8.
The entrance to Greenwood Crescent was visible halfway up the street when Terry stopped suddenly to vomit.
As he chucked his guts up, Kingsley wondered what they were going to do with him while they went to confront Mark. They couldn’t bring Terry along with them as an extra head was likely to arouse suspicion from Mark. And if he sensed anything odd going on, if he thought he was being played, he might slit Sammy’s throat open before they had a chance to talk.
Obviously, they could leave him here to wait and then come back for him after they’d rescued Sammy. But Terry was vulnerable in his current state; he was weak. If more snappers came along, he might not be able to defend himself.
And what if he turned before they got back? He was a ticking time bomb and his dog would be the first victim.
Kingsley scanned their surroundings for a safe place to leave the man while Eric and Kara checked on him. Kingsley’s eyes alighted on the building adjacent to the corner they had just turned – a public toilet block. The cubicles inside would have locks on them. That might just be the perfect place, he thought.
He turned to Rebecca. “Hey, I’m gonna check the toilets out. Could be a good place for Terry to rest. Can you come with me and watch my back?”
She nodded.
They jogged over to the toilet block, conscious of their limited time. There were three doors on the low dun-brick structure with signs for men, women and disabled. Kingsley headed for the ladies’ room. Most public male restrooms were unpleasant places at the best of times, let alone when they hadn’t been cleaned for days because of the zombie apocalypse that had ravaged the nation. Kingsley didn’t want to imagine the ammoniacal reek that likely permeated the air inside the men’s room; it wouldn’t be a very comforting smell for someone in Terry’s condition.
Kingsley trained his crossbow on the door at eye-level as he kicked it open. It was dim inside, empty, quiet… until he got five paces in and picked up on the hollow sound of snapping jaws coming from one of three floor-to-ceiling cubicles on the right-hand side of the room.
Approaching the cubicles, he placed the occupant snapper in the one closest to the entrance. The cubicle wasn’t locked but because the door opened inward, the snapper inside couldn’t get out as it didn’t have the cognition to pull instead of push. Having heard the survivors enter, it was now throwing itself against the door repeatedly from the inside.
Rebecca stood side-on to the cubicle and held her machete in front of her chest, pointed at the door.
Then after a few more slams from the snapper on the other side, she turned the door handle, jerked it open, poked her machete through the snapper’s emaciated face as it lunged out from the cubicle.
Kingsley ducked into the other two cubicles to make sure they were empty. Which they were. He twisted a tap on one of the sinks just to test it and got a stream of clear water.
After helping Rebecca take the body outside, he beckoned the others over. As soon as they entered the toilets Terry went to the far wall and sat down with his back against it, hanging his head between his knees. Kingsley squatted next to him and made sure he was fully conscious before he spoke to him.
“The cubicles are all empty,” Kingsley said. “If you feel like you’re close to turning, lock yourself in one of them. That way Archie will be safe from you if it happens.”
He refilled the bottle of water from his backpack at one of the sinks and placed it by Terry’s bag. “We’ll only be around the corner. This seems like a pretty quiet area, not a lot of snappers about, but you best keep that hammer close. Just in case.”
As they left the restroom Kingsley took one last look at the homeless man, who gave a weak smile that was obviously supposed to be reassuring, but instead looked so out of place and forced that for a moment it filled Kingsley with immense despair.
What the fuck are we about to do? he suddenly thought. But he quashed the emotion as soon as he felt it.
The truth of the matter was that sometimes there was no simple way out, no path to avoid pain. But that didn’t mean you should do nothing; dismissing a problem, rejecting reality, was always worse than a poor decision because a problem ignored was bound to grow.
They arrived at the turn into Greenwood Crescent.
Hanging back from the entrance, Eric told the others to wait while he trotted up to the wall of the nearest house on the development, sneaked to the corner and peeked across the packed-dirt driveway towards the centre of the development. He returned to the others with a determined look on his face.
“They’re parked at the end of the driveway, standing in front of the van with Sammy. Waiting for us. I reckon you’ll get a good shot from the second house on this side,” he said to Kingsley. “Go now, get in through the back. We’ll give it a few minutes before we meet them so you can find a spot.”
“Alright,” Kingsley said. “See you on the other side.”
With a tight-lipped smile, he was off. Dashing across the fenceless back garden plots of the newly erected houses.
9.
It was time to go.
The hour would soon be up. If Mark carried out his threat, Emma didn’t want to be around to witness what he had promised to do to Sammy. And she couldn’t bear another minute of listening to the helpless cries that kept spluttering from Sammy’s throat.
She wanted to help. She really did. But how could she? One woman with a sprained knee against three armed men.
But even the logical fallacy of
