Undead at Heart (21 page)

She tried again, and
then Dan and Sam reached her from one side, and Dave and Daz from the other,
between them they hoisted Tony from the floor and placed him on his feet.

She wondered if they
should turn and run again, but no-one made any move to do so.

This, it would seem,
was the place they would stop running. This was where they would take their
stand.

Tony, Dan, and Daz
allowed their packs to drop to the floor. Tony passed his whole jacket, with
its pockets-full of shotgun shells, to Dave. Then finding
himself
weaponless, Tony reached into the pack at his feet and found a long
screwdriver.

And so each of them,
armed with a range of makeshift weapons – and the one gun which Dave was
already loading again – planted their feet in the dirt of an anonymous field,
under a blackened sky, and waited for the enemy to attack.

There were three
soldiers in the Hut, the rest, apart from Alyssa, were villagers who had had
the same idea of using the unusually fortified scout hut as a refuge from the
madness.

The newcomers made
themselves as comfortable as they could on the wooden floor of the hut and
listened while Scott, the solder who had let them in, told them what had
happened.

“We were being
transported in by helicopter to engage the hostiles when they got us first.
There were twelve of us, including the pilots, but only six of us survived.
When the…” he paused, unable to believe what was about to come out of his
mouth, “… when the
aliens
hit us with their beams, they split the
helicopter. We were at the back and fell out. We weren’t that high up and landed
on soft grass, so we were okay. The rest of the helicopter, with everyone in
it, went down and exploded. We were lucky to escape.

“Our first thought was
to head to the LZ on foot, but before we could, there was a blast and
everything between us and the target was vaporised. We were blown into a ditch
by the blast, and the ditch saved us. The fire-front rolled right over the top
of us. Still, only four of us made it. Billy and Gobbo weren’t close enough to
be carried as far as the ditch. They burned up right in front of me.”

He was telling the
story in a low, matter of fact voice. It was obvious he had told it already,
but it was still affecting him.

“The trees above the
ditch started burning and flaming branches started to drop on us. We had to run
for it, through the flames. The other side was the road. We found a burning
truck and cars, but no people. They had all been abandoned. We presumed the
people had fled into the woods, so we followed, but we didn’t find any.”

James heard Andy say something
to Alan, and then Alan spoke up. “We met some of them. We met people who were
there. One saw your helicopter go down and then the truck flew over onto the
road. Was it your helicopter crash that sent it over, do you think?”

Scott nodded.
“Probably.”

“They headed into the
woods, but then they got split up. One of them was her mother, I think.” He
turned to Alyssa. “Is your mummy called Nicola, honey?” he asked her and she
nodded. Alan looked back at Scott. “They went looking for her.
In some shed on a hill?”

Scott nodded. “Yes,
that’s where we found her. We rescued her before some of those zombie things
could get to her.”

“What are they?” James
was surprised to realise that it was him who had asked the question.

“They’re zombies, as
far as I can tell. You
know,
the living dead and all
that crap?
They
make them and then it spreads in the bite from creature
to creature. They melt in the sun and you can stop them by smashing their heads
in or chopping them off. That’s all I know, really.”

“The aliens made
them?” Alan asked, and James saw Scott wince at the word. Something in his
rational, army training just seemed to rebel at the idea.

“Yes, we saw them, we
think.

“After we crossed the
road and went through the woods, we came out into fields. We kept going in the
hope of seeing a farm or a village. It didn’t take long before we did see a
farm, but before we could get there, we saw something else.

He paused and looked
at the newcomers with a fixed stare. “What I’m going to say may sound crazy,
but you have to believe me, okay?”

They all nodded, and
James wondered what could be crazier than everything he had seen and heard so
far in the last day.

“The…” Scott still
obviously found it hard to say the word ‘aliens’, “…the attackers have ships –
spaceships
– which drop legs and become giant robot spiders which can walk around the
countryside.”

He waited for the
stunned reaction that this comment had brought before, but all he got was nods.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” said Bert, softly.

“Two of them demolished
my pub,” Alan filled in.

“Oh, I see.” Scott
even sounded a little disappointed at having his thunder stolen and James could
suddenly see this young soldier as an old man, telling this story to wide-eyed
grandchildren. If they all survived, that was.

“Well, one of them
came across in front of us. It was headed straight for a man who had come out
from the farm. For such big things they’re amazingly quiet and fast. It was on
him before we could shout. One of those legs just seemed to scoop him up in to
the machine. Seconds later it pulled him back out in a shower of blood and
dropped him, from what we could see, near the farmhouse. We ran, but when we
got there, no-one was there. There was just a puddle of red on the carpet in
the kitchen. We called, and walked around the farm, but we couldn’t see what
had happened.

“We worked out after
that the puddle must have been what was left of the man we saw. The aliens had
taken him in - bitten him themselves, maybe, we’re not sure – and let him out
to spread the infection. We think that’s their plan to get rid of us, let us do
it ourselves. Now they’ve blocked the sun it should be easy. Even a short
exposure to the sun kills them. He must have gone in and melted in there.”

“That was my dad,”
James said quietly. He then told his story, again, of what had happened to his
dad and how he had hidden in the barn. Even as he was saying the words was
aware that his voice held the same monotone as he had heard in Scott’s.

When he finished,
everyone was
quietfor
a moment, then Scott said,
“That would explain what we found. When we got to the farm we must have just
missed you, and your mum must have moved deeper into the house. After we found
the… your father, we didn’t really look further. We just called out and when we
got no response we carried on.

