Coldbrook

6

The car stank of unwashed bodies — and fear. No one seemed to care. They wound the windows down and breathed in the fresh mountain air, and Vic didn’t understand how the views could still be so beautiful. Wasn’t the world stained now? Wasn’t it tainted? It took him a while to realise this was not the case at all. Humanity was stained and tainted. The world was doing just fine.

Jayne was sitting behind Sean, leaning against the door and groaning in pain. Whatever weird disease made her immune — and she’d shown him her bite, wet and infected but not deadly to her — he wasn’t sure it was anything better. She was a pretty girl aged by her disease, face drawn and eyes pale with the knowledge of pain. She’d told them about the boyfriend she’d lost.

They passed people both living and dead, most of them still walking. The living would be at the side of the road, waving them down for help, shouting, begging. But everyone in the car knew they could not stop. They had no more room in the vehicle. Many people carried guns, and several times Vic heard shots behind them when they passed by, and once something struck the vehicle’s wheel arch like a sledgehammer.

There were many dead wandering this part of the Appalachians. They sometimes saw them on the slopes, sad pale shapes moving aimlessly until they saw the car, even though sometimes they might be a mile away. Others had remained close to the road. Marc called a warning whenever the station wagon was about to hit someone, and usually there was time to cover Olivia’s eyes. Usually, but not always. His daughter had stopped crying, and Vic hated what that might mean.

An hour into the journey, and maybe halfway there, they saw a roadblock on top of a ridge. Marc stopped the vehicle.

‘No way to go overland,’ Marc said.

‘Sure it’s a roadblock?’ Sean asked.

‘The road’s blocked,’ Marc said, his words slow with sarcasm.

‘Yeah, but is it intentional?’ Vic said.

Marc tapped his fingers against the wheel. ‘Why bother blocking the road? Zombies don’t drive.’

‘We could go back,’ Lucy said. ‘Find another way around. Somewhere safer.’

‘Nowhere’s safe,’ Jayne said. Vic had thought she was asleep — her eyes were still closed.

As Marc edged them forward again Vic let go of Lucy’s hand and pulled the M1911 from his belt.

‘Let’s not look too threatening,’ Sean said. He lowered his window and leaned his arm outside, casual, cool. ‘Vic, keep your piece handy. But out of sight. Marc?’

‘I’m just the driver.’ In the mirror, Vic was amazed to see Jonah’s old friend smile.

They rolled to a stop fifty feet from the roadblock. A couple of big trucks had been parked nose-to-nose across the road, and whoever had done it had chosen the place carefully. Rocks on one side and a ditch on the other made passing impossible.

A man emerged from behind the truck on the left: short, long hair, a gun in his hand. There was movement in the ditch to their right, and Vic saw three faces peering up at them.

‘You got any food?’ the man called.

‘I’m hungry,’ Olivia said, reminded of her rumbling stomach.

‘Nothing,’ Sean shouted back. ‘What’re you doing hanging around-?’

‘My family’s hungry,’ the man said. ‘Can’t go to the towns. Can’t go to houses. They’re everywhere. And I can’t call anyone, the goddamn phones don’t work. And we’re starving. So. .’ He lifted the gun and aimed it at the car. ‘So get out, hands up. And-’

‘We don’t have any food,’ Sean said.

‘Thomas!’ a woman said. Vic tried to see past Sean and Marc but he wasn’t sure where the voice had come from.

‘Thomas,’ the woman repeated. Sean opened his door and slipped out, lifting his gun and pointing it at Thomas’s face.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Lucy whispered.

Vic wanted to get out but he was trapped between his wife and daughter on one side and Jayne on the other. He reached past Jayne for the door handle, and Marc hissed like an animal.

‘Stay inside!’

The two men pointed guns at each other. In the ditch, the three faces stared, terrified.

‘We’re not infected,’ Sean said. ‘And we have someone very important with us. Someone who might be able to help stop all this. We’re going to somewhere in the mountains, an underground bunker called Coldbrook, where it’ll be safe. There’ll be food and water and shelter for you and your family.’

Thomas held the gun as if it was hot, and Vic thought he’d probably never fired it before. It took only a few seconds for him to lower it, and from somewhere behind the trucks the woman called out a third time, startled and scared: ‘Thomas?’

‘Good,’ Sean said. He kept his gun raised and stepped forward, and for a second Vic thought he was going to shoot the man in the face. Then he’d kill his wife and kids and steal whatever they had, because survival was the only law now.

But Sean paused again. ‘One of those yours?’ he asked, nodding at the trucks.

‘Both.’

Sean nodded and lowered his gun. ‘Bring the one with the most fuel. Follow us.’ He clapped the man on the shoulder, then returned to the station wagon.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Vic muttered as Sean slammed his door closed again.

‘Nope,’ Sean said, ‘just some dude who doesn’t know shit about safety catches.’

They headed off with Thomas and his family following on behind.

Marc got out next time and talked to the people they saw, a group of three teenaged boys walking along the road and, amazingly, still alive. They carried automatic weapons and when he returned to the station wagon Marc said that the boys had been using them against the zombies. They joined Thomas and his family, sitting in the truck’s bed.

A car, eight bikers from a gang called Unblessed, a bus with several adults and twenty kids, more walkers. They found some of them stationary, parked on or just off the road and waiting for something that would never come — or fearing something that would. They passed others going in the opposite direction and flagged them down; some stopped, some stepped on the gas.

And Vic began to feel that this was something good. Once inside Coldbrook they’d be somewhere easy to defend, and from there Marc could start his development of a vaccine or cure. With luck the food and water would last.

As they advanced towards Coldbrook and the convoy grew they saw more and more movement in the hills. Several times they passed zombies stationary by the roadside, and with the vehicle’s windows down they could hear their haunting calls. They did not stop.

They moved south-west, parallel to Route 81 but sticking to minor roads. There was a general agreement that to hit the highways would be a bad idea. And, as the afternoon wore on, Vic gained a sense of their wider surroundings and the stories unfolding around them. The people they picked up either lived close by or had fled to the mountains from surrounding cities and towns, believing that the wilds might be safer. Most of them told tales that proved this was not the case. Many had lost family — brothers, parents, wives, children — and they wore the haunted, often hopeless expressions of refugees.

Vic knew that the zombies could not follow on foot, but the larger the convoy of survivors grew, the more he came to fear that news of their existence was being broadcast. The few times they stopped, he climbed from the car and heard a gentle hooting in the distance. It might have been a breeze in the hills.

But he thought not.