candidate and twisted. With a few good yanks the three-foot metal rod was dislodged.
He wasted no time in slotting the bar between the window and the frame. He took a square stance and purposefully pulled back with both hands. The plastic frame started to creak and deform. Ali kept the pressure up, leaning back and pulling with all his might. Something started to give-he could feel movement through the metal shaft.
Invigorated by the prospect of success, he found more strength and pulled harder. There was a sudden crunch and the makeshift crowbar was catapulted out of the Ali’s grasp. The bent metal bar flung off into space, slicing through the air like the blades of a helicopter to land in the zombie-carpeted street below.
The tension suddenly released, Ali stumbled backward where he collided with the damaged handrail. He threw his hands out, grasping for anything before his momentum carried him over the railing.
Unable to stop, he flipped over the balcony. As the sky flashed overhead his grip found purchase. Then came a jolting wrenching through his shoulders as the momentum yanked at the joints. He hung there for a spilt second before his fingertips slipped free.
Ali started plummeting again. He was watching the balcony above fly away. As he fell a couple of the loosened bars burst free and were sent tumbling to the ground with him.
Ali flailed his arms out, trying to grab hold of anything to arrest his fall. His arm connected with something impossibly solid. The force of the impact was numbingly violent. His whole body twisted from the impact and he collided hard with the metal deck of the balcony below. The two metal bars that had fallen with him clattered off the decking and continued their journey to the crowd of zombies below.
Ali started laughing. Like an action hero, he’d survived by a piece of miraculous luck. Granted, it hadn’t seen him favoured enough to get him to the adjacent apartments, but he was still thankful. He laughed until he realised just how much pain he was in. The laughter turned to coughing, and when that subsided, Ali groaned.
After an age and a couple of aborted attempts, Ali hauled himself up to sit against the wall. His injured leg throbbed and now his shoulder did too. There was a lump on the back of his head and a massive headache to testify to the force of the impact. He looked down at his hands. They were bloody and scratched and now he noticed the nail on his index finger had been ripped off about halfway. He felt sick looking at the raw pulp of his nail bed. He dropped his hand out of sight, grateful that the pain from elsewhere was masking his missing fingernail.
He looked out over the thoroughfare packed with undead. They filled the road from here to the offices across the street. The front windows were smashed in and the zombies were packed inside just as thick as outside. To his right he could see the plaza they’d been trying to get to. The helicopter and its promise of rescue were long gone. And still there was no sign of the people who’d been shooting earlier.
Up to the left, back towards the warehouse, Ali could just see the odd patch of tarmac. The zombies were thinner on the ground up there but there were still thousands of them. The odd waft of grey black smoke drifted across the street, some of the petrol bombs were still burning and hopefully still incinerating zombies.
“What now?”
He could climb back up and try the window again, but even if he forced his way inside there would be nothing of use to him. All the food and weapons had been scavenged from here years ago. Could he survive until the helicopter came back? And what if the helicopter never came back?
Ali looked across at the dilapidated office block, its sandstone walls grimy with soot and moss and all the other discolouring that five years of the apocalypse and a lack of maintenance had accumulated. The maintenance crews, the cleaners, the office workers and a hundred other careers had all amalgamated into one profession: denizen of hell. Most of the undead that had congregated wore the same uniform now: tattered brown rags, pale blue skin and a gormless open maw.
Here and there Ali could still pick out the odd noticeable individual. A soldier in a bio-chemical suit with his gas mask torn off, a hiker with his backpack still secured by its shoulder straps his thick jacket with white puffs of stuffing poking out from the rips, and Ray-
Ali shook his weary head and let out a lonely sigh.
Among the zombies gawping up at him was Ray. There were raw chunks of flesh gouged from his body where the zombies had ravished him. His familiar glasses were missing and his face was caked in his own dried blood, but it was unmistakably Ray. Ali’s friend these last four years was now reduced to a mindless corpse.
Even with a hundred hungry ghouls feasting on his bones he had revived before the ravenous mouths had time to consume him. And no matter how fresh the kill, once they had reanimated no zombie would eat them.
“I am truly sorry, my friend,” Ali said.
He closed his eyes.
Chapter Seven
Chamber
“What the fuck happened here?” Cahz said, stepping over a dead body. Once through the broken gap in the makeshift defences, he had been confronted by an extraordinary scene. It looked like the stairwells had been barricaded and sealed off. The office furniture piled up to block the entrances and the space created by their absence resembled a campsite. There were tents, camp beds and piles of provisions all laid out in an orderly pattern. The only thing that wasn’t orderly were the blood splatters, bullet holes and dead bodies.
“Defence in depth,” Cannon said absently, looking at the make do redoubt.
“What are the tents for?” Elspeth said absently.
“Privacy I guess,” Ryan offered.
“The Whisky Deltas break in?” Cahz asked, looking round the breached stronghold.
“Nope, not a single W.D. in here.” Cannon nudged a corpse with his foot. “These poor bastards have rotted to mush. The roaches and flies have seen to them.”
“W.D.?” Ryan asked.
Cannon answered without acknowledging Ryan, “Walking Dead.”
Cahz continued to prowl round the site, occasionally pulling open the flaps on tents with the muzzle of his rifle. He prodded at a flap of leathery skin on a cadaver’s skeletal rib.
“That’s an exit wound,” he observed, looking at the shattered bone. “This guy died from a shot to the chest. What the hell happened here?”
“When we found this place,” Ryan looked across at Elspeth, “What, four years ago?” Elspeth shrugged. “Well, the corpses were in better condition. You could see some had their throats cut, others shot.” Ryan gestured to a stack of crates. “There was food and water and guns and ammo and everything you’d need to hold up for months. Ray called it Masada.”
“Masada?” Cannon asked.
Cahz stepped back to the group. “First Jewish uprising against the Romans in something like fifty A.D.”
“Ray reckoned the same thing happened here,” Ryan added.
“Do one of you want to fill me in? I ain’t that clued up with Jewish history,” Cannon grumbled.
“There was a Roman siege at a place called Masada. The Romans built a massive ramp to breach the defences. It took months to build but when they finally got over the wall everyone was dead. Even though they had plenty of supplies, rather than being captured and crucified or sold into slavery they decided to commit mass suicide.”
Cannon kicked a corpse with a gunshot wound to the head. “Yeah, well, nobody shoots themselves in the cheek to blow their brains out.”
“At Masada they drew lots,” Cahz said. “Each man would kill his family and then they in turn would kill each other until only one man remained. Then he would be the only one who had to commit suicide.”
“So you’re saying the same thing happened here?” Cannon asked. “It was Jonestown massacre all over?”
“That’s how Ray and Sarah saw it,” Ryan answered. “Surrounded with no way out, they committed mass suicide.”
“It’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it?” Cannon wonder aloud. “Could it not just as easily been looters?”
Ryan shook his head and pointed at the crates. “There were still a ton of supplies when we found the place.
