Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel (7 page)

I looked at the
barricade again. It might not have been air tight - there were gaps in it here
and there - but there sure as hell wasn't enough room for a person to fit
through.

"Don’t be
stupid," I said.

He looked at me
with a wounded look on his face. "I'm telling you, Kyle. There's a way.
Stop being so stubborn and listen to me." He walked over to the barricade.
"Lemme go first then, and prove it."

I was going to
tell him to shut up and let me think, but before I could say anything he moved
a shopping trolley as much as he could to one side to work enough room to
squeeze into. With that, he squirmed his way through the barricade. I looked at
the hole that he had left, and there was no way I was going to fit my frame
through it. I was considerably bigger than Justin, and I was nowhere near as
agile. The kid was like a rat.

I bit my tongue
and tried to fight back the rising anger that I could feel building. Why had he
gone off like that? Way back when we started, hadn't I specifically told him
that he had to do everything I said, that he mustn’t act on his own? Yet he had
gone and done just that, leaving me stood on my own, trapped and with twenty of
the infected closing in. Just wait until I got hold of him; the strangling was
going to seem like a treat compared to what I would do this time.

The infected
were close enough now that I could make out what passed for their faces. I
could see their expressions - blank for the most part, yet there was something
like desire in their eyes, something in their stares that glimmered. It was
likely a hunger for my flesh, but it was proof enough to me that something
about them was still alive, even though they weren’t people.

At their pace,
I had five minutes until they reached me. I still had my knife, and with that I
could probably take a few of them out, but with no space to fight and nowhere
to run, this was a battle I was sure to lose.

Above me the
sky had taken on a late-afternoon grey tint. It was getting dark, and we were
supposed to be out of the village by now. I looked at the barricade. Where the
hell was the kid?

"Justin?"
I shouted, no longer caring about making a noise.

There was no
answer.

I weighed up my
options. As I saw it, I only had two; fight the twenty infected on my own, or
try and get through the barricade.

I put my knife
back in my belt and walked up to the wall of scrap metal. I found the part that
Justin had squeezed through, and I pushed on the shopping trolley to try and
make a little more room for myself. Blowing out as much air as I could to make
my body smaller, I crawled forward. I worked my way slowly through the
barricade, squeezing my body into a much smaller space than it had any right to
fit. Through squirming carefully and sucking in my stomach, I could almost see
an exit.

And then I got
stuck.

I tried to move
my body, but it was wedged right between two blocks of metal. I felt my chest
tighten and adrenaline shot through me as the panic took over. No matter how
much I tried I couldn't move. Outside the barricade and on the high street, the
infected were so close that I could hear them moan. My legs poked out of the
barricade and soon they would be an open target for the infected to chew on. I
was going to be eaten alive.

Or half of me
was, anyway.

I started
breathing noisily heavily though my nostrils, and it was all I could do now to
shout out madly. "Justin," I said in as calm a voice as I could.
"If you're here, I need your help right fucking now."

When no reply
came, I suspected the worst for him. For now though, his wellbeing was the
furthest thing from my mind. This was it for me. The infected were getting
closer to my outstretched legs, and I was completely stuck.

From outside
the barricade, a gun popped off. There was the sound of bodies hitting the
pavement as the gun exploded several times, and then it stopped. My heart
hammered. I twisted and turned and slowly shifted the metal off me and backed
my way out. I managed to move my body around so that the top half of me was out
of the barricade, but my leg was still trapped. I looked up and saw what the sounds
had been.

A man was
there. A man with a gun and a grin.

Chapter 8

There were still five stray infected
all within a feet of him, but the man didn’t seem to care. One of them stumbled
close, but he sidestepped, got behind it and drove a hunting knife through its
head with a crack, sending bloody skull fragments to the floor. He wiped the
blade on his green khaki trousers.

As he walked over to me his steps
were almost playful, and despite how heavy his boots looked, they didn’t make a
sound on the ground. Justin could learn something about stealth from this guy.
He had a thick brown moustache that curled over his top lip and into his mouth,
which must have been irritating, and his eyes were small, squinty, and gave him
an almost sneering look.  I wondered if his army khakis meant he was in the
military, or if he was one of those guys who just loved to pretend he was.

Before getting to me he stopped above
the body of one of the infected. It was a little boy who wore a blue t-shirt.
The man put his foot underneath the boy’s body and gave a kick, flipping him
over. On the boys t-shirt, faded but just about there, was the outline of a
train. The man looked at the boy’s face as though he was trying to recognise
him, but attempting to see any facial features was made impossible through
fifteen years of infection. He shook his head and turned his attention back on
me.

