The first blow buried itself deep in the side of her skull, lopping off the top part of her ear. As she fell, he wrenched the machete free and followed up with two more savage blows, silencing her for ever. The adrenalin was pounding in his ears and so he didn’t immediately register that Xian Mei was screaming for help. When he did, he turned to see her on the ground, the male zombie clinging to her kicking right leg, trying to bite it.
Her machete was lying several metres away from her, and she was simultaneously trying to scrabble towards it and avoid getting bitten. She pistoned her left leg out, hitting the zombie in the face with the sole of her foot and breaking his nose with a crunch. However, although the kick snapped his head back, it didn’t loosen his grip on her leg. Hearing a crash, and registering in his peripheral vision that Purna was focused on kicking in the door of Wave Your Worries Goodbye, Sam ran across to Xian Mei, raising his machete once again.
He brought it down with all his force on the back of the zombie’s head, cleaving its skull. The creature fell forward on to its face, its body spasming and jerking as its dying brain short-circuited. As it died in a spreading pool of its own blood, Xian Mei scooted backwards away from it and scrambled to her feet. Her right leg was scratched and a little bloody, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.
‘You OK?’ Sam asked.
‘Fine,’ she said, snatching up her machete.
The two of them glanced around, then hurried across to the van parked outside Wave Your Worries Goodbye. Purna had succeeded in kicking the door open now and had gone inside.
Before Sam could even think about going in after her, she was running back out, left hand raised triumphantly, keys jangling on the loop of a keyring around her finger.
‘You see anyone?’ Sam asked.
She shook her head. ‘Neither dead
nor
alive.’ Then her eyes flickered beyond him and widened. ‘Shit.’
Sam and Xian Mei turned to see a zombie running towards them. It was a fat, bald white man of about sixty, with a grey beard and fuzzy blue tattoos on his hairy arms. Unlike the other zombies they had seen, he was not drenched with the messy remains of a recent meal. The cause of his infection, however, was clear. His left leg was badly bitten and he was missing the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
The man’s face was as blue as a heart attack victim’s and his pendulous belly swung beneath a yellow T-shirt bearing the legend
World’s Greatest Lover
. His bottom half was clad only in a pair of black Speedos and he was wearing an open-toed sandal on his right foot; his other was bare.
Purna pressed a button on the key fob and the van chirruped and flashed its lights as its doors unlocked. They ran across to it and got in, Purna diving into the driver’s seat, Sam and Xian Mei running around to the passenger door. Sam glanced at the approaching zombie as Xian Mei climbed into the van ahead of him. Though it was running as fast as it could, its steps were lumbering, its weight slowing it down. It made Sam think of an old lion that was getting too slow to hunt; he almost felt sorry for it.
The zombie was still ten metres short of them when the van pulled away. Watching it in the wing mirror, Sam saw it try to put on an extra spurt of speed but succeed only in tripping over and sprawling headlong in the dust.
Need to lose some weight, you fat fuck
, he thought, then turned as Purna muttered, ‘Hell.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Xian Mei, who was sitting in the middle of the three front seats.
‘We’re almost out of gas,’ Purna said. She raised her eyes Heavenwards. ‘Thank you, God.’
‘Bound to be a gas station around here someplace,’ said Sam.
‘There is,’ said Xian Mei. ‘There’s one further along the main street, back the way we’ve just come.’
Without hesitation, Purna hit the brakes and turned the steering wheel, performing a neat U-turn. They were now heading back towards the fat, grey-bearded zombie, which appeared to be picking itself up almost ruefully, its bare legs and the front of its T-shirt covered in brown dust.
At their approach, the zombie held up its hands and lurched into their path, like a drunken late-night reveller trying to hail a cab. Purna gave a casual jerk on the steering wheel to bypass it, but in a desperate attempt to satisfy its hunger it flung itself at the van. There was a heavy thump and the van shuddered slightly as the zombie impacted with the side of it and bounced off. Once again glancing into his wing mirror as they sped away, Sam saw the zombie, its shattered arm now hanging at a bizarre angle, pick itself up from a spatter of its own blood and stagger hopelessly after them.
