The Swiss Family RobinZOM (Book 5) (9 page)

When they got to the ledge they found two Spinners there already – a young girl and the decapitated body of an old man.

“Good timing,” Bill said. “We just got here.”

“Shall we do it at the same time?” Liz said, sharing a look with the others.

“Sure,” Bill said. “It can be a family team building exercise.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to do this for her?” Liz said, nodding to the young girl Spinner.

“It’s not Priya anymore,” Bill said.

The whole family ran forward on their steeds and knocked the Spinners over the side. Priya somehow made a screaming noise as she fell, and for a moment Liz’s blood curdled and turned cold in her veins. The scream died, ending with wet slaps. Liz chastised herself for thinking of the Spinner as a ‘she’ and not an ‘it’.

“Looks like one of them survived,” Fritz said, peering over the side.

“Which one?” Liz said.

“I’m not sure,” Fritz said, squinting at the figure. “It’s kicking up too much froth to tell. It’s heading out to sea.”

The figure was lost to the eye, disappearing into the light of the refracted sun.

“Hopefully a shark will get it,” Bill said.

“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Liz said.

“Neither would I,” Bill said. “Who knows where it might wind up. Hopefully far from here.”

Bill’s hair was a bird’s nest, his face caked in mud, his clothes torn. He looked exhausted.

“Are you all right?” Liz said.

“I’m fine,” Bill said.

Liz noticed something about his chariot.

“One of the goats is missing!” Liz said.

Bill let out a sigh, as if he’d been hoping she wouldn’t notice.

“I got knocked off my chariot,” Bill said. “After we got split up, a Spinner came at me and got stuck under my wheels. He slashed at random and injured a goat. I cut the goat loose and rode the Spinner down.”

“Poor thing,” Liz said. “Do you think the virus got into the goat’s system?”

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I didn’t want to take the risk. I don’t even know if it can infect animals.”

Jack, Ernest and Fritz shared high fives.

“I got twenty-eight!” Jack said.

“I got thirty,” Fritz said.

“You did not!” Jack said.

“Are you sure?” Fritz said with a sly smile.

“Come on guys,” Bill said. “This isn’t a competition.”

“Life is a competition!” Jack said.

The bushes behind them shook as a Spinner came through it. Jack hurled himself and Herdy at it.

“Yaaaa!” he said.

“Where did he get his wild streak from?” Bill said.

Liz raced forward, screaming “Yaaaa!”

“That answers that,” Bill said. He turned to Fritz. “How are we doing?”

“Not bad,” Fritz said. “I think we’ve got a good number of them, but there are still a lot left.”

“At least now we’ve got a method that works,” Bill said.

“It’s still going to take forever to clear them all,” Fritz said.

Liz and Jack drove the Spinner over the cliff. They shared a high-five.

“With how fast they move it’ll be easy for them to avoid us,” Ernest said. “While we scout one area they could be crossing over to another.”

“What other option do we have?” Bill said.

“We could set traps,” Ernest said. “Funnels to lead them out to sea. Traps to ensnare them. They’ll slow them down, if not kill them.”

“Look out!” Jack shouted. “Behind you!”

Bill spun around, too late as a Spinner smashed into the back of his chariot, knocking it onto its side. The goats ran, the chariot churning up the earth like a plough.

The Spinner’s mutilated leg slammed down. Bill rolled aside, escaping the blow. He moved to get to his feet but found the Spinner on top of him. The Spinner’s handless limb landed between Bill’s legs, an inch from his crotch.

Bill breathed a sigh of relief. The Spinner slapped Bill across the face with a wayward blow. Bill used the momentum to roll aside. The Spinner rolled with him. Liz ran into the Spinner and pushed it clear. The boys were busy keeping another two Spinners under control, knocking them together to keep them fighting, bouncing off one another.

Liz offered her hand. Bill took it, swinging up onto the back of the zebra. Liz pulled sharply on the reins. Lightning reared up onto her back legs, kicking the Spinner on the chest, knocking it back.

“We have to get out of here!” Bill said, gesturing to half a dozen more Spinners emerging from the jungle. “They’re surrounding us!”

Bill slipped off Lightning, ran to the chariot and righted it. He jumped onto it and snapped the reins, heading toward the boys and the two Spinners they were controlling. More Spinners sprung from the foliage on either side of them.

“We have to get out of here!” Bill said.

“It’s too late for that!” Ernest said. “Look!”

The family watched in horror as scarred rotting corpses streamed through the foliage, heading left, right, forward and back, a miasma of whizzing forms. The family looked with desperation at the approaching horror of the Spinner army.

