Great Bitten: Outbreak (23 page)

“I got it. Go find Carla for me.”

“Yeah it’s the only husband duty I’ll be doing for you. This isn’t Norfolk.”

Rick coughed, trying to laugh. “Go Warren. There’s no time.”

I ran through the arcade, looking to see if there was anyone left inside. Oz must have corralled them all at the top of the pier for lift-off. I more felt than heard as the helicopter moved overhead. I swore to myself and hoped that Oz had elected to run in the second lift, if it were coming. Beyond all hope though, I didn’t think he’d wait longer than a single extra second to get his overweight carcass off this cursed length of glorified decking. I stumbled, falling in to a coin-pusher and cursing as it jarred my hip. I felt like fate’s wrecking ball.

I was right. When I got outside I couldn’t see anything hovering over the end of the pier. I looked out left and thought I could make out another flying dot on the horizon, but couldn’t be certain. That wasn’t my immediate concern. The screams were my immediate concern. The crying. I rounded the corner of the nightclub at a hobbling run and around me was nothing but chaos. The wood, once grey-green and worn with the wear of years and the never-ending erosion of saltwater was now slippery and slick with angry red blood.
It was quite literally everywhere and I found myself carefully placing my feet to stop myself from slipping over. There was no sign to where it came from. I had my suspicions though, and there was only one place the screaming could be coming from. A shattering of glass told me to head up in to the old club. I skidded that way. Grasping on to the handrail for support I felt along the surface – it was slick and my hand came away bloody. I tried to run up but my legs didn’t want to listen to my brain, which wasn’t exactly working at full capacity. I was panicking and I knew it, and I also knew that every time I had panicked so far I had made mistakes. And I was chalking up far too many mistakes than was reasonable, even with every admissible circumstance we had at stake.

My worst fears were met at the top of the stairs. The door was being hammered, hard, and an axe rested across the handle to stop anyone from getting out. The glass had already been broken through as whoever was trapped inside tried to make their way out. A hand shot out, scrambling around looking for the handle. A shard of glass already stuck out the top of the forearm and the screaming never let out.
I only thought for a brief second before grabbing at the axe to free the door. The hammering pushed the axe handle as I closed my good hand around it, trapping my fingers. I swore again, unsure if there were any limbs left that weren’t in pain.

“Leave the door! Leave the fucking door! I’ll get you out!”

I kicked the axe, not trusting my arms any more. It took three full boots before it dislodged and fell to the side with a heavy clatter. The door flew open immediately and Lana landed in my open arms. She was followed by Pete, who slammed the door closed.

“Put it back! Put it… argh fuck!”

The door was slammed open as bodies threw themselves against it. Their weight was too much and Pete was thrown back. Trapped between the door and the railing, half his body was left prone as a little body shot out and dug teeth in to his leg. Lana rolled out of my grip, struggling hard to get away. She lost her footing and fell backwards down the stairs, her arms flailing in shock. I couldn’t bring myself to watch her fall. I looked back at Pete and tried to pull him. It was Heather’s child biting in to him and the press of bodies behind told me just what had happened to the rest of the people on the pier. They weren’t all dead, but they were all bleeding. The child was pulled away by an adult biter, all focus and intent on the morsel directly in front of them. Pete howled in agony as teeth tore in to his side. There was no rending of organs, no visceral splatter of blood. But the noise he made drove through my eardrums and left an imprint on my brain I will never be able to shake off. He battered at the zombie, weakening arms coming down on a head determined not to let go of its grip. Behind, others, living people, tried to pull them back in. One of them caught my eyes. It was Anna.

“Save them. Save yourself.”

She reached forward and grabbed the zombie by the hair. As the face was yanked back I saw that it was Heather. Anna pulled hard. First time, she pulled away with a fist full of hair and skin. Second time, the biter was pulled away. I saw chunks of red flesh still between chewing jaws. Then Heather disappeared and without another word, Anna yanked the door closed.

Pete was panting heavily. I clumsily fumbled for the axe and slid it back in to place to hold the door.
It slammed once. I thought I could see the back of Anna’s head, but had to step away. There was nothing I could do for the people left in that room. I pulled Pete away and held him up as we both limped down the stairs. The last sound ringing in my ears was laughing, and there was only one candidate for the source. At the bottom of the steps Lana was still. I felt for a pulse but felt nothing but a pale clamour against her skin. Blood bloomed up from underneath her and I swivelled, forgetting about Pete who collapsed to the decking without my support.

“What happened here?”

