Undead Rain (Book 2): Storm (5 page)

They kicked open the front door and went inside. I could hear shouts of “Clear!” as they entered each room.

“What if they check out the barn?” I whispered to nobody in particular.

“They will,” Tanya replied.
 

“What do we do?” I asked.

“Fight or get captured.”

“They have guns,” I said. “We have bats and crowbars.”

“If they capture you, you’re dead anyway,” Jax said, “so you might as well go down fighting.”

“I know the Survivors Camps are bad,” I said, “but…”

“Bad?” Tanya asked, incredulous. “You’ve been on that boat of yours for too long. You don’t know what’s really going on here, do you?”

“I…no,” I admitted.

“I’ll put this in simple terms,” she said flatly. “If they take you to a Survivors Camp, you’re as good as dead.”

I thought of Joe and my parents.
 

“They’re coming out,” Jax said.

The four soldiers emerged from the house and took up positions at the Land Rover again. One of them spoke to the man in the maroon beret. He nodded and pointed at the barn.

The four soldiers got into their line and advanced across the dirt and grass towards us, assault rifles held steady.

“Fuck,” Sam whispered.

“Everybody, get in the Jeep,” Tanya whispered. She grabbed a backpack and ran over to the ladder and started down it. We all followed, Sam and Jax grabbing rucksacks and jostling for position in the line for the ladder. I ended up at the back. By the time I got down to ground level, the others were already in the vehicle. I got into the backseat with Sam. Tanya was in the driver’s seat with Jax next to her on the passenger side.

Tanya hadn’t started the Jeep. Her finger hovered over the Start button.

I felt helpless. The men outside were trained and they had guns. We had a Jeep Cherokee and baseball bats. If this was the end, my decision to come ashore in the fog had been the must stupid decision of my life. Lucy would never know what had happened to me and I would never know why she sailed away from the marina, leaving me on the mainland.
 

Outside the barn door, I heard the soldier’s voice.

“Stand by.”

A brief hesitation, then he spoke a simple word that sent my heart racing.

“Go.”

eight

The door slid open, letting in a shaft of light from outside. Four shadowy figures entered the barn, flanking the door. One of them shouted as Tanya started the Jeep and slammed it into first, sending the vehicle roaring forwards.

The soldiers had opened the door wide enough to allow themselves to slip into the barn so the gap wasn’t large enough to get the Cherokee through. We hit the door with a crash of wood meeting metal. The door splintered and we drove through. Behind us, the soldiers started firing.
 

“Hold on,” Tanya said through gritted teeth, pulling the wheel to the right and taking us into the field. I heard half a dozen bullets hit the rear of the Jeep with loud pinging sounds.

Tanya spun the wheel in the opposite direction and the Cherokee fishtailed before straightening up and speeding for the trees.

I risked a glance out of the back window. The soldiers were running for the Land Rover, their beret-headed commander gesturing at them angrily.

Tanya narrowly avoided two trees and we skidded onto the dirt road. She put her foot down and the Jeep picked up speed.

I pulled my seatbelt across my body and clicked it into the buckle. Everyone else did the same as we approached the wooden gate that led to the main road.

Behind us, the Land Rover gave chase. The man in the beret was shouting into a radio.

“There might be more of them on the road,” I told Tanya. “He’s talking to someone on the radio.”

She nodded and said, “Hold tight.”

We went through the gate with a loud bang and as Tanya spun the wheel to straighten us up on the road, I saw the gate lying in pieces. The Land Rover was closer now, almost at the remains of the gate.

Tanya floored the accelerator and we sped along the road.

Jax opened the glove compartment and took out a map. She unfolded it and ran her finger along the roads. “There’s a left turn ahead,” she said. “A side road that leads north.”

Tanya nodded, watching the road ahead closely. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered.

I leaned forward to see what she had seen.

A herd of zombies stood on the road, most of them wandering aimlessly, some of them staggering towards us. There must have been a hundred of them. They were standing on the road and trudging between the trees at either side. There was no way around them.