I moved my foot and tried to pry it
loose inch by inch, but it wouldn’t move. The weight of the metal on it was
such that if I moved too much, the whole barricade was going to shift itself
onto me and break my foot, and then I really would be screwed. I could still
move my arms though, so I reached to my waist and pulled out my knife. I looked
at the man and wondered if I’d get time to use it.

He lifted his gun up in the air and
gave a sideways nod to it, with a mocking look in his eyes.

“Gun beats knife,” he said. His voice
was gravelly, like a boot crunching on glass.

He was right, I knew. If things went
bad I could swing my knife all I wanted, but all he had to do was take a step
back out of my reach, pull the trigger and I’d be done. With the metal sheets
trapping my leg, I was completely at his mercy. Behind him, the four infected
were slowly making their way toward us. I felt sweat trickle down my forehead.

The man took a step closer and knelt in
front of me so that his head was only a little higher than mine. Up close he
had the same unwashed smell that most of us travellers had, so it was obvious
he wasn’t from Vasey. He also smelt faintly of Old Spice, and I didn’t know
where he could have gotten that from, or why. What did it matter how we smelt
these days? He had a dark leather belt around his waist. On one side of it was
a sheath for his knife, and then wrapped around the rest of it were what seemed
to be parts taken from various animals – a couple of rabbits paws, presumably
for luck, and some teeth that looked like they were from an alligator, though
he must have ordered these online before the infection. As I followed the trail
of animal memorabilia hung around his belt my eyes snapped onto something, and
I felt a cold shiver run through me.

There was a human ear on his belt. It
was torn and mangled, but unmistakably human.

I remembered what Justin had said about
the hunters, and suddenly it didn’t seem so stupid. The need to free my leg
became more urgent, and the feeling of being trapped jabbed at me. It was a
struggle to control my breathing, and my chest felt tight. Behind us, getting
closer still, the infected moved toward us.

“Name’s Torben,” he said. His voice was
as rough as sandpaper. “Torben Tusk.”

I looked down at my leg, but there was
no way I could get myself free. It would take someone to hold up the metal while
I dragged myself out, and Torben didn’t move to help. I still had my knife in
my hand, but he was knelt in such a way that he could easily move himself back
if I took a swing at him. The infected were moving slowly toward us right now,
but they would speed up when they got closer, and at that point I would need
Torben to take care of them or they would be on me.

Where the hell was Justin? I wanted to
look at the other side of the barricade to where he had squirmed his way
through, but I didn’t want to draw Torben’s attention to it. The longer he
thought I was alone, the better.

My only option was to see what he
wanted, and hope he didn’t want one of my ears for his belt. I was conscious of
the fact that my bag was on the floor a few feet away from me, and in it were
the bulk of our supplies as well as the broken GPRS. I prayed Torben didn’t
notice it.

Torben wiped his knife on his khakis
again. He brought the tip of it toward his mouth and stuck his tongue out so
that it was millimetres away from the blade. I thought of the lingering
infected atoms that would still be on the silver, just waiting to enter a new
host.

“Peculiar, don’t you think? One little
nick from this blade, and in a few days I’ll be one of them,” he said,
gesturing behind him. He didn’t seem to care that the four infected were only
fifty feet away and headed in his direction.

I stayed quiet and kept my eyes focussed
on him, waiting for the slightest of movements in my direction. As silently as
I could, I twisted my foot and tried to make room to pull it out.

He held the blade of the knife in front
of him as if transfixed. “We’re all living like this – inches away from the
knife edge. Makes you wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just give in and
become one of them.”

The infected were forty feet away now.
Where was Justin?

Torben leant in a little closer. “How’d
you come to be in this fix?”

I feigned a smile. “I slipped.”  I
needed to play nice as much as I could, but I wasn’t telling him anything.

“Accidents happen easier than you think,
‘specially now. You from town?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

He turned his head away from me and looked
at my rucksack on the floor. As he moved, I saw an infected closing in behind
him less than ten metres away. My heart pounded. Should I warn him, or should I
let it pounce on him? I didn’t trust the guy an inch, and he gave off a vibe
that made me want to get far away. But once the infected was done with him, it
would eventually turn its attention toward me. Justin was gone and I was stuck,
and I’d be helpless as all four of the infected ripped me to pieces.

The infected was five steps away.

“Behind you,” I said.

