Family Matters: Season 2 Book 3 (Killing the Dead 9) (8 page)

Hope surged. I knew it shouldn’t, it was beyond foolish but it was there. A bright spark of hope that helped hold back the darkness. “He didn’t see them die?”

“Gabe couldn’t bear that. He didn’t see them fall but he was sure of the numbers against them, the chance of them surviving are tiny. They were lost to sight beneath a crowd of hundreds of undead.”

“You don’t know them,” I said as my eyes closed. “They didn’t die, not like that.”

I didn’t hear her reply as the darkness took me but as I sank deeper into it I knew that I would wake at least once more. I had to know for sure they had survived.

Chapter 10 - Ryan

My knife came free of the corpse with a sucking sound like that of mud as you pulled your booted foot free. Not the most pleasant sound even to me, but one I had heard often throughout the day.

Jinx gave a silent snarl as tore at the back of a downed zombie’s neck, her teeth tearing through the flesh to chew on the spinal cord. I wasn’t entirely sure she would be able to chew right through it in any efficient time frame but I admired her determination.

Another zombie made its way up the last few steps and I kicked it in the chest, sending it falling back against the others. Gregg pulled on my arm and I sighed as I looked back at him.

“Help me with this one,” he said as he hauled up a corpse, his hands under its armpits.

I grabbed the dead body’s legs and together we lifted it over the railings before letting it drop onto the other undead that were trying to climb the stairs.

He wiped his forehead with one arm, leaving a streak of bloody grime. Hardly worth mentioning since the both of us were covered quite liberally in blood and other fluids I didn’t want to think too much about.

“This is getting us nowhere,” he said and I shrugged. “We must have killed hundreds of the bloody things and there’s no end of them in sight.”

“Sixty-three,” I said as I watched another making its way around the bend in the stairs. It stumbled over the bodies that already littered the steps and I knew it would take a few more minutes to make its way up to us.

“What? You’re counting them?”

“Aren’t you?” I asked as I turned to him. He shook his head, eyes wide with… something I couldn’t identify.
I need to start learning to read people's expressions
, I thought since it seemed ever more likely Lily wouldn’t be there to help me with that kind of stuff.

“No mate,” he said. “Who the fuck has time to count how many we kill while trying to stay alive.”

“Keeps the mind occupied.”

“It should be occupied with staying alive!”

I shrugged. It wasn’t up to me to tell him what he should be doing during a fight for his life, but being focused on staying alive was severely limiting. I mean sure, staying alive was useful and often necessary to allow you to continue the real fun, like the actual killing itself. It wasn’t the end goal though.

Well perhaps not for me,
I thought as I looked over at my friend. He was staring aghast at Jinx who seemed to be crunching on the zombie's spine as it thrashed weakly beneath her.

“Does it bother you?” I asked and he looked from the dog to me.

“Does what bother me?”

“Dying.”

“What?” he raised one eyebrow and tilted his head as though unsure what he was hearing.

“Does the idea of dying upset you?”

“Of course it upsets me!” he snapped. “Are you saying it doesn’t upset you?”

“Not really,” I said with another shrug. The zombie was almost half way up the stairway and another was rounding the bend behind it. I glanced over the railing to the other half of the stairway to see plenty more making their way over the impromptu barricade of corpses we had thrown down there.

“Then why the hell are we here?” he asked.

“We were getting medicine for Lily.”

“Yeah I know that, but if dying doesn’t bother you then why does it matter? Why did you even bother surviving those first days of the Fall?”

“I said it didn’t bother me, but that doesn’t mean I am going to die easily,” I said in the quiet tone I used when dealing with someone who clearly didn’t grasp a rather simple concept. “As for Lily, I know she wants to live and so I will do what I can to help her do that.”

“There’s something wrong with you,” Gregg said with a shake of his head. “Seriously mate, something really wrong with you.”

I flashed him a grin and he swore softly to himself before lifting his bat from where he’d left it beside the wall and swinging it overhead to crash down on the zombie's skull as it reached the top of the stairwell. It fell without a sound, to tumble backwards down the stairs.

