‘And you didn’t think to tell us?’ I asked him before Nick had a chance to. I gestured with my hand, ‘calm down’, before our guest exploded in rage.
‘There was nothing to tell, bro. Same info as we were getting off the news. If there was anything different, do you think I would have kept it to myself? And no one I know locally was on line. With all the cars we saw heading out, I’d assumed everyone had gone. Gone or…you know.’
Yeah, we knew, but saying it out loud made it seem that more real, and after he’d said it I’ wished he hadn’t. The brief silence between us was permeated by the constant wave of hungry groans outside. How the children had blocked it out amazed me.
‘They’ve all been using their personal Facebook accounts to make sure their family and friends are okay,’ Danny continued, ‘and they only logged onto the shop account when they saw our lights, hoping we would make the connection. Lucky for them we did, huh? The shop was shut when things turned bad, so they locked it up tight, grabbed a laptop, and sealed every door as they worked their way to the top of the building.’
Danny’s fingertips flew across the keys, sending and receiving messages in seconds. He had found out that the owner was there, a fat and ironically balding Cockney called Simon who we’d all seen around town, his friend John, two of the hairdressers, girls called Claire and Susan, and one of the regulars, a middle-aged woman called Sheila. Between messages the three of us stared across at the light, at the other survivors in Usk, as if we could see each other.
‘Ask them how many of those things are outside the shop,’ said Nick.
Dan typed.
‘They can’t see. They’re too high up to get a proper view out of the window.’
‘They’re high enough to open the window and have a look straight down.’
‘I’ll ask, but if they haven’t done it yet, they may not want to.’
Across the river we saw the light in the top window of the Cardiff Arms go out for over thirty seconds, during which time the computer didn’t register any messages. Then it came back on, and the incoming message tone pinged once more.
‘Oh, no.’
‘What, Danny?’
‘Seriously. Oh, no.’
Nick and I lowered our eyes from the light in the distance to the message on the monitor in front of Danny. Three simple words. Three terrifying words.
Hundreds of them
.
‘Well one thing is for sure: we can’t just sit here and do nothing,’ Jenny said the following morning. Nick had filled her in on the situation in the town and she had become more animated than ever.
‘Matt, what if it was Danny over there? And Nick? If it was me? The kids?’
She was right and we knew it. Of course she was right. But what could we do? We weren’t the ones surrounded by hundreds of those things. Or were we? When had one of us properly checked last? Yes, we opened the front door and ensured the gate was still intact every twenty minutes or so, but to actually go out there and count? All the curtains and blinds to the front of the house were kept shut so the children would not see anything they didn’t want to see, and that had worked out fine for the rest of us, too. But what it also meant was that there could well be hundreds of them, thousands even, the pressure mounting on the gates, the Range Rover slipping inch by inch as they…
…I was surprised to see there were no more than twelve of them outside the gate, plus the six that Danny had put to the sword. They had been gradually trampled into a red pile of mushy clothes and bones that those still upright paid no attention to. Somewhere out there were also the tragic remains of the two car occupants. The infected just kind of stood there, rocking forward and back in the morning sun as if they had lost the ability of balance and that to stop still would result in them simply falling over.
They had become more alert when I had stepped away from the door, for the first time their hands reaching out for me through the bars, but their demeanour had calmed, and they remained more placid since, even when I climbed onto the bonnet of the Range Rover. The groaning was the most disturbing part of being so close to them.
A constant, guttural ‘MMMMMMMM.’
Some held their top lip in a permanent Elvis sneer, a few opened their gore-covered mouths wide, others let their jaws hang slack and loose, but the noise from each of them was identical. Not a single one was looking me in the face; I guessed they saw me as their meat, so their eyes tracked whatever part of me was moving.
