Right, so we were travelling in the pickup towards the centre of town, following the road that passed by the court building where Shooty McFuckface tried to gun us down. It’s weird how long ago that seems, yet it was hardly any time at all, but after the Prius explosion that likely drew in a mass of undead, we reasoned any such mass had likely ambled apart over the weeks, drawn away by whatever little sounds captured their mindless attention.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
“What the living fuck?” muttered Nate, slowing the pickup to a halt, but leaving the engine ticking over.
His words were somewhat ironic. Stretching from the burnt-out wreck of our deceased Prius, right across all four lanes of the carriageway and up to the court building, there was a fucking sea of undead. There was nothing living about it at all.
I’m not talking the couple of hundred that shuffled out of the shopping centre all those weeks ago that I played British Bulldog with. Shit no.
“There’s got to be nigh on a thousand,” breathed Nate, answering my unspoken query as to the number. Military folk always seem to have a knack for estimating numbers. My estimate was in the region of, “a metric fuck ton,” which is less than, “oh my fucking God,” but considerably more than, “well, isn’t this a pickle?”
Bear in mind this town’s population total was probably just over ten thousand, so we’re talking ten percent of the town’s population in this wall. How the hell did they all get here from all over town? The explosion of the Prius? Shit, there’s been gunfire galore since that day with our running battles with Bancroft’s crew. Gunfire echoes for some distance, and those storms of screaming lead and rattling rifles should have drawn the mass away from this location like flies to shit. It doesn’t make any sense.
They weren’t just strung out in a scattered mess in the manner we usually find crowds of undead. This was a wall of the undead, and if you’d handed them costumes and shields, they could have been lined up like the ranks of an undead Roman legion. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, a dense mass of motionless hate, just waiting. Not shuffling, nor ambling in their aimless way. They were an impassable barrier to the far side of town, like undead Spartans and their allies packing the narrow pass of Thermopylae, and they weren’t letting us Persian fuckers through to our promised land. They were a monstrous, ravenous wall of darkness. Just… waiting.
“Do they usually do this kind of thing?” whispered Alicia, her eyes bright and wide, her disbelief equal to ours.
“No,” murmured Nate. “No, they don’t.”
“What do we do?” I asked. And then the weirdest thing of the whole fucking day happened.
The moment I spoke, the spark of demonic life ignited in the undead, and hundreds of eyes snapped round, locking onto us. I say us, but it felt like me. Nate and Alicia had muttered in low tones and there was no reaction. The moment I’d opened my mouth, just as softly as my two compadres, every fucking head snapped round in our direction, and that tight mass of aberrations begin to ooze forward with that same purposeful stomp.
I nearly shit my heart out of my arse.
That movement is far more terrifying than their hateful looks my way. It’s been easy to laugh with dark humour at the brainless meander of the undead pockets we’ve encountered. I laughed like a maniac when I dodged and weaved through the lesser mass in the shopping centre when I was trying to flank Bancroft’s useless sniper, but I wouldn’t have raised even a titter if the undead had been moving like this on that day. They don’t run (thank fuck), and they don’t necessarily move much faster, but it’s all in the way they move, like they’ll walk through any obstacle that stands in their way to get where they’re going. Like they know where they need to be.
And where they wanted to go was exactly where I was sitting.
It wasn’t just the front rank, or a group splintering from the mass. It was the whole fucking horde.
“Nate,” I urged. “Get us the fuck out of here, right fucking now.”
“Aye,” he agreed, throwing the pickup into reverse and thundering back at speed, before whipping it round in a one-eighty and getting us the hell out of Dodge.
I looked in my passenger side mirror and shivered, seeing the mass of undead still plunging forward, eyes locked to us as we sped off into the distance.
“We’ll leave it for today, eh?” said Nate, not turning to look at me. His eyes remained focused on the road, but I heard the note of concern in his voice. He’s sharp as hell, and I’m fairly sure he picked up on the fact that the undead legion didn’t do diddly shit until I opened my mouth.
I’m still freaked out by the whole experience. Particles is on my lap now, staring at this screen as I record the events, as though checking the validity of my words, making sure I haven’t missed anything.
I don’t know what’s going on, Freya. Something has changed and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I am genuinely fucking scared.
OCTOBER 7th, 2010
THE HOME FRONT
I woke up still unnerved by yesterday’s experience, and in truth, I hadn’t really slept much anyway, so I decided to hit pause on another venture out today and Particles seemed more relaxed because of it, though he still didn’t leave my side. Even when I went to take a piss, I came out of the bathroom to find him sitting doggedly (pun intended) outside the door, pulling sentry while I was at
