Year of the Zombie (Book 8): Scratch (2 page)

‘Get in,’ she yelled,
and Jenny and Holly did exactly as they were told, fighting with each other to
get in first. Ben, though, had frozen. Jody ran over to him, dragged him from
the back of the car to the front, then shoved him into the passenger seat. She
felt the fat kid’s fingers on her back, dragging down her anorak. She’d been
freezing cold last night and was still wearing the waterproof coat she’d slept
in.

She slammed the car door
shut and spun around just as the kid came at her again with a speed which
belied his bulk, claw-like fingers lashing out. She pushed him away and sent
him tripping backwards. He fell over his own feet, too slow to react, and lay on
his back on the ground like a turtle on its shell, unable to right himself,
arms and legs thrashing wildly. Jody allowed herself to get a little closer to
fatboy. His grubby T-shirt had ridden up in the fall, exposing his wide, white
belly. The area below his navel was covered in a crosshatch of scratch marks,
raw and infected.

Ben was hammering on the
window.

Jody looked up and saw
her son gesticulating wildly. It was the old woman with the crooked jaw again.
She was getting dangerously close. Jody ran around to the driver’s side and let
herself in, then double-locked the doors and started the engine. ‘Everybody
okay?’ she asked. ‘No one hurt?’ No reply. Just muffled cries from the back.

The lanky kid walked
clumsily into the side of the car, slamming into her window and smearing it
with oily discharge.

‘What’s wrong with them,
Mum?’ Ben asked, eyes wide and terrified.

‘Don’t know. Put your
seatbelt on.’

‘But why are
they—?’

‘Put your bloody
seatbelt on!’ she shrieked at him as she slammed the car into reverse. She put
her foot down and sent them careering backwards in a wild arc which just missed
what was left of their tent.

‘My dollies,’ Holly
whined.

‘We’ll come back and get
them later,’ Jody told her, although she already knew they never would.

Into first gear, ready
to disappear.

She stopped.

The dead old woman with
the fucked-up face was blocking their way. ‘How can she still be standing?’
Jody asked no one in particular. The woman had looked paper-thin and frail when
she saw her last night, so where the hell had all this strength and hostility
come from?

‘You think they’re
sick?’ Ben asked.

‘Very sick,’ she
mumbled, still watching the woman who seemed as strong now as the two kid
attackers some fifty or sixty years her junior.

The woman wasn’t giving
ground. It was a bizarre stand-off which lasted only a few seconds until she
made a single lurching step forward. Jody responded with a sudden burst of
wheel-spin and speed. She hit the woman hard then immediately braked again, the
impact sufficient to send her flying several metres through the air and inflict
enough damage to make it impossible for her to get up again. Though she tried.
Both legs now broken, bones protruding through ripped skin, spine snapped in
two, yet still she tried.

Jody put her foot down
again and this time she didn’t stop.

***

‘Where are we going, Mum?’ Ben asked for what
felt like the hundredth time in the half hour they’d been on the road. Jody had
long since given up trying to answer. The speed with which everything had
happened this morning was incredible. She was still trying to catch up and
process it all.

‘Are we nearly there?’
Holly whined from the back.

Ben turned around and
snarled at his sister. ‘She don’t even know where we’re going, dummy.’

‘Mum, Ben called me
dummy.’

‘Don’t be rude to your
sister.’

‘Tell her to stop being
stupid then.’

‘She’s only four.’

‘She’s still stupid.’

‘I don’t like that
word.’

‘Okay, then, she’s a
retard.’

‘I like that word even
less. Now shut up, all of you. I need to listen to this.’

The roads around the
campsite had been mercifully quiet, though here in the Welsh mountains they
weaved and snaked continuously through the landscape, never letting her get up
quite enough speed. Still, the lack of traffic meant Jody could focus a little
more attention on the radio. The stuff she was hearing was bizarre, like
something out of those third-rate zombie horror novels Gary used to read.

A deadly infection, the
likes of which hadn’t been seen before.

Source unknown.

The disease kills the
hosts, then reanimates them.

Spreads through physical
contact. Usually with open wounds.

The infected break the
skin of their victims by scratching or clawing (or, in unconfirmed reports,
biting).

Short incubation time
– usually between one and three hours.

Widespread, and spreading
wider.

No known cure.

Stay indoors. Stay calm.
Stay safe.

‘That man said stay
indoors,’ Ben said.

‘I know.’

‘We going home then?’

‘That’s the plan.’ She
glanced at the fuel gauge. She’d planned to fill up on the way to the campsite
last night but she’d had enough of being stuck in the car with three squabbling
kids. ‘Don’t know yet,’ she added.

‘Where else we gonna
go?’

‘You shut up and play
with your phone. Leave the planning to me.’

‘My phone’s still in the
tent.’

‘Shit. Sorry, love.’

‘I need it.’

‘You don’t need it. You
want
it. There’s a difference. You only use it for games.’

‘Not just games,’ he
said without thinking, sounding unexpectedly aggressive. Jody looked across at
her son.

‘Shit, Ben, have you
been texting him again? What have I told you about texting him?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No,
you
don’t
understand. He shouldn’t put you in this position. It’s not fair.’

‘I need a wee,’ came a
small voice from the back.

‘Can you hold on, Hol?’

‘For a little bit. Can
you hurry up?’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

More radio noise:
frantic eyewitness reports, floundering politicians using hundreds of words to
say nothing, phone-ins and social media round-ups. Everything tinged with an
air of resignation and desperation. An edge of raw panic, barely supressed. Inevitability.
The end is nigh? The end is
now
.

