Bay of the Dead

She looked up at him, scowling. 'You don't know that,' she said.

Andy's face twitched into an expression somewhere between compassion and apology. 'No I don't. Sorry. But try not to worry, OK? Chances are, you'll be fine.'

She nodded, took another deep breath, and then stood up shakily. Andy helped her wash her hand at the sink and wrap it in a tea towel. Together they hauled the still-snarling, still-struggling man to his feet and then Andy frogmarched him towards the kitchen door.

'There's something really wrong with him,' she said.

'Tell me something I don't know,' replied Andy.

Dawn shook her head. 'No, I mean, really. Look at him. His skin's all marbled. His eyes are sunken and dead, like there's nothing there, like he's blind or something. I've seen corpses that look healthier than him. And he smells like death too.'

It was true. The man smelled like a week-old cadaver. Even when Andy had been grappling with him, he'd been uncomfortably aware of how the man's skin felt beneath his hands — damp and somehow greasy.

'Let's just get him down to the station,' he said. 'The doc can look at him there. Clear a way through, will you, Dawn? We don't want him biting anyone else.'

She nodded and opened the door into the crowded front room. 'Please move back,' she shouted, sweeping her uninjured hand left and right, as though parting curtains. Partygoers glanced at her and then stepped hurriedly aside, many clearly alarmed by the sight of their snarling, bloodstained captive.

They were almost at the door into the hallway when they heard shouts and screams from outside. Next moment, people were pouring into the house, stumbling and falling over one another in their haste.

'Hey! Hey!' Dawn shouted, as she was pushed and jostled. Instinctively, she reached out with her bandaged hand and grabbed the arm of a thin guy, who was running past. She winced at the pain, but maintained her grip. 'What's going on?'

The guy's wide-eyed alarm turned to momentary anger. Then he registered Dawn's uniform and said breathlessly, 'They appeared from nowhere. They're attacking people. Tearing them apart.'

'Who are?' asked Andy.

The guy's attention shifted to look over Dawn's shoulder. His gaze fixed on the slavering creature that Andy was holding in an arm lock, and his eyes widened.

'They're like him! They're all like him!' Then he was gone, running towards the back of the house, overcome with panic.

Andy and Dawn exchanged a glance, and pushed their way through the now-dwindling inrush of people to the front door. They could still hear screams from outside. One series of raw, agonised shrieks chilled Andy to the core, before it was abruptly cut off. Shoving their captive before them, he and Dawn exited the house — and there they froze. The scene before them was one of such appalling carnage that for a moment they could do nothing but stare.

In the overgrown front garden, not five metres away from them, two men with the same dead-eyed, slack- jawed expressions as the arrested gatecrasher were delving into the gaping stomach of a young girl with their bare hands. The girl was still twitching, but clearly beyond help. The men, drenched in gore, were scooping out handfuls of her innards and eating them.

In the middle of the road, soaked in the pumpkin-orange light of the overhead street lamps, a young, dark- haired man was lying on his front, kicking and whimpering as a crowd of five people — three of them women — tore and slashed and gouged at his exposed back with their bare hands.

Yet another murderous crowd were clustered around the back of the still-open ambulance, bumping and blundering into one another as they tried to get at the vehicle's contents. Andy couldn't see what had become of the paramedic and the young girl with the bite on her arm, but he could see that the hands, faces and clothes of the majority of the attackers were stained with fresh blood.

It wasn't until a naked man reeled clumsily away from the back of the ambulance, however, chewing on a chunk of raw and bloody meat, that Andy realised exactly what he was witnessing. With a dreamy kind of horror, he saw that not only did the naked man have a gaping black hole in the left side of his face, but also that his chest and stomach, stretching from his groin to his collar bone, bore an ugly Y-shaped post mortem scar, stitched with black thread.

I'm looking at a dead man! he thought. Oh Jesus, I'm looking at a dead man! The sudden realisation hit him like an express train, and all at once he was noticing further details about the attackers. He was noticing how dishevelled they were, and how slowly and awkwardly they moved. He was noticing how sickly many of them looked, their complexions ranging from ghastly white to an awful greyish-green. He was noticing that one of the women attacking the young man had black, cancerous growths on her arms and legs. He was noticing that at the back of the crowd clustered around the ambulance was an eyeless child, shrivelled to the point of starvation. He was noticing that some of the attackers had skin so dried and puckered that their lips had drawn back from their mouths to reveal dark gums and yellow teeth. He was noticing bones poking through flesh; gaping wounds; canker and rot.

And he was noticing the smell. The high, sickening stench of a plague pit or charnel house.

'No,' he murmured, 'it's bloody impossible.'

He was so shocked that he didn't realise he had loosened his grip on his captive until the man suddenly twisted and lunged at him with a snarl, mouth gaping wide to bite.

'Andy!' screamed Dawn, but Andy was already jerking backwards. He heard the man's teeth clack on empty air.

Instantly the gatecrasher came at him again — and now the two men who had been eating the girl (the two zombies, Andy thought with a kind of horrified wonder) were rising to their feet, alerted by the commotion. They turned their heads. One of them let out a low, guttural moan, blood and drool spilling from slack lips.

Andy sidestepped as the zombie, its hands still handcuffed behind it, lunged again. He put up his hands to fend it off, and the zombie snapped at his fingers. Then Dawn was behind the creature, a clench-teethed look of revulsion and determination on her face. She jumped forward, shoving the zombie with all her might. Off-balance, it stumbled sideways and fell, crashing head-first into an overgrown rhododendron bush.

'Thanks,' Andy breathed, but already the two blood-drenched creatures who had killed the girl were stumbling towards them. One was wearing a checked shirt and jeans; the other had gore matted into its beard and was draped in a tattered white burial shroud.

Andy ducked as the zombie in the checked shirt made a swipe at him. He sensed rather than saw its clawed hand, fingernails caked with blood, passing over his head. Then Dawn was grabbing his arm, pulling him towards the gate.

'We've got to get away from here,' she said.

'But all those people in the house-'

'What are the two of us going to do against this lot? We'll have to call for back-up.'

Andy nodded, and they ran towards their car. In his peripheral vision he saw zombies registering them with whatever passed for cognisance in their dead brains. He was aware of the creatures abandoning their meals, converging on this new living prey with lurching, lumbering steps. He and Dawn dodged a girl in a green dress who had had part of her face torn away; a balding man in a mechanic's oily overall, his face bloated with rot.

As they neared the car, Andy fumbled for the key fob in his pocket, found it with sweaty fingers and pressed the button. He and Dawn wrenched the doors open and threw themselves inside. Andy rammed the key card into the slot and pressed the button which started the engine. All he could see around them were dead faces, slack and vacant, but also livid with a kind of relentless, idiot hunger. As he slammed the car into gear and they screeched away up the road, his only thought was that as soon as they'd requested back-up, he'd call Gwen. She and her Torchwood mates would know what was going on.

FIVE

Trystan Thomas spooned Horlicks into his mug, added a little milk and stirred vigorously. He glanced at the