Unfed (11 page)

There’s a crack of light, and we all hurry to it as quickly as the dimness will let us. This is a barn, complete with bales and a tractor and the farmyard smells. There’s a constant drumming noise that I can’t place, but I can’t see any movement. We run to the wooden doors, fling them open, and we’re outside.

Fresh air.

The rain hits us like a roar. It is pelting down, and I’m instantly soaked and gulping for air. I do a 360. There’s a farmhouse almost directly in front of us and a couple of outhouses behind. There’s a chain-link fence surrounding all of the buildings, with a gate to our right, through which I can see a road winding down a hill. A thick white mist hangs heavy over trees that I can just make out in the distance. But beyond that, nothing. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I think it was something more than this.

“Where to?” Russ yells over the sound of the downpour.

“The gate — the road,” I shout back. We run, grit skidding beneath my boots, water splashing up my bare legs. This is it, I realize. I could be on the run through Scotland with cold-beaten, ruddied pins poking out of Alice’s ridiculous skirt like two boiled hams. The rain hammers hair
down slick to faces (at least I don’t have that to contend with), clothes to skin.

*  *  *

“Stop!” Russ — who is in front, of course — skids to a halt and holds his arms out wide, steaming like a thoroughbred after the gallops. We hurtle into the back of him, puffing and blowing from the chase.

Beyond the second building there is gate over the road. It is shut. And a good thing, too, because beyond is a huge chicken run … for monsters.

The hordes.

I’ve never seen so many. Even back at the road from the Cheery Chomper. Even on the ice at the loch — all those dribbling fiends coming at us from the castle — that was just an intimate gathering compared to this. They stumble around the vast coop, lumbering and moaning, some with arms out, head on one side, dragging a leg. They are drenched, festering — the smell is unlike any I’ve experienced before, like someone turned the odor volume up to eleven. And so many! Where did they get them all? I almost find myself waiting for the music to start. This is a
Thriller
flash mob.

“They can’t get out, can they?” Alice says.

I don’t know, but I’m looking. Looking for that breach in the fence, that hole, that break in the chain-link. Because it will be there, it’s bound to be there.

“No, but we have to go in.” Russ points. “The only way out is down the road.”

The road divides the coop into two halves, straight down the middle. I can see that it used to be enclosed by fences within the coop, but those fences have been breached on the left-hand side by an army tank, which
has torn through and now rests wrong side up in the midst of the left half of the coop. The mob roams freely onto the road.

“What about if we climb the fence somewhere else and work our way back round to the road on the other side?”

Russ shakes his head. “There’s a drop.”

I run to my right and slam into the chain-link fence. The whole of the compound sits on a little hill with a steep bank dropping off below. A modern-day citadel. If we climb over the fence, we’ll have nowhere to go but a fall the height of a four-story house to the muddy ground below.

“There’s no other way.” Russ is behind me. “We have to follow the road to the bottom.”

I shake my head but run back to the gate anyway, where Alice and Pete are shivering, eyeing the monsters who are reaching their rotten arms through the fence at them.

“Let me guess.” Pete pants. “We’re scaling the fence and tightrope walking out of here.”

He looks over to Russ and gets his answer. Russ has already climbed the fence on the side and is heading toward us. By the time he hits the chicken coop, he’s too high for the hordes to reach him. He moves swiftly, body bent over the rail at the top, feet finding holds in the chain-link, moving along like he did this all his life. He takes a look around, hangs for a moment, dangling tantalizingly just out of reach of the zom claws, and then springs down beside us again.

“Easy,” he says. “We do what I did, then we descend the hill by the road fence. They won’t reach us.”

He grabs Alice’s hand and hauls her over to the fence by the drop. Pete and I look at each other and follow. By the time we get there, he is
already straddling the top rail and reaching down to encourage Her Royal Blondness.

“Pete next,” Russ shouts. “Bobby, you bring up the rear. That gives me time to double back and help you.”

