Great Bitten: Outbreak (19 page)

Carla pushed at my back and expectant eyes swivelled around to me. I took to my feet reluctantly and stood next to Austin, who sneered in unbridled delight at my discomfort. I’d find some way to thank him in kind later and chose to stand deliberately in front of Gollum, who squealed in protest. Austin pushed him to one side and he scuttled off to sit on his own in the corner – no mean feat in such a crowded room. “Right yes, my plans. Well Austin’s already described the shopping list at length. If I add much more to that we’ll all slip in to comas.” There were a few titters around the room and I saw Austin shift uncomfortably out of the corner of my eye. Point one, you fat fuck. “Suffice to say we’re going to go hard and quick. I’m experienced at that. All my exes said so.” More laughter. Keep them happy, keep them engaged. “Trust me I want to stay alive as much as everyone else in this room so we won’t be taking any risks. We’re going to hit each shop in order to bring us around in a loop and back with a clear run to the pier. I’m going to set up some decoys for if the swarm moves in, and we expect to be back at dawn. It’s going to be a scary night for us, but when you all wake up in the morning it’ll hopefully be to something more adventurous than stew.”

There was a ripple of applause and I sketched Austin a mock bow. “Is that it? Is that your grand plan?”

I shrugged. “What more needs to be said? It’s hard enough going out there as it is, without regaling our friends and loved ones with the gory details. And it’s not easy to talk about. We all know what it’s like to face them right?” Everyone nodded their agreement and I went in for the kill. “I mean apart from you, Oz. We weren’t all lucky enough to avoid confrontations with the infected.”

“I’ve seen – I did – I’ve done plenty, you arrogant shit.”

“Hey I didn’t say anything but you were lucky. My choice? I’d rather not have had to put my hammer through skulls to stay alive. You win some you lose some pal.”

We were nose to nose to each other now. The room had dropped to tense silence. Austin heaved in indignation, his disgusting breath flooding my senses.

“Good luck. You’ll need it.”

I smiled in return. “Brush your teeth you fucking tramp. I don’t want to die of over-exposure before I get out of the gate.”

Austin pulled back to take a shot at me and I stuck my chin out at him. “Go on. Take a hit. Put your extensive weight behind it because it’s the only chance you’ll ever get.”

Of all people, Gollum broke in between us. Pete and Matt joined shortly after, pushing Austin away rather than
holding me back. He spat at me. “I’ll get you, you hear? You keep embarrassing me and I’m going to make you pay, Warren.”

“You embarrass yourself Austin, I don’t have to do anything. Now think about where we are and what you’re doing, and keep your voice down before we have a swarm at the gate.”

He shrugged off Matt and Pete’s hands and pointed at me. “This isn’t over.”

“Yes. It is.”

I walked out, resisting every temptation to slam the door behind me and ignoring the excited wash of whispers. I clicked the door closed, hoping the deliberate act would stop someone following me, at least for a short time. I looked out over the beach and for a heart-rending moment I thought the swarm had moved on. I couldn’t see them at all. Then I heard an unnatural movement below and I stepped down slowly from the club room and on to the slats of the decking. I got on my hands and knees and peered through the gaps in the aging wood. They were splashing around in the shallow water directly beneath us. I saw one scalped head, the brain already exposed. There were too many for me to pick out enough detail. What was worrying though was the congestion of movement around the wrought iron rudders that held the pier upright. If the mass moved in precisely the wrong way, the entire thing could come crashing down in to the shallow sea bed and the hungry jaws below. It was a perfect time for us to make the run again. But we had to keep quiet. It would be even better to keep everyone else elevated and away from making too much noise on the head of the pier.

I headed quietly back up the stairs. I walked in to Gollum as he headed out – to follow me no doubt. I pressed a finger to my own lips and pushed him back inside, keeping his eyes on mine so he could hopefully see how serious I was being. I pulled the door to behind me and waved my arms indicating I wanted everyone to circle again.

“What’s wrong hero? Come to make some apologies?”

“The swarm is beneath us.”

