Infection Z 3 (6 page)

W
hen Hayden climbed
over the fences of Riversford, he felt a part inside of him fade away to ashes.

As he walked across the main road and into the fields opposite Riversford, towards the trees, he felt a distinct urge to turn back. Sarah, Gary and Holly were with him, but Martha and Amy were staying behind. Nothing Hayden could say to Martha would possibly tempt her to leave.

Except he had a feeling there would’ve been something he could’ve said. He could’ve told Martha how much hope Newbie had for his daughter. How optimistic he was about a brighter future, and how he fought to the very end.

But that moment had gone now. That opportunity had passed. Martha and Amy were staying behind. Staying behind in the very place that Tim had died and Karen had turned, all without being bitten.

Staying in the clutches of the unknown.

And yet, there was a bigger sense of security surrounding Riversford than there were the grounds outside.

“Pretty depressing when you think about it,” Sarah said.

Hayden looked to his left at her. She was walking through the fields beside him, her brown walking boots squelching through the muddy grass that the sun shone down on. Winter was heading into its final act, which meant that the frosty grass that greeted them every morning was defrosting more readily. As the sun rose a little earlier every day, so too did the optimism, the hope.

And yet Hayden knew he had no idea what he was optimistic about, what he was hoping for.

“What is?” he asked.

Sarah turned around and looked back at Riversford. Studied it with her radiant blue eyes. Her dark brown winter coat was unzipped halfway, revealing a dirty white shirt underneath. Her blue jeans were splattered with mud and something that looked like blood. “That we were happy back there. Content back there.”

Hayden turned and looked back at Riversford. He saw the faint outlines of the metal hangars, saw the leafless trees scattered around the grounds beyond the makeshift walls. “It served its purpose. Kept us safe. Wasn’t so bad.”

“But to think it was the end goal for us. Just … just some industrial tip with decent walls around it and a stinky damp room to sleep in at night. To … to think we were content there. That we were happy that we had that place. It’s like back at the bunker. Is this all we’re living for now? Stopgaps on the road? One junkyard after another?”

Hayden thought about Amy and Martha being stuck back in Riversford. He tried to picture them firing shots at the zombies when they surrounded the fences or repairing the makeshift walls whenever a brick fell out of place. He thought of their solitude. Just the two of them, and maybe one day just one of them. And then he felt an incredible guilt. He’d made a silent promise to Newbie that he’d find his daughter and look after her. And yet here he was, marching away at the first opportunity without even attempting to win Martha and Amy over.

“Do you think they’ll be alright?”

Hayden looked ahead and saw Gary staring back at Riversford too. He could see the genuine look of concern on his bearded face. Beside him to the right, Holly, who was dressed in a black coat and black trousers way too big for her. She glanced back at Riversford with casual interest. But there was no connection in her look. No real sentimentality. And why would there be? All Riversford was to her was a stopgap. A temporary shelter where she’d finally found company to help her get to Holyhead.

Holyhead. Just thinking about it made Hayden’s stomach turn.

“They made their choice,” Sarah said, turning away from Riversford and carrying on walking. “We gave them the option to leave that place and Martha made the right call for her and her daughter.”

“Just dunno how you can say that’s the right call,” Gary said. His cheeks were reddening. He fumbled with the sleeves of his grey Mackintosh.

“Not to us, maybe,” Sarah said. She put a hand on Gary’s arm. “But Martha has a daughter to think about. And Holyhead’s a long journey to take on a … well, it’s a long journey to take.”

Hayden could sense the apprehension in Sarah’s voice. The doubt about this journey. “If there’s someone there waiting for us in Holyhead, we can tell them about this place. We—we just need to know for sure. We need to … to check it out. And then we can go back for Martha and Amy. Help them.”

Sarah, Gary and Holly all looked at Hayden with apprehension like he was a crazy person talking crap.

And Hayden understood exactly why. It’s because he
was
talking crap. There was no going back for Martha or Amy. Who in their right minds would take a risk like that?

They’d made their decision. They were gone.

And in this world, gone really was gone.

