Shaun Harbinger - Rain

Crows perched atop the APC, ragged pieces of red flesh dangling from their black beaks.

We drove on and as soon as we got past the mess of bodies, I pressed the accelerator and didn’t look in the rear-view mirror until that place of death was out of sight.

Then I checked the mirror several times; the road behind was empty.

“The soldiers aren’t following us anymore.”

Mike looked over his shoulder. “Maybe seeing their dead friends spooked them.”

I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t feel right that they were letting us go.

“That was unreal, man. We need to get on a boat and leave this shit behind.”

Mike seemed to think that a boat would solve all our problems. It would solve some of them. We would be able to sleep safely at night. We could spend days out on the sea, away from the zombies. But we still needed to eat. There would be food runs, during which we would have to land the boat, or at least row to shore and raid the houses, villages and towns along the coast. We couldn’t ‘leave this shit behind’; we could only try to survive it.

I didn’t say anything to Mike. No need to slap him around the face with a cold dose of reality. He had been through enough today. We all had. I envied his ability to dream of an escape, to actually think life could be good again.

It was a probably a result of his life experience so far. Mike had it easy. He was good-looking, physical, charming. He might not be the sharpest tool in the box but he was a man’s man. His poor school grades were the gateway through which we met. I helped him do a math assignment at school. At the time, I did it because I thought Mike was going to beat me up if I didn’t. Later, we discovered that despite our social differences, we shared some interests. Mike liked to play video games when he wasn’t playing sports and once he saw my collection of titles, he realized I wasn’t just a game player, I was a game geek.

I introduced him to the online worlds and therefore also to my world. In return, he invited me to events that were outside of my comfort zone. He didn’t care what his friends, mainly jocks, said about him bringing a geek to parties. As far as Mike was concerned, we were friends and that was that.

He was good like that.

If it weren’t for Mike, I wouldn’t be alive now.

I would never have gone to Doug Latimer’s barbecue. That led to coming to Wales in a desperate attempt to speak to Lucy Hoffmeister. If I had stayed at home, I would most likely be dead. I owed Mike my life.

So instead of saying, ‘No, Mike, we are never going to leave this shit behind. Even if we get a boat we are still going to be in the shit because we have needs like every human being and if those needs aren’t met, we die,’ I looked across at him and gave him a thin-lipped smile.

“Don’t worry, Mike, we’ll get a boat.”

But first we had to get to the coast. I couldn’t understand why the soldiers had stopped chasing us. If they had friends at that checkpoint, why not chase us down and come back later? It wasn’t like any of those soldiers were going anywhere.

Or was that it? Had they stopped to make sure their friends weren’t going anywhere? The bodies had been in pieces but that didn’t mean some of them couldn’t be in a zombie state. The two soldiers had probably pulled over to deliver head shots to any infected.

That gave us a chance to get away.

“Mike, look out!”

Lucy’s voice snapped me back to reality. Ahead on the road, two cars lay across both lanes. It looked like they had ploughed into each other at high speed. The bodywork was mostly wrecked. Carpets of glass lay twinkling in the sunlight all across the road. I couldn’t see any survivors. There was no way around the wreckage.

Unless we moved it quickly, we were trapped.

I stopped the Land Rover but kept the engine running. As soon as I got out, I could smell petrol and burned flesh. A white Ford Focus lay on its side across the road. Its tail was facing us so I couldn’t see if there was anyone inside. A dark blue Chrysler Cruiser sat on its wheels but its front was destroyed, the engine sticking up through a gash in the bodywork like an erupted boil.

The air bags had inflated so we couldn’t see the driver.

I leaned into the Land Rover. “Lucy, hand me the gun.”

She passed it to me. “The safeties are off,” she said. “Be careful.”

I nodded. “Keep an eye on the road behind us in case those soldiers show up.”

Holding the gun in my right hand, muzzle pointed to the ground, I strode across to the crash site. Mike joined me, brandishing a large branch he had found at the roadside. I hoped his clubbing would be more accurate than my shooting. I had never fired a real gun in my life.

We approached the Focus first. As soon as we got close, the smell of death became overwhelming. Mike grabbed my arm. “There’s no one alive in there, man.”

He was right. There had once been a family of four in that car. Now, every inch of unbroken glass was tinted red with blood. Through the broken windows we could see the bodies. Still buckled in by their seat belts. All of them had turned. They glared at us with their yellow eyes and began to emit that eerie moan of hunger.

We stepped back instinctively even though they were trapped in there. I wondered if they had been infection-free when they crashed. Maybe the same zombies that had killed the checkpoint soldiers had come upon this family in the overturned car and gone to work on them. Or maybe the family had simply died in the crash and then turned because everybody turns after death. That was how it worked in all of George A. Romero’s movies, anyway, as well as in a few TV shows.

But the air bags were inflated so I assumed it wasn’t the crash that had killed them, it was roaming zombies.

We moved away and went to the Cruiser. The driver was dead. And human. His face rested on the air bag as if he were simply lying on a pillow. He was in his fifties, balding, and wearing glasses that were still intact. There was no blood, no wounds. What had killed him? A heart attack?

On the passenger seat, a road atlas lay open. The hospital in Brecon was circled in red pen.

A sudden movement from the back seat surprised us. I raised the pistol automatically, peering through the window.

A grey-haired woman sat on the backseat, dressed in a white nightgown and green bath robe. She had turned. Struggling against the seat belt that held her in place, she gnashed her teeth at us and growled.

“Fuck,” Mike said.

“Looks like he was taking his wife to hospital and she turned in the back seat. He had a heart attack and crashed into the Focus. They got turned before they got out of the car. There must have been zombies in the area.”

“So why didn’t they turn him? He looks normal.”

“He was already dead. The virus wants to spread itself. There’s no point infecting someone who isn’t going anywhere.”

Mike nodded at the Focus. “They aren’t going anywhere either.”

“But they were alive so the virus could infect them, kill them and raise them from the dead. Now they have the potential to spread it by killing others.” I looked at the way the cars were blocking the road. If we could move the Cruiser, we should be able to make it past the Focus. “We need to see if there’s a tow rope in the Land Rover.”

We walked back to our vehicle and opened the back. A length of thick blue rope lay amongst various tools and a tire iron. Mike took the rope while I turned the Land Rover around so the back faced the Cruiser.

“Are there any survivors?” Elena asked as I performed the manoeuvre.

“No,” I said. “Everyone’s dead.”

I got out and Mike tied one end of the rope to the tow bar on the Rover. I found a piece of solid chassis on the Cruiser and tied the rope to it. Getting back in the Rover, I put it into first and slowly let up the clutch. The vehicle moved forward until the rope tautened. Then I gave it more gas gradually until it moved forward again, slower this time as it pulled the weight of the Cruiser.