I knelt by his head. He looked up at me, grinning. “Oz happened. You were right not to trust him. He took them. Then he left the rest of us to die.”

“Took who?”

“The ones he wanted. The ones he wanted to… he took them. The younger ones. He told us, after they all headed to the helicopter. Then he turned on us all. He was always going to turn on us all.”

“But the blood, everything down here. There was a shot too. What happened?”

“It was a massacre.”

My head reeled. How? He’d obviously locked all the others together and somehow infection had got in to the group, but he’d also managed to isolate a cluster of women to take north to the sanctuary he’d been talking about on the radio. Was my sister part of his payment for entry?

“Stay with me Pete come on, I need you. I need help, I can’t do this on my own.”

“Yes you can. You got here on your own. You were the only one that saw through Oz.”

“Not soon enough. I haven’t saved anyone. I’m only alive because of other people.”

“That’s how the heroes always start out. Now let me up. I can’t hang around here to bite you. There’s no one else left alive. One of the children… the woman you brought with you? Her little one. He was infected. Oz brought him in and he just set it all off. Once everyone was locked in together it was just a matter of time before we all died.

Now let me up. Come on we haven’t got all day.”

I helped push the older man to his feet. He staggered around, frowning tears of frustration at the blood and decay around him. He spared me a pitying smile. “I think I’ve got the better end of the bargain.”

“How so?”

“Because I’m not going to have to face life in this hell. I don’t envy your future, Warren.”

We both turned as we heard the tell-tale sound of rotors. The dot I had seen was another helicopter and it was heading for the pier. But this time there was something wrong. There was smoke billowing out of it and its course was clearly not going to leave it hovering above us for our rescue. It was going to make a direct impact. At the foot of the stairwell Lana moaned and I could see here try to push herself to her feet, but I couldn’t tell then whether she was rising as one of the infected, or whether she had somehow survived her ordeal in the club and her subsequent fall.

I didn’t have time to wonder anything else; the copter collided in the middle of the pier before we had time to react. My ears were filled with a high-pitched screech that blocked out the rest of the world, and I felt a rushing of air.
I briefly remember hitting water before the world again went gratefully black.

“
And in real life endings aren’t always neat, whether they’re happy endings, or whether they’re sad endings.” – Stephen King

My body
was being pulled. No, dragged. Dragged was a far better definition. All of my limbs felt like cotton wool that had been lightly scorched and blanched in freezing cold water. My ears were still ringing fiercely. As I started coming to, I realised both of my arms were out and being pulled, and wondered dully if a couple of the undead were pulling me out of the water to get to more of my body. I wondered where the heat of what should have been a massive explosion had gone, and where the dead were that should have been absolutely caroused by such a massive blaze. I opened my mouth to ask these questions, or at least cry inadequately for help, but took in a mouthful of water. The salt was revolting against my abandoned taste buds and my throat constricted in a choke. I started to cough convulsively and my arms were suddenly dropped. I plunged completely in to the water, taking down a complete lungful of the rancid water. There were some muffled words and I realised that my legs were already on the bottom of the sea, my hands clenching on to soft fronds of seaweed. I knelt, my head coming out of the water and my ears popping. I blinked a few times, trying to clear my vision of the stinging salt. I had to rub them twice as I saw Rick and Lana in front of me.

“I’m dead, right?”

“Nearly. We’re all nearly dead. But right now we’re the three luckiest fuckers in the country and we need to move quickly. Are you okay to walk?”

I tried my legs. I stood, shakily, but managed to hold myself firm. I nodded at them both.

“Good. We’re heading for some shelter. We haven’t got long.”

“Long before what?”

“Before the zombies realise there are three snacks running away from the crash very very quickly. We were all thrown away from the wreckage, and the wreckage is what got the most attention. You and Lana both drifted in closer to shore with the tide. She was dragging you in when I found you both.

“So I’ve got even more people to thank for being alive? Great. I’m not going to have enough time to pay you back you know.”

“Surviving is going to be plenty payback. We just need to get out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“Where we were going to go in the first place. The Downs.”

“And from there?”

“He’s taken Carla, Warren. Where the fuck do you think we’re going?”

I turned and looked back at the decimated structure that had so briefly been our bastion of safety. It was all burning, and the blaze and wreckage was the only thing now keeping us alive. The end of the pier had collapsed and chunks of building lay embedded in the shallow sea
. Steam drifted upwards as hot wood was extinguished in the salty water. I hoped everyone that had been left inside had been granted either a quick end or a final rest. It was a miracle that even one of us had managed to get off the pier alive, let alone three of us. I thought back to the screams that had permeated to the other end of the pier from within the enclosed walls.

