After the Fall (Book 1): Outside (3 page)

Chapter 5

Jack sat in the back of the flatbed of a Mitsubishi L200. They bounced out of the holiday park onto the main road. Light flecks of rain hit his cold cheeks. They turned to the right, towards the town of Tulloch.

Simon was in the front of the cab, in the dry, with driver Ash. Jack shared the back of the pickup with Marcus, a thin teenager with night black hair, long and matted from lack of washing and turning into one big dreadlock. He held an axe comfortably down by his boots.

“She’s a good driver,” said Marcus.

“Is she?” asked Jack, his eyes scanning the green hills and farmland that surrounded the road. Pylons, emptied of electricity and useless beyond perches for hundreds of birds, stood in mocking testament to the world that was gone.

“Yeah, she used to ride the ambulances in Bristol. Can’t half shift it when she needs to.”

A farmhouse stood about fifty yards back from the road. Its windows were boarded up. Its front door stood wide open.

“Where are we going?” said Jack.

“We’re going to the industrial estate. We’ve been all over the shops in Tulloch, but there is an industrial estate about five mile down the road. I think James’ plan is we clear all the shops and factories within ten miles, then we start working the houses. Should be enough to keep us going for the next year or so.”

“Unless more people arrive.”

“Well, yeah, but then we will have more people to go on the runs.”

The truck bounced roughly over a pothole.

Jack grabbed on tight to the side of the flatbed. He felt exposed. What was to stop a zombie from jumping from one of the hedges, or one of the trees, into the truck? How did people know they couldn’t do that?

“How come this is your first run?” said Marcus.

“I’ve been looking after my daughter.”

Marcus nodded, seemingly satisfied.

“Are these runs dangerous?” said Jack.

Marcus shook his head. “Nah, you get used to them. Can get a bit hairy if you come across more than a few dead-heads. But that’s pretty rare now around Tulloch. Reckon we’ve cleared most of them. Just listen to what Ash says, and Simon, he’s pretty handy.”

The words didn’t ease Jack’s flustered and turning stomach. He imagined this was how a rabbit felt when forced to run across an open plane, with the eagles hovering above.

“You ever lost anyone on a run?”

Marcus gave Jack a strange look. “You only just arrived?”

Jack shook his head. “No, I just don’t go out much.”

Marcus shrugged. “Yeah, we lost a few people in the early days. And we lost Ian, that accountant, last week. You know, people with no experience.” Marcus caught himself. “Not you of course, sure you’ll be ok.”

Jack didn’t answer, but instead turned to watch the world. At first it looked the same as before. He could easily imagine he was returning to Leeds after a nice holiday by the sea. Just the normal world… Until you looked closely.

The traffic lights that didn’t light.

The large number of cars left on the side of the road, overturned in ditches, or ended into lampposts.

The grass spurting through the cracks in the tarmac and the pavements.

The cracked windows in the buildings.

And, strangest and yet most prevalent, th
e
feeling
;
a deep down knowledge in his being that things weren’t right anymore. A darkness…

After twenty minutes or so of slow driving they turned off the main road. Here, more cars were lined up, abandoned, crashed.

“Don’t look too close in the windows,” said Marcus. “There’s a load of them trapped. It’s not pretty.”

Jack did look though. They passed closed to a large articulated lorry. Through the window was a skeletal figure, gnawing uselessly at the glass. Jack’s heart beat heavily and a nervous twitch in his lip fired into life. He never knew he had this twitch until three months ago. He didn’t know why he was so scared of the zombies.

“You ok man?” said Marcus.

Jack managed a smile and tried to breath deeply without it looking like he was breathing deeply.

“It’s ok to be a little scared you know,” said Marcus. “I near shit myself first time I came out.”

“Really?”

Marcus nodded, his young face carrying an ambivalence that wasn’t usually seen until one reached their forties.

“Ok. Well, yeah, I’m scared.” Jack let out a laugh, it fell weak and dead in the still air.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be good.” Marcus turned round to look behind him as the truck slowed to take a right turn. “We’re here, you see it?”

Marcus pointed to an area of many large metal warehouses, their signage still lively, calling out to customers that would never come
.
Drew Hardware, Animal Feed World, Boat and Sea, The Gas Man - Suppliers to the Trade.

Marcus smiled at Jack. “Like I said, you’ll be good. Easy as pie.”

The truck pulled off the road and through the gates of Tulloch Building Supplies into an empty car park. The store itself was a large corrugated building with a wide glass front entrance. Plain and functional.

The rain picked up. A trickle of water seeped in through Jack’s helmet and down the back of his neck.