“Go through them,” Sam suggested. He glanced out of the back window. “The soldiers are getting closer. We have to go through them.”

Tanya nodded grimly but slowed our speed slightly. “This is going to get messy.”
 

We hit them with a heavy thud and I saw two of them go down immediately. The others crowded towards the Cherokee, their arms outstretched as they reached for us. Their yellow eyes held a look of malevolence. They moaned as their searching hands found the glass of the windows, the steel of the doors, and not yielding flesh.

More thuds came from the front of the vehicle as we drove through the herd. The zombies closed in around us like a sea of rotting blue flesh. Tanya was forced to slow down. She gunned the engine in frustration and we made slow progress through the mass of rotting bodies.

I looked out of the back window. The Land Rover had stopped a safe distance from the nasties. The soldiers weren’t following us into the throng of hungry undead. But the man in the beret was climbing out and going around the back. He disappeared for a few seconds behind the Land Rover then reappeared and went down on one knee.

“He’s got a rocket launcher!” Sam said.
 

“Still think the army is our friend?” Tanya asked, glancing at me over her shoulder. “We need to get out of here…now!”

She put her foot down and we roared forwards through the mass of zombies. The increased speed and impact of the bodies brought us to a sudden halt. Tanya gunned the engine. “We’re stuck. There’re too many of them under the wheels.” The front of the Cherokee had lifted into the air, supported by a pile of bodies underneath the chassis.

“We need to get out,” Jax said, looking back at the soldier with the rocket launcher, “or we’re going to get fried.”

We still weren’t clear of the herd. While the other three grabbed their rucksacks and opened their doors, I hesitated, my trembling hand on the door handle. There was no choice. If I stayed in the vehicle, I would be toast.

I opened the door with as much force as I could, sending a zombie staggering backwards, and came out swinging my bat wildly. The sound of the wood thwacking into zombie heads was sickening. The stench of rotted flesh was overpowering. The sound of the nasties’ hungry moans made the hairs on my arms and neck stand on end.

I concentrated on the stretch of clear road past the herd. I swung at anything that came near me. The zombies at the rear of the Jeep realised their prey was out of the vehicle, exposed and vulnerable, and tried to crowd closer to us, jostling with each other in their eagerness to tear into our flesh with teeth and nails.

I swung the bat wildly, trying to clear a path to that sweet patch of clear road ahead. For every zombie I knocked over, another replaced it instantly.
 

At one point, I felt a hand rake down my back and I thought I had been scratched, infected, but the nasty’s nails didn’t penetrate my hoodie. I was lucky but I knew my luck wouldn’t hold out much longer. There were too many of them.

The road ahead might as well be a thousand miles away.

I tripped over a body and went down hard, feeling a flare of pain in my shoulder as it hit the hard road.

A dozen blue-skinned monsters stood above me, ready to tear into the video-gaming geek who was lucky to have lived this long in the zombie apocalypse.
 

Then everything became light, sound and heat. A light so bright it burned my eyes, a sound so loud it deafened me, and a heat so intense it seared my skin.

nine

nine

I rolled onto my stomach, feeling the rough road beneath my fingers. The only sound I could hear was a constant whine in my head. My ears felt like they had been stuffed with wool. My skin felt tender, like I had been burned by the sun. I staggered to my feet unsteadily. The Cherokee was a flaming tangle of white metal and broken glass. Angry flames and black smoke plumed from the remains of the roof.

The zombies around me had been destroyed by the blast. They lay on the road like blue-skinned rag dolls. There was a stench of cooking meat in the air and I gagged, trying not to be sick. I didn’t have time to be sick. Most of the herd, the nasties that had been far enough away from the Cherokee, were still “alive”. They shambled towards me.
 

A hand grabbed my shoulder from behind and I whirled, bat ready. It was Jax. Black dirt smeared her face but she looked otherwise intact. She said something to me but I couldn’t hear anything over the whine. She pulled me off the road and into the trees. Tanya and Sam were waiting for us there.

We ran.