The boy sure knows how to stoke my fire. I ain’t gonna need no help from GI Joe.

Just as I’m about to start my climb, I spot something out of the corner of my eye. A chainsaw, propped up against the fence a ways down from us.
Wow
. This is better than a towel rail or a dumb chisel. Worth making a detour for. I run to it and claim it as my own. Heavy as hell, but there’s a handy strap that I fling over my shoulder. I run back and begin scaling the fence, my new weapon weighing me down. It does occur to me that I have no clue how to use a chainsaw. But there’s no time to figure it out now, and I’ve always had a knack for picking stuff up on the fly. How hard can it be?

Alice has made it to the top of the fence with Russ as carrot and Pete as stick. The climb is not as bad as it looks. The gap in the chain-link is conveniently teen-feet-sized, and the fence is taut and stable. You just have to ignore the huge drop on the other side and the fact that the metal digs into your hands and is slippery and ice-cold from rain. We shimmy along sideways, until we hit the corner and the start of the chicken run.

“OK, no lazy dangling feet, people,” Russ says unnecessarily.

The zoms swarm at us, hissing, reaching, the sheer swell of them pushing at the fence and making us wobble. I can’t look down at them or I will lose it and puke, but I do anyway. I retch; they are rancid, putrefying. I can’t tear my eyes away as I marvel at the way their clothes have bonded with rotting skin, long shreds of flesh hanging off limbs like slivers falling off a well-cooked piece of meat.

“Keep moving,” Pete croaks back at me.

The hands reach up for us, snatching at air. As long as we don’t slip, we’re OK.

“There’s a second gate!” Russ cries, pointing. “Once we get there, we’re home and dry.”

He’s looking at a gate by a sentry box down the road a little. The gate looks good, and the fenced-in road behind it is clear of Undead. It’s just the same distance that we’ve already covered again. We can totally do this.

“Go!” Russ points again. “Get to that gate, now!”

We pick up the pace. But then something weird happens. One by one, the zoms that have been underneath us peel off and start stumbling down the road away from us. This is a good thing. Until I realize where they’re going.

“Incredible.” Pete has stopped, hugging the top rail and looking at the trail of zoms. “They heard what Russ said. They’re heading us off at the pass.”

The monsters are at the gate, pressing on it with all their might, rhythmically pushing it,
one, two, three
, working as a team to get it down.

“Remember what Grace said,” I splutter. “Xanthro’s been slicing and dicing in the gene pool, rewiring zombie brain, shooting them full of something.”

“Whatever,” Russ shouts from down the fence. “Keep moving!”

It’s a race to get there before they break through. Russ is like a winged monkey on steroids; he reaches the gate easily and quickly, reaching down at the monsters and whipping out his mini-saw to cut off the stretched-out hands. It’s totally gross, but it doesn’t stop them pushing the gate.

Alice, Pete, and I get there together.

“Once we’re down, we leg it,” Russ yells to us. “There’s no climbing up again!”

The road is clear, but to each side of the coop there are hundreds of monsters lining the fence. We won’t have a spot to get out of reach if the gate is down.

“What if they can run fast now?” Alice cries, clinging to the fence, refusing to move.

“No evidence of that,” Pete says.

“We need to go!” Russ calls as the gate buckles dangerously.

“No!” Alice shouts back. “What if there are more down there?”

She could have a point — we can’t see the full length of the road — but there’s no turning back. Pete groans, then climbs around her and gingerly plops down on the safe side of the road. It’s not clear if he nudged her or if she simply lost her grip, but she slips and starts to tumble into the coop. Somehow she saves herself with one hand and an awkward foot that has stuck in one of the chain links, but she hangs there perilously, back to the fence, a mere inch or two from the nearest of the grabbing hands.

“Help!” she screams. “Oh god, help me!” She kicks down with her unfettered foot and wildly snatches at air with her free hand.

I’m nearest, and I throw myself forward on the top rail, reaching out to grab the hand that is waving in the wind.

