Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse (3 page)

I leaped the gutter and landed badly. I felt my left leg go from under me and then I was falling. I went down in soft grass, my momentum hurling me end over end until I felt cold concrete under my back. I got up quickly and checked myself for injury. My legs were trembling and the surging adrenalin made my hands shake. I stood gingerly and took a couple of steps.

Nothing broken. Nothing sprained.

The night was so dark that it was impossible to see more
than a few feet in front of my hands. There was no ambient light. There was no light at all. I heard my brother’s heavy footsteps as he pounded across the blacktop and then he was rasping and gasping for breath beside me. Harrigan came across the street last. He was a big beefy man. I didn’t imagine he would be fast on his feet. I heard him well before I saw him – heard his ragged gasping breath as he came closer. He must have been running with his arms outstretched because I felt the slap of his palm against my shoulder as he almost crashed into me.

We didn’t wait.

A dark solid shape loomed ahead of us – the silhouette of a house. I knew this place because I had stared anxiously through the curtains a hundred times in the past few weeks, scouring the neighborhood for marauding zombies. It was a two-story home, directly across the road from the house we had been hiding in. I remembered there was a row of low hedges that served as a fence-line across the front of the property, and I groped my way forward until I felt the brush of small leaves and branches. I kept my hand extended, and began to pace tentatively until I came to a break in the foliage. I felt more concrete under my feet – the path that led down the side of the house. I turned and waited for Jed and Harrigan to find me. It took a moment. We were like three blind men, the task made all the more difficult by the howling wind that moaned and shrieked like some mournful lament of the damned.

And maybe that’s what we were.

“Stick close,” I pressed my mouth close to Jed’s ear. “Keep each other in sight.”

I went along the path, and sensed the shape of the house overhanging us like an avalanche of black. The path was narrow, and I kept my hands outstretched, feeling my way. The path was flat. I could feel long grass and low scrubby thorns snagging at my jeans
. I pushed on, moving in a cautious crouch as we suddenly walked into a hole in the wind.

We were walking close against the side of the house. The building was buffering the force of the gale. We could still hear it howling through the trees and rooftops, but suddenly it was calm enough that I could open my eyes fully and rub the grit and dirt from them. I took a chance.

“Jed, give me your lighter.”

I needed to get my bearings. I knew where we were – but I had no idea what lay beyond. The view of this house from the living room window of our hideout showed this path that lead down the side of the home… but then what?

I sensed Jed rustling through his pockets, and then felt him press the cigarette lighter into the palm of my hand. We crouched down, making ourselves as small a target as possible and I flicked the lighter. I cupped my hand around the tiny orange glow. It threw off just enough light for me to see the faded green clapboard siding of the house, a few feet of concrete path – and Jed and Harrigan’s taut, strained faces, cast in a ghostly orange glow that deepened the shadows of their features so they looked like undead apparitions.

The glow from the lighter also turned every tree, hedge and fern into ghastly nightmarish shapes. I flicked the lighter off.

“I think this path leads all the way around to the rear of the house,” I whispered. Jed and Harrigan leaned closer. “There has to be a back fence. We find it, and we go over it. It’s our best chance of avoiding trouble,” I explained, hoping I sounded calm. “The Zed’s won’t be wandering around suburban back yards in the middle of the night – they’ll be roaming the streets – so we stay low and we stay close to cover. Okay?”

I must have sounded confident. Jed and
Harrigan simply nodded. Then I felt Harrigan’s big meaty hand – a hand the size and shape of a baseball mitt – on my shoulder. “The chopper,” he said cautiously. “It’s moved again. I think it’s coming back this way, Mitch.”

I propped my head to the side and tried to focus my attention. The sound of the rotors was still a constant noise, but it had been
the same for so long now that I had to focus in order to separate the sound from the undulating howl of the wind that carried it. I shrugged. It didn’t sound any different to me, but I wasn’t prepared to doubt Harrigan’s verdict. “What do you think that means?”

Harrigan
was silent for long seconds. “He might not be able to find a safe place to set down,” Harrigan speculated. “We’re in the suburbs. There are power poles and wires everywhere. Maybe he’s trying to use up fuel – like planes do before they crash. They try to burn up fuel, or they dump it to reduce the risk of an explosion.” He shrugged again. “All I know for sure is that he’s edging his way back towards us.”

“He might be circling,” Jed offered. “He might be waiting.”

No one commented. Jed’s words got whipped away by the wind. The truth was – we didn’t know.

But we were going to find out.

I got to my feet and cast another glance skyward. The night was a heavy blanket. Somewhere in the sky was the moon – but the banks of storm clouds were so dark and so low to the ground with the weight of pending rain, that not even the faintest night glow seeped through. Nor could I see the helicopter’s spotlight. Either the pilot had switched it off – or he was still too low for us to see it.

I took a deep breath. It was cold. I felt the air bite in my lungs, but my body was drenched in a nervous adrenalin-fueled sweat. I could feel the perspiration wet in my hairline and on the back of my neck, trickling down inside my
tee-shirt. I wiped my palm on my jeans. The handle of the Glock was slippery and damp. Then I started down the path towards the back fence with Jed and Harrigan shadowing me.

I went slowly – unsure of exactly what I might be walking into, and doing my best to keep the concrete path under my feet as it seemed to meander its way past small gardens and rock features. Then the sky was ripped apart by a jagged blue flash of lightning, and for a split second everythi
ng ahead of me was frozen and burned onto my eyes.

There was a retaining wall ahead of us and another garden that fringed the back fence of the proper
ty. The fence was made of wooden palings. I went forward slowly.

