Dead Ahead (4 page)

Chapter

3

Flesh of Their Prey

Frank had never had an easy time of it. He never made friends easily. He had always been the oddball. Not being the prettiest boy in town either, with his blonde curls which never wanted to sit quite right, slightly larger than average ears and wide, intense blue eyes. He was forever the outsider, and that suited him fine. He had enough friends living inside his head without adding outsiders to the mix.

Over the years the voices had gotten him into all kinds of trouble. Giving him ideas, good ideas, they were always good ideas, even if the results they created were bad. No matter what happened they would give him praise, tell him the things he did were taking him somewhere special, it was all preparation for something else, something momentous.

So he did their bidding, every command was met by unmitigated obedience. No matter how obscene or depraved. He was their slave, and they were his angels. Angels that would whisper long forgotten secrets into his mind. Telling him things no mortal man should know. They told him other people’s thoughts, their plans, their desires. The angels had full control of Frank; and it soon became that every aspect of his life was dominated by them.

Of course Frank was mental, a complete fruit and nutcase. It was a miracle that he could function in society, as secluded and isolated as he made himself, he still interacted with members of the public when the angels told him to, and they told him to all too often. He was well known to the police in his area and to a good number of the locals of Houghton, a little town just north of Carlisle, but everyone saw him as no more than a nuisance. He had no criminal record to speak of and somehow, just before the end, he found himself in the T.A. No one quite understood how bad his case of schizophrenia had gotten, and not many of them got the chance to find out.

It was just as people were starting to get sick that Frank was told to join the Territorial Army by the angels, and so he did. The bodies started to pile up and he was fast tracked into one of the hazmat suits and put on corpse collection. But of course the corpse collection didn’t last long; you can’t collect a corpse that is trying to eat you. He was then given minimal training and put on crowd control. But again, you can’t control a crowd of zombies.

He was given a gun.

For the first time in his life he was told to do the same thing by the people around him and by the angels.
‘Kill!’

From the moment his fingers wrapped around the handle of the SA80 automatic rifle and his finger curled round the cold steel of the trigger, the angels only said one thing.
‘Kill! Kill the dead and return their souls to heaven!’
and as always, he did their bidding.

He found himself as part of a unit of rag tag T.A. recruits. The ‘crowd control’ orders they were given were to kill as many zombies as possible, but in all the chaos you couldn’t tell who was dead and who wasn’t. Shoot them in the head, if they move too slow they are zombies who have been eaten and if they move too fast they are ‘the returned,’ people who had caught the infection and come back from the dead.

That was the only information they were given as they were thrown out the back of an army land rover in the middle of Carlisle. Before long they found themselves in trouble, thousands of people were fleeing from the zombies, tearing their way through the streets screaming and shouting. Cars were hurtling past them and soon the streets were clogged with crashed vehicles and bodies. When the first of his team shouted ‘zombies’ and started firing at the crowd everyone started firing, it was a baptism of blood. And Frank loved it.

All they could do was to make a hasty retreat back to the T.A. headquarters as they were assaulted by the zombies, not one of them moved slow; not one. Frank watched as one by one his team was whittled violently down from sixteen to just seven.

Finally they made it through the streets back to the T.A. headquarters at Carlisle castle just before the gates were barred. He spent a lot of time just staring at the creatures reaching through the gates at him, listening to the screams and explosions going on in the distance around him, listening for more orders. He heard a whisper,
‘kill,’
he raised his rifle. But then he heard a voice behind him.

“Whoa there soldier, conserve your ammo, I have a feeling we are going to need every bullet.” He felt his finger tighten around the trigger, he had never disobeyed his angels, further he squeezed until he heard a ‘click,’ it was empty, he had spent his last bullet already. “A bit trigger happy were we son? Well… can’t say as I blame you. Come on back to the H.Q. we will get you cleaned up.” Frank just stood there still pointing his rifle at the zombies unable to do as the angels asked. He flinched and a hand was placed upon his shoulder. He followed what turned out to be his Lance Corporal back to the headquarters feeling like a complete and utter failure. The Angels had gone silent in his head.

He spent the next week or so in the castle with forty-three other T.A. recruits all living on top of each other. It was a large castle with plenty of grounds to move in but within a week the food started to run low and the walls seemed to be closing in on him. Each day there were more zombies outside the walls and he tried to entertain himself by devising ways to dispose of them without using any of the staff sergeants precious bullets, but even that didn’t satisfy the angels thirst enough to make them speak again, he had to get out of here somehow, he had to get out or….
‘Let them in.’

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At the very moment the infected lunged at the windscreen an explosion ripped through the mass of creatures before them. Throwing the front of the truck in the air and tearing a huge amount of the husks to pieces. Brandon couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in his ears as the truck lurched back to the ground and the head of the infected that had been on the bonnet smashed through the windscreen. His father had his head leaning on the steering wheel, blood running down over his eye and off of his nose. The infected was jerking its head towards his dad, snapping its jaws as it neared him. The jerking motion was causing the glass of the windscreen to saw into its neck and shoulders, allowing it to edge ever nearer to its prey. Brandon, sill dazed, desperately searched for something to stick into the zombies head. Then he looked behind him, out of the cab and into the flatbed of the truck. How could he have been so stupid? The weapons, all of the weapons were in the back.

