‘...Just a second’ gasped Reg, grabbing the thick trunk of a white poplar.

  ‘We can’t stop...’ Katie grimaced. ‘You told me, remember? We can’t stop now...’

  ‘...Just...for...a...second...’

  Katie watched as the old man leaned his head against the trunk. He had weakened dramatically in the last few minutes and now looked ready to collapse. Maybe, she thought, that bang on the skull was even worse than it looked...

  Reg raised his head, fighting to speak between wheezes, but when the words wouldn’t come he pointed through the trees and down a slope to the right. She followed his direction and stared through the foliage, making out an old farm building beyond the veil of waving leaves. A drop of sweat dripped from the end of her nose and she wiped it with the cuff of her blouse. Then she nodded, and a moment later both of them were trudging down the slope.

  The ‘building’ was barely a shell; just an old abandoned cattle shed open to the elements on two sides with a broken roof and muddy floor pitted with puddles. Old stonework and sheets of corrugated metal made up the two remaining walls but there was still a hay loft and also a ladder, albeit a battered one, leading up to the higher level. Temporarily at least, it was somewhere safe.

  ‘Do you think you can climb?’ asked Katie, equally worried about the old man’s head wound as well as his sheer exhaustion.

  ‘Hope so...’ Reg gasped, taking an unsteady step forward. ‘You first though..?’

  -crack!-

  The sound came from nearby; a dry branch snapping underfoot.

  ‘No time!’ Katie hissed, pushing the old man from behind. ‘Go. Go!’

  Reg approached the ladder and began to climb, his sweaty palms slipping on the first rung before finding a proper grip. Gritting his teeth, he dragged his aching feet up from one step to the next.

  Below him Katie snapped a look over her shoulder, her blue eyes searching the slope up to the edge of the tree line. Although she could see nothing there were definite sounds nearby; twigs snapping, leaves rustling. A creeping unease sent a shiver down her spine and she stared up at the old man. ‘Hurry, Reg. Please..!’

  Reg had almost reached the top when Katie decided that she could wait no longer. She grabbed the base of the ladder and stepped onto the bottom rung, wincing as it groaned under their combined weight. Common sense told her to wait for Reg to get off, but common sense had taken a back seat in place of a primal need to survive. With her heart pounding in her throat she started to climb as quickly as she could.

  Five feet off the ground Katie Reilly felt an iron grip on the heel of her boot. A jolt of panic surged through her body and she looked down. Staring up at her with smoky-white eyes was a man drenched in red, his mouth wide open and snarling. A few feet behind him were another five or six equally terrifying individuals, lurching slowly closer with their arms outstretched.

  With a scream, Katie wrenched her boot free and thrust her heel back down, crunching it straight into the attacker’s eye-socket. The thing stumbled back, its eyeball instantly mashed to jelly, a ripped optic nerve jetting dark blood onto the muddy floor.

  Katie froze in horror, appalled at the damage she had done, but the thing gave no howl of pain. Instead it bared its rotten teeth and lunged again, cold fingers clawing once more for her legs.

  ‘Quickly!’ shouted Reg, reaching out and grabbing her hand. With every sinew stretched to breaking point he hauled her up out of the creature’s reach, her scrambling boots immediately finding the security of a higher footing. Gasping in relief, she used the old man’s help to clamber up the final rungs and stepped onto the surface of the loft.

  ‘You alright?’ Reg asked as he helped her onto the creaking wooden platform, but Katie’s reply was stuck in her throat. Instead she turned and dropped to her knees, looking back down over the edge of the hayloft...

  Fifteen feet below them, glaring back up through identical ghostly-white eyes, were seven growling creatures; five men and two women. All had the same anaemic pallor, the same yellowed teeth and twisted expressions. A waft of decay, like festering meat, rose up from them. Filled with revulsion, Katie suddenly found her voice again.

  ‘Quick, help me move this!’ she yelled, pushing at the top of the ladder.

  ‘No, wait!’ shouted Reg, grabbing the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Look..!’