He shook the bat to rid it of the worst of the blood and brain matter and grimaced at Jinx. “Is she going to keep doing that?”

“How would I know?” I replied as I looked at the dog. She seemed to be making some progress on the spinal column and her claws had raked deep furrows in the rotted flesh of its back.

“That can’t be good for her,” he insisted. “It’s zombie flesh for god's sake.”

“She’ll be fine, I don’t think animals turn from the infection.”

“We don’t know that.”

“But we would have seen them,” I pointed out before adding, “Though they are generally smaller than a human so there might not have been enough left to reanimate after the zombies had finished with them.”

I studied the dark furred hound for a moment and scratched idly at my chin as I thought. “Perhaps she’ll turn. Will be interesting to see if she does.”

“No way mate, that’s too cruel,” he said as he stepped towards her. I held up one hand and waved him back.

“Oh don’t worry,” I said. “The pigs ate loads of tainted meat and never turned and they would be more likely than a dog would.”

He stopped and looked back. “Why would pigs be more likely?”

“Similarities to humans,” I said. “There’s a reason they were researching transplants from pigs to humans back when the world was whole. You know hearts and the like.”

“Maybe,” he said and grunted. “Not sure I’d want a pig heart though.”

“There’s another one,” I said with a nod towards the stairs and he swung the bat against its head without blinking. It staggered a moment and then fell forward to land part way on the landing.

We didn’t even need to discuss it, Gregg grabbed one end of the body and I went to pick up the other and together we dumped it unceremoniously over the side of the railings to land with a thud on the others below.

“This isn’t accomplishing anything,” he said. “It’s already getting dark outside and we can’t stay here all night.”

“Of course not, we have to get to the hospital,” I agreed. “The question is how.”

He turned to me and even in the dim light of the halls of residence, I could see his eyes widen and mouth drop open. “You’re joking?”

“No, why?”

“We couldn’t make it past the university, you think it will be any easier at the hospital? We need to head back and find some other way.”

“No,” I said. There was nothing else to say, no arguments that would sway me. I’d wasted enough time and she lay dying while I failed at the task I had set out to do.

As Gregg shook his head and muttered something beneath his breath, a final sharp crack sounded and the zombie beneath Jinx stopped it thrashing. She looked up at me with big dark eyes and licked at the blood and gore that covered her maw. “Well done,” I told her.

The dog seemed pleased with my attention or at least I assumed it was pleased. For all I knew it could be annoyed. I had enough trouble discerning the emotions and facial expressions of humans, I doubted I’d be any better with a canine.

Still, she had proven herself useful. A great deal more useful than my brother at least. I wondered idly if I should kill him when I made it back to the sanctuary. He had abandoned us and made my task of saving Lily that much more difficult. That deserved some form of punishment at least.

“So what now?” Gregg asked as he looked back at me from where he leant against the railings. He’d been watching the zombies clamber over one another in their frenzied attempts to reach us.

That same frenzy was what had ultimately saved us from having all of them climbing the stairs at the same time. Unlike living enemies who would go up the stairs one after another, the zombies pushed and shoved, even clawed their brethren in an attempt to reach us, such was their hunger.

The result of that could be seen at the bottom of the stairwell where a bottleneck had been created, allowing just the occasional lucky few through the door to climb the steps and die at our hands.

“Stay here and watch them, I’ll check out the rooms,” I said. “If too many start making their way up, call out and I’ll come back.”

“Yeah sure thing, just leave me with all the undead,” Gregg muttered as I flashed a grin at him. I turned to the door to the second-floor rooms and paused. I glanced back at the dog who was watching me intently and I sighed.

“Fine, you can come too.”

Jinx fairly scampered over to my side as Gregg said something too low for me to hear and laughed. It was no doubt something he thought was funny but would be totally incomprehensible to me. I ignored it and set off to check the rooms.

We’d done a cursory search earlier but that had been to check for any potential threats more than anything else. In our haste, we’d not gone through personal belongings in search of items that may be of use if getting us out of the building and while I doubted that I would find anything really useful, I was out of options.