“Lana? What happened up there?”

“Not now Warren. I’ll tell you when we’re safe. If I can.”

I let her misery lie. If Oz had put children to death in there and she had managed to survive unscathed then I wasn’t going to push her any harder than she had already suffered that day. The sun was still sitting in the sky but it was fat and low, dipping towards the horizon. We didn’t have long to make shelter and I asked where we were going to head first.

“Like Carla said, the hills are only a couple of miles from the town. You can see them quite easily when you get past all the larger buildings. There’s fields slightly further out so we should have a free walk all the way up. We’re heading that way, and we’ll get there before dark if we don’t come across any issues.”

“And if we do come across… issues?”

“Do you have any weapons on you?”

“No.”

“Then I suppose we’re fucked. Soldier on, you’re meant to be the double-hard Londoner. We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it.”

We waded through the shallow water of the beach, using its natural
sound of the sea lapping against the shoreline to disguise our own movements for as long as we could. I moved mutely behind the other two, my mind cold and shrouded, reliant on their knowing where we were going and that we would indeed be safe by nightfall.

+++

“Under any other circumstance, this would be beautiful.”

We sat in a line, tired and hot but safe and sitting at the top of a hill that I had been told repeatedly was called Cissbury Ring. It was grassy and the barrows reminded me of gigantic burial mounds. They gave me the creeps.

“It’s still beautiful.” I said. And it was. There were now less pools of light to disrupt the darkness, and there was very little I could see tarnishing the landscape. There were no headlights of cars going past and no noise from aircraft. There was peace across all I could survey, although we all knew the country was anything but. I could easily stop there at rest. With a full vantage over the rest of the countryside we could see walkers from a mile off before they got to us, and could prepare a defence appropriate to the threat. There were even plenty of place to run and hide if a horde came for us; we’d have more than enough time to run like hell in the other direction. But more importantly, there was no reason for a horde to come this way. We were in the middle of nowhere. As long as we were careful, we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves. There would be no reason for jumpers or lemmings to come anywhere near us. We’d be able to pick off the occasional biter and weather the storm until the government took control – although that was unlikely – or until they all died off and we could retake control naturally.

There was one major flaw in the plan though; Carla wasn’t here. And I desperately wanted to murder Austin with my bare hands with her watching on. In fact, I wanted her to be kicking him in the bollocks repeatedly whilst I did it.
Rick hadn’t mentioned her at all in our soundless trudge up to our hillside vantage point, but he must have been torn up inside. If I felt some sense of rage then he should have been absolutely frothing. We’d managed to stop off at a high street pharmacy and picked up some meagre rations to tend to our wounds. We were all suffering from fatigue and dehydration more than anything else, and we had taken as much water as we could carry. I had almost been sick with the amount I had drank. The one limping undead we had come across in the shop hadn’t been much of a threat, and we had let the child live. I was exhausted with killing. The others evidently felt the same.

The streets had again been quiet. I had felt eyes on me, as if pitying people were peeking out at us from behind their curtains. They were probably wondering why there were poor sods wandering the streets in the middle of an apocalypse; like you used to watch the telly and wonder why people would be out shopping during a torn
ado or a hurricane. You realise, when you’re the one out there, that many of those people were probably caught there by accident more than choice, and it was mainly luck rather than skill that ensured your safety in these situations. But we had seen no other people, and no other signs of life. We had seen lots of bodies; bodies that would thankfully never move again, but the bodies of the dead nevertheless. It seemed that most of the carnage in the centre had created the walking dead and as they had moved out in search of prey, people caught out in the open were devoured to such an extent that they would never rise again.

I wasn’t sure which I preferred.

I looked at Lana. Even in the dying light she still looked pale and suffering from what she had experienced. She still hadn’t uttered a single word about what had happened whilst we had been in the town. It was time to exchange stories, whether she wanted to or not. She had information I needed, and I was weary to the bone. I needed the rage I knew she could fuel me with. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go on otherwise. She must have sensed my eyes on her, and looked up. Her sockets were sunken and her eyes dark. She looked downright ill.

“You okay?”

“As okay as I can be. It’s not exactly been a class one day.”

“And never a truer word was said.
We should have taken some beer from that last shop.”

“Warm beer? I’m not that desperate yet Rick.”

We all had a giggle at that, but the atmosphere still sat there, heavy and bloated with words left unsaid. In the end I knew how to do it. The way I had always done things, and always would. No dancing. No flirting. Straight to the point.

