Annaliese hurried around to the driver’s side door and put the key in the lock. The central locking engaged and the doors were unlocked. “Eve, Pauline, squeeze in the passenger side.”
The two women did as they were told and Annaliese started the engine. The moment the vehicle came to life, she instantly felt safer. The thought of being on the road after being cooped up on this hill for so long felt exhilarating. She reversed the truck and pulled it around to face the other way.
Thank God the battery didn’t run flat.
The dead from the house were coming in their droves now and Annaliese could already hear more of them coming up the hill from the distant car park below. Soon, they would be surrounded.
“What about Nick and the others?” Eve said. “We can’t leave without them.”
“They’re already dead,” said Pauline.
“They have to be,” said Annaliese.
But then she saw them.
“Jesus,” said Eve. “Is that Jan?”
Up ahead, surrounded on all sides by the dead, Jan fought for his life. He battled the dead bare fisted, clocking them with right hooks and snapping the necks of any that got too close. Fighting side-by-side with him were Nick and Renee. All three of them were unarmed and desperately trying to survive.
“They’re going to get ripped apart,” said Pauline.
Annaliese gunned the engine and shifted into gear. “Not if I can help it.”
The truck shot forward, accelerating quicker than she expected. She steered the bonnet towards the thick lines of the dead and sped up as much as she could.
The first body she hit went clean over the bonnet and landed behind them. Blood splattered the windscreen, which somehow had remained intact. The second body went down rather than up, falling beneath the big wheels of the utility truck.
Annaliese stamped on the brake and turned the wheel sideways, sending the vehicle into a skid. More bodies went down as the truck slid along like a plough. The windscreen finally cracked and glass shards fell onto the bonnet.
The truck came to a stop. The dead were all around.
Annaliese rolled down her side window and screamed through the one inch-gap. “Nick! Jan! Renee!”
In the distance, amidst the shadows of rotting bodies, the three men turned around. They saw the truck and seemed relieved by its presence. Immediately the three of them started making their way towards it. They pushed and punched at the dead, dodging their grasps and avoiding their bites. The truck was their salvation, and they were so near…
But there were just too many of the dead. Their reaching, clawing hands made a net impossible to escape.
Annaliese watched in horror, praying for her friends to make it. But there seemed to be no way.
A dead waiter knocked Jan sideways with an elbow, which led to the man losing his footing. His ankle twisted and he fell down to one knee. It was all it took for the dead to take him. Probing hands dragged Jan to the floor and wrestled him into submission. He kicked out and caught a dead man in the chin, managed to snap the neck of another that knelt down beside him, but as soon as one body fell away, two others joined it. He could not fight them all.
Nick saw that the big man was down and stopped his journey towards the truck. “Jan!” he shouted out, trying to push his way through the dead. Renee fought to help, too. But the dead were all over them. Jan disappeared under a blanket of bodies and then was gone from sight. His angry shouting was the last thing they would know of him.
Annaliese shouted through the window. “Nick, Renee, come on. Come on!”
Nick shook his head in despair at the loss of Jan, but he seemed to find the resolve he needed to continue. He and Renee made a last-ditch effort to get to the truck.
Come on, guys. You can make it.
Just as Nick and Renee were getting close, a scream startled everyone inside the truck. Annaliese craned her neck and saw through the rear window that Michelle had snapped out of her daze and was now standing up and screaming hysterically at the dead all around her. As soon as they spotted her they turned and headed for the truck.