“When night came we
were near another farm, and that’s when we saw what it really was we were
facing. There were only three of them, all with their necks torn, but one of
them was just a kid.” He took a deep breath and shuddered.

“The kid ripped out
Teddy’s throat before we knew what was happening. They turned on us and we shot
them. Five minutes later we had to shoot Teddy too.” He stopped talking and
everyone was silent for a moment.

One of the other
soldiers picked up the story. James thought his name was
Bolly
,
but he wasn’t sure. Was that even a name? “We didn’t want to carry on after
that. It was dark, and we just had no real idea what was going on. They didn’t
brief us before they sent us in. Just that there had been an ‘invasion’-” He
almost spat the words, his scorn much deeper and more angry than Scott’s
bewilderment.
“- and that we were being sent in to fight.
We’d lost our way and our will. We sat and we talked and we tried to work it
out. And then it was full dark. We already knew, from trying at the first
farmhouse, that some kind of EMP had knocked out the power to anything useful,
but we found some firewood and made a fire. It was a warm night, and it was
kind of pleasant.

“Until
they
came.”

“I guess the light and
the smell of smoke drew them,” Scott continued with the story. “There must have
been forty of them. We shot some, but they kept coming, and we hadn’t expected
them. Our clips were in our bags, so we couldn’t reload. We ended up in a barn,
barricaded in. It was all we could do.

“They kept us there
for hours, battering on the door, but we had pushed a tractor against it, and
there was no way they were coming in. We just had to wait for them to leave.”

Bolly continued,
“Eventually they did, and when it had been quiet for a little while, we moved
the tractor back and looked out. We could see a trail where they had headed out
into the fields. We’d reloaded, and stashed our extra clips in our belt, and we
thought that if we came up behind them, we could take most of them before they
could turn on us.

“When we caught up
with them, they were breaking into a shed and we could hear screaming. They
were tearing the door into matchsticks with their hands and didn’t care when
they ripped off flesh or fingers. We took aim and shot a few of them in the
heads, and the others turned and fled. They ran off the side, away from us. We
didn’t know what we had done to scare them so badly. Only hours before they
hadn’t seemed to care about our guns or the possibility of being shot. But only
ten minutes later the sun came up, and we realised that they had known,
somehow, and had run off to hide.”

“We’d found Alyssa, by
then,” Scott carried on with this game of story-tag that he and his comrade had
developed. “She’d been the one in the shed. I think if we’d been just one
minute later, they would have got her. The door was almost gone: just so much
kindling. We barely touched what was left and it collapsed. The girl was
cowering in the back, but we eventually calmed her down.”

“We brought her with
us,” – Bolly again – “and headed down the hill away from the farm, in the
opposite direction from where the zombies had gone. There didn’t seem to be any
point following them, and from the hill we could see nothing but farms in that
direction. Deek-” he indicated the third soldier who had said nothing so far,
“-had a pair of field glasses in his kit and he said he could see a village
over here, so we came this way.

“We reached the
village just a few hours ago. We met all these people.” He waved a hand around
at the assembled group, none of whom had engaged in the story-telling, and to
James they all looked in shock. “They were just emerging from cellars and garages,
where they’d been hiding from their undead friends and loved ones all night.
They were all heading here, the place that would be easiest to lock and defend.
Some of them had made it here last night, and they let us in. And we’ve been
here ever since.”

With the story told,
he fell silent. Scott didn’t have anything else to
add,
he just looked down between his crossed legs and rolled his rifle along his
thighs.

“So,” asked Alan,
“what now?”

Scott looked up, and
James could see in his expression that this was a question that he didn’t want
to answer. He took a deep breath. “Well, until the sun went, we were planning
on scouting for food, but we can’t do that now, not enough ammunition. So, when
our food runs out, we’ll last a while, as long as the water’s still working.
But-,” he shrugged, “if nothing happens and no-one stops those things, I’m
guessing we either have to try and break out of here and find a stocked
shelter, or we simply wait to die in here.”

The silence following
this bald assessment was followed by a loud banging on the metal doors which
reverberated through the building.

“Or maybe we won’t
have to wait.”

The cautious advance
of the zombies didn’t last long once they saw that their prey was no longer
running away. As they all reached the flat of the field, they ran, loping over
the ground, some even dropping to all fours. The leader of the pack sprang
straight at Nicola who was standing in the middle of the group of humans. She
stepped back and started to swing her blade, but her foot sank into a
depression and her arms went out wide as she struggled to stay upright. Her
neck and chest were exposed, offered, to the zombie’s attack.

Tony didn’t even think
,
he just raised the hand with the screwdriver clutched in
it directly in front of Nicola. The zombie impaled itself on the tool as it
entered through the eye-socket. Tony couldn’t stop the creature’s flight. The
screwdriver was torn from his hand and the zombie still collided with Nicola,
knocking her back.

The breath flew from
her in a whoosh as her back hit the ground, but still she rolled, dislodging
the now-still body of the zombie from her, and scrambled to her knees, blade
still clutched in her hand, trying to drag air into her lungs. Tony watched
this, and wasn’t aware of the creature which had used his distraction to launch
itself at his neck. The first thing he knew was when the shotgun discharged
close enough to his face for him to feel the singe of the blast on his skin and
his right ear to start ringing with deafness. He turned in shock and saw the
headless corpse of a zombie flying backwards, seemingly propelled by a cloud of
blood and brains. He nodded his thanks to Dave, who took a brief moment only to
nod back before turning the second barrel on another approaching attacker.