Nick
climbed down the ladder while Kris descended the shelving unit. Next, Ethan and Jack began to make their way just as Jim felt a tremor against his back. He stumbled forwards and then pushed back against the internal door with all his might. Nick, Doug and Masayuki ran over and added their weight as a defence against whatever was on the other side; or rather what they knew to be there, because it could only be one thing.
A
t that moment a panic-stricken Ana ran into the room, sparking Marla and Leah to head outside. Simultaneously, the dead loitering at the end of the building turned in semi-slow motion to glare at them. Marla leaned back inside and waved at everyone to leave. Ethan and Jack raced across the room, turned and pointed their weapons at the four men blocking the door to the corridor. They both nodded and then Doug, Nick, Sid and Masayuki sprinted towards them. The bookshelf swung outwards as though weightless and cluttered to the ground. Ethan and Jack emptied their guns into the zombies that stumbled their way out. Outside, Marla and Leah opened fire on the dead-lookers creeping down the side of the building.
“Come on,” Ethan urged Jack
after the other four men had sprinted out into a blast of morning sunshine. “You take too many risks!” Jack turned on his heels and followed, reloading his gun on the way. From the other end of the building to the zombies, Brian poked his head out and started waving ferociously at them to hurry before pointing in the direction of the road opposite.
“Run,” said Nick, although no
one really needed to be asked; they took off immediately.
Kris and Sid brought up the rear, stopping every now and then to fire back at the
dead in a bid to decrease their numbers in case they became sandwiched between them and the approaching tide from the opposite direction. When Nick reached Brian, followed closely by Marla and Masayuki, their predicament became clearer. From across the parking lot the creatures walked towards them in an unsteady line, accompanied by their gruesome soundtrack.
Nick pointed to the alleyway
and the group sprinted towards it. Brian and Masayuki reached it first, skidding at the turn. As Brian glanced the other way, he clapped sight of three zombies sat idle on the pavement, one armless. Their downturned chins rose slowly and their bodies followed suit. Marla chased after the two guys down the alleyway. Footsteps pounded behind her, along with the sound of laboured breathing, but it was human. Eerie wails carried through the air from the warehouse behind the fencing. She could imagine them lined up behind it, trying to force their way through the wire, blind to this obstacle in the path of food. At the end of the alleyway, she found herself in Holders Road. Glancing back, she saw the rest of the group pounding the gravel in a line, hurrying to catch up.
Marla
raced behind Brian and Masayuki, across the road and between two houses. Doug and Leah were right behind her; the others not too far. She hoped no one would get left behind. Deep down, she knew that Nick would never allow it. Checking in all directions, Marla could see no one else. Relief washed over her as the houses opened up on to a street once more. Brian and Masayuki paused to take in their surroundings. A few paces away, the legs of someone flickered along the ground amid red, rope-like lengths. Marla cringed and stepped off the pavement behind the two men. When they reached the back door of the supermarket, Brian banged hard on the surface with the code. It opened immediately.
Freya’s face broke into a huge grin. “Oh my God,
am I glad to see you?” she gasped, standing back to allow them access. When only the three entered, her face fell. “Where are the others?”
“Right b
ehind us,” informed Marla, walking further into the room.
Brian headed back out
side to wait. The brief seconds struggled by like hours. “Look,” he cried out finally, “they’re coming.” As he spoke, gunfire erupted, and Freya, Masayuki and Marla joined him outside. Nick, who was running across the street with Leah, paused and looked back. Doug overtook him and stopped also, while Leah carried on to the supermarket.
“Where are the others? Why have they stopped?” Freya
asked her.
“C
-coming,” Leah panted. “Don’t k-know.”
Nick started to
head off, but Doug grabbed hold of his arm. “Wait,” he urged. The top of the road was filling with the dead. No one else emerged from the shortcut between the houses.
“Too long
,” said Nick before another gunshot smashed the end of his sentence. In that instant Ana and Kris appeared, and he ran towards them. “Where’s Sid, Ethan and Jack?”
“Behind us,” Kris replied. Seeing no one
there, he grimaced and took off.
Doug pulled
Nick back again. “Let him take care of it,” he urged. “Get inside. Be safe.”
“Not when our family’s out
there.”
“I know, but you’re out of breath
.”
Nick relented and noticed they had company at the end of the road. “They’
re coming,” he muttered, nodding towards them. Reluctantly, he followed Doug into the supermarket where the others were waiting.
Kris ran out on to Holders Road. Another g
unshot attracted him into the alley. Standing at the end with his weapon raised was Sid. He ran faster for what seemed forever. The horde had gathered on all three sides of the car park. Ethan was visible, yet they were moving towards him too swiftly. Where was Jack?
Sid turned and fired to the left, taking down the nearest two creatures. Blood exploded from their heads before they sank. Kris strode towards Ethan, firing continuously at
his closest foe; they swept in. “Where’s Jack?” he asked.
Ethan looked pale. He fired again. “
In there.”
“What?
!”
More gunshots in close succession
a short distance away.
