Shaun Harbinger - Wildfire - Destruction of the Dead

I felt Lucy stiffen next to me. My heart began to race. Was Jax at Camp Prometheus? In a way, it made sense. She had jumped overboard near the coast north of here. Camp Prometheus was the closest place that was densely-populated with living people. She must have been attracted to it like a fox attracted to a henhouse.

“I can see from your faces that you know what I’m talking about,” Price said. “We were told that the creature is something to do with you people.”

“She was one of us,” Tanya said, her voice sad as she remembered her friend.

“Yes, so I gathered,” Price said. “I also heard that you faced one of these creatures before, at a lab in Scotland.”

I nodded. “We did.”

“Well then, you might have some ideas about how we can get rid of this one. We’ll escort you to the camp. It’s a good seventy miles south of here and involves a little jaunt past Carlisle. If you’re interested in zombies, you’ll see plenty on that leg of our journey.” He turned to go back to the Jeeps but stopped, seemingly remembering something. Turning to face us again, he pointed at Sam and said, “And keep a close eye on him.”

With that, he turned and marched back to the Jeeps with his two companions.

“I can’t believe Jax is here,” Tanya whispered to me as we watched Price return to his vehicle.

“And I don’t know why he thinks we’ll know how to deal with her,” I said. “We didn’t exactly deal with Vess.”

“Let’s just get to the camp and convince this brigadier person to call off the drones,” Lucy said. “As soon as they do that, we can get back to the boats.”

We got back into the Mastiff. Lucy sat in the back with Sam while I went up front with Tanya.

Survivor Radio seemed to have a new presenter for the midday slot, a man named Chris Barnes. He wasn’t quite as upbeat as Sasha Green had been earlier but his voice was soothing with a low Scottish burr. “This one is for all you survivors out there,” he said. “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol began to play.

We set off down the road with the Jeeps matching our speed on the opposite side of the motorway.

“Do you trust them?” Tanya asked me.

“No, I don’t. I’m grateful to them for saving us back there, and I respect the job they do, but I don’t trust them. There are very few people I trust in this world. I’ve always been that way.”

She said, “Yeah, I know what you mean,” but she didn’t elaborate.

A blue sign overhead told us that the motorway had become the M6 and we had fifteen miles to go before we hit the city of Carlisle.

At our current speed, that would take us about twenty minutes.

I turned in my seat to face Lucy. “How are things back there?”

“Fine,” she said.

Sam attempted a grin but it looked more like a grimace. I gave him a thumbs-up and turned to face front again. I had thought, maybe naively, that being vaccinated meant a zombie bite wouldn’t affect us at all. Now that I thought about it, that had been a simplistic view.

A zombie bite passed the virus into the bloodstream of the victim. That virus was deadly to an unvaccinated human so of course it wasn’t going to be painless, even for a vaccinated person. A chemical reaction must be taking place in Sam’s body as his vaccinated blood fought the powerful virus.

I just hoped it wouldn’t be too long before Sam’s body started to win the fight.

Twenty minutes later, we reached the junction where a slip road led to Carlisle. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles here and I could see zombies through some of the windows. Tanya steered us around them expertly and said, “I wonder how long they’re going to stay trapped in those steel coffins?”

I shrugged. “Probably until they rot away or someone comes to dispatch them.”

In the distance, beyond the fields and trees, I could see some of the buildings that were part of the city. A column of black smoke was rising from somewhere in that direction, obscuring the view. I wondered if there was a single living soul in any of those buildings. Probably not. And if there was, they were as good as dead.

“I wonder how they’re going to clear the cities,” I said. “We can vaccinate every living person in the country but someone is going to have to get rid of all the zombies that are already here. What about the cities? How many tens of thousands of undead must there be here, in this small city, never mind densely-populated places like Birmingham and London?”

“Maybe they won’t ever clear everything,” Tanya said. “Maybe this is what life is going to be like from now on.”

That surprised me. Tanya had always been adamant that the rest of the world was uninfected. Had she changed her mind now?

The Jeeps were now on our side of the motorway. They had taken the exit at the northbound junction and turned around to join the southbound lanes. They stayed at a constant distance behind us.

“Price said we would see plenty of zombies here,” Tanya said, “but I haven’t seen…” Her words trailed off as she gazed at the road ahead.

I followed her gaze. The motorway was seething with zombies. They were shambling up and down the road while others staggered across the fields. Their movement seemed to have no purpose but when they heard and saw our vehicles, they began to come our way. The moan that came from so many rotted throats filled the air.

“I don’t think we can drive through them,” Tanya said. “There are too many.” She brought us to a stop.

Price’s Jeep pulled up alongside us and he motioned for Tanya to lower her window. She did and the rotten stench that entered the Mastiff was almost overwhelming. “We’ll clear a path,” Price said. “But you have to stick right behind us. The blue bastards will fill in any hole we make in no time. Got it?”

Tanya nodded and put the window back up quickly.

The Jeeps pulled in front of us and started to fire the big guns into the center of the zombie mass. The undead were blown apart and the Jeeps edged forward, still firing.

Tanya accelerated so that we were directly behind the Jeeps, inching our way through the horde of rotting, seething flesh. The gunners in the Jeeps continued blowing the zombies apart in front and to the sides of their vehicles and moving forward. As we were the last in the line, the horde closed in around the rear of the Mastiff and banged on the door with their fists.

At least these slow zombies wouldn’t climb aboard like the hybrids had. Instead, they pounded on the steel cage to no avail. They were never going to break in here.

It took us fifteen minutes to clear a path through the horde. By the time we had driven beyond the last of them, the road behind us was full of zombies again as if we had never passed through.

The Jeeps increased their speed and Tanya did likewise to keep up with them.

I relaxed a little and closed my eyes, listening to Chris Barnes play a selection of songs by Coldplay, The Killers, Bastille, and Green Day. The lyrics of those songs spoke of a world that was gone now and might never come again. Even Tanya had her doubts that this apocalypse would ever end, and that worried me. Her outlook was usually optimistic. Not in an “everything is going to be okay” with rainbows and unicorns way, but in a pragmatic and realistic way. If she was thinking that a future without zombies was doubtful, then it probably was doubtful.

I wasn’t sure if I could live the rest of my life like this, constantly running and fighting and searching for the people I loved. But I had no choice. I thought of the people living at the motorway services, too scared to go outside. They might as well already be dead. Soon, when they ran out of food and were too afraid to go out and find more, they would be dead.