house. A body was pulled inside with him and, while Michael kicked and punched at the wretched thing, Emma slammed the door shut, severing an emaciated arm in the process.
The body on the floor stopped moving momentarily and Michael crouched down, struggling to catch his breath.
‘Okay?’ Emma asked, shouting to make herself heard over the noise coming from the frenzied crowd outside.
He nodded.
‘Think so,’ he gasped.
She turned to look out of the window in the door. The small pane of glass was filled with a mass of dark, dangerous shadows, every last one of them clamouring to get inside.
‘We need to…’ Michael began before being interrupted by another noise, this time from the front of the house. He looked at Emma for a split-second before standing up and running down the hallway.
It was Carl.
‘Shit!’ Michael yelled to Emma. ‘What’s he doing?’
The two survivors watched helplessly as their friend unlocked the front door. He lifted his hand to the latch and then stopped and turned to look over his shoulder when he heard the others approaching.
‘Ready?’ Carl asked, grinning with excitement and misguided anticipation. His face was grotesque and almost unrecognisable. Already scratched, bloodied and bruised, his features were distorted further by the dark shadows of the besieged house. He seemed blissfully unaware of what was waiting for him on the other side of the door.
‘Fucking hell,’ Michael gasped, ‘he’s going to open it! He’s lost it. He’s completely fucking lost it!’
Emma was rooted to the spot with fear. She couldn’t move or even think. Her lips formed silent words of desperation and terror.
Carl lifted up the rusty rifle they had found and smiled again at Michael.
‘Come on, Mike,’ he yelled. ‘We’ll have them. You and me’ll have the fucking lot of them!’
Michael could hear the bodies fighting to get into the house with a new found purpose and ferocity. He was about to try and talk to Carl and make him understand when he opened the door.
‘Get upstairs now!’ he screamed at Emma. He grabbed hold of her arm and half-dragged, half-threw her up the staircase. He followed close behind but stopped and turned back when he was only a couple of steps up.
Blissfully unaware, Carl opened the door fully and, for a single second which seemed to last longer than ten, nothing happened. A moment of stillness and unexpected calm which was suddenly shattered by a tidal wave of rotting flesh and bone which powered into the house. The force of the surge was such that Carl was lifted clean off his feet and smashed against the nearest wall. In seconds the hallway was filled and Carl had completely disappeared from view, swallowed up and destroyed by the vast and unstoppable crowd.
Turning quickly, Michael ran up the stairs after Emma. She was hiding in Carl’s attic bedroom. He slammed the door shut behind him.
‘Get the fucking bed!’ he screamed. ‘Help me push it in front of the door.’
Taking one end each, the two of them shunted the heavy wooden bed down the length of the room and turned it sideways so that it completely blocked the door.
‘Where’s Carl?’ Emma asked, although she already knew the answer. Michael didn’t bother to reply. He ran over to the window and looked out. The bedroom was at the front of the house. It was dark but he could make out their Landrover and car in the yard below.
‘We’ve got to get out,’ he said, his voice trembling with emotion. ‘I’ve still got the keys to the Landrover…’
‘But what about our stuff? Christ, all our stuff’s…’
‘Forget it,’ he snapped.
‘But how are we going to get out? We can’t just…’
Michael ignored Emma’s questions. He opened the window and leant outside. A few of the bodies below caught sight of him and their ferocity seemed to increase when he stepped out onto the roof.
‘Follow me,’ he said, turning back momentarily to face Emma.
She walked over to the window and looked down.
‘I can’t…’ she whined.
‘You’ve got to. You haven’t got any choice.’
Fighting to stay calm and in control of her body and emotions, she watched as Michael carefully shuffled around and lowered himself down along the slanted roof until his feet were resting in the guttering. Lying flat with his stomach pressed against the tiles, he shuffled sideways until he was directly above the porch. Once there he stopped and looked up at the bedroom window again.
‘Come on,’ he hissed. Emma looked at him and then looked down at the mass of bodies in the yard. More and more of them were reacting to Michael’s voice. Unsure, she climbed up onto the windowsill and tentatively put one foot outside. Moving painfully slowly, she then lowered herself down until she was hanging out of the window. She stopped again, paralysed with fear.
‘You can do it!’ Michael yelled, sensing her unease. He prayed that she couldn’t sense his.
He lowered himself down the last few feet onto the roof of the porch and then stood still for a moment to regain his balance. He glanced down at the shifting sea of figures below and saw that he was now close enough to be able to see the faces of the hundreds of corpses gathered around the house. Just meters away from his feet an endless column of creatures struggled to force themselves into the building.
