Great Bitten: Outbreak (8 page)

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“
A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it” – John Steinbeck

I’d love
to say I was glued to the window as we drove to Wickham, eyes wide and jaw dropping at the carnage I was seeing. Truth be told, it was boring as hell and the roads were astonishingly trouble-free. Maybe a lot of people were still trying to use or were stuck on the major routes. Maybe people weren’t leaving at all; this close to the coast, anyone with sense would have already tried to head out to sea or would be trying to ride it out in their homes. If I had been them, I’d be heading out for it. That’s what we had intended to do before fate played its cruel hand, after all.

Carla
and Rick were just as mute. I think we were probably all in shock, but none of us knew how to put words to that oddly withdrawn state of being. All of our thoughts were introverted and none of us wanted to voice any of the chilling horror scenes that were rampaging around our heads. We tried the radio to see what was happening locally and the broadcasts had all reverted to pre-recorded emergency announcements alternating with disconcerting periods of static.

One thing I did try to see was signs of fighting in the town, or sight of any support coming from the major roads. Mercifully there were no gouts of flame licking the underbelly of the night sky. Worryingly, I saw no signs of the emergency services bringing us aid either. There weren’t many routes between towns in this end of the world and I had thought to see at least one or two sets of flashing lights on our tense journey. I echoed these worries out loud to see how the other two would react.

“Maybe they’re already in the town.”

“Maybe they’re going with lights off. Not as if they’ll need to get people out of the way if the roads are blocked.”

“And they don’t want to draw unnecessary attention from those things. Look at what it was like for us, and we don’t have sirens and a two-tone light strip on our car.”

I sucked my teeth and added my own fear to the mix. This landed a lot closer to the callous likelihood of the situation. “Or they’ve been told to
completely ignore the smaller towns.”

There was a horrified silence as they thought about this prospect.

“Think about it. London’s so bad it’s been completely locked down. The
country
has been cut off from the rest of the world. The government knows this situation is critical and they don’t have the resources to tackle and protect every small town and every village across the bleeding country. They already said they were concentrating metropolitan. So what would you do?”

Rick’s voice was firm. He’d bought in to it. “I’d send them
all to the cities.”

I nodded my approval. “I’d send them
all to the cities.”

“But,”
Carla hesitated “that would be suicide!”

“They’re under orders. I’m guessing we don’t shoot deserters
any more, but how many of them will be swept away in a heroic haze thinking that they’ll be the ones to save the country? And how many others will just ignore the orders and stay at home? If we can’t save the cities then the country is lost; most of our population sits in those core areas. But how much do you want to bet that they’ve made this decision without even looking out of a fucking window and seeing the blood down on the street?”

“Like weather forecasts.” I cocked my head in query and
Carla laughed bitterly. “You know, the weather forecasts. Apps, websites, you name it. Each and every one of them when they’re wrong, we say ‘stick your head out of the window and you’ll see what the fucking weather is like here’ but the thing is, whoever writes and updates that app or whatever, is
nowhere near
where you are. In fact, sometimes they’re in a different country. Do you think the Cabinet and the Royals are even
still in
the UK?”

I smiled bitterly along with her.
Apocalyptic, with a chance of zombies. 80% - 95% probability of death, and light showers. “Probably not. That’d be about right. Airlifted out as soon as the shit hits the fan. The Royals I can understand, women and children first and all that, I mean even they were meant to get off the Titanic first. Not as if they do the decision-making any more. But the Cabinet? If they’ve done a fucking runner too…”

“What? You’ll write a scathing articl
e about them Warren? No one’s going to be reading the papers for quite some time, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Well I’m making sure I survive this. So that when people do start reading papers again, I can roll one up and personally shove it up the PM’s arse.”

“We don’t know that they have gone.” Rick added. “And you need to get out of Bennington first.”

“But it makes sense, doesn’t it?
That they’ve just done a runner, I mean. They’re making calm announcements – fuck, even decent announcements, by their standards. Who’s telling them what to write, because they certainly never managed it before?” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and scowled at its ebbing battery. Never mind, the networks probably wouldn’t last that long anyway. Right now, I had a few precious bars of data signal and I flicked in to Twitter.

“What are you doing?”

“Let’s see what #BritishPM gets me.”

I sifted through dozens upon dozens of vitriolic rants from Londoners that couldn’t leave the city, from
gun keepers that were reeling from the loss of their weapon, and from a lot of the general public just wanting to know more than the basic earlier announcements were able to provide. I bet #BBC would have got me some great tongue in cheek comments about the repeats being aired throughout the day and how the TV License was a waste of money. Then my thumb rested over a comment that had already been retweeted over a thousand times and yet was only a couple of minutes old. “Nice to see the #BritishPM is sinking with his ship. New England is not the UK. #coward #zombies”

How trustworthy was this tweet? I checked the user - @funboi1992 – and he looked inconspicuously average. No sign of a job. Maybe he was a bagboy and had seen the PM in a hotel? Whatever the truth of the story, it was gaining momentum and might need a response. I favourite
d it so I could search it out later. If I could search it out later.

“Guess we might be right. Lots of chatter, but one tweet saying the PM is in the States. Must have got out early to get all the way across there.”

“Fucking arsehole.”

“What she said.”

“Here, what’s that?”

Carla pointed ahead to a glow in the distance. A couple of cars came speeding the other way and the glare of their headlights on a road that had been so quiet up to now stunned our sight for a couple of seconds. They were quickly followed by another four cars, one of which flashed its lights at us in full beam before fleeing.

