EIGHT
'So what happens now?' asked Nina.
St Helen's Hospital was in lockdown, all entrances and exits to the building firmly sealed. No one could get in or out. The dozens, perhaps hundreds, of walking dead that Rianne and Nina had witnessed attack and kill the man in the car park were surrounding the hospital, staring in through the building's glass frontage at the people inside.
At first there had been panic. Lots of people screaming and running. Demanding answers. Demanding action. The staff, who were terrified too, had done their utmost to calm the rising hysteria, to bring the situation under control.
Now there was a sort of uneasy calm. People were still edgy, still scared; some were weeping; a number had been sedated. There had been an attempt to clear the Reception area, to seal it off and evacuate everyone to the upper levels. But perversely the majority of people had refused to leave. The general consensus was that they wanted to know what was going on. They wanted to be able to see the enemy, to keep tabs on what they were doing.
And, though few people would have admitted it, there was a sense of morbid fascination involved too. Many of the creatures looked awful, terrifying – rotting and scabrous, some with parts of their bodies or their faces missing – but the majority of the tense and muttering multitude which had gathered in Reception simply couldn't stop staring at them, couldn't stop gazing with wonder and awe and disgust at the grotesque and the impossible.
After the initial flurry of panic, things had started to settle down. Despite the tension and the fear, a sort of siege mentality had set in, a touch of the Dunkirk spirit. The people inside the hospital, the living, were pulling together, helping one another. The staff were even handing out refreshments, nurses going round with trays of tea and biscuits. Of course, if the walking dead actually did something rather than simply stand and stare – if they tried to smash their way into the hospital, for instance – then the situation would undoubtedly change; the screaming and the panic would start all over again. But for now there was a stand-off. Not a truce, as such, but a stillness, a silence. A sense of dreadful anticipation.
Like most people, Rianne and Nina had been drawn to the Reception area, had felt a peculiar need to be close to the action – or at least close enough to be able to see first-hand what was going on. And, also like most people, they were now staring with fascination and revulsion at the walking corpses – the zombies – standing in silent rows outside the hospital. Like sentinels. Like guard dogs.
Rianne shook her head in response to Nina's murmured question. 'I don't know,' she said.
Speaking in a hushed voice, as though afraid the creatures outside might somehow overhear her, Nina said, 'It's almost as if they're waiting.'
Rianne looked at the girl. 'Waiting for what?' she said.
Nina looked back at her with haunted eyes. She gave a little shrug. 'For the order to attack, maybe?'
Gun in one hand, PDA in the other, Ianto ran through the building site, taking care not to slip in the mud and rubble. Eschewing subtlety, he yelled his friend's name as he ran, his eyes darting every which way, constantly on the lookout for movement between the silent, hulking machines, and in and around the roofless shells of houses caged by scaffolding.
Jack's comms were down, which did not bode well. But at least his life-sign readings were still registering on the PDA. Trouble was, they were too imprecise for Ianto to get a fix on Jack's exact location. Jack could be in any one of the two dozen or so soon-to-be 'desirable luxury dwellings' springing up from the few acres of quagmire that Ianto was currently wading through.
In the centre of the site, Ianto stopped and pivoted on his heels, taking a good look round. There were no street lamps here and the half-finished buildings were nothing but featureless blocks of darkness around him, cutting off what little light had previously bled through from the adjacent street. Ianto wished he had a third hand with which he could hold a torch, and thought that maybe he ought to think about rustling up some kind of head-mounted devices for them all. However, the thought of how horrified Jack would be if it was suggested he wear something practical rather than stylish almost made him smile.
'Jack!' he shouted again, his voice bouncing off the black walls around him. 'Jack! Jack!'
This time he received a reply. Jack's voice was tight, as if he was trying to speak and lift weights at the same time.
'Ianto,' he grunted. 'In here.'
Ianto spun round. It was impossible to tell where the voice was coming from. 'I hear you, Jack, but I can't tell where you are. Keep shouting.'
He followed Jack's strained cries towards a house on his left. He squelched across what would one day be an immaculate front lawn and into a rectangular gap awaiting a door. The blackness swallowed him as soon as he stepped into the building, and he shivered as if the new plaster was giving off a clammy chill.
'Jack!' Ianto's voice echoed around him. 'Where are you?'
'In. . . here. . .' Jack gasped, so close that Ianto felt as though he could almost have reached out and touched him.
He felt his way along the narrow passage until he came to an opening. He slipped through it, gun arm swinging from left to right.
At first he thought the room was empty, and then, from over by the far wall, there came a scuff and a grunting snarl. Ianto screwed up his eyes and glimpsed what appeared to be a suggestion of movement.
