Bay of the Dead

For Alan and Max,

who love zombies even more than I do

'Mike's funny, isn't he?'

Joe Hargreaves glanced at his wife, Jackie, who was sprawled on the passenger seat next to him, bare feet tucked up under her thighs. She had kicked off the high heels which made her legs look fantastic, but which she always complained were crippling to wear, and had released the clip which had been holding her carefully sculpted hair in place all evening. Now, with her blue silk dress shimmering in the light from the dashboard and her mahogany hair tumbling about her shoulders, Joe thought she looked gorgeous. He smiled teasingly.

'Funnier than me?'

'Don't be daft.' She matched his smile with her own. 'Funniest man in the world, you are.'

His smile widened into a grin. 'It's a natural gift,' he said.

'Course,' she murmured nonchalantly, pretending to examine her fingernails, 'I meant funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.'

He adopted an expression of mortification, and a voice to match. 'Oh, now I'm hurt. I'm cut to the quick.'

She arched an eyebrow. 'The quick? Where's that then?'

'Dunno,' he said, shrugging. 'Opposite the slow?'

They laughed together. It had been a good night. They had spent it visiting their best friends, Mike and Sue Roach, in Llandaff, and were now on their way home to Cowbridge, full of good food and — in Jackie's case — good wine, both of them buzzing from an evening of friendship, laughter and great conversation.

The night was chilly but clear, silvery moonlight edging the trees, fields and hills that rolled gently outwards on either side of the hard grey artery of the A48. During the day this was a busy road, but now, on the wrong side of eleven o'clock, the twin headlamps of cars heading back towards the bright lights of Cardiff were few and far between.

Cocooned in the susurrating warmth from the heater and serenaded by the mournful beauty of Elbow's music drifting from the car's sound system, Jackie felt her eyelids drooping closed. She knew that uncurling herself from her seat and stepping out into the cold when they got home would be doubly horrible if she allowed herself to fall asleep, but she didn't care; she was warm and cosy and tired, and right at this moment that was all that mattered.

She was three-quarters asleep, the soft roar of the engine and the swirling music becoming part of her dream, when Joe said, 'That's strange.'

Reluctantly she opened one eye. 'What is?'

'This fog. It's appeared from nowhere. Look at it. It's like a barrier. Weird.'

Jackie had slumped down in her seat. She struggled upright and peered out through the windscreen. Blinked.

'That is weird,' she said.

The fog, thick and grey and impenetrable, seemed to stretch in a perfectly straight line across the road ahead. It stretched, in fact, as far as the eye could see in either direction, a smoky wall that bisected the landscape to left and right before dissolving into the darkness.

Almost unconsciously, Joe slowed the car to a crawl.

'It is fog, I suppose?' said Jackie. 'It's not something. . solid?'

'Course it's fog,' Joe snapped, then flashed her a look of apology. 'Sorry, love, it's just. . I'm a bit freaked by it, that's all.'

Jackie peered out of the passenger window, knowing that a few miles beyond the night-shrouded landscape were the even darker depths of the Bristol Channel. 'Maybe it's come in off the coast,' she said.

Joe made a non-committal sound. It was no kind of explanation, and they both knew it.

'Oh well,' he said, 'it is only fog, I s'pose. What's the worst that can happen?'

Without waiting for a reply, he pressed gently down on the accelerator and the car rumbled forward.

Entering the fog was like having a thick grey blanket thrown over them. Jackie tensed, clenching her fists, holding her breath. The light from the headlamps bounced back, as if from a mirror, dazzling them. Instinctively, Joe braked.

'I'm not happy about this,' he said.

'Just keep going,' said Jackie. 'It's a freak fog bank, that's all. Cold and warm air colliding or something. Just take it slowly and we'll be through it in a minute.'

