Mark Morris - Bay of the Dead

'Sorry, Gwen, but it's true. You're a lot safer up here. Come on .'

This last remark was directed at his phone, which he was now holding above his head, as though making an offering to the moon.

'What are you doing, Rhys?' said Gwen irritably.

'I'm trying to get a decent signal on this bloody thing.'

'Why?'

'Why do you think? I want to make a call.'

Frustrated, he lifted the security bar on the window and shoved it open, then thrust the hand that was holding the mobile out into the drizzly night.

'Bingo!' he exclaimed.

'Who are you wanting to call anyway?' said Gwen. 'Rentokil?'

He gave her the look a teacher might give a facetious pupil. 'I'm calling in a favour,' he said. 'It's a bit of a long shot, but you never know.'

The pod, which was sitting in an open containment case on Ianto's lap, was going crazy, pulsing brighter and more fiercely as they neared the hospital. The coloured lights flickering just beneath the surface of its opaque skin were moving so rapidly that Ianto couldn't keep track of them. The pod's rate of regeneration was increasing too; indeed, Ianto fancied he could now see the silvery orb repairing itself before his eyes. He was watching it, mesmerised, when the SUV slammed into something, jolting him out of his reverie.

'Zombie roadkill,' said Jack. 'Couldn't be helped. He stepped right out in front of me.'

Ianto glanced into the rear-view mirror, to see a dark smear on the road behind them.

'There's no need to sound so happy about it,' he said. 'I worry about you sometimes.'

Jack grinned. 'What can I say? I enjoy my work.'

They were very close to the hospital now. The drive through Cardiff had been a journey through a nightmare landscape. Even in the couple of hours they had been in the Hub, the number of zombies had increased dramatically. They were everywhere , filling the streets, aimlessly shuffling. Cardiff had become a city of the dead.

Jack had managed to avoid most of them, though some had had to be nudged aside. Ianto knew that if Jack had had his way, he would have simply ploughed through the lot of them.

'It's not like they're real ,' he had told Ianto, when Ianto had asked him to slow down and be careful, 'and this baby is big enough and tough enough to cope.'

'That's not the point,' Ianto said. 'You're not the one who has to clean up the mess afterwards.'

It didn't help that the creatures seemed so interested in the pod. Whether it was the flashing lights or something more intrinsic, it certainly seemed to spark a reaction. Or maybe it's just us , thought Ianto. Maybe it's just the fact that we're the only thing apart from themselves that's moving . Certainly, wherever they went, the dead would converge on them, arms outstretched and something like. . what? eagerness? recognition? in their otherwise glazed eyes.

At last they turned a corner, and there was the hospital entrance, a hundred metres ahead of them.

'Weird,' said Jack.

'What is?'

'Look around. What d'you see?'

Ianto peered through the windscreen. It was a leafy street in a nice part of town. Big houses on the left; the hospital grounds, flanked by high hedges, on the right.

At first he didn't see what Jack was getting at, and then he realised. 'Oh,' he said. 'No zombies.'

'A coupla streets behind us it was wall to wall, but here there's nothing,' said Jack. 'Pretty odd, wouldn't you say?'

Ianto remained silent. It was only when Jack swung the SUV through the gates leading in to the multi-level car park and they saw the brightly lit building before them that the mystery of the missing zombies was solved.

The creatures were standing in rows, several layers deep, forming a cordon around the building. There were literally hundreds of them, and they were motionless and eerily silent.

'My God,' breathed Ianto. On his lap, the pod was pulsing more fiercely than ever.

Jack looked across at Ianto and raised an eyebrow. 'No prizes for guessing what they're guarding,' he said.

It was odd in a way, but the constant state of tension, of apprehension, had become boring after a while. Tired of the crush of people in Reception, and more particularly of their endless theorising and analysing, Rianne and Nina had retreated to the empty maternity ward, and were now sitting in the semi-darkness, staring out over the car park, cradling mugs of tea.

They hadn't talked much in the last half-hour or so. In fact, Nina had spent much of the time dozing. A nurse had cleaned and re-bandaged her leg for her; despite what Nina's friends had thought, she hadn't needed stitches.

'I wonder what happened to the Thomases,' Rianne said.

'Huh?' Once again, Nina's eyes had been drooping closed. Rianne reached out and gently took the half-empty mug out of her hands.

'Sarah Thomas. She's one of my ladies. She phoned earlier this evening to say she'd gone into labour. I hope she's all right.'

Before Nina could rouse herself to answer, the faint screech of brakes from outside drew Rianne to the window. At the top end of the car park was a big shiny-black vehicle, all lit up like a Christmas tree. In fact, it was pulsing with light, as if it contained some kind of mobile disco.

Rianne tensed. Clearly the occupants of the vehicle had seen the creatures massed around the hospital. Turn back , she urged them silently, turn back .

The big black vehicle began to rumble forward.

'No!' Rianne said, loud enough to snap Nina fully awake.

'Wassamatter?' Nina muttered.

Rianne gestured at the approaching vehicle in dismay. 'Another lamb to the slaughter.'

Nina hauled herself out of her chair and hobbled across to stand beside Rianne. They watched the big black car edging towards the hospital, rippling and strobing with inner light, almost as if it wanted to draw attention to itself.

The creatures encircling the hospital had been still and silent for some time, but now twenty or more of them jerked into motion and peeled away from the main throng, shuffling towards the newcomers.

'Get away from here. Get away,' Rianne urged, her fists clenched in dreadful anticipation.

Nina's voice was as bleak as her words. 'Whoever they are, they don't stand a chance.'

In his hospital bed, Oscar Phillips thrashed and writhed. His lips curled back over clenched teeth gleaming with spittle, and his eyes rolled madly behind their closed lids.

'This isn't good,' Ianto said nervously as zombies swarmed over the SUV.

Jack, however, seemed unperturbed. 'Relax, Ianto,' he said. 'This thing's tougher than a tank. There's no way in hell they can get in.'

'Yes, but there's no way we can get out either,' Ianto replied. 'In fact, there's so many of them I doubt we could even drive through.'

Jack acknowledged the observation with a shrug. 'There is that, I guess.'

He nodded at the orb, pulsing madly in the box on Ianto's lap.

'Maybe buddy boy there will protect us.'

'Or maybe they'll tear us apart to get to it,' Ianto said. 'It certainly seems to have agitated them.'

It was true. In the presence of the pod, the zombies seemed more animated, more ferocious than usual. They were crawling all over the SUV, pounding and scrabbling at the windows, leaving greasy smears of themselves behind. Their rotting faces glared in at Jack and Ianto, the pod's light flashing silver in their lifeless eyes.

Jack unholstered his Webley. 'Only one way to find out,' he said.

Ianto blanched. 'You're not going out there?'

As ever, Jack seemed to relish the prospect of extreme danger. 'It's either that or sit here till doomsday.'

'But you'll be killed,' Ianto said.

Jack shrugged. 'So what's new?'