“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I need to get back to Colchester. I know me and Emma aren’t exactly on good terms at the moment, but I want to see her. I have to make sure she’s okay. Nothing is more important to me right now than doing that.”
Sammy blinked and half-smiled in a show of understanding.
“But I’ll come with you to find your parents first,” Kingsley went on. “Kelvedon is near enough in the same direction as Colchester anyway, and we’re stronger together. We’ll stand a much better chance of surviving as a group. We should try to stick together for the time being, at least until we have a better understanding of what’s going on.”
Sammy’s half-smile rose into a full one and the dimples in her cheeks reminded Kingsley of the thoughtful, appreciative young girl he had known in their school days.
They turned to Eric, who shrugged and agreed to the plan.
“The only family I have are friends,” he said. “And I’m staring at the most important ones.”
Having known him since early childhood, Kingsley knew that Eric’s biological parents had died in a house fire when he was a baby, and he had spent most of his youth in a foster ward before being adopted by a jolly, divorced man who loved him unabatedly. His adoptive father had remained single until he passed away seven years ago, and Eric himself was single and openly aromantic; he had few connections, but the people he did have were close.
“As you said, we should stay together.”
Kingsley nodded, picked up the duffel bag. “Okay. Let’s go find ourselves a vehicle.”
2.
Concrete, brick and glass. Drifting rubbish and blood stains. Corpses stalking the roads on expired legs.
The tired colour palette of the urban sprawl was not alleviated by the weak sunlight, and the recurring signs of abandonment and death were more of an eyesore than a horror at this point.
They had thought there would be at least a few cars left that they could take. But every car they came across was either locked – and even if they could risk the noise of smashing a window and breaking into one, none of them knew how to hot-wire a car – or surrounded by too many snappers for it to be worth checking out.
Clearly, most of the people who had made it out of Braintree alive had taken their cars with them, and most of those who had died and/or been infected had never reached their vehicles which were locked up and collecting dust in the driveways. Likely never to be used again.
Whether it was the same in the other towns and cities, they had no idea. Kingsley hoped the population of his hometown had fared better with the undead threat, that more people were alive there, barricaded in their homes, and there were fewer snappers on the streets.
He hoped Emma would still be there when he arrived.
After about an hour of searching and failing to find a vehicle, Kingsley started to believe they would end up having to go on foot. He wondered how long it would take, how dangerous it would be, whether he had any chance of finding Emma at all.
Suddenly he was irritated. He didn’t know what exactly was causing the spurt of emotion – perhaps a combination of everything he had been through recently, along with the hopelessness of their search for a car.
But his irritation grew into anger.
And that anger swelled into a fury.
A snapper shuffled across the road in front of them and Kingsley strode towards it as it turned in their direction, his machete rising. With a suppressed shout, he kicked the snapper in the middle of it’s chest, sending it to the tarmac on it’s back.
Kingsley hesitated for a brief few seconds before the image of James sprawled out dead on his back, just like this sorry fucker, pumped motion back into his arms and he slashed at the snapper’s legs, severing one at the knee.
Pinning the snapper to the ground with his foot, Kingsley stared down his blade at the face below him.
The girl couldn’t have been any older than seventeen. A pair of white headphones clung to her neck, one of the speakers broken and hanging from the frame by a wire. Gym clothes hugged her body, clean and intact apart from a rip in her leggings where infected teeth had torn into her thigh. It looked like the girl had been walking to a gym session when it happened, drowning out the world with her music and blissfully unaware, probably up until the moment she was bitten, of what was going on around her.
He didn’t want to think about the human being the girl had once been, but it was that frozen expression of shock, agony and regret on her face – the expression she had died with – that made him think about it.
Kingsley felt a hand on one of his shoulders and flinched at the touch. Then one settled on his other shoulder. Eric and Sammy stood at his sides, looking down at the undead girl.
Eric bent down and ended the snapper’s squirming with a knife to the temple.
“We killed a man. We… we fucking murdered him.”
“No,” Sammy said. Her tone was flat. “You didn’t kill him, Kingsley. It was me, and me alone. I pushed the knife into his neck.”
“Why didn’t we listen to James? He wanted us to leave him.” Kingsley’s anger was subsiding into remorse now. “It could have all been avoided if we had just listened to him.”
“Kingsley – look at me.” Eric was facing him, tear trails framing the hard, straight line of his mouth. “Remember what I said to you in the woods two days ago? That dwelling on the things you can’t change only makes it harder to plan ahead for the things you can change?
“The second I stabbed Darren in the leg I regretted it, and I haven’t stopped
