Shaun Harbinger: Storm

She looked me over. “How have you survived this long?”

“I’ve been on a boat.”

She nodded, as if that explained to her how someone like me could still be alive during a zombie apocalypse. She probably thought I had no chance on the mainland.

She was probably right.

Relaxing her fighter’s stance, she said, “So what are you doing here? Where’s your boat?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I came ashore in the fog. I wanted to find a rowboat so we could get to shore more easily…”

“We?”

“I was with three friends when… the world went to shit. Two of them are dead. There’s just Lucy and me left. We live on a boat. I shouldn’t have left. I heard my brother on Survivor Radio and I wanted to see if I could find out anything so I needed a rowboat and…” I shrugged, feeling helpless. My stupid decisions were indefensible. “Lucy disappeared,” I said, “and now I’m stuck.”

She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Why not just get another boat and go find her?”

“I was going to but the army are crawling all over the marina.”

That caught her attention. “Really? Interesting.”

“Can I leave now?” I asked.

“Where are you going to go? You said you have no clue where your boat is. You came here looking for shelter. You think you’re going to find somewhere safer?”

“No, but…” I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay there with a woman who punched first and asked questions later.

She laughed. “You can stay here when we’re sure you are actually alone.” She nodded to the dirt road where a tall, lanky guy in jeans and a Savatage tour T-shirt was walking towards the house. In one hand, he carried a tire iron. He saw the girl looking at him and gave her a thumbs-up.

She looked back at me. “You were telling the truth about being alone, anyway. I’m Tanya. The guy coming up the road is Sam. And the girl sitting on your car is Jax.”

I turned to the Astra behind me. A pretty, young, petite woman with shoulder-length blonde hair sat cross-legged on the roof. She smiled, waved, and slid down to the ground. She wore a denim jacket and jeans and a white T-shirt. Her wooden baseball bat was propped against the car.

Sam got closer and Tanya said, “Everything okay?”

He nodded. “He’s on his own. And he remembered to close the gate behind him.” He was big and loose-limbed with short sandy hair and a soul patch.

“This is Alex,” Tanya said.

“Hey, man.” He raised a hand.

I nodded. I still wasn’t sure if they were going to kill me. They knew I was here alone so why not? But they didn’t seem like the killing types. They looked like they were ordinary people caught up in a deadly situation they had no control over, just like me.

“Give Jax your car keys and she’ll put your car in the barn with ours,” Tanya said. “We can’t be too careful. The army might decide to come and take a look. I’d rather not advertise our presence.”

I had dropped the key fob in my fight with Tanya. I picked it up and handed it to Jax. She took it and went over to the Astra, slid in and started the engine.

“You’d better come inside,” Tanya said. “If you’ve been sailing along the coast, you might have some useful info.”

And maybe they’d tell me what they were going to do with that info. They had a purposeful air about them, as if they had a mission beyond simple day-to-day survival.

Tanya and Sam went to the front door and I followed, aware of a dull ache across the bridge of my nose where Tanya had punched me.

She turned and said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

I frowned, confused. “What do you mean?”

She pointed to the grass where my baseball bat lay. “Your bat. It’s too dangerous to be unarmed.” She grabbed a crowbar she had placed by the door.

I ran over and picked up my weapon. As I stood and turned back to the house, I felt a sudden panic in my gut. Everything seemed too quiet. I closed my eyes and listened to the noises of Mason’s Farm. I could hear my car being parked in the barn, the breeze on the grass and Tanya and Sam talking inside the house. I opened my eyes and shook my head. I was getting paranoid.

But as I reached the front door of the house, I realised my senses hadn’t picked up a noise that didn’t belong; they had detected that a sound was missing.

The birds in the trees had stopped singing.

Jax came running over from the barn. She ran past me and into the house. “We’ve got company!” she shouted.

All three of them came out of the front door and closed it behind them. “Get to the barn,” Tanya told me. She sprinted to the barn with the others.

I followed and as I entered the barn, Sam slid the door closed behind me.

I felt trapped

The barn was spacious. There was a small tractor in there as well as my car and a white Jeep Cherokee I assumed belonged to Tanya. The barn smelled of hay and oil. Various farming implements stood against one wall and there were bales of hay piled in the corner beneath a wooden ladder that led to a hayloft. The others were climbing up the ladder. The barn was gloomy with the door closed but there was sunlight up in the loft so I assumed there must be a window. I followed them up the ladder.

The window was actually a window-sized opening in the wooden wall. A shutter that fit over the opening was open, allowing the sun to come into the loft and offering a perfect view of the house and the dirt road beyond.

Rucksacks and rolled up sleeping bags lay amongst the hay. Tanya, Jax and Sam were positioned around the window, peeking out at the house.

Tanya turned to glare at me. “If this is somebody you brought here, I will kill you, Alex.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “I swear.” I crawled over to the window. The farm looked deserted. “There’s nobody out there,” I whispered.

“Sshh!” Tanya held up a hand to silence me then pointed out of the window.

Coming up the dirt road was an olive green Land Rover. It halted twenty feet from the house and four soldiers poured out, taking up shooting stances to cover a 360-degree arc.

A fifth soldier climbed out of the passenger side of the vehicle and stood with hands on hips. He wore a maroon beret where the other soldiers wore helmets. He wore army trousers and boots but his top was a dark blue long-sleeved T-shirt that showed off his muscular physique. It was hard to see his face from this distance but I could see he had a moustache. He regarded the house and swept his eyes over the farm. I shrank back when his gaze fell on the barn but his inspection continued over the rest of the farm.

He pointed at the house and the four soldiers advanced to the front door in a tight line.

“Stand by,” the man by the Land Rover said, then, “Go.”

They kicked open the front door and went inside. I could hear shouts of “Clear!” as they entered each room.

“What if they check out the barn?” I whispered to nobody in particular.

“They will,” Tanya replied.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“Fight or get captured.”

“They have guns,” I said. “We have bats and crowbars.”

“If they capture you, you’re dead anyway,” Jax said, “so you might as well go down fighting.”

“I know the Survivors Camps are bad,” I said, “but…”

“Bad?” Tanya asked, incredulous. “You’ve been on that boat of yours for too long. You don’t know what’s really going on here, do you?”

“I… no,” I admitted.

“I’ll put this in simple terms,” she said flatly. “If they take you to a Survivors Camp, you’re as good as dead.”

I thought of Joe and my parents.

“They’re coming out,” Jax said.