“Is that apocalypse
Morse code for ‘turn the fuck around’?”

“Probably.
Carla? How far from the marina are we?”

“Not far. But I’m starting to think
that it’s right where that orange glow is.”

“That flame-coloured hazy glow?”

“Yep.”

“Shit.”

Rick, passive and quiet as always, seemed to be winding up to say something. I braced myself, as if a world-changing announcement was about to be launched in to the stratosphere.

“If the marina is on fire, do we really want to go in there?”

I wilted. Even Carla sighed a little before she responded. “We don’t know that the marina is on fire. And the boat is our only chance of a clean escape. We haven’t driven all this way to turn around. And where else would we even go?”

“Should’ve thought about that before we got in the bloody car.” He muttered.

“What?” Carla snapped at him.

“We shouldn’t have left the house – a building we could ha
ve made safe – without thinking about a Plan B. You think us and Alan are the only ones that have thought about getting a boat ride out to safety? There are going to be dozens, if not hundreds of people heading to this place. Most of them probably live within walking distance of the place, for fuck’s sake. And remember the London riots? Don’t you for a second think that just because someone doesn’t own something, they don’t think they’re entitled to it. They’ll see a boat as a route to safety and with the airports closed down, only patrols of warships would stop you from escaping. You think they’re going to care about ownership when it comes down to survival?”

I thought about it. I knew that I wouldn’t give a toss about fighting for something if it would guarantee our safety. At that point I’d probably
dislocate the knees of a pensioner if it meant securing my own survival. They’d already had a good innings, I wanted to live a bit more and, if I survived long enough, try to find out how this shitstorm had started.

“We’ve got the gun
s though. Everyone else, well they’ll have no guns, right?”

“You don’t need a gun to kill someone. You proved that with
Alan. If enough of them want something badly… bloody hell Warren they could tear us apart just to try to get to the thing. It doesn’t matter that they destroy it in the end. They’ll be like the zombies. All they’ll see is the end goal. Who they hurt to get to it won’t matter one jot.”

I sat back in to my seat with a grunt, not realising I’d started leaning forward and, w
ith there being a first time for everything, hanging on Rick’s every single word. I glanced at Carla around the head post but her glance was drifting out of the window, occasionally moving from side to side as she focused on little things we passed by. I saw nothing of interest out of that window. Maybe she was crying. At least she was keeping it to herself. The last thing I wanted was the inner-sobbings of a hysterical woman breaking in to the calm. There wouldn’t be many moments of peace and quiet like this for the foreseeable future, and I suspected there weren’t too many places in the UK that could offer it.

We were close now. Even I knew that. Even in th
e dark, I was recognising murky landmarks.

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Carla screamed when it went, bursting and banging, the car shuddering to one side and tyres screeching as the car fought to retain equilibrium. Rick swore, yanking hard at the steering wheel to keep the car straight before caressing the brakes and limping it gently to a stop at the side of the road.

“Great, that’s just fucking great.” I threw myself out of the car to
crouch with my hands on my thighs, throwing evil and accusatory glances at the blown-out tyre that had so ungratefully given up the ghost on us without warning. “What a great fucking time to have to start walking.”

“I’ll just put the spare on.”

“It’s dark. There are zombies wandering around. I’m not standing here whilst you tit around with your spare wheel. How far is the marina?”

“Not far. A mile or so maybe? Just straight down that way.”

Rick waved his arms in the general direction of the burning and the smoke. Even better. Still, a lot better than waiting around waiting to get picked up by a potential group of those things, as their latest and greatest drive-by morsel. “See, this is why I said to put the things in rucksacks. Get the gun loaded and ready and get the bags out of the boot. We’re walking the rest of the way.”

“But Warren, we’ll walk in to more things that way too. As long as we stand here we can see them coming, and we’ve got the protection of the car.”
Carla protested. “Let Rick change the spare. It will be safer.”

I waved away her suggestions with an impatient hand. “We’re
getting away from here. What if Rick’s only part-changed the tyre and some of those things come along? We can try to get away on three wheels but it might turn messy.”

“Messier than going it on foot?”

I shook my head stubbornly, not wanting to listen to advice that anyone else might have to offer. “We’re walking and that’s final. Once we get near the marina the headlights and the noise of the car will attract attention, and we don’t want that from rioters or from zombies, do we? On foot we can sneak it, if we do it carefully.”

Rick was on my side again, already fumbling around in the boot. I thanked the absent gods and stubborn luck that
Carla didn’t have any friends in the vicinity that had been at her house and that we hadn’t been outnumbered in gender. If we had, we might all be sat in a circle on the living room floor at her house, holding hands and screaming.

“You’re fucking insane Warren. I’m staying in the car.”

“And then what, Carla? You’re going to drive the car with three wheels, to where? You can barely drive when cars are fully intact. You won’t have a gun. You won’t have protection. We need to stay in a group and help each other. So stop being all Penelope Pitstop about life, get your backpack and let’s go, we can’t carry you.”

I stalked off, hoping they’d both follow. Their crunching footsteps
told me that they did and inwardly I sighed with relief. Clearly shows of force were the only thing propelling us through this. Maybe a bloodied career in journalism was actually going to be of benefit to me though as a lawyer, I would have expected Carla to be storming ahead in the survival stakes. Rick came up alongside me and whispered out the side of his mouth.