A quick but thorough search of the rooms that were open yielded little, though we would at least be able to change our clothes should the need arise. Besides the clothes, there were electronic devices such as phones, tablets, and laptops but none of those were any use at all.

Books, magazines, a large quantity of pornography in one room that I could only assume belonged to someone who hadn’t discovered the internet and enough condoms to ensure no new children need ever be conceived until the zombies were all gone for good. Nothing of actual use though.

I moved to the first closed door and turned the handle to find it locked. As expected. Still, these were student accommodation and the locks were on the doors more for privacy than any real security, so I leaned back and kicked with as much force as I could.

The flimsy lock broke easily and the door swung inwards revealing a neat room with a single bed, wardrobe and small chest of drawers. Another quick search found much the same as the other rooms and I began to realise that perhaps my expectations were way higher than they should have been.

For the next hour, I moved from room to room, breaking in and searching for anything of use as the light dimmed ever more. Before I finished, I had my flashlight to hand as I moved through the building. At least I had found plenty of batteries, so had no need to worry about being without light at a crucial moment.

Gregg walked along the hallway as I left the final room and nodded amiably at me. “Anything useful?”

“No,” I said and frowned. “Shouldn’t you be watching the stairs?”

“Nah, a few more made it up and I finished them off. I managed to drop them over the railings on my own,” he gave me a slightly accusatory look and I shrugged. “Seems there’s enough down there now to stop any getting through.”

“Great, we’ll have some peace and quiet to slowly starve up here then,” I said.

“Could be worse,” he replied with a wide smile that showed straight white teeth. “We could be stuck on the roof out in the cold.”

“True,” I agreed as I followed him along the hall to the far window. It was quieter there, even with the undead gathered on the lawns outside and the echoing sound from those downstairs.

I glanced through the window, out into the dark of evening and swore. The numbers had, if anything, grown. Down on the lawn surrounding the building were hundreds of dark shapes that moved slowly and moaned their hunger at the night.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” I said. “We’ve failed and all we can do now is decide on how we die.”

“Speak for yourself, I don’t want to die.”

“We seem to be stuck here,” I pointed out slowly as though I were speaking to a small child. “We can’t get past that many, we can’t kill them all though I will be happy try and there’s no help coming. I suggest we go down the stairs and kill as many of them as we can.”

“Might not have to,” Gregg said as he looked through the window, staring at something off in the distance. He turned to me as he raised one hand to point at one of the other buildings. “Is that a light?”

Chapter 11 – Ryan,

Much to my surprise, it was a light. I glanced at Gregg who shrugged to indicate he had no idea what it was either and I looked back through the window. “It’s getting closer.”

“What is it?” he asked as we watched the light approach.

Whatever it was it was coming towards us at a fair speed and seemed to be in the air, just above the height of the window we were looking out of. The light itself was a neon green that shone brightly but didn’t provide a huge amount of illumination.

As it came closer the noise from below the window rose in volume, the undead clustered there had apparently noticed it. I lifted the handle of the window and pushed. The window opened several inches before stopping as the window stop prevented it opening further. A no doubt necessary device to add to a second-floor window in a halls of residence full of often drunk and still teenage students. The university wouldn’t want anyone to fall out but that didn’t help us.

“It’s coming close,” Gregg said. “Turn your torch on.”

I flicked the flashlight on and the bright beam immediately filled the hallway with shadows. I pointed it at the window but the glare on the glass obscured more than the light revealed so instead I held it so that the end fit through the gap in between the window and the frame and managed to get a look at what was outside.

“A drone,” I said and Gregg looked at me blankly. “It’s a drone, a quadcopter that people could buy before all this began.”

“Ah right, yeah I remember them. What’s it doing here?”

I shook my head as I studied the drone. It was plain white and quite large, hard to gauge the size accurately but it was certainly one of the larger models. It hovered before us and I could see that the bright light we’d seen came from the LED lights mounted beneath each of the four arms that held the rotors.