Worried chatter broke out and I let it run its brief course instead of trying to shout over people. They eventually looked back to me as the man with the answers. “Something’s got their attention again. I don’t know if they’re moving to the other side of the pier but right now they are all underneath us and out on the head of the pier. If we move out there in a big group right now, we’ll risk being seen.

I think we should make the run now. Guys, what do you think? We can head out the front without any worry of being seen.”

“That’s a bit hasty Warren, it’s not like we’ve had that much time to rest.”

“We can’t miss an opportunity like this. What if alarms start going off in town and we end up with them right in our path again? We go tonight.”

“And what do we all do in the meantime? Sit in here like jessies waiting for you to come back?”

“No. There’s no need for that. But I recommend keeping as many people as possible indoors. And if you have to walk on the deck do it without shoes. Get everyone back to the arcade in pairs or small groups – bring little attention, get little back.

In the meantime – chaps, shoes off. We’re going to the arcade to get our kit.”

+++

“
An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” – Mahatma Ghandi

“You
know
, I almost preferred the idea of doing this when it was getting dark.”

“Why’s that Matt?”

“Then you don’t have to look them in the face. I mean, look at them all.”

He pointed back down the pier to the swarm still milling around in the steadily deepening water. I had been told enough times that the current there wasn’t strong enough to move them if they wanted to stay put. That seemed freaky. I kept wishing they’d do us a favour and get washed out.

“I wish they’d make some noise ya know? It’s just eerie seeing them swaying around like that with the tide. All the movies I’ve seen, I’d expect to hear the zombies over the noise of the shoreline.”

“You don’t.” Rick replied bluntly. Matt asked why and I knew Rick was thinking back to the monster that took out Dan on our way here. “
It’s nothing like the movies. I thought we would have all figured that out by now. No one’s coming to save us. And we’ve got no superheroes. No easy way to fight this.”

“Jesus great motivational speech. Anything else I need to know before we head out to our deaths?”

I smiled blandly at both of them. “You won’t come back as one of them on my watch I promise you that much. Now both of you stop being miserable fucks. It’s going to be a long enough night without you two turning the daylight hours in to a downer too.”

I opened my empty bag and looked at my lonely trusted hammer. I felt like naming it. It had worked for Tom Hanks. Kind of. But there again naming a hammer came with certain responsibilities. I’d need to grow long blond hair and have biceps. I flexed my arm
absentmindedly. That wasn’t going to happen any time soon. I unzipped all the pockets and fumbled around to make sure I wasn’t bringing along any extra unneeded weight. In one I felt a crumple of paper and pulled it out. It was a £20. I smiled to myself. In days gone by, that would have been a discovery worthy of announcing, possibly followed by immediate expenditure at a nearby bar. Now? It was a worthless purple sheet of loo roll. My mind fluttered briefly to international markets and the panic the world in general was probably embroiled in figuring out what to do without pound sterling. Then I realised that in the here and now, I didn’t really need to care.

We were sat in a line outside the front of the arcade now. All we were waiting for was Gollum, although both Rick and Carla told me I had to call him Jez for the duration of the hunt. It didn’t matter that I thought the spindly little man was out to kill me, nor that they both agreed he was parked so far up Austin’s backside that it would be difficult for him to identify daylight.
Rick had already picked up a knife to go alongside his hammer and he told me it was stowed in his bag. I had told him to make sure he didn’t stab himself with it. When he asked if I’d wanted another weapon, I’d said I was fine with the hammer. It’d be a sorry day in hell if that runt managed to overpower me. Stab me in the back maybe, but he had to get out of my line of sight first and I planned on keeping that little freak on a tight leash.

When he finally appeared, Austin literally had his hand wrapped around Gollum’s neck. He pushed him forward and feeling at least briefly sorry for him, I stood forward and grabbed him to stop him from falling face first in to the decking. He looked at me gratefully, then almost sorrowfully, before standing up and feeling at his neck. There were red
finger-marks already beginning to show, and there was blood where one of his piercings used to be. My loathing for Austin somehow managed to crank up a notch.

“You got your list?”

“We have. You sure you don’t want us to take Lana or Carla so you can keep one of us on guard?”

