Shaun Harbinger - Survival - Revenge of the Living Dead

"The place has been looted," Sam said.

"We'll keep going up," I said. "If we can't find a flat with an intact door, we'll have to barricade ourselves inside a bedroom or something. Any room that has a door we can defend."

Sam sighed and ascended the stairs to the next level. When the rest of us arrived, he'd already gone up to the level after that because every flat door down here was smashed.

"We're going to die in here," Lucy said calmly and with a certainty that unnerved me.

"No, we're not," I assured her, although I knew I was probably lying. I could hear the zombies on the steps below us.

There was no way down.

As we reached the fourth floor and found more broken doors, Sam came down the steps and said, “Come on, we can get onto the roof. That door is the only one that isn’t fucked up.”

I wasn’t sure how great a plan going out onto the roof was. The drone would have no problem spotting us up there. But what other choice did we have? At least we could close the door on the zombies that were shuffling up the steps below us.

What we’d do after that, I had no idea but anything was better than being ripped apart by the undead on these concrete steps.

Sam helped us with the crate and we managed to get through the door and out onto the flat roof. Sam closed the door behind us.

We put the crate down on the gravelled roof and Tanya put the footlocker next to it. “Now what?” she asked.

I went to the roof’s edge and looked down, immediately wishing I hadn’t. The building was totally surrounded with zombies and from here, I realised that my estimate of a thousand undead was inadequate. There must have been at least three thousand zombies roaming around down there.

They’d left the RV alone and now they were all focused on the flats but there were so many of them that they couldn’t all fit in the building so some of them wandered aimlessly around while others got stuck in tight clusters.

I raised my head and looked for the drone. There was no cover up here. As soon as the aircraft flew overhead, it would spot us easily.

A loud bang sounded on the door. Through a small glass window in the door, I saw a rotting face appear. It was joined by another and then another. The banging continued.

“Can they break through?” Tanya asked.

I didn’t answer her. I was thinking about the force that many bodies would exert on the wood until eventually the hinges gave way. What the hell would we do when that happened?

I heard the drone somewhere in the distance. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I searched the skies until I saw the black shape coming this way. Once the drone got a visual on us, Gordon would send his men to deal with the zombies and take us off the roof.

They’d have a problem dealing with the horde, though, which meant that by the time they got to us, we might be already dead if that door gave way.

“What do we do?” Tanya asked. “What’s our exit strategy?”

“We don’t have one,” I admitted. “We’re stuck here.”

“That isn’t what I wanted to hear, Alex.”

“I know. I’m sorry,”

The drone was getting closer. I looked in its direction and wondered if shooting at it would do any good. Probably not; we’d just be prolonging the inevitable. Gordon would realise where we were anyway when he saw the number of zombies milling around this particular building.

I squinted at the black airborne shape I’d thought was the drone, realising suddenly that it was in fact a Chinook helicopter. Its twin rotors were impossible to mistake. So we were going to be captured after all, assuming the helicopter got here before the door broke. We might as well surrender. Better to be captured by the army than torn apart by undead teeth and nails.

The four of us stood together while the Chinook descended. The wind whipped up by the twin rotors scattered gravel across the roof and made it an effort to stand in the same place without being blown away.

The helicopter didn’t land; it hovered at the edge of the roof and the ramp at its rear opened up. A man stepped forward. He wasn’t wearing an army uniform. Instead he wore black cargo pants and a tight blue T-shirt over his heavily-muscled frame. An assault rifle was slung over his shoulder. When I saw his face and buzz cut hair, I recognised him immediately.

Ian Hart, head of security at Apocalypse Island. He was the man who’d overseen our mission when we’d worked for the government facility. I’d never been happier to see him than I was at this moment.

He gestured for us to come aboard the Chinook and said, “Come with me if you want to live.”

We grabbed the crate and footlocker and took them up the ramp and into the interior of the helicopter. The rear ramp closed and I felt the floor beneath my feet move as we ascended.

“You said that exact same line the first time we met,” I told Hart.

“Did I? Take a seat and we’ll get the hell out of here. Looks like you’ve got yourselves into a spot of bother.”

We sat in the seats that were attached to the walls and strapped ourselves in. The interior of the aircraft was noisy and the only way to be heard was to shout so we remained silent.

I wondered what Hart was doing here. Apocalypse Island was off the coast of Scotland, hundreds of miles north of here. How had he found us?

I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. My questions could wait.

We flew for half an hour before I felt a twinge in my stomach due to the helicopter descending. We touched down and the engines were switched off.

“Here we are,” Hart said, unstrapping himself from his seat and standing by the ramp as it opened. “Site Bravo One. Before we go into the facility, I have one question. What’s in those boxes?”

“The small one contains papers and documents,” I told him. “The large crate has the body of Patient Zero inside. If you have a secure room, you’ll want to lock the crate inside it.”

He frowned, confused. “You said it was his body.”

I nodded. “But I didn’t say he was dead.”

Hart raised a questioning eyebrow.

“The virus might be bringing him back to life,” I said.

Two men armed with assault rifles and dressed similarly had appeared at the foot of the ramp. “Get this crate into one of the cells,” Hart told them. “And make sure it’s guarded around the clock.”

I knew why he was being so cautious. When we’d been at Apocalypse Island, our friend Jax had turned and taken out a number of personnel before she’d escaped the facility.

“Follow me,” he said. “I take it you’ve had some adventures since we last spoke.”

“You can say that again, man,” Sam said.

We followed Hart down the ramp and found ourselves standing on the tarmac of a small runway near two aircraft hangars. Beyond the hangars, a large three-storey building that had the unmistakable boxy look of a government facility stood in the sunshine. The morning light reflected off the building’s windows, which seemed to have been treated with some sort of silver-coloured reflective material.

“Site Bravo One,” Hart said, gesturing to the building. “We had to abandon Apocalypse Island in the end. Too many bloody zombies on the island. We don’t have that problem here. This island is free of the bastards.”

“We’re on an island?” The area around the complex was covered with trees so from this vantage point, it looked like we were in the middle of a forest.

“Yes, we are,” Hart said, leading us across the tarmac to the silver-windowed building. “It’s not as big as Apocalypse Island and it’s mostly trees apart from what you see here. There’s a harbour on the west side. That road there leads to it.” He pointed at a road that led into the trees. “What do you think?”