Francis rounded the concrete base of the treehouse in the opposite direction the Spinner had gone. He placed his feet carefully, deliberately, to make as little sound as possible until he realised the creature couldn’t hear him anyway. He got to the pen.

He looked over at the other side of the fence where the Spinner had been. It was no longer there. This should have made Francis feel relaxed, but it didn’t. He felt more afraid. His heart pumped hard in his chest. He looked around at the animals, who kept neighing and crowing and snorting. They clearly weren’t relaxed either. They sensed something dangerous nearby.

“Sh,” Francis said, reaching through the fence posts to calm down a fearful pig.

Francis edged around the pen to the front. He lifted the latch and opened the gate.

“Run!” he said to the animals. “Go!”

But they didn’t move. A sheep bleated. Francis entered and waved his arms.

“Go on!” he said. “You can go now! Go! Hide somewhere safe until this is all over!”

The animals ran from him, toward the opposite back corner. Francis scared them out the gate and down the short incline that led to the east coast. Most of them wouldn’t wander far. “They’re too used to the easy life to run far,” his father had said.

Only Valiant paused, looking back at Francis. But eventually he ran too. Francis smiled to himself, hands on his hips, pleased at a job well done. A man’s job. His smile soured, malformed like a tube of toothpaste squeezed in the middle. He heard Mark Jonson’s cheek flap, coming from the darkness on the left. Only it wasn’t Mark Jonson.

The figure emerged like it was being born out of the night, a nightmare in living form. It edged the property, spinning, fast and hypnotic. Francis froze. Seeing the creature from the safety of twenty feet up and at ground level in the flesh were very different things. It suddenly became real, a danger that wasn’t to be trifled with. Francis’s breath caught in his throat like a lump he couldn’t swallow.

The Spinner twisted and shuffled, crawling along the ground, heading away, and then back toward him. He wished it would just keep going in the wrong direction. But it didn’t. The Spinner slipped into the pen through the open gate.

Francis shuffled back, bumping into something solid that made him jump. It was the flint block. He put his hand to it. It was cold and rough. It no longer felt like the supporting foundation of their home, but the dry hard concrete of a prison cell wall. If he hadn’t been frozen stiff by fear he would have realised he could have squeezed under the fence posts along the sides.

He had eyes only for the creature approaching him. He loomed larger and larger in Francis’s vision until he was the whole world and there was nothing else in it but him. It was halfway to Francis now, bouncing off the fences on either side, drawing closer and closer with each passing second.

The Robinsons were pressed back against the cliff. The wind was strong and blew their clothes tight against them. Lightning and Lightfoot were the first amongst the animals to recognise their dangerous situation. They reared up onto their hind legs, teetering precariously close to the edge.

“Everyone form up behind me,” Bill said. “We’re going to punch a hole through them.”

Bill was at the head, Liz and Fritz behind him, Ernest and Jack in the rear.

“But we don’t have enough of a run-up!” Ernest said.

“We have to try,” Bill said. “On the count of three. One, two, three!”

They snapped their reins, and the animals darted forward. Bill’s goats struck the first Spinner, knocking it back. Liz and Fritz attacked the Spinners on either side, Lightning and Lightfoot rising up on their hind legs and kicking at them. Ernest turned Clementine around so she could kick with powerful thrusts of her legs. Herdy head-butted the Spinners, throwing all her weight into each blow. But the harder they pushed, the harder the Spinners bounced off those around them, striking the animals’ armour.

“It’s not working!” Liz said.

“Pull back!” Bill said.

The family edged back and lashed out at any Spinners who drifted too close. The oppressive wall of death inched closer.

“How did the situation turn on us so fast?” Ernest said. “One minute we were celebrating, the next… This!”

Jack looked down over his shoulder at the crashing waves below.

“It’s a long way down,” he said, gulping.

“I’m not much in the mood for a swim,” Fritz said.

“We might miss the rocks if we jump,” Ernest said.

“Even if we were that lucky we’ll still be infected by the bloodied water,” Bill said. He turned to face the Spinners. “We can’t jump. We have to go through them.”

The Spinners formed a tight wall of thrusting fists, feet and snapping jaws. They cajoled one another, parting and converging like Battling Tops.

“We’ll never get through them!” Ernest said.

Bill stepped off his chariot.

“Maybe we don’t need to,” he said.

He moved to the goats, who were skittish with the whirlwind wall of noise before them. Bill whipped their blinkers off. The goats pulled back at the sight of the Spinners.

“Go on,” Bill said to the goats. “Find a way through.”

But the goats only
meh
ed, rubbing against the Robinsons’ legs. They were having none of it. Liz hopped off her zebra.

“Try Lightning,” she said. “He might be a bit more stalwart.”