“Here’s the rail,” I tell her, showing her hand where it is, above and behind her. She clings to it, but she’s in such an awkward position, practically crucified on the fence, unable to turn round or pull herself up. I haul at her arms, but she resists, not able to let go and trust me to hold her weight, which is probably wise, because I probably couldn’t.

“Russ!” I yell. He seems to be moving in slo-mo — and Pete is on the ground and useless — so I make one final effort to pull Alice up, with a mighty grunt.

But I don’t have the strength I’ve learned to rely on, all resources used up. Plus, my new friend Mr. Chainsaw is pulling me down, the strap near-strangling me from behind. My hands slip from Alice’s arms, and the momentum makes me fly backward and off the fence, down into the swarm of Undead.

My fall is broken by a body or two, and then I splat on my back in the mud below.

As soon as I’m down there, a switch flicks off in my head. I know I’m going to die. This is it. No way out for me now. It’s easier to give in to it, to accept that within seconds my limbs will be torn off, my eyes gouged out, my bowels eviscerated and feasted upon.
Just make it quick
.

“Fight them, you tosser!”
Smitty rasps in my ear.
“Get on your feet!”

But as usual, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My hand scrabbles for the chainsaw, but I’m lying on it. I twist to one side, grab the handle, and look down at the controls.
Shit!
How do I turn this thing on?

And then it’s useless, they’re on me in a second, and all I can do is burrow, choking, into the thick mud. Hands on my jacket, pushing from all angles, it’s only a matter of time before they exhibit some of that newfound teamwork and dig me out together. Or I’ll drown down here, which is definitely preferable.

But it doesn’t happen. And through the mud and the groans, I’m aware of shouting.

“Get up! Get up!” At first I think it’s Smitty again, but then a strong hand slips under my shoulder and hauls me upward, and through the
slop running down my face I see Russ there beside me, my chainsaw in his hand, no doubt in his mind how it works. He’s spinning and kicking, lunging and ripping through flesh in a way I’ve only seen in the movies. He’s cleared the zoms away from the fence, and I go for it, scrabbling up to the rail and over in one move, and landing in the mud again at Pete’s feet.

“Good god,” Pete says. “He’s a machine.” He watches in awe as Russ swivels — a well-placed kick to the jaw here, a decapitation there, until the chainsaw sputters and runs out of juice. Russ tosses it aside and swiftly follows the trail I blazed to safety at the top of the rail.

“Help me!” A scream rings out.

“Shit,” I splutter. “Alice.”

Alice still hangs, crucified, but both feet have wedged through the fence behind her, her knees bent down, and she’s worked one arm through to the elbow and is clinging for dear life, unable to see the drama and beauty of Russ rescuing me.

Russ notices her, shakes himself, and manages to scoop her up and toss her over the gate to where Pete kind of half catches their fall, and the three of them land on the road beside me, like we’re all catching some rays at the shore.

But not for long.

We run.

The road is steep and slick with rain, and we don’t know what’s ahead, but we run as fast as our bruised and bent limbs will let us, until we reach the bottom, a final gate to the outside, beyond the horror of the monster coop. We’re over it and alone, only a stretch of road and then a line of thick trees in front of us. We skid to a halt and catch our breath, looking around.

“Where did you park, Grace? Where?” I mutter.

“The keys!” Pete does a gimme. I don’t, but I get them out of my pocket at least. “Press the unlock,” he says.

I look down at the fob. He’s onto something. I hold the fob up and press the button. We all spin on our feet, looking and listening in every direction. I press the unlock again.

“Heard something.” Russ takes off down the road. We follow, our feet splashing through the water that flows down the slight hill, turning grass to mud and road to river.

“Again!” he shouts as we hit the tree line. I press. This time I think I hear it, too, but Russ is sure of it, running over rough ground into the woods.

“There!” Alice jumps. “That way!”

There’s a
beep
and a flash off to the left. I press again, and we have it. We run, dodging trees and leaping over bracken, until we’re at the Jeep. We pull off branches and shove the tarpaulin that partly covers the vehicle into the back.

