Coldbrook

‘Daddy-’

‘Don’t you dare leave us!’

‘Lucy, there are kids in there,’ Vic said, and in his soft voice they all heard the truth. With everything he had done wrong, leaving them behind would be one step too far.

‘You said you’d never leave me again,’ Lucy said.

‘He won’t,’ Jayne said. ‘He’ll be back. You’ve seen his shooting.’

Vic kissed Lucy and Olivia. ‘You need to go on,’ he said. ‘Get Jayne down to Coldbrook and inside. Straight down the air vent, and Holly will be waiting.’

‘I could come,’ Marc said, and he meant it. But he also nodded when Vic refused, acknowledging how important he had become.

Vic climbed over Jayne and slipped from the car, his M1911 in one hand, Sean’s pistol in the other. For a second as the car powered away he locked glances with Lucy through the back window. Then he ran for the bus.

The sound of the other vehicles’ engines faded, and the hooting of the zombies was appalling now.

‘Well, come on!’ Chaney shouted. He and two of his gang had reached the bus, and while Chaney fired a pistol at the advancing zombies — shotgun swinging empty from his other hand, ready to club anything that came too close — the other two men were struggling with the bus’s door. The kids inside were screaming. The three remaining adults were shooting from smashed windows.

As Vic sidestepped a running dead child, wondering what he had done, praying that he would see his family again, a woman on the bus turned her gun towards him.

‘No!’ he shouted, but she fired anyway. He ducked down, waiting for the pain. It didn’t come. Someone hit the ground behind him.

‘Squatting for a shit?’ Chaney shouted, and he actually laughed as he came to help Vic up. His hand was huge and sweaty.

‘Not sure what I’m doing.’

The other two bikers had prised the bus door open, and Vic and Chaney followed them on board. One of them grabbed the dead driver and pulled him aside, a wet mess. Kids screamed and the adults shouted louder to try and calm them. The bikers seemed not to notice.

‘Stray bullet,’ one of them said.

‘Fuck that,’ the other drawled. ‘Stray bullets, plural. Steering column’s wasted.’

‘This bus is fucked?’ the first biker asked.

‘This bus is fucked.’

‘And here come the cops,’ Chaney commented, kicking the doors closed.

Vic saw who Chaney had been referring to. Sheriff Blanks and two other cops — ex-cops now, he supposed — had emerged from the station’s smashed front door and were coming down the steps. The pretty officer who’d once let Vic off a parking ticket had what looked like a fence post embedded in her abdomen.

As the adults quietened the kids, that dreadful, gentle hooting came in to fill the silence. From the several streets that met on the square, and many of the buildings around them, the dead of Danton Rock converged.

‘Dinner is served,’ Chaney said. And he started reloading the Remington.

12

‘He’ll be fine,’ Jayne said. She spoke through a haze of pain and the threat of unconsciousness, the simple act of talking sending vibrations into her chest that set her bones on fire and shivers along her limbs that seemed to crush her hands.

‘You can’t say that,’ Lucy said as if she was disgusted.

‘She can, Mommy. She knows.’ Olivia had sat up as soon as her father had left and was staring from the back window, even as they left the town uphill behind them.

‘She can’t,’ Lucy said, softer this time. ‘It’s just something that people say.’

Jayne gave the woman and her kid a smile, even though to smile hurt her cheeks. It was worse. Much worse. The churu had never been this bad.

Lucy was staring at her daughter and Jayne wondered what they’d been through already. There were billions of stories of pain and anguish on the planet today, but fewer every second. Zombies didn’t have stories — no past, no future. They were as far from human as you could get.

‘He’s a brave guy,’ Jayne said. The wind was roaring through the smashed windscreen, and now and then she thought she could hear those hooting calls.

‘I’m not sure what brave is,’ Lucy said. ‘He’s got guilt. He loves his family. And sometimes he loves someone else.’

Jayne opened her eyes a little wider and thought, Holly. She’d heard the way Vic had spoken to her over the phone, seen Lucy’s reaction, but back then she hadn’t put two and two together.

The little girl didn’t know anything about all that. Her Daddy had gone to help the kids, and Jayne had told her that he’d be back. That seemed to be enough for her, but there was no saying what she was thinking on the inside. Never was with kids.

‘Well. .’ Jayne said, not knowing how to respond. She shifted and bit her lip, breathing heavily against the churu coma that she felt rising. They need me on my feet. They need me able to-

Sean slammed on the brakes.

‘What?’ Marc snapped.

‘Bike.’ He looked back at Jayne and saw her pain. She grinned, breathing heavily through it. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said.

A motorbike roared uphill and skidded to a stop on the driver’s side.

‘Found the place,’ the biker said. ‘Looked from a distance — been a hell of a fight there. Dead soldiers all around, three Chinooks outside the compound, one burned out.’ He spat. ‘Still got the stink in my nose.’

‘How dead?’ Sean asked.

‘Very dead. Didn’t see any walkers. Where’s the bus?’ Several other vehicles had stopped behind them, and more bikes. ‘And where the fuck’s Chaney?’

‘Bus crashed in the town. Chaney, Vic and a couple of others stopped to help it,’ Sean said. ‘So the compound looks clear?’

‘Think so,’ the biker said, staring uphill, back the way they’d come. He scanned the rear of the car, eyes lingering on Jayne and her twisted limbs. She was curled up in pain and she hated feeling different, despised the way he was looking at her. But then she realised that perhaps he saw a saviour, not a cripple.

‘We’ll follow you down,’ Sean said.

‘Got you covered,’ Marc said. He’d set aside his laptop and picked up the rifle.

‘I think I saw the vent you were on about,’ the Unblessed guy said. ‘Cover’s off. We’ll park as close to there as we can, and one of us’ll go down, check it out. Anyone got flashlights?’

‘Dunno,’ Sean said. ‘Maybe we should worry about that when we get there.’ He pointed away from the road and across a sparsely wooded field. There was a dead horse, its corpse swollen, flies blurring the air around it, but that wasn’t what he’d seen. Beyond the field were the remains of several farm buildings, one of them a charred ruin, one partially collapsed as if something had crashed through it. And from the farm, half a dozen shapes had emerged.

The zombies spoke to the dead air and started to run.

‘Yeah,’ the biker said, but he wasn’t looking at the farm. He was pointing behind them.

‘What is it?’ Jayne asked, because she couldn’t bring herself to turn.

‘Lots of people,’ Olivia said, kneeling on the back seat. ‘Those people.’

The biker pulled away, and Sean drove off fast. He angled the mirror so he could look at Jayne, then shifted it again so that he could see behind them.

‘The others?’ Jayne asked.

‘Following. But still no sign of the bus.’