The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) (12 page)

              I could hear the growls coming up the street as I slammed through the doorway. I ran upstairs, bounding into my mother’s bedroom.

              She wasn’t there. The covers were strewn on the bed, but there was no sign of Henrietta herself.

              ‘Mom! We need to get out of here now!’

              Through every room I ran, stopping in my own just as I heard the slamming of bodies against the front door downstairs.

              A chill surged through me, despite the sweat appearing on my brow, as I pulled my father’s loaded rifle out in it’s case from beneath my bed. I heard the half-box of shells, maybe 15 in total, rattle about inside as I pulled the case open and folded it up with the loose shells inside, stuffing it in the back of my jeans.

              I didn’t have time to look about the room, at everything I was leaving behind – the survivor within me had kicked in.

              There was no sign of Henrietta – and then the obvious struck me, as I held my father’s gun in my hands.

              The garden.

              I ran into the upstairs hallway, seeing the shadows of the attackers slamming against the front door, those horrendous thuds feeling as if they were shaking the house every time they struck against it.

              Could I make it downstairs before they got inside?

              My question was answered for me just seconds later, in the short moments that I was readying myself to jump down the stairs.

              I heard the glass of the living room window smash, just as it had done at Larry and Mae’s house, and with the snarling and animalistic growling, I knew that they were inside.

              My mind searched for a way out. There had to be something that would let me escape, there always was.

              Of course there was.

              Turning from the stairs, I dashed through the opposite door to my bedroom, shutting it quickly and locking it behind me.

              Robbie’s room.

              I had a minute at most, and that was being optimistic about my situation.

              I crossed to the window, clutching my father’s rifle tightly in one hand as I unlocked the window and opened it. I stuck my head out through the gap, the scene that greeted my senses making me feel as if I was in warzone – the smell of smoke, the screeches, the growling, the screams far off of somebody who wasn’t one of our attackers.

              They had gotten to somebody, if not most of them… I had no idea.

              That was the worst part.

              Casting the thought aside I looked down at the drop below me. Three, four yards, maybe… Could I make that?

              There wasn’t a question to be asked – it was this or face my assailants.

              I climbed out onto the ledge, looking at the drop below me, and for a second the image of the trampoline we had out here when I was a kid flashed through my mind.

             
Bend your knees, Tommy – that’s it!

              I jumped.

              A twinge of pain jolted through my right leg as I struck the ground. At any second I expected one of them to come jumping over the wall, or to push over the fence from any direction. The sounds seemed sourceless, as if they were surrounding me now that I was here in the garden with the entrances on every side.

              I stood to my feet, finding my injury to be a sprain at most as I took up the rifle and ran for the entrance to the garden.

              I pushed through the door, looking about for my mother as I shouted her name – but she wasn’t there either.

              Moments of helplessness had resounded in my mind over the years, but none had ever struck me as hard as that moment of horror. The implications of the empty garden before me set in – Henrietta wasn’t here, and I had no chance of looking for her anywhere else. The place would soon be overrun, and there wasn’t enough time to continue searching for her.

              Tears of frustration and anger welled up in my eyes as I clenched the rifle tightly in my hand, running my other over my face and through my hair.

             
Fuck.

             
I dashed back into the yard, arriving just in time to see one of the infected come scrambling over the garden wall.

              They were here.

              I tried to stay calm, knowing that any idiocy or recklessness would get me killed without warning.

              I raised the rifle, breathing as it raced towards me – five yards, three yards.

              Less than a yard from the barrel I pulled the trigger, a bullet ripping through it’s face, killing it instantly, if there was anything at all left to kill.

              I moved to grab the extra shells from the back of my jeans, wondering how much good it would do, when a group of four came colliding with the glass door at the back of the house. They cracked it in an instant, before smashing through it.

              I had one round left.

              I resigned myself to my fate, the hell that awaited me – once I had been bitten I could use that bullet to put myself out of my misery, in the hopes that I wouldn’t end up like all of them.

              They were seconds away from reaching me, ready to infect me, to run me through with their teeth… And that was when I heard the sounds of the Ranger’s engine coming roaring from the left.

             
Smash, smash, sm-

             
The car tore through the garden fence of Carl’s house, just somebody else whose fate was unknown to me. The timing couldn’t have been better, and I had just enough foresight to catch the determined look on Leah’s face as she ran down the four attackers and ground to a halt.

