Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse (18 page)

Cutter began to feel
uneasy. The building he remembered might have been a safe, defendable haven to rest for the night. A glass-fronted diner was not. He felt his hopes begin to slide as the silver hatchback slowly crept closer.

Cutter looked around carefully, his eyes searching for signs of movement – for any
sense of danger.

He noticed about a dozen houses that had been built just beyond the turnoff to
Draketown.

They were new. They all looked the same: like some small random estate of cookie-cutter homes that had been
thrown up quickly by a developer who had been keen to make a fast buck with low cost accommodation. Cutter frowned, and his sense of disquiet started to sound louder in the back of his mind.

The old gas station had stood alone in the middle of nowhere
– just a dot on the map beside a turn in the road. Now he was staring at a small residential development. Cutter wondered about the homes, and what might be waiting for them as the night pressed down and the darkness filled with sounds and fear.

“Is this the place?” Samantha asked. She sounded scared.

“I’m not sure anymore,” Cutter admitted. “It’s changed a lot from the way I remembered it.”

Samantha stopped the car in the middle of the
highway, forty yards short of the diner. She left the motor running and glanced down at the temperature and fuel gauge needles. She bit her lip. “Car’s getting a little hot,” she said softly. They had been driving at such low speed the radiator had begun to hiss under the hood. “And we have a little under half a tank of gas left.”

Cutter nodded. Half a tank of gas was all they needed – Eden Gardens couldn’t be more than twenty miles ahead. But the radiator was a problem.

He turned to Samantha. “What do you think?”

The girl stared through the windscreen, anxiety
darkening her expression. “I don’t like it,” she said at last.

Cutter n
odded. “Neither do I. But I don’t see what choice we have. We can’t drive through the night.”

Samantha nodded. “But maybe there will be somewhere else we can stop,” she offered. “There might be another place further along the road. Maybe a farmhouse, or another general store.”

“And if there isn’t?”

Samantha sat back in the driver’s seat. Cutter could see the rise and fall of her chest and the movement of her breasts beneath the fabric of her shirt as she fought to control her breathing. Finally she turned to him with sad, fatalistic eyes. She nodded. “Okay,” she said in a small voice, and Cutter sensed the girl had suddenly remembered that she was alone with him – that her father was no longer there to protect her.

For the first time in her life she was alone in the world.

Cutter had re-loaded the revolver and the
Glock during the drive. He put the revolver in the glove compartment and racked back the slide on the Glock.

“Just go in nice and easy,” Cutter said. “Whatever you do, don’t stop the car. Don’t park up anywhere. We want to cruise around the parking bay for a few minutes. If there’s anything waiting for us, we’ll have time to get away.”

Samantha nodded grimly. She tightened her grip on the wheel. Cutter slid down the passenger-side window and felt a cool breeze on his face. He braced himself in the seat, tensing his body and feeling his nerves suddenly string taut. The car rolled off the blacktop and he heard the tires crunch over loose gravel as it bumped down onto the concrete.

They drove past the front of the diner warily. Samantha’s eyes darted anxiously in all directions. Cutter stared through the glass windows.

The diner was gloomy – and deserted.

He could see about a dozen tables, and twice as many chairs, strewn around the room, upended or laying on their side. Against the far wall he could make out the shape of a high serving counter. A cash register was
lying open. The floor was littered with napkins and cutlery. There was blood on the bottom of the diner’s door. Nothing moved.

Samantha reached the far end of the parking lot and pulled the car into a tight three-point turn. They cruised back the way they had come.

“Stop.” Cutter said when the car was near the glass door. “Wait here – and keep the motor running.”

Before Samantha could protest, he flung himself out of the Honda and crouched, poised. He reached slowly for the door and pulled it wide open. The stench washed over him like a wave: the familiar sickly reek of death, mingled with the greas
y smell of fried food and coffee. Cutter used a chair to keep the door wedged open and stepped past spattered blood that lay slick and congealing on the tiled floor.

He stood inside the diner for long seconds. The place felt abandoned. He saw a stand of packaged snack food to his
left and he snatched up bags of potato chips. The sound was loud in the eerie silence and he swung the gun in an arc towards an open door behind the serving counter.

There was a wide hole in the wall next to the doorway and beyond he could see the shiny
steel edges of commercial cooking equipment.

Cutter stomped his foot loudly on the floor. Nothing moved. No sound. He scraped a chair across the tiles. The sound was jarringly loud. He let it fall to the ground and the noise echoed around the empty walls.

He waited. Nothing.

Finally he allowed himself a long slow breath. He turned to Samantha, sitting fraught with panic in the waiting car. He raised his thumb and edged backwards out through the door until he felt the fender of the Honda brush against his leg. Without taking his eyes off the empty diner he called quietly over his shoulder.

“It’s empty,” he said. “Park the car up between a couple of the others. Reverse it into a space so the nose is out. We’re going to spend the night here.”

He heard Samantha sigh, and then the sound of the car revving. Samantha swung the Honda into a parking space and Cutter edged back into the middle of the
concrete lot to meet her as she came running to him. “What about the bag?” she asked. Cutter nodded. He handed his Glock to Samantha and fetched the bag from the car. He hefted it over his shoulder, took his gun back and waited until Samantha had drawn the other Glock from her jeans. “And the revolver?”

“I left it,” Cutter said. “And I left the car unlocked. Just in case we need to get away quickly.”

Samantha shook her head. “What?” she sounded appalled. “It might get stolen. Then what will we do?”

