Chapter Five
“ F uck,” Blake cries. “We’re fucking fucked!”
My head is mostly back on straight now, though it’s hard to ignore the commotion below. Dane seems much more unmoved. He orders everyone to grab their bags because, emergency or not, we’re going to need those supplies.
More wood splinters, and Autumn flinches when there’s an almighty crash from below. I eye the door to the flat. It has just as many locks on it as the one downstairs, but it’s not nearly as sturdy.
Fuck. I stride over to the window and shove it open. If we can get onto the roof… I lean out to take a look. It’ll mean swinging ourselves around the dormer, but if we can do that, then we’ll be safe. Once the sun rises, we can work out a better way down.
“Isaac?” Dane’s holding a lighter in his hand and I shake my head.
“We need to get onto the roof.”
“We can get down—” Blake begins, but I shake my head.
“We can’t see down there.” The streetlights don’t work, obviously. “The place could be crawling with them. They can’t get onto the roof.”
Autumn is shaking, standing by the bedroom door. She looks ready to bolt.
Rae nods. “Roof’s the best bet. Once the sun’s up, we can work out our next steps.”
Blake shoves me aside and sticks his head out. “And how do we get up there?”
“Gonna have to hold on to the window and climb up,” I say. “It’ll be hardest for the first person, but after that, we can help in here and up there.”
Blake swears again. “Fuck. All right.” He shrugs off his pack and shoves it into my arms. “I’ll go first.”
A powerful blow shakes the door to the flat. Autumn lets out a little scream and Otto backs away from it, eyes wide. At least the stairs have bottlenecked them—it’s blow after blow instead of many all at once.
Blake clambers up into the window frame. Dane and I are standing close in case he falls, but he just lets out a grunt as he lifts himself up onto the dormer.
“Okay,” Dane says. He looks at Autumn, then Rae. “You two next.”
Makes sense. They’re smaller, slighter, and if the zombies break through in the meantime, I don’t think Autumn’s going to be much help. She gives me her full pack, too, and I place it next to Blake’s.
Fuck… “I’m going to have to pass these up before I come out.”
Dane frowns at me, half of his attention on Autumn as she clings to the window frame. “You’re not going last.”
“I’m lighter than you and Otto. I can chuck those up and follow you out.”
Out of the three of us, I’m most likely to make it up on my own, too. I can’t rely on them to help me. Those zombies are going to get through, and they may well do it before we all get out of this room.
“Shit,” Otto mutters but doesn’t argue.
Autumn gets up on the roof, then Rae, and while Dane is positioning himself in the window frame, Otto and I shove a chest of drawers from the bedroom in front of the flat door.
A panel of the door bursts open as we push it into place. A splinter of wood scrapes my cheek, and I flinch away.
It’s a zombie, all right. Milky eyes roll sightlessly as it shoves its face into the hole it has just made, nostrils flaring. Sight goes quickly, but they have a stellar sense of smell.
Otto grabs my arm. Dane is gone from the window. “Come on!”
I don’t like having my back to the door, but I put Otto’s pack by the window as he climbs into the frame. The chest of drawers shakes. It’s heavy, made of oak, maybe, but the horde is hungry. I can hear that.
“I’m up,” Otto shouts, and I grab his pack first, leaning out of the window to pass it up.
His is cumbersome, his war hammer attached to it, but the others have smaller weapons, have kept them on them, so it gets easier.
I pass Otto my pack too, then my bat, heart thumping at the sounds behind me.
My arms ache. I’m going to make it. I’m not dying in this strange town in the middle of nowhere.
As I climb into the frame, definitely not looking back and down to see how far I am from the ground, the chest of drawers tips forward and the door pushes open.
I see them.
And what I see…
It’s impossible .
These zombies are whole. They look like bodies that have only been dead for hours, never mind the months or years everything around here must have been destroyed.
We’ve seen nothing to suggest there was a group of people hiding nearby, who were slaughtered recently.
But I stare at milky-eyed, entirely whole zombies and know that I’m right.
“Isaac!” Rae screams. I pull myself up, Otto clutching at my arms, just as a zombie lurches over to the window. It roars out its frustration, almost tipping out of the frame in its haste to get to me.
Dane drags me further up the roof. I rest on my back, clinging to the tiles, breathing hard.
“Fuck,” Otto mutters. “I thought you—”
Dane shakes his head. “What were you doing?”
“I—” I don’t know how to explain what I saw. He’ll see soon enough. Zombies might prefer the dark, but this is a hungry horde and already a strange one.