Joe nodded, and for the next few minutes the car crept forward at little more than twenty miles an hour. All the while, the fog rushed and swirled towards them like something furious and alive. Mesmerised and unnerved, Jackie forced herself to blink, told herself she couldn't really see shapes trying to form from the muscular grey vapour. Her brain was simply trying to make sense of the constantly shifting shapelessness of it. It was a natural human reaction — like seeing faces in clouds, or looking for patterns in the chaos of nature.

It wasn't only her sight that was affected, though. She fancied she could smell the fog, like thick, sour soup, and she was equally certain that it was playing havoc with her hearing, filling her ears like cotton wool, blurring the music into a mushy buzz, reducing the throaty growl of the engine to flat, bland static. She opened her mouth wide, trying to yawn, hoping her ears might pop. And then she did yawn, and was dismayed to find that it made no difference. She felt a stab of anxiety. Maybe the fog was toxic; maybe it was affecting them physically, like nerve gas or something. She wondered whether she should say something to Joe, but she was almost afraid to speak, in case she found out that she could no longer string two words together.

And then suddenly, without warning, they were through.

It happened in a blink. One second they were crawling forward through impenetrable greyness, and the next the road ahead was clear, and the moon fat and bright again, spilling its light onto the land.

Joe was so shocked that he stamped on the brake, stalling the car.

'What just happened?'

Jackie jerked forward, her seatbelt clamping across her chest. Then she twisted round, to look out through the back windscreen. Incredibly there was no sign of the fog behind them. Just the evenly spaced lights above the carriageway, dwindling into blackness.

'I dunno,' she said. She was relieved that the fog had gone, but scared too.

'Ten past eleven,' Joe said, glancing at the glowing green digits of the dashboard clock.

'What's that got to do with anything?' Jackie asked.

Joe grinned, but it was sickly, feeble. 'I wondered whether we'd. . lost a chunk of time. It's what's supposed to happen when people get abducted by aliens.'

'Abducted by aliens?' Jackie scoffed, fear making her angrier than she would ordinarily have been. 'Are you serious?'

'No,' said Joe, 'I suppose not. We haven't lost time, in any case.' He grinned again, trying to make light of it. 'Maybe we should check each other for puncture wounds, though.'

'Let's just get home,' Jackie said.

Joe nodded and started the car up again. Jackie was wide awake now. They set off, and had been travelling for a minute in tense silence when Joe said, 'This can't be right.'

'What is it now?' Jackie asked.

'Is it just me or have we already been on this bit of road? About ten minutes back?'

She shrugged. 'Dunno. It all looks the same to me. Anyway, I was asleep.'

'Yeah, look,' he said, pointing, 'there's the sign for Bonvilston. This is just. . this doesn't make sense.'

'Maybe there're two signs,' said Jackie.

Joe shook his head. 'No, that's definitely the one we passed ten minutes ago.'

'Well, it can't have been, can it?' The impossibility of the situation was making Jackie snappish again. She swallowed, trying to control her fear. 'You must have just. . taken a wrong turn or something.'

'I've been driving in a straight line,' Joe said.

'It's the fog,' said Jackie. 'You must have driven up a slip road without realising it. Looped round in a circle. It's easily done.'

'Yeah, you're probably right,' said Joe, but he sounded unconvinced.

He drove on, mouth set in a grim line, hands gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles stood out in sharp white points. For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Both stared at the road ahead.

Then Jackie's eyes widened. 'Oh God,' she breathed.

The fog was back, same as before, a thick, solid wall of it, directly in front of them.

There was something intimidating about it. Something sinister and challenging. But when he spoke, Joe's voice was carefully upbeat, almost jaunty.

'Well, I suppose this supports your theory that we've come in a circle. We'll just have to be more careful this time.'

Jackie nodded, but said nothing. She felt the muscles in her arms and stomach tightening, instinctively pressed herself back into her seat as the fog enshrouded them again. She'd always hated roller-coasters, always hated that moment when the car clanked its way to the top of the incline and was inching forward in readiness for the downward plunge.

