Jack Lewis - Fear the Dead - A Zombie Apocalypse Book

A man was there. A man with a gun and a grin.

Chapter 8

There were still five stray infected all within a feet of him, but the man didn’t seem to care. One of them stumbled close, but he sidestepped, got behind it and drove a hunting knife through its head with a crack, sending bloody skull fragments to the floor. He wiped the blade on his green khaki trousers.

As he walked over to me his steps were almost playful, and despite how heavy his boots looked, they didn’t make a sound on the ground. Justin could learn something about stealth from this guy. He had a thick brown moustache that curled over his top lip and into his mouth, which must have been irritating, and his eyes were small, squinty, and gave him an almost sneering look. I wondered if his army khakis meant he was in the military, or if he was one of those guys who just loved to pretend he was.

Before getting to me he stopped above the body of one of the infected. It was a little boy who wore a blue t-shirt. The man put his foot underneath the boy’s body and gave a kick, flipping him over. On the boys t-shirt, faded but just about there, was the outline of a train. The man looked at the boy’s face as though he was trying to recognise him, but attempting to see any facial features was made impossible through fifteen years of infection. He shook his head and turned his attention back on me.

I moved my foot and tried to pry it loose inch by inch, but it wouldn’t move. The weight of the metal on it was such that if I moved too much, the whole barricade was going to shift itself onto me and break my foot, and then I really would be screwed. I could still move my arms though, so I reached to my waist and pulled out my knife. I looked at the man and wondered if I’d get time to use it.

He lifted his gun up in the air and gave a sideways nod to it, with a mocking look in his eyes.

“Gun beats knife,” he said. His voice was gravelly, like a boot crunching on glass.

He was right, I knew. If things went bad I could swing my knife all I wanted, but all he had to do was take a step back out of my reach, pull the trigger and I’d be done. With the metal sheets trapping my leg, I was completely at his mercy. Behind him, the four infected were slowly making their way toward us. I felt sweat trickle down my forehead.

The man took a step closer and knelt in front of me so that his head was only a little higher than mine. Up close he had the same unwashed smell that most of us travellers had, so it was obvious he wasn’t from Vasey. He also smelt faintly of Old Spice, and I didn’t know where he could have gotten that from, or why. What did it matter how we smelt these days? He had a dark leather belt around his waist. On one side of it was a sheath for his knife, and then wrapped around the rest of it were what seemed to be parts taken from various animals – a couple of rabbits paws, presumably for luck, and some teeth that looked like they were from an alligator, though he must have ordered these online before the infection. As I followed the trail of animal memorabilia hung around his belt my eyes snapped onto something, and I felt a cold shiver run through me.

There was a human ear on his belt. It was torn and mangled, but unmistakably human.

I remembered what Justin had said about the hunters, and suddenly it didn’t seem so stupid. The need to free my leg became more urgent, and the feeling of being trapped jabbed at me. It was a struggle to control my breathing, and my chest felt tight. Behind us, getting closer still, the infected moved toward us.

“Name’s Torben,” he said. His voice was as rough as sandpaper. “Torben Tusk.”

I looked down at my leg, but there was no way I could get myself free. It would take someone to hold up the metal while I dragged myself out, and Torben didn’t move to help. I still had my knife in my hand, but he was knelt in such a way that he could easily move himself back if I took a swing at him. The infected were moving slowly toward us right now, but they would speed up when they got closer, and at that point I would need Torben to take care of them or they would be on me.

Where the hell was Justin? I wanted to look at the other side of the barricade to where he had squirmed his way through, but I didn’t want to draw Torben’s attention to it. The longer he thought I was alone, the better.

My only option was to see what he wanted, and hope he didn’t want one of my ears for his belt. I was conscious of the fact that my bag was on the floor a few feet away from me, and in it were the bulk of our supplies as well as the broken GPRS. I prayed Torben didn’t notice it.

Torben wiped his knife on his khakis again. He brought the tip of it toward his mouth and stuck his tongue out so that it was millimetres away from the blade. I thought of the lingering infected atoms that would still be on the silver, just waiting to enter a new host.

“Peculiar, don’t you think? One little nick from this blade, and in a few days I’ll be one of them,” he said, gesturing behind him. He didn’t seem to care that the four infected were only fifty feet away and headed in his direction.

I stayed quiet and kept my eyes focussed on him, waiting for the slightest of movements in my direction. As silently as I could, I twisted my foot and tried to make room to pull it out.

He held the blade of the knife in front of him as if transfixed. “We’re all living like this – inches away from the knife edge. Makes you wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just give in and become one of them.”

The infected were forty feet away now. Where was Justin?

Torben leant in a little closer. “How’d you come to be in this fix?”

I feigned a smile. “I slipped.” I needed to play nice as much as I could, but I wasn’t telling him anything.

“Accidents happen easier than you think, ‘specially now. You from town?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

He turned his head away from me and looked at my rucksack on the floor. As he moved, I saw an infected closing in behind him less than ten metres away. My heart pounded. Should I warn him, or should I let it pounce on him? I didn’t trust the guy an inch, and he gave off a vibe that made me want to get far away. But once the infected was done with him, it would eventually turn its attention toward me. Justin was gone and I was stuck, and I’d be helpless as all four of the infected ripped me to pieces.

The infected was five steps away.

“Behind you,” I said.

Without even looking first, Torben readied his knife and span his body, connecting with the stomach of the infected and slashing a deep gash through its skin. Through the tear in its abdomen the infected’s rotten guts slipped out and slapped onto the floor. Torben sprang to his feet, hooked his right leg behind the infected and pushed it to the ground. He walked around to its head, lifted his boot in the air and brought it down with all his weight. The infected’s skull caved like a watermelon and sprayed bits of blood and bone onto the road.

Somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of someone retching. I couldn’t move my head because that meant taking the effort to reposition my whole body, and this would draw Torben’s attention to what I was trying to look at. I knew who was being sick behind the barricade. It had to be Justin. I just hoped he had the sense to keep quiet.

In front of me, Torben lifted his leg, propped it awkwardly on his knee and tried to balance. He picked at the grills of his boots with his knife and dug out a piece of flesh that had lodged between them.

“These are great in the snow, but they’re a bitch to clean,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, what’ve we got here?” He walked toward my rucksack, unzipped it and began to look through it.

The sight of the stranger fishing through my things made my blood run hot. I tried to pull my leg toward me, but the metal wouldn’t budge. As Torben looked through my bag, I slowly moved my body so that I could get a view of the other side of the barricade. I managed to do it without him seeing, and on the other side of the barricade, there he was. Sure enough, it was Justin, and his face was pale.