              Two crashed off the bumper, slamming into the opposite fence and falling to the ground, disoriented, unmoving.

              One went under the wheels, the crunching of bones something I never would have imagined to be such a sweet sound.

              The fourth and final was clipped by the left side of the grill, going flying against the wall just beneath the kitchen window – that was the one I was most worried about, because it had hardly taken any force.

              ‘GET IN THE FUCKING CAR!’ Leah screamed through the open window.

              The thought of my mother, whom I had no idea as to her whereabouts, who had literally raised me through the fucking apocalypse, raced through my head once again.

              Hayley near enough kicked the door open and I jumped onto the backseat. I scrambled for the door, but in my hesitation the fourth of my attackers, the one by the window, had come running around to the side and emerged through the door, screaming incoherently at me with blood on its face and insanity in its eyes.

              ‘Fucking kill it!’ Robbie shouted.

              He didn’t have to tell me twice, but that was easier said than done in the chaotic heat of the moment. Leah reversed, and here it was clinging onto my leg, its body dragging along the floor.

              I kicked it out at its face with the heel of my boot as it snatched at my other leg, hearing its teeth break off and watching it’s head swing back just as it was inches from biting through my jeans.

              It showed no sign of letting up, even after I kicked it hard in the face again.

              Perhaps I would have truly been a goner if Hayley hadn’t leaned over from her seat, having taken up the rifle in her hand, and smashed it in the nose with the wooden handle with all her strength.

              The crunch of the bones breaking in its face sounded as it fell back and away from the car, onto the ground.

              I snatched for the door handle, pulling it closed and locking it just as it jumped back up and slammed against the window.

              Leah spun the car around, reversing back out and going the way she had come through. I tried to catch my breath in the hazed chaos of the moment. Hayley grabbed me, and through the ringing of shock in my ears I heard all of three of them asking if I was okay.

              Somewhere in that I nodded, and as I got a hold of myself and checked my legs for any marks or tears. I was safe, but as that relief set in I was once again met with the terror that surrounded me on all sides.

              We crashed through five or six back gardens, trampling over fallen fences that Leah had already crushed with the Ranger. I looked over the debris, the mess that we had caused, until we pulled out onto the road end, back onto the street.

              The exit was right next to where we came out, two wooden doors that flew open as easily as the fences had done as we crashed through.

              As I looked out of the back window, through the open gates, I caught sight of somebody running towards us from the end of the road, having just turned the corner.

              ‘Wait!’ I shouted, ‘there’s somebody-’

              But just as I shouted the words, looking with hope at the person running towards us, two things occurred. I realised that it was Carl, sprinting for his life, and I also realised that the two infected attackers chasing him were much closer than I had first anticipated.

              They took him down in an instant, his figure crashing to the pavement as they jumped upon his back.

              Leah turned the car sharply, onto the empty road out of town, the side that I knew the least, as we sped away from Bastion.

              I tried not to listen to the screams, to ignore the smell of smoke, to see the huge plume of still billowing from the ruins of Rudy’s house, but they had already ingrained themselves into my mind.

Chapter Twelve

In Ruins

Trees, forests, desolate empty roads save for the occasional abandoned wreck of a rusted car… We must have driven for two miles before the car finally came grinding to a halt as Leah parked it a little off the road beneath some trees, next to an empty house. We had some cover, but even though we rarely ran into others in our time in this world, I still found myself wary and paranoid as I got out of the car.

             
Where are we going?

              Oh my God, they’re all fucking dead…

              What happened to mom?

              What were those things? Were they people?

              Robbie, just calm down…

              Tommy, where are we headed?

              I can’t believe it…

              What are we going to do, Tommy?

             
Robbie leapt out of the front seat the moment the car stopped, dropping to his hands and knees and throwing up all over the grass. Even though Leah had a firm grasp on the wheel still, I knew it was only to stop her hands from shaking so violently – from the backseat I could feel the shudder emanating through the car as she stared straight ahead catatonically. Hayley had her face buried in her hands as she shook her head violently, trying to maintain some composure.

              I looked about at the three of them, hearing Robbie retching on the ground nearby, before getting out of the car and shutting the door behind me.

              I took a deep breath, feeling myself shaking with the afterburning shock of everything that had just happened.

              Three days ago we had been a community of fifty strong people, running Bastion like clockwork, making sure everybody could live comfortably. Now, for all I knew, we were the only four survivors. There was no sign of anybody else, not even the sounds of screams from Bastion, although in the sky I could see the thinning plume of smoke continuing to rise towards the clouds, Rudy’s last-ditch effort to take out as many of the infected as possible.

