Undead Rain (Book 2): Storm (6 page)

She shook her head. “All lies fed to you by the media. That’s why we’re going to Cornwall. We’re going to tell everybody what’s really happening.”

ten

I had no idea what Jax meant by that and I had no time to ask. Tanya and Sam suddenly dropped to crouching positions and gestured at us to do the same. We complied and crawled up to where they crouched peering through the trees.

The forest dipped down to a road ahead. It was more a track than a road and it looked like it had been made by tractors. Twin grooves had been gouged into the mud by big tires and between the grooves grew a line of grass. I looked up along the track and spotted a red painted metal gate. Beyond the gate was a muddy field and in the distance I could see a low wooden barn. I assumed there was a house up there somewhere but the trees cut off my line of sight.

“Looks like a farm,” Sam whispered. “We should check it out.”

“Do we really want to?” I asked. “We didn’t do so well at the last farm.”

“This one looks more remote,” Tanya said. “There’s no road, only that muddy track. Jax, have you got the map?”

Jax took the map from her backpack and unfolded a portion of it. She located our position and the farm. “It’s a few miles to the main road,” she said. “We should take a closer look.”

Tanya nodded and set off down the slope. We followed until we all stood on the muddy track. I glanced back along the track. It disappeared around a bend in the distance. In front of us, it ran up to the gate and disappeared into the field. The gate was held shut with a short blue cord that was looped over the metal gate post.

We could see the farmhouse now. It sat waiting for us just beyond the barn. There were no signs of life.

Tanya opened the gate and said, “Come on.”
 

We trudged through the mud towards the house.
 

“I hope there’s food in there,” I said. It was lunchtime and my stomach was growling at how empty it was.

“Don’t worry, man, we’ll find something,” Sam said. “And if we don’t, there are some granola bars in my backpack.”

I wasn’t sure a granola bar was going to sustain me for the rest of the day. I felt exhausted from all the fighting, running, and nearly getting blown up by a rocket launcher. I needed something substantial in my belly.

The farmhouse was a two-storey stone structure like the Mason’s house. But unlike the Mason place, this one had a garage with a white metal door attached to the house and a wooden porch that looked like it had once been painted white but was so weathered that the paint had flaked away, revealing faded wood beneath. Only a few stubborn lines of paint remained.

Sam went up onto the porch and tried the door. “Locked.” He went to the window, cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face to the glass. He stepped back. “Wow, freaky.”

“What is it?” Tanya asked.

“There’s an old woman in there. She’s turned but she’s sitting calmly on the sofa like she’s watching the TV.”

Tanya nodded. “That’s what happens when they turn but there’s no stimulus. They replicate old behaviours. I bet the entire family has gone nasty and they’re all locked in there.”

“We should move on,” I suggested. I’d had enough of zombie-killing for one day.

“No, we go in and clear the place,” Tanya said. “We don’t have many options. I don’t want to be outside at night when it’s harder to see the zombies coming. This place shouldn’t be too hard to clear. Just a family in there.”

I nodded. I didn’t much like the idea of going in there and killing a family, even if they were zombified, but I liked the idea of sleeping outside even less.

Sam went back to the front door and kicked it with the sole of his boot, putting all his weight behind it. He was a big guy and the wooden door cracked slightly but stayed shut. He kicked it a second time and it gave, opening with a crash. “Knock, knock,” Sam said, brandishing his tire iron as he went inside.

The girls followed and I took up the rear, hoping that by the time I got inside, the killing would be done. But as I entered, Tanya said, “Alex, take the upstairs.” She and Jax were moving through the downstairs rooms. Sam was in the living room, disposing of the TV-watching old lady zombie.

I went upstairs quickly, wanting to get it over and done with. As I reached the landing, the smell of decaying meat hit me. There were four doors up here. Two were open. One of them was the bathroom and the other a bedroom out of which a zombie staggered, arms outstretched. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans and looked like he had been in his fifties. I brought the bat back with both hands and swung it as hard as I could at his head. He went down like a sack of rotted potatoes and lay on the carpet unmoving.

