Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (5 page)

Jed fired a third shot from so close that the muzzle-flash of the weapon seemed to reach out and touch the undead.
The bullet smashed through the zombie’s eye socket and splattered us with flesh and thick ooze. The ghoul was flung backwards, falling into the long grass.

It
didn’t move again.

Jed stood over the
body. He was breathing raggedly. I saw him wipe the rain from his eyes and scrape his hands down the side of his face. His fingers were trembling. He stared at me for long seconds of disbelief, and I stared back. Then he took an almighty swing with his leg and kicked the heavy shape in the ribs. The corpse was rolled onto its side, and Jed crouched down in the grass and retrieved the crow-bar.

I went to
Harrigan and hauled him to his feet. He was gasping for breath. We all were.

“It kept coming,”
Harrigan said incredulously. “Wouldn’t go down. I buried the crow-bar in the monster’s back, and it just hissed at me…”

I nodded,
but I was impatient. I grabbed Harrigan’s arm and dug my fingers into his flesh. “Clinton, we haven’t got time for this right now,” I said urgently. “Later. Right now we need to get to that helicopter.”

He nodded dazedly and his eyes were glazed and vacant, like he was replaying the moment in his mind. Jed handed me the
crow-bar and I shoved it hard at Harrigan.

“Take it,” I said, putting an edge on my voice. “And swing it at the next one we see… only be sure to bury the claw in its head. Okay?”

Harrigan nodded. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, and when he opened them again, he seemed clearer – more focused. “Good man. Now move your ass.” I slapped him on the back and then turned on my heel and struck out towards the house.

Maybe ten or fifteen seconds had passed from the moment
Harrigan had burst from the tree-line and dashed across the road into the path of the undead ghoul. But even ten seconds is a long time when you’re standing in the driving rain on a dark and dangerous night. I felt exposed and vulnerable. I had no doubt there were other undead nearby – maybe even in the house we were approaching. I wanted to get into cover. I wanted to be concealed and to make use of terrain and noise of the storm to hide us. Standing on the front lawn of a suburban home was certainly not the best place to hold a committee meeting.

I went forward in a cro
uch and made my way towards a row of ferns. Once behind their dark bulky shelter, I took a few seconds to study the house.

I
t was a brick home, built a couple of feet off the ground, with a porch that ran right across the front. I saw the front door. It was open – a dark yawning hole in the façade. Maybe there were more undead waiting inside. Or maybe they had already left the house and were moving in exactly the same direction we were – drawn inexorably towards the screaming flailing sound of the dying helicopter.

I went on grimly, with the
Glock thrust out ahead of me, and my eyes swiveling from side to side, all of my senses alert for the slightest sound of danger, or the slightest suggestion of movement. I was soaked to the bone, and my jacket and the nylon bag felt like lead weights.

I reached the back corner of the ho
use and waited without turning. There was dark flat space ahead of us, and then the black border of a fence. Beyond the fence, hanging low in the sky and whipping the air around us into a maddened frenzy, was the helicopter.

“Come on!” I barked, and then sprang instantly to my feet and dashed across the back yard towards the fence. I snagged my shin on something and fell. I immediately leaped to my feet and fixed my eyes on the silhouette of the helicopter. I started running again, then tripped on another solid obstacle and went tumbling face-first back into the wet long grass. Cursing, bruised and a little dazed, I got to my haunches and shook my head. My ears were ringing. I blinked my eyes and peered into the darkness. I couldn’t see Jed or Harrigan. I couldn’t even sense their presence nearby. I frowned and cursed again. I was near the fence – I could tell that because the whoosh of wind from the helicopter’s downdraught was muted, even though the sound was a roaring assault on my ears. I felt my shin through the sodden wet fabric of my jeans. I had no way of knowing if I was bleeding or not, but it hurt. I got slowly to my feet and stared hard into the night.

I stood perfectly still, kept my eyes fixed on the black brooding shape of the house, and waited. I waited to sense some movement – some flicker to my left or right that might suggest Jed or
Harrigan were nearby.

Nothing.

I had lost them in the night.

I cursed with bitter frustration – and then I started to sense my own panic begin to rise. I hadn’t lost them. They had lost me. I was the one that was
alone and on my own. I felt the fear that came with the realization, and I had to crush down on the impulsive urge to scream out, or to reach for the cigarette lighter.

If I
had shouted at the top of my lungs, they could not have possibly heard me. The tremendous roar from the helicopter would drown out the sound of explosives. And the lighter was no good. Even in the sheltered lee of the fence, the draught of air being hurled out by the chopper’s rotors would make it impossible to get a light. So I stood there – feeling my panic rise, feeling the storm and the rain seem to build towards some ominous crescendo – and I waited, with my nerves fraying until I was on the verge of terror.

Then the night was ripp
ed open by a long jagged bolt of lightning, and a heavy bass rumble of thunder rolled across the clouds and seemed to make the air quiver and the ground beneath my feet tremble. And then a second brilliant jag of lightning ripped the night apart.

In the instant flash of that moment I saw everything.

Harrigan and Jed were still crouched by the corner of the house, and between us, spread across the long green lawn of the back yard, were the dark shapes of at least a dozen dead bodies. They were misshapen mounds, their limbs twisted at impossible angles, their corpses torn and dismembered. They were young and old. They were terribly mutilated.

They were the reason I had tripped and fallen.

I had stumbled over the dead.

I stared aghast – and then, mercifully, the night slammed down
like an anvil and the back yard became dark once more.

But the image of that instant was burned into my mind and it stayed with me for long seconds afterwards as my panic returned, multiplied many times over.

Were they dead? I mean
really
dead.