He had barely faced front again when two more of the infected appeared. One, a skinny, short-skirted black woman with spectacular legs, who had clearly been for a night on the town and had decided to head home a little too late, came running out of the open door of a nearby bar. The other, a white boy of about seven wearing nothing but a pair of green shorts, was crouched in the gutter on the other side of the road, devouring what might have been a dead cat, but he jumped to his feet at their approach.
With the zombies heading at them from separate directions, it was impossible to avoid hitting both of them. An expression of calculating grimness on her face, Purna took the path of least resistance, veering to her left just as the boy took a running leap towards them.
Caught in mid-air, the boy smashed into the van and all but disintegrated like a flimsy bag of meat – which, in effect, is what he was. For a few seconds the windscreen was coated in a thick spray of red and Purna was driving blind. Then, calmly, she flicked on the windscreen wipers and tugged the indicator lever towards her, activating the water jets. Sam sat back with a groan as the wipers swept the majority of the mess away, shocked by the fact that the boy’s violent death hadn’t affected him more than it had. What was it the psychologists called it? Combat fatigue?
With Xian Mei directing them, they reached the gas station without further incident. Opening the passenger door, Sam said, ‘I’ll fill her up. You guys watch out for more of those things.’
The girls nodded and Sam flipped open the cap on the side of the van, and unhooked the gas hose. For a second after squeezing the trigger he felt sure the pump would either be locked or run dry. But to his relief the gas started to flow.
The tank was almost full when he happened to glance up and saw a face watching him through a small dusty window in the closed side door of the body shop attached to the gas station. As soon as he established eye contact with it, the face disappeared with a wide-eyed expression of alarm.
‘Hey!’ he shouted.
Purna opened the driver’s door and stuck her head out. ‘You OK?’
‘There’s someone in there,’ Sam said, nodding towards the body shop. ‘A regular person, I mean.’
‘They look friendly?’ Purna asked.
‘They looked scared,’ said Sam. ‘
She
looked scared. It was a girl. Twenty years old, maybe younger.’
‘I’ll check it out,’ Xian Mei called, getting out of the van and walking across to the body shop. She knocked on the door. ‘Hello, anyone in there?’ When no one answered, she said, ‘We just wondered if you needed any help? We’re not going to hurt you.’
After a few seconds there was a click and the door opened, albeit no more than a few inches. A girl’s voice, young and nervous, said, ‘What do you want?’
‘We’re just getting some gas,’ replied Xian Mei. ‘We’ll pay you for it if you want. Are you OK in there?’
There was a pause and then the girl said, ‘My papa’s hurt.’
Sam and Xian Mei exchanged glances. ‘Hurt how?’ asked Xian Mei. ‘Is there anything we can do?’
There was a further pause and then the door opened a bit more to reveal a slender, almost frail young girl, who peered out at them with wide dark eyes, like a timid animal uncertain whether to emerge from its burrow.
‘Hi,’ said Xian Mei with a sudden warm smile which transformed her face. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jin,’ said the girl.
‘Hi, Jin. I’m Xian Mei, that’s Sam and our driver’s called Purna.’
Jin looked at Xian Mei and then at Sam. ‘How come you’re not like the others?’ she asked.
‘The infected, you mean?’ said Sam, and shrugged. ‘We don’t know. We’re just not.’
‘Infected?’ Jin asked.
‘There’s a virus,’ explained Xian Mei. ‘It … affects people’s minds, sends them crazy.’
‘One of the crazy people hurt my papa,’ Jin said.
Sam tried not to look alarmed. ‘Hurt him how?’
‘She bit him. She tried to kill him.’ Jin swallowed. ‘My papa had to shoot her.’
To his shame, the first question that leaped into Sam’s head was to ask Jin what kind of gun her father owned. Resisting the urge, he asked instead, ‘And how’s your papa now?’
‘He’s sick,’ Jin said. Hesitantly she asked, ‘Can you help him?’
‘We can try,’ said Sam. ‘You want to show me where he is?’
After another moment’s hesitation the girl nodded and led the way inside.
‘Let Purna know what’s going on,’ Sam muttered to Xian Mei, and followed Jin through the door and into the cool gloom of the body shop. There were tools on racks against the walls, a hydraulic pulley system overhead to lift heavy car parts and a small office space in the corner. The place smelled of oil, grease and metal. Jin led him over to an open door in the left-hand wall.
‘This is where we live,’ she said simply. ‘Papa’s through here.’
