Jack Lewis - Fear the Dead - A Zombie Apocalypse Book

I gripped the steering wheel. “I’ll be fine.”

“Sorry Kyle,” said Justin, “but I agree. You look like shit.”

***

The countryside floated alongside us and we wound our way through the roads, but this time I watched them from the backseat. I looked up at David and say that he was concentrating on the road, his eyes wide and alert.

“Sorry,” I said.

He turned his head slightly, still keeping his eyes on the road. “For what?”

I was going to say for everything, I was sorry about all the stuff that had happened and all the shit I had done. But when I tried to say that, my throat tightened and the words got stuck. I let out a sigh.

“Sorry for ruining the paintwork.”

David looked at the car bonnet. There were two big dents and a few scratches. “I was going to get an MOT soon anyway.”

I smiled and let my eyelids fall as the road and the hedges and the walls swayed past.

When I opened my eyes we had stopped in the middle of a wide road. In front of us and to the left was a pub with black and white walls and a sign on the outside that read ‘The Babe and Sickle’ and had a picture of a gleaming blade and a tiny lamb. Up ahead was a roundabout with overgrown grass spilling over the sides. A few cars were abandoned and on our right there were a row of shops, but the windows so thick with dust it was impossible to see inside.

David and Justin were already sat on the car bonnet. I unclipped my belt and got out of the car.

“Evening,” said Justin.

I looked up at the sky and saw that it was indeed evening. The light of the sun was getting weaker and the sky was losing its colour. Somewhere, wherever they nested, stalkers would begin to stir, ready to prowl in the night-time and look for their kill.

“Where are we?” I said.

“Edness,” said David, a pointed to a large sign in front of me that said ‘EDNESS’ in capitals.

I walked over to them and looked in the bonnet. Everything seemed okay. “Why’ve we stopped?”

“No juice,” said David.

I sighed. This was the last thing we needed, to be stuck in the middle of a village when night was coming. Even though there didn’t seem to be any infected nearby, this was a human habitat and that meant a good chance there would be stalkers in the area.

“What do we do?” said Justin. He put his hands in his pockets.

I looked around me. There weren’t any petrol stations nearby, that was for sure. We were only twenty-odd miles away from the farm so we didn’t need much fuel, just enough to last that short journey. It’s not like we needed anything for a return trip; for me, there was no return. This was it.

Across the road and parked near a shop, there was a white transit van. I nodded over to it. “Think you could siphon some from there? We only need a little.”

David put his hand to his chin and looked at the van. “Could do. Worth a try.”

I nodded. “Good. Take the kid with you, show him how to do it.”

While I watched David show Justin how to siphon fuel from the van, I leant against the car and smiled. I hated to admit it, but part of me was starting to like having them around. Sure they annoyed the hell out of me sometimes, but it was occasionally nice to have the company.

I wondered if I would still be able to dump them off, when it came to it.

Fifteen minutes later David poured the petrol into the car, closed the cap and gave the roof a tap. I sat in the driver’s seat.

“Start her up,” he said.

I twisted the key. The car coughed, but the engine didn’t roar. I twisted it again. It sounded like the spluttering sounds of a dying man.

“What now?” I said.

David shook his head. “Must have been the crash. I thought it would make it to the farm before it died. I was wrong.”

I thumped the steering wheel with my hand. This was all my fault, I knew. If I’d just kept my eyes open and not crashed into a wall, we’d be fine.

I got out of the car and looked up at the sky. The sun was gone now, and we only had a couple of hours before the sky turned completely black and the stalkers came. I looked over at the Babe and Sickle pub. Should we shelter in there? We could have a pint and wait for all this to blow over.

“Guys,” said Justin.

I span round and looked at him. His arm was outstretched and pointing at a turn in the road less than fifty metres away.

“Oh shit,” I said, and felt my blood run cold.

Walking down the road was a sea of infected. There were more than I had ever seen in my life, an endless procession of rotting faces.

Chapter 16

I saw the sheer number of them, and my mouth fell open. There were at least a hundred dead faces, some with their lips torn off, eyes missing, arms cut in half, entrails hanging loose. Some stumbled into one another and fell to the floor, only to be trampled on by those behind them. There were so many that it was like a travelling battalion marching to war, except this army had no purpose or aim.

I looked at David. He was leant so far back against the car that it was like he was trying to melt into it. His hands clutched for the door handle behind him, as though he didn’t dare turn round to find it in case one of the infected pounced.

We needed to escape or fight, those were our only choices. The car was dead, so that was out of the question, and I didn’t want to be walking on the road on foot during the night. There were other things to worry about apart from the infected.

Fighting them would be foolish. I could take three of them, at a push, Justin could handle one and David was only good for standing there in shock. That left a hundred of them still left to fight.

Above us a sheet of black had covered the sky and blotted out the light so that not even the stars were shining.

I took a step forward, grabbed the handle and opened the car door. I shoved David’s shoulders down so that he didn’t bang his head and pushed him into the car. Justin followed suit and opened the passenger door, got inside and shut it as quietly as he could.

I looked at the infected getting closer, their numbers large enough to trample anything in their path, and something inside me wanted to shout out. I felt a cold panic in my chest, and my skin was tingling. I had never seen this many in my life.

“Kyle, get in,” said Justin.

I opened the driver door, sat down and tried to get my breath back.

“Now what?” asked Justin.

From the back of the car, David spoke. “Seen this lot before. They’re like a shoal of fish, they wander around and any infected they see get swept up. When I saw them there was half this many.”

“How do you know they’re the same ones?” I said.

“Recognise some of them.”

The infected got closer, so that now they were ten metres away from the car. It was clear that they were going to walk in our direction. I gripped the sides of my seat and sucked in the insides of my cheeks.

“What can we do?” I said.

David looked at my eyes in the rear view mirror. “Just wait it out.”

I shook my head. “No fucking way I’m just sitting here with a hundred of them close enough to spit on.”

He leaned forward a little. His voice was a whisper. “Nothing else you can do. You can’t run. You can’t fight. You have to trust me. Just wait it out.”

I leant my head back and banged it against my seat. Yet again I was put in a position where I had to go by someone else’s word. I never wanted any of this; I was just fine on my own. Well, not fine, but I survived.

It was the end of the frigging world and it was still impossible to avoid people.

I sighed. “Not much of a choice.”

The infected stumbled past us. It was clear now that there was way more than a hundred of them; it was possible we were even looking at a thousand. How had they all collected together? Was it a conscious decision to group up, or did they just go with the flow?