'Jack,' he said cautiously. 'Is that you?'
Jack's voice was a grunt in the darkness. 'Get. . . her. . . off me.'
Ianto stepped closer, still pointing his gun. He saw a blue glint on the floor, and realised it was Jack's earpiece, which must have fallen or been pulled off. The PDA cast a metre or so of cold, bluish light before it. Six strides brought Ianto close enough to see Jack lying on his back, trying to hold off the dead teenage girl, who was writhing like a wildcat, her teeth clacking together as she snapped at his face.
Jack glanced up at Ianto with an almost embarrassed expression. 'She's a lot. . . stronger than. . . she looks,' he said. The girl snapped at him again. He turned his face aside. 'And her breath really stinks.'
Ianto put his gun away, placed the PDA on the floor, and produced a choke-loop, which the Torchwood team sometimes used on Weevils, from the inside of his jacket. He tried to loop it over the girl's head, and had to snatch his hand back when she twisted in Jack's grasp and snapped at him.
'Hold her still,' he said tetchily.
'I'm. . . trying,' Jack replied, indignant.
Ianto had another go at snaring the girl, and again almost lost several fingers for his troubles. Sighing, he delved into the left hip pocket of his jacket and produced a nebuliser. This time when the girl twisted her head towards him, he sprayed her full in the face.
He wasn't sure whether the chemicals would have the same immobilising effect on the girl as they did on Weevils – presumably she had no working respiratory system – but it certainly seemed to disorientate her long enough for Ianto to slip the choke-loop over her head. Once that was done, it was only a matter of minutes before he and Jack had the girl gagged and bound. They carried her, still struggling wildly, out of the house, back through the building site, and out onto the street, where the SUV was parked and waiting for them.
In the ten minutes or so that Ianto had been away, three more zombies had arrived, and were now clustered around the SUV, batting ineffectually at the toughened glass of the windows, trying to gain access to the juicy titbits inside.
Jack and Ianto put the trussed and wriggling girl down on the road, and Jack pulled out his gun.
'Oh, you guys are so damn tiresome,' he shouted, and ran towards them.
***
Andy gave Dawn another worried look as he turned into the road leading to St Helen's Hospital. She looked awful – pale and sweating, her eyes ringed with dark circles. The tea towel around her injured hand was stained red, but the blood loss wasn't so great that she would be in any immediate danger.
He thought of what she had said after she'd been bitten, of how she'd been afraid that the suspect might have infected her. But what kind of infection attacked its host so quickly? This was more like the effects of snake venom or something.
Unless. . . Andy swallowed, hardly daring to contemplate the possibility.
Unless this was some sort of alien infection. A plague from beyond the stars. Some bloody germ or other that turned people into flesh-eating monsters.
He went cold at the prospect. Best to put it out of his head for now, concentrate on the matter in hand.
'Soon be there,' he said, wincing inwardly at the tremor beneath the false cheeriness of his voice.
Whether Dawn could hear him or not he didn't know. A few minutes ago she had closed her eyes, murmuring that she was 'so tired'. Since then he hadn't heard a peep out of her.
'Dawn?' Andy said, hoping that she was just dozing, that she hadn't slipped into a coma. 'Dawn, are you – Oh, Christ!'
It was what his headlights had revealed as he had turned into the hospital car park that had prompted his outburst.
Zombies. Hundreds of the buggers. Forming a cordon around the hospital. Just standing there in ordered rows like. . . like bloody soldiers or something.
Andy shivered. What were they doing? Massing to attack? Waiting to beam up to the mothership? Or was this some kind of war of attrition? Were the creatures going to wait until the people inside became hungry or desperate enough to take a chance at confronting them, trying to break through their massed ranks?
Whatever the reason, one thing was certain: Andy was not going to get any medical help for Dawn here. He reached for the gear lever, intending to put the car into reverse – and something slammed into the driver's window mere centimetres from his head, making him jump out of his skin.
His head snapped round. A hand, the fingernails purple-black and peeling away, the skin like old green leather, was pressed against the glass. The owner of the hand bent down to peer in at him, and suddenly Andy found himself face to face with a Halloween mask come to life. The flesh of the cheeks was torn and green, the wounds wriggling with maggots. One eye, a withered orb on a thread of tendon, dangled from the socket; the other stared upwards, the pupil only just visible, as if the creature was trying to gaze into its own rotting skull.