They passed through a short hallway with a threadbare carpet and into a small sitting room at the back of the house. There wasn’t much in there but a small colour TV perched on a wooden fruit box, a bookcase which mostly contained
Reader’s Digest
editions of classic novels and a ratty grey sofa with matching armchair.
There were also lots of framed family photographs on the walls – some of Jin on her own at various ages, or with her parents, smiling and happy. Sam wondered what had become of the pretty woman in the photographs who, from the resemblance, was clearly Jin’s mother. He turned his attention to the man lying on the sofa with a blanket over his legs. He was evidently the same man in the photographs, but the difference between the smiling images on the walls and the flesh-and-blood figure on the sofa could not have been more marked.
Jin’s father was sweating and feverish, his face a ghastly grey, his eyes ringed with dark flesh and rolling in his sockets. He was breathing stertorously and there was a bad smell about him, a smell of sickness and fear. His left arm was heavily bandaged from elbow to wrist, and on the floor beside the sofa was a bowl of water with a white cloth floating in it.
‘I cleaned and disinfected the wound, and gave him some painkillers, and I’ve been trying to keep him cool,’ said Jin. ‘But he’s getting worse. He’s been delirious for the past hour and he’s had a couple of seizures. I tried calling for an ambulance, but all the phones are dead.’
‘How long ago he get bit?’ Sam asked.
‘About … four, five hours.’
‘And this woman who attacked him? It wasn’t …?’ Instead of finishing his question, Sam glanced up at the family portraits.
Jin shook her head vigorously. ‘No. My mama died when I was twelve. Anaplastic large-cell lymphoma.’ When Sam raised his eyebrows she said, ‘I’m a nurse. Just about to qualify anyway.’
‘Good for you,’ Sam said distractedly. He was thinking hard, wondering what to do, what to suggest. He knew that if Jin stayed here with her father he would eventually turn, just like the others, and attack her. Indicating the man’s bandaged arm, he asked, ‘So how exactly did it happen?’
‘He heard a noise in the night, thought someone was messing with the gas pumps. When he saw the woman he thought she was drunk or maybe ill. He went out to ask if she was OK and she just attacked him. Papa said she was like a wild animal. He said if he hadn’t shot her she would’ve killed him.’
‘So where’s this woman now?’
Jin shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Papa said he was sure he’d killed her, but when we looked out later she’d gone.’
Sam was silent for a moment, and then he said, ‘Listen, Jin, there ain’t no easy way to say this. Your papa’s ill,
really
ill I mean, and he ain’t gonna get better. This thing he’s got, there’s no cure for it. Pretty soon he’ll turn, like the woman that attacked him, and he’ll attack you too.’
Jin shook her head almost angrily. ‘No! He would never do that!’
‘He won’t be able to stop himself. Believe me, I’ve seen it. You can’t do nothing to help him. All you can do now is help yourself.’
‘What are you saying?’ Jin’s face was stony.
Sam took a deep breath. ‘You gotta get away from here. You gotta come with us.’
She recoiled, almost as if he had tried to strike her. ‘I’m not leaving him!’
‘You got to, if you want to live.’
‘No!’
‘He’s right,’ croaked a voice from the sofa.
Surprised, Sam looked down at Jin’s father. Moments before, the man had been delirious but now, temporarily at least, the fever had abated and he seemed alert and lucid.
‘Papa!’ Jin exclaimed delightedly, and cast Sam an accusatory look. ‘You see. He’s getting better.’
‘No,’ said Jin’s father, his voice so weak it was barely there, ‘I’m not.’
Jin knelt beside her father and took his hand. ‘I’m not leaving you, Papa. You
will
get better. I’ll
make
you well.’
Jin’s father shook his head and winced, even that simple movement seeming to cause him pain.
‘You
must
go,’ he said. ‘If you don’t … then I’ll do something terrible, I know it … I’m having such thoughts, my beautiful Jin … such awful thoughts … You are not safe here …’
His eyes drifted closed. Jin clung to her father’s hand, shaking her head, tears running down her face. After a moment the man’s eyes flickered open again.
‘Leave me some medicine … and lock me in … Help will eventually come … I know it … But in the meantime … you must go …’ His eyes shifted to focus on Sam. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Sam, sir.’
‘Sam … a good name …’ He swallowed. ‘Sam, do you promise to look after my little girl?’