“There are plenty of other cars here,” he said. “If anyone comes in the night and they’re looking for a car to steal, a little Honda hatchback won’t be their first choice. And it’s worth the risk for us to be able to escape quickly.”

Side-by-side, with the pistols drawn, they edged back towards the diner. Around them night was falling fast. The warmth of the sun had gone, leaving the air chill. Samantha shivered.

Cutter went though the door, moved the chair aside and held it open with his back until Samantha went into the diner ahead of him. He let the door close and locked it.

“What’s beyond that door?”

“Kitchen,” Cutter said. “I don’t know what else.”

They went cautiously around the counter. Cutter stole a glance through the doorway and ducked back. His grip on the gun tightened. He took a deep breath and stepped into the opening.

There was a man’s
arm on the floor. It had been hacked off from the rest of the body and lay mangled in a pool of blood. The limb was stiff and pale, and there was a bloody knife still gripped within the fingers. There was a gold watch around the wrist. Cutter followed the frenzied patterns of blood with his eyes and found the other arm lying on a stainless steel bench. The torso of the body was slumped behind a deep-frying vat on the far side of the kitchen. It was awash with blood – more blood than Cutter imagined a body could contain. He gagged and turned away. Then saw the body’s head in a sink. It looked to Cutter as though the head had been severed, and then ripped from the torso. The mouth hung agape, the jaw slack. The skin was pale, the eyes wide and staring. It was the head of a middle-aged man. Cutter glanced over his shoulder at Samantha. She was edging through the kitchen door, her eyes enormous. “Don’t come in here,” Cutter warned. “Watch the entrance while I check out what’s behind this last door.”

It was a steel door without a lock, hanging ajar between two commercial refrigerators. Cutter smelt spoiling food as he stepped closer. The door was narrow. Cutter set the heavy bag at his feet and held the pistol ready. He flung it open.

It was dark inside. There was no light. He fumbled for the lighter in his jeans and flicked it on.

It was some kind of a storage room.
He could smell onions and dirt. He held the lighter high overhead and stepped into the room. It was only small – maybe fifteen feet square. There were shelves stocked with boxes of rotting fruit and vegetables along one wall. Cutter went quickly back out into the blood-spattered kitchen.

“In here,” he urged Samantha.

He led her into the storage room and dragged the bag in behind them. He lit a candle and pulled the door closed.

Samantha took the candle and held it high over her head. She glanced quickly at the surroundings and then
back to Cutter. She shook her head. “There’s no lock?”

“No.”

She stared at him in appalled silence for long moments. “And you want to spend the night here?”

Cutter nodded.

“In a room without a lock on the door?”

Cutter nodded again. “It’s not perfect,” he conceded. “But we either sleep in here, or in the car.”

“But there’s no lock!”
Samantha said again, her voice edged with rising hysteria.

“I know,” Cutter grabbed her shoulders. “So we have to be quiet. Stealth and secrecy are going to keep us safe.”

* * *

Cutter filled a plastic shopping bag with snack food and
warm soft drinks and came quietly back to the storage room. Samantha was sitting cross-legged on the dirty floor, hunched and miserable. She barely looked up as Cutter began sorting through the supplies.

“It’s dark out now,” he said. “I checked the lock on the door and set a couple of chairs against it.”

Samantha raised her eyes. “Do you think the chairs are going to stop the undead from breaking in?”

“No,” Cutter said. “But the noise will at least give us some warning.”

Samantha grunted. Cutter reached for the candle and set it down between them. He held up a bag of chips. “Chicken flavor, or barbeque?”

Samantha said nothing. Cutter handed her one of the packets and a can of Coke. The can was warm.

“Eat while you can,” Cutter said. “You never know when we’ll get the chance again.”

She looked up at him. “And what about sleep?”

Cutter nodded. “You can sleep tonight,” he said. “I’ll stand guard at the door.”

“You don’t trust me
to pull my share of guard duty?”

Cutter shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said. “You need to sleep because you’re driving. I can sleep tomorrow in the car until we reach Eden Gardens.”

Samantha lapsed into moody silence. Now the terror of escaping the city was just a lingering nightmare, she felt the full crushing weight of sad despondency as her memories drifted back to her father.

Cutter sat in the corner and let her be. There was nothing he could say – and he had his own dead family to grieve.

* * *

Cutter heard a harsh sound
, and his nerves ripped and jangled in alarm. It was the sound of the diner’s glass door being forced. He sat up, pressed his ear against the door of the storage room, and listened for long seconds with the sound of his breathing and the sudden thump of his heart drowning out the detail.

He went to where Samantha lay and shook her awake urgently. Her eyes flew alert in an instant.

Cutter put his finger to his lips. “Someone is breaking in to the diner,” he whispered.

Samantha reached for her
Glock and Cutter went back to the door.

The sounds were louder now, harsh scraping noises. Cutter imagined the door being
wedged open and the chairs he had used as a barricade being forced aside. He felt the press of Samantha’s warm thigh against his own and he turned to her, their faces just inches apart.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’m going out to take a look.”

He heard the sharp intake of her breath, and then he pushed the storage room door silently open and crept into the dark kitchen.

But it wasn’t entirely dark.

Cutter crept to the server window and slowly raised his head. There was ambient light coming into the diner from a slice of moon in the sky, and out in the parking lot a car’s headlights were shining in through the full-length windows, filling the front of the diner with weird bright halos of light and strobes of movement and shadow.

Cutter saw two men. One was holding a crowbar. The other was holding a length of chain that was wrapped around the neck of a tall young woman. The woman’s head was bowed and her hair hung down over her face. She was shaking and sobbing.