  At first resisting him, Katie dared to glance down again. The creatures were clawing the air, hissing and growling, stretching their bony fingers upward as the voices above drove them into a wild frenzy. But there was one thing they were not doing.

  They weren’t trying to climb the ladder.

  Katie’s shoulder’s sagged as Reg slowly released his grip on her sleeve. ‘They don’t know how to get up here...’ she said softly, with a trace of disbelief.

  ‘No’ replied Reg. ‘But we can’t leave the ladder there just in case they figure it out somehow. We need something to distract them…’

  The pensioner scanned the surface of the loft. Hazy daylight was coming through from large holes in the broken roof, enough to illuminate the area. The boards themselves were covered with a sparse sprinkling of mouldy hay and in the partially destroyed wall at the far end was a large two-door shutter, presumably where fresh hay was once loaded from outside. With a rusted pitchfork and a pile of fallen roof tiles in the far corner, the place looked like it hadn’t been used practically for years.

  ‘Hold on, pet’ Reg whispered. ‘I’ve got an idea. Get back from the edge. Don’t let them see you...’

  Tiptoeing carefully over the creaking boards, the old man picked up one of the broken tiles. Then he looked over his shoulder at Katie and put a finger to his lips, a gesture for her to stay quiet.

  She looked on as Reg drew his arm back and hurled the slate up through a gap in the roof, watching as it arced in the air, spinning over and over before landing unseen on the worn ground outside. Without pausing for breath the pensioner grabbed another piece of slate and threw it up and out at a slightly different angle. This time it landed on a more solid piece of ground and shattered on impact, making a louder, sharper noise.

  Katie held her breath as the old man again put a finger to his lips. After a few seconds he returned to her by tiptoeing silently across the loft, and then both of them slowly knelt by the edge, cautiously peering over.

  Beneath the platform the creatures had already begun to move, their attention drawn to the sounds outside. One by one they staggered away, following each other like sheep as they lurched out into the hazy sunshine.

  Quickly, as if it were a military operation, Katie and Reg grabbed the top of the ladder and began to haul it up. It was heavier than expected, the task made more difficult by trying to move it as quietly as possible, but in a sequence of five motions they were able to lift it completely into the loft. Aching in exhaustion they carefully laid it down, easing themselves into sitting positions against the wall.

  ‘Get your breath back and rest for a bit’ Reg whispered. ‘It looks like they don’t have much of an attention span. If we keep quiet maybe they’ll go away completely...’

  Katie rubbed the sweat from her brow and lowered her eyes. Once more her thoughts returned to Ben and she bit her bottom lip to stem the tide of grief.

  ‘I’m sure he’s okay’ said Reg, reading her mind.

  ‘It’s not just him’ she murmured. ‘It’s everything. My mum’s in a home, miles away. She won’t be able to deal with any of this. God, I feel so bloody helpless...’

  ‘Listen, pet’ said Reg with a cheeky sideways wink. ‘Us old ‘uns are tougher than you think. All you and I can do is try and get through this the best we can. Some things we can’t control, other things we can. Just don’t give up yet…’

  Katie sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘You sound like my dad used to, apart from the accent. What is that, Sunderland?’

  Reg gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Bloody hell, pet, I’m no Mackem. I’m from Newcastle. A Geordie boy, loud and proud...’

  The old man smiled and then so did she, but the expression faded from her lips almost immediately. She had been very quick to judge Reg Herbert as a liability; a kind individual but a burden nonetheless. Now she hated herself for thinking that. On the contrary he had been focused, showing a clear mind at exactly the right moment. Furthermore, he had probably saved her life back on the road as well as here.

  ‘Reg?’ she whispered. ‘What do you think they are? I mean, what do you think happened to them?’

  The pensioner put a finger under the rim of his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. ‘This is going to make me sound mad’ he said softly, ‘but I’ve seen dead bodies before, back in my army days’. Then he took a deep breath. ‘And I think that’s what they are. I think somehow they’re dead...’

