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

Yet
when Torben turned his face toward the driver’s, there was a definite look of
scorn.
     
    “I’m not giving up on my wife and son,”
he said.
     
    My head span. The driver mentioned
searching for someone for two months. Justin and I only met Torben a day and a
half ago, and if he’d been tailing me for a couple of months I’d know about it.
Now there was the mention of his wife and kid. What the hell was going on?
     
    Who was Torben looking for? Justin and
me, or his wife and son? I hadn’t just imagined him telling me he was going to
hunt us.
     
    Either way, I knew that if he saw us, he
would kill us. That much was obvious, and I wasn’t staying here to chance it. We
were going right now, and no matter how screwed we were by leaving
empty-handed, we would deal with the consequences later.
     
    I turned to look at Justin, but I saw
that he was gone. I looked back at the shelf with the food on it, and I saw
that he was already halfway up.  I felt my face start to heat up. He’d done it
again; he’d disobeyed me when I specifically told him to do exactly as I said.
The kid was a cheeky little bastard and a liability, and I was done with him. I
clenched my fist and felt the blood drain out of it.
     
    I was going to have to drag Justin off
the shelf and pull him out of the building by his hair. After that, I didn’t
know what I would do with him. But I couldn’t trust him to do what I said, and
that made him a danger to me. I’d already broken enough of my rules by taking
him with me, and now it was time to stop.
     
    As I got to my feet I banged my head straight
into the shelf next to me. A metal clang rang out into the acoustics of the
warehouse, and I saw Torben’s head snap in my direction. Out of instinct I
ducked down. My head stung from where I had hit it, but for the moment my heart
was beating so quickly that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.
     
    Torben flicked his torch in my direction
and the beam of light hit my eyes. I squinted and ducked my head.
     
    “Boys,” he said with joy in his voice,
“They’re here. The hunt is on!”
     
    There was no point in subtlety now. I
ran over to the shelf, not caring about the sound my boots made on the floor. AS
I ran I could just about make out the bodies of the infected as they shuffled
closer toward us. When I got to the shelf, Justin was already at the top of it.
     
    He looked down at me. “Kyle – heads up.”
     
    Adrenaline shot through my body.  Trying
to keep track of both the scuffling of the oncoming infected and the scrambling
movements of the hunters as they ran toward us fogged my brain, and I couldn’t comprehend
what Justin was saying.
     
    “Stop screwing around.” he hissed.
“Catch!”
     
    When the crate was halfway through the
air my brain cells fired and I realised what he meant – he wanted me to catch
the crate of cans that was hurtling down toward me. I took a step back, tensed
my muscles and readied myself. As the crate hit my forearms I felt my thigh
muscles buckle a little, but I steadied my feet and stood firm. I put the crate
down on the floor next to me. My face felt red with the strain, and I realised
I was badly out of shape.
     
    “Flank them,” said Torben somewhere
behind me. “Trap them in, and if they come at you, don’t kill them.”
     
    The footsteps scattered out from all
directions. Although opening the delivery doors had let in a little light, the
warehouse was still too dark to make out anything but the most immediate space
around me, so I couldn’t see where the hunters were coming from. The only
person I was sure of was Torben, and that’s because he had his torch pointed in
my direction. Above, on the top shelf, Justin looked down and waited for me to tell
him what to do.
     
    I needed to do something. This was no
fair fight, and if all four of them managed to corner me then my odds would
drop to zero.
     
    I looked to my right. The shelves were
all arranged in rows, and they were