“Come on,” Holly said, leading the group. “It’d be nice to be out of the open and in those trees over there sometime soon. Then we can figure out which way we’re actually supposed to be heading.”

Hayden looked back at Riversford. He looked back at it and he remembered the hope he’d felt when he first laid eyes on it. Or was he misremembering? Had he felt hope or had he felt apprehension right from the off?

Had he felt the same way about Riversford as he now felt about Holyhead?

“Hayden?” Sarah said.

Hayden swallowed a lump in his throat. He thought about Clarice. Thought about her kneeling on the ground while Ally sliced her head off her neck. He thought about Newbie—Newbie’s drive and determination to reach his daughter, the hope in his face when he found that note in Martha’s old house.

And then he thought about Tim. Tim, dead on the ground for no apparent reason. And then Karen, turned without the first sign of a bite wound.

He cleared his throat.

Felt his face getting a little clammy.

He took a deep breath of the fresh late winter air and he walked.

“
H
ow long did
you say this is gonna take again?”

Hayden traipsed through the grass. His legs had lost their strength, and the rucksack of weapons and supplies over his shoulder made his body feel like it was going to cave in. Cold sweat stung his lips, and the smell of rot completely engulfed them in this barren woodland.

But that emptiness was also a problem. The complete silence was a problem.

The smell of rot accompanied by … nothingness. There was something deeply unsettling about it.

“Warrington to Holyhead used to take us a good two hours in the van,” Gary said. “And that was goin’ the easy route. Right down the motorway. Even with a car, it ain’t gonna be possible for us to go down the—”

“How long?” Sarah asked.

Gary moved his fingers through his short hair. “Forty hours. Or so. Two solid days walk without any rest. Talkin’… a week if we bear in mind sleep and—”

“A week,” Sarah said. She shook her head. Hayden could see the bloodshot tiredness in her eyes. “Knackered after a fucking
hour
and now we’re talking about walking a week.”

She glared at Holly, but Holly didn’t see it. Hayden understood it though. He’d been glaring at Holly this entire journey so far. Not with hatred, not with resentment or anything like that. But with curiosity. Genuine curiosity.

What did she have to gain?

What did she have to lose?

What did they really even know about Holly?

“This transmission,” Hayden said, catching up with Holly.

“The one on Harry’s phone?”

“You say you heard it?”

Holly nodded. “I saw the words on the screen. Saw all the stuff about an extraction point. There were others, too. Holyhead, Devon, Dover. Figured Holyhead was less of a strain on the—”

“What happened to the people you were with before us?”

Holly stumbled a little. She tried to disguise it as misplacing her footsteps, but Hayden saw it. He saw the question catch her off guard. And he didn’t like the surprise on her face. “I told you. Zombies attacked and—”

“You ran off into the woods and found a little cabin to stay in before conveniently dropping by at Riversford a few days after being bitten. I got that part. I still just don’t get why.”

“And by the sounds of things you never will,” Holly said. She turned and looked at Gary and Sarah. “I know how this looks. I know for whatever reason you don’t want to trust me. And that’s cool. I can handle that. I can live with that. But I know what I saw. I know what happened to me and I know what I saw on that website.”

“You said earlier it was a transmission.”

“Transmission, website, whatever,” Holly said. “Look, I’m not bullshitting you, man. I don’t expect you to believe that. But you’re out here with me now. We’re all out here and we’re all heading to Holyhead. So whatever beef you have with me, we all want the same thing here. We’re all pulling in the same direction. So can we please just… just not bite each other’s balls off about this entire situation? Can we just save some of our energy, maybe?”

Hayden never liked being spoken down to. But he was kind of relieved by Holly’s semi-outburst. “Well done,” he said. “That’s the most honest thing I’ve heard you say since I first met you.”

She didn’t have anything clever to say back to that.

They kept on walking through the trees, over the crispy fallen leaves and branches. The woods didn’t seem to be getting any thinner. They were heading west, according to Gary. And right now, Hayden was just taking Gary by his word. But he wasn’t too sure even Gary knew where he was heading. They could be looping around in these woods, heading anywhere.

