The four of us used the raft to stay together, each of us holding onto the slippery fabric and swimming towards the beach.
I glanced back to where the Land Rover had been. It was gone, buried beneath the waves.
I spat out a salty mouthful of cold seawater and scanned the beach. It appeared deserted. As darkness fell, so did the rain, fat drops splashing into the water around us. I looked up at the cliffs where we had gone over the edge. It must be at least a fifty-foot drop. We were lucky to be alive.
I felt something grasp my legs and I cried out, certain that a zombie was standing down there under the water and had curled his rotting hands around my calf.
“It’s just weeds,” Mike said, his teeth chattering with cold.
I looked at Lucy. Her lips were turning blue and her skin was pale, making her appear like a beautiful vampire.
We reached the shallows and stood up, dragging the rucksacks out of the water.
“What now?” I asked.
Mike looked along the cliff wall. “There must be caves. There are always caves.”
That was true. I remembered many family holidays when I was a kid, exploring caves along the beach with Joe while Mom and Dad sat on sun loungers. There were always caves.
We set off along the wet sand. The rain lashed into our faces, making it hard to see. I put my hand up to ward it off but I had to keep blinking raindrops from my eyes. It made it harder to find a cave. Worse, I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to see the zombies. There would be nothing more tragic than surviving thus far only to stumble into a zombie in the rain.
“There’s a cave,” Lucy shouted, pointing to the rocks with a trembling hand.
A dark gap in the cliff wall led into darkness.
We made for it, shuffling through the sand until we stood at the mouth of the cave. Mike searched through the side pocket of his rucksack and got a flashlight. He shone the beam into the blackness. Shadows fled to the edges of the space he illuminated.
The sand on the floor in there was dry. The space was big enough for all of us to fit inside. We got in out of the rain and Mike lit the kerosene lamps, placing them at the back of the cave so the light wouldn’t spill out onto the beach outside.
There was driftwood in here. It looked like someone visited this cave regularly and built fires here. Before the world went to hell. Blackened and charred wood lay in the centre of a circle of stones. I placed fresh wood in there and Mike lit it. As the fire sparked into life, we huddled around it, removing our soaked jackets and laying them on the sand by the rocky wall.
“I’m going to get changed,” Elena said, digging into her rucksack.
“So am I,” Lucy agreed.
They fished out dry clothes and stood in the heat of the fire. I watched as they peeled off their wet clothing. Mike looked at me and grinned then stared at the girls, firelight glowing in his eyes.
As they stripped down to their underwear, I felt myself getting excited despite the cold, wet cargo pants clinging to me. Elena was much thinner than Lucy, her ribs showing beneath her black bra. Her legs were sleek and muscled.
Lucy’s curves made her appear more womanly in my eyes. Her breasts thrust against her pink bra, her cleavage deep between the swells of soft flesh. Her waist was small above the inviting curves of her hips. Her pink panties were small too and when she turned around to protect her modesty while she removed her bra, the firelight cast flickering shadows over the smooth slopes of her buttocks.
She removed the panties and quickly replaced them with a fresh, dry pair. White with tiny blue flowers printed on the cotton. She put on a matching bra before slipping on a black T-shirt and blue jeans.
When the girls turned to face us, we were sitting there with huge grins on our faces.
Elena looked at Lucy and raised an eyebrow. “Looks like the boys are happy about something.”
We all laughed. It was a moment of light relief in an otherwise shitty day.
“It’s your turn now, boys,” Elena said.
I looked at Mike and he shrugged. We did need to get out of our wet things. I found my dry clothes and faced away from the girls while I stripped. Mike did the same except he spun around for a split second to give the girls a flash of his goods. I remained as hidden as I could in the shadows. Working a sedentary job and playing video games is not the way to get a great physique.
I hurried into my clothes and returned to warm myself by the fire as quickly as I could.
Lucy looked into my eyes. “You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about.”
I was thankful she didn’t know the non-history of my non-existent love life. Apart from the prostitute in Amsterdam, my only other experience in the sex department had been with a girl named Gina Lewis when I was twenty-one. Gina was as much of a geek as I was and we met in Second Life one afternoon when I was off sick from work. I actually only had a cold but I rang in and said I had the flu because I wanted a couple of days off to stay in bed and play on the computer. I took enough shit at work to have a couple extra days off at my discretion.
On this particular sunny afternoon, I was propped up against the pillows balancing the laptop on my knee when I ran into Gina. We had a chat and it turned out she lived in Manchester, which was only an hour’s drive from my house.
Gina was online looking for a man. As obsessed with games as I was, but without a Mike-equivalent to get her out of the house, she lived most of her life online. She worked freelance, writing manuals for software companies, so she didn’t even have contact with work colleagues. Every now and then she craved human contact so she went online to find a man who lived close by.
And so I had spent an hour driving to Manchester followed by an hour of sex. I didn’t see Gina again and she never contacted me.
So I reckoned my embarrassment in front of Lucy was justified.
I stared into the fire and let it warm my face.
I felt exhausted. Today had been the longest day of my life. I had experienced every emotion possible and almost been killed a number of times. “Someone should be on guard duty,” I said. “We can take turns.”
We arranged a shift pattern, which meant I had two hours’ sleep before it was my turn to keep watch for an hour. Laying the sleeping bags out in the sand, we agreed that the guard would have the gun.
I put my head down and closed my eyes. The soft sand shifted beneath my sleeping bag, adjusting to my body. This was more comfortable than the ground on the mountain. I fell asleep almost immediately.
And dreamed of a fish swimming in the shallows before being picked up and eaten by a heron.
twelve
I knew what the dream meant. I sat by the entrance of the cave on my guard shift, watching the rain pour down over the sea and sand and cliffs, and I knew why I had dreamed of the fish and the heron.
It was because of the virus.
I had seen a TV show once about how viruses controlled the hosts they infected. There was a virus that infected insects then made them climb as high as they could up a plant or a tree so the virus could send out spores to infect more insects. The higher the spores were, the better they could catch the breeze and travel farther.
The virus that infected the fish I had dreamed about was a waterborne virus that wanted to infect birds, not fish at all. But it started in rivers because it was spread in bird faeces. So it infected a fish host then made that host swim in the shallows in a manner that would attract hungry birds. The birds ate the fish and became infected. The virus got to where it wanted to be.
So now there was a virus infecting everyone and my mind had looked back in its data banks for any information it had about viruses and brought up memories of that TV show. Interesting, but useless to me in my current situation.