As Andy stared in revulsion at the maggoty face, the car lurched violently. Tearing his gaze away from the monstrosity separated from him by nothing more than a thin sheet of glass, he glanced into his rear-view mirror. Dark, ragged figures were milling at the back of the car, shoving and jolting, as if trying to turn the vehicle over.
Terrified, Andy slammed the car into first and stamped on the accelerator, causing the creatures that had gathered around the vehicle to stagger and reel and fall as he sped away. He bumped down to the next level of the car park and turned right into the entrance, knowing that there was an exit at the far end.
A fat female zombie in a purple dress stepped out of the bushes on his left, right into the path of the car. Andy jerked the wheel and the car screeched past her, clipping her leg and sending her spinning away. Immediately another zombie – a thin man in a stained white lab coat – lurched into view from behind a parked van, hands raised, fingers hooked into talons. Andy clenched his teeth as he hit the man head on. There was an almighty bang and the body was thrown across the bonnet and into the air, disappearing in a mass of whirling arms and legs.
The car skidded and spun. Andy wrenched at the wheel, desperately trying to keep control. For an awful second he thought the vehicle was going to flip over, or at the very least hit a tree or another parked car, but then it steadied itself, enabling Andy to drive out of the upraised exit gate and high-tail it out of there.
999 wasn't working. At first Sophie thought it was just her, that she was shaking so much she kept mis-hitting the buttons. But after a dozen attempts, following which she was still receiving an engaged signal, she was forced to conclude that, for the time being at least, the emergency services were out of her reach.
In light of what had just happened, the pink fascia of her phone, imprinted with green bubble-letters spelling out the words 'Party Grrrl', suddenly struck her as hideously inappropriate. Sophie dropped the phone with a clatter on the formica-topped kitchen table, then she pulled out a chair and slumped into it. Still shaking uncontrollably, she leaned forward, propped her elbows on the table, and lowered her head into her hands. Loudly and lustily, she began to cry.
She still couldn't believe what she had seen less than half an hour ago. Every time she recalled it, trying to focus on the details, her mind veered away like a startled deer. Physically, though, she was still reacting to it; her body was close to going into shock. Her hands and feet were freezing and, if she had happened to look in a mirror at that moment, Sophie would have been alarmed by how deathly pale she was, how blue her lips had become.
She had run all the way home, a distance of two miles, and, by the time she had arrived at the front door of the house she shared with her lodger – a graphic design student called Kate, who Sophie had never really developed much of a bond with – her stockinged feet were bleeding and embedded with gravel.
Sophie hadn't even noticed. Even now she didn't feel the pain. She sat at the kitchen table, the sobs tearing out of her, her body heaving with tears. She cried for a long time, and when she was done she felt dizzy, sick and drained. Almost subconsciously she crossed to the kettle and flicked it on, took a mug down from the cupboard and spooned instant coffee into it.
When the coffee was ready she re-took her seat at the kitchen table, stared into space and smoked a cigarette. She lit a second from the butt of the first, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. Recently she'd been trying to give up, and she'd been doing so well too; she'd got down to three a day. But after what she'd seen tonight, all those things like cutting out smoking and eating healthily and going to the gym suddenly seemed so pointless, like trying to deflect a hurricane with an umbrella. Because sooner or later death would come, whatever you did to try and prevent it. It was an unstoppable force: massive, ruthless and unpredictable. Tonight it had taken Winston and Kirsty, and it had nearly taken her too. And, although she had escaped, she felt as if it had the measure of her now, as if she was living on borrowed time.
Sitting in the kitchen, smoking and drinking coffee, her mind drifting haphazardly from one crazy thought to another, Sophie felt a kind of numbness setting in. It was almost comforting in a way. She wished she could sit here for ever, not thinking about anything, cut off from the world. She had always known the world was cruel and unforgiving, but until tonight she had never realised quite how cruel, how unforgiving, it could be. But now she did know, and she wanted no further part of it. It could go on without her as far as she was concerned. She was happy just sitting here, doing nothing.
It was the creak on the stairs which eventually roused her from her torpor. She raised her head slowly, looking across at the kitchen door, willing it not to open. The last thing she wanted right now was Kate babbling on about what a stressful day she'd had at work. Sophie heard the plod of descending footsteps, and braced herself for the inevitable. Just as she'd feared, the door to the kitchen swung wide.
Kate was there, all right, but not the whole of her. There was just her head, eyes and mouth wide open, as if she'd been caught by surprise. The head was hanging by its hair from the clenched fist of a recently dead Asian man in a dark suit, whose wire-framed spectacles dangled from one blackening ear.