  ‘God’ said Katie, shuddering. ‘I thought I was imagining that, the smell of them and all. But how..?’

  Reg shook his head and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He muttered something under his breath that Katie couldn’t hear but she decided not to press him again; especially with a question he could not possibly answer...

  ‘You should let me see to that cut’ she said instead, removing a wad of crumpled tissues from her jean pocket. ‘At least try and clean it up a bit...’

  ‘Okay’ he said, reluctantly. ‘And then we’d best rest for a while. As soon as it’s safe we’ll need to get moving again.’

  ~ 12 ~

  Ben Reilly saw the woman first. She was lying on the ground ten feet away, scrabbling pathetically at the earth with two fingers remaining from a half-eaten hand. And the rest of her body was a bloody mess too.

  With a guttural growl she inched over the forest floor, milky juices dribbling from a gaping belly wound out of which, like a string of sausages, trailed a glistening rope of intestine. Her legs, mangled in some unknown incident, thrashed uselessly in the leaf litter. In some strange, twisted way she reminded Ben of a baby yet to take its first steps...

  ‘Oh my God...’ cried Sarah, noticing a shard of bone jutting through the woman’s jeans just below the knee. Grimacing, the teenage girl turned away as Ben shepherded both her and Chris to a safer distance.

  ‘It must be some sort of disease; a virus or something’ mumbled Ben, looking back to read a tortured hunger within eyes that had already turned milky-white. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

  The dead woman watched as they disappeared, glaring through tangled, greasy hair, her drooling lips drawn back over snarling teeth. Then she dug her remaining fingers into the earth and started crawling forward again, one inch at a time.

  Leaving the corpse behind, Ben led the teenagers swiftly through the woods, his face a pale mask of despair. Muddled thoughts continued to tumble through his mind and one in particular kept resurfacing.

  Had he guessed correctly?

  Maybe it was some kind of virus, and maybe they were already infected. If the red rain was the cause then maybe it was only a matter of time before all three of them turned into monsters. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  Maybe he would never see Katie again.

  ‘Ben’ whispered Chris as they reached an area thick with narrow-trunked trees. The older man stopped and turned around, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘What is it?’ he croaked.

  Chris put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh.’

  Silently, the spiky-haired youngster pointed to the right, down through the gaps in the trees to an open area beyond the woodland a hundred or so feet away. There, walking parallel to the tree line and bathed in the mid-afternoon sun was a mass of stumbling bodies.

  A legion of the dead.

  Ben’s breath caught in his throat and he froze. The others immediately did likewise, jangling nerves turning their bodies to statues. Only their eyes moved, looking from one creature to the next as wave after wave passed by the forest’s edge in one colossal, rotten procession.

  Thirty seconds went by. Then sixty.

  Sarah Janson’s stomach began to churn, caused in no small part by the stench of decay filtering through the trees. She gulped, resisting the urge to vomit while digging sharp nails into her palms as a distraction. Ben’s eyes were on her now, reading the fear in her crumpled face before he switched to Chris. The blond-haired, slightly gawky youngster was trembling too, his throat rippling as he gulped dry air.

  ‘It’s okay’ Ben whispered, his voice so hushed that it barely registered. ‘Stay still and quiet and it’ll be okay.’ And then, in the space of a heartbeat, Ben Reilly knew.

  These youngsters were his responsibility now. They had left the stream of survivors on the road to go with him and now he had to keep things together for their sake as well as his own. He had to push aside thoughts of never finding Katie because that would crush his spirit; it would make him careless, useless to them and probably get them all killed.

  ‘It’ll be okay’ he mouthed again.

  It took six more agonising minutes for the last of the creatures to stumble past the forest’s edge. Ben had lost count of how many had passed but estimated at around the three hundred mark. Their stench still lingered though, a stomach-churning cocktail of putrefying flesh, vomit and excrement.

  After another two minutes he gave a heavy sigh and stretched his spine against the body of the tree. ‘Stay here’ he whispered. ‘Let me just check it’s clear.’

  Sarah’s eyes creased with fear. ‘But...’

