Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent (12 page)

             
Misha and Neil were easily convinced, and agreed to the journey at once.

             
“I’m in,” said Rob in a serious voice, glancing over to see Helena’s face.

             
Helena frowned, “Well, I’m not going to stay here on my own.”

             
The next stage was to find a suitable vehicle from those in the car park.

             
“Let’s take a truck,” suggested Neil, “it’s big enough to smash through most obstacles, the doors are so high the dead fucks will struggle to get inside, and best of all there’s a bed in the back, we can take turns to sleep.”

             
“And,” added Will, “we’ve got plenty of room in the back for our shopping, and there could even be something useful already in there too.”

*   *   *

Unknown to the survivors, a zombie had been pinned under the truck when it had skidded to a halt several weeks earlier, in the first night of the Apocalypse.  The driver had heard the news and wanted to fill his half empty tank before panic buying had made refuelling impossible.

             
He never got as far as opening the petrol cap; the creatures were on top of him the moment he opened the door of his cab.

The driver was long gone, but the zombie, once a teenager in a red hooded top, had lain pinned under the front wheels of the truck ever since.  One side of the face was missing as it had been scraped along the tarmac, and several teeth were broken as it had tried to pull itself along by biting into the ground.

             
It had tried to move for weeks, and slowly the flesh of its stomach had started to tear, until it was pinned by a mess of intestines and skin, the spine having snapped in the impact.

             
The excitement of being so close to warm flesh made the creature redouble its efforts to get free, and as it struggled, the last of the skin that joined its two halves tore, and it was able to pull away, unravelling its intestines as it went.

             
The first thing Helena noticed was the smell, but no sooner had she wrinkled her nose in disgust than she felt icy cold hands grip her ankles.

             
The zombie was heedless of the missing lower half of its body as it pulled itself forward and sunk its teeth into Helena’s shin.

             
“Help me!” Helena screamed, as the half-zombie clawing and biting at her legs was joined by another scrambling out from under the truck, “Please!”

             
Rob felt only anger at Helena, he wanted to push her away and say, ‘We know all we have here is a last gasp, but it’s all we’ve got, and we’ve had to fight for it.’  But since he knew Helena was as good as dead, he couldn’t bring himself to make her last human contact an act of cruelty.

             
He tried to pull her into the cab, but her two attackers were joined by a third, and there were more on their way, running towards the truck with disturbing speed.

             
“I’m sorry, Helena, it’s been good!”

             
“No!” she screamed, her eyes wide with fear and pain.  She felt teeth tearing at her thighs.

             
This is all the fault of those newcomers, if I’d been left alone with Rob in our hideout we’d have been fine.
  She tried to shut off her mind to what was happening.

             
As she felt her body roughly torn, the thought shot into her head that human teeth weren’t really designed for this kind of work.  She wondered if being eaten by a lion, with sharper, carnivorous teeth, would be less painful. 
At least if a lion killed me,
she mused,
there would be no danger of coming back as one after I was dead
.

             
The thought made her laugh.  She realised that she was going to die laughing deliriously; she had seen it in films, but till now had never thought it would actually be possible.

             
The truck lurched forward, and Rob lost hold of Helena’s hand.  In moments she was lost beneath the clawing, scratching, biting throng of the undead.

             
Tears were running down Rob’s face into his beard, as he looked back at the service station that had been his home since the world had ended.  He looked at the frenzied crowd of the dead feasting on his sole companion for the whole of that time.

             
The others drove without speaking, the silence only punctuated by the truck occasionally scraping against parked vehicles, or smashing into the body of a zombie.

*   *   *

“Oh my good God!” Will’s voice was awed as he looked under the tarpaulin.  They had driven ten miles out from the service station before they had felt able to stop and examine the contents of the truck they had taken from the parking lot.  “Bingo!  We’ve hit the bloody jackpot!”

             
It was a lorry prepared to supply a supermarket, filled with food.  There were bags of mouldy bread, and trays of mouldy fruit, but there were also thousands of tins of food, packets of rice, pasta and soups: enough to feed a dozen survivors for years if used carefully.

             
Equipped with food and other supplies, they set off to return to the Bunker with a sense of triumph: triumph tempered by the nagging memory of what these supplies had cost: there were fewer returning home from this expedition, and they had not made it back to safety yet.

*   *   *

It became clear that Gary Bush was in charge of the army base.  He placed a cautious hand on Danniella’s shoulder and steered her towards a large concrete building.

             
“Showers are through there Ma’am.  You can freshen up.  I’m afraid the water’s cold, but we have our own pump, and there should be some soap.  I’ll have some clothes brought over.  We have plenty of uniforms.”

             
Despite her reluctance to strip off in this intimidating environment, Danniella felt her hair wet with the gore that had splashed over her from her rescuers’ gun-shots.