              I was a second away from leaning one way or the other, from gaining some control over myself or collapsing into a screaming mess.

              Turns it was the latter.

              ‘FUCK, FUCK, FUUUUCCCK!’ I bellowed, my lungs straining with the force of the scream as I dropped to my knees and held my head in my hands, my arms shaking uncontrollably. I eventually fell onto my back and found myself staring up at the cloudy sky. It had begun to clear a little, unashamedly proceeding as it did every day. It was one of those things that hadn’t been affected by the fall of man; nature continued, uncaring, all-powerful.

              I don’t know how long I stayed like that for, but when I finally sat up and then brought myself to my feet, Robbie was leaning against the front of the car, Leah had sat back in the seat, and Hayley was stood on the roof, looking about at the scene around us.

              I crossed over to it silently – none of us had said anything coherent or made an effort to communicate since we had stopped. I opened the driver’s door, looking at Leah, who refused to even acknowledge me as she continued to stare straight ahead of herself.

              ‘You alright?’

              She did nothing for a few seconds before looking down at her lap. Finally, she took a few deep breaths before getting out of the car. Robbie shook his head and rounded to us, and Hayley sat down on the roof. They all seemed to have gotten themselves together – they had done it with a lot more control than I certainly had.

              ‘What do we do?’ Robbie asked. ‘What the fuck just happened?’

              I looked between the three of them – they all stared back at me with piercing expressions, wanting answers.

              So I told them. I told them everything. I told them about Morgan arriving from the forest. I told them about what he had said. Most of it I had already reiterated from the previous night when they had come over to the house; they already knew all of it.

              What they didn’t know was what had happened at Mae and Larry’s, and the things that he had said to me.

              ‘He said ‘we’. I think he was part of a group, or something. He said that a woman had come to them from the south. She was infected with something. She died and came back to life, and then went about biting people in this state she was in. Then they got it, and turned out just like her. Morgan made it out from wherever he came from, but he was infected too. Maybe the last of all of them.’

              ‘That’s complete bullshit,’ Leah said. ‘You can’t just come back from the dead.’

              ‘I watched it happen last night. I saw him die, right in front of me. When I got there this morning, he had a knife sticking out of his head. Mae was infected, and Larry was on death’s door, splayed out on the bed. Blood everywhere. I think that Morgan came back, attacked her… Then her or Larry would have killed him. They would’ve kept it to themselves inside the house – you know what they’re like… What they
were
like… They don’t like to bother other people with those sorts of things. Problem is, this is the one time they should’ve told somebody about it.

              ‘Mae attacked me… It was like being attacked by an animal. There was nothing in her eyes that resembled any part of who she had once been… I killed her in the street, then Larry came outside exactly the same… Then… You know the rest.’

              Everybody fell silent, either shaking their heads in disbelief or running their hands through their hair, trying to determine some course of action, some explanation.

              ‘And you fucking brought him in here…’ Robbie said. I looked up at him, seeing the look of anger and resentment in his eyes.

              ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘D’you really think I’d have brought him in if something like that was going to happen?’

              ‘He was an outsider!’

              ‘It doesn’t fucking matter, Robbie. Even if I had killed him then and there in the forest, buried his corpse and told you all about it and that it was all taken care of, those infected would have still come to Bastion. It didn’t matter what we did with him. Mae and Larry would still be dead, probably along with everybody else, and we would still be right where we are now.’

              Robbie paused, looking me in the eyes, before nodding.

              ‘Yeah… Yeah, you’re right… I just… Mom…’

              I could see his eyes welling up with tears just as he turned away. I tried to regain some control over myself. This time I managed to – whatever response I had erupted with upon exiting the Ranger had purged me of anything I had left inside after the event.

              All that mattered now was the situation at hand, where we were, and what we were going to do about where we currently were.

              ‘Who were they?’ Leah asked. ‘All those people who attacked us?’

              ‘The infected,’ I said, ‘just like Morgan. Isn’t that obvious?’

              ‘No, you shithead. Not the infected, I mean,
who were they
? Where did they come from? They must have been from a community like ours. Survivors don’t just crop up out of nowhere, group together and assault places like that, even if they are infected. Where did they come from?’

