Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse (23 page)

Behind the church was a s
catter of weathered gravestones, enveloped by a rusted wrought iron fence that wrapped around the edges of the property. The gates sagged open and tufts of long stringy grass grew around the support posts.

Cutter
glanced at Samantha.

Samantha wasn’t moving.

She wasn’t breathing.

With a gut-wrenching sickening slide, Cutter
suddenly realized why.

The car had rolled to a stop beside a mailbox: number thirty-four. It was
Hos’s fortress.

Cutter followed the trail that broke away from the road as it weaved a hundred yards through a tree-studded field
and ended abruptly in front of the burned out blackened shell of a destroyed house.

The roof had collapsed, and the grass around where the building had stood was burned. Only one
sidewall of the building remained. The rest had been utterly, totally destroyed.

Fifty yards away from the house was another burned out building. It might have been a barn – Cutter wasn’t sure. He felt the crushing weight of total despair suck the breath from his lungs and drain away the blood from his face.

He stared, desolate, for long seconds, and there was the sound of a wild roaring in his ears.

Bes
ide him, Samantha sat small in the shocked silence. She was weeping.

T
here was no Eden.

* * *

Cutter shook his head in disbelief, and then swore bitterly. He punched at the dashboard with his fist. He felt cheated – betrayed. He flung himself out of the little hatchback and stood staring at the ruined buildings.

Samantha climbed from the car, made small and quiet by her despair, and the force of Cutter’s rage. She brushed at tears. High in the sky overhead, big black crows flew in lazy spiraling circles.

Samantha closed her eyes, and Cutter thought she might be praying.

He glanced away.

Then he froze.

The skyline was filling with h
undreds of dark wavering shapes that seemed to rise up from out of the grassy fields beyond the burned out house. Cutter’s eyes went wide in appalled horror. Zombies were cresting the gentle slope and beginning to spill down the fields towards where they stood.

Too many to count – a thick dark wall of snarling demented fury. Maybe still a mile away, but coming at them in a ragged serpentine wall.

“Shit!” Cutter spat. Samantha’s eyes snapped open. She saw the terror in Cutter’s face and followed the direction of his gaze. She went cold.

“Get in the car!” Cutter shouted.

He gunned the little engine and it roared to life. He crushed his foot down on the accelerator. The car leaped forward. The track was narrow, but there was open ground a hundred yards ahead. Cutter sped towards the clearing and as soon as the car had room, he threw the wheel hard over in a sharp turn. The tires skidded, biting into the gravel and then losing traction. Cutter felt a moment of weightlessness and the steering wheel kicked viciously in his hand. The motor roared. Cutter crushed down on the brakes. But it was too late. The hatchback went off the road and teetered on two wheels for a perilous split-second.

Then it rolled over onto its roof.

The sound inside the car was a crashing roar in their ears. The roof collapsed. Dust filled the air and the car – and Cutter and Samantha were slammed from side to side, and then hurled upside down. Cutter felt the Glock dig into his ribs and a flash of blinding pain. He heard Samantha scream out in panic and then his teeth bit deep into his lip and there was a copper-like burn at the back of his throat that tasted like blood.

Cutter groaned. The world was upside down. He kicked out hard at the crumpled door and crawled out onto the grass. Samantha was lying tangled, with her arm trapped between the seats. He hauled her out gently and wrapped his arm tight around her waist.

“Nothing broken?”

Samantha shook her head. “Your mouth is bleeding.”

Cutter didn’t seem to hear. He reached back inside the wrecked car for the black carry bag and found the revolver still in the glove compartment.

The zombies were closing quickly. They reached the burned building and swept down the hill unchecked.

Cutter looked around in despair.

“The river!” Cutter said. It was a few hundred yards away, down a gentle slope, directly away from the zombies. If they could get to the water ahead of the horde, they might be able to find a boat. He heaved the bag up onto his shoulder and the weight of it almost took his legs from under him. “Come on! Run!”

“No!” Samantha said suddenly. “The church!”

Cutter stared. “We can’t escape. They’ll be all over us. They’ll pour in through that gate – or knock the fence down.
It’s abandoned Sam. It’s a wreck!”

But Samantha had already started running.

Cutter staggered under the weight of the bag. The zombies were raging down the slope to intercept them. The church was still fifty yards away when Cutter realized the first of the undead would reach them before they made it to the church. Samantha realized it too. Cutter was behind her. Samantha was close to the wrought iron gates. She snatched the Glock from her jeans and dropped to one knee.

“Run!” she screamed at Cutter. He was sweating. His shirt was wet against the heaving swell of his chest. His legs felt like rubber. The bag was like a millstone around his neck. He felt his feet kicking up dirt as he staggered closer.

Samantha turned back to the closest zombies. There were two mutilated rotting shapes that had reached the shallow drainage ditch on the opposite side of the road. Samantha took careful aim and fired. The first ghoul was flung backwards into the grass. The second threw up its arms and snarled. Samantha fired again and the bullet hit the zombie in the chest. The ghoul spun round in a circle and fell into the dirt.

Cutter dropped to the ground beside Samantha. He threw the bag down in the dust and struggled up onto one knee. “Make every shot count!” he said. “We need to conserve the ammunition.”

He fired at two more of the undead that were bursting through a low border of bushes on the opposite side of the road. One of them went down and stayed down. But the other got up, and Cutter had to fire three more times before he hit the ghoul in the head. He cursed.

“I’m almost out of bullets,” he said.