             
She stood under the cold shower in the draughty room, shivering with shock, grief and the bitter cold.

             
She heard a loud deliberate cough, and looked over to see a young female soldier leave her a neatly folded uniform and a pair of army boots.

             
The soldier motioned towards the boots.  “We got your size from the ones you were wearing.”

*   *   *

Danniella marvelled that they had maintained their army discipline in the face of the End of the World.

             
“Most of the Cadets were on a training exercise when all this began,” explained Acting-Sergeant Bush, “there’s been no word, of course.  There’s been no word from anyone since day three.

             
“On day two the chopper arrived.  Pilot Jones here was the only survivor of his regiment, and our parade ground gave him a safe place to land.

             
“Strictly Jones is the most senior soldier on site, but he refused to take command, so I stepped up and we worked to make our base secure.

             
“Stage one was to reinforce our base camp, stage two was to round up survivors and bring them here.”

             
Danniella looked around, “So how many survivors have you found so far?”

             
Gary shifted uncomfortably. “It took longer than we imagined to make ourselves secure.  We’ve been raiding hostile areas for supplies.”

             
“I know how hard it is out there.  I’ve traveled to Rochester and back.”

             
Danniella instantly regretted revealing anything about her location.  She had seen how Tina had been treated, and she did not want any military interference with the Bunker, but she carried on quickly, trying to cover up the information she had let slip.  She would think of a cover story. “It
is
hell.  But how many
have
you saved?”

             
“To be frank, Ma’am, stage two has only just begun.  You are the first.  Our look-out saw the hostiles swarming across the Heath, and we took the chopper out to investigate.”

             
“We were the first?”

             
“It’s not just the securing of the area: we haven’t seen any survivors.”

             
“There must be some in the houses round here, or in the flats; surely you have investigated.”

             
“Our priority was setting up a secure base.”  Bush glanced from Danniella’s face to the fences and back.  He did not meet her eyes.  “The walls need constant maintenance.  Have you seen the damage that human hands, heedless of self-preservation can do to the sheet metal and razor wire?  We have two soldiers on constant duty welding, bolting and reinforcing the walls.  It was just a simple wire fence most of the way around when we started: now it’s solid as a rock.”

             
They lapsed into silence.

             
“So what’s your story?”  Bush asked briskly, “where have you been
hiding
while the world ended?”

             
His emphasis on the word ‘hiding’ made it sound like an insult.

             
“I was holed up in a house on the banks of the River Medway, then I made it to Rochester University where we were trying to research why this is happening, and if there is something we can do about it.”

             
Bush nodded curtly, “And what were your findings?  Why has this happened?”

             
“It’s a virus,” Danniella replied, “augmented by nanotechnology.”

             
“What exactly does that mean?”

             
“It’s a bit like a tiny robot working to stimulate an organic host cell to rebuild dead cells.”

             
“So where do they come from?  Is it a weapon?  Are we under attack?”

             
“More likely they have come from medical research gone wrong.”

             
“Well, it strikes me as the perfect weapon.”

             
“I think it’s too complex for that, and too contagious.  If it was a weapon it’s destroyed whoever launched it as well as its intended victims.”

             
“Well, that’s an academic point right now.  The important question is
can we do anything about it
?”

             
“Not right now, but it is theoretically possible to release a counter-virus, or maybe find a frequency that would deactivate or destroy the artificial component to the virus, or we could find an inoculation.”

             
“It seems we have lots of options, Ma’am.  Which one are you pursuing?”

             
“I think that the frequency would be the easiest to accomplish, but it it would require the ability to broadcast, ideally nationwide, and ultimately world-wide.  But we could probably set up a basic sonic weapon that would broadcast the frequency and destroy the virus.”

             
“Yes I like the sound of the weapon.”

             
“The problem is that I don’t know what will happen in the short term if we are able to destroy the virus.”

             
“What do you mean ‘in the short term?’”

             
“In the long term a creature affected by the frequency will rot away and crumble.  What we cannot know is what will happen to it at the moment of the signal: it may collapse straight away or it may stay animated until it decays.”

             
“So we could have a deadly weapon that will neutralise hostiles in three weeks’ time.”

             
“It would help if we didn’t see it as a weapon, but as a cure.  We could slowly create safe areas and gradually re-colonise our world.”

             
Bush sat silently thinking.

             
“So what were you doing outside?” Asked Bush, “you were about to be killed; not good for your research programme.”

             
“That is what I was doing outside.  I was trying to get to the only lab I know fully equipped for this sort of work.”

             
Danniella did not tell them that she had once worked in that same laboratory.

             
Once again Bush lapsed into silence, thinking.

             
“It’s in Central London,” added Danniella after a pause, “Green Park, behind Buckingham Palace.  I-I met someone who had escaped from there, and…”