To be fair, I wasn’t looking into their eyes either. I looked at their blood-smeared faces though. Wanting but not wanting to see someone I recognised. If all of these were local people, then it would give me some hope. If I couldn’t place a single one of them, then they must have come from elsewhere, and that would not be a good sign. Our very first arrival was still there, hand every now and again gripping a bar of the gate and push-pulling at it. I knew he was local. A couple of other faces were vaguely recognisable too. At the back, almost going in circles, was a short, blond doctor from town, his glasses still perfectly balanced across the bridge of his nose.
And then it struck me. Most of these things were not heavily disfigured. Some were mutilated, yes, like the first one I saw, but the rest? Some looked like they hadn’t even been touched. Was it just that the merest contact was all it took? Or could it be that whatever it was that caused this was now airborne?
What was I doing out here? I could already be infected… I needed to get inside. I…
I jumped down off the bonnet and rushed towards the house, my legs feeling weak, jelly-like. I realised I was struggling for breath. I had no choice but to stop and bend over, putting my head between my legs as I inhaled deep lungfuls of air.
What was I panicking for? There had been no mention of airborne infection, and most of us had been outside, had been near those things with no ill effects. I had freaked myself out, that was all. I wasn’t about to change into one of those things. I straightened up and stood for a few seconds, shaking my head at my own irrational fear.
I broke my own spell and walked onward, to the front door. I had spotted it, resting just at the bottom of the stairs. I retrieved Dad’s sword, now with a thick crust of dried blood at its point. I tested its weight in my right hand, turned on my heels and strode back towards the zombies as they once again stretched their fingers out in a vain attempt to snare me.
I stepped to the front of the Range Rover, leaning a little over its wing. From a distance, I lined up the one-armed monstrosity that had first come to take my normal life away from me. Using both hands, I drove the tip of the sword forward, just as Danny had done, through the left eyeball and into its brain. His groaning halted immediately. I whipped the sword backwards, expecting a spray of blood, but no more than a dribble ran down his grey, dead cheek.
‘Die!’ He began to fall, but was held up by the pressure of the others pushing from the back.
‘Die!’ He bobbled around, more animated than before, and finally fell to my right and out of view.
‘Die!’ I screamed, throwing the sword across the drive.
I hurried back to the house and up the stairs to Danny’s room, where the three of them, Dan, Jenny and Nick, were still discussing helping the five people trapped above the hairdressers’. They hadn’t even realised I had left.
* * *
‘Twenty. Not hundreds. Twenty! This is totally do-able. What you reckon, bro?’
They all turned around and looked at me, as if I was meant to know the answer to whatever they were talking about.
Jenny stepped in and answered for me.
‘It is. If what they’re now telling us is right, then we can help them. But where’ve the rest of them gone? Last night there were…’
Nick cut her off. ‘I think the key word is night. Last night when Danny got the children to look out of the window, it was pitch black. They would have been afraid, thought they were seeing hundreds of those things. But now? Now it’s morning and they are more rational; they see how many there really are.’
‘And if that’s
all
there are, we can get to them. I’m sure of it,’ Danny’s excitement was almost out of control. ‘But the problem is going to be getting out of here. We don’t know how many are outside the house.’
‘Twelve,’ I said, then raised my eyebrows to the ceiling. ‘Actually, make that eleven.’
The three of them stared at me like I had just become one of the creatures outside. I had some explaining to do.
* * *
‘The key thing is that they don’t move very quickly. Everyone we saw get attacked, they ran into them, not the other way around. People were panicking, not thinking. That’s what lost them their lives. Not speed, not cooperation;
our
mistakes, not their ability to hunt us.’
Jenny was very confident that we could pull off the rescue. Nick sat next to her on Danny’s bed, nodding in agreement to about every aspect of her description of the enemy. I could not help but think about the man I had watched die. If he hadn’t been injured, then he would have fought his way clear, that was for sure. More importantly, no one deserved to die like that.
I did not want us to take any risks; I had never wanted us to have to risk out own lives, but that was something we would have to do if we didn’t want anyone else dying on our watch.