I checked the bedroom he had come out of for further inhabitants but it was empty. A patch of dried blood and gore on the sheets told me the nasty had lain there for a long while. Zombies didn’t sleep as far as I knew so he was probably going through the motions of his former life, as Tanya had said.

I went to the first closed door and opened it. The room was empty. Rock band posters on the walls and a game console attached to a large TV in the corner told me it probably belonged to a teenager. There was no sign of him in the room. Maybe he had been away at college when the virus outbreak started.

The next room was also empty. The light floral wallpaper and knitting on the chair in the corner probably meant it belonged to the old lady downstairs. Whatever she had been knitting would never be finished now.
 

I went downstairs to find the others.

Sam was outside, dragging the old lady’s rotting body across the mud. I found Tanya and Jax in the kitchen.

“Did you find any more?” I asked them.

“No,” Jax said, shaking her head.
 

“There’s one upstairs,” I said. “Looks like the farmer.”

“The old lady was probably his mother,” Tanya said. “No wife? Kids?”

“There’s a teenager’s bedroom upstairs. Maybe their son was away at the time and never came home.”

She walked lithely into the hallway and pointed at a photograph on the wall. It showed a man in his fifties with a pretty blonde woman and a dark-haired boy of sixteen or seventeen. They were all smiling at the camera. “So where’s the woman?” Tanya asked.

“Maybe she was away too. Visiting the son in college or something.” I didn’t really care where the wife was as long as she wasn’t here trying to tear my throat out. Tanya and Jax were journalists so I supposed they had more curiosity about these things than I did.

Tanya went back into the kitchen and opened a door that led into a large pantry. There was plenty of food in there and my stomach did a little flip of anticipation. Tanya wasn’t searching for food, though. She checked the dining room before going out into the hallway and opening a small door underneath the stairs.

“There’s a basement,” she said, pointing to an opening in the floor and a ladder leading down into darkness.

Tanya leaned over the opening and tried to see what was down there. “Too dark,” she said.
 

Remembering the working lights at Mason’s Farm, I reached in and found a switch on the wall. I clicked it on and the area beneath the stairs and the basement below lit up. Tanya went down the ladder cautiously. A moment later, she called, “It’s okay. Come down.”

Jax went down and I followed. When we reached the tiny basement, I had to stoop to keep from hitting my head on the low ceiling. The basement was actually little more than a crawl space used for storing tools and sports equipment, which I guessed had belonged to the son.
 

The wife was in the corner, recognisable as the woman in the photo upstairs by her blonde hair. She was dead. Really dead. Not turned.

“She must have come down here when her husband and the old lady changed,” I said. “She was too scared to go back up into the house and eventually she just died down here. She didn’t even dare put the light on.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Tanya said. “There are things down here she could have used as weapons. She could have gotten out of the house. Why stay down here waiting to die when you can fight your way out?”

“Not everybody thinks the same way,” I said. “Where would she go to if she got out? Her husband had turned. The old lady might have been her mother. She probably thought everyone in the world had changed like them. She had nothing to live for.”

“What about the son?” Tanya didn’t seem to understand the concept of giving up, not fighting for survival.

I shrugged. “She must have thought he was changed or dead. And if he was alive, how would she find him? She wouldn’t last five minutes out there.”

Tanya nodded slowly. I could see she was trying to understand but her job took her to places where situations were dire yet people fought for survival. It was what she knew.

If I hadn’t been with Mike, Elena, and Lucy when the shit hit the fan, I probably would have ended up like this woman. Afraid to leave my house. Somebody would find me one day and I would be lying dead among video games and fast food containers.

“We need to give her a proper burial,” Jax said.

Tanya nodded. “I can’t believe she didn’t fight.”

I didn’t say anything else but as I looked down on the corpse of the woman, I totally understood her choice. Fight for what? She had no future.
 