Him and Marcus jumped off the back of the pick up. Marcus automatically ran a few feet from the truck, holding his axe ready to strike, and quickly turned through 360 degrees, scanning the area.

“Look for movement of any type,” he said. “Sometimes you just see them as shadows, and next thing you know they are on top of you. Worst thing you can do is assume it’s just a cat, or a dog. Most of the time it is, but when it isn’t…”

Simon and Ash got out of the truck. They left the doors open and the keys in the ignition.

“Don’t make too much noise,” said Simon in an even voice. “They got good hearing.”

Simon carried his baseball bat, and Ash had what looked like a long survival knife, the type they used to show on the front of survival magazines.

Ash walked away from the truck and stared at the store. Beyond the glass frontage it was dark and uninviting. The glint of tools and the dull steadiness of piles of breeze blocks for sale stood in silence behind the windows.

“How you doing Jack?” she said. “Easy so far?”

Jack nodded, now getting strangely used to the constant anxious buzz in his body.

“What are we looking for?” said Simon.

Ash took a piece of paper out of her pocket. “The shopping list.” She half smiled. “Concrete mix, wooden posts, barbed wire, any sort of fence wire, sledgehammers…”

“Looks like we’re building a fence,” said Marcus.

Jack nodded. “There are still a good few gaps need plugging. Covered with trees and crap at the moment. Will keep them out for now, but a big storm, passing of time, who knows.”

“Well, whatever the reason, we got our list,” said Ash. “We’ll go in the front here. Let’s stick together. Marcus, you and Jack grab one of those large trolleys. Me and Simon will cover you front and back as you load up. We’ll try and do it all in one trip.”

They moved slowly towards the grey of the building. Jack noticed his companions constantly looking in all directions with sharp furtive glances.

Jack took a large wooden trolley from beside the entrance to the shop.

“I’ll stack ‘em,” said Marcus. “You keep pushing.”

Ash and Simon pushed open the door, and they entered as a unit: Simon at the front, Jack pushing the trolley with Marcus beside him, and Ash at the rear.

She closed the door behind them.

To their right and left was a bank of cash tills, surrounded by special offer deals of hammers, shammy leathers, tool boxes, tiles, concrete mix.

“Special offer,” said Marcus smiling. “We’ll have some of that.” He moved quickly and lifted a few bags of the concrete mix onto the trolley.

Beyond the tills stood tall aisles of building goods. Their every movement echoed in the still of the cavernous building

“Remember, we stick together,” said Ash. “And keep as quiet as you can. ”

They passed the tills at a steady pace and into the main part of the shop. They turned left and moved slowly to the far end, aisle one.

Jack pushed the trolley up the aisle in half darkness. The dull grey from outside did its best to penetrate the shop, but as they got further up the aisles, it seemed to give up. A murky darkness engulfed them. The goods shelves towered twenty feet above like menacing sentinels, displeased at being disturbed from their months of rest.

Simon looked back and winked at Jack. “Doing good Jack, doing good.”

Their footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The wheels of the trolley let out the odd squeak. Whenever they found an item from the list, the transfer from shelf to trolley sounded as loud as a car crash. Jack remembered when he was a teenager, trying to sneak into his house after a night out drinking, and how everything, from opening the front door to turning on a light switch, had seemed loud as an elephant herd.

Jack imagined every excruciating sound calling out to all the zombies for miles around.

But it wasn’t until the fifth aisle that something happened.

Chapter 6

Annie and Tom ran laughing through the maze of chalets, pretending to be chased by the zombies, never getting caught.

The rain became heavier, but neither child noticed. Annie hadn’t had this much fun since arriving at the holiday park - it was much better than being stuck in the chalet playing with boring jigsaws or colouring in.

“Come on Annie, lets go near the beach,” shouted Tom.

Annie paused. “Are we allowed? My Daddy says it’s dangerous.”

“It’s fine, I go there all the time with my Dad.”

Her Daddy would never take her near the beach.

They ran past the last chalet at the edge of the holiday camp, and onto the dunes, slowing down as they clambered up the wet sand.

“When do we have to be back?” said Annie. Now the chalets where behind her, she had that funny nervous feeling in her belly, the silly butterflies, as Mummy used to call them.

“Mum thinks we are playing at Sam’s chalet,” said Tom. “So we should be ok for another hour or so.”

Annie reached the top of the sand dune. The fence was at the bottom. Her silly butterflies fluttered a little harder. “You mean your mummy doesn’t know we are by the fence?”

Tom let out a big sigh and rolled his eyes. “God, girls are so boring. I thought you said you were bored inside the chalet all the time?”

Annie nodded. She had been bored, but something didn’t feel right.

