“Help me!” Carl cried out. “Somebody get her off m-“
His words were cut short. Kathryn’s teeth sunk deep into his throat. She ripped away his carotid artery and chewed on it like a length of sausage. Carl writhed in agony as he struggled to take a breath through a throat that was filling with fluid.
A wailing screech from the group’s right-hand side made them all spin around as one. Several metres away, coming towards them like an Olympic sprinter, was Jake.
“They must have heard the alarms, too,” Nick shouted. “It brought them in this direction.”
“Everybody run,” Dave bellowed.
No one needed convincing. They all sprinted back the other way, towards the car park. When they burst back out of the treeline, hitting the unforgiving concrete, the group skidded to a halt. Several of the infected had now poured back out of the Rainforest Café and were outside again. Jake’s screeching had alerted them and they were now staring toward the treeline with their swollen eyeballs.
“There’s nowhere to run,” Eve said as she shuffled up beside Nick. “We’re surrounded.”
Nick knew she was right. Jake and Kathryn hunted them from the woods behind, while dozens of infected had started to fill up the car park ahead. He looked around desperately for an option.
“There!” he pointed. “Head for the cable cars.”
The group did as he said and sprinted across the car park. The infected outside the café spotted them immediately and filled the air with their collective screeching. Then they stampeded as one, clattering across the pavement like a pack of bloodthirsty wolves.
With every step Nick and the others took towards the cable cars, the mob of infected got closer. Nick didn’t know if they had any chance of making it, but the air was filled with the echoes of their hurried footfalls as he and the others ran as quickly as they could. They were running for their lives.
They ran so fast that Nick worried his legs might fail at any second. None of them could quit, though. They had to keep running. “Quickly,” he shouted. “Into the cars.”
On the raised cement platform, only two cable cars were accessible. All of the others were hanging at spaced intervals up the hill. The cars were too small to accommodate everyone individually, so the group were forced to split into two. Nick leapt into the nearest car, followed by Cassie and the three prisoners. Cassie seemed immediately uncomfortable in the presence of the men, but there was no time to comfort her. The rest of the group were lagging further behind and barely managed to make their way inside the remaining cable car before the infected reached the platform.
But they did make it.
Are we safe?
Nick pulled his car’s sliding door shut and watched through the plastic windows as Dave did the same in his. Both groups were now inside a protective cocoon.
But Nick realised something terrible.
Looking across at the other cable car and then checking out the occupants of his own, he noticed that someone was missing.
Margaret wasn’t inside either car.
“No, no, no!” Nick looked out at the car park and spotted the old woman stumbling across the pavement, too old to sprint as quickly as the rest of them.
He made for the door, but Jan stopped him. “You won’t make it in time, brother. Her nine lives are up.”
“I have to get her. We only just saved her.”
But it was too late. The infected mob engulfed Margaret like a swarm of flesh-eating locusts. They pulled her arms at weird angles, snapping her fragile bones and sinking their teeth into her tissue-paper skin. It took only seconds for the mob to strip her flesh like a pack of ravenous piranha, leaving nothing but a wet mess on the floor that stained the concrete like spilled red paint.
Oh, Margaret.
The rest of the infected hit the cable cars hard, rocking them on their moorings and sending everyone inside against the steel walls like beans in a maraca.