She took the zebra’s blinkers off. Lightning grunted and backed away. Liz tutted soothingly and led her forward by the bridle. Lightning hesitated, stepping toward a gap, and then back again as it closed.

“Get off your animals,” Bill said to the boys.

The boys shared wary glances, and then dismounted, feeling even more vulnerable. They took the animals’ blinkers off. The animals approached the Spinners, stepping toward an opening, and then backing off as the Spinners closed it.

“If one gets through, follow them,” Bill said. “They’ll find a way.”

“This is so dangerous,” Ernest said.

Clementine was the first to squeeze between two Spinners.

“Quickly!” Bill said.

The Robinsons dashed forward, but the Spinners closed the gap. One by one the animals slipped through the Spinners’ defences, but each time, the family was blocked.

Gwek!

Clementine stood on the other side of the raging Spinner army.

“Clementine got through to the other side!” Ernest said. “Damn, I could have ridden her through!”

“You would have slowed her down,” Bill said.

“Still…” Ernest said.

“It looks like Lightfoot and Lightning got through too,” Jack said.

“Happy days,” Bill said drily.

“We’re going to have to jump,” Liz said. “It’s a long way down, but we might be able to make it.”

“What about the blood?” Bill said.

“It’s still better than heading into
that
,” Liz said, pointing at the Spinner army.

“At least the fall and the rocks will be over quick,” Ernest said. “Not like getting torn to pieces.”

“Wait,” Bill said. “There might be another way. Hold my legs!”

Liz pressed on them as Bill lay down and crawled over the precipice, hanging upside down. The water raged and billowed, roaring and reaching up like a bird ruffling its feathers.

“Whatever you’re doing, do it fast,” Fritz said, stepping forward and pushing against the Spinners with his shield.

Bill peered at the cliff face. There were no ledges jutting out from its surface.

Damn!
It was their one way out. Bill ran a dirty hand through his hair at the realisation that this was the end. His throat burned and he felt the tears well up behind his eyes. He shook his head and forced a relaxed expression onto his face. He gripped the underside of the cliff to push himself back.

He paused. He felt at the rough material his fingers had instinctively grasped onto. A tint of moonlight caught an entwined rope of white roots. It curled under the ledge and ran between the cracks and fissures in the cliff face. Bill pulled at the root rope. It tore free of the soil. Bill pressed all his weight onto their base, where they met the earth. They stayed firm and did not come loose. Bill grinned like a man who had discovered gold. He pushed himself back up onto the surface.

“What did you find?” Liz said. “A way out?”

“Maybe,” Bill said. “Jack, come here. I’m going to lower you over the side. You’re going to grab the roots and climb down them. I want you to pull them free as far as you can.”

“But-” Jack said.

“We haven’t got time for questions,” Bill said. “Just do your best.”

Bill lowered Jack over the side.

“It’s right there in front of you,” Bill said. “Grab it. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Jack said.

He monkey-barred along the roots, pulling them down with his weight. They pulled free as he climbed, drawing out into a long rope.

“Good,” Bill said. “Now, climb down to the bottom.” He turned to Fritz and Ernest. “You boys next!”

“You should go first,” Fritz said to Liz.

“You go,” Liz said. “We’ll be along in a minute.”

Fritz and Ernest dropped their shields and climbed down the root rope. First Fritz, then Ernest.

“Your turn,” Bill said to Liz.

She shook her head.

“Just go!” Bill said.

Liz knelt and began to climb over the side. Bill held his battered shield out, smacking the Spinners aside when they got too close. The blows came as a flurry, like heavy rain on a tin roof. His heels were balanced on the cliff edge like a gymnast on a balance beam. A fat Spinner with large flabby arms struck Bill’s shield, knocking him back. He teetered on the edge, waving his arms to keep balanced.

“Bill!” Liz said. “Hurry!”

Bill found his centre. A grin spread across his face.

“I’ll come down now,” he said.

The fat Spinner cracked Bill over the head with its bony knee. Bill’s eyes rolled back and his body went limp. He fell forward, the Spinner close behind.

“Bill!” Liz screamed. “Bill! No!”

She reached for him, but her arm was too short, her fingertips grazing his shirt. Alerted by the scream, Fritz stretched out his own arm. His hand snapped around Bill’s ankle. Fritz braced himself for the sharp tug he knew would follow. There was a crack, as something tore inside his shoulder. Fritz let out a roar that was primal, deep and pained, but kept hold of his father.

There was another crack, this one at the top of the root rope, which dropped a foot before catching and holding. Fritz clenched his teeth, his father swinging in his hand, upside down.

The Spinners eased over the cliff edge, spinning in an acrobatic display as they fell through the air. It must have been what it was like to see it snow in hell.