twenty
We explored the house quickly and made sure it was safe. It looked like a typical family had lived here once. The family photos showed a couple in their thirties and a bright eyed blonde girl of eight or nine.
The upstairs consisted of a simply-furnished double bedroom, the little girl’s bedroom decorated in pink, and a spare room that was being used to store cardboard boxes full of books and DVDs. The bathroom was tidy and decorated in sea blue with plastic fish and crabs on the window sill.
Downstairs we found a utility room and a cozy living room.
A typical family house.
I wondered where they were now.
We found food in the kitchen cupboards and filled the backpacks with cans and jars. We wouldn’t be going hungry for a while.
As long as we could get this stuff back to the Lucky Escape.
We left the food-stuffed backpacks in the kitchen, went into the living room and sat on the sofa after shrugging off our backpacks full of medical supplies. The curtains in here were closed and I left them that way. If the soldier was out there roaming the street, there was no point risking him seeing us through the window.
“What the hell was he?” Jax asked. “He wasn’t an ordinary soldier. There was something about him… something strange.”
“I got a glimpse of him,” I replied. “His skin and his eyes were weird. I don’t know exactly what it was, I only got a quick look.”
“You mean he’s turned?”
I shrugged. “He can’t have. We know how the zombies move and it isn’t anything like that. It was like being chased by Usain Bolt.”
“You think he’s still out there?” she asked, looking at the curtains.
I nodded. “Somewhere.”
“He must have been the driver of the truck.”
I dug into my backpack and found the notebook. “If he is, he’s probably Sergeant Wilder. This is his notebook.” I laid it on the glass coffee table and opened it.
Flicking through the pages, we discovered that Wilder had been tasked with transporting the vaccine from a nearby army base to the medics who were vaccinating soldiers at the outlying military outposts. Reading the list of places he logged in the book, we learned that the army had men stationed at every major port, harbour and marina.
He hadn’t worked alone. Wilder was part of a team called Alpha 3 Victor. Along with Wilder, the other team members were Corporal Francis and Lance Corporal Jones.
Judging by the dates entered in the notebook, the vaccination program had been in operation for just over two weeks.
The final entry was dated two days ago and Wilder had written a simple note in the margin. “Cpl Francis was bitten four days ago. He has not turned but keeps saying he wants to be left alone. Tries to wander off at every opportunity. He doesn’t look well but at least he hasn’t become one of the nasties.”
There was nothing else in the book that could help us piece together why the truck was lying in a field and one of the team had chased us into the village. Where were the other two members? There were no bodies in the truck so either all three men survived the crash or they weren’t all in the vehicle when it went off the road.
I closed the notebook. “How are we going to get back to the beach with him still out there?”
Jax thought a moment then said, “Let’s take a look out of the upstairs windows. We might be able to come up with a plan if we know exactly where he is.”
We went upstairs. The double room and the spare room looked out over the street. We tried the double room first, parting the curtains and looking down onto the street.
He was there, pacing up and down along the row of houses like a tiger ready to pounce.
“Look at his face,” Jax whispered.
It was difficult to see his features clearly at this angle but I could see the veins in his neck and face were abnormally dark blue. His skin did not have the blue mottled colour of the zombies, which made the veins stand out even more in contrast. The backs of his hands were the same, dark blue veins spreading like an inked spider web from his wrist to his fingers. His eyes were the same yellow as the eyes of the other zombies.
He didn’t move like an undead zombie being controlled by the virus. He moved like a living man and that made him all the more dangerous. We knew how fast he could run. There was no way we could get to the beach, untie the Zodiac, and be on the water before he caught us.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Jax.
“I have an idea,” she said, leaving the room and going into the pink-wallpapered girl’s room. The window looked out over the back yards of the houses. Jax pressed her face against the glass and looked in the direction of the beach. “We’ll have to go the back way,” she said.
I looked out at the row of yards. Each small patch of grass was separated from the next by a waist-high wooden picket fence. I remembered how I had stumbled on the front yard fence. This time I would be weighed down with a backpack full of heavy cans. It didn’t seem like a good plan to me.
“I don’t think I’ll make it,” I said.
“We’re not going to run. We’re going to sneak down to the beach.”
The thought of going outside while the soldier was out there sent a chill down my spine. “Can’t we just wait awhile? He might go away.”
She looked at me with sympathy in her eyes. Sympathy seemed to be the default emotion I brought out in girls. “I’m scared too, Alex, but we have to get back to the boat.”
“I just don’t think I’m going to make it if I have to outrun him with a backpack full of food weighing me down.”
She didn’t say what we were probably both thinking—that a backpack of food wasn’t going to make the slightest difference. I would be too slow to escape this hybrid soldier zombie even if I had on a pair of Nikes and running gear and no backpack at all. I just wasn’t built for this shit. The neglect my body had suffered from so many years of sitting on my ass while playing video games and eating crap wasn’t just going to go away overnight.
The reason didn’t really matter. All that mattered now was that if I went out there, I would probably get killed. Or bitten. Or eaten. Or whatever that hybrid intended to do to his victims. Either way, I wasn’t happy about leaving the house while he was out there on the street.
“You go,” I said to Jax. “I don’t think there’s any point in me even trying.”
“I’m not going to leave you here,” she said.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I turned my head away when I felt hot tears in my eyes and wiped them away with the back of my hand.
“How about we get something to eat while we’re making our plans?” Jax asked.
I nodded and we went downstairs to the kitchen where we found burgers in the freezer. We got a pan of water boiling on the stove top and added rice to it while the burgers cooked in the oven. I got one of the cans of baked beans we couldn’t fit into our backpacks and poured the contents into a saucepan.
The smell of cooking burgers made my mouth water. They sizzled and spat in the oven and I could hardly wait to get them out and start eating.
While I took charge of the rice, beans and burgers, Jax explored the house more closely than our initial inspection.
“What are you looking for?” I asked as she rummaged through the cupboard beneath the sink.
“A gun would be nice.”
“Good luck finding one of those.”
She continued searching, pulling out cleaning cloths, bottles of bleach, and a plunger.
“You going to plunge him to death?” I asked.
She smiled and said sarcastically, “Very funny.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything that kills hybrid soldier zombies,” I said.