“He’s behind them. I saw him a second ago.”
“What the fuck?” Kris sprinted to the side of the line of drifting corpses and checked each way, but no Jack; nowhere to be seen. Veering to the right, he searched the entire area and the side of the warehouse by the fence with his eyes, but there was no one, only the dead. Firing at those now far too close, he ran back towards Ethan and finally spotted Jack, standing behind the row in front of him, covered in bloody, rotten guts from what he could see, as if trying to disguise his scent. Kris ran forwards, shooting zombies right, left and centre while Sid took after him. Ethan stayed where he was, firing at the nearest drifters.
“He saved Ethan,”
Sid mumbled, “and then got trapped.”
Kris nodded,
stepped closer to Jack and fired again. Jack turned abruptly and smiled, relief scrawled across his face. In front of him the dead swarmed like insects; groans amid stinking hides.
“Watch out!” Jack warned Kris, who
spun around and blew off the pungent head in front of him. They were almost encircled.
“We need to get out of here,” Sid
urged. “Like now!” As he spoke, blood and brains splattered into the air a short distance away. Someone else was shooting.
Jack ran to stand alongside Kris and Sid backed into them as they all fired at the dead dripping bile and blood. Bodies
fell further away; they could hear them. The gunfire increased, but it would bring more and more of them. As the corpses parted, Jack, Kris and Sid ran through to catch sight of Brian, Leah and Marla.
“Run!” said Leah, but it did not need to be said. They sprinted back towards the alleyway, but the noise seemed to have awoken the whole of Amesbury. Both sides of their destination were heaving with zombies. They hurtled through the middle with Jack wiping the
grisly innards from his torso as he went. Leah and Marla headed into the alleyway first and out on to Holders Road; then between the vehicles and houses to complete the shortcut. Outside the supermarket, Doug and Nick were waiting, but the dead had almost reached them. They used their treasured bullets to take them down. The girls careered across the road, past them and into the supermarket, with Brian on their heels.
Kris, Sid and Jack ducked behind
a white van parked beside a house and crept through. Kris moved straight, but a crunch of gravel made the other two turn. To the side stood a young, blonde girl in a torn yellow sundress, staring. She wore one scuffed, red sandal and dirt stained her knees.
Jack gazed back
, hypnotised by her sightless eyes that were fixed on his own. At the most she could only have been sixteen years old when she turned. If you looked her way quickly you could trick yourself into thinking she was normal, he thought, apart from the way her right arm dangled, suspended by a tendon. The girl raised her other arm as if to point at something behind Jack, but he knew it was his flesh she wanted.
Sensing no one behind him, Sid
halted and turned around. His friend had stopped for some reason. “Jack!” he called to him.
Jack glanced his way and saluted him
jokily as a tall, dark figure who had once been a man grabbed both of his shoulders and sank his sharp teeth into his neck. Sid froze as Jack’s blood showered outwards and the creature groaned in ecstasy, quenching its thirst. Again it dipped its head, ripping out a chunk of flesh, which it spat on the ground before drinking from the crimson waterfall spouting from the severed jugular vein. The skinny girl in the yellow dress took a step forwards, continuing to point while Jack shrieked. Sid’s arm shook as he struggled to aim his gun.
Wednesday, 21
Marla observed the dead-looker sail like driftwood up to the end of the road and sink against the wooden fence outside a house. It stayed there, not moving for a time before slumping down to the pavement. She gazed up at the faint egg-yolk sun and imagined being able to walk around freely, taking in the fresh morning air and its coolness with a positive expectancy, but she knew that day would never come.
She
could not stop thinking about Ellen. Every day, every hour, she was there. As for Tommy, he was always present too. They haunted her mind, making it difficult to concentrate on anything and impossible to sleep, as if the nightmare was not enough. She could see no alternative: she had to go back. Then her mind switched to Jack, reminding her how dangerous it was out there. Her heart sank.
Leaning against the windowsill,
she gazed back at the dead-looker. Still there, slumped, waiting. Marla was aware of what he longed for – there was no guessing that – and his patience knew no end, but waiting was something she had never been good at. His capacity to endure was something she almost envied.
Except it is an empty shell.
Turning away from the window, she wandered out of the room and into the main living area. Her new housemates looked up as she entered and welcomed her.
“Toast, eggs, beans, mushrooms, cereal or porridge?” asked Harris from his
usual position by the stove. Ana was helping him.
“T
oast and eggs would be great,” Marla replied.
“Is Freya still sleeping?” Ana asked her.
Marla nodded sadly. “I don’t know what to say to her.”
“Same.”
Turning, Marla spotted Nick sitting on the sofa talking to Kris. As she approached, he shuffled over to make space. “Thanks,” she told him, taking a seat. “How are you, considering?”
“Getting by,” he muttered. “Like everyone. Freya’s going to take a while.”
“I know.”
“You look troubled
too.”
“You’re too wise,” Marla replied. “The thing is I need to get back… to the facility, because of my sister and Tommy. What happened to Jack got me thinking that I can’t afford to wait. I need to get them out of that place.”
