Undead at Heart (10 page)

He looked at her and
felt his stomach tighten. There was something wrong with her face.
Something really, really wrong.
He took one stumbling step
backwards, but got no further before she was on him.

Her fingers dug into
his shoulder, like steel talons, and she leapt, her knees hitting him in the
chest firmly enough for her slight weight to knock him onto his back, and then
her mouth was at his neck and her teeth were tearing and ripping.

Stan screamed once
before his throat was gone, and then he simply gurgled.

Tony didn’t realise
his head was hurt until he felt Samantha touch it. Then he winced away from the
sharp pain in his scalp and turned to look at her, accusation on his face.

“Ow! What are you
doing?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s
not me. You’ve got a cut, you’re bleeding.” She held her fingers up and he saw
the ruby shine of fresh blood. He reached his hand up to his head and felt the
warmth of the blood and the sting of the cut. In fact, now that she had pointed
it out, he could feel the trickle of the blood running down the left hand side
of his head through his hair.

He traced it
absent-mindedly with his fingers, unable to leave the painful gash alone, as he
turned back and, like the others, watched the two metal contraptions stride
away over the treetops.

Part of Tony had
expected the people from the pub to all be as shocked as Bert’s wife. But he
guessed, like himself, they were finding this too big a thing to take in. It
was almost comical watching these fantastical robots lurching through the
woods, dragging trees with them when they brought their spindly legs up to take
another step.

And what would be the point
of running? It would only take those things a few strides and they would be
right on top of them again. He guessed what he felt was resignation. He’d just
been given a vision of what was happening, and it was so big that he now knew
there was nothing he could do. All the planning and running was for nothing. He
might as well give up, find a pub that hadn’t been trampled to the ground, and
find a bottle to crawl into while he waited for the world to end.

Bert was crouching
next to his wife, slapping her face gently, and she was starting to come round.
Doreen looked up into his face and smiled. Tony wondered for a moment what it
would be like to know someone so well that a look like that would come onto
their face when they woke and saw you. Then she noticed that they were outside
and she remembered why and started to scream.

This acted like an
alarm on the assembled group, and they all started to move at once. Alan and
his wife, Charlotte, knelt down with Bert to help calm Doreen, while Dan and
his young helper, and the others turned to face Tony who was standing at the
rear of the group with Sam.

“Right,” said Dan, a
decision obviously having been taken in his mind. He looked around at the
people not helping Doreen. “Get what you need from your cars. Daz, you and I’ll
see what we’ve got in the van in the way of weapons. I just know that pickaxe
is in there somewhere. And we’ll meet back here when we’re done.”

The woman with the
baby,
and her husband – they’d told Tony their names, but he
couldn’t remember them – headed to the front of the pub, where their car had
luckily been spared from its collapse. The chef and waitress – again nameless
in Tony’s mind – headed to the car parked just feet away, at the side of the
conservatory.

“And you,” Dan pointed
at Tony and Sam. “Well, you can help these guys get Doreen on her feet. We need
to be heading away from those guys,” he pointed over his shoulder to where the
alien walkers had now disappeared from sight, “and this farm of Bert’s sounds
like the first stop.
If we can get a working car there, then
all the good.
If not, we’ll move on and see what we can find.” He nodded
his head at the pub. “I don’t want to be here when they come back to squash the
ants that ran out of the anthill.”

He turned and headed
after the young couple, to where his white van was parked in the shade of the
trees. The young lad smiled at Sam then followed after him.

Sam moved past Tony to
kneel next to the others. Doreen had stopped screaming and they were talking
calmly to her, and trying to get her back on her feet. Sam got her arm under
the older woman’s back and helped to heave her up. She was still visibly upset,
but she seemed okay.

She seemed much better
than Tony felt, in fact. He just stood and watched as all these people calmly
went about their business. It was like they had planned for it.

As he watched, the
couple came back from the front, the baby secured in a pushchair, the woman
carrying a large bag over her shoulder.
Debbie, that
was
her name, Tony remembered. The man’s name, or the baby’s, still eluded him.

The chef and the
waitress appeared moments later, from behind Tony. They had removed their
outer-garb and were just in ordinary clothes now. Each had a bag with them and
the chef was carrying a tire iron.

A noise caused Tony to
turn and he saw Dan returning from the van. He and Daz had shed their high-vis
jackets. Daz was carrying a sledgehammer and Dan was trundling a wheelbarrow
towards them. He said something to the young couple as he drew level with them,
but Tony couldn’t hear it. Whatever it was, it made the man laugh and the woman
smile. It was strained, but it was at least a smile.

As they got nearer,
Dan called, “Here you are, Doreen, if you don’t feel like walking, we can take
you in this!”

The man pushing the
baby nodded, so Tony assumed this was the same comment that had made him laugh
before. Doreen and her attendants laughed at the idea. “You’re alright, love. I
just had a turn, but I’m right now.” Bert patted her shoulder and kissed her
cheek.

The only one not to
laugh was Tony. He couldn’t really believe what he was seeing. It was all so
calm and orderly. How could they be so organised when his brain was whirling
and his guts churning. The urge to run was trying to overtake him again, and it
took all his strength to fight it.

Dan and the others
finally reached them. “Only joking, Doreen, I just thought it would be easier
to use this than to try and carry all these.” He indicated the contents of the
barrow and Tony could see an array of tools: shovels, hammers, long spanners,
lengths of metal pole.

Dan took the pickaxe,
and then everyone started to gather, picking up whatever they thought they
could handle best. Tony managed, somehow, to unlock his legs, and approached.
By the time he got there, most of the things had been taken. He reached down
and picked up a long-handled screwdriver and weighed it in his hands. He didn’t
like the feel of it at all, but he wanted – no, he needed – to be part of the
group.

