Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse (22 page)

“Keys are still there,” she said.

“Get it out of the parking space,” Cutter snapped. He felt his senses coming taut again and he crushed down on a rising tide of alarm. “Make sure it’s running smoothly.”

Samantha got the hatchback parked alongside the 4WD. She waved at Cutter through the windshield.

Underdude leaped off the back of the truck, hauling their heavy black bag. He flung it onto the backseat of the little silver car and then clambered back up onto the vehicle.

“Zeds,” Lone Wolf
pointed suddenly, but his voice was calm and detached. “Three of them across the road. Maybe a hundred yards away.”

Rampdog
heard the call. He got out of the cabin and stared back across the deserted street. He could see the zombies. Two of them were rotting filthy retches, hideously deformed and hissing with demented rage. They broke into a sudden sprint and raced towards where the vehicles were parked. The third ghoul was a big man who shambled unsteadily, as though newly infected. Rampdog made his decision.

“Put them down, Lone Wolf.”

The Scotsman had his sniper rifle already up to his shoulder, tracking the zombies through the telescopic sight. He fired three quick shots, working the bolt of the weapon with smooth practiced precision, and the undead dropped to the ground before the final sound of gunfire had echoed and faded away into the still morning air.

“That will be the dinner bell for the rest of them,”
Rampdog turned to Cutter and frowned grimly. “It’s time to go.”

Cutter nodded. He stared past the shape of the big man and glared at Jillian through the open door of the 4WD. The girl had discarded the warm jacket so that she sat with her blouse gaping open and her skirt rucked up high on her thigh
s. She stared fixedly ahead through the windscreen.

She sensed Cutter’s eyes burning into her but never turned her head. “I’m a survivor, Jack,” she said. Her voice was empty of all emotion. “I know
the game and I do what it takes.”

Cutter stared. Said nothing.

Jillian’s eyes swam with tears. “Don’t hate me for wanting to stay alive.”

Cutter turned away. Samantha was waving urgently at him through the windscreen of the hatchback.
Rampdog got back into the passenger side of the truck and thrust his big hand through the window. “Be all you can be – and good luck to you both.”

Cutter ran for the hatchback. Other dark twisted shapes were beginning to emerge from around the corner of the diner. Samantha spun the wheel of the car and put her foo
t flat down on the accelerator, heading north.

Heading towards Eden
Gardens – and hope.

Six
.

Paradise...

After a mile the road north narrowed to two lanes and the land beyond the thin ribbon of blacktop became rolling green fields of farmland.

Samantha relaxed her grip on the wheel and stole a glance at Cutter. He was watching her.

“You look like you’re deep in
thought,” Cutter said.

Samantha paused, and then nodded. “I guess I am,” she said. “But I’m thinking about a lot of things at once.”

Cutter raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

Samantha shrugged. “I was thinking how little I know about you… and how much I’d love to get out of these clothes right now.”

Cutter looked at her sharply. There was just a trace of a twinkle in the girl’s eyes – enough to suggest to Cutter than she was perfectly aware of the double meaning.

He glanced away and watched the farmland drift slowly past the window. There was a smudge of dark smoke on the eastern horizon. “I’m an artist,” Cutter said at last. “A commercial artist. I painted book covers and CD covers – those kind of things for publishers.”

It was Samantha’s turn to be surprised. “Have you done work for any authors or bands I might know of?”

Cutter laughed. “Probably not,” he said. He turned back and she was looking at him. He realized suddenly how young she was.
Young and innocent. She had perfect smooth skin and big wide eyes: impossibly beautiful and unprepared for the terrifying way the world had turned. But he knew too, that below that naïve exterior was a tough, steely resolve, and he found her beauty and bravery impossible to reconcile.

He shook his head, but for a different reason. “I don’t think the books or music you listen to are
the sorts of covers I’d be commissioned to illustrate.”

She made a face, but it was a fun, lighthearted gesture, and then seemed to change the conversation completely.

“Tell me more about Eden Gardens,” she said. She brushed a long golden tendril from her face with the back of her hand. “Tell me what you know.”

Cutter sat back in the seat and closed his eyes. He remembered Hos and the conversation back in the
bookstore basement. Had it really been just a couple of days ago? It seemed like an eternity had passed, so that his recollection was vague and halting.

“The man who told me about the place died back in
Newbridge,” Cutter explained. “But the night before, he told me he had a place in the country that was prepared for this kind of apocalypse. He told me he had been a survivalist for years –”

“– Like the men from Team Exodus?” Sam interrupted and Cutter nodded. “I imagine so,” he said. “He seemed the type.”

“Type?”

Cutter nodded again. “He had an interest in guns and tactics. That kind of thing,” Cutter explained. “He told me his place was a fortress. He had a full collection of weapons and a stockpile of ammunition, food and water. And he said he had a generator.”

Samantha smiled and her expression was almost dream-like. “Does that mean hot water for a shower?”

Cutter shrugged. “I don’t know,” he smiled. “Maybe. We’ll have to be careful with water. But I remember the area around Eden Gardens being good farmland. So maybe it means we can plant a vegetable garden. If the land around the house is fenced or fortified.”

Samantha slowed the car and diverted her attention quickly back to the road. There was a burned out vehicle across one lane. Thin wisps of black smoke still climbed lazily into the morning sky. Next to the car was the dark charred shape of a body. Cutter checked the Glock and wound down the window. “Don’t stop the car,” he said. “Pass the body on this side so I can get a clear shot if I need to.”

Samantha obeyed. The car crept past at a crawl. The blackened body never moved, and as soon as they were past, Samantha built up speed again.

“Is it a big house?”