And now that I was separated from Lucy, what was I fighting for? A life of roaming from one farm to the next, trying to stay one step ahead of the army and clearing houses of zombies? That was no life.
 

Being with Mike, Elena, and Lucy had taught me that sometimes I had to fight for what I wanted.

I was willing to fight to get back to Lucy. That was the only thought keeping me going right now.

Without that thin strand of hope, I might as well be like the dead woman lying at my feet.

eleven

We removed the farmer’s body and dumped it next to the old lady’s in a ditch. Sam and I found shovels in the basement and dug a grave behind the house for the blonde woman. For some reason, we afforded her more respect because she had died without becoming one of the nasties.
 

When I thought about it logically, it didn’t make sense that we should treat the zombies any differently; they had died too. But the virus turned them into monsters and that threw all logic out of the window.

They died as monsters and we treated them as such.
 

After we buried the woman, Sam and I stood over the fresh grave silently for a moment. We bowed our heads. I thought about the friends I had lost in the apocalypse and I hoped I didn’t lose any more. I wasn’t religious in any way but I said a silent prayer that I would find Lucy and she would be alive and well.
 

Sam raised his head and looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. He had been thinking about his own loved ones. “Let’s go back inside, man. We’ve done all we can for this woman.”

I nodded and as we walked to the house I wondered if these three people now numbered among my friends. I barely knew them but they seemed like decent people. They had let me join them and we had fought together. I didn’t know how long they would let me stay with them…they seemed to have some mission to carry out…and I didn’t know what I would do when we parted ways but for now I was glad to be with them.

As we reached the door, Sam turned to me with a serious look on his face. “There’s something we need to do now, Alex. It’s very important.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

A grin spread across his face. “We need to find beer.”

*

Later, Jax and I sat in the living room while Tanya and Sam fussed about in the kitchen cooking a meal. They had a friendly, joking banter between them and I wondered if they were a couple, or should be a couple. Outside, it was getting dark. We had opened all the windows in the house and left them open all afternoon to let fresh air into the house. The rotting smell was gone and now the house was filled with the fragrance of chicken being fried in herbs and spices. In his search for beer, Sam had found a freezer packed with meat.

He had also eventually found a case of beer in the pantry. A dozen bottles of Spitfire ale. A half-drained bottle sat in front of me on the coffee table as I waited for the meal. The smell of the chicken was driving me crazy.

Jax had lit a fire in the stone fireplace. The logs crackled and popped. With the ceiling light dimmed, the fire flickered orange on the walls, making the room seem cozy. Jax had unfolded her map and laid it on the rug in front of the fireplace. It showed the surrounding area and Swansea to the west. She had placed a second map next to it. That was a map of Britain, showing the contours of the coast.

I had asked her earlier about the “media lies” she had mentioned in the forest and she said they would explain everything to me after we ate. I couldn’t argue with that; right now, food was my main priority.

Sam stuck his head through the door. “Come and get it.”

We gathered in the dining room around a large oak table. Sam and Tanya had set out plates and cutlery and in the middle of the table sat two big serving bowls. One was full of boiled white rice. The other contained a mouth-watering chicken curry. Four bottles of Spitfire sat next to the rice.

I sat and said, “That looks and smells great.”

Sam laughed and said, “Tanya’s curries are great but she makes them spicy, man. If you’re not used to them, they go right through you.” He looked at Tanya and said, “We’ll probably be fighting zombies tomorrow and Alex will have to excuse himself to go shit behind a tree.”

She slapped him on the shoulder playfully. “I’m not taking the blame for that. You had just as much a hand in making it as I did. You’re the one who was heavy-handed with the spices.”

“I had to do something to cover up the way you fried the chicken with too much coriander,” he said, looking at me and winking, letting me in on his joke.

“You liar!” Tanya said.

“Well it smells great,” I said. We set about loading the curry and rice onto our plates and grabbing a bottle of beer each.