Thinking as best he could, he slipped off his shoe and slapped the creature in the face. Stunned, it turned its attention towards the shoe. Brandon waved the green and white Adidas vintage trainer in the face of the foul creature and waited for it to open its mouth wide enough. He then forced the shoe as far into its mouth as he possibly could with is right hand and punched the zombie hard in the temple with his left and held the head hard against the dashboard. He leaned forward and started to push his thumb slowly into its eye socket. Its body was flailing around outside of the cab, its hands beating desperately against the glass, but Brandon kept pushing. He felt a pop, and there was more room for his thumb to move, but the flailing continued. He switched to his middle finger, to try to reach deeper into the scull. The sickening squelching and putrid smell of the rotting corpse made bile rise in his stomach, but he couldn’t stop. His fingers weren’t long enough though. He stared to beat on the scull with his fist, tears rolling down his cheeks, screaming “Die, Die, DIE!” He switched to his elbow, throwing his whole weight behind it. The force of the first few blows sent his father sliding off of the steering wheel and down between it and the door. On the fourth or fifth blow he felt something give inside the head, and a thick deep red gloop spurted from the gaping eye socket. He kept on pounding till he realised he was only hitting the dashboard.

His dad was huddled against the glass of the driver’s side door, shielding his face from the spray of broken scull. Slowly he lowered his hands, you couldn’t tell where his blood started and the Infected’s blood began, his face a crimson red, with wide staring eyes.

His dad shot towards him rapidly, and Brandon panicked. He grabbed him and started moving him this way and that.

“What the hell are you doing dad?”

“Checking for bites, scratches, anything! Are you hurt? Did it get you?” his father was shouting at him and he could hear the panic in his voice.

“I’m fine, I’m fine Dad. Really I’m fine. What the hell is going on out there?” The number of dead outside the truck had greatly diminished and they were still dropping one by one. Tiny spurts of blood shooting from their heads. The truck lurched to the side slightly as something landed in the back. They both turned to look out the back window to see a camouflage clad figure rolling over the side and onto the flatbed, pistol in hand firing at the heads of the zombies.

Just over his head they could see a mass of dead come pouring down a hill chasing him, there were hundreds of them, tumbling and staggering over each other, desperate to taste the flesh of their prey.

Firing another couple of rounds he turned to look into the cab, wild eyes staring at Brandon through the holes in the balaclava. He turned away again to fire another couple of rounds and started banging on the roof of the truck shouting,
“Drive, Drive!”

The crazed look in his eye left a lasting impression on Brandon, and a bad feeling he just couldn’t shake as they pulled away, bumping over the remnants of the husks that lay before them, shedding the corpse from the bonnet, scythe blades slicing neatly through any dead that happened to stumble in to their path.

________________________

It was only now, while bouncing around in the back of a blood soaked pick up truck desperately trying to stab a disembodied head snapping around his ankles with his bayonet, that the Angels spoke something different to Frank.

‘Can you trust them?’

The angels had never asked him a question before. He had no idea how to answer. He eventually answered in a whisper, as only a slave, a subservient would. “I trust only you my angels.” He was met only with silence within his head.

He eventually captured the head and slid the blade in through the right eye socket, giving it a riddle about for good measure. He held the head, still stuck on to the bayonet, pressed up against the back widow of the cab and shouted to his would be rescuers “You didn’t want to keep this did you?” he gave a chuckle as he whipped his arm to the side, launching the head towards the bushes lining the road. The chuckle quickly became a cackle as he saw the head connect with that of another zombie strutting towards the fast moving vehicle, knocking it flat on its back.

Feeling quite good about himself, he took a seat with his back to the cab watching the road disappear away from him. He had a look at the varied selection of weapons that had been tossed into the back. He shook his head, they were all hand weapons, that which he could see. Too messy, you had to get too close to the zombies; he would stick with his guns thank you very much. The thought reminded him, he checked the magazine of his pistol, pulling a box of bullets out of his pack he refilled it and the few empty clips that he had, sliding them back into his vest. He made sure not to throw away empty magazines, like they did in the movies, if you didn’t have any spare mags it could lead you into all kinds of trouble! He then moved on the SA80 rifle he had slung over his shoulder. Pulling another box of rounds out of his pack he filled the clips and rested. It had been a very long few days.

______________________

Caleb was wiping the blood from his face with an old leather shammy that he had found in the door pocket; it wasn’t going to be much use on a busted windscreen now anyway. “Help me burst out this windscreen son,” he said to Brandon.

“Hang on and let me get my shoe back on,” the boy said back.

“Why the fuck have you got your gutty aff?”

“I was feeding it to that ‘fected while you were asleep!”

“Ye wur wit?” Caleb always slipped into broader Scottish when he was confused.

“Never mind; let’s just get this glass out.” Brandon placed his feet on the glass and started to push it out while Caleb pushed with his free hand. The glass strained a little, fragments falling to the dashboard, then popped out in a flimsy sheet. They weren’t moving fast but the wind in their faces made their eyes water making it difficult to see where they were going properly. Caleb slowed down further. Then they felt a bump on the roof of the cab and an upside down black balaclava clad head came into view.

“If you keep on down this road you are going to come up on Wigton, and you don’t wanna be doing that, mate! Get round this bend and we will ditch these wheels. My gaff ain’t far from here; we can lose our little gathering of followers there!” With that he disappeared back over the cab.

“What do you reckon?” Caleb asked.

“I don’t trust him.” Brandon said quietly.

“Me either but its getting late and what other choices do we have?” All he got in response was a shrug.

They rounded the corner and ass they were passing a row of large green barns on their left two loud thumps came from the roof of the pickup. Caleb rolled the Hilux to a stop and quickly climbed out, keeping a good eye on the stranger in the back who was already throwing their possessions out of the back to the ground