“I said, when are we going to do it?” Stokes asked, slapping his hand down on the table when he didn’t get an answer, making Hollis jump.
“What?”
“Do we go now or leave it until later?”
“We should just get it done,” Hollis replied. “Let’s get out of here, get back, and then have a bloody good drink.”
5
Jas pushed his bike out of the front lobby of the flats and wheeled it over toward the other vehicles. Hollis acknowledged both him and Harte, who climbed onto the back of the bike to ride pillion. Next to Hollis in the larger of the group’s two vans sat Lorna, quiet and pensive and chewing her lip nervously, unaware he was staring at her. He often found himself watching her. She had a spark of energy and life about her. Even now, about to head out into the grim, dangerous and unpredictable ruin of their world, she remained remarkably positive. She was wearing a trace of makeup and had tied her hair up neatly. She did something different with her hair almost every day. It said something about her that she still took pride in her appearance. He, on the other hand, hadn’t brushed his teeth for more than a week.
The hydraulic hiss of the doors of the bus opening on the other side of the car park distracted Hollis. He watched as Driver let Stokes and Webb on board. Before disappearing inside, Webb glanced along the length of the bizarre-looking vehicle. Once just like any other double-decker bus, over the weeks the group had cannibalized and fortified it to the best of their limited abilities. Barbwire had been spooled along both sides in an attempt to make it as difficult as possible for the dead to reach the survivors inside. Sheet metal had been bolted to its otherwise flat front to form a rudimentary pointed plow, perfect for cutting through the incessant crowds which gathered around them whenever they left the relative safety and calm of the flats.
The air, so eerily quiet and still most of the time now, was suddenly filled with noise as, one by one, the engines were started. Lorna shuffled forward in her seat and peered through binoculars down into the gray sea of cadavers. Even from this distance she could see that they were already beginning to react to the rumble of the machines.
The geography of the area around the block of flats had made the ugly concrete building a surprisingly effective base. Its location, perched three-quarters of the way up a steep hill, made it difficult for the bodies to get close easily. Some of them, those less damaged or decayed than the rest, were occasionally able to drag themselves through the desolation and get closer to the survivors, but were easy pickings. Webb in particular seemed to take great pleasure in destroying them, although Jas, Harte, and Hollis were always ready to take their turn. Behind their building, a myriad of tracks and roads led through an empty, mazelike housing estate which had also been scheduled for demolition before everything had ended. Many houses were boarded up, and the group had created makeshift road blocks and barriers, leaving only the most inaccessible roads clear and making it all but impossible for even the most determined of corpses to reach them.
No one was sure how much of a difference it made anymore, but it had become standard practice to create a distraction whenever anyone left the flats. Regardless of how much control the bodies had begun to exhibit, they could still be fooled. Fire was usually the best diversion. A little heat, light and noise were usually enough to take some of the pressure off whoever it was heading out into the open.
“Ready?” Ellie yelled from Hollis’s right. He gave her a leather-gloved thumbs-up. On his signal she ran over to where Caron and Gordon were standing and started working. Hollis wiped sweat from his brow. Christ, he was hot. One of the worst things about going outside—apart from the unwanted attention of the remains of the local population—was the regulation uniform they had each decided to adopt. Bike leathers, wet suits, over-trousers—anything that might protect them from the layer of germs, slime and decay which was gradually coating every square inch of the world outside.
Ellie lit a petrol-soaked rag and tossed it through the open window of a small, box-shaped silver car. A puddle of fuel on the driver’s seat and in the foot-well immediately burst into flame. Moving with sudden purpose and speed, she ran around to the back of the car and, with the other two, began to push it away from the flats. They could hear the crackle and pop of the fire taking hold inside; dirty black smoke was already beginning to belch out through the window.
“Come on,” Gordon grunted, his face flushed red with effort and his dodgy hip feeling like it was about to pop out of his pelvis. Ellie took a step back then ran and launched herself at the car, finally feeling its wheels beginning to turn and pick up some speed. Its interior now completely ablaze, it rolled down the hill with increasing velocity, running away from the three people pushing it. Breathless, she stood with her hands on her hips and watched as it raced down the slope, bobbling up into the air as it hit the curb. It juddered along a little farther, then thudded into the barrier.
“Could have done with that being a little more dramatic,” Hollis grumbled, disappointed. “It’ll have to do.”
“Should be okay,” Lorna said. She watched through the binoculars as bodies swarmed around the part of the barrier closest to the burning car. Worryingly, she was sure that one or two of them were actually trying to climb over the blockade to get closer to the flames.
“We’ll just need to make sure we—” Hollis began to say before the quarter-full fuel tank of the burning car exploded in a swollen, incandescent mushroom of flame, showering the ground with shrapnel. The sudden burst of energy caused huge numbers of diseased creatures to surge toward the epicenter of the blast. “That’s better,” he said to himself, slamming his foot down on the accelerator.
“Here we go, then,” Driver announced to his two passengers in his monotone, emotionless drawl. “Hold tight.” He instinctively checked his mirrors and even indicated before pulling out. Stokes and Webb held onto the handrail inside the bus as if they were rush-hour commuters on their way to work.
Jas paused before following on the bike. The visor on his helmet still raised, he watched the bodies swarming around the fire. Many had been drawn to the flames, some had been crushed in the confusion and others had even found themselves close enough to the heat to be set alight. Others, he noticed, had changed direction. He could see six or seven of them actually trying to move away from the burning wreck. Damn things, it was almost as if they’d realized the fire was nothing more than an unsubtle decoy. Harte tapped his shoulder.
“Come on,” he shouted, his voice muffled by his helmet. Jas flicked his visor down and powered after the bus.
6
“Almost there,” Lorna said, glancing up from the notepad and map she gripped tightly in her hand. The windscreen of the van was covered in an almost opaque film of greasy stains and dripping gore and she couldn’t see much up ahead. Hollis repeatedly tried to use the wipers but all they seemed to do was make the problem worse, smearing the foul muck from side to side in a bloody rainbow arc of insipid yellows, browns, and grays. He frantically used the screen-wash, managing to clear just enough of the glass to be able to see through. “Turn left and we’re on the Kingsway Road.”