After a few minutes, I was out of breath. The whine in my head was still there but now I could hear other sounds as well, muffled but definitely there. Tanya and Sam speaking. The crunch of twigs beneath our boots. My own laboured breathing and the sound of my rapid heartbeat.

I slowed to a stumbling pace and let them get ahead of me. There was no way I could keep up. Story of my life. Always lagging behind everyone else. My stumbling jog slowed to a walk. I could barely breathe, never mind run. At least my hearing was improving with each passing minute. The whine had faded into a dull background noise.

I made my way through the forest at my own pace, unable to do anything else, and was surprised when I found Tanya, Jax and Sam waiting for me.

“You okay?” Jax asked as I reached them.

I nodded. “I can’t…move very fast.”

“We’ll take a breather here,” Tanya said. She sat down on a fallen log.

I did the same, sitting on the ground and leaning back against a tree trunk. “What are your stories?” I asked. “You all seem to know how to handle yourselves.”

“We’ve been in some tricky situations before all this shit went down,” Tanya said. “I was a reporter for the BBC. Sam was my cameraman. We’ve been to the Middle East a few times, reported on the war. We made a documentary on the US and British forces in Iraq. Sam was also the cameraman for Vigo Johnson.”

“The survival guy?” Vigo Johnson made TV shows about how to survive in various situations.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “We went all over the world and got into some tough situations. A lot of people think all that stuff is faked for TV but it was real. Usually just me and him stuck up a mountain in the middle of nowhere or deep in a tropical jungle. I filmed a lot of it on a handheld camera. Whatever Vigo did, I did too. But the viewers rarely saw me on their screens.”
 

“What about you?” I asked Jax.

“I’m a journalist,” she said. “We were making a documentary when the shit hit the fan and the army started taking people to the camps. We went on the run. There were seven of us to begin with. Now, only we three are left.”

I nodded. These people had seen death and misery just like everyone else.
 

“We should get moving,” Tanya said.

I stood up, feeling only slightly refreshed after the short break, and we started through the forest again. I wondered what Lucy was doing. Was she sailing up and down the coast looking for me? Did she think I was dead? How long would she stay in the area before she forgot about me and moved on? Where would she go? Where were my three new companions going?

I caught up with Jax. “Do you guys have a plan?”

She nodded. “Of course. Find somewhere safe to stay. Eat and drink before moving on tomorrow.”

“I meant a long-term plan. Are you moving on to anywhere in particular?”

She looked at me as if deciding whether or not she could trust me. “Yeah. Somewhere particular.”

“Where’s that?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. It seemed like their destination was a closely-guarded secret or something.
 

“Cornwall,” she said.

I nodded as if I understood why they would want to go there. “Good choice,” I said. “Not as populated as the rest of the country. Plenty of remote areas to hide.”

“Yeah,” she said noncommittally. I had hoped to draw more information out of her but my social skills were seriously lacking. Did they know something about Cornwall? It had remote areas, as I had said, but there were more remote places in Scotland so why not head north across the border? What was it about Cornwall that was drawing them there?

“Any other reason?” I asked Jax.

“Maybe,” she said.
 

This line of questioning was getting me nowhere. I should just keep my mouth shut and concentrate on how I was going to find Lucy and
The Big Easy
again.
 

Trouble was, I had no ideas at all.

After a few more minutes of relentless trudging through the woods, I asked her, “Why are the army trying to kill us?”

She looked at me like I had just asked her why the sky was blue. “You really don’t know, do you?”

I shook my head. “I thought they were supposed to be protecting people from the zombies, not trying to kill civilians.”

She laughed. “They do what the government order them to do. It isn’t about protection; it’s about control. Even now, after the entire country has gone to hell, the politicians spread lies and try to control the people.”

“Lies? I don’t understand.”

“Tell me what you know about the virus outbreak, Alex.”

“Okay,” I said, “it comes from India. There was a doctor quarantined in a hospital in London. It spread from there.” I remembered the news reports I had read on board the
Solstice
. “And it’s infected America. Probably the rest of the world too.”