Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (16 page)

“Fuck it!” Walker spat venomously. “There’s another car in the middle of the road about fifty yards away,” he fumed with frustration. “We’re going for it.”

We left the Taurus with its doors wide open and moved quickly towards the abandoned car. I felt Walker’s daughter clutch at my hand as we ran. Her grip was fierce, her finger nails digging into the flesh of my palm. Walker was in the lead. He went forward at a run, and Jed was beside him, their footsteps sounding loud as pounding hooves. Harrigan ran alongside the girl and me, but we couldn’t keep pace. Walker and Jed reached the car ten yards ahead of us.

It was a
blue Japanese sedan, left skewed across the blacktop. The driver’s door was open, and there was a body hanging out through the door. I saw a woman’s legs in high-heel shoes. Jed leaned into the car and grabbed hold of the body. He dragged the woman’s limp shape out onto the road. She was decomposing.

I
reached the car. Jed’s face was wrenched into a fierce, berserker’s expression. His eyes were wild, every fiber in his body singing with adrenalin. He threw himself into the driver’s seat. He was breathing hard, mouth wide open. He stomped his foot on the gas and pumped the pedal. There were keys in the ignition. I stood there, gasping, and held my breath. The engine whirred then died. Jed thumped the wheel with his fist.

Walker was on the passenger side of the car. He pulled the door open and then reached through to unlock the rear door.

“As soon as this thing kicks over, pile in!”

Jed tried the engine again. It whirred
and died again. I heard him spit a tirade of abuse at the car, and then a flicker of movement caught the corner of my eye.

I turned my head towards a clapboard house directly opposite the car. It was a worn old building, paint flaking from the walls and the roof tiles stained and moss-covered. There was a big curtained window facing the street. I narrowed my eyes.

The curtains twitched. I stared, feeling a chill of apprehension blow down my spine. My breath jammed in my throat.

My first impulse was to shout a warning
, but I crushed down on the urge and forced myself to disentangle my hand from the girl’s. I glanced further along the street, then back to the window. There was a dark shadowed shape behind the curtains – a shape like a head. It was moving – rocking from side to side.

I felt my skin prickle, like a thousand insects were crawling over my body. I turned to the girl and grabbed her shoulders fiercely. “Stay here,” I said in an urgent whisper. “Do not move. Understand?” The girl nodded her head with jerky confusio
n, but then clawed for my hand. I caught her wrist. “Stay here!” I hissed.

I went around the trunk of the car, and put my hand on Walker’s shoulder. He whirled round, his eyes fierce and frantic.

“The clapboard house,” I said, looking Walker in the eye. “There’s someone – or something – at the front window.” Somehow I managed to keep my voice low and calm, even though my stomach was churning with swollen knots of fear.

Walker was good. I knew the urge for him to turn his head and stare at the window would have been almost impossible to resist, but resist he did. He nodded at me and actually looked away – further along the street.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s something there.”

“Just one?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know – but if we don’t get this car running in the next few seconds, we’re going to be in a world of pain out here in the middle of the road.”

Walker nodded. “Get back around the other side of the car,” he said. “Make sure Millie is covered, and let Harrigan know what’s going on. If they come from that house, I’m going to need you to cover me.”

He ducked his head through the passenger door and spoke briefly to Jed. I heard the engine suddenly whine again – a tired, weary sound – and then more muttered curses.

I got back around the car and prodded Harrigan in the back. He was leaning against the rear door, with my Glock in his hand, covering the scrubby fringe of nature strip. Millie was standing close beside him, dwarfed by his enormous bulk and size.

“They’re in the house on the other side of the road,” I said quietly. “Clapboard house. There is a window at the front. I saw movement there. Might be one – might be a thousand.”

Harrigan didn’t have the training or discipline of Walker. The big man’s head turned like it was on rusty hinges and he gaped at the building, then back at me.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then why aren’t they attacking?”

I shook my head. “Maybe we’re not making enough noise to set them off,” I shrugged. “Maybe the noise isn’t distinct enough.”

Millie made a strangled sound of alarm
– a whimper of panic in the back of her throat. I pulled the back door open and held it. Jed was in the front seat, hunched over the wheel. I could see the back of his head, and the tense cords of muscles in his neck. He tried to start the car again, hissing abuse under his breath as the engine whirred then died again.

“Sit on the back seat,” I told Millie.
“Right behind Jed. If we get the car started, you will be safe. We will all pile in around you.”

She sat on the back seat, sidesaddle, with her feet hanging out of the car and her bottom perched on the edge of the
upholstery. I leaned over the roof of the car, resting my gun arm on the hot sun baked metal with my knees rubbing against the rear tire.

Walker ducked back through the passenger door and I heard the raw tension in his voice as he struggled to keep his words to a whisper.

“Has it got fuel?”

“Half a
fuckin’ tank!” I heard Jed hiss.

“Then try it again.”

The engine groaned, and I felt the car rock on its hinges, as though Jed was desperately trying to urge the car into life. Then suddenly the engine coughed – and died.

“Again!” Walker hissed.

The motor spluttered, gasped – and then burst into reluctant life, like an old man coming awake. For brief seconds the beat of the motor was fragile and uncertain, and then quite suddenly it wailed into a full-throated roar of smoke and noise.

I heard Jed give a ragged cheer of expletive-filled relief. He sawed his foot up
and down the gas pedal until the motor was revving high and hard.

“Get in!” Walker screamed.

This wasn’t the plan – but then no plan was ever perfect.

