The impact of the body slamming against the front of the bus startled him.
A floodgate broke open in his head, traumatic memories pouring out and sweeping him back to that terrible moment. The only other moment in his life when he had felt so out of control at the wheel of a vehicle – the accident.
Suddenly, he really didn’t want to be driving.
But Kingsley couldn’t slow down or stop. Snappers were chasing them. A lot of snappers.
He saw that the bus was heading towards one of the shelters between the parking lanes. But for some reason, he couldn’t steer away from it. His arms were paralysed, his muscles rigour. They were heading straight for the edge of the shelter but Kingsley’s foot would not lift from the pedal.
Only the jolt of them crashing forced him to hit the brake.
The voices of his friends filtered into Kingsley’s awareness through a haze of disorientation, through the familiar ringing in his ears.
“Reverse!” Eric.
“What happened?” Sammy.
“Hurry, we’re being surrounded!” Kara.
Kingsley began to put the bus into reverse – at least he tried to. But his hands were shaking like hell and everything felt so uncannily slow. His mouth opened and closed like he was a fish out of water, the words trapped in his throat.
A large pair of hands pulled him out of the seat. Eric took over. Kingsley dropped into one of the passenger seats, unable to do much else other than try to control his shallow, frenzied breathing while the others struggled to maneuver the bus around the wrecked shelter.
Five minutes later, a hand touched Kingsley’s shoulder and startled him from his fever. It was only then that he realised they were no longer in the bus park. They were now coasting along a main road, approaching the urban-rural fringe of the town.
Kingsley looked up at Sammy, her hand still resting on his shoulder. She tried to smile at him, but he could see the worry in her eyes, clear as day.
*
It was all his fault.
Everything that had happened to them was because of him and his stupid decisions. He had led them to Braintree after James had been attacked, and James had ended up dead. Maybe James would have died regardless, but not in that brutal manner. And if they hadn’t gone to the town, they might have been able to bury his body rather than leave him to rot on the floor of a stranger’s flat.
Kingsley hadn’t been able to steer the bus out of the way of that shelter and it had almost resulted in all of their deaths. He had misjudged; he didn’t think he would be affected in that way when the bus hit the snapper.
He should have known. His therapist had urged him to take it slow, to not drive when he was feeling anxious. But Kingsley had never been very good at taking advice.
It was all his fault.
With Sammy taking the wheel, Eric walked over to Kingsley and sat in the seat next to his. Kingsley watched the trees and fields whizz by, not sparing his friend a glance. He knew that Eric was going to tell him exactly what he needed to hear, but right now he just wanted to be left alone.
“It was a trap.”
They weren’t the words he had expected to come out of Eric’s mouth. Kingsley’s head turned a fraction.
“Somebody made a trail,” Eric continued. “A trail of blood and meat to lure the snappers to the shop. It led into the stockroom where our stuff was, like someone knew we were staying there and wanted to ambush us.”
Kingsley didn’t know what to make of that. For a moment, he was baffled as to why anyone would want to kill them.
Then he remembered Darren, and his talk of the group that had been with him – a group of three other people, so he had claimed. There was a good chance that the crazy, apocalypse-obsessed man hadn’t been lying, and his pals had returned to find him dead and all of his expensive weapons and valuable supplies gone. That would surely piss them off.
But Kingsley found it hard to believe that anyone would have gone through the effort to set a trap for him and his friends.
First off, they would have needed to track down Kingsley’s group or have seen them leave the building with the weapons and then have followed them.
Then they would have needed to set the trap, which meant wasting meat to make a trail that would lead the dead to the store. Who would do that?
“There was a severed pig’s trotter in the trail,” Eric said. Kingsley’s head turned all the way now, and he faced his friend with bewildered eyes. Before he could speak, Eric continued. “It was a trail of pig flesh, Kingsley. Remember that van full of pig carcasses outside Darren’s flat?”
Kingsley gawped at him now, suddenly understanding. It made sense. Darren’s group had used the pigs as bait to shepherd the flesh-craving undead from one street to another. It wasn’t impossible that they had used that trick again to set a trap for the people who killed their friend and stole their supplies.
Kingsley managed a few words. “Does that mean they’re following us right now?”
Eric shook his head. “I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll lose them now that we’re out of Braintree.”
“Jesus… We need to be more careful. We can’t just kill people and take their stuff.”
Eric frowned. “We didn’t attack Darren for no reason. He shot James as soon as he found out he was bitten. The bloke was fucked up in the head.”
“But we can’t have conflict like that,” Kingsley said. “We need to be more careful when we run into survivors. People are more dangerous than the dead.”
“You think I’m not careful enough? I’ve made some bad decisions, I know. But only to keep us alive, and I’m choosing not to let my decisions weigh me down so I can continue to keep us alive. Maybe you should do
