Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent (9 page)

             
“Aye, well, it’ll be a night to remember, anyway.”

             
They laughed.  Not the hysterical laughter of crumbling sanity, but genuine, good-humoured, glad-to-be-alive laughter.

             
“But you really should put some dry clothes on love.”

             
“I need to get my breath back first.”  However, Siobhan fell asleep, cold and muddy, within ten minutes of Will driving.

             
When Will felt his eyelids droop he pulled over to the side of a deserted road and slept.

*   *   *

In the morning it was still raining.  Siobhan opened the car window to wet a T-shirt with rainwater, and she used the cold damp material to clean the mud from her body before getting dressed awkwardly in the confines of the car.

             
Will pretended to be asleep, and watched her through eyes open just enough to see.

             
He realised that pretending to be unconscious while watching her wash was probably not the most gentlemanly thing to do, so he turned away from her, pretending to roll in his sleep.

             
He opened his eyes fully now his back faced her and looked out across the fields.  There was no sign of life or unlife.

             
Finally he spoke, his back still turned, “We have to finish our shopping today.”

             
Siobhan sighed, “Yes, I wonder where’s still open?”

*   *   *

As soon as Danniella and Tina crossed the M25, the massive motorway that encircled Greater London and formerly the busiest road in the United Kingdom, the number of undead on the streets rose exponentially.

             
In the countryside they could travel for a mile without seeing anything, and when they did stumble across an isolated pocket of zombies they could speed away.  The city was an entirely different proposition.  An alarming number of roads were blocked: some by army barricades, but mostly by crashed cars or jams of cars overrun as they tried to escape London.  The roads that weren’t blocked still required careful negotiating.  But worst of all in the city the number of zombies had increased.  They now had a permanent and growing crowd of zombies following them.  They were not able to gain enough speed to shake them off, as the roads were littered with obstacles, from dead bodies to smashed-up or burnt-out cars.

             
Danniella clutched a map of London, while Tina sat hunched over the wheel on the lookout for obstructions.

             
Twice they had to drive into a crowd of zombies, which did the car no favours, and splattered the windscreen with reddish-black blood.  The wipers were out of water, so the window remained smeared and their visibility limited.

             
Their chosen route into London was to run parallel with the main A2 route, and then drive through Blackheath to Greenwich, where they hoped to find a boat to take them back to the centre of the city and the entrance to Down Street.

             
They would have to fight their way through several of the undead in order secure the labs, but there would hopefully be no more than half a dozen, and the research centre was divided into small, securable areas.

             
“As long as we don’t have to deal with too many of them at once we should be fine.”  Danniella was trying to reassure herself as well as Tina.

             
“Anything is better than living in the dark waiting to die,”  Tina spoke with a sigh.

             
Feeling responsible for the virus, Danniella had considered suicide more than once, but she had refused to run away from the problem she had helped create.  She recognised the despair in Tina’s voice, and worried that her companion may be helpful in a fight, but Tina’s presence could pull Danniella’s moral even lower.

*   *   *

With Arlene gone the shopping trip became much more difficult.  Primal instinct made Will want to be the ‘hunter-gatherer’ so Siobhan could stay in the relative safety of the car.

             
However, Siobhan insisted, “I’m faster, more agile, and you are the better driver.”  She didn’t really believe the last point, but hoped it would appeal to Will’s dented male pride.

             
After a long discussion Will conceded, “OK, but I don’t like it.”

             
They targeted garages and small village stores.  The stores tended to be boarded up, but garages were often looted.

             
At length they found enough to call it a day.

             
“I’d really like some new books.”

             
Will rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “It’s gonna be dangerous to get them, I don’t know if they’re worth the risk.”

             
“Books not worth the risk?”  Siobhan shook her head. “We could be spending the rest of our lives down there; this could be the last time we ever,
ever
go outdoors.  We need to get a lifetime’s entertainment.

             
“Shite.”  They had talked about life underground, but for the first time Will had a vision of what that could really be like. “Bugger the books!  We need whiskey, and some films.”

             
“So we’re agreed, entertainment is a priority?”

             
“OK.”

             
“And you’re with me that this is worth risking our lives for?”

             
“Abso-fucking-lutely!”

             
“I know where to go!”  Siobhan sat upright in her seat,  “No wait!”  She slumped back down.

             
“What’s wrong?”

             
“I was thinking of Lakeside, the big shopping centre, but it’s the wrong side of the Thames; we’d have to cross at the Queen Elizabeth Bridge or the Blackwall Tunnel.”

             
“I’m not going down the tunnel.  It’d be a death trap.”  He paused. “Not sure about the bridge.  Almost certainly blocked.”  They were driving past a garage with several cars for sale.  At the end of a line of grubby cars stood a few grubby motorbikes and scooters. “It would be almost certainly blocked for cars.  But what about a motorbike?”