Or were they undead?

Was I standing in a macabre slaughter-yard… or was I about to be set upon by the bodies in the grass, as they rose up from the ground in demented madness and tore me to pieces?

Fear paralyzed me – turned my limbs to lead. I shrank down against the fence and for long seconds I could do nothing more than concentrate on breathing. I closed my eyes and the image of the bodies littered across the lawn came back to me in gory detail. I saw the horror of their pale faces, their bloodied, muddied torsos and the gnawed, severed limbs
– and it was so vivid and so confronting that I started to shake. I tore my eyes open, expecting the night to be filled with black hunting shadows – but there was just the howl of the wind and the drumming hiss of the rain. I drew a deep breath and forced myself into action. I fumbled the cigarette lighter from my pocket and flicked it.

The lighter sparked,
then was immediately extinguished by the swirling downdrafts of wind. I did it again. And again.

Half a dozen times I flicked the lighter, sending an intermittent pattern of split-second sparks like a marker beacon. Then I leaned back against the fence, and waited – either for the mutilated bodies to rise, or for Jed and
Harrigan to find me.

It was impossible to see anything in the crushing dark of the night. Down low against the fence, the ambient orange glow from the distant fires was blocked out, so that all of my senses were heightened – and all of them were
utterly useless. My sense of smell was overwhelmed by the thick cloying stench of rotting corpses, and the smell of muddy earth and grass.

I waited.

The trembling in my hands became worse. I was shaking like a leaf. I told myself it was the soaking cold – and maybe it was. Maybe.

My teeth began to chatter and I was overcome by the sudden urge to run – to run anywhere. Just to flee like a coward. I wanted to be away from this place. I wanted to be away from the fear. I wanted to be safe – and I wanted to see again. More than anything else, I wanted that. The crushing dark and the
horror-fueled images in my mind sent my imagination into overdrive. The clatter of the helicopter became the menacing scream of a horde of zombies. The slap of the wind against my neck became the fetid gasping breath of the undead. Alone in the dark, I felt myself unraveling.

I heard it too late
– the splashing sound beside me of heavy footsteps. Then I saw movement – just the flicker of a darker shadow, but by the time I saw it, it was too late to react. I had time for a final gasping choking breath – and then whatever moved in the night was upon me.

“Fucker!”

It was Jed. I felt him crash into me and then slump down against the fence, the heat of his body hard against my shoulder. He was panting, his breath sawing raggedly across his throat. Not a second later, the shape of Clinton Harrigan appeared as a drifting black shadow a little to my left. I choked down a cry of panic that was rising up into my throat, and was overwhelmed by a surge of relief. They had found me.

“Fucker!” Jed said again, snarling. He was angry, but it was anger mixed with his own fear, and it flamed as he fumed in outrage.

“You just took off into the dark, you son-of-a-bitch!” Jed hissed. “You just left us.”

I shook my head – then realized that in the darkness, shaking my head was a useless gesture. “I didn’t leave you,” I said. “I just moved before I had time to change my mind. I thought you two were right behind me.”

I heard Harrigan’s voice, sharp and tense, loom out of the night. “Well we weren’t,” he said. “You should have waited, Mitch. That was stupid. Next time, wait until we’re ready. And make sure we know what you’re doing. I don’t want to go through that again,” he said, and there was an ominous tone of warning and suppressed violence in his words that left me in no doubt that he too had been frightened, and that I should not take Harrigan’s Christian nature of benign benevolence for granted. He was letting me know that he was a nice guy – because he chose to be.

A warning.

I got to my feet, and groped like a blind man in the dark until I felt Harrigan’s shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “I gave us all a fright. It won’t happen again.”

Harrigan
might have said something – I’m not sure, but if he did, his words were drowned out by the sharp sound of Jed suddenly crying out in horror. He was standing on the other side of me. I felt the rub of his shoulder and his rigid tension. “Jesus Christ! Look at that!”

My head snapped round,
and I peered over the top of the fence.

My body went
ice cold.

I had to screw my eyes into n
arrow slits against the maniacal shriek of the beaten wind, but that didn’t diminish the horror.

The land beyond the fence was clear. It might have been a suburban park
, but the grass was long and swaying in the night. It stretched for maybe two hundred yards, and then the ground began to rise gradually to a hilly crest that was built out by suburban homes.

The hill was on fire.

I could see at least a dozen buildings ablaze, the flames flickering into the night sky, as if lashing out in anger at the rain. I couldn’t see smoke, but I could smell it in the air, and the burning skyline created a red-orange backlight that gave me a view clear across to the far side of the park.

In the
night sky – not fifty feet from the fence – was the dark shape of the helicopter. It was very low, the skids beneath the fuselage seeming to scrape and slash at the grass as the craft swayed perilously from side to side. But even so close, and even with the fire blazing across the distant hills, still the helicopter’s shape was dull and blurred, and I realized it was because the helicopter had been painted black.

I felt
Harrigan suddenly squeeze my arm, and his grip was vice-like and painful.

“We
’ve got problems,” he said.

I frowned, not understanding – and then saw a
blur of movement in the distance.

I stared for long seconds
. The rain was a grey misting curtain that beat down in a vertical haze. But through it – right on the edge of the field, I suddenly saw several shapes. They moved like ghostly apparitions, seeming to hover and undulate through the driving squalls. The shapes were lit by the glow of the fire, but it was an uncertain light, and it took me many moments before I suddenly realized what I was seeing.

There was at least a dozen of them – a
dozen undead – drifting through the long grass of the field, drawn towards the sound of the helicopter, and moving in a long ragged line, like a pack of wolves stalking a wounded prey.