She had my boot gripped tightly in her hands and she slid me across the floor to the hatch. I kicked at her face with my other boot but she didn’t even seem to notice.
Lucy screamed and grabbed my arms, trying to pull me back into the vehicle. I wasn’t sure what Tanya was doing because my attention was focused on kicking the hybrid that had me in her grip.
Then a single shot rang out in the enclosed space and a hole appeared in the hybrid woman’s forehead. She released me and fell to the ground.
“Sam, go!” Tanya screamed.
More hybrids appeared at the hatch, hands grabbing and clawing as they tried to force their way inside.
I scrambled farther into the vehicle and pulled out the Walther.
The engine roared to life and we lurched forward.
But we were going too slowly. The hybrids surged forward and one of them got inside. I kicked him hard and he staggered back before Tanya put a bullet in his head.
The Mastiff began to pick up speed but the hybrids were still matching our pace.
“We need to close the doors,” I said.
Tanya began to shoot wildly into the mass of faces that appeared at the hatch. Lucy joined her, firing her M16 in three-round bursts.
I fired the Walther until it was empty. The air inside the vehicle smelled of cordite and my ears were ringing.
At last, we seemed to be moving fast enough to outrun the hybrids. I lunged forward for the doors and pulled them closed, locking them with shaking hands.
“Hold on,” Sam said from the driver’s seat, “we’re going through the gate.”
Metal screeched against metal as we hit the gate and went through it. Then I could hear the heavy thump of hybrids bouncing off the Mastiff’s grille as Sam plowed through them.
I was breathing hard, trying to tell myself that it was all over, that we were safe for now.
“Everyone okay back there?” Sam asked as we drove onto the track that led through the trees.
“Yeah,” Tanya said. “We’re okay.”
“There’s gonna be a slight bump,” Sam said. “Hold on.” We rammed through the gate at the checkpoint. He turned to us, grinning. “This thing is pretty neat, huh?”
I sat up and looked around the interior of the Mastiff.
There were five fold-up seats attached to one side wall, and three on the other. They each had a four-point harness like those used by fighter pilots. The floor was made of bare, ridged steel, the ceiling covered in sand-colored fabric that housed the interior lights. A circular hatch in the ceiling led to what I assumed was the top-mounted gun. Below the hatch was an adjustable platform for the gunner to stand on.
An opening at the front led to the cockpit where Sam sat. There was an empty passenger seat next to him and an array of computer screens. Instead of being a single pane of glass, the windscreen was split into two side-by-side panes. Through them, I could see the trees and the track ahead. We were rumbling along at a decent speed.
Sam was right; the Mastiff was pretty cool.
“Who wants to sit up front?” he asked. He really was like a kid with a new toy.
I looked from Lucy to Tanya. I didn’t mind sitting back here and I didn’t want the earlier argument with Sam to be rekindled if we sat together on the front seats.
“You go ahead,” Tanya told me. She must have assumed that I wanted to go up there because, after all, I was the gamer geek who played at being a soldier online.
“Yeah, you go and sit with Sam,” Lucy said. “We’ll stay back here and have some girl talk.”
“Oh?” I asked. “What are you going to do, compare lipstick colors?”
“No,” she said, “we’re going to discuss the best way to kill hybrids.”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking or serious. I looked at Tanya, who looked as solemn as Lucy, giving me nothing to work with.
So I went up front and slid into the seat next to Sam.
“How awesome is this?” he asked. “We can drive this thing at night with the lights off. There are six cameras mounted outside, including night vision.” He leaned across and turned on a screen in front of me. The display showed the track ahead.
“SDU,” Sam said. “Situation Display Unit.”
“We won’t be driving at night,” I reminded him. “We’re going back to the boats. You’ll have to leave the Mastiff at the village.”
He looked a little disappointed. “I know that, man. I’m just saying what we could do if we had to.”
“Well, let’s hope we don’t have to,” I said. “This is great but I prefer the safety of the sea.”
He shrugged and reached down to switch the radio on. When the sound of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” came out of the speaker, I was grateful that the station wasn’t broadcasting another interview. The last thing we needed was another rant from Sam.
Instead, he sang along with Simon Le Bon. Sam’s singing voice wasn’t great but I’d take it over an argument any day.
We got to the main road and Sam turned the Mastiff in the direction of Muldoon. “Hold on,” he shouted back to the girls. “We’ve more of the creepy bastards coming this way.”
I looked through the narrow windscreen. Ahead of us, a horde of hybrids was gathered on the road. Some of them came running straight at the Mastiff while others waited.
The first few runners had nearly reached us.
Sam increased our speed. “Get ready to die, fuckers.”
But instead of letting the bulky Mastiff run them over, the hybrids leaped up onto the vehicle. I realized then that the grille that protected us also had a downside; it provided hand-holds and made it easy for the hybrids to swarm over the vehicle.
Two of them scaled the front grille and crouched in the hood, pummeling the windscreen with their hands. Their fists made a hollow thumping with each blow and left smears of blood on the glass.
“They won’t break through there,” Sam said.
I could hear more of them on the roof, pounding on the metal, trying to get in.
Sam used the Situation Display Unit to see where we were going, since the view through the windscreen was blocked by the hybrids trying to break the glass.
On the screen, I could see the main horde waiting for us. We reached them and although some of them jumped onto the Mastiff, others were rammed by the front grille. Their bodies thudded against the metal.
“Fuckers,” Sam muttered.
His earlier bravado seemed to have waned slightly now that we had infected passengers on the outside of the vehicle. I wondered how many were actually hanging on to the grilles as we plowed through the main mass of camouflage-clad monsters.
“They can’t get in here,” Sam said in a low voice as the pounding in the vehicle’s body increased in intensity. I was sure he was right but we had to shake the hybrids somehow.
“They’re following us,” Tanya said. She was looking at a second SDU screen set up in the back. I assumed she had switched it to the rear camera view.
“What are we going to do when we get to the village?” I asked nobody in particular. “We can’t just stop the vehicle and get out.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Sam said. The lack of confidence in his tone didn’t reassure me.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said sarcastically.
“If you have a better one, let’s hear it, man.”
I fell silent. I didn’t have a better plan. And I wasn’t trying to intentionally rile Sam. I was still feeling frustrated at our lack of progress in Camp Apollo, particularly the fact that I was no wiser about the location of Joe than I had been before we’d driven to the camp.