I waded into a barrier of rose bushes and thorny shrubs, then felt the rough timber of the fence. I crouched down and waited for
Harrigan and Jed. The fence gave some shelter from the swirling wind. I could hear it moaning through the tree-tops, and a flurry of leaves rained down on me. Somewhere overhead I heard a branch snap – the sound like the retort of a gunshot.

Jed squatted down in the garden beside me. We waited another minute. Nothing.

Clinton Harrigan had disappeared.

I cursed under my breath. Overhead, thunder rumbled with a sound like artillery fire, and the wind shrieked. There was no point calling out to
Harrigan – he wouldn’t hear me unless I shouted, and I didn’t want to do that.

I fumbled Jed’s lighter from my pocket and lit it. The glow was
a weak puny spark in the impenetrable depth of the night. It cast a small glow that showed me Jed’s face and the fence. Nothing more. But I wasn’t expecting to miraculously see Harrigan wandering around, lost in the darkness.

I was expecting him to see the glow, like a lighthouse in the middle of the night.

A few moments later I heard him, clambering for a foothold on the retaining wall, and then he was next to me, his breath ragged and his eyes wide and wild with the remnants of his panic.

I felt the big man’s weight slump against the fence. “Sorry,” he muttered bitterly. “I lost you for a moment. One minute I was following Jed, with my eyes on his back – and the next I was bumping into God-knows what and starting to panic.”

I said nothing.

I hadn’t been afraid of the dark since I was a kid.

But I was now. The night terrified me. As a child I had believed the darkness was filled with horror and monsters. Then I grew up and realized my fear was merely a child’s imagination.

But not now.
Now the terror was real. Now the night really was alive with monsters.

And horror.

And death.

Harrigan
had been on the verge of blind, terrified panic. I could see that in his eyes, and I could hear it in his voice. And I understood and sympathized.

I slapped him on the back and flicked off the lighter. “It’s okay,” I said. “From now on, you stay in the middle. Jed, you bring up the rear.”

I got to my feet and took a grip on the fence. It must have been old. As I heaved myself up, I felt it begin to sway. I scrambled to the top, and pushed myself out into the dark space – and then realized, too late, that I was a fool. I had no idea what was on this side of the fence. I should have used the lighter again. I should have taken the extra moment to be sure. But I didn’t.

For all that I got lucky. I landed on my f
eet on soft grass. I went down into a crouch and pressed my back against the fence. Another violent rent of lightning tore the night apart and I saw a small clearing and then a patch of light woods. This wasn’t someone’s back yard. This was some kind of a nature preserve that the developers must have included when the suburb had been built.

I called softly back to Jed and
Harrigan, and felt their weight coming onto the fence and then heard them landing on the grass nearby. Harrigan sounded like he was struggling. This was probably more physical activity than he got in a year. It was like taking on an army obstacle course – blindfolded.

I crept forward and found both men a few feet away.

“We’ve got a strip of grass – maybe thirty feet of clear ground – and then there is a fringe of trees,” I explained in a hoarse whisper.

I closed my eyes for a moment and concentrated on the so
und of the helicopter. It was closer now. The roar of the rotors seemed to be almost above us. I groped in the darkness until I felt Harrigan’s arm and pressed my face close to his.

“I think the helicopter is still on the move.”

There was a pause. “Sounds like it,” Harrigan agreed. “He’s definitely coming back this way. He’s definitely doubled back, or he’s circling,” Harrigan said with absolute confidence. “I think he’s lower now. The wind and the storm must be giving him hell.”

I thought about that for the first time. Up until now, I had only considered the plight of the pilot from a mechanical prospect; the terror of flying a helicopter that had some kind of mechanical fault, and the fear of crashing. Now I factored in the added danger of keeping an ailing helicopter in the air in the teeth of a howling wind and a night sky full of storm clouds and lightning.

Maybe the helicopter’s mechanical problems weren’t as severe as we had first imagined.

Or maybe the pilot was far better at his trade than I had ever considered…

I got to my feet and struck out across the open ground, moving in a bent-over crouch, counting my steps. I had guessed there was about thirty feet of open ground to the tree-line, and after twenty paces I paused and took a breath. Harrigan bumped into my back and then stopped.

“What’s up?” he whispered.

I didn’t answer.

I didn’t know. But something other than caution had made me stop.
Some instinct perhaps – or some sixth sense. I went perfectly still and my finger curled around the trigger of the Glock. Without turning my head – and without looking away – I reached behind me and pushed Harrigan back. “Down!” I said urgently.

I stared hard into the darkness before me. I knew the trees were somewhere close ahead, but I had also sensed movement. Maybe it was the trees, bending and swaying before the wind – but I didn’t think so. There was something else on the wind – something more than the electricity-charged air of the rising storm.

It was the stench of decay.

My eyes were useless – it was just too damned dark to see anything. I closed them and concentrated.

The wind swirled, and for a moment I could sense and smell nothing other than the heavy perfume of grass and earth. Then the pall of death came again, seeming to rise up from somewhere close ahead of me. I didn’t make a sound. I felt a lump of fear choke the breath out of me, and the Glock felt like a lead weight.

Slowly I reached into my pocket for the lighter with my left hand. The seconds dragged on. The rank, decaying smell seemed to coat the back of my mouth so that I felt myself begin to gag. I opened my eyes and stared directly ahead. I could see nothing. I could sense no movement. I tightened my finger on the trigger of the
Glock – and struck the lighter.

The flash of
orange glow in the night was like a bright, burning flare. Without my free hand shielding the light, the area ahead of us was thrown into dramatic relief.

I stared fixedly ahead, my gun ha
nd extended, my finger tight on the trigger, and my whole body tensed and coiled, expecting violence. I gritted my teeth.

Nothing.