“You’re joking
!” Kris exclaimed, raising his voice. “They will kill you, like they did my brother.”
“
She’s my sister, Kris. I can’t leave her there. They’ve been doing tests on her while she sleeps and I don’t know what that really implies after everything I’ve seen.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nick. “Why are they doing that?”
“Because she has the nightmares… of the dead.” Marla was suddenly aware that everyone else in the room had gone quiet and was listening to their conversation.
“Really?” gasped Ana
, walking towards her. “I heard about this on the news right at the start of everything.”
“
Some people said they were warnings,” Kris chipped in.
“So they say,” said Marla. “
I dream them too.”
Leah bli
nked. “You do? What are they like?”
“Awful,
terrible, but I’ve got used to them. They can’t harm me and they’ve faded a little, but Ellen’s were getting stronger. She had them first, on the same day as that scientist.”
“
You mean the Nobel Prize guy,” Harris noted. “I followed his story. A genius, he was. Well, I hope he’s still alive. He had a lot of followers when all this started. However, some people accused him of starting a sect and that he was a religious nutcase.”
Marla nodded. “I laughed when I first heard about it, but then Ellen told me she was having these nightmares. You know
, I didn’t believe her, yet when I started having them I had no choice but to believe it.”
“How are her dreams stronger?” asked Nick, rubbing his forehead.
“They are more detailed,” Marla replied. “She sees more in them and they are longer, and she remembers everything. I don’t always. The doctor at Haven was really interested in her nightmares. I think he got bored of mine pretty quick, but I don’t really understand why. Our dreams are almost the same. It made no sense to me, but Ellen wanted to help. That’s how she is. She always wants to help people. I have to go back…” She stopped talking when she realised Kris was staring straight at her. “What?”
“The doctor,” Kris replied, frowning. “His nickname was Doctor Sleep while I was there. He wa
s our only doctor in that place, so you’d have to go to him with anything, but he was obsessed with the dreamers.”
“Doctor Sleep… that’s the name Robert gave me… he said he was trying to read people’s minds, but I thought he was talking garbage. Poor Robert…”
“Why poor?” asked Nick.
“B
ecause they tortured him,” Marla mumbled. “I found him. He spoke out and tried to show everyone what was going on there. It went wrong. He was a soldier…”
“What was his surname?” asked Kris.
“Genner, I think.”
“Gentser,” Kris corrected. “I knew him. Bastards. He was a decent man.”
“I know… it haunts me. I can’t leave Ellen in that place.”
“I would feel the same way,” said Leah, sitting down on the carpet and some of the others mumbled their agreement.
“How did you know the dreams were warnings?” Marla asked.
Kris leaned back in his chair. “
Let me tell you a story. When I was in that facility there were two people who had those dreams: one Oriental woman and one Welsh guy. I didn’t know her. She was quiet, young and very striking looking. He was the opposite; really loud, outspoken, friendly, and he wanted everyone to know about these dreams he was having. Said they were a warning. Doctor Sleep was monitoring them both.
“
This guy, I think his name was Arthur, shared his experiences. He didn’t want to have the dreams anymore, said they were scary. This went on for weeks. He’d update us and they sounded real scary to me. I was glad I didn’t have them. Anyway, this one day he just wasn’t there anymore and neither was she. He was popular, so a lot of people asked after him. They were told he’d asked for a transfer to another facility to be with his family, and that she had too. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Weird thing is the guy had never mentioned any relatives and he told people everything. If he’d asked for a transfer, he would have said his goodbyes or told at least one person. There would have been a big party, for Christ’s sake. But nope, no one had any idea. That was the weird part. That’s when I started asking questions in my own mind.”
“God, I have to get back there soon,” said Marla.
Nick thought for a second and shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. They’d kill you on sight. You know they’ve probably reported you as a terrorist. They won’t be expecting you to survive out here on your own, but to be sure, they’re bound to make sure no other facility will take you in.”
“I could change my appearance… and there are hundreds of
people at Haven. They are all at risk. If you’d seen what they did to Robert…”
Nick waved his hand. “No, you’re not thinking straight.
You can’t just barge in. There has to be another way. We just have to think of a solution.”
“I’ll do it,” said Kris.
“Don’t be crazy,” said Ana. “They know you.”
“Freya won’t want anyone going,” Harris cut in. “And I think we shouldn’t…”
“I could go back,” Kris insisted. “Fuck it, I need…”
Nick turned around to face him
down. “Kris, I know you want revenge for your brother, but that’s the wrong way to go about it. If someone were to infiltrate Haven and get a message to Marla’s sister, it would have to be someone they don’t know… someone they wouldn’t suspect.”
“I’ll do it.”
Everyone turned to stare in surprise at Doug, who was sitting at the table wearing an expression of poker-faced determination. “I volunteer,” he clarified. Scooping up a spoonful of scrambled egg, he ate it and smiled. “DD stands for double dare.”