“I guess this would be the part of a cheesy bullshit movie where we all talk about our sins before the end times and how fucking damaged we all are,” Sarah said.

Holly smiled. “Funny how the worst of clichés are often clichés for a reason.”

“Go on then,” Sarah said. “What’s your story?”

“Oh, not a lot to tell really. Nothing interesting anyway. No partner. No kids. No parents. No siblings.”

“On point about the sob story part,” Gary said.

“I don’t think we mentioned a thing about sob stories,” Sarah said.

Gary shrugged. “Musta been getting the clichés mixed up with the reality.”

Hayden couldn’t tell whether he was being intentionally witty or not.

“What happened to your folks?” Hayden asked.

Holly cleared her throat. “Oh, I er, I lost them after my sister died.”

The final words made the muscles in Hayden’s body tighten up. “You … How old was your—”

“Eighteen,” Holly said. “Anyway, like you say. Nobody wants a sob story. Pass us the water?”

Hayden reached into his rucksack with his shaking hand and he passed out some bottled water. When Holly turned around, she didn’t look at him directly, and it was right at that moment that Hayden saw the glimmer of tears building up in her eyes.

“I’m sorry. About your sister. I … I lost my sister. So I … I know. How it feels.”

She looked up, this time. Looked at Hayden with a look that said so much more than anything anyone had said to him since Clarice had been killed. It was a look of sheer empathy; not of sympathy but of an understanding that transcended words.

He looked back at her in this momentary stasis and he didn’t snap out of his trance until he heard the gasps up ahead.

“Wait.”

Gary held up his hand. The group stopped walking in an instant, like they’d just run out of batteries. Hayden could hear the gasps up ahead and he could smell the intensifying decay, but he couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t see anything drifting through the branches, couldn’t see anything clawing its way through the trees, reaching their rotten hands out to …

“There,” Sarah said.

It took Hayden a few seconds to realise where Sarah was pointing.

On the ground up ahead, there was a zombie. Its balding middle-aged head was intact, but its chest had been torn to pieces. Inside it, the bloodied remains of a heart punctured by cracked ribs, organs and entrails spilling out onto the bed of the woods.

Its legs and arms had been torn away.

And the worst part about it?

It wasn’t the only one.

“Shit,” Gary said. “The fuck happened here?”

Hayden looked at the line of zombies splayed out in front of him. They’d been torn to pieces. Torn except for their pitiful heads, mouths snapping away in search of a stray ankle or a flailing arm. Flies feasted and laid maggots on their exposed insides, and the zombies just didn’t react, didn’t care, just like they didn’t react or care about anything.

“Who … who could do this?” Holly asked. Hayden heard the genuine wonder, the clear amazement in her voice.

Sarah pulled the steel crowbar from her belt and crouched over one of the gasping heads. “I think the question should be
what
could do this,” she said.

She slammed the crowbar across one of the fallen zombie’s necks. The neck cracked, the zombie went silent.

But the rest of the zombies kept on singing their ghastly song, echoing through the woods’ perfect silence.

Hayden looked around at the trees. He thought he saw shimmers of movement in the light, twitching of silhouettes.

And then he looked back at the butchered zombie remains and joined the rest of the group in finishing them off.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.

Watched by
something
.

A
fter two more hours of
walking, Hayden fell to his knees.

Branches snapped underneath him. The dampness of the woodland floor seeped through his jeans onto his legs. No matter how much water he’d drank—and he
was
trying to ration—his throat was dry, and his stomach was calling out with hunger.

And they weren’t even a day into their journey.

Gary put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find some place safer to rest for the night, mate.”

Hayden shook his head. “I’m … I’m starting to think—”

“We can’t turn back,” Gary said. “Not now. We’ve come too far. And I ain’t mad keen on goin’ back to Riversford and gettin’ the apocalyptic sniffles anyway. So we push on.”

Hayden took some deep breaths into his stomach. A stitch crippled the right side of his body. They could do this.
He
could do this. He could push on through this hurdle and they could reach Holyhead, all of them, together.