Russ flings the driver’s door open.

“Keys,” Pete says to me. I throw them. Russ pauses only for a second before he gives way to Pete; no doubt Pete regaled him with tales of his expert bus handling.

So Pete’s in the driver’s seat, and Russ riding shotgun (oh, yeah, how I wish we had one of them), while Alice and I hug the backseat like stupid girls on some kind of weirdo group date.

Pete fires up the ignition and flicks on the windshield wipers. They move at top speed, crazy noisy. He shifts the Jeep into gear and edges forward through the eddying water that covers the ground. I look for a seat belt regardless and try to fasten it across me surreptitiously, because in spite of my quite reasonable concerns, no one really wants to be that person who buckles up first. Alice checks me, and it only takes a couple of seconds for her to follow suit, without comment. Safety first.

“Gas?” I shout against the hammering of the rain on the roof.

“Plenty.” Pete nods vigorously. “Enough to get us very much out of here, wherever exactly that may be.”

“Just don’t go freaky-deak fast, OK?” Alice clings to her belt. “Well, not unless you see any monsters or sniper people, that is. Then you can floor it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Pete does a dorky little imaginary cap doff.

“So,” I say to Russ as casually as I can under the circumstances. “Those were some moves you showed back there.”

“Hmm.” He’s busy searching the glove box.

“You didn’t tell us you were a closet Karate Kid. Looked kind of handy with the chainsaw, too.”

“Done some kickboxing in the past,” he says curtly. “And felled a few trees.”

“As you do,” I say. “Well, thanks for saving me: I thought I was a goner.”

“Yeah,” says Alice, “me, too. And I nearly
was
a goner, because you all forgot I was bloody there!”

“Eureka!” Pete cries before Alice can spin out the drama. “Thank you very much, Grace, I love you.” He hits a couple of buttons on the dashboard.

Alice flutters her eyelids like she’s going to expire. “What is he on about?”

“Satellite Navigation!” Pete shrieks, and as I lean forward, I see a small, illuminated screen move out of the dashboard.

“We have a GPS?” I ask him. We whoop and scream, and even Alice makes snarky applause. “So where the hell are we?” I shout to Russ, who has taken over pressing the screen while Pete winds us slowly down the
watery road into the fog. It hangs there in patches, specters loitering in the damp air.

“Not sure,” Russ says. “Looks like there’s a signal, but this road isn’t even coming up on the map. Surprise, surprise.” He shoots me a look. “It’s not as if the army — or Xanthro or whoever — is going to be signposting the way to a secret underground hospital.”

“Has Grace programmed anything in? Like where we should be headed?” I ask.

“Give me a few seconds.” He turns round to it again and resumes pressing the screen. “No. There’s nothing here, not even her last destination. She must have wiped it clean before she hid the car.”

“Great.” I keep one eye behind us, but no one seems to be following. “So we’re on our own. Again.”

The road is getting steeper now, and as we wind slowly down the hill, the moor, with its muted, sludgy greens and purples, is giving way to the sharp emerald of pine forest. Through the patchy fog the color is shocking in its brightness, and it’s quite a cheery greenness, but then again, I don’t like suddenly being hemmed in by trees on both sides. Trees hide so much.

“OK, so it looks like we
are
outside of Edinburgh.” Russ keeps us informed with his GPS fiddling. “If we can get onto a road that’s actually on the map, we’re about fifteen miles away. But there’s a lot of nothing between us and the road on the map.”

“Regardless of if it’s mapped, we’re on a road, obviously,” Pete says. “We can do nothing but follow it and hope we hit something recognizable soon. Soon as we do, then we can navigate.”

“Unless Xanthro controls the satellites.” Alice plays with her nails.

Pete, Russ, and I stay silent for a minute. Then Pete spoils it.

“It’s entirely possible that Xanthro controls satellites. They could be watching us right now.”

