Florence stood.
“Shall we go?” Frank asked.
She nodded.
Frank saw something dark on the grass at the edge of the green. He walked over to it, bent down to examine it.
“What is it?” said Florence.
Frank picked up the shard of dark metal. He turned it over. It had been ripped from something. He looked around. He walked to the top of the slope. Florence followed.
There was another piece of metal at the crest of the hill. He picked it up. It was bigger than the first piece and ragged. He looked down the slope.
More pieces of metal on the fairway.
They walked down the slope and found more wreckage on the way. Two hundred yards down, the fairway curved to the right, and Frank saw from where the debris had come.
A helicopter had crash-landed at the edge of the fairway, where it had come to rest against a large oak tree. Crumpled and torn. Bits missing. There was no smoke and no fire. One of the rotors had torn loose and gouged shallow furrows into the earth, where it was now stuck in the ground like the marker for a makeshift grave. Florence touched it then took her hand away as if it were hot. She prodded a warped sheet of metal with her foot.
More wreckage had been shed during its landing, scattered around the crash site. Scraps of plastic. Frank could smell oil.
They approached the downed helicopter. The fuselage was pitted with dents and scratches, and had been ripped open. Wires and cables. Cracked glass. It must have been a privately-owned helicopter. It had been painted the colours of the Union Jack.
The pilot was dead in his seat. The cockpit had been compromised and warped. He was slumped forwards. Blood stained his white shirt. His eyes were open. His neck was too limp and his head was set at an obscene angle.
Frank looked inside the fuselage. A row of seats. A middle-aged man in an expensive suit was slumped in a corner. A spiked tree-branch had impaled him through his chest and out the other side of his body so that it pierced the back of his seat. He was meat on a stick, and he was starting to smell.
Frank found a red plastic case and opened it on the grass outside. A flare gun and spare flares packed in foam. He put the case in his rucksack.
“There was someone else here, as well,” said Florence. She pointed at a faint trail of blood on the grass.
“Let’s follow the trail,” Frank said.
CHAPTER FORTY
The woman was sitting against a tree at the edge of the golf course. A dotted ribbon of red led to her. She was holding the left side of her stomach. She saw them coming and her eyes widened in a mixture of hope, elation and fear.
“Please help me.”
Frank and Florence crouched next to her. Her eyes were wet, sharp and clear with pain. Her face was pale. Red on her lips that wasn’t lipstick. Bleached white teeth. The hand over her stomach wound was sticky with blood, of which she had lost a lot. She was wearing a ripped white blouse, and Frank tried not to let his eyes linger on the sight of her bra strap clinging to her pale skin. A black skirt ended well above her knees. Bare legs. There was blood in her long blonde hair and smeared over her forehead. A yellow-black bruise under her bloodshot left eye.
“Please help me.”
“It’s okay,” said Frank. “Take it easy.” He didn’t know what else to say to her. He offered a thin, forced smile.
He checked the wound in her stomach. She winced when she moved away her hand. The wound was deep. He replaced her hand upon it.
“You need to get me to a hospital,” she said.
“Calm down,” Frank said. “We’ll help you.” He didn’t know how, though. He had no medical training; hadn’t even done a First Aid course.
“I need to get to a hospital.”
Frank took out the First Aid kit from his rucksack. He placed some gauze on her wound, told her to keep pressure on it. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
“What’s your name?” Frank asked her.
“Caitlin.”
“Hey, Caitlin, I’m Frank. This is Florence.”
“Florence is a nice name.”
Florence kept her distance from the woman.
“They’re both dead, aren’t they?” Caitlin said.
“The men in the helicopter. Yeah. What happened?”
“We escaped from London.” Her eyes fluttered. “Tim and I were heading for France. He had a chateau in the countryside.”
“Is Tim the man in the suit?” said Frank.
“Yes. I was his secretary. He said he would protect me, get us out of the country, to somewhere safe. He was a decent man.”
“I’m sure he was,” said Frank. “What happened in London?”
“The plague happened,” she said. “It was all panic and slaughter. Killings in the streets. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I might do,” said Frank.
“After we heard the rescue camp at Wembley stadium had been overrun, we decided to get out of the city. We’d already been told that the Royal Family had been evacuated, along with what remained of the government. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for us. Nothing to stay for. It was Hell. Think of the worst things you’ve ever seen and that’s nowhere near what I’ve witnessed. The city was falling apart. There were monsters. I remember seeing people running and fighting in the streets, ripping one another to bits as we flew over them. Bodies everywhere. Packs of infected. After leaving London, our pilot had a seizure of some kind, like he had caught the plague or something, and we crashed. Woke up with a hole in my stomach. I think my right ankle’s broken. I crawled here. You have to help me.”
“We will,” said Frank. “We’ll think of something.”
There was a shriek from the other side of the trees. Another voice yipped and bayed in response.
“Was that one of them?” Caitlin said.
“It’s okay,” said Frank. “Don’t panic.”
“You have to help me get out of here. Don’t leave me here!”
“We won’t leave you, I promise.”
More shrieks and screams. Closer. Florence looked at Frank, breathing fast, her eyes wide.
“I don’t want to die here,” said Caitlin. “I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t die,” said Frank. He looked at Florence. “We’ll carry her.”
They pulled Caitlin to her feet. She screamed as her ankle took her weight.
The infected were coming through the trees.
“Come on!” said Frank. He put Caitlin’s left arm around his shoulders and held her up. Florence held on to the woman, helped her along. They moved slowly. Not fast enough.
Caitlin was crying. She screamed in Frank’s ear and he almost dropped her.
“I don’t want to die!” she wailed.
Frank looked back. Wished he hadn’t.
Too late.
The infected poured out of the trees. Five of them. Ragged men and women. Two of them had been transformed into things with claws instead of hands and wide mouths snapping at the air. One of them was lop-sided with glistening bulbous growths the colour of mould.
They were screaming and howling. They lusted after blood and meat.
“Keep moving!” Frank said. The fairway opened up before them. Nowhere to hide. An open range where they would be run down and gutted. A killing ground.
Caitlin slipped from Frank’s grip and fell down. She cried and screamed. Frank glanced back at the infected then picked her back up. He dragged her with all his strength.
“They’re coming,” said Florence.
The infected screamed.
Florence was crying.
Caitlin was dead weight.
Frank would not let the infected hurt Florence. He had promised to protect her. He knew what he had to do, and he hated himself for it.
He let Caitlin go.