“Going to take them
apart screw by screw, eh, Tone?” asked Bert, and Doreen cackled. Tony felt
himself blush but didn’t know if he was going to burst with anger, or burst
into tears.

“I don’t understand
what you think all this is for?” he burst out. “How are things like this going
to help us against things like
that
!” He waved the screwdriver in the
direction in which the walking machines had disappeared. “It’s pointless, isn’t
it?!”

Dan simply waited for
Tony’s outburst to run out of steam, the others looked from one to the other
like spectators at a tennis match.

“You’re right. We
can’t do anything about them. But we’re heading in the opposite direction and
maybe
– ”
he spun the pickaxe in his hands, “ – maybe
we’ll find something else that we can do something about. And I wouldn’t want
to be without something in my hands should that happen. That okay with you?”

Tony dropped his gaze
and nodded. Sam, now holding a large claw hammer in one hand, stroked his
shoulder and arm with the other.

“Right, then,” said
Dave. “Let’s go.”

Despite her better
instincts, Nicola’s first reaction to Stan’s scream was to take a step towards
the door. She let go of Alyssa’s hand and took another step, then stopped. She
looked back, but Dave, his face white, had already reached out to take the
girl’s hand. He nodded to her.

It occurred to her
that it should be him going in after her friend, not her. But it was too late
to protest, her legs were already taking her inside.

Even as she crossed
the threshold she tried to work out why she had been so willing to take on so
much responsibility. Everything that was asked of her, she balked inside, and
then stiffened her back and did it anyway. What was she trying to prove? And
who was she trying to prove it to?

She didn’t have time
to think much more. She stepped into the dark of the house and her eyes
adjusted enough for her to see Stan lying on his back on the floor with what
looked like a wild animal gnawing at his throat. There was a lot of blood on
the floor. There was no way he was still alive.

She wanted to run to
him, and she also wanted to run away. Instead she simply stood still, hoping
that the creature wouldn’t notice her. But, of course, her entrance had made a
shadow on the floor. Whether the creature only now noticed it, or whether it
had noticed but had been too busy to care, Nicola didn’t know. Either way, it
stopped its attack on Stan and looked up with a snarl.

Nicola realised with a
shock that what she had taken for some kind of wild beast, a large dog perhaps,
was actually a person: an old woman. Her left eye was
gone,
a red spongy mess in its place, and her mouth was slathered with gore. The
woman growled at Nicola, followed by a pre-human scream which erupted from the
old woman as she leapt.

Nicola uttered a
scream in reply, but not one of fear, one of rage. All the tension she had been
bottling up came out in a warrior’s cry as she swept her arm across and knocked
the woman against the wall in mid-flight.

From somewhere
outside, Nicola heard her daughter calling for her, but that wasn’t important
right now. The wizened creature
who
was climbing to
her feet was her priority. Nicola backed into the kitchen. She knew she was
moving away from the door, and away from the light, but she needed to let her
eyes adjust, and she wanted to find something she could use against this
nightmarish hag.

The woman was back on
her feet. Nicola could see that her right arm was hanging at a strange angle,
but it wasn’t stopping her as she approached across the darkened room.

Nicola retreated, her
eyes fixed on the woman, until her back collided with a worktop. She reached
behind her, trying to find a weapon of some sort.  Her hand closed on the
handle of something heavy and, as the woman leapt again, Nicola brought round
whatever it was she had grabbed and smacked the woman across the head with it.
It was a cast iron frying pan and once more the woman was sent sprawling.

She was back on her
feet more quickly this time, almost as though the beating Nicola was doling out
was giving her more strength. Nicola strode over to the woman as she rose and
struck her again with the pan, driving her to the floor. She hit her again and
again, keeping the demented creature on the floor, even as her arms flailed up,
trying to scratch or grab.

Slowly, even as
Nicola’s arm started to tire, the woman’s arms dropped, and she lay still.
Nicola stood over her, panting, the pan still held at shoulder height ready to
hit again, but the woman finally lay still.

Nicola realised that she
was making a small keening noise with each laboured exhalation. She let the pan
drop to her side, but didn’t let go of it, and backed away from the body of the
woman, watching her as she moved towards the door. She stopped briefly at
Stan’s body, but his throat was laid open and he was obviously dead.

With a sigh which
threatened to become a sob, she turned and walked out through the back door. As
the sun hit her she became aware of the blood and tissue spattered on her arms.
Some of it was from the woman and some of it, she thought with a shudder, was
from the bits of Stan’s throat the woman had still had inside her mouth.

She fought the urge to
retch and raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

What greeted her was
not what she expected. There was no Dave, no Alyssa,
no
group of followers waiting to hear the news of what had happened. The courtyard
was once again deserted.

The sun was getting
lower in the sky. It was high summer, so it was still hot, and the sun would be
up for a while longer, but already Tony could feel the day slipping away. He
tried to remember what time it had been when the truck had
come
flying towards him. About three, he reckoned. From the position of the sun, he
thought it was maybe now about six. Could all of this have really only taken
three hours? It felt like a lifetime.

He knew he wasn’t the
world’s greatest thinker; or feeler for that matter. More than one woman had
accused him of being emotionally stunted. He knew they were right, but hell,
he’d been happy. Or he thought he had been. In the last few hours he had felt
more emotions than he could remember feeling in a long time. Most of them had
been fear, but still, he felt alive in a way he couldn’t remember since… since…
Well, a long time.