Jax had put her jeans, boots, and white T-shirt on. She came over to help me.
“I hope you don’t mind going with me,” I said.
“You watch my back and I’ll watch yours and we’ll be okay,” she replied, untying a cord and pulling the Zodiac free.
I put my damp jeans and boots on and the four of us carried the inflatable boat to the rear of the Lucky Escape. We got it over the side and when it was in the water, Sam tied it to the aft ladder. Jax and I descended the ladder and climbed on board.
I sat on the bench and Jax knelt by the outboard motor while Sam went to fetch our weapons. He returned with our baseball bats and handed them down to us. I lay them on the aluminium floor of the Zodiac.
Tanya threw the four empty rucksacks down and I stowed them next to our weapons.
“You want to take anything else with you?” Sam asked, offering us his tire iron.
I shook my head. “No, I’m fine with the bat.” I didn’t want to be weighed down by anything except a backpack full of food. Jax also refused the offer of his weapon and started the outboard engine.
It was noisy and spat out white smoke that smelled of oil and petrol. Jax grabbed the tiller and guided us away from the Lucky Escape.
The Zodiac cut through the water towards the beach.
As we reached the sand, I jumped out and waded ashore with the boat’s mooring rope. Someone had tied a heavy rock to the rope already so I made a hole in the sand and buried the rock in it. I didn’t want to risk the boat floating away with the tide.
Jax tilted the engine forward to keep the propeller from hitting the sand and rocks then she grabbed the empty backpacks and baseball bats and jumped out to join me on the beach.
We slung the backpacks over our shoulders and stood silently on the sand for a moment, listening and evaluating our situation.
All I could hear was the gentle rush of waves breaking on the beach. A slight smell of rotting meat hung in the warm air but that didn’t necessarily mean there was a village full of zombies here.
Jax looked at me. “You ready?”
I nodded with more confidence than I felt. “Ready.”
We moved up the beach to the parking area. One of the cars was a white Nova, the other a metallic red Toyota Camry.
As we approached, a sudden movement in the Nova surprised us both and we jumped back. Two rotting blue-skinned faces appeared in the back window of the car, their hateful yellow eyes fixed on us. They banged on the windows with their fists, leaving smears of blood and flesh on the glass.
“Don’t worry, they can’t get out,” Jax said. “They scared me though.”
“Yeah,” I said. The sudden appearance of the two zombies worried me. They had waited there quietly until we were close. If not for the car windows, they would have grabbed us.
How many more of them were hiding in the village?
We readied our bats and walked past the cars towards the houses.
nineteen
The village was no more than a single street lined with thirty or so houses built of grey stone and with small fenced-off front yards, a post office and a pub. The street was deserted. A few cars were parked here and there but there was nothing to indicate that anyone was in the houses. Most of the curtains were closed and through the windows where they weren’t, I could only see glimpses of empty living rooms. A dead meat smell hung in the air.
“It’s too quiet,” Jax whispered.
“Let’s just find some food and get out of here,” I suggested.
She nodded. “Which house do you want to try first?”
I indicated the nearest house with open curtains. For some reason, the houses that had closed themselves off from the street seemed more dangerous. What if the people in them had closed the curtains as they had fallen ill and died? What if they were roaming the rooms behind those curtains?
“Let’s go,” Jax said. Then she saw something at the end of the road and put a hand on my arm. “What’s that?”
I looked up the road. Past the houses, the street intersected with a wider road that was probably what was considered to be a main road in this rural area. Beyond that road, a low stone wall marked the boundary of a field. Part of the wall was missing. It looked like a vehicle had driven off the road and into the field. Beyond the gap in the stones, a green army truck lay on its side.
“I wish we’d brought the binoculars,” I said. “I can’t see it clearly. Looks like an army truck.”
“We should investigate,” Jax said, setting off along the street.
Walking farther from the beach, from the Zodiac, didn’t seem like a good idea to me but I had no choice. I couldn’t let her check out the army vehicle alone. I caught up with her and kept a wary eye on the houses we passed as we made our way along the street. I was keenly aware of the growing distance between us and the Zodiac.
The pub was called The Fisherman’s Rest. Its wooden sign was dark green with the pub’s name in gold letters beneath a painting of a fishing trawler sailing on a sunlit sea. I looked into the windows. It was gloomy inside. I could see the bar and the beer pumps and a few tables. There was no movement.
We reached the main road and looked both ways. The road wound between stone walls and hedges in both directions, following the coast. We crossed to the gap in the stone wall and looked into the field beyond.
The army truck bore the medical red cross symbol on its doors. It lay on its side in the long grass and judging by the skid marks on the road and the distance the truck had slid into the field, it had been moving quite fast when it crashed through the wall.
The rear of the truck was crumpled on one side and the windows and windscreen of the cab were smashed. I couldn’t see anyone inside either in the front or the rear.
“Do you think it’s been there long?” Jax asked.
“A while,” I said. “See how the grass behind the truck is standing up? That would have been flattened when the truck slid through here.”
“What do you think happened?” She leaned on the wall to get a closer look but neither of us suggested going into the field to investigate closer. Standing here in the dead quiet of a sunny afternoon with the silent village behind us and the crashed army truck lying in the grass seemed almost surreal.
“Maybe somebody in the truck turned, grabbed the driver, sent the vehicle skidding through this wall. Or they might have swerved to avoid hitting something in the road, overcorrected, and gone into the field. We’ll probably never know.”
“We should check it out,” Jax said. Her tone made me wonder if she was trying to convince herself.
“Yeah, we should,” I replied. I hated to admit it but there could be something valuable in the truck. Assuming the survivors of the crash hadn’t been evacuated by the army when they realised one of their trucks was missing and came to find it, there could be dead soldiers in there. Maybe even guns.
We stepped through the hole in the wall and into the long grass. It swished around our knees as we walked slowly towards the truck. I gripped my bat tightly. My breathing had quickened since stepping into the field and I felt a little queasy. Sometimes these trucks were used to transport soldiers. Any minute now, a dozen of them could come crawling over the tailgate, mottled blue hands reaching for us.
The back of the truck was dark. I knelt in the grass and peered into the blackness. I was sure there were no zombies in there waiting for us and the air here didn’t smell any worse than it did on the road.