He told himself he could do it, he could make it. But the belief wasn’t there. It was minuscule. Combated by the pain crippling his exhausted body.

Sarah walked over and put her hand on Hayden’s left shoulder. “Gary’s right. Don’t like saying that too much, but he’s right. You need to get up. Isn’t safe in here. I’m all for stopping for a rest but not in the middle of this place. Gives me the creeps.”

Hayden looked around at the trees, the fallen leaves, the occasional splattering of blood from God-knows-what and God-knows-when. It was the feeling of unease that was getting to him, too. It was like there was no calm moment in this woods because something was constantly watching. And yet that notion was absurd. They’d been lucky. They hadn’t encountered a horde of zombies or even a few strays for that matter. Except for the butchered zombies a few miles back, their journey through the woods had been unproblematic.

But that in itself was the problem.

There was no such thing as unproblematic in this world.

Hayden pulled himself up. His legs felt even worse for taking a few seconds of rest. And worse than that, they were damp, so they were cold too. Damp, cold legs for a one week trip. Shit—the chilly confines of Riversford seemed practically five-star next to this.

They moved further through the woods. Sarah led the way sipping at her water, Holly trailing just behind her. Gary and Hayden walked side by side.

“Be straight with me,” Hayden said. “D’you actually know where we’re going here?”

Gary glared at Hayden. “You doubting me?”

“Yes. To be honest, I am.”

Gary shook his head. “Used to drive past these woods all the time on the way down the M56. Always thought they’d be a decent place for a criminal to hang out if their world went to shit or summat.”

“Right about that,” Hayden said. More rustling to his right. More silhouettes.

Just illusions. Just in your mind …

“Now you be straight with me,” Gary said. “Whaddyou think of her?”

Hayden knew who Gary was talking about right away, but that didn’t stop him buying time by asking. “Holly?”

Gary nodded. Hayden hoped he’d reveal a tidbit of what was going through his head, but this answer was on Hayden.

“I want to trust her,” Hayden said, lifting his foot over an icy puddle. It was icier the further they got into the woods, the ground sheltered from the sun. “I mean I feel like I should trust her. She seems … honest. Right?”

Gary just nodded. He didn’t say anything, he just nodded.

“You thinking differently?”

“Just think we should keep an eye on her. Just in case. Y’know?”

He looked right at Hayden and Hayden saw the apprehension in his face.

Hayden nodded. “Just in case,” he said. “I know what you—”

And then he felt something grasp hold of his right ankle and he fell to the ground.

At first, Hayden thought he’d just slipped on ice.

But then he heard the grunt and heard the cracking sound and he knew they had company.

Sarah and Holly swung around. “Fuck!”

Hayden turned onto his back and kicked at the zombie. It had frozen to the ground completely, its hand now free of its icy shackles. Dark hair stuck to its white cheeks and frost covered a gaping wound on the side of its neck.

Hayden tried to wriggle away but the zombie pushed its teeth up to Hayden’s shin and tried to clamp its jaw, frozen open in the ice. He felt its grip getting tighter, heard the ice on its jaw cracking, readied for the searing pain of contact.

Then there was an ear-splitting crack and the zombie went still.

Hayden pulled his ankle free from the tight clutches of the zombie. He wiped his shivering hands on his coat, backed away, nearly slipping on another sheet of ice in the process.

Over the zombie, Holly stood, a bloodied metal baseball bat in hand.

“You okay?” she asked.

Hayden studied her for a moment and then he nodded. “Yeah. I … Thanks. I just—”

Another splitting sound from inside the woods.

And then another.

And another.

Then, gasping.

Hayden looked around at the half-frozen zombies dragging their partly thawed bodies from the ground. He reached into his rucksack, pulled out a wrench and a gun, and then he backed up to Gary, Sarah and Holly.

“What—what do we do?” Hayden asked.

The zombies rose from behind them, clambered free of the ice and stumbled in the group’s direction.

“We run,” Gary said.