When we touched down, the rear of the helicopter opened, revealing a grassy field beneath the stars. The night was clear and dry, the moon bright and almost full, splashing the field with silver moonlight. It was a good night for zombies.
“Come on, people,” Hart said, “let’s move.” He made sweeping motions with his hands, ushering us off the chopper and out into the night. As I was about to step onto the ramp, he grabbed my shoulder and looked into my eyes earnestly. “See you in a couple of days, Alex. Don’t let Kate and Lucy down.”
“I won’t,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.
He nodded, and then disappeared back into the helicopter. I walked down the ramp and into the long grass.
“We need to leave this area now,” Tanya said, adjusting her backpack before marching away across the field toward a low stone wall.
We all followed, advancing across the field toward the wall as the Chinook lifted into the air, its rotors flattening the long grass behind us. Hart had been right about the noise; if there were zombies in the area, they were sure to hear the chopper and come this way.
We seemed to be in a farmer’s field. The farmhouse sat in darkness a couple of miles away, and the night breeze smelled of cows. I couldn’t see any in this field or the next, but we passed an open gate in the wall, so the cattle might have wandered off, leaving only their smell behind.
Tanya stopped and took out a map from her pocket. “The compound is a few miles beyond the farm,” she said, pointing at a low, dark hill in the distance. “Over there.” She turned to look at us all. “Do we go tonight, or wait until morning?”
“Let’s do it, man,” Sam said. “The sooner we finish this bullshit task, the better.”
“I’m with Sam,” Johnny said. “We should get this over with.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.” I pointed at the farmhouse. “Maybe we should hole up in there for the night and go to the facility in the morning. It’s already late, and we’ll be getting tired soon. I’d rather spend the night in that farmhouse than in the labs.”
“I’m not tired at all,” Sam said. “I’m ready to kick ass. For some reason, I feel a sense of urgency. Oh, wait, maybe it’s because I have the fucking zombie virus in my blood.” He looked at me sharply.
“I didn’t make you go to Apocalypse Island,” I reminded him. “In fact, I said I’d go alone.”
“If it wasn’t for your stupid girlfriend getting herself bitten, we wouldn’t be here at all,” he said.
The emotions that had been simmering inside me all day boiled over, and I lashed out at Sam. My punch, which I had been aiming at his face, connected with his shoulder. He was fast, and even as I was withdrawing my fist for a second blow, he drove his own fist into my stomach, forcing the air out of my lungs in an explosive whoosh. I fell down and lay in the grass, clutching my belly and trying to breathe.
Sam stood over me. “If anybody gets killed on this mission, I’m blaming you, Alex. Their blood will be on your hands.”
“Stop it,” Tanya said, pulling him away. “You two can fight it out when we get back with the H1 stuff, and we’ve all been given the antivirus. Until then, we need to work together or none of us will be going back alive.”
Sam glared at her but seemed to take her words on board. He backed away and sat on the stone wall, sulking.
I managed to suck in some breaths and stagger to my feet. I stood with my hands on my hips, looking up at the stars while I breathed slowly and tried to ignore the pain in my stomach.
Jax put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay, Alex?”
I nodded.
Johnny pointed into the dark, at the place the helicopter had landed. “We should get moving.”
I turned to see at least a dozen zombies shambling toward us. They were the slow-moving kind, trudging through the grass with hungry determination.
Tanya set off toward the farmhouse. “Come on.”
Jax and I followed while Sam and Johnny sauntered behind us, muttering to each other.
“Are we going to the farmhouse?” I asked Tanya. She seemed to have assumed leadership of our group. We all knew how tough she was, and I couldn’t think of a better person to take charge.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We need to get to that chemical as quickly as possible, while we’re still working together. If the group splits apart because of arguments, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to complete this mission.”
Her talk of the group splitting apart sounded like an overreaction to me. Sure, everyone was mad at me because they all thought it was my fault we were here, but I didn’t think the group would split because of it. Or were everyone’s emotions running hotter than I knew? Maybe the others had been talking about me behind my back.
I was beginning to feel like an outsider again, and I didn’t like it. We had all been through a lot together, so why couldn’t’ we be friends? Maybe I was too naive; in the old world, the world before the living dead had appeared, people like Sam and Tanya would never be friends with someone like me. We were too different.
But I had assumed that in this new world, that could change because we all had something in common: we were survivors.
A shot cracked the air behind us. I whirled around to see Sam standing in a firing position with the MP5 braced against his shoulder. One of the zombies that had been following us collapsed to the ground.
“Head shot” Sam said proudly. “Right between the eyes.”
“You idiot,” I said. “You’re going to bring every nasty in the area down on us.”
“Shut up, man.”
“Alex is right,” Tanya said to Sam. “The more noise we make, the more trouble we’re going to find ourselves in.”
He shrugged, lowering the weapon.
I heard a sound like a bee buzzing past my face before a bullet slammed into the wall. The sound of a gunshot reached us seconds later
“Get down,” I shouted.
A second bullet hit the wall, cracking into the rocks. I waited to hear the shot so I could gauge where it was coming from.
“It’s coming from the house,” Jax said when the sound reached us.
Muzzle flash appeared in an upstairs window. A bullet thudded into the ground somewhere near Tanya’s face. We scrambled over the stone wall quickly. As I landed on the opposite side, I glanced over my shoulder. Some of the zombies, seeing us go over the wall, had shambled through the open gate so they were on the same side as us.
“Zombies heading this way,” Johnny said.
We began to crawl beside the wall, away from the zombies. No more shots came from the farmhouse; whoever was in there shooting at us, was smart enough not to waste bullets when they couldn’t see us.
A short distance ahead, a second wall bisected the wall we were following at a ninety-degree angle. If we tried to go over it, we would expose ourselves to the mystery shooter. If we stopped, the zombies would reach us.
We scrambled up against the second wall, putting our backs against it so that we faced the advancing horde.
Tanya readied her MP5. Sam began shooting. When Tanya was locked and loaded, she joined him in spraying bullets at the zombies. They went down easily enough when they were hit in the head, but I couldn’t help wondering how many more were going to arrive when they heard all the noise the guns were making. Sam and Tanya were probably making a bad situation worse by tearing up the night with bullets.
After a brief burst of muzzle flash and ear cracking bangs from the assault rifles, the zombies on this side of the wall lay unmoving in the grass.