The boy nodded. “Absolutely. Loud and clear.”
“Okay then. As soon as the rain lets up and we’ve got a dry day, we’re going to move out.”
The rain finally receded, and after a full dry day and the sky clearing, Dean set the outing into motion. Alex and Zain were both strapped into light Kevlar vests, helping to underline the very real danger that existed outside the walls of the campus, and Sarah checked and double checked her weapon. She was nervous, but that reassured Dean in a small way. Nerves meant she was taking the danger seriously and lessened the chance of any complacency.
Dean took his usual loadout of the Glock and G36C and the four of them climbed into his Range Rover. In the boot, they’d loaded up a few backpacks from the school to make carrying any medicines they could recover quick and easy. This was a get in, load up, and get out mission. Direct to the pharmacy, do what they needed to do, and return to the school. After that, Dean would start planning their next move in hunting for more food. Having Sarah to back him up would hopefully help speed up those operations and he reminded himself to organise building clearance lessons with her. Having so many differing buildings on campus would give him varied options to test her developing skills, but for now, they were distant plans.
“Everybody ready?” he asked as he closed the driver door. He turned to look at the two boys in the back seat. “All good?”
Both boys gave a nod, clearly nervous.
“We’re ready,” said Sarah, gifting him with a smile of reassurance. She looked so much like her mother at times. Each day the likeness to the late Andrea was growing.
“Alright then. Buckle up. Let’s get this done.”
The drive was relatively simple on the quiet roads. As they approached a right turn that would take them towards town, his three young passengers gaped at an old accident that had occurred back in the early days, when a speeding BMW coupe had smashed into a small Mini Cooper as it pulled from the junction, scattering debris all over the road. The three of them gasped as they passed it, seeing an undead woman still strapped into the Mini, the white eyes and silent snap of her jaws a chilling accompaniment to the broken arms reaching for them. In the back seat of her car, the tall sides of a child seat poked up above the rear window, though the twist of the metal prevented them from seeing if there was a child still strapped in. They were not ready for such sights yet, so Dean thanked the Lord for such a small mercy.
“Is that what it’s like everywhere?” asked Alex in a small voice as they made the turn.
“It is,” confirmed Dean. “Out here, you’ll find little hope. Only tragedy and sights you can never unsee.”
The three youngsters remained silent at that. Dean did not like to seem so negative or dramatic, but managing their expectations was more important than protecting their innocence. While he did not feel the need to force such macabre sights as undead children still strapped into car seats on them, they needed to know that the things they might see would affect them. The dead had risen to murder the living, and society as they knew it had fallen. Life was forever changed.
As they started passing a few clusters of housing on the outskirts of town, the three passengers stared out of the windows constantly, drinking in the stillness of the world around them. The road was devoid of traffic, no people were tending their gardens, no red-faced joggers with their earphones in, and no cyclists frustrating drivers by taking up the whole lane on the winding road.
“It’s so still and silent,” said Sarah absently, her eyes drinking in the apparent tranquility. “Like we’re driving through a landscape painting.”
“That’s a neat way to describe it,” replied Dean. “It won’t stay like that, mind you. We’re approaching the top of town now, so sightseeing is over, sweetheart.”
Sarah turned to look at him, forcing an expression of tight focus to her youthful face. She nodded, saying nothing more, and idly rested a hand on the gun sheathed at her hip.
As he neared the end of the long road, Dean could see there was already a mound of twisted metal across the approaching junction. He had not entered town this way before, but it was the easiest way to access the small pharmacy, which was about two hundred yards from that junction. When he had visited town on some of his early excursions, he had used a couple of different routes that kept him far from the town centre, where traffic accidents would have caused difficult snarls in road access.
He breathed a sigh of relief as he neared the junction. From a distance, he had imagined a mountain of mangled vehicles and undead interspersed among them. As he neared however, it was clear that much of the traffic must have been able to get around the obstacles by mounting paths and grass verges usually reserved for pedestrians. As he neared, the vehicle jolted as he mounted the small pavement, using the same tactic as previous drivers. Driving over a wide, flat grass area and following the road to the right, he spied the small left turn where the pharmacy was situated.
There were corpses littering the scene of the accident, which drew the eye of the three youngsters as Dean concentrated on driving.
“Uncle Dean?”
“Yeah?” he said absently as he steered carefully round an obstacle.
“I can see about twelve or thirteen dead in the road. Not undead, but dead.”
“And?”
“From what I can tell, they’ve all been shot in the head.”
That gave him pause. “Say again?”
“They all look like they’ve been shot in the head, and quite recently, as they don’t seem particularly rotted or bloated.