We say nothing. What can you say? Can’t satellites read the time off a wristwatch? If they can do that, they can certainly see the grim look on my face as I squash it against the glass and look up into the gray sky beyond the trees.
Hello … is there anybody out there?

The rain thuds on, seemingly even louder now, although that doesn’t make sense — the trees should give us a little shelter, surely. And then I realize that the sound isn’t the rain. I twist around in my seat again, looking to check we’re not being followed. But the road behind is clear.

“What is that noise?” Russ says. “Sounds almost like a helicopter.”

Pete swerves the car.

“You’re kidding! Where?”

We’re all at it now, searching the skies. Russ opens his window and the car instantly fills with wet. He kneels up on his seat like a stuntman preparing to climb outside the moving vehicle.

“I can’t hear anything,” yells Alice.

“Shh!” I tell her. But I can’t hear anything, either. If it was a helicopter, it’s gone now.

Russ comes back in and closes the window.

“Didn’t see anything. It can’t be after us, otherwise why wouldn’t it look on the road? If it was a helicopter, maybe it was just doing a flyby?”

Pete screeches to a mud-splashing halt, flings open the door, and he’s out. A second or two later, he’s back, with a large, smooth, black rock in his right hand.

“Screw it!” He dashes the GPS with the rock, smashing the screen so that it cracks like ice across a gray pond. “Don’t! Follow! Us!” He hits it again and again.

“What are you doing?” Alice says. “You’ve killed it.”

“We can’t take the chance they know where we’re going,” Pete cries, hurling the rock out of the door.

“We don’t even know they were following us,” Alice says.

“Keep driving,” Russ mutters.

Pete doesn’t need telling twice. He wrenches the Jeep into gear and it moves off with a roar. The road levels out a little, and we veer round to the right and see a clear stretch before us.

So this is it. This is our outside. Snow given way to torrential rain, ice to fog. Where could Smitty be hiding in all of this, for all of this time? Is he actually hiding? Or is he being held? For all we know, he’s been ferreted away into St. Gertrude’s 2.0, somewhere deep under the sodden ground.

And then I see it, a few seconds’ drive away. A humpbacked stone bridge over a river that has burst its banks.

“There!” I shout. “Under bridge! It must be.”

Nobody responds, except Pete, who slows the Jeep a little. That might just be because the water level is rising the closer we get to the river.

“Like in the message.” I try again. “‘Underbridge’? That’s the bridge, isn’t it?”

My mother didn’t feel the need to be especially specific, but if Grace was telling the truth about Smitty being close by, then this must be it.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m hiding out in Sydney Harbour or dangling from the Golden Gate, Roberta,”
Smitty whispers in my ear.

“We need to stop, we need to check it out.” I unclick my seat belt.

“Uh, how?” Pete shrugs. “Got your Aqua-Lung with you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Under the bridge. Look.”

He pulls the Jeep to a stop on the left of the road, wipes some condensation off the windshield and taps the glass. “See the water level? It’s almost up to the stone. We’ll be going some to clear the bridge in the Jeep as it is. But you want to get under the bridge. You’ll need a wet suit.”

I squint. It’s hard to see, but I have a sinking feeling he’s right. The brown water flows deep and fast all around the bridge. I dig my fingernails into my palm and hope that Smitty’s waiting in a speedboat just around the corner.

*  *  *

“Smitty!”

What a nutjob.

I am standing knee-deep in running water, looking under the bridge. A rope from the back of the Jeep is around my waist, the other end tied to a small tree. Russ found me some waders in the car, but it is freezing.

The others watch me from the Jeep.

Am I crazy to even attempt this? I could drown or die of cold. I cast a look up the road where we came from. We really can’t dawdle. They could be out looking for us at this very minute, and if they are, they won’t have to look very far. It’s now or never.

It is very dark under the bridge, and the water roars, black, deep, and fast.

“Smitty!” I yell again.

So maybe he’s not here after all.

But then there’s a noise.