Austin hawked and spat a disgusting amount of phlegm to the floor. My stomach turned. “I think we’ll be just fine here. That dyke thinks she’s a man anyway. You’re not as important here as you think you are. Now, I know you don’t think much of my good friend Jeremy and I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual. If he doesn’t come back alive and unhurt, there will be great trouble for you my friend.”

I looked at Gollum and back to Austin, and simply laughed. He thought he had me stuck because he would effectively be holding my sister to ransom whilst I put my neck on the line, along with her boyfriend, to get more supplies for the pier. I had more than a few bad feelings about this run, but we could hardly go on strike. Austin would have us in a corner then – we’d be the bad guys, refusing to do these things for the good of everyone on the pier. I warrant he was waiting for one good excuse to just throw me over the side.

“Is that it? Any other inspirational last words you want to add? Any more direct death threats? No? Then let’s go.”

I pushed at Doughy’s chest as I walked past. The others followed me silently. My mind was spinning as I tried to think at what Austin might have planned, but right now there were more immediate issues – like not dying in town. I had to get back as scheduled. I didn’t trust what Austin might do otherwise.

We slid out the gate and across the empty road as we had done before. This time the alleyway was simply dim, so we grouped there and huddled together in a circle. I asked Matt and Jez to go back over the plan, each one in turn. They were the only two that I hadn’t seen in action. Whilst I thought Jez would be handy in combat in a wiry chaotic way, I was still pretty certain that when it came to the crunch, Matt would be cowering in the corner.
Jez repeated the plan back with ease. Matt stuttered, but when he saw we weren’t talking over him or forcing the information out, he calmed down a little. I asked to see the weapons they had all picked again. Andy proudly waved his axe at me and Rick his hammer. He obviously elected to keep the knowledge of the knife to himself. I produced my own hammer and Jez flashed a mean-looking rusty carving knife in our faces. We all shied back a little and told him to put it away before he cut someone. Matt looked a little embarrassed and I was expecting him to bring out a stick before he presented us with a ridiculously long Philips screwdriver and a hand axe. Andy whistled appreciatively. “You know how to swing that boy?”

“Only in my garden. But if it comes to it… rather us than them hey?”

I nodded. “Definitely. Right, it’s too light for us to go sprinting up and down the high street so let’s lend a little caution to this. Jez, go scout up ahead. You’re the smallest so you’re the least likely to be seen. We just need four or five minutes of nil activity – noise and movement. If you get that then we get the all clear to move forward. Matt, can you do the same and cover our rear? Don’t be a hero – if you see anything coming, fall back to us so we can make decisions. Questions?”

The two newcomers didn’t object and headed to either end of the alley.

“Smoothly done, sir. So what’s the real plan?”

I moved closer to Andy and Rick. “The plan is the plan. If we can, I want us all to survive this. I don’t like Jez but he’s another pair of eyes on guard we otherwise wouldn’t have. I just want you to keep a close eye on him for me. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, and I don’t trust him.”

“Really? I couldn’t tell.”

“Sarcasm still doesn’t suit you Rick. I’m being serious. I think he’s planning something and I really like being alive. And you Rick need to get your wits about you. Have you not seen the way Austin keeps looking at Carla?”

“You think
Carla
hasn’t seen the way Austin keeps looking at her? You think she’s walking around that pier without something she can castrate him with at a swipe?”

“Are you ever going to wear the trousers in that relationship?”

“Nope. And I like it that way. Although I have to admit all this hunter-gathering is making me feel all manly.”

“Well don’t start beating your chest yet Tarzan we need to go back with the stuff everyone’s waiting for. And like I said, I’d like to do so in one piece. You got my back?”

“If you’ve got ours. If Jez sticks you then I’m pretty sure he’ll have orders to stick Rick. And he must know that I’m not exactly sympathetic with him. So I’ll have to go too. How does Jez explain that away? And how does Matt figure in to all of this?”

I hadn’t considered Matt beyond him being our silent bystander.
I clicked at the roof of my mouth as I contemplated this. “You think he’s with Austin?”

