Dead Frost - 02 (26 page)

'Maybe,' Shane said
after a few moments, 'I got it wrong. The sounds travel in this
weather, don't they?'

He was about to
lower the .22 again when it appeared, just jumped out of the open car
door, a dog, or so they thought at first.

And then it landed,
a few feet in front of the overturned vehicle.

All three of them
recoiled; Marla actually squealed, which was a rarity in itself.

Shane held a hand
up, a sign for them to make as little sound as possible. The gun in
his hand rattled, though, as he kept it trained on the prowling
monster.

A tiger, an actual,
full-grown fucking tiger, in the middle of the street. You heard
about things like this in Africa, but now it was happening in the
middle of an American city.

Shane didn't know
what to do. The animal was obviously uninfected – was it even
possible for them to contract the virus? - but it was a maneater,
nonetheless. They had slipped even further down the food-chain in a
matter of seconds.

Marla's eyes bulged
from her head as she struggle to control her breathing. She had seen
tigers before, at the zoo where they belonged. There were no safety
fences now, though, and she had never been more terrified in her
entire existence. Lurkers were slow, they could outrun them; a tiger
would chase them down and tear them to shreds before they even had a
chance to turn.

The beast slowly
stalked the road. Shane tried to recall the countless nature
programmes he and Holly had watched together, but there had been
nothing on there about fending off one of the predators should they
appear in the middle of the fucking street. He knew that you should
punch a shark on its nose, and if a pit-bull latched onto you the
best way to get it to open its jaws was to shove a finger up its ass.
Shane didn't think either of those methods would work on a 700 pound
tiger.

Suddenly, its head
turned in their direction. Its expression changed, its mouth fell
open and a rumble from deep within its throat emerged.

For a moment, it
did nothing but look at them; maybe it was working them out, or maybe
it was trying to figure out the best way to attack so many delicious
treats.

'Can we run now?'
Marla whispered, not knowing or caring if the tiger heard her. It
could
see
them, which was enough.

'Don't move a
muscle,' Shane said out of the corner of his mouth. 'Not yet.'

The tiger grunted
again, huffed as if it was pissed off beyond belief, and took a step
towards them.

Terry wished he
hadn't let Moon take the shotgun. One shot from that would have
probably been enough to bring the beast down. The .22 that Shane was
clinging to would do the job, but it would take a lot more than one
shot unless they got lucky.

The tiger suddenly
lifted its head; up until then it had been skulking. Its mouth open
wide, it roared, and then it started to run, racing towards them,
covering the space between them in less than a few seconds.

Marla was already
running down the street, Terry hot on her heels. She was screaming
something incomprehensible as she ran. Shane was a few feet behind,
but he was running backwards, trying to get a shot off.

The pistol recoiled
in his hand, followed by a deafening blast. If it was shot, the
tiger didn't show it. There was a row of bicycles chained up in the
road, which it leapt over in one bound. Shane fired again, and this
time the tiger yelped as the bullet tore through its hind leg. It
skidded for a few feet through the snow, slammed into a fire-hydrant
and buckled over, pained and confused.

Shane turned and
started to run, not looking back. The tiger would have been all over
them by now if he hadn't fired true. Marla and Terry were
twenty-five feet in front, rounding a corner. Shane heard something
groan from the side, and immediately thought that he'd made a big
mistake in turning his back on the beast.

Then, he saw them,
lurkers everywhere, attracted to the noise of the pistol. As they
shambled into view, a sea of undead, Shane heard the tiger begin to
roar behind him.

He raced around the
corner to find that Marla and Terry were holding back a little. The
truth was, he wouldn't have been mortally offended if they had
decided to run for their own lives.

'Look!' Marla
screeched. She jabbed away to the road behind, to where the lurkers
had appeared.

The tiger was
wounded, limping on its back leg ever-so-slightly, but that didn't
stop it from going after the cadavers as if they were a herd of
antelope. It lunged amongst them, and they began to crowd around it,
unaware that the beast would tear them all into pieces.

It just proved that
the lurkers were so vacuous, so intent on only one thing...

Feeding.

But the tiger was
hungrier.

Shane, Marla and
Terry watched, dumbstruck, for a few seconds before they turned and
ran, none of them looking back to see the carnage.

*

The moment they
noticed her, they began to stagger towards her, groaning, arms
outstretched. She wasted no time in killing the first one,
decapitating it with the adeptness that she had somehow taught
herself. As the creature fell aside, another two were immediately
after her. She wasn't sure whether to take them on, or run for it.
What good was it to fight them? There would never be a last one, at
least she didn't think there would. It was like trying to fight off
an intrusion of cockroaches; sure, you might get the first wave, but
what about the one that followed, or the one after that?

Regardless, she
sliced the freezing air with the machete, lopping body-parts off the
cadavers as if they were made of straw.

More came, a lot
more, and she suddenly found that even if she wanted to turn and run,
she couldn't. Her path was blocked, the only gate she could see was
now teeming with the undead.

What the heck,
she thought as she fought for her life.