Otto passes me my pack, and I shrug it on, shifting so I’m sitting at the top of the roof like the rest of them. The zombies groan and roar and thrash below us. I fancy I can see some out in the shadows, but they—
They’re different. I squint at the darkness. Some are like what I saw inside, freshly dead. I see bloated stomachs, skin peeling and sliding from rotting muscle.
I see skeletons. My hands tremble.
And among them all… There and gone, and I can’t be certain of anything I’m seeing because it’s too dark, and fuck, I’m terrified, but I see—
I see him .
I see the same man I saw earlier today. The man who was watching us when we arrived. Who ran to the church. And he stares right back at me, and when he sees me looking, he tilts his head to one side and…
He smiles .
“What do we do now?” Autumn asks, voice thick like she’s holding back tears.
I jerk, my attention moving to her, and when I look back, the man is gone.
“Wait,” Blake says. For once, he doesn’t sound cruel. Hollow. Who among us has ever experienced anything like this before?
Autumn lets out a little sob. I pull my bat out of the side of my pack and rest it over my knees. Realistically, I know the zombies can’t get up here.
I know dead bodies don’t burst out of graves, either. I know towns don’t feel the way this one does.
Something moves, and I look down, inhaling a sharp breath.
I know they can’t get up here. I know I can’t be seeing a half-rotted hand digging into the tiles, hauling an emaciated frame up onto the roof.
“Oh, fuck!” Blake shouts.
I don’t hesitate. I’m closest. I shift onto my feet, keeping in a low crouch, and move away from the others once I’m sure its eyes are on me. The zombie snarls, showing blunt teeth that I know will tear flesh from bone all the same.
I swing once it’s within my reach, sending the zombie—still snarling, still trying to claw at me—skidding off the roof. It doesn’t hit the ground. More groans erupt from below.
Otto is at my back, hands on my pack. “You’re going to fall.”
“I need to get to the dormer.”
He nods. Another is trying to drag itself out the window when we get there, but that’s not the only thing that strikes me as strange.
It’s moving the way we did. I knock it away, stamping on one ruined hand when it won’t let go of the roof, then see how the next zombie climbs into the frame, turns, and clambers up.
Sweat rolls down my spine, arms aching with each precise strike.
Otto is at my back, and whenever I hesitate, his hammer comes down with absolute finality.
The others spread out over the roof, but aside from one zombie making a failed attempt to scale the drainpipe, the window seems to be their only way out.
Eventually, light begins to creep across the horizon. Yesterday’s clouds are gone, and sunlight spreads in a slow golden wave, casting long shadows and finally revealing the zombies I know have been watching us all night. Their eyes are as milky and unseeing as the others’, but somehow…
They see us. I know they do.
The zombies have stopped coming out the window.
Otto makes a move to climb back up onto the roof proper, but then he notices the zombies.
He makes a high, panicked sound in the back of his throat.
“What the fuck?” He loses his balance, slipping down the roof a little way, and I grab him on instinct, seizing hold of the back of his jacket.
The movement jolts me, too, but he’s caught himself already. He climbs back up, then lets out a sigh. “Thanks.”
“They’ve been there all night,” I say.
Dane grunts in agreement.
“They look…” Rae trails off.
“Look like what?” Blake asks.
“Organised,” Autumn whispers, and the horror in her voice echoes what I’m feeling, though none of the rest of us would sound quite so raw.
A beat too late, Dane says, “That’s impossible.”
“It is,” Rae agrees.
I say nothing. The zombies are still angry. Still hungry. But as the sun peeks above the horizon, they move, shuffling away to wherever they emerged from. No more try to climb out of the butcher’s, either. I hear them moving across the flat and we all watch them emerge and move away.
“What the fuck ?” Blake whispers.
No one replies to that. I can’t guess what the others are thinking, but perhaps it’s the same as me. Autumn’s not wrong. Zombies can’t organise. Their brains don’t work .
We don’t seem inclined to move, either. The sun rises, and the zombies are gone, but what if we go back inside and they aren’t?
“What’s that?” Rae points.
Three figures are walking down from the church. Dane gets to his feet as though that will help him to see, but like the rest of us, he doesn’t climb down from the roof.
We wait as the figures descend the hill and walk into the square.
They come to a stop some distance from the butcher’s, one heavyset white man, one tall white woman, and a shorter Indian woman who steps forward, away from the other two.
Her dark hair is pulled back from her face, and she looks to be maybe a little younger than Rae.
Unerringly, her eyes seek mine. “You might want to come down here. We need to have a chat.”