drifted hungrily over the heads of the buildings on their right.

The air was breathable here – they weren’t close enough to the fire to be exposed to the fumes – but the wind picked up from the west and brought little flakes of ash cascading down around them.

Following one of the ash flakes with his eyes, Kingsley’s gaze passed a window in the second storey of a house to his left, just as the curtain twitched and a half-seen figure sank back from view. Kingsley was sure it had been a person – a live person – at that window, watching him and his friends.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. The thought that they weren’t the only people alive in this town was relieving because it meant that there was less chance of the hospital being abandoned like many other buildings they had passed. However, no one else was outside roaming the streets like they were. And there was probably a good reason for that.

Aware that the zombie population was not getting any thinner as they neared the centre of the town and the shopping district, Kingsley was about to suggest that they should get off the main road before the zombies became too many to deal with.

But then – as if fate had eavesdropped on his thoughts and decided to toy with his expectations – the group rounded a curve and the stretch of road that greeted them ahead was completely forlorn and empty. Quiet. Not even the footsteps of the dead.

Kingsley could see a roundabout ahead with a building on the left that he recognised. The Old Water Tower stood behind it, a historical building that Kingsley couldn’t say he’d ever been interested in visiting. But now it was a beacon of hope for him, its brown, octagonal shape jutting out stern and proud above the buildings enclosing it.

He knew where he was going, and they weren’t far from the hospital now.

Past the roundabout, George Yard shopping centre was on either the first or second left turn. Then it was simply a matter of following the main road beyond for a distance until the hospital came up on the right.

They could make it yet, get James the medical attention he desperately needed. Would luck really be on their side? Would the road to the hospital be clear for them now, despite all the signs there were that this was where the highest concentration of zombies should be?

The sudden absence of the undead didn’t sit right with him.

While it was true that many things that happened in life were down to chance, people tended to blame just about everything that happened to them on pure luck, when in fact a lot of events were really the outcome of unchecked behavioural patterns. People were generally terrible at taking responsibility, looking at their own actions and thinking about what they were doing wrong, rather than chalking everything down as a matter of stupid fucking luck.

Kingsley wasn’t about to ignore the strangeness of the lack of zombies here. Something had probably drawn them all farther ahead, and if they continued down the road they would probably end up walking into a large group of the undead.

If that happened, it wouldn’t be because they were unlucky. It would be because of their failure to heed the signs.

That accident wasn’t luck. Emma breaking up with you wasn’t luck. It was all your fault. These thoughts flew at him. Accusations, facts, contradictions? Whatever they were, it didn’t matter – not right then at that moment, and that couldn’t have been any clearer to him.

Apocalypses have a way of highlighting the important things in life, Kingsley thought as he turned to tell his friends that they should take the next exit off the main road before they ran into trouble.

They nodded at him and followed, likely sinking into their own turbulent thoughts.

Maybe that was why they didn’t immediately notice the red slug-trail lines of blood leading around the corner. Or the little pieces of raw meat in them. Or, when they turned the corner, the blood-covered bodies squatting around the open back doors of a butcher’s van, feasting on the carcasses of two slaughtered pigs.

This was where all the dead had gone. They had been drawn to this side street by the meat from a butcher’s van, all the zombies from that long, empty stretch of the main road. There were at least twenty of them, and the sound of them all gnawing together on pig flesh was a horrible, wet cacophony.

Kingsley may not have liked to blame everything on luck, but at the same time, he was aware that pure happenstance could be a significant factor in how some events played out; and it definitely seemed like happenstance that one of the zombies at the back of the feasting group happened to turn it’s head and stare in the direction of the four survivors who had frozen in the middle of the road, completely caught off-guard.

They hadn’t made any loud sounds to attract it’s attention. The zombie just turned, glared at the newcomers with it’s murky grey eyes for a few seconds, then stood and began to limp toward them.

Kingsley found himself rooted to the spot. He didn’t want to run because he thought the movement and sound might catch the attention of more of them, yet he realised that killing this one could have the same effect. It would have been best to slowly creep away, but that wasn’t possible now that one zombie was onto them.

And it looked like another one had also picked up on their presence. It was about to escalate into a bad situation.

But the first zombie only made it halfway toward them. The door to a block of flats on their left flew open and a figure loped out with something heavy and cruel dangling from their hand. Moving fast, it was hard to tell whether they were alive or undead.

That question was answered right away, though,

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