She felt like that now. That awful anticipation. That sense of being out of control and unable to do a thing about it.

Stupid, she told herself. What is there to be scared — Without warning, a figure loomed out of the fog.

She only caught a glimpse of it before Joe was yelling, and yanking on the wheel, and the car was slewing sideways. But in that split second she got the impression of someone tall and ragged and oddly lopsided; someone standing directly in the path of the car, head tilted to one side as if it was too heavy for the spindly neck that was supporting it. She saw no other details. The figure was nothing but a charcoal-grey silhouette on a pearly-grey background.

And then the car hit the figure side-on with a sickeningly loud bang, and the figure flew backwards, as though snatched away by some vast predator. Suddenly the car was spinning madly, and the tyres were screeching, and Jackie was being thrown about as if she weighed nothing.

Even as pain exploded in her shoulder and knee as she whacked them on the seat and door, a sharp, almost searing memory came to her of being seven years old and clinging to the safety bar of the waltzer in the fairground and wishing it would stop. And then, hot on the heels of that, she thought with an almost lucid calmness: This is going to be the biggest impact I've ever known. I wonder if I'll die.

Then suddenly there was silence, and she was lying at a strange angle across her seat, pressed back by the air bag. There was a smell in the air, fumes and hot metal, and she could taste blood in her mouth, and when she tried to move her leg a hot, jagged corkscrew of pain leaped from her shinbone to her hip, making her cry out.

Joe spoke. She couldn't see him, but she heard his voice, cracked and shaky. 'Jacks, are you OK?'

She opened her mouth to answer and it was full of blood. She spat it out.

'Hurt my leg,' she said.

She heard Joe shift beside her, then grunt softly in pain. 'I need to call for help,' he said, 'but I can't get a signal. I think it's this bloody fog.'

There was a screech of metal. Jackie couldn't think what it was at first, and then realised it must be the sound of the buckled driver's door being pushed open.

'What are you doing?' she said, fighting down panic.

'I need to get help,' he said again. 'I'm going to walk back along the road a bit, see if I can get a signal.'

'Don't leave me, Joe,' Jackie said.

'It'll only be for a few minutes. I need to call for an ambulance. And I need to find out what happened to that bloke we hit.'

'Don't leave me,' she said again.

'I'm not going to leave you,' he said. 'I'll be back in a few minutes, Jacks. Promise. Just. . just try and relax, all right?'

She heard a creak of metal as he shifted his weight. A hiss of pain. Then the sound of his footsteps as he hobbled away, into the fog. His footsteps grew fainter, and then suddenly she couldn't hear them any more. She felt a sudden surge of loneliness, which threatened to escalate into outright panic. She breathed deeply, in and out, fighting to bring it under control. She told herself that everything would be fine, that Joe would get help, and that soon they would be in the hospital or at home, a bit bruised and battered, maybe, but wrapped up snug and warm in front of the telly, sipping nice hot cups of tea.

Because of the air bag she couldn't see much. Just a portion of the shattered passenger window and the swirling grey fog beyond. Curls of vapour were drifting in through the window, acrid and cold.

She was just beginning to wonder how much longer Joe was going to be when a terrible, ratcheting scream came tearing out of the fog.

It was an awful sound, barely human, and yet Jackie knew that it had come from her husband's throat. Gripped by freezing terror, she started to shake and cry. She tried to move, and her spine erupted with white-hot pain, so intense that she almost blacked out.

Then another scream tore into the echoes of the last, a high bubbling wail of pure agony. Now Jackie felt alternately hot and cold as sheer sickening panic surged through her. Terrified and helpless, she told herself that this couldn't be happening, it couldn't, it couldn't. .

She tried to call her husband's name, to scream for help, but she couldn't make a sound.

Not even when she heard the slow, dragging footsteps coming towards the car.

Not even when a hand that was more bone than flesh reached in through the window.