Tom stood a few paces ahead of her. “Are you a coward like your dad?”

“He’s not a coward, he’s just sad.”

Tom shrugged. “Ok then, if you don’t want to see my secret, then we can go back.”

No one had ever shared a secret with her before, never mind an older boy.

“What secret?”

“You have to come with me to find out.”

Maybe it was ok. Tom was older and smarter than her, and he did say he came here with his dad. “Ok, just for a few minutes though, then we have to go back.”

“Sure, come on.” Tom bounded down the dune towards the fence.

Annie followed, laughing again as she fell over in the sand and rolled down the hill.

Ash looked over the list and the accumulating items on the trolley. “All we need is barbed wire,” she said. “Where do you think-”

She stopped and held her hand up. Simon and Marcus jumped to attention. Jack looked at them, scared. “What, what is it?”

Simon motioned at him to be quiet, his face caught in a vicious frown. “Shut it…” he hissed.

Then Jack heard it. Too quiet at first to be anything, but growing slowly and certainly. In a normal world he could have easily discounted it as wind buffeting the trees outside, or the multitude of raindrops against the glass fronting of the huge store. But this wasn’t the normal world anymore - he knew it was something else.

Steady, metronome shuffling.

“Just sounds like the one, shall I go have a look?” said Simon.

Ash nodded, but before Simon took a step, there was a large crash and the sound of breaking glass.

“What the hell?” said Marcus.

“It must have knocked something over…” said Simon.

Another crash, a louder sound that lasted for a few seconds. Jack imagined boxes of building supplies tumbling to the ground before the zombie’s advances.

“I’m not sure about this,” said Ash, the whites of eyes glowing in the murk of aisle 5.

“Me neither,” said Simon. “We’ve got most of what we need, let’s go. This place is freaking me out.”

Jack felt his body heave a sigh of relief.

“It’s ok man,” said Marcus resting his hand on Jack’s shoulder, “we’re going.”

Marcus helped Jack turn the trolley round.

They had only moved a few feet when a chorus of voices, terrible voices able only to render pained moans, echoed through the whole of the empty building. The air seemed to shake.

Jack was sure his heart stopped.

“Fuck,” shouted Simon above the din, “sounds like hundreds of them. Wait here.” He ran towards the end of the aisle. The rumbling cacophony escalated and the shuffles of what sounded like hundreds of feet bounced from wall to wall, so they appeared to be everywhere at once. It was impossible to tell how close they were.

Simon reached the end of the aisle and peered round the corner. Within seconds he was motioning like crazy for the others to join him. “Move, we have to move now!”

Annie and Tom stopped by the fence. It was built from wooden posts and wire, strengthened with thick tree branches, logs, piles of sand, concrete, anything to block the holes, all along the length of the fence, for as afar as she could see. Annie thought it looked like it went all around the world, and impossible to get through. It was taller than Daddy, maybe even twice as tall as him. Curls of angry looking barbed wire lined the top.

No way any zombies could get through. Maybe Tom was right, it was safe.

“Come on, this way,” said Tom, motioning for her to follow him along the length of the fence.

She tramped through the sand, her little legs getting tired, but she didn’t want Tom to think she was a coward, so she kept going. The waves crashing onto the beach could be heard on the other side of the fence, and seemed to be getting louder. They were getting closer to the sea.

“Ok, you ready to see the secret?” said Tom.

Annie nodded.

They had stopped at what seemed to be a very thick part of the fence. Huge tree branches were covered by a tall and wide piece of wood.

“Ok, but can I trust you?”

“I wont tell anyone.”

“Are you sure, because if you do, we could get into trouble.”

“Is it bad?”

“No, it’s not bad, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Annie’s butterflies fluttered like crazy. She had never had such an important secret before.

She took a deep breath. “I promise not to tell anyone,” she said.

“Even your Dad?”

“Even Daddy.” Tom looked at her for a moment, his eyes narrowing. She hoped that he believed her. “Please, I won’t tell anyone Tom, I promise. Super promise. Double promise.”

Tom nodded his head slowly, “Ok.”

Annie felt a wave of relief, and then excitement.

Tom reached over to the piece of wood and pushed it to reveal a gap in the fence.

Annie and Tom kneeled down and peered through. No wire, no branches. Just empty air, leading straight to the beach. Annie gasped.

“You ever been to the beach before?” said Tom.

She rolled her eyes, what a stupid question. “Of course, everyone has been to the beach.”

“But not this one?”

He was right about that. “No.”

“Come on then, let’s go.”

She knew it was wrong, and she knew she would get into trouble, big trouble, if Daddy found out. But that just made it more exciting.

They climbed through the gap, onto the beach.