“What happened on the pier, Lana?”

“You don’t mince your words do you?” she said with a nervous laugh, hooking her arms around her legs and putting her chin on her knees. She slid a look across to me that I couldn’t read and looked back out down the hillside. She squinted and pointed down. There was a lone figure stumbling up towards us. With its almost sideways gait and mute approach, it had to be a lemming. “Looks like we were followed after all.” Then quieter, almost so we couldn’t hear her “I’m going to be one of those soon.”

“Shit!”

Rick scuttled away as if she were infected here and now. She sneered at him and cleared her throat, his reaction giving her previously timid voice some temerity. “It’s taking its time, don’t you worry about that. I’ll last a couple of hours yet. But I feel wrong. I feel bad. My heard hurts. It’s like a hangover and oh man I wish I’d had a fucking drink to deserve it. I’m hot too, but want to shiver. It’s like the flu, but worse. My brain feels foggy. Thinking is hard. So I’m guessing if you want to know what happened to your sister, I tell you before I forget how to think straight and you kill me no?”

Her candour broke through my own darkened thoughts. I knew then that I was not going to be able to kill this woman. I didn’t know how we would deal with her when she turned, but she would be the first person to turn undead that
I had been able to form some kind of bond with. I hadn’t known Dan long enough, and I hadn’t seen either Anna or Thomas turn. If Carla were dead I was sure she would have already told me. That and Austin had already admitted to having his eye on her, more than once. I was sure beyond doubt that she would have been the first person on that helicopter, whether she wanted to be or not. None of this was detail that Lana really needed to know though.

“Yeah. I guess. So what did he do? What happened to you all?”

“I can’t even begin to tell you how foolish I feel about what happened. It was obvious that you didn’t trust Oz and I think some more people should have picked up on your own unease. Fuck even I didn’t trust Oz. He was a homophobic shit and he dribbled over anything with a cleavage and a pulse. But he was still helping everyone, so we kind of overlooked his little faults you know? He helped a few of us on to the pier in the early days and made sure we were safe. He made sure the gates were secure and kept a watch on things, even suggested the fishing and using the telescopes for lookout. We knew early on he was trying to get hold of the airport to see if there was any way of picking us out. None of us were surprised when he said he had made radio contact and there was help on the way. It’s what happened after that was a problem.

He had us all in the club. He’d already said that you were all dead. We weren’t expecting anyone back. We were all pretty shocked to lose Matt and Andy. No one gave a shit about Jez. Carla was absolutely inconsolable.
She thought she’d lost you both. Pete had to carry her up to the club and let me tell you, he had a pretty hard time of that. Oz locked us all in there. Said it was for our own safety but didn’t say why. You know what? No one even questioned it. No one ever questioned any of the decisions he made, apart from you. Then he told us to wait right there and got on the radio with his friend. Asked if the first helicopter was on the way. Got told it was, so he sent Carla and Gaynor down to the pier. We asked why no one else was going and he said the helicopter wasn’t big enough for more. Said the second one would hold more and that we’d be able to get on that. Well we did the maths – Forrest Gump could have worked out quickly enough that we weren’t all going to get off the pier in one piece. That’s when the screaming started, though purely through panic than anything else. He took out a shotgun then. Pushed Gaynor and Carla out and pulled Mary in the door. She was gagged and crying, and she was carrying little Thomas, Anna’s boy. They were tied to each other, and Mary’s side was covered in blood. Oz took a knife out and cut them apart. Thomas dropped to the floor. It was so wrong. Mary’s a nurse, she wouldn’t just let a child drop to the floor like that. Then Thomas, he crawls up. Anna runs over to him and he just bites her. He’s infected. Then Oz picks up a gun and just shoots Mary in the back. That’s when the chaos really started. Someone managed to run past him, I don’t know who. Then the door closed. None of us could get out, and the rest of it was just teeth. Hunger and teeth. I was lucky to get away with the little bite I did, and that was thanks to Pete. I heard another gunshot on the pier but I don’t know who it was. But I doubt it was your sister. He had a very keen eye on her.”

It was all too much for Rick. He leaned his head back and howled in to the sky. I was too weary to warn him against caution, and had more than a passing suspicion at that point that he didn’t give a fuck what came for him, or when. His voice cracked at the end of the yell and he dropped his head, sobbing in to his lap. I couldn’t comfort him; I felt the same. But Lana’s words hadn’t given me any of the impetus I needed yet because I knew there was a wholly unclean task that still lay in front of me.