             
Siobhan had visions of hordes of the undead tearing her from a bike.  This competed with visions of her driving through the streets at eighty miles an hour. “I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s tempting.”

             
They pulled into the garage forecourt. 

             
It seemed deserted.

             
“You look at the shop, I’ll look at the bikes.”

             
“You’re not going to be cautious and stay with the car?”

             
“Fuck the caution, you’ve just got risk it sometimes, you know, feel the rain in your hair.”

             
Siobhan smiled. “But let’s keep the doors open, and the engine running.”

             
They left the car and ran, stooped low, treading as quietly as possible.  Siobhan found the shop door open, and the shop was a mess: most of the shelves toppled over and the contents scattered across the ground. 

             
There was blood all over the counter.  Siobhan stood up straight, acutely alert.  Then the smell hit her.  It was the stench of rotting human flesh.  A smell that six months ago she never would have imagined becoming familiar.

             
She kept looking around, while kneeling and fumbling through the scattered shop contents on the floor, picking up items to look at them, then throwing them into the bag.

             
After a few minutes exploring she looked round behind the counter.  There was a dead body.  The arms were covered in bites and the material of its green hooded top torn and stained red.  Then she realised the body was not totally dead.  The neck was snapped, laying at an extreme angle.  But the head was still animated.  When it caught sight of Siobhan out of the corner of its eyes, the jaws started snapping, and a sickening gurgling noise started up in its throat.

             
Siobhan felt her bile rise.

             
Her head was spinning.  But she returned to reality as she saw the row of keys hanging behind the counter.  She scooped them up, averting her gaze from the creature’s snapping mouth, and ran outside to show Will.

             
Will was trying to hotwire the largest motorbike.

             
“I think I found the keys!”  She spoke in a loud whisper.

             
“Good girl!”  Will beamed.

             
He ran back inside and looked through the keys, searching for the key rings for the cars and bikes.  He gathered a pocketful of the likely suspects and returned to the forecourt.

             
As he approached one of the cars at the back of the lot Will jumped at the movement he saw within.  There were at least two creatures inside, smacking against the windows as soon as they saw living outside.

             
“I’ll watch them,” hissed Siobhan, “you get some bikes sorted.”

             
“But-”

             
“No buts, it’s only a matter of time before one works out how to open the door or smash the windows.”

             
In the cramped confines of the car there was not enough room for the creatures to get any leverage, but the glass would not survive the vicious pounding for long.

             
The car rocked alarmingly as the creatures thrashed and writhed inside.

             
Will cheered in triumph as the bike’s engine roared to life.

             
“Do you want to hop on the back?”  He shouted to his companion, “Or should I try to start another?”

             
Siobhan nodded towards a blue moped, “We shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket.  I’ll take the scooter.”

             
Will hurried over to the machine, fumbled with the keys, and in a moment its engine was also purring.

             
“Let’s go!” Will shouted.

             
As they hopped onto the bikes they heard the car window smash, and two creatures were pulling themselves out through the broken glass.

             
The zombies were sliding across the front of the car, as Will confidently rolled his bike off its stand.

             
As a teenager Siobhan had once ridden a friend’s motorcycle as a teenager, and remembered that the technique was fairly easy, but couldn’t quite recall how to do it now.

             
Will shouted some instructions and she started with a jolt, just as the zombies staggered to their feet and started to run towards her.

             
Fear and inexperience made her accelerate too fast, and she almost fell off as she shot forward, and then she had to turn sharply and skidded on the ground that was still wet from the previous night’s thunderstorm.

             
After a wobbly start she began to run steadily.

             
The cold wind in her face was exhilarating.

             
Now that she was actually moving she began to realise how vulnerable she was on two wheels.  In the car they had the occasional creature leap out at them.  Sometimes they could swerve to avoid a zombie, sometimes they had no choice but to run it over.  On the bikes their choices were reduced dramatically.  If they hit a zombie, no matter how badly they smashed the creature up, they would come off worse.

             
The other unnerving thing about this mode of transport was the noise, which was loud and unmistakable.  Whenever they arrived in an area they knew that any resident zombies would already be aware of their presence.

*   *   *

The roads around the large, open, green space from which Blackheath took its name, were all blocked.  Danniella and Tina decided to ride across the Heath itself.

             
The solid ground was good, but the untended grass on the Heath had grown tall, and obscured the vire.

             
“That way!” Tina shouted, pointing towards the far end of the Heath, “We can try to get through Greenwich Park: it should be less busy than the streets.”

             
The car lurched as it bumped over something hidden in the grass, and they heard what sounded like fists pounding the its underside.