“You should have dropped onto that,” Sam said. “You’d go bouncing over the fence in no time.”
“What happened up there?” Lucy asked me as she picked up a box of syringes.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, lifting the other two boxes “When we’re safe.” As far as I was concerned, we might be out of the house but we were still in danger. We were the only humans in a village full of zombies. I wouldn’t feel safe until we were back in the boats.
The fence panels around the yard were made of flimsy wood slotted into stone uprights. Sam put his shoulder against a panel and pushed against it. The wood broke out of the slot and fell to the ground. We stepped over it and onto the grassy clifftop beyond.
I looked for a route we could take that would lead us back to the Zodiac but the cliff face was almost vertical and the beach below was full of jagged rocks. My experience of trying to abseil out of a bedroom window and failing left me in no doubt that I wouldn’t be able to get down this cliff without killing myself.
“This way,” Tanya said, leading us along the clifftop. I glanced back at the village every now and then. We weren’t being followed.
“What happened back there, Alex?” Lucy asked me.
“Yeah, man, we thought you’d decided to stay up there and play with the zombies,” Sam added.
I told them about the girl in the armoire and how she had been gagged and bound.
“Her parents probably put her in there after she turned,” I said. “If nobody else went into the room, she might have gone into that dormant state that takes over the zombies when there’s no external stimulus.”
“And we woke her up,” Tanya said.
“Yeah.” I looked back toward the house. That girl had been someone’s daughter and they had been forced to shut her away, probably because they hadn’t wanted to kill her. I wondered if her mouth and hands were bound because her parents had continued to live with her after she had turned and were making sure they couldn’t be bitten.
And then, I guessed, they themselves had turned and the girl had been forgotten.
“She’s better off now,” Tanya said. “Better dead than… whatever the hell the zombies are.”
I nodded. Breathing in a lungful of fresh sea air, I scanned the cliff for a way down. If we could get down to the beach below, we could double back to the Zodiac.
But Tanya veered away from the cliff edge toward a narrow road that led from the village and disappeared into the distance.
“Aren’t we going back to the boat?” I asked.
She shook her head. “We need to find a vehicle to get us to Camp Apollo, remember?”
“I just thought that… since we couldn’t get a vehicle at the village… we were going to go back to the Zodiac and search the coastline for a car or something.”
“Waste of time,” she said. “We’re here now, so we might as well keep going. Retracing our steps will only slow us down.”
I didn’t reply. Being out here on foot, without a vehicle or a safe place to hide, made me feel exposed and vulnerable. There was nowhere to run if the shit hit the fan.
We reached the road. It looked barely wide enough for a single car and was pitted with potholes. Walking along the road was easier than trudging through the grass but my arms were aching from holding the boxes.
“There’s a farm ahead,” Lucy said, pointing to a wooden sign by the side of the road that said FRESH EGGS, NEXT LEFT. Above the words was a drawing of a chicken.
We increased our pace. I had no idea how far ahead the next left turn might be but the sign had given me a glimmer of hope.
It was fifteen minutes later when we found the farm. A narrow track led from the road to a stone house in the distance. Behind the house was a collection of barns and animal pens. As we walked along the track, I could hear chickens clucking from somewhere close by.
When I saw a dark blue Land Rover Defender parked by the side of the house, my heart leaped and I felt a sudden rush of optimism.
All we had to do was drive that Land Rover to Camp Apollo, deliver the boxes, and get back to the boats.
Maybe this mission was going to go according to plan after all.
9
The day had become sunny and warm, and the Land Rover seemed to gleam in the sunlight. The smell of farm animals filled the air, along with the clucking of chickens. The birds were running loose in a field behind the house, along with a dozen cows that were lazily grazing on the grass there.
Sam went to the front door and tried it. After discovering that it was locked, he knocked on the wood. “Hello? Anyone home?”
I was sure that if I lived here and four people dressed in army clothing and carrying weapons strolled up the path and knocked on the door, I wouldn’t answer.
Sam shrugged when there was no reply and went around the back. I put down the boxes I’d carried all the way from the village and rubbed my aching arms. Lucy did the same, going over to inspect the Land Rover after dumping her box. She used her hand to shield her eyes from the sun and peered in through the driver’s window.
Tanya set down her boxes and sat on the front step, closing her eyes and turning her face to the sun.
I didn’t know how she could be so calm because, despite my earlier optimism, I felt nervous now that we were at the house.
I heard bolts being drawn back and latched unlocked, then the front door opened and Sam stood there grinning. “Back door was open,” he said.
“You get the Land Rover keys?” Tanya asked him.
He dangled them from his fingers.
“There’s nobody in the house?” I asked.
Sam shook his head. “The radio is on but there’s nobody home.”
Now that he mentioned the radio, I could hear music playing faintly somewhere within the house. I went inside. The place looked like it hadn’t been decorated in a long time and some of the cream-colored wallpaper that covered the walls was stained, with some of it damp and peeling in places.
The kitchen was large, with an old stone fireplace that had been bricked up at some point to create space for a large oven. The radio was on the kitchen counter, playing “Heaven is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle. The back door was open, revealing a small graveled area beyond, and the fields beyond that.
There were deep depressions in the gravel where a car had once been. Maybe the Land Rover had been parked back here at some point.
The air in the house smelled damp but there was no rotten-meat stench.
“Alex, are you coming?” Lucy called from the front door.
“Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t even sure why I had entered the house. I was curious to know what had happened to the owners but there was nothing here to indicate their fate. Belinda Carlisle faded out and Nick Tucker, the new Survivor Radio DJ, announced that the next song was dedicated to all the survivors left in the world. The Doors began to sing “Strange Days”.
“Alex?” Lucy called again.
“I’m coming,” I said.
As I passed the stairs on my way back to the front door, something upstairs caught my eye. I went up the first couple of steps to take a closer look, still wary even though I was sure the house was empty.
One of the upstairs doors was open and through it I could see a bedroom that looked as if it had been hit by a cyclone. The closet doors were open and there were clothes scattered over the bed and floor.
I went up to the top of the stairs and saw that the bathroom was in a similar state. The medicine cabinet on the wall was open and looked like somebody had rifled through its contents in a hurry. A smashed bottle of cough medicine lay in the sink, its dark brown contents congealed around the drain.
A noise behind me made me whirl round, gun raised.
It was Sam, standing halfway up the stairs. “Hey, man, we’re ready to go.”