Bay of the Dead

She ran towards the police car, gun held out before her. Zombies converged from all sides, but Gwen twisted and turned, shooting them in the head. Rhys ran along behind her, crouching low, wishing he had a gun too. He had never fired one in his life, and wasn't even sure whether he would be able to bring himself to point one at a person — even a dead person — and pull the trigger, but he wished he had one all the same.

A crowd of maybe three dozen zombies were still milling around the wrecked vehicle, but as Gwen and Rhys approached they started to peel away, to turn round, alerted by whatever weird senses they possessed to the proximity of live meat. Calmly and methodically, Gwen began to take them out one by one. Her reactions were fast, her movements fluid, but even so the sheer number of the creatures, slow though they were, was forcing her and Rhys to retreat.

'We've got to find a way through,' Gwen muttered between shots.

Rhys's ears were ringing from the gunfire, but he heard her words and knew how desperate she was to help the policemen. Enough of the zombies had peeled away from the vehicle now, however, for him to be able to see inside it. It was abundantly clear to him that both officers were way beyond help. There was very little left of either of them.

'It's too late,' he said softly. Gwen appeared not to hear him. She was still firing, her teeth clenched, dark eyes full of fury. Rhys put his hand on her shoulder and raised his voice. 'It's too late, love. They're both dead.'

She glanced at him, anguish on her face.

'And if we don't get away from here, we'll be joining them,' he added.

Gwen nodded, though not before shooting a blonde-haired zombie in a nurse's uniform, who was holding something red and oozing that was leaving a trail on the road behind her. 'I know,' she muttered.

Rhys grabbed her free hand. 'Then let's go.'

They ran back along the street, Gwen still shooting, Rhys dodging clumsily flailing arms and clutching hands. When they came parallel with the car, he stopped abruptly, almost yanking Gwen's arm off.

'Hang on a sec,' he said.

'What are you doing, Rhys?' Gwen demanded in exasperation. 'Come on.'

'I need a weapon too,' he said. 'Give me ten seconds.' He ran round to the back of the car and popped the boot open. Rummaging inside, he drew out what at first Gwen thought was a sword, but then realised was a golf club.

'See?' he said, hefting the club in his hand. 'Not a complete waste of money, after all.'

Gwen rolled her eyes. Rhys had bought the clubs on eBay, with the intention of taking up golf. After a couple of rounds at their local course, however, he had decided he liked neither the game nor the people who played it, and the clubs had been gathering dust in the boot of the car ever since.

He grinned at her, reached up and pushed down the boot — which revealed a bespectacled, middle-aged man with a rotting, greenish face. The man had shuffled up the pavement on Rhys's blindside and was now less than a metre away from him.

'Rhys! ' Gwen screamed, but he didn't need the warning. Moving with remarkable agility for a man forty pounds above his optimum weight, he spun round and buried the business end of the club in the zombie's forehead.

The zombie's eyes rolled up and it collapsed, the head of the club coming free with a gristly tearing sound as it fell. Rhys stared at the creature in a kind of wonder, and then looked at the head of the club, which was covered with a mess of blood and grey-green gloop.

'Can we go now?' Gwen asked impatiently.

'Right behind you, sweetheart,' said Rhys.

Sophie and Kirsty were sitting in the back of a cab on Bute Street, en route to Oceana on Greyfriars Road. Both girls were feeling mellow, tapping their feet and moving their bodies to the seventies funk which filled the car. The traffic lights were on red and the engine was idling. The cab driver was called Winston, and he'd already told them all about his fortieth birthday a month ago, which he had celebrated by visiting his extended family in Jamaica. Now Winston was taking the opportunity to have a quick roll-up, blowing blue-grey smoke out of his open window. Drizzle sheened the streets and blurred the light from the overhead lamps. The pubs had shut and there were very few people around.

'You girls ain't too cold with the window open?' Winston said between puffs on his straw-thin cigarette.

'No, we're fine,' said Sophie, though in truth she was a bit cold; she had goose bumps on her bare arms.

'I'm never cold,' Kirsty said, and touched her forearm with the tip of an index finger, making a tsss sound. 'I'm always hot.'

Winston chuckled. 'I can believe it. So how come you girls are out partyin' so late at night? Ain't you got work in the mornin'?'

Kirsty leaned forward, resting her arm on the back of his seat. 'No, we're-' she began.

And at that moment a chalk-white hand with black fingernails reached in through the driver's side window and ripped Winston's face off.

It happened in an instant. The hand seemed simply to dig its fingers into the soft flesh beneath Winston's jaw and peel off his skin like a balaclava. Winston fell backwards without a sound, sprawling across the front seats, his roll-up still held daintily between the forefinger and second finger of his right hand. Blood fountained from his severed jugular vein, an arterial spray which drenched Kirsty in an instant. She screamed and threw up her hands. All Sophie could do was gape in utter disbelief.

Then the door next to Kirsty was wrenched open, and half a dozen hands shot into the car, grabbed hold of the screaming girl and dragged her out. Sophie couldn't believe what was happening, couldn't believe that less than ten seconds ago she, Kirsty and Winston had been chatting and listening to music. She sat there, frozen in terror, as she heard Kirsty's screams rise in pitch and agony, until they became almost too unbearable to listen to. 'No!' Kirsty was screaming. 'No, please … ' There was a final gurgling scream and then silence.

Shaking from head to foot, her sparkly top speckled with Winston's blood, Sophie reached for the door handle. At first she wasn't sure she even had the strength to turn it. Then the door clicked open and she all but fell into the road. She got up, sobbing, her legs shaky and weak, her stomach juddering, as if she was frozen to the core. She looked over the roof of the car and saw a group of. . things, tearing at something that was covered in blood. Something that no longer looked human. Something that Sophie refused to believe had been her best friend less than a minute before.

Head spinning, her breathing coming in sobbing, shuddering gulps, she tottered away on her high heels. After a few steps she paused to kick them off, and then, with the chill wetness of the ground soaking into her stockinged feet, she ran.

***

'Left here, Jack,' Ianto said.

Jack swung the SUV into the sharp turn without even slowing. The tyres made a screeching hiss on the wet tarmac.

'Whoa there, Mr Testosterone,' Ianto said drily. 'There's no need to impress me with your crazy stunt driving.'

'Never walk when you can run, Ianto,' Jack said heartily.

'Never die when you can live,' Ianto muttered, and then added, 'Oh, I was forgetting — you don't.'

They were 'zombie-hunting', as Jack kept insisting on calling it, the monitoring equipment inside the SUV acting as a kind of 'zombie' satnav. Ianto was using the readings to give Jack directions; only problem was, the 'zombies' — whether by accident or through some kind of flocking instinct — tended to congregate in large groups, and that was something they were trying to avoid. They were in Trowbridge, on the trail of a quartet of the creatures, which appeared to have been stationary for the last five minutes or so. Trowbridge was an area of tight suburban streets and public housing, though it was presently undergoing something of a facelift. The 'zombies' — or at least their Rift traces — had been detected on a road with pre-war housing on one side and a building site (which would soon become desirable new dwellings) on the other.