Dead Island

van bearing the same logo.

‘Wave your worries goodbye,’ murmured Purna. ‘Very appropriate.’

‘I like to think of it as an omen,’ said Sam.

From their vantage point they could see a couple of hundred metres along the street in either direction. At this moment only two of the infected were visible — a white guy of medium build in his early thirties wearing a black E Street Band tour T-shirt and cut-off jeans, and a pretty dark-haired girl of about eighteen in white shorts and a floral-print vest. The girl had brightly coloured plastic bangles on her wrists and a small shoulder bag on a long thin strap jouncing perkily on her hip. The man’s hands and face were slathered in blood. The girl was chewing on what looked like a human liver, burying her face in it and snuffling like a pig.

‘Those were the two I saw earlier,’ whispered Xian Mei.

‘If we’re quick they’ll hopefully be the only two we’ll have to contend with,’ said Purna.

Quickly she outlined her plan, and Sam and Xian Mei nodded their agreement. Without further preamble she said, ‘Let’s go.’ Then the three of them stood up and began to run across the street.

They had covered almost half the distance before they were spotted. It was the girl who saw them first, her head snapping up as if she had caught their scent on the air. She let loose a snarling roar, dropped the lump of meat she was holding and started running towards them, the bag looped around her shoulder flying behind her.

She converged with them when they were around ten metres from the van. Ignoring Purna, who was in the lead, she targeted Sam.

‘I got it!’ he shouted, slowing just enough to raise the flare pistol and fire at the girl. The flare exploded against her chest in a flash of light, blackening her clothes. She screeched in rage and staggered slightly, but didn’t go down. ‘Fuck!’ Sam shouted and veered to meet her head on, swinging the machete. When she reached for him, he hacked at her arm, almost severing it with one blow and knocking her off-balance. As she stumbled, her badly wounded arm gushing blood, he raised the machete again, stepping to one side so he could get a good swing at her head.

The first blow buried itself deep in the side of her skull, lopping off the top part of her ear. As she fell, he wrenched the machete free and followed up with two more savage blows, silencing her for ever. The adrenalin was pounding in his ears and so he didn’t immediately register that Xian Mei was screaming for help. When he did, he turned to see her on the ground, the male zombie clinging to her kicking right leg, trying to bite it.

Her machete was lying several metres away from her, and she was simultaneously trying to scrabble towards it and avoid getting bitten. She pistoned her left leg out, hitting the zombie in the face with the sole of her foot and breaking his nose with a crunch. However, although the kick snapped his head back, it didn’t loosen his grip on her leg. Hearing a crash, and registering in his peripheral vision that Purna was focused on kicking in the door of Wave Your Worries Goodbye, Sam ran across to Xian Mei, raising his machete once again.

He brought it down with all his force on the back of the zombie’s head, cleaving its skull. The creature fell forward on to its face, its body spasming and jerking as its dying brain short-circuited. As it died in a spreading pool of its own blood, Xian Mei scooted backwards away from it and scrambled to her feet. Her right leg was scratched and a little bloody, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.

‘You OK?’ Sam asked.

‘Fine,’ she said, snatching up her machete.

The two of them glanced around, then hurried across to the van parked outside Wave Your Worries Goodbye. Purna had succeeded in kicking the door open now and had gone inside.

Before Sam could even think about going in after her, she was running back out, left hand raised triumphantly, keys jangling on the loop of a keyring around her finger.

‘You see anyone?’ Sam asked.

She shook her head. ‘Neither dead nor alive.’ Then her eyes flickered beyond him and widened. ‘Shit.’

Sam and Xian Mei turned to see a zombie running towards them. It was a fat, bald white man of about sixty, with a grey beard and fuzzy blue tattoos on his hairy arms. Unlike the other zombies they had seen, he was not drenched with the messy remains of a recent meal. The cause of his infection, however, was clear. His left leg was badly bitten and he was missing the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

The man’s face was as blue as a heart attack victim’s and his pendulous belly swung beneath a yellow T-shirt bearing the legend World’s Greatest Lover. His bottom half was clad only in a pair of black Speedos and he was wearing an open-toed sandal on his right foot; his other was bare.

Purna pressed a button on the key fob and the van chirruped and flashed its lights as its doors unlocked. They ran across to it and got in, Purna diving into the driver’s seat, Sam and Xian Mei running around to the passenger door. Sam glanced at the approaching zombie as Xian Mei climbed into the van ahead of him. Though it was running as fast as it could, its steps were lumbering, its weight slowing it down. It made Sam think of an old lion that was getting too slow to hunt; he almost felt sorry for it.

The zombie was still ten metres short of them when the van pulled away. Watching it in the wing mirror, Sam saw it try to put on an extra spurt of speed but succeed only in tripping over and sprawling headlong in the dust.

Need to lose some weight, you fat fuck, he thought, then turned as Purna muttered, ‘Hell.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Xian Mei, who was sitting in the middle of the three front seats.

‘We’re almost out of gas,’ Purna said. She raised her eyes Heavenwards. ‘Thank you, God.’

‘Bound to be a gas station around here someplace,’ said Sam.

‘There is,’ said Xian Mei. ‘There’s one further along the main street, back the way we’ve just come.’

Without hesitation, Purna hit the brakes and turned the steering wheel, performing a neat U-turn. They were now heading back towards the fat, grey-bearded zombie, which appeared to be picking itself up almost ruefully, its bare legs and the front of its T-shirt covered in brown dust.

At their approach, the zombie held up its hands and lurched into their path, like a drunken late-night reveller trying to hail a cab. Purna gave a casual jerk on the steering wheel to bypass it, but in a desperate attempt to satisfy its hunger it flung itself at the van. There was a heavy thump and the van shuddered slightly as the zombie impacted with the side of it and bounced off. Once again glancing into his wing mirror as they sped away, Sam saw the zombie, its shattered arm now hanging at a bizarre angle, pick itself up from a spatter of its own blood and stagger hopelessly after them.

He had barely faced front again when two more of the infected appeared. One, a skinny, short-skirted black woman with spectacular legs, who had clearly been for a night on the town and had decided to head home a little too late, came running out of the open door of a nearby bar. The other, a white boy of about seven wearing nothing but a pair of green shorts, was crouched in the gutter on the other side of the road, devouring what might have been a dead cat, but he jumped to his feet at their approach.

With the zombies heading at them from separate directions, it was impossible to avoid hitting both of them. An expression of calculating grimness on her face, Purna took the path of least resistance, veering to her left just as the boy took a running leap towards them.

Caught in mid-air, the boy smashed into the van and all but disintegrated like a flimsy bag of meat — which, in effect, is what he was. For a few seconds the windscreen was coated in a thick spray of red and Purna was driving blind. Then, calmly, she flicked on the windscreen wipers and tugged the indicator lever towards her, activating the water jets. Sam sat back with a groan as the wipers swept the majority of the mess away, shocked by the fact that the boy’s violent death hadn’t affected him more than it had. What was it the psychologists called it? Combat fatigue?

With Xian Mei directing them, they reached the gas station without further incident. Opening the passenger door, Sam said, ‘I’ll fill her up. You guys watch out for more of those things.’

The girls nodded and Sam flipped open the cap on the side of the van, and unhooked the gas hose. For a second after squeezing the trigger he felt sure the pump would either be locked or run dry. But to his relief the gas started to flow.

The tank was almost full when he happened to glance up and saw a face watching him through a small dusty window in the closed side door of the body shop attached to the gas station. As soon as he established eye contact with it, the face disappeared with a wide-eyed expression of alarm.