Or maybe not.

Out here on the road,
surrounded by absolutely nothing and no one, Jody found it increasingly hard to
accept the unacceptable. She knew what she’d seen at the campsite, what she’d
done, but with every mile she drove away from the place, it was harder and
harder to believe what had happened. The last year and a half had been horrible
– the hardest eighteen months of her life – so was this a
side-effect of that? Had she lost her mind? That seemed marginally more
plausible than the things she was hearing on the radio right now.

‘Really need a wee.’

‘I know. You already
said.’

‘Yeah, but I need one
now.’

‘Do it out the window,’
said Ben.

‘Shut up, Ben,’ said
Jody. ‘Hold on, Hol, there’ll be somewhere we can stop soon.’

Another ten minutes and
she found it. An outwardly well-kept toilet block in a National Park car park.
Jody slammed on the brakes and brought her tired car to a juddering stop, then
crossed the carriageway and pulled into the car park. Ben reached for the door
handle. She told him to wait.

There was one other car
in the car park. A dirty blue Ford Focus. Doors shut and all locked up. Empty.

She told the kids to
stay put and checked out the toilets and surrounding area. There was no one about.

‘All of you, with me,’
she ordered as she marched them out of the car. She herded them into the toilet
block like sheep. Ben pushed back when he realised which door they were heading
for.

‘I’m not going in the
girls’ loo,’ he protested.

‘Yes, you are,’ she said
as she pushed him inside.

Two cubicles, four
people.

‘I don’t need to go,’
Jenny said.

‘You’re going. I don’t
know when we’ll get chance to stop again.’

Less than impressed, she
trudged towards the remaining cubicle, the firehouse-like noise from the other
indicating that Holly’s need had been genuine. Ben leant against the solitary
sink and glared as his mum. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

‘Absolutely no idea.’

‘Those people at the
campsite... what was wrong with them?’

‘You heard the radio. They’re
sick. Infected.’

‘Something to do with
the scratches.’

‘I guess.’

‘You really messed up
that old woman.’

‘I know. I didn’t have
any choice.’

‘Were they going to eat
us?’

She laughed out loud at
that, then stopped and checked herself. He wasn’t far off the truth. ‘Something
like that.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘Do what? I didn’t do
anything.’

‘You beat them up. You
drove the car into the woman.’

‘Did I? I don’t
remember. It all happened so fast.’

‘It was pretty cool.’

Coming from Ben, that
was one heck of a compliment, if misplaced. ‘It definitely wasn’t cool. It was
horrific. I’m not proud of myself.’

‘I would be.’

The two toilets flushed
within seconds of each other and the girls reappeared. Jody told them to wait
where she could see them and left the door open while she did what she had to
do. Ben went in the cubicle next door. A minute or so later and the four of
them were finished.

‘Ready?’ she asked.
Three heads nodded back.

Jody guided the kids
out, protective arms around all three of them. Something caught her eye way
over to her left.
Shit.
Standing in the trees a short distance away was
a solitary figure. Male. Late forties, maybe early fifties. Overweight. Shabby
clothing. Scruffy beard. Clearly infected.

He was watching them.

His head remained still,
but his eyes followed their every movement.

She didn’t tell the
kids, and she pretended she hadn’t noticed.

‘Are we going back to
the holiday now?’ Jenny asked.

‘Shh...’

A twitch of movement
from the man in the trees. Ears pricked up.

‘I want my things from
the tent.’

Sing-song voice.
Everything’s okay.

‘We’ll talk about it in
a minute, love. Just get into the car first.’

‘But Mummy, what about
my bye-bye blanket?’

Almost there. Key fob
pressed. Central locking clunk.

‘I told you, in the car
first.’

Jody reached for the
handle just as the man in the trees pounced. He came at them with vicious speed
and impossible athleticism, launching himself into the air and virtually
clearing the length of their car in a single inhuman leap.

She managed to get the
girls safely inside and shut the door, but he caught hold of her shoulders and
pulled her away. Flat on her back with a sick bastard leering over her. She
could hear the girls screaming and she pressed the key fob in her hand
involuntarily, locking the kids in.

The man on top of her
was a dead weight. Literally. Bizarrely cold and lifeless, yet somehow still
volatile. He (
it?
) tried to raise his hands to get at her face, but his
oversized belly and low centre of gravity made it almost impossible for him to
move freely. Driven by instinct and repulsion, Jody turned her face away from
his then forced her hands under his shoulders and hefted him up and over. She
rolled one way and he rolled the other, slapping hard against the tarmac like
meat on a butcher’s slab. Their legs were still entangled, but she managed to
kick and thrash and free herself.

Jody got up, and so did
the dead man.

She was disorientated
and had her back to the toilet block. The kids in the car screamed in absolute
terror, and when Jenny banged her fists repeatedly against the window, the dead
man turned to face her. To Jody’s horror, he began lumbering towards her
children.

‘Oi, you,’ she yelled at
him. ‘Leave them alone, you greasy fucker.’

But it was too late, and
he was up against the car now, scraping at the metal and glass with numb,
germ-carrying fingers. Jody ran at him and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him
around.

‘I’m here,’ she screamed
in his face. ‘Leave them alone.’

And to her surprise, he
did. When she was absolutely sure she had his full attention, she slowly backed
away and he followed. To her immense relief the kids had shut up, but that
relief was short-lived as he launched another attack. She kept backing away and
he kept coming towards her, matching her pace almost step-for-step. And then,
when she reversed into the wall of the toilet block and could go no further, he
came at her with another uncharacteristically athletic leap.