Shaun Harbinger: Survival: Revenge of the Living Dead

Not to mention the soldiers Sergeant Locke had warned me of. They would also be on their way to the area. We were driving into a hotbed of activity.

We reached the clifftop. The road levelled out and then intersected a larger, main road. Sam turned left and we drove south. This road was lined with low dry stone walls and beyond them, I could see fields. In the distance, figures moved through the grass with slow, stumbling gaits. They were zombies and they were also moving south.

A couple of minutes later, I was jerked forward against my seatbelt when Sam hit the brakes suddenly.

“Looks like this is the place,” he said.

The road ahead was crowded with shambling zombies. They seemed to have got onto the road by pushing through the dry stone walls because there were stones everywhere and the walls were destroyed. I guessed that this pack of creatures had been wandering in the fields when Echo Six’s Land Rover had broken down. It had probably only taken a couple of minutes for the undead to stagger onto the road and surround the vehicle.

I could see Echo Six’s Land Rover in the middle of the horde. The tailgate was open but no gunfire issued from the vehicle so I assumed everyone inside was dead.

Almost in unison, the zombies turned to face our vehicle. Their skin was the mottled grey-blue of dead flesh and the whites of their eyes had turned yellow. Many of them bore wounds that told the tale of their manner of death. Some had missing limbs, others deep scratches that had ripped their flesh apart.

Their clothes were ragged and torn, probably as a result of the undead corpses wandering around the countryside without regard for obstacles in their path.

“If I reverse back along the road,” Sam said, “maybe I can lead them away from the Land Rov—”

His words were cut off and I leaned forward to see what had made him stop talking mid-sentence. Through the windscreen, I saw the zombies shambling towards us but nothing more.

Then I realised Sam was looking in the rearview mirror. I turned in my seat and saw two military Land Rovers behind us on the road. These must be the soldiers Sergeant Locke had mentioned, the ones he warned must not get their hands on whatever it was Echo Six had stolen from them.

“There’s no going back now,” Sam said.

Instead of backing up, Sam slammed the gear stick into first gear and pressed the accelerator pedal gently. the X-Trail crept towards the zombie horde.

“Hold on,” Sam said. “I’m going to try and bully my way through.” He increased our speed slightly, keeping the vehicle in first gear. The zombies in front of the car didn’t move so Sam simply plowed into them. Their bodies made sickening crunching sounds as they hit the radiator grill or went down beneath the tyres.

Undead hands slammed against the windows as the zombies who weren’t in our path tried to force their way into the car. I peered out of my window at dozens of faces staring back at me with hateful yellow eyes. They wanted nothing more than to break my window, pull me out of the vehicle and rip me apart with their teeth and nails.

The hatred in their eyes sent a chill rushing along my spine.

I directed my attention to the two army Land Rovers behind us. They didn’t move forward. Instead, they sat on the road, engines idling, waiting for something.

“They’re not even shooting at us,” I said.

Tanya turned in her seat and looked out of the rear window. “They don’t know who we are and they have no idea Echo Six contacted us. As far as they know, we’re just a group of civilians out on a day trip.”

I thought about that. If the soldiers didn’t know who we were, that gave us the element of surprise. They didn’t know we were here for the contents of Echo Six’s Land Rover so maybe we could use that to our advantage.

“What’s the plan?” I asked the others.

“First we need to get through this horde of walking corpses,” Sam said. “Then we need to either take out those soldiers behind us or get to the stuff in the Land Rover before they do and escape without getting shot.”

He sped up slightly. We were moving at a speed slow enough to not plow into the zombies ahead of us at high speed and damage the car but fast enough that they couldn’t break their way into the vehicle. That was a luxury Sergeant Locke and his team hadn’t had. It was clear from the state of their Land Rover—which we were passing now—that the nasties had broken their way inside.

All of the windows were smashed and the tailgate was open. I tried to see inside the back of the vehicle but my view was blocked by zombies clawing at my window.

“I guess the guys inside will be hybrids now,” Sam said.

The military had run a vaccination project to protect their personnel from becoming zombies if they got bitten. It had backfired spectacularly. If a vaccinated soldier was bitten by a zombie, instead of becoming undead, he would isolate himself for three or four days. This was an incubation period during which some sort of metamorphosis occurred.

After the incubation period, the soldier became a hybrid. Hybrids weren’t animated dead corpses at all; they were much more dangerous. They were fast and strong and consumed by a murderous rage. Because they were alive and not made up of dead flesh, they didn’t avoid rain or water or anything else. They were savage killing machines.

“They will be soon,” I said, thinking of Sergeant Locke’s voice on the radio. He’d trusted me to do what was right and now, thanks to a simple bite, he was turning into a monster much worse than he could ever have imagined.

We drove past the Land Rover and Sam increased our speed, taking us past the horde and onto clear road. Some of the zombies staggered after us but most turned their attention to the other two Land Rovers.

A group of six soldiers dressed in camouflage jackets and brandishing SA80 rifles were getting out of the vehicles and assuming firing stances. “Keep going,” I told Sam. “They’re going to start firing.”

Sam floored the accelerator and the X-Trail sped along the road. As we drove around a sharp bend and the zombies and soldiers disappeared from view, I heard gunshots.

Sam hit the brakes and we came to a stop. He turned in his seat and looked at both me and Tanya. “What are we going to do? They’ll kill the zombies and get the prize.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw eight soldiers. Three got out of each Land Rover and the drivers stayed inside.”

“Eight of them, three of us,” Tanya said. “I don’t like those odds.”

It wasn’t only the odds I didn’t like. Those soldiers back there were human beings, just like us. Dispatching zombies and killing hybrids was one thing but taking the lives of men who were probably just following orders was something else entirely.

I cursed the fact that we’d wasted so much time on the Big Easy debating whether or not to come ashore. If we’d arrived here before the soldiers, we could have taken out the zombies and be long gone by now but their presence made things a lot more complicated.

“So what do we do?” Sam asked again. “I’m not going home until I know what’s in that Land Rover that’s so important.”

“Agreed,” I said. I’d promised Sergeant Locke I’d help and I wasn’t about to give up and go home. But I also didn’t want innocent blood on my hands.

Tanya was studying the map. She showed it to Sam and said, “If we follow this road and take the next left, it’ll take us to this crossroads here.” She pointed at a spot on the map. “Assuming they’re going to return the same way they came, we can set up an ambush.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said, putting the car back into gear and setting off again. “They deal with the zombies while we wait. Then we take the mystery box from them while they’re transporting it back to their base. Sounds easy.”