Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel by Jack Lewis Page A

us tightened with the
infected on one side, and Torben and his hunters on the other. Without any
clear escape and certainly no chance of winning a fight, I was struggling to
work out what we could do. I knelt down in front of the shelf and tugged at
Justin’s coat. He got to his knees.  
     
    Torben turned the corner and entered checkout
area of the warehouse. One of the hunters walked next to him, and two others
hung behind. From their faces, and their lack of curiosity about the place, I
got the impression they’d been here before.
     
    “You reckon they’re still around?” said one
of the hunters. It was the driver of the pick-up truck. He was tall and his
belly pressed tightly against his shirt and spilt over his belt.
     
    Torben looked down and spat on the
floor. “I imagine that on foot and with nothing to eat, they won’t get far.
Come on, let’s load up and head out. I want to be back on the road before it
gets dark.”
     
    The driver shoved his hands in pockets.
On his left arm he had a tattoo sleeve, but I couldn’t make out any other
detail of it in the dark other than the fact it covered all of his skin. “Not
many shelves left.”
     
    Torben brushed his thumb across his
moustache. “Just find one with food and take it all. I don’t want to kick my
heels here when I could be out there finding them.”
     
    Listening to Torben talk about us like
that made it hard to stay hidden. I’d never let a man make me hide before, and
doing it now was like swallowing glass. All things being equal, I could take Torben.
That was the problem though; nothing was equal. The gun slung around his neck
and the three guys he had with him guaranteed that.
     
    I looked at Justin. “We can’t hang
around,” I whispered.
     
    Justin turned away from me and looked
back at the shelf. The food crates were twenty feet up at the top. “We’re not
going to get another chance like this. Look at it all, it’s enough to last a
month.”
     
    “A month of food is no good if we’re
going to die in a few minutes. We need to leave.”
     
    Across the warehouse Torben’s footsteps
echoed up to the rafters. He coughed, cleared something from his throat and
spat again on the floor. He turned to the driver. “They’re still around here, I
know it. Lancashire’s a big place, and they won’t have left it yet.”
     
    “What if they don’t want to be found?”
     
    “Just cause someone doesn’t want to be found,
doesn’t mean they can’t be. “
     
    He was talking about us, I knew, and he
was right. There was no way on earth I wanted him to find us, but then again,
that didn’t mean he couldn’t. This was a prime example – here he was, just
metres away. We were both here by coincidence and with the same goal, but
nonetheless it showed how easy it was to slip up.
     
    Fifty yards behind me, toward the back
of the warehouse, I heard the faint cries of the infected. The ones from the
yard were piling in now, and it wouldn’t be long before they reached us. With
them on one side and the hunters on the other, we didn’t have the luxury of
choice or time. We either fought our way out of either side, or we found
another way to escape.
     
    I turned back to Justin.  “You see any
other way out?”
     
    He looked around him, but his gaze drifted
back to the food behind us. “No,” he said.
     
    “Forget about the tins,” I said.
     
    In front of us, Torben pulled a torch
from his belt and turned it on. The beam of yellow cut through the shadows and
moved through the shelves like a search light.  The driver walked up to him and
put a hand on his shoulder.
     
    “Torbs,” he said, “It’s been two months.
Think we gotta accept that Alicia and Ben are gone. I’m not saying they’re…no
longer with us…, but if they’re still breathing then they don’t want to do it
around us no more.”
     
    The familiarity of the name ‘Torbs’ as
well as the hand on the shoulder told me that these two men were friendly.