Samantha snapped off one more shot and then ripped open the zipper on the bag and dug her hands inside. She snatched a look up at the zombies. They were twenty feet away. She felt her fingers fumble over unfamiliar shapes inside the bag and she glanced down.

“Cutter, there are boxes of ammunition in here!” she said in disbelief. And then her fingers felt deeper, and her eyes grew even wider. “And these!”

In her cupped hands she held three grenades. They were shaped like miniature pineapples. Cutter stared in wonder. “Team Exodus. The guys must have put them in the bag.”

“What do I do?”

“Throw them!”

Samantha had sat through enough war movies to know the basics. She c
lamped one hand over the safety lever and pulled the pin with the other. Then she jumped to her feet and hurled the first grenade into the milling mass of undead.

She threw the grenade like a girl. It went twenty-five feet,
wobbling in an awkward arc through the air, and landed amongst the zombies. Then suddenly the air was split apart by the sound of a deafening
‘crump!’
, and the ground shook with the impact of the blast. Samantha was hurled off her feet. She landed on her back on the grass. When she sat up, shaking her head and her ears ringing, the air was filled with a swirling dust cloud.

“Did I get any?”

Cutter turned and glared at her. His face was covered in dust and there were clumps of grass and flesh in his hair.

“Give them to me!”

He took the second grenade and threw it high and long, and even before it had detonated, he had the pin pulled from the last grenade. The first exploded and he threw the final one at the same moment, tossing it into the closest of the undead who were clambering down into the muddy roadside drainage ditch. Cutter threw himself over Samantha’s body, pressing her down into the grass and throwing his hands protectively over his head as the final grenade exploded and ripped the soft earth apart.

“Now run!”

They got to their feet and staggered towards the church gates.

Cutter didn’t know if there were undead behind them, and he couldn’t risk the split-second it would take to find out. He didn’t dare to stop running. He knew if he did, he was dead. He pushed himself on with the last dwindling reserves of his will and strength until he was hunched against the sagging church gate.

The gate was
wrought iron and eight feet high at its arched peak. It was about ten feet wide. Cutter dropped the bag and set himself the next task. The gate was rusted orange oxide and mounted on rusted old hinges. Cutter took a deep breath and threw his shoulder against the resisting weight.

“Get in here!” Cutter shouted to Samantha. She heard his voice and turned. “Try to find somewhere to hide. It’s your only hope. These gates won’t hold them. They’re falling apart – and so is the entire damned fence.”

Samantha ran back through the gate. There were zombies everywhere – a solid dark wall of rotting bodies. They pressed closer and the air filled with the stench of their decomposition. Cutter saw a hundred snarling spitting faces, each one hideous and ravaged and bloodied with demented mindless rage. He cried out and threw the very last reserves of his strength against the gate, just as the first of the undead spilled across the dusty road and began to funnel towards the opening where Samantha stood waiting like bait.

The gate moved. Not only moved – the gate swung effortlessly on whisper quiet oiled hinges. It swung in a sharp fierce arc and slammed hard against the post. Cutter
’s eyes went wide in bewilderment. He stood there staring down at his hands while the undead hurled themselves against the wrought iron. His hands were orange, but it wasn’t rust.

He knew what it was. It was the one thing he
did
know about.

It was paint.

“Your belt!” Samantha shouted, her voice so full of panic that it cut through the fog of Cutter’s confusion. He looked up. She was standing a yard inside the gate, near the post. Undead hands clawed through the wrought iron bars at her. She fired once into the closest zombie and the bullet ripped the top of its skull off. The ghoul slumped against the bars, held upright by the press of raging madness behind it.

Cutter snatched off his belt. He went to the
gate post and handed his Glock to Samantha. She emptied the magazine into the milling undead, cutting a swath through the corpses so that Cutter could lunge forward and loop the belt around the post and gate fixture, sealing them in.

They stood back, face-to-face
, with uncountable undead with just the church fence between them. The ghouls had spread along the length of the fence, shaking themselves against the iron bars and spitting thick brown gore until the slime of it covered the grass.

Cutter spun round quickly. Other undead were sweeping towards the side fence near the headstones. He watched them hurl themselves against the
barrier and recoil in maddened frustration.

Cutter showed Samantha his hands.
They were colored with dry paint dust, as if he had dragged his hand across the side of a house.

“It’s paint,” he said slowly, as the realization began to dawn on him. “I thought it was rust. I thought the fence – this whole church was an abandoned, ruined shell,” he said. Then he shook his head slowly. “It’s not. Samantha, it’s
Hos’s fortress. He camouflaged the church and the grounds to look like it was abandoned and rusted out. It’s all a mask.”

Samantha stared do
wn at Cutter’ hands. She smeared some of the dry paint off and rubbed it on his shirt, then smiled up at him. Her face was pink, her eyes wide and wild with adrenalin and relief.

“
Well if Eden was going to be anywhere, Cutter, then surely a church is the most fitting place in the world.”

* * *

Cutter and Samantha patrolled the perimeter of the church fence for an hour before Cutter finally relaxed. It was solid. Under the mask of paint, the wrought iron was shiny silver, and the posts along the border were as thick as a man’s wrist and footed in concrete. The undead threw themselves against the barrier in a relentless moaning wail of anger and frustration – and the fence held firm.

Cutter shook his head. “Hos hid his fortress well,” he admitted. “He hid it where no one would ever think to look. In plain sight.”

They couldn’t force the front doors of the church: they were locked from inside and impossible to break open. Cutter went to the rear of the building. Under a small porch cover he found a second wooden door. It was bolted and hung with a heavy brass padlock.