Jed was in the driver’s seat and Walker in the passenger seat. I
ran around to the other side of the car and threw myself through the door so Millie was jammed between me and Harrigan’s comforting man-mountain of bulk. The interior of the car smelled like leaked gasoline and rotting food. My door was still swinging open. I reached out for it – at the same instant the front window of the house exploded outwards in a shattering blast of flying glass.

A chair landed on the front lawn, and then the figure of a man hurled itself through the jagged opening. He was hideous. His skin was grey and drawn like the withered skin of an onion. He was a tall shape. He landed on his feet, and came lurching towards me, dragging one of its legs behind it.

“Go! Go! Go!” I shouted. I heaved the car door shut. Walker’s window in the front of the car was down. I saw him jam his gun out through the opening and pull the trigger.

The sound slammed painfully into my eardrums, and
the recoil threw Walker’s hand high. The undead lurching shape on the roadside staggered drunkenly, and then toppled into the grass.

I felt my body thrown back
hard against the seat and there was a scream of squealing tires. The car filled with the stench of blue smoke and burning rubber and we were catapulted forward, weaving across the blacktop as Jed fought to get control of the wheel.

I heard Millie scream. Her body was twisted, her head wrenched round, staring out through the rear window. The ghoul was getting back to its feet, rising up from the ground but dwindling in the distance as the car surged forward.

“Oh, Jesus no!”

The despairing tone – not the words – made me snap my head around. It had been Jed’s voice, flat and strangled of all life. A
voice that sounded dead and desolate.

I stared
forward through the windshield, between the broad shapes of Jed and Walker’s bodies. The whole road ahead was filling with dark figures that spilled from the neighboring houses, the rustling keening sound in their throats an undulating hypnotic chant that crackled in the air like electricity.

There
was at least a hundred of them, drawn inexorably by the noise of the revving engine, shambling and staggering and convulsing in a broken tide of bodies that surged towards us.

“
Turn around!” I heard Walker bark.

“There’s no room!” Jed snapped
back. It was a typical suburban street. By the time he spun the car around in a three-point turn, the undead would be swarming all over us.

“Then speed up!”

“What?”

“Hit the gas!”

Jed crushed his foot down on the pedal and the sedan leaped forward. The space between the undead and us telescoped – reduced to nothing in an instant.

“Wind your windows up!” Walker shouted a warning – and then he reached across the car and reefed down hard on the steering wheel.

He caught Jed by surprise. The car swerved on tired spongy springs, and rolled like a big boat. We were veering towards the curb.

“Keep going!” Walker shouted.

“You’re a crazy bastard!” Jed shouted back. “Hang on!”

The car mounted the curb with a bone-jarring crack that hurled us forward in our seats. I felt my head smash against something hard, and my vision
shattered into a million shards of dazzling light. I tasted the warm coppery tang of blood in my mouth, and then everyone was screaming and shouting in panicked fear.

I shook my head. We were bumping an
d jolting across someone’s lawn, the car’s tires churning up clods of muddy earth and flinging them high into the air. Jed was tugging at the wheel like he was wrestling a grizzly bear. We crashed through a bushy green fern and then the car fishtailed into the side of a low brick fence, but kept going. The sound of groaning grinding metal was a noise like the dying shriek of some terrible beast.

There were half-a-dozen undead ahead of us. Their dark wretched shapes filled the windshield. The car ploughed into them and flung their bodies across the hood. I saw the figure of a woman bounced off the driver-side fender
. She spun in a tight circle and then slammed into a power pole. Another of the undead disappeared under the front wheels. The car jolted and leaped and the engine screamed and strained.

I clung to the seat with grim terror. Millie was sobbing. The car spun wildly then crashed through a mailbox and landed back onto the blacktop.
Harrigan’s big body swayed and lurched from side to side, crushing the girl between us. Arms and legs went everywhere and the sound of our cries and panicked screams reached a terrifying crescendo. Then the tires caught traction in a howl of rubber and smoke, and we were suddenly skidding out of control towards the opposite side of the road.

I saw Jed wrench the wheel. He was hunched deep in the driver’s seat, huge muscled forearms braced and his face rigid and grim. He caught the skid at the last possible moment. The car jounced up onto two wheels for an instant and then righted itself with
a sickening thud and a mournful groan of metal.

We were through the undead
.

There was
only clear road ahead.

We sped towards safety. R
elief washed over me like a wave.

And then two gunshots rang out – clear and piercingly loud, the sound of their retort echoing in the morning sky.

The car lurched – dropped down on one side – and slewed out of control.

“Jesus!” Jed shouted, and the
raw fear in his voice frightened me even more than the sound of the gunshots. He slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel violently. The sudden change in the car’s inert weight was catastrophic. I felt the car gouge down on the passenger side, and then we were veering out of control.

“Look out!” I heard Walker shout. The car hung over on two wheels an
d then miraculously righted itself, only to plough head-on into the back of a flat-bed truck left abandoned on the side of the road.

The impact was like a mighty fist
being slammed into the center of my chest. I felt my head snapped forward and for an instant I was weightless. The sound of crushing rending metal was like the blast of an explosion in my ears. Everything went black, then the world came swimming back into focus through dust and thick swirling smoke.

There was a stunned silence that lasted long seconds. We had covered less than a couple of miles. The undead were out of sight, but I wondered for how long.

I had lost my gun, and as I threw my weight against the crumpled door, I groped for it. I caught a glimpse of Millie’s terrified face. She was huddled down in the seat, and there was a thin razor-like gash on her forehead welling fat round droplets of blood.