              They had clearly been at another commune, along with Morgan, but…

              ‘Oh, shit…’ Leah exclaimed quietly, looking up at the three of us.

              ‘What?’

              ‘The radio… I know we don’t usually speak with Ashby all that often, but we haven’t had communications with them for weeks…’

              I felt the pangs of cold sweat rising up on my neck as the implications of her words set in – not because of the possibility of Hayley’s theory, but because I knew that she was right in an instant.

              ‘They…’

              ‘That was Ashby,’ Leah said calmly, raising her hands to the sides of her face. ‘They were the citizens of Ashby.’

***

Most of the land surrounding Bastion was farmland – it meant that we could expand in terms of our food capacity in the event that more people had come to live with us at Bastion. All of the old farmhouses and barns were abandoned, and the vast majority we had just left alone save for a few scavenging trips.

              We knew one, a small, remote place about a mile from where we were, and that’s where we decided to head to stay safe for the time being.

              The car pulled up and we all got out silently. It seemed trivial – if there was anybody there to hear us they would have definitely known we were there by now. All the same, Leah dashed off to check that the barn was clear while Robbie did a sweep of the back of both buildings. Hayley checked the overgrown sections to the right of it that had once been hobby plantations, probably for the farmer’s children a long time ago.

              The gun in my hand, I headed to the front door and opened it. Everything was as you would imagine after having been left alone for fifteen years. Dust covered everything in an abandoned world, free to move in without interference. We had made a concerted effort over the years to get rid of any bodies that we came across in the surrounding areas, and this house was one of those. All the same, you never knew who might have been calling it home.

              A few minutes later we all met back out the front of the house and headed inside.

              After dusting down the couches and cushions and sitting ourselves down, we finally had a moment to catch our breath in the wake of the revelation we had just stumbled across.

              ‘You really think they were from Ashby?’ Robbie asked.

              ‘Yeah…’ I said. ‘It makes sense. Haven’t heard from them in weeks and then we get attacked by a mob about the size of their population. Morgan would have known we were here, would have to come to us for help, but didn’t realise he was bringing all of them with him. Or maybe he did, but he panicked and did it anyway.’

              ‘That son of a bitch,’ Hayley muttered.

              ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Robbie said. ‘They’re all gone… Everybody.’

              ‘We don’t know that,’ I said.

              ‘What else do you think could have happened to them, huh? With those…
Things
attacking everybody?’

              ‘Some of them might have gotten away. We can’t know for sure… But if they have, I know where they’ll go to.’

              ‘Where?’ Leah asked.

              ‘The outpost.’

              The outposts were a short-lived idea we had put together regarding emergency stops in the event that we needed to evacuate Bastion. We had only put them together after a couple of years, when we could afford to put such measures in place. They were select buildings in the area that people could go to for refuge. They were stocked food and a small supply of water, and were intended as a place for people to regroup.

              Well, I say
they
as if there were multiple. We reached a consensus pretty early on that the idea was something of a waste – we never thought we would run into as many people as we had in Bastion, and assumed that we had the numbers to fight anything off.

              Clearly we were wrong, but something had remained from the idea.

              One of the outposts we still looked after, checking upon it once a fortnight. It was maybe half a mile away.

              ‘You think people will remember?’ Hayley asked.

              ‘People have an amazing tendency to remember important things when their lives are on the line. Don’t you remember that story mom told us, Robbie?’

              ‘Which one?’

              ‘She said she had heard it in the old world… It was about this guy who was attacked by a shark when he was swimming in the ocean, and he knew that he was about to die, and somehow he remembered something from some documentary that he had seen twenty years before that said you have to kick a shark on the nose in order to get rid of it. Because his life was on the line his memory served up the information to him…’

              ‘Yeah…’ Robbie said. ‘She had loads of stories like that from the old world…’

              I paused, thinking back to her, knowing that she was likely gone… Oh, God… What had I done…?

              I looked down at my hand as it rested on the arm of the couch I sat on, watching my fingers tremble. I sank them into the cushion, trying to bring it to a stop, hoping nobody would notice.

              ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do,’ I said, sighing deeply, not in disappointment but simply to feel the air rushing into my lungs. ‘We’ll catch our bearings, grab anything we can use from here, then we’ll head to the outpost. If…
When
we find our people at the outpost, we’ll come up with a plan of action. Although as far as I’m concerned, that plan is getting everybody ready, equipped with weapons, and coming up with a plan to take Bastion back.’