Jack Lewis - Fear the Dead - A Zombie Apocalypse Book

There was a yell outside, and the farmhouse door burst open. A worried-looking hunter ran in.

“They’re here, Torben. There’s hundreds of them!”

Chapter 21

Torben walked over to the door slowly, as though he were in no hurry. He opened it and went outside. The hunter trailed after him. As soon as Torben left the room, Justin walked over to me. He pulled a knife from his belt and sawed at the ropes around my wrists, and as he cut them away I felt my skin loosen.

“You okay?” I asked him.

He nodded. “They’re a bunch of idiots.”

Torben and the hunter walked back into the room. Justin straightened up and backed away from me, hiding the knife behind him.

I grabbed the ropes and held them so that it looked like I was still tied up.

Torben looked at me. “He wasn’t kidding,” he said, his voice controlled. “Never seen so many before.”

I twisted my head to get a look. I could only see through the square doorway, but across the farm and over the fields I spotted them; there was a sea of infected headed in our direction. Was it the same ones we had seen in Edness? If it was, then there were thousands of them, and none of us stood a chance.

Torben turned and looked at me. His face was void of emotion, a stark contrast to the hunter next to him who looked terrified.

“This is what happens when you fire a shotgun out in the open,” he said.

I thought about David outside. I wondered how he was doing, how hurt he was. The bite hadn’t been bad, but I knew enough about the infection to realise that eventually, whether it be in hours or days, the bite was going to kill him. And when it did, he wouldn’t stay dead for long. I felt something welling up inside me, but now wasn’t the time for that. I couldn’t afford to feel anything now.

Torben looked over at Justin. “Come on, boy, time to earn your place.”

“What?” said Justin.

Torben pointed at the door. “We didn’t drive all the way here just to give it up. Come out and fight.”

He strode outside. Justin looked over at me, and I nodded. He walked after Torben and out of the door.

When the room was empty I let the ropes fall off me and stood up. My legs ached and my skin around my wrists was raw. I had a pain in my lower back, and my neck was stiff. I looked around me for my belt and knife, but I couldn’t see what Torben had done with them.

I walked over to the dining table, pulled out a chair and tipped it on its side. I need some sort of weapon if I was going outside. I didn’t know what my plan was yet, but going out there unarmed would be crazy. Any weapon would do, any blunt instrument; it just had to be solid enough to smash through bone. I lifted my foot and brought it down on the chair leg, snapping it from the base. I picked up the block of wood and twisted it in my hands.

Outside the sky was black. The first wave of the infected had reached the farm and their faces were illuminated by the dim glow of the lamps on the porch and the flashes of the hunter's guns as they fired at them. The sound of the gunshots made me flinch, but it didn’t matter about the volume now. There were already enough infected coming our way, and drawing in a few more wouldn’t make a difference.

The hunters and the infected engaged in battle. The driver held a machete in his hand and swung it at the head of an infected, splitting into down the middle. Across from him the hunter with the long fringe held the neck of an infected woman as she struggled to bite him. With his right hand he lined up a screwdriver and drove it into her eye socket, splitting her eyeball like an onion.

A man to my right cried out, and I span around and saw him fall to the floor. Two infected fell on top of him and didn’t waste a second in tearing pieces out of his neck and chest, their teeth clacking as they tore through his skin. One took a big bite of his chest, chewed and pulled away a long strip of flesh. The man’s screams of agony rose above the collective cry of the infected, but were quickly silenced as the infected ate his vocal chords.

“Kyle!”

I turned round and saw David with his back against the porch. His face was drained of colour and he held his bitten arm tight against his chest. When he saw me look at him, he pointed to my left. I turned and saw an infected man inches away and lunging right at me.

I grabbed hold of the man’s hair, held it tight and then smashed the end of the chair leg against its face. The leg was so square and blunt that all it accomplished was breaking the skin and making putrid blood ooze from the infected’s face. I pushed the infected to the ground. When it was on the floor, I lined my boot with its face and brought it down as hard as I could. Its head didn’t smash straight away, and it took three tries before I heard it crack. When I looked down, my boot was covered in dark red blood and bits of grey flesh.

I turned, ran over to David and knelt beside him. He looked at me, and his voice was so quiet that it was hard to hear him over the battle cries of the hunters and the groans of the infected.

“You need to go,” he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “ We need to go,” I agreed, and give him a squeeze.

I heard footsteps run over to us, and then Justin was next to me. He bent over and took a few shallow breaths. His hands were covered in blood.

“You okay?” I said, looking for the tell-tale marks of a bite.

“It’s not mine,” he said. He held his hands up.

Behind us there was a scream, and I knew another hunter had been taken by the infected. How many more were left? I glanced over, but I couldn’t see them all. It didn’t matter; the hunters were outnumbered twelve to one.

Justin leaned in to David. Panic spread across his face. “Shit, David,” he said.

David nodded. Shit. No other words needed to be said.

I looked at Justin. “We need to go, right now. I don’t care where, we just need to get out of here.”

Justin swallowed. “Their truck,” he said, and pointed past the farmhouse. The hunter’s pick-up truck was parked on the stone driveway that led to the farm.

I nodded at him. This was as good a plan as any. Right now we just needed to get as far away from the farm as possible. What happened after, whatever we were going to do later didn’t matter, now we just had to escape.

“What about the keys?” I said.

“They keep them in the ignition for quick getaways.”

I grinned. “Smart.”

We picked up David and between us we supported him over to the truck. Behind us the sounds of the gunshots faded as the hunters ran out of ammo, and I knew that most of them would now be reaching for their knives. If they had any sense, they would slit their own throats. There were too many infected swarming in for the hunters to have any chance of winning.

We set David down next to the wheel of the truck. I opened the door, jumped in and reached for the keys. The ignition was empty.

My heart began to pound and my chest flooded with panic. The keys had to be here somewhere. Our luck just couldn’t be this bad, surely. I looked all around the dashboard and found plenty of chocolate wrappers, but no car keys.

I got out. Justin and David looked up at me, but I shook my head.

“Shit,” said Justin.

I knelt down next to David. His face was so grey that he looked like he should be in a morgue. I put my hand on his arm. “Listen, pal. We need to leave, we can’t stay here. Think you can make it just a little bit further?”

He looked up at me. His lips were dry and his eyes were dark. “Just leave me. I’m dying anyway.”

I couldn’t leave him. I’d already done that once, and I knew that I was going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. I couldn’t change the past, but what happened in the present was still up to me. And I wasn’t abandoning him again.