We ran.
After a few minutes, I was out of breath. The whine in my head was still there but now I could hear other sounds as well, muffled but definitely there. Tanya and Sam speaking. The crunch of twigs beneath our boots. My own laboured breathing and the sound of my rapid heartbeat.
I slowed to a stumbling pace and let them get ahead of me. There was no way I could keep up. Story of my life. Always lagging behind everyone else. My stumbling jog slowed to a walk. I could barely breathe, never mind run. At least my hearing was improving with each passing minute. The whine had faded into a dull background noise.
I made my way through the forest at my own pace, unable to do anything else, and was surprised when I found Tanya, Jax and Sam waiting for me.
“You okay?” Jax asked as I reached them.
I nodded. “I can’t… move very fast.”
“We’ll take a breather here,” Tanya said. She sat down on a fallen log.
I did the same, sitting on the ground and leaning back against a tree trunk. “What are your stories?” I asked. “You all seem to know how to handle yourselves.”
“We’ve been in some tricky situations before all this shit went down,” Tanya said. “I was a reporter for the BBC. Sam was my cameraman. We’ve been to the Middle East a few times, reported on the war. We made a documentary on the US and British forces in Iraq. Sam was also the cameraman for Vigo Johnson.”
“The survival guy?” Vigo Johnson made TV shows about how to survive in various situations.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We went all over the world and got into some tough situations. A lot of people think all that stuff is faked for TV but it was real. Usually just me and him stuck up a mountain in the middle of nowhere or deep in a tropical jungle. I filmed a lot of it on a handheld camera. Whatever Vigo did, I did too. But the viewers rarely saw me on their screens.”
“What about you?” I asked Jax.
“I’m a journalist,” she said. “We were making a documentary when the shit hit the fan and the army started taking people to the camps. We went on the run. There were seven of us to begin with. Now, only we three are left.”
I nodded. These people had seen death and misery just like everyone else.
“We should get moving,” Tanya said.
I stood up, feeling only slightly refreshed after the short break, and we started through the forest again. I wondered what Lucy was doing. Was she sailing up and down the coast looking for me? Did she think I was dead? How long would she stay in the area before she forgot about me and moved on? Where would she go? Where were my three new companions going?
I caught up with Jax. “Do you guys have a plan?”
She nodded. “Of course. Find somewhere safe to stay. Eat and drink before moving on tomorrow.”
“I meant a long-term plan. Are you moving on to anywhere in particular?”
She looked at me as if deciding whether or not she could trust me. “Yeah. Somewhere particular.”
“Where’s that?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. It seemed like their destination was a closely-guarded secret or something.
“Cornwall,” she said.
I nodded as if I understood why they would want to go there. “Good choice,” I said. “Not as populated as the rest of the country. Plenty of remote areas to hide.”
“Yeah,” she said noncommittally. I had hoped to draw more information out of her but my social skills were seriously lacking. Did they know something about Cornwall? It had remote areas, as I had said, but there were more remote places in Scotland so why not head north across the border? What was it about Cornwall that was drawing them there?
“Any other reason?” I asked Jax.
“Maybe,” she said.
This line of questioning was getting me nowhere. I should just keep my mouth shut and concentrate on how I was going to find Lucy and The Big Easy again.
Trouble was, I had no ideas at all.
After a few more minutes of relentless trudging through the woods, I asked her, “Why are the army trying to kill us?”
She looked at me like I had just asked her why the sky was blue. “You really don’t know, do you?”
I shook my head. “I thought they were supposed to be protecting people from the zombies, not trying to kill civilians.”
She laughed. “They do what the government order them to do. It isn’t about protection; it’s about control. Even now, after the entire country has gone to hell, the politicians spread lies and try to control the people.”
“Lies? I don’t understand.”
“Tell me what you know about the virus outbreak, Alex.”
“Okay,” I said, “it comes from India. There was a doctor quarantined in a hospital in London. It spread from there.” I remembered the news reports I had read on board the Solstice. “And it’s infected America. Probably the rest of the world too.”
She shook her head. “All lies fed to you by the media. That’s why we’re going to Cornwall. We’re going to tell everybody what’s really happening.”
ten
I had no idea what Jax meant by that and I had no time to ask. Tanya and Sam suddenly dropped to crouching positions and gestured at us to do the same. We complied and crawled up to where they crouched peering through the trees.
The forest dipped down to a road ahead. It was more a track than a road and it looked like it had been made by tractors. Twin grooves had been gouged into the mud by big tires and between the grooves grew a line of grass. I looked up along the track and spotted a red painted metal gate. Beyond the gate was a muddy field and in the distance I could see a low wooden barn. I assumed there was a house up there somewhere but the trees cut off my line of sight.
“Looks like a farm,” Sam whispered. “We should check it out.”
“Do we really want to?” I asked. “We didn’t do so well at the last farm.”
“This one looks more remote,” Tanya said. “There’s no road, only that muddy track. Jax, have you got the map?”
Jax took the map from her backpack and unfolded a portion of it. She located our position and the farm. “It’s a few miles to the main road,” she said. “We should take a closer look.”
Tanya nodded and set off down the slope. We followed until we all stood on the muddy track. I glanced back along the track. It disappeared around a bend in the distance. In front of us, it ran up to the gate and disappeared into the field. The gate was held shut with a short blue cord that was looped over the metal gate post.
We could see the farmhouse now. It sat waiting for us just beyond the barn. There were no signs of life.
Tanya opened the gate and said, “Come on.”
We trudged through the mud towards the house.
“I hope there’s food in there,” I said. It was lunchtime and my stomach was growling at how empty it was.
“Don’t worry, man, we’ll find something,” Sam said. “And if we don’t, there are some granola bars in my backpack.”
I wasn’t sure a granola bar was going to sustain me for the rest of the day. I felt exhausted from all the fighting, running, and nearly getting blown up by a rocket launcher. I needed something substantial in my belly.
The farmhouse was a two-storey stone structure like the Mason’s house. But unlike the Mason place, this one had a garage with a white metal door attached to the house and a wooden porch that looked like it had once been painted white but was so weathered that the paint had flaked away, revealing faded wood beneath. Only a few stubborn lines of paint remained.