Turning the corner, I saw a few of the creatures staggering down the road towards the business district. To my amazement, I also saw people,
real
people, still wandering the streets. My heart flared with hope. Maybe this madness hadn't reached Michele yet.
Maybe I would be in time
.
Ahead, a young girl with a backpack turned towards the car. Long brown hair fell over her chest but it did not hide the gaping hole in her chest or the glazed eyes. Deliberately, I swerved the car at her.
"What are you doing?" Emma gasped.
Whatever it takes
.
The girl stood motionless as the car powered towards her. At the last moment, I twitched the steering wheel so that the the car only clipped the girl. Spinning, she flew several feet before landing heavily on the bitumen.
Braking hard, I jumped out of the car and ran back to her. She lay faced upwards, the bloody hole in her chest repelling me as I knelt beside her. I pulled out my stake, waiting. Sure enough, her eyes opened and focused on me with the mindless stare I had become familiar with.
"Sorry." I whispered, feeling an ache for the girl she had once been and for the loss her parents had suffered. Before she could react, I plunged my stake through her eye with an ease that should have troubled me, but didn't.
As the body stilled, I pulled her backpack off and rummaged roughly through it. My hands closed over a familiar shape and I pulled out a mobile phone. Sending up a fervent prayer of thanks, I ran back to the car.
Dialing Michele's number, I sent the car squealing forward again. It rang once, twice, three times.
Pick up!
"Hello?" My daughter's familiar voice coursed through my body like red wine.
"Are you okay? Where are you?" I yelled as I drove through a red light. Vaguely I was aware of a car crash on my right.
"Oh, hi mum. Um, I'm fine." Michele sounded surprised and wary. "Why, what's going on?"
I took a deep breath and tried to talk normally. "Is everything okay at the shops? Any trouble?" People running on my left. A sudden scream. I blocked them out as I focused on getting to the large shopping centre which was looming in the distance.
"Everything's fine. Oh, there
is
something going on in the food hall. Hannah and I were just heading over to see what all the fuss was about."
"No!" I screamed, my heart in my mouth. "You run the other way right now, do you hear?! Meet me out front if you can get there safely."
Michele sounded scared now. "Mum, what's going on?!"
I took another deep breath. There was no way to explain this situation in a few words. "Bad people, Michele. Very bad people."
I heard a sharp intake of breath. "Terrorists? Okay, okay, we are leaving now. Come quick, mum, please."
"I'm three minutes away, baby."
2
A commotion in the back of the ambulance attracted my attention. In the rearview mirror. I saw Roy's belligerent face appear in the dividing window.
"If you want to get your daughter, that's fine, but you have no business dragging us along with you! We should be getting the hell out of town!"
I gritted my teeth, ignoring a flare of guilt. "You don't like it, Roy? Just say the word and I'll drop you off on any corner you like."
He scowled. "Like hell. I'm just saying - who made you captain?"
"Really, Roy, really?" I glared at him through the mirror. "You want to argue about who's the fricking boss
now
?!"
He had the grace to look a bit shamefaced as he mumbled "Just saying..."
"Stow it, Roy." The man beside me said calmly, popping a fresh gum in his mouth. I glanced at him gratefully as he pulled out his weapon and started loading it.
"Last lot." He glanced blandly at me. "I guess I'd better make them count."
As the large shopping centre loomed a block away, the phone rang. I snatched it up.
"Michele? Where are you?"
Her whispered reply sent cold chills through me. "I'm hiding upstairs in Tosca's restaurant, mummy. We can't get to the stairs. People...they're killing people, mummy." Her voice shook.
"I'm right there, sweetheart." Did my voice sound as hard to her as it did to me? "Stay out of sight until you hear my voice."
Mike cocked his weapon. "Trouble?"
I nodded.
People were pouring out the front doors of the large building ahead. Screams of terror and pain filled the air. Amongst the crowd, I spotted shambling, torn figures grabbing at panicked shoppers.
I drove the car screeching up onto the curb, narrowly missing people and zombies alike. Reassuring myself that my trusty stake was in my belt, I flung open my door and took the outside stairs to Tosca's, two at a time.
On the balcony, a zombie held a young blonde girl close, teeth buried in her throat. The blood poured down her dress as she stood in his arms like a lover, the light dimming in her eyes. Two more zombies, a teenaged boy and a chef, appeared in the restaurant's doorway, stumbling towards me. As the freshly dead creatures came towards me, I felt, rather than saw, Mike's comforting presence at my back.
"I'll handle them." He murmured. "You get your daughter."
An agonised scream from within the restaurant sent me bolting past the zombies and inside. A woman in a floral dress chewed upon a body beside the door while another zombie sat near the kitchen bench gnawing on the leg of a large male tourist. I looked around desperately. "Michele!"
Another feminine scream sent me running to the back of the Italian restaurant. As I neared it, I saw a zombie tearing at the face of a prone girl. A girl with honey hair.
No, no, no!
"Mum!" From behind a beam, Michele launched herself at me, sobbing. "Mum! He's got Hannah! Help her!"
I gathered Michele in my arms for a brief moment, absorbing the smell of her warm,
live
body.
Thank you, God.
Pushing her behind me, I approached the zombie cautiously. Hannah was clearly dead but she had been part of our lives for four years; I couldn't just abandon her to such a horrible fate. The zombie, a waiter, looked up with its unnervingly blank eyes, blood dripping down its chin.
