
was cracked. The hills to either side of us offered a little protection from
the cutting wind.

As we got nearer to David’s house, my
heart hammered. I hadn’t seen him in years, and the way we left it hadn’t
exactly been friendly. I knew he’d be pissed off at me, especially when I came
to him asking for his car. If I could have thought of any solution, no matter
how difficult, I would have turned around in an instant.

 Justin kept his head down and walked,
which hopefully meant his curiosity about me was satisfied for the time being.
I still felt anger faintly twisting in my chest over what he’d done, but I knew
it wouldn’t do us any good to take it out on him.

“Your steps are getting quieter,” I
said.

He nodded.

I tried to smile at him. “Well done.”

Ten minutes later we reached what passed
for David’s house. It was a red-bricked building that had once stored pumps
that helped in some way toward filtering water from the reservoir. The pumps
had been removed years ago, and ever since then the building had been left to
fall apart. There were four windows cracked with dust, and at one side of the
building there was a power generator, though it wasn’t switched on.  There was
space at the back of the building for a yard, which is where his car would be.

Justin started to walk ahead, but I put
a hand on his shoulder.

“Steady on, kid. Wait a minute.”

“Isn’t this where your brother lives?”

“Brother in law.”

“Whatever, what’s the problem?”

I scratched my chin. “You’ll see.
David’s…not quite right.”

I stared at the building for a few
minutes, trying to find a sign of life, but I couldn’t see anything. I looked
at the generator again. Despite that it wasn’t humming right now, I knew it
would be a working power supply. David was a genius at things like that,
mechanical stuff. Electronics, cars, computers, power, you name it, he had a
working knowledge of it. These days, that was a valuable skill to have. It was
a pity his personality made people want to get a hundred miles away from him.

I opened my mouth and filled my lungs
with air. “Let’s go.”

We walked down a path and toward the
front door.  I knocked on it, three taps that shattered the stillness of the air.

“David?”  I said.