Danny had been up all through the night, talking with the five at the hairdresser’s online, convincing them that we could do this, that they could escape. Once he knew the real numbers of creatures waiting on just the other side of the bridge in Usk, he was pushing that we rescue them.
Now he had a map of Usk up on his computer monitor, Google Earth and Street View providing more detail than I would have ever thought possible. He and Jenny talked while Nick and I fed the children breakfast. I felt humbled by how well they were coping with everything. But I guess the fact that it wasn’t in their faces anymore helped them. They were safe and they knew it. And, as Nick had said, as long as the sun was in the sky, they believed nothing could harm them.
When we came back up the stairs, my brother and Jenny had their plan fully developed. I had thought we’d done enough by taking in the Williams family, but the more I heard Jenny and Danny talk about getting the others over here, the more I realised I was so wrong to sit back and think that all was well just because we were.
Danny crashed past me as I headed up the stairs, desperate for some sleep and hoping that an afternoon nap would re-energise my body in a way that restless nights were currently failing to do.
‘Do you know where the binoculars are?’ he asked over his shoulder, his shoes slapping on the steps as he descended.
‘What?’
He stopped by the front door.
‘The binoculars? There’s activity outside and I want to get a closer look.’
‘What activity? Over in town?’ He shook his head. ‘Then what?’ ‘Let me find the binoculars and I’ll show you. Any idea?’ ‘Range Rover. Glove box,’ I replied, and he was out of the front door and across the gravel drive before I had chance to tell him to be careful.
It was only when I heard the crunch of his return journey that I realised I had been holding my breath. He closed the front door behind himself and once again made his way past me on the stairs.
‘Come on, bro,’ he said. ‘If you snooze, you lose.’
With Usk so close across the river, it was really easy to forget just how isolated we were out here, but apart from Des next door, there were no houses for a couple of miles. By the time I reached Danny’s room he had already opened his window and was focusing the binoculars off to the right and away from the town. I edged in next to him. I could see the farmhouse and the attached stables he was looking at, probably about five miles from our house. It was one of those places that I saw every day and paid no attention to. It was painted white and stood out from the trees and fields that surrounded it. If I thought we were isolated, then the farmhouse was a million miles from civilisation. Only one single lane track, about a mile in length, linked the farm to the main road.
‘Check out the courtyard.’
He passed me the binoculars and, after a few moments, I found the track and followed it up towards the front of the farm. It opened up into a paved driveway, which itself broadened into a courtyard between the house and the stables. I adjusted first the zoom and then the focus dials. I removed the binoculars from my eyes. I placed them back again. I removed them. I looked at my brother. For once, he was calm. I looked again out over the fields, across the river, to the farmhouse. I placed the binoculars back in front of my face and leant forward, resting my elbows on the windowsill.
The courtyard was full of zombies. Men, women, children. They walked and they bumped and they turned and their mouths were open, and I could all but hear that sound they made. Some were torn. It was the only way to describe them. Limbs were absent, clothes were ripped, faces were unrecognisable. I began to try to count them, but Danny preempted me.
‘There are at least fifty. Seriously, bro, I recognise loads of them from Usk. I guess this is where they went after they left the town.’
I scanned the front of the house, no longer able to watch the undead and their bizarre dance. None of the windows were broken. The front door looked rock solid. The sun was reflecting off the glass and it was impossible to see inside, but if the theory was right, then the farmhouse had people inside and the zombies had been drawn to the scent of their flesh.
I placed the binoculars down on the desk and rubbed at my eyes. The magnification was beneficial but the slightest movement made the view jump around like a badly edited movie. I felt like I had a little motion sickness.
‘So many of them,’ I sighed.
‘I know, but…’ Danny paused. ‘If they’re out there, then it means they might not be in town.’
‘We need to keep the gates secure, so there’s no way that we can take the Range Rover.’