“Something moved in the undergrowth up ahead. By the side of the road.” He pointed to the area I had already been watching.
I shrugged. “You sure?”
He nodded, tightening his grip on the baseball bat. I did the same, wondering why, if our own footsteps were so loud, we hadn’t heard anyone walking in the undergrowth ahead of us.
Maybe they weren’t walking. Maybe they were just waiting for us.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
Sam crept forward, gesturing for me to follow. I moved forward as quietly as I could, staying close behind him. Sam had a much better chance against whatever was in those trees than I did.
As we got closer, I saw a movement in the undergrowth, and nearly jumped out of my skin. I calmed my ragged breathing when I realized it was something small, maybe a squirrel or a bird.
But apart from the gulls we had seen on the other side of the island, I hadn’t seen or heard a single bird since setting foot on the dock. In fact, now that I thought about it, the woods were eerily quiet, apart from the sounds we were making.
Sam strode up to the undergrowth and peered into it.
I heard a low moan that I knew all too well. The wail of a zombie.
“Get back!” I shouted.
“No, it’s fine. It’s just a head.”
I went over and looked at the head lying on the ground. Its skin was the familiar mottled blue of the zombie, its eyes yellow as they glared at us. It opened its mouth and moaned again when it saw me.
The zombie had once been a man with a neat, short haircut, wearing a blue shirt beneath a white lab coat. But something had shredded the coat, shirt, and the rotten flesh beneath. The zombie had a head, neck, and part of his chest, but that was it. The arms had been ripped off, leaving a bloody mess where the shoulders had once been. Entrails lay on the ground like dead snakes.
“What do you think happened to him?” I asked Sam.
“I don’t know, man. Either he got torn to pieces and then turned, or he was already a zombie before he got eaten or something.”
My head snapped up when I heard another sound. Something was coming this way, running through the undergrowth toward us.
“What the fuck?” Sam whispered.
“We need to get out of here,” I said. I could see the figure crashing through the woods. He wore a dark blue security guard’s uniform, complete with a baseball cap sporting the logo of whichever security firm he had worked for, and a black gun belt with a holstered sidearm. The veins in his neck and face were dark blue, spreading beneath the skin like a network of tentacles.
A hybrid. There was no way I could outrun him. Sam seemed unsure whether to run or fight, his hands flexing around the bat.
“The trees,” I said. “I don’t think they can climb.” My limited experience with hybrids suggested they couldn’t perform many actions beyond running and eating, but I was no expert when it came to monsters.
Sam nodded, and we began climbing the nearest pine. I had never been a tree climber, even when I was a kid, and the unwieldy baseball bat made the task even more difficult. Sam went up the tree like a big, loose-limbed monkey, and was out of the hybrid’s reach in seconds.
My slow pace wasn’t getting me out of danger quickly enough, and when the hybrid reached the tree, it reached up and grabbed my boot, pulling down with tremendous force.
Sam began to come down the tree to save me. “Hang on, man.”
Hanging on was precisely what I was doing. My hands gripped the branch above my head so tightly that my fingers went numb. The hybrid was yanking at my boot as if trying to pluck an apple from the tree. Its yellow eyes stared up at me, its face contorted by a mixture of determination and anger. I could see blue flesh hanging from its teeth, and I knew what had happened to the zombie on the ground; this hybrid had eaten it.
I couldn’t hold on much longer. My body felt like it was being stretched on a medieval torture rack. My grip slipped, and I hit the ground so hard that it knocked the wind out of me. As I struggled for a breath that I knew would be my last, I tried to claw my way backward out of reach of the monster.
He came forward, moving quickly and preparing to claim the plump morsel he had pulled from the tree.
Sam was still too high in the branches to do anything to help me. I looked up at him, hoping he would do something to save me, but his attention was elsewhere, and he was staring at something behind me. Maybe the hybrid had a friend who wanted to feast on me too, and Sam was unable to look away, like the people who rubbernecked as they drove past a gory car crash.
Then I saw three red laser dots dance across the front of the blue uniform. The sound of automatic fire cracked through the air, and the hybrid fell to the ground.
I sat up and looked over my shoulder. Six men wearing identical security guard outfits as the hybrid had been wearing advanced to my position, assault rifles raised, red laser sights bouncing off the trees. They took up firing positions on the road, aiming their weapons into the woods.
A seventh man strode up to me and stood with his hands on his hips. He had a military buzz cut and wore trousers patterned with woodland camouflage. A dark blue T-shirt clung tightly to his heavily muscled upper body.
“Gentlemen,” he said in a rough voice, “come with me if you want to live.”
CHAPTER THREE
THEY LED us along the road to where three dark-green Jeeps were parked. The man and his colleagues were silent as they led us to the vehicles. They bundled us into the back seat of a Jeep. Buzz Cut got into the front passenger seat, while one of his men drove us along the road.
“Right,” Buzz Cut said, turning to look at us. “Let’s get some names. Who are you?”
“I’m Alex, and this is Sam,” I replied. Sam gave me a sideways glance that told me he didn’t want me to give away any information, but I didn’t see any point in being quiet now. These men were obviously connected with the island so maybe they could help us get to the person we needed to see regarding a cure. If there even is a cure, I reminded myself.
“My name is Ian Hart,” Buzz Cut said. “I’m in charge of security on this island. Perhaps you’d like to tell me what you’re doing here.”
“We need help,” I said. “Our friend has been bitten. I want to talk to the scientists here to see if they can help her.”
He frowned. “There’s no help for people who get bitten, son. They die. Then they come back as zombies. Then we shoot them. Game over.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not that simple. My friend took the vaccine. She’s still alive.”
Hart raised an eyebrow. “How did she get the vaccine? Is she military personnel?”
“No, we got our hands on some,” I said. “We’ve all been vaccinated.”
He turned around in his seat to look out at the road and said nothing else.
The road broke through the trees and continued through flat grassland. In the distance, a square-shaped five-story building with rows of tinted windows came into view. A high, wire fence surrounded it, and the place looked like a typically nondescript government facility, complete with a parking lot out front where a few Jeeps were parked. I could see two military Chinook helicopters in a field by the side of the building, sitting next to a large hangar.
We drove up to a large gate, which was opened by a security guard in a sentry hut, and then through into the compound.
The driver parked the Jeep with the others, and Hart motioned for us to get out. We were led up to a set of glass doors. Hart swiped a card through a digital lock, and the doors opened into a reception area, which was deserted.
“Rooms five and six,” he said to two of the men. They took us through a set of heavy doors and down a set of concrete steps to a white-painted corridor with doors lining the walls on each side. I was taken through one of them and left alone in the room, the guard shutting and locking the door after I was inside.