“What?” Cutter’s mind was still on the remains that lay dwindling from sight in the car’s side mirror.

“The house we’re going to. The fortress. Is it a big house?”

Cutter frowned. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But the man said he had come into
Newbridge to try to rescue his mother. I think she was old, or ill. He never reached her in time – but that must mean the house has a couple of bedrooms at least. Maybe more, because storing six months of food and water, and weapons takes up plenty of space.”

Samantha made a so
und like a wistful sigh and then drifted into thoughtful silence once more “What do we do when we get there, Jack?”

Cutter frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do we do?”

“We wait,” Cutter said. “It’s all we can do. We stay there until the virus burns itself out.”

“Will it?”

Cutter nodded. “Eventually,” he said. “It has to. The undead rise and they’re slow, but they become faster as the virus reaches to all parts of their bodies – but they’re still undead. They’re decomposing. We’ve both smelt the stench. Their bodies are rotting away. Sooner or later, it has to reach the point where they are no longer a threat.”

Samantha stayed silent, and Cutter felt compelled to reassure her in some way. “Or maybe the army will move in,” he said. “If they have a good defensive line and the infection hasn’t spread past the eastern states, then maybe they will mobilize the military and begin cleaning up. One way or another, this has to end eventually. We just have to reach Eden Gardens and wait it out.”

As they drove on towards the town of Guthrie, the road gradually became choked with more abandoned cars, and more
dead bodies. It became harder for Samantha to navigate the obstacles and keep the car on the road. She stopped the hatchback on a bridge and they got out cautiously and peered ahead.

The bridge was a rickety old timber structure that had been built back before the Second World War, when the farms and towns surrounding
the city of Newbridge had all been linked by dirt roads. Cutter and Samantha went to the railing and peered down into the river. Bodies were floating downstream, rolling and floundering in the eddying water as it washed under the bridge.

“Where does the river go?” Samantha asked.

“The ocean,” Cutter said. “It starts in the hills outside of Guthrie and winds its way south, past Newbridge and eventually runs all the way to the coast. In the old days, farmers used to send their produce to the city on barges.”

Cutter went and stood on the hood of the car and swept his eyes carefully north and east.

The road cut through patches of woodland as it meandered towards Guthrie, and there were trees lined on both sides of the road. He squinted his eyes. There was smoke on the horizon.

He turned and looked south, and frowned.

“We must be almost there,” he said cautiously. “The turnoff to Eden Gardens can’t be much further. He pointed to the skyline. “There’s smoke on the horizon, maybe seven or eight miles north,” he explained. “That’s most likely the township. And the turnoff to Guthrie is a couple of miles before you hit the town outskirts – so we can’t be far from safety.”

They climbed back into the car and Cutter got behind the wheel. There was an overturned Ford sedan blocking the road ahead and he was forced down off the road and into long grass to get past it. The Ford’s roof had been crushed and he saw a small broken body trapped in the wreckage.

He drove on.

For some reason he had been expecting a big billboard sign by the side of the road with pictures of apple trees and beautiful gardens written in flowing italic script. The reality was very different. The turnoff to Eden Gardens was a small green sign with simple lettering:

‘Eden Gardens 2 miles’

The sign had been peppered with buckshot so the paint had flaked and rusted around the impact dints. Cutter shrugged. He turned off the main road and the little hatchback bounced on its
springs as the surface became a narrow dusty track that was grooved and rutted by years of use by heavy farm equipment.

They drove through a small grove of trees and then the land around them on either side of the trail opened up into lush farmland, fenced and furrowed into a huge patchwork of greens and browns. Cutter wound down the window and the air was fresh. There were mailboxes clumped in groups along the side of the road and more dirt tracks branching left and right towards isolated farmsteads that sat hunched in the distance, well away from the roadside. Samantha read off the numbers with a growing sense of excitement and anticipation.

“Twenty four and twenty six,” she said. She pointed out through her window. One of the mailboxes was an old four-gallon drum. The other had been made of wood into the shape of a tiny house. Underneath was the name ‘Rogers’ painted in the big imperfect letters of an amateur.

Cutter drove on. The river followed them. It cut through the land like a fat silver python, reflecting the midday light and shimmering under the sun.

“Thirty,” Samantha said suddenly. Cutter tore his eyes away from the river and glanced through the side window. Beyond the mailbox, he saw a dirt track leading towards a run-down clapboard house about two hundred yards from the roadside. There were a couple of rusted out trucks parked in front of the homestead and a post and wire fence leading all the way to the horizon.

Cutter slowed the car. Ahead was a rise on the ground, like the gentle undulation of a wave. He nodded. “Over that crest,” he said. “
The Garden of Eden.”

Impulsively Samantha clutched at his hand and squeezed tightly. Her face was flushed and her eyes alive with hope and excitement. Her hand felt warm. Cutter didn’t want to let it go.

He took a deep breath and checked the car’s mirrors instinctively. There was a drifting haze of dust behind him from where the car had disturbed and kicked up dirt. Beyond the haze, the road was empty.

He took the car slowly up the rise and felt himself craning forward in the seat, anticipating the first glimpse of
Hos’s fortress that was to become their home together.

The hatchback went up the slope and at the top of the rise the lay of the land opened up before them. The river was to their left, beyond a
quilt of green fenced fields, and narrow trails. And just off the road – maybe two hundred yards ahead – was a flat grassy strip of fenced-in land, surrounding an abandoned country church.

The church had a stone foundation and the rest was clapboard
painted white, with three short timber steps leading up to solid wooden doors. The windows had been boarded over. It had a steep roof over the nave and a square tower with a bell.