*

'This way,' Marla
said, ducking into a darkened alleyway. Once away from the street,
she doubled over, trying to catch her breath. As Terry and Shane
caught up, they did the same.

It was amazing how
unfit they all were; the world had gone to shit, and so had they.
Shane made a mental note to start working out when they returned to
the barracks. Better chance of survival if he didn't get a stitch
every time he ran more than twenty metres.

'See,' Marla said,
straightening up, though still breathless. She was pointing to a
fence at the side of the alley. Barbed-wire twisted around the top
of it, but nothing too difficult, not with the padded jackets that
they each wore.

There were wooden
panels just on the other side of the mesh; a clever tactic to obscure
the museum fence from intruders, though if Marla knew about it, then
the chances were that everyone did.

'I'll take a look,
first,' Shane said. He handed Terry the pistol. 'If you see a
fucking tiger, or a bear, or anything that's got more legs than me,
you have my permission to shoot it.'

'I was gonna,'
Terry said. 'I ain't kidding you, that tiger scared the holy fucking
shit out of me. I mean, really...'

Shane began to
scale the mesh. It rattled as he climbed, chunks of snow fell from
the spaces between the wire. His boots barely fit through the holes,
which caused him to falter a few times. Marla gasped as he slipped,
and then relaxed when she realised that he was still clinging on with
his fingers.

Once
at the top, he pulled himself just high enough to peer over. You
never could be too careful, not since the outbreak. Riflemen might
have taken up refuge in the museum, posted sentries up on the roof.
It sounded ridiculous, but didn't
everything
nowadays? Shane knew to never take anything for granted, and so
assumed there would be a sniper somewhere over the fence, just
waiting for a head to pop up. The trick was to give as little to aim
at as possible.

He stared out
across the museum grounds. A hundred metres of untouched snow lay
between them and the building. The fact that the white sheet was
pure and untainted came as a relief. The rear of the museum was just
visible through the blizzard, a largely grey structure that could
have been an asylum if you didn't know better.

'What can you see?'
Marla whispered from the safety of the ground. When he didn't
respond straight away, she called his name with a hint of impatience.

'We're good to go,'
he said. And no fucking snipers, he thought but didn't add. He
pulled his body the rest of the way up and tossed his legs over the
fence beyond the mesh.

Marla began to
climb, hoping that she didn't make a complete fool of herself in the
process. It had been her idea to take the shortcut, which made her
all the more careful in her ascent.

Terry
struggled at first, but once he got his footing he was over the fence
quicker than Marla. Landing on the other side, he wiped his
rust-stained hands on the front of
his
coat.

Marla came down a
few seconds later, and had never been more grateful to find her feet
planted in freezing-cold snow.

'Come on,' Shane
said, turning and breaking into a jog.

Marla offered Terry
a cursory glance before they joined Shane.

She couldn't stop
thinking about the tiger, the way it had immersed itself in lurkers.
What bothered her more, though, was that the tiger would have won
that particular fight.

And unless Shane
knew of another way back to the bus, they would meet the beast again.

*

They attacked as
a pack, which was something she hadn't seen before. Maybe they were
getting smarter. Perhaps they had evolved, regained a portion of
their brainpower, and working together for their food was just the
start.

She evaded three
of the cadavers, rolling away to her left. As she scrambled to her
feet – it didn't pay to lie down for too long, although she
suddenly found herself exhausted – she swiped the machete at
the legs of one creature. Tendons tore, and the thing went down like
a broken marionette. She was back on her feet, now, and making her
way slowly towards the gate that led onto the street.

She turned and
saw that it was only partially blocked by the creatures; some of them
had continued to shamble towards the building, while others had paid
no attention and awkwardly made their way across the grounds in
search of an easier meal.

One of the
things, a female cop before the virus had stricken her, groaned and
landed in the snow a few feet away from her. She could see the
creature's holstered gun, and was immediately confronted with a
tantalising thought.

I could take it,
she thought. She had never had the opportunity to fire a gun before,
and why would she? They rarely handed out weapons like that to girls
of her age, despite what foreign countries thought. The fact that
she hadn't fired a gun before did very little in the way of
dissuading her, and she stepped forward, slammed the blade down into
the back of the corpse's head, and waited for it to stop moving
before freeing the pistol from its holster.

It was heavy; a
lot heavier than she had anticipated. She would have to use two
hands just to keep it steady, and even then she was unsure that she
would be able to pull the trigger without being propelled through the
air backwards.

She slipped the
machete through the loops of her backpack and stepped back, enough
distance between her and the nearest corpse to have a practise-shot.

Using both
hands, she lifted the gun and aimed it at the approaching creature's
face. She pulled the trigger, and when nothing happened she panicked
momentarily, before noticing the red dot on the side of the gun and
the tiny switch next to it.

Safety was still
on.

She flicked the
switch, levelled the gun at the cadaver's head, and pulled the
trigger.

She didn't fly
back through the air as she had half-expected, but her arm did recoil
as the bullet exploded from the weapon at a thousand feet per second.
It tore through the corpse's face, lifted the top of its head off
and exited, leaving a hole roughly the size of a tennis ball at the
back. The creature immediately toppled over.