Without even looking first, Torben
readied his knife and span his body, connecting with the stomach of the
infected and slashing a deep gash through its skin. Through the tear in its
abdomen the infected’s rotten guts slipped out and slapped onto the floor.
Torben sprang to his feet, hooked his right leg behind the infected and pushed
it to the ground. He walked around to its head, lifted his boot in the air and
brought it down with all his weight. The infected’s skull caved like a
watermelon and sprayed bits of blood and bone onto the road.

Somewhere behind me, I heard the sound
of someone retching. I couldn’t move my head because that meant taking the
effort to reposition my whole body, and this would draw Torben’s attention to
what I was trying to look at. I knew who was being sick behind the barricade.
It had to be Justin. I just hoped he had the sense to keep quiet.

In front of me, Torben lifted his leg,
propped it awkwardly on his knee and tried to balance. He picked at the grills
of his boots with his knife and dug out a piece of flesh that had lodged
between them.

“These are great in the snow, but they’re
a bitch to clean,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, what’ve we got here?” He walked
toward my rucksack, unzipped it and began to look through it.

The sight of the stranger fishing
through my things made my blood run hot. I tried to pull my leg toward me, but
the metal wouldn’t budge.  As Torben looked through my bag, I slowly moved my
body so that I could get a view of the other side of the barricade. I managed
to do it without him seeing, and on the other side of the barricade, there he
was.  Sure enough, it was Justin, and his face was pale.

I flicked my head to the side, trying to
tell him to run. Justin took a few seconds to comprehend my instructions, but
he got them wrong. Instead of running, he started to climb the barricade. He
put his foot onto a metal dustbin and began to work his way up.

To my left Torben pulled his hand out of
my bag, and he had my GPRS in his palm. My heart pounded.

“Haven’t seen one of these in years.” he
said excitedly. “Good thinking, using one. Course I remember once getting
rerouted fifty miles and almost driving into a lake on account of one of these
buggers.”

He pushed the on button. For a second, I
worried that it would work, and that the route to the farm would flash on the
screen. I didn’t want Torben to know where we were going.

“Broken?” he asked.

“It’s a piece of shit,” I said.

He put it in his jacket pocket. The
sight of him taking what was mine made me want to get up and beat the crap out
of him, but all I could do was grind my teeth and keep calm.

“Where were you headed?” he asked.

“Just wandering.”

“A fella from the town, leaving behind
those cushy walls with a GPRS and a bag full of food? I’m no Sherlock, but to
me that ain’t just wandering. ”

What could I say to him? That I was a
scout sent by the town to see what I could find? That I just fancied a road
trip? I needed something to tell him; anything but the truth.

“I got kicked out,” I said.

Torben walked over to me. He raised his
boot and then brought it slowly down onto my arm, pinning it to the floor. I
could feel the moisture on his boots from where he had stomped on the
infected’s head, and the pressure of his foot made me drop my knife. I was
powerless.

Behind him, the three remaining infected
were closing in on their meal.

Torben’s eyes narrowed on mine now, and
his voice was rough. “Don’t fuck with me. Nobody leaves that town – nobody. And
to do it with a bag full of beans, means you got a plan. It must be pretty damn
important to risk the wilds.”

He pushed down a little harder on my
arm, and I started to feel it go numb as the blood drained from it. I said
nothing.

“Now either you tell me where you’re
going, or you can talk to the freaks behind me instead,” he said, gesturing
toward the infected.

As I contemplated what to tell him,
there was a clang of steel from the top of the barricade and Justin leapt off
it, slamming straight into Torben and knocking him to the floor. The man led
there for a second and tried to suck in a deep breath, but he was winded.

Justin was the first to his feet. He
readied his knife in his hand with an awkward grip. Torben looked up at him
from the floor. A smile spread across his face, and he laughed.

“Look at the little stalker boy,” he
said.

Justin looked like he was shaking, and
his face was still white, but he didn’t take his eyes off Torben.

“Come to rescue your dad?” said Torben.

“He’s not my dad.”

“No, you got more guts than him by the
looks of it.”

Torben took a step toward Justin, but as
he got closer, he held his hands up to show there was nothing in them.

“Come now, let’s play nice. No need for
us to get off on the wrong foot.”

I was about to tell Justin not to trust
him, but Justin had already dropped his knife, suckered in by Torben’s gesture
of peace. Torben took another step, raised his fist and clocked Justin in the
face, sending him to the ground.

I tugged at my feet but the metal wouldn’t
budge. I still had my knife, but it wasn’t going to help much. My thoughts were
flying through my head as the blood rushed through my skull. What was I going
to do? Was he going to kill Justin in front of me and leave me for the
infected?