The familiarity of the name ‘Torbs’ as well as the hand on the shoulder told me that these two men were friendly. Yet when Torben turned his face toward the driver’s, there was a definite look of scorn.
“I’m not giving up on my wife and son,” he said.
My head span. The driver mentioned searching for someone for two months. Justin and I only met Torben a day and a half ago, and if he’d been tailing me for a couple of months I’d know about it. Now there was the mention of his wife and kid. What the hell was going on?
Who was Torben looking for? Justin and me, or his wife and son? I hadn’t just imagined him telling me he was going to hunt us.
Either way, I knew that if he saw us, he would kill us. That much was obvious, and I wasn’t staying here to chance it. We were going right now, and no matter how screwed we were by leaving empty-handed, we would deal with the consequences later.
I turned to look at Justin, but I saw that he was gone. I looked back at the shelf with the food on it, and I saw that he was already halfway up. I felt my face start to heat up. He’d done it again; he’d disobeyed me when I specifically told him to do exactly as I said. The kid was a cheeky little bastard and a liability, and I was done with him. I clenched my fist and felt the blood drain out of it.
I was going to have to drag Justin off the shelf and pull him out of the building by his hair. After that, I didn’t know what I would do with him. But I couldn’t trust him to do what I said, and that made him a danger to me. I’d already broken enough of my rules by taking him with me, and now it was time to stop.
As I got to my feet I banged my head straight into the shelf next to me. A metal clang rang out into the acoustics of the warehouse, and I saw Torben’s head snap in my direction. Out of instinct I ducked down. My head stung from where I had hit it, but for the moment my heart was beating so quickly that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.
Torben flicked his torch in my direction and the beam of light hit my eyes. I squinted and ducked my head.
“Boys,” he said with joy in his voice, “They’re here. The hunt is on!”
There was no point in subtlety now. I ran over to the shelf, not caring about the sound my boots made on the floor. AS I ran I could just about make out the bodies of the infected as they shuffled closer toward us. When I got to the shelf, Justin was already at the top of it.
He looked down at me. “Kyle – heads up.”
Adrenaline shot through my body. Trying to keep track of both the scuffling of the oncoming infected and the scrambling movements of the hunters as they ran toward us fogged my brain, and I couldn’t comprehend what Justin was saying.
“Stop screwing around.” he hissed. “Catch!”
When the crate was halfway through the air my brain cells fired and I realised what he meant – he wanted me to catch the crate of cans that was hurtling down toward me. I took a step back, tensed my muscles and readied myself. As the crate hit my forearms I felt my thigh muscles buckle a little, but I steadied my feet and stood firm. I put the crate down on the floor next to me. My face felt red with the strain, and I realised I was badly out of shape.
“Flank them,” said Torben somewhere behind me. “Trap them in, and if they come at you, don’t kill them.”
The footsteps scattered out from all directions. Although opening the delivery doors had let in a little light, the warehouse was still too dark to make out anything but the most immediate space around me, so I couldn’t see where the hunters were coming from. The only person I was sure of was Torben, and that’s because he had his torch pointed in my direction. Above, on the top shelf, Justin looked down and waited for me to tell him what to do.
I needed to do something. This was no fair fight, and if all four of them managed to corner me then my odds would drop to zero.
I looked to my right. The shelves were all arranged in rows, and they were all so close that if one fell, it was possible the rest could topple. If I could get a domino effect going, maybe I’d get lucky at hit one of the hunters. Maybe this was a ridiculous plan, but in my head I could see the shelves toppling. At the very least, a bunch of giant metal shelves falling in front of them ought to slow them down.
“Hang on,” I said to Justin.
I walked to the row of shelves next to us pushed against it. Although the shelves of this one were empty it was still a twenty-foot high metal construction, and I wasn’t exactly in a peak physical state. It took a lot of straining, but soon I managed to get it moving. As I kept my weight on it and shoved, the shelf started to rock with its own momentum. Soon it tipped so far forward that for a second I thought my plan was going to work.
When it turned the other way and rocked back in my direction, I felt my chest flood with panic. I moved out of the way and watched it fall. It was going to hit Justin’s shelf, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Jump,” I told him.
I was too late. The shelf leaned back like a tower block blasted with a demolition charge and it smashed into Justin’s shelf. Both metal structures made a creaking sound and fell to the floor, spraying metal and loose cans around the warehouse.
“Justin!” I said. I couldn’t see where he had landed.
The hunter’s footsteps were closer now, but I still couldn’t see them. To my left the moans of the dead were getting louder. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Justin’s body, nor could I hear him. This worried me; if he had fallen and hurt himself, I would have heard him shout about it. Injuries meant pain, and pain meant screaming. Screaming meant you were still alive.
Silence could mean anything.
I was about to take off to my left when I heard the stomp of a boot to the right of me. I turned my head and saw a hunter in front of me. He was a giant guy; six foot three, completely bald and he had a butcher’s knife in his hand.
“Got ‘im!” the man shouted.
There were a few acknowledging shouts, and footsteps started in our direction.
He looked at me and a smile spread across his lips. “The man who catches the pig usually gets first choice of cut,” he said.
I thought about reaching for my own knife, but judging from the size of this guy there was no chance of me beating him. I looked over at the collapsed shelves. If Justin was buried underneath them there was no way he’d be coming out of nowhere to help me, like he had back at the barricade. I hoped he wasn’t buried. Wherever he was, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.
As I desperately tried to think up any solution that didn’t result in my complete surrender, an unseen ally came to my rescue. Behind the hunter, the head of an infected appeared, and he had his eyes set on the human flesh in front of him. I could have warned the man, I could have told him what was happening, but I said nothing. The sight of the infected made me instinctively flex my hands, but this time I kept them at my sides.
The infected sank its teeth into the hunter’s shoulders and tore at the skin and flesh that covered his shoulder blade. The man screamed, and blood splashed all over his clothes and onto the floor. He made a sound that was almost a gurgle as the infected dragged a stringy sinew of skin off his back. He turned and tried to fight it, his eyes wide with sheer panic.
This was my only chance. Torben and the others would be here in seconds, and the other infected were closing in. I looked across to my left and saw a sign for a manager’s office. Surely there would be a way out through there?
The only problem was that escaping now meant leaving Justin behind. I still didn’t like the kid, but there was a chance he was still living. And if he was, it meant that he’d feel it when the infected found him and started to tear shreds off him.
I couldn’t abandon him to that.