Who was on that bus? Was it full of people, banding together and helping each other survive, or was it just more thieves? Was there room for good people in this world anymore, or was there only space for survivors?
Emma went left at the roundabout, the direction the bus had come from, and turned onto Shrub End Road. Then froze.
Zombies filled the road ahead, thronging towards her. The noise of the bus must have attracted them, as they were walking in the direction it had gone – but now they had seen Emma and were evidently more interested in the easier target she presented, their murky eyes fixing on her, one by one.
Her heart fluttered and she snapped her gaze back and forth between all the possible routes to the park.
The quickest way she could think of was the narrow dirt path behind the cash and carry on Peddler’s Close. But to get there she would have to get past the group of twenty or more zombies in front of her. There was no way in hell she was doing that.
Backing away from the voracious infected, Emma glanced at the barren car park of the pub to her right. The road next to the pub was blocked by them, but if she cut through the car park she could get around them and follow the long, winding road to the parks main entrance.
A longer but safer route. Her legs were already carrying her that way, driven by mechanical fear.
It felt as though there were rusty nails in her heels being driven deeper and deeper into her flesh with every step. But the only way Emma was stopping was if she dropped dead.
Which wasn’t an unlikely prospect.
She was about halfway along the road when she came across five infected clustered around a body that lay near the curb, one leg mangled and half-severed at the shin, arms flung out in snuffed anguish. Flitting between the infected without much difficulty, Emma stepped over the body – just as one of the hands animated, grabbing hold of her tired foot.
Startled, Emma missed a step, yanking her foot free from the grip of the immobilised undead. But in doing so she lost her balance, tripped, fell and landed with her knee crashing on the curb.
Emma yelped in pain.
Seeing the infected closing in on her, inert on the pavement, she tried to stand up again – only for her knee to flare in agony, the pain forcing her back onto her arse.
Shit. How screwed am I now? she wondered helplessly as she scooted along the pavement. There was no way she could move fast enough to escape the zombies like this. She raised her steak knife, her fleeting coherent thoughts going to the memory of bashing an infected over the head with a lemonade bottle. Did she have it in her to stab one of them to death?
Then fear took over, and Emma no longer had to ask herself; the vacant face of an infected was in front of her as it bent down to grasp her leg. She put her knife through it’s eye, burying the blade in the socket. There was a stomach-churning pop as she punched through the cartilage behind the eye, then penetrated the brain.
Even as she tore her knife from the infected’s head, horrified at what she had just done, Emma knew she wouldn’t be able to take on the other five of them. Nor could she run. She was fucked. Completely and utterly—
Wait… She almost didn’t hear it over the thrumming pulse in her ears, but it was definitely there.
The sound of a car approaching.
She looked and saw that it was a white van. It pulled up nearby, the doors opened and three men hopped out.
Wielding knives and a cricket bat, the men quickly took care of the zombies, cracking their skulls and stabbing them in the soft points at the temple and the back of the head.
Just like that, Emma was saved. She sat there on the pavement, knee throbbing, gazing at the bodies sprawled around her and trying to process the fact that she was alive right now.
Then she lifted her eyes to the strangers who had saved her life. Three men, one old guy, one young and one middle-aged. Like dad, son and grandfather, except they didn’t look related to one another in the slightest, the young one being clearly of Asian descent while the other two were Caucasian.
The middle man stepped forward, Emma immediately getting the sense that he was the leader of this trio.
“Have you seen a bus?” the guy asked. Had Emma not been reeling from her close encounter with death moments ago, she would have answered right away. Especially since the man had a cranky air about him, his hands constantly moving, fidgeting with his knife.
She had seen a bus.
“Err… yes, there was one… I think it was blue – blue and white. It—it went down Shrub End Road towards town.” Emma pointed in the direction she’d come from. “Thank you for saving me,” she added.
Something flickered in the man’s eyes. He glanced down the length of the road, then turned back to Emma. “Which way is that? I’m not familiar with this area.”
Emma started to answer, but then he seemed to notice her injured leg for the first time and he cut her off.
“Your leg’s hurt. Is it broken?”
She shook her head. “It’s my knee. It’s just badly sprained, I think.”
“It’s dangerous out here,” the man said. “Come with us and you can show me where the bus went. We’ll help you. With your leg.”
Her first instinct was to politely decline the offer. The idea of getting into a van with three men she didn’t know in order to help them track down a bus for god-knew-what reason wasn’t appealing. But she wasn’t exactly in a position to turn them down. After all, her knee was fucked; she could