The man growled like a dog confronted by a stranger, his slack and stupid gaze fixing on her. As Sophie rose from her seat, thinking almost wearily, Oh no, not again, the zombie opened its hand and Kate's head dropped to the floor with a dull, squishy thump.
With a cry of fury and despair, Sophie snatched up her half-empty coffee mug and hurled it with all her strength. Coffee sprayed in an arc across the kitchen as the mug shattered against the zombie's forehead, opening up a wound which trickled with blackish blood.
The zombie didn't flinch, or even blink, from the impact. It just kept shuffling forward, raising its bloodied hands towards her.
'Why can't you just leave me alone!' Sophie screeched at it. She rounded the table and ran towards the kitchen window.
The window was above the sink, and Sophie had to scramble up onto the draining board to reach it, dislodging crockery and pans, which crashed and clanged on the tiled floor. The window itself was divided into three sections. The main picture window in the middle didn't open, but the two side windows did. Sophie groped for the levered catch halfway up the frame and wrenched it upwards, then stooped to lift the bar at the bottom. Her hand closed around the bar at the precise instant that the zombie's hand closed around her ankle.
Immediately the creature began to tighten its grip, grinding her ankle bones beneath its fingers. Sophie screamed, grabbing the window frame as the zombie tried to wrench her from her perch. Half-turning, still clinging to the frame, she drew back her right leg and pistoned it forward. Her foot slammed into the zombie's face with such force that she heard a loud crack as its jaw broke.
The creature didn't seem to feel any pain as such, but it was certainly knocked off balance by the blow. Releasing her ankle, it staggered and dropped to one knee. It was all Sophie needed to turn back to the window and shove it open. Even as the zombie began to rise sluggishly to its feet behind her, she climbed onto the sill and jumped.
It was only a short drop, onto a patch of grass too tiny to be called a lawn at the back of the house, but it was wet and slippery, and as Sophie landed she felt her right leg slide out from under her. She cried out as her knee twisted, flaring with white-hot pain. Clenching her teeth, she forced herself to stand, and then, barefoot and whimpering with agony, she hobbled away.
'Sorry about the loud bangs, boys and girls,' Jack grinned, opening the back door of the SUV. His eyes alighted on Sarah's belly, but his grin wavered not at all. 'Now that's going to make life interesting,' he said.
Sarah was all eyes. She looked at the zombies strewn at Jack's feet like roadkill. 'Are those things dead?' she asked in a small voice.
'As dodos,' said Jack, and slipped his Webley back into its holster.
Sarah eyed the gun as if it was a poisonous snake. 'Who exactly are you people?'
'Official zombie exterminators for Cardiff City Council, ma'am,' Jack said glibly. 'I can show you some ID if you like.'
Ianto appeared beside him. His previously immaculate suit was spattered with mud and blood. 'How are you?'
'She's very pregnant,' Jack said, still grinning. 'When you told me we had passengers, Ianto, you neglected to mention that tiny detail.'
Ianto frowned. 'Didn't really have time, did I?' Turning back to Sarah, he asked, 'Have you been OK?'
Sarah's obvious terror at a second zombie attack in the space of twenty minutes manifested itself as anger. 'No, I've been bloody scared,' she snapped. 'Don't ever leave us again.'
Ianto stepped back in surprise. Jack chuckled and raised his eyebrows.
'We won't,' Ianto said. 'How are the contractions?'
As quickly as Sarah's anger had appeared, it was gone. Now she just looked exhausted, both physically and emotionally.
'About the same,' she said, 'which is pretty amazing considering.'
'And how's Trys?'
'He's also the same. I think.'
Jack clapped Ianto on the shoulder. 'I'll leave you to practise your bedside manner while I make our other guest comfortable.'
He walked round to the back of the SUV and opened the boot. After dealing with the zombies, Jack had hurried back across the road and helped Ianto carry the girl across to the SUV. They had laid her face-down on the ground before checking to see whether the Thomases were all right. Now Jack bent down to pick her up.
'Come on, sweetheart,' he said. 'We're taking you somewhere warm and cosy.'
He was concentrating on keeping his hands away from the girl's snapping teeth, and so didn't see the zombie underneath the SUV until it was too late. The creature, a boy of no more than seven years old, shot from the darkness with an animal-like snarl and slashed out at him, its fingernails cutting into his throat.
Jack threw himself backwards, intending to whip out his gun and shoot the boy as soon as he was out of the thing's range. But the road was slippery. Jack's feet shot from under him and his skull hit the concrete with a resounding crack. Vaguely aware of the wetness of his own blood pumping from his throat, Jack managed to croak out one word, 'Ianto', before unconsciousness rushed in and everything went black.