The three of them reached the shop, stumbling inside one after the other. Emma assumed the man’s plan was to go through the staff door and exit into the alley at the back of the shop, so she started to run there as soon as she got inside.
The man stopped her with a gruff call for help.
She whirled to find him crouched by the front window, trying to push an ice cream freezer in front of the entrance to block it.
Joining him, Emma gritted her teeth and put her shoulder to the freezer. It was heavy, a waist-high, plastic and steel container with the added weight of all the ice and frozen desserts inside. But their combined efforts were enough to gradually move it. Emma considered unpacking some of the frozen products from the freezer to make it lighter and easier to push, but one glance out the window put an end to the notion; the infected were drawing close to the shop. There was no time.
The freezer was inches from the door when an infected man in a dishevelled suit burst through, stumbling into the corner of the freezer. Emma immediately scanned the shelves for something to use as a weapon. Her eyes stopped on the two-litre bottles of lemonade lining a shelf to her left. She snatched one up, hefting it in both hands.
Emma hesitated. Stared at the stony, snarling face before her. Monsters, she repeated to herself. Not people.
As the infected lunged at her, fear trumped her other emotions – as it always had – and Emma took a swing at it’s torso. The infected tottered back a step but was unhurt.
“Aim for the head!” the homeless man yelled at her.
Emma swallowed, her throat dry as bark. Then she lifted the bottle again and obliged the man, bringing it down on the forehead of the zombie. It wobbled on it’s feet. But the second hit still hadn’t hurt it. Clenching her teeth, Emma clubbed the infected with the bottle a third time.
This time the bottle punctured from the impact. Lemonade sprayed out, wetted her arms and chest and puddled on the plastic flooring. The dog barked at the spouting liquid.
In agitation, Emma flung the leaking bottle at the infected, then turned a shoulder to it and shoved the monster back through the doorway. The slippery floor helped, causing the infected to lurch and fall onto the pavement outside.
Emma quickly slammed the door shut and returned to help push the ice cream freezer the last few feet.
Once they were satisfied that the entrance was secure – standing back to watch as several of the desperate zombies piled up against the door and the window, smacking on the glass – they sat against the wall in semi-shocked silence. The contrasting smells of sour sweat and sweet lemonade muddied the air.
Emma’s hands were sticky from the sugary drink that had spilled over them when the bottle split open. The sudden thought of her sticky hands touching her phone screen made her cringe.
That was when she realised she’d left her phone at home.
The anxiety that had been redirected to the infected outside began to creep back into the forefront of her mind.
4.
The bus was nearing Colchester, and there was no telling what the survivors would find when they got there.
The emergency notice was still being broadcast on the radio but it gave no new information. Kingsley guessed a lot of people had listened to the advice on the broadcast and were staying in their homes; he recalled the twitch of a curtain and the retreat of a shadowed figure from the window of a building back in Braintree.
Kingsley could get no service on his phone. Neither could Eric. Kara and Rebecca’s phones were out of battery, but Rebecca had kindly let Kingsley use hers to ring Emma before it died. She hadn’t answered.
Hoping to avoid more impossibly clogged roads like the A120 near Braintree where they had been forced to abandon their cars, the survivors were taking the longer, but quieter, back road route to Colchester rather than the direct route via the A12. It wasn’t a route without obstructions, though. On one of the narrow country lanes, they came round a bend and almost plummeted into an SUV skewed horizontally across the middle of the road, the driver’s door ajar and a snapper strapped into the passenger seat, squirming in effort to free itself.
The bus was too wide to slip past the SUV so they stepped off to see if they could move it out of the way. The engine had been left running, but not long enough to drain it of diesel. At a guess, the ginger-haired woman in the passenger seat – who had a bite on her shoulder, blood congealing into a purple mass in the fabric of her blue vest top – had turned at some point during the drive and attacked the person at the wheel, causing them to swerve and come to a stop in the middle of the road. Then the driver had probably panicked and fled.
While Eric and Rebecca searched the SUV for supplies, Kingsley stood thinking about how quickly they had devolved into insolent scavengers who rooted through the belongings of the recently deceased without batting an eyelid.
It had been two days of madness, and here they were. Despite the notion that humans were the conquerors of the natural world, it had always really been the other way around; it was the environment that shaped the psyche and gave humans the need to conquer things in the first place.
Though some people had changed quicker. Surrendered their humanity in the name of survival on day one.
The thought of Darren and his hasty decision to kill James was still laced with anger. It didn’t matter that the apocalypse prepper had only done what was necessary for safety, or that Kingsley would probably now do the same thing himself. Because Darren had not