“You think he’s been loud enough for us to make an opinion of him either way?”

“Nope.”

“Then that’s enough for me to not trust him. The man seems like a wet fish. Can you see a wet fish surviving this long enough to get to the pier?”

“Nope.”

“Then we need to watch him too.”

“Have we got enough eyes left to watch out for the dead things trying to eat us?”

“Sarcasm still doesn’t suit you, Rick.”

“Yeah well I’ll keep working on it. I think it’s been long enough, shall we see if Jez has actually managed to spot anything?”

“Go and get Matt first. If we don’t trust them, it’s an even better reason not to let them out of our site.”

“Yeah we get it Warren. When are you going to go back to just being the stressed journalist we all knew and loathed?”

“When there are enough alive people in the UK for us to start recirculating newspapers.”

Rick rolled his eyes and went to fetch Matt as Andy and I headed to Jez. I resisted the temptation to smack him on the back of his shaven head and instead patted his shoulder. He jumped out of his skin but bit back his yelp.

“Shi… sorry. You scared me. I was concentrating.”

“Anything?”

“Not a lot to be worried about. There were a couple of dogs running around, or at least they were probably dogs. Maybe foxes, they were quite a ways away. They weren’t near anywhere we need to go so it should be fine.”

“Anything more deadly?”

“No. No people, no zombies. Nothing infected. When can we make the first dash?”

I inched around the corner and eyed up the deserted high street. I pondered out loud “where are all the bodies?”

We pulled back in to the alleyway. “What bodies?” Jez asked.

“You know. The bodies? The apocalypse? I was expecting to see some… well some corpses at least. We’ve only seen one or two in buildings. I mean, I can see blood spatter. At least it’s probably blood. Lots of dark patches on the pavement. But there’s no actual
bodies
. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“Did you actually see the middle of
Bennington when this all broke out? Or were you hiding in your posh house?”

“My sister’s posh house. And no.”

“I think it’s already been said it was hard and fast. I just think… most people were turned, you know? This is an open space. So people really ran, but some were packed in tight so the infection spread really quickly. Sure lots of people died, but they were already infected right? So they just eventually got up and re-joined the pack. I don’t want to know what the middle of London looks like. But here? It’s not a big town. You’re not going to have corpses litter the street just because that’s what they put in films.”

“Yeah but there’s still got to be what, tens of thousands of people around here
on any given day right?”

“In
Bennington? Ha, I don’t think so. Sure there’s that many residents, but people in the town? I don’t think it ever gets that busy. You want to survive an apocalypse? Come to a UK seaside resort. You want to see bodies? Go to an enclosed space – nightclubs, pubs, trains, buses, cinemas – anywhere that people couldn’t escape quickly.
Those
people got devoured.”

Begrudgingly I had to admit that Jez made sense. If this place never got busy then there probably wouldn’t be that many bodies scattered around the place. That wasn’t necessarily reassuring though; he was also right in that practically everyone that got attacked in the town subsequently turned. Whilst some of those might have stayed in the town itself, a large number of them would have also gone home. They would have most likely infected their friends and family and… that’s how these things manage to spread so wide and so fast.

“Okay so no bodies, no disease. That’s not a bad thing. Less animals around to give us unwanted attention. Less smell, too.”

“So where are we going first?”

“Anywhere but the store next to the pharmacy.”

“Light things first, then medium, then heavy. Like you said Warren, we shouldn’t have to be throwing around the heavy stuff at the start of the night. It’ll tire us out.”

Wow. Jez really had been listening. Experiencing his new amiable nature though was simply setting me more on edge than before. He was obviously looking to gain my trust before shoving a knife in my back.

“Okay. Light things. That would be clothing and blankets, which is quite bulky. Seeing as we have more time than we thought, I vote we make the first run and stow everything back here. We can do the heavy run when we want then too. I don’t want to do everything in a set order and then be stopped from going in to certain shops because of unforeseen circumstances.”

“Would we be in danger of overloading?”

“Potentially,” I responded “but I’d rather have too much gear and be able to go through rationalising, then not get enough and go back with bags that aren’t full.”