Jack Lewis - Fear the Dead - A Zombie Apocalypse Book

I unhooked the bolt, took hold of the door handle and put my weight behind it. Slowly, the shutter started to move open and cracks of daylight seeped in. I strained against it and slid the door all the way to the end, then stood to admire the afternoon sun. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I stopped dead. My breath choked in my mouth, and I my throat was tight.

In the yard outside, a mere twenty feet away, there were over fifty infected walking around. They all saw me and then turned in my direction, their arms outstretched and their teeth clamping together. They starting moving in my direction, toward the warehouse.

I turned and ran over to Justin. He had started his climb onto the shelf, and he was about halfway up.

“Jump down, we need to get the hell out,” I said.

“What’s wrong, we need to –“

“Just get down!” I shouted.

My heart was pounding and my body was covered in sweat. From the other end of the warehouse I could hear the infected moaning. It didn’t matter how dark it was in here; their hunger was so powerful a drive that they would find their way to us eventually. If we stayed, we would die.

Justin looked back toward the shelf, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him along with me. I wasn’t taking any chances. We just had to get out, and we’d figure out what to do later.

“Kyle!” Justin said, and he stopped. I tugged at him again, but he wouldn’t budge.

“What is it?” I said

“Listen.”

Despite the blood throbbing in my eardrums, I listened. That’s when I realised how screwed we truly were. From the front entrance, our only way out of the building, I could hear laughing and voices. One voice was louder than all the rest.

It was Torben’s.

Chapter 12

The vice around us tightened with the infected on one side, and Torben and his hunters on the other. Without any clear escape and certainly no chance of winning a fight, I was struggling to work out what we could do. I knelt down in front of the shelf and tugged at Justin’s coat. He got to his knees.

Torben turned the corner and entered checkout area of the warehouse. One of the hunters walked next to him, and two others hung behind. From their faces, and their lack of curiosity about the place, I got the impression they’d been here before.

“You reckon they’re still around?” said one of the hunters. It was the driver of the pick-up truck. He was tall and his belly pressed tightly against his shirt and spilt over his belt.

Torben looked down and spat on the floor. “I imagine that on foot and with nothing to eat, they won’t get far. Come on, let’s load up and head out. I want to be back on the road before it gets dark.”

The driver shoved his hands in pockets. On his left arm he had a tattoo sleeve, but I couldn’t make out any other detail of it in the dark other than the fact it covered all of his skin. “Not many shelves left.”

Torben brushed his thumb across his moustache. “Just find one with food and take it all. I don’t want to kick my heels here when I could be out there finding them.”

Listening to Torben talk about us like that made it hard to stay hidden. I’d never let a man make me hide before, and doing it now was like swallowing glass. All things being equal, I could take Torben. That was the problem though; nothing was equal. The gun slung around his neck and the three guys he had with him guaranteed that.

I looked at Justin. “We can’t hang around,” I whispered.

Justin turned away from me and looked back at the shelf. The food crates were twenty feet up at the top. “We’re not going to get another chance like this. Look at it all, it’s enough to last a month.”

“A month of food is no good if we’re going to die in a few minutes. We need to leave.”

Across the warehouse Torben’s footsteps echoed up to the rafters. He coughed, cleared something from his throat and spat again on the floor. He turned to the driver. “They’re still around here, I know it. Lancashire’s a big place, and they won’t have left it yet.”

“What if they don’t want to be found?”

“Just cause someone doesn’t want to be found, doesn’t mean they can’t be. “

He was talking about us, I knew, and he was right. There was no way on earth I wanted him to find us, but then again, that didn’t mean he couldn’t. This was a prime example – here he was, just metres away. We were both here by coincidence and with the same goal, but nonetheless it showed how easy it was to slip up.

Fifty yards behind me, toward the back of the warehouse, I heard the faint cries of the infected. The ones from the yard were piling in now, and it wouldn’t be long before they reached us. With them on one side and the hunters on the other, we didn’t have the luxury of choice or time. We either fought our way out of either side, or we found another way to escape.

I turned back to Justin. “You see any other way out?”

He looked around him, but his gaze drifted back to the food behind us. “No,” he said.

“Forget about the tins,” I said.

In front of us, Torben pulled a torch from his belt and turned it on. The beam of yellow cut through the shadows and moved through the shelves like a search light. The driver walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Torbs,” he said, “It’s been two months. Think we gotta accept that Alicia and Ben are gone. I’m not saying they’re…no longer with us…, but if they’re still breathing then they don’t want to do it around us no more.”

The familiarity of the name ‘Torbs’ as well as the hand on the shoulder told me that these two men were friendly. Yet when Torben turned his face toward the driver’s, there was a definite look of scorn.

“I’m not giving up on my wife and son,” he said.

My head span. The driver mentioned searching for someone for two months. Justin and I only met Torben a day and a half ago, and if he’d been tailing me for a couple of months I’d know about it. Now there was the mention of his wife and kid. What the hell was going on?

Who was Torben looking for? Justin and me, or his wife and son? I hadn’t just imagined him telling me he was going to hunt us.

Either way, I knew that if he saw us, he would kill us. That much was obvious, and I wasn’t staying here to chance it. We were going right now, and no matter how screwed we were by leaving empty-handed, we would deal with the consequences later.

I turned to look at Justin, but I saw that he was gone. I looked back at the shelf with the food on it, and I saw that he was already halfway up. I felt my face start to heat up. He’d done it again; he’d disobeyed me when I specifically told him to do exactly as I said. The kid was a cheeky little bastard and a liability, and I was done with him. I clenched my fist and felt the blood drain out of it.

I was going to have to drag Justin off the shelf and pull him out of the building by his hair. After that, I didn’t know what I would do with him. But I couldn’t trust him to do what I said, and that made him a danger to me. I’d already broken enough of my rules by taking him with me, and now it was time to stop.

As I got to my feet I banged my head straight into the shelf next to me. A metal clang rang out into the acoustics of the warehouse, and I saw Torben’s head snap in my direction. Out of instinct I ducked down. My head stung from where I had hit it, but for the moment my heart was beating so quickly that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.

Torben flicked his torch in my direction and the beam of light hit my eyes. I squinted and ducked my head.

“Boys,” he said with joy in his voice, “They’re here. The hunt is on!”

There was no point in subtlety now. I ran over to the shelf, not caring about the sound my boots made on the floor. AS I ran I could just about make out the bodies of the infected as they shuffled closer toward us. When I got to the shelf, Justin was already at the top of it.