  ‘I’m not leaving you’ Ben continued. ‘I promise. We need to get back into the open. We can’t move quickly or quietly enough through these woods. It’s not safe...’

  ‘Is anywhere?’ Chris muttered.

  ‘Just stay here’ Ben scowled. ‘I’ll only be a minute.’

  The older man made his way to the perimeter of the wood as quietly as he possibly could, wincing at every footfall. In his head every cracking twig sounded a hundred times louder than it actually was.

  From the dappled edge he craned his neck and looked out in all directions. The stench of decay was stronger here, although fortunately not at the nauseating intensity of ten minutes ago. Directly ahead beyond the leaf cover a worn area of patchy scrubland was invitingly clear, the red rain remaining only in recessed puddles. To the right a sloping hill wound up around a bend and seemed to head back to the roadside. To the left, in the direction that the creatures had gone, the ground merged with a beaten track that snaked off into the distance. Ben shuddered, seeing the bobbing heads of the last stragglers disappear down the sloping trail and out of sight. Then he looked back over his shoulder through a gap in the trees and waved at the staring teenagers.

  ‘It’s okay’ he mouthed. ‘Come on.’

  Once back out in the hazy April sunshine, Chris blinked and looked left and right. ‘What’s the plan?’ he asked. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  Ben thought for a moment and stared at the sky while weighing up their options. The horizon was finally clear of the distinct plumes of smoke although now there was a dusty tinge to the blue. He had to find Katie, that was for certain, but he would only stand a chance of doing that by thinking rationally. The couple’s original plan was to try and get to get to his brother’s place in Sevenoaks. If Katie was okay then surely that’s where she would be heading.

  ‘Hey’ said Sarah, trembling. ‘What’s that?’

  The willowy girl pointed to the right, to the edge of another grove of trees. Just visible beyond the waving branches was the top of an old building.

  An old farm building.

  Katie Reilly awoke with a start. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, frantically trying to clear them enough to read the time on her watch. It had only been a matter of minutes but she was amazed that she had been able to doze off for any length of time at all. Must be nervous exhaustion she concluded, although something had woken her; a noise from somewhere...

  She looked over at Reg. He was lying on his side, glasses askew, fast asleep, breathing heavily and facing toward her. She blinked and looked away, running her fingers through her dirty hair before quietly removing a wristband and using it to tie her hair back. Only then did she realise that something was missing. Her treasured silver bracelet was gone, and its absence made her heart sink.

  ‘Stupid cow’ she whimpered, instantly annoyed at her own emotional reaction. The bracelet was quite plain really and certainly not valuable; well, not financially anyway. Still though, there was something symbolic about its loss. It had been a physical reminder of her old life, a gift from Ben that she had cherished for years. And now it was gone; gone for good.

  Deep in thought, a sudden buzzing sound made her jump and she instinctively reached into her jean pocket. She took out a mobile phone; the one that she had taken from the girl on the train. The display blinked with a ‘battery low’ icon, alongside the now familiar ‘no service’ message.

  This was the tone that had woken her.

  Katie exhaled, staring into the display screen at the default image of the girl in her boyfriend’s arms. She paused, feeling briefly intrusive, and then started to click through the menus. Again her finger hovered over the ‘images’ button before pressing it, bringing up a screen of thumbnail photographs. Not sure of what to expect, she began to scroll through them, finding pictures of kittens, likely grandparents and one family get-together after another. And in the later photos she saw countless ‘selfies’ of the girl and her boyfriend.

  ‘What the bloody hell happened to you..?’ Katie mumbled under her breath as the display turned black.

  Perhaps roused by her faint words the old man began to stir. Stretching, he smacked his lips and straightened his glasses before sitting up to stifle a yawn. Then he pointed at the phone. ‘Anything?’

  ‘No. And the battery’s just gone, too.’

  Putting the phone back into her jean pocket, Katie shuffled near to the edge of the loft and peered down onto the shadowed floor below.

  ‘Anything there?’ Reg asked, with a whisper.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42