Something about that impersonal look infuriated me beyond measure. I picked up a nearby iron-wrought chair and swung it at the monster like I was wielding a cricket bat. It connected with a most satisfying thud, knocking the monster several feet sideways. I brought the chair down on his head again and again. His features became a meaty mash but still I knew he lived, if you could call it that.
"Mum!" A squeal of dismay brought me around and I saw Hannah on her knees, face so torn she could not see anything before her. Quickly, I turned back to the zombie before me and, planting my knee in his chest, I ended his miserable existence with a stake through the eye. Swinging around, I grabbed what used to be Hannah around the throat.
"What are you doing?" My daughter's horrified whisper brought me up short. I didn't have time to explain all this to her, but I knew I had to try.
"She's already dead, Michele." I looked her firmly in the eye. "They all are. Take a look around you."
Michele looked around and saw the two zombies at the other end of the restaurant as they began to shamble in our direction. The large gaping wounds all over their bodies combined with their complete lack of pain said more than an hour's explanation possibly could have.
"Oh my God." She whispered.
While she stared at the approaching creatures, I silently finished off sweet Hannah with an ache in my heart that I feared would never go away. I had watched her grow up, seen her giggle and plot with my daughter, heard her dreams for the future. All gone.
****
Keeping Michele safely behind me, I approached the two zombies slowly. Both were dripping in the blood of their victims. We needed to get out of the shopping centre as quickly as possible, before the noise we were making attracted all the remaining zombies in the area. I did some quick calculations and then without further thought, launched myself at the nearest zombie, bowled it over, staked it through the eye, spun up on my feet, kicked the other zombie over as it started to turn, and dispatched it with a minimum of fuss. As I stood up and shook the blood off my stake, my daughter stared at me with her mouth hanging open.
A bit discomforted by her expression, I muttered a hurried 'come on' and headed for the balcony. From the corner of my eye, I saw the wide-eyed glances Michele was sneaking at me. I couldn't blame her. I had always been squeamish about killing anything. But, in truth, after the number of zombies I had faced this morning, it would take more than two or three zombies to faze me now.
Mike stood calmly within a circle of dead zombies, wiping clean a metal picket he had acquisitioned from the nearby potted tree. I raised a questioning brow, to which he shrugged. "Didn't seem worth wasting my bullets on just a few zombies."
I couldn't help it; I threw my head back and laughed out loud.
3
In the few minutes that we had been preoccupied in the restaurant, the situation in the city centre had deteriorated markedly. In the street in front of us, people struggled desperately with implacable corpses. A zombie pulled a clueless driver out through his car window. Terrified mothers dragged their young children through traffic trying to evade the ever-increasing numbers of walking dead. Vehicles honked as they tried to make their way through the confusion.
Scattered amongst these scenes of desperate struggles were the heartbreaking images of battles that had been lost - a father shooing a toddler away from him as zombies tore into his body; a large middle-aged woman clawing her way along the pavement as a corpse gnawed at her leg; a mother with a baby still clasped to her chest as blood pooled beneath her senseless body.
The zombies crouched over their spoils like jackals at a lion's kill, squabbling over intestines and fleshy chunks. And then, to me, the most chilling image of all - the newly dead figures slowly standing up and moving off in search of new victims.
Mike whistled slowly. "This thing is moving quickly, Lori."
Finally, he's stopped calling me ma'am.
He pointed to smoke spiraling into the air several blocks away. It seemed a good bet that it was related to this catastrophe.
"We'd better try to get ahead of it," I answered grimly. "or we might find ourselves trapped in town."
The ambulance, with its lack of obvious occupants, remained largely unbothered by the zombies. The three creatures that blocked our way proved no deterrent to Mike's picket and my stake and we were soon back in the vehicle.
I slipped into the passenger seat after Michele, allowing Mike to take the wheel. Having got my oldest daughter back, I just wanted to reassure myself that she was really here. I grabbed her hand tightly.
"Oh, so kind of you to join us!"
I sighed. "Nice to be back, Roy." I glanced through the back window. "Is everyone okay in there? Jessie?"
Her thin face appeared. "I'm okay. It was a bit scary for a while, though. There was a lot of screaming and banging outside."
"You kept quiet. That was the right thing to do." She smiled a little at that.
As Mike swung out onto the street, he made no attempt to avoid the zombies making their way towards us. There were few living people in the vicinity now, having fled or joined the walking dead. My chest tightened as I recognised the dead father standing beside the blank-eyed chubby toddler he had tried so hard to save, watching us drive by.
As Mike made his way carefully down the main street, taking care to avoid abandoned cars and the occasional living human, we sat in silence, trying to make sense of the chaos. Michele didn't say much, still looking a bit stunned. I squeezed her hand tightly but left her alone to deal with her emotions. What could I say that could possibly make things better?
Pulling out the mobile phone, I dialled the police. As unlikely as it seemed that they didn't already know the score, I had to make sure. The line was engaged. I tried again with the same result.
Too many emergency calls flooding the line.
Shutting the phone, I asked levelly, "Okay, folks, what's the next step?"
I desperately wanted to get to the twins but Kaye lived half an hour out of town in the rainforest - I had to believe that they were safe for the moment. These people, however, had families in more immediate need of rescue. I swallowed the urge to demand to be taken to my kids.
Mike answered slowly, darting the ambulance around a pileup. This far down the street, there were no obvious signs of zombies but the frantic behaviour of the people on the street suggested otherwise. "I think we should split up."
He hastened on before anyone could protest. "We've only got a small window of opportunity before this plague infects the whole town. It makes sense to split into two or three groups, collect our families and meet back at a designated location as quickly as possible."