In The End Box Set | Books 1-3 Stevens, GJ (story books to read TXT) 📖

can gather, it started in a laboratory near to the village we’re headed to. The scientists were doing work on a virus, trying to find a cure.” I heard Toni’s voice correcting the words in my head. “An antidote or a vaccine. Maybe both.”

She nodded, only moving her eyes from me to check her footfalls as the ground undulated.

“It got out of control. They argued about how to deal with it. The scientists squabbled about the best approach. I got a call, my girl…” I paused on the word. “Toni, was in trouble and I rushed here to see if I could help.”

“Your girlfriend, right?”

I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath.

“It’s complicated,” I said, shaking my head and opening my eyes as the sole of my trainer kicked against a stone. “What they were doing in there…” The words felt heavy in my throat. “They were testing on people. Live people.” I stopped walking and she stayed at my side, her gaze fixed in my direction.

“Their tests created something. Some things,” I said, correcting myself. “These things are like a hybrid, a mutation and they’re so much more powerful than when the disease, the virus, takes over a dead body. They overran the facility. Not even the Army could deal with it.”

“And that’s when you escaped?”

I nodded and walked on.

“Why you?” she said as she followed.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Where did it come from? The virus, I mean,” Alex said.

I paused. Had Toni said something about the Amazon?  It was one of many questions I would ask when the gun was in the doctor’s face. I shook my head.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “All I know is you have to damage the brain to kill them.”

“Like in the movies?”

“Like in the movies, yes.”

“So…” she said, stalling for a moment. “They’re zombies, right?”

I didn’t reply, but my shoulders gave an involuntary shrug. The name had been on the tip of my tongue since I’d first seen them, but to use the word to describe the creatures seemed both perfect but too cartoonish; too trivial at the same time.

“They’re the dead come back to life?” Alex said, with an eyebrow raised.

“Apart from those who escaped the facility, yes.”

“They’ve got an insatiable thirst for flesh?” she said.

I chewed my bottom lip and gave the slightest tip of my head.

“What happens if you get bitten?”

“Okay,” I said. “I get it.” The world obsessed with zombie culture on the TV, in books and in film. Now they’d need to obsess in real life, too. “Call them Zombies if it makes you happy,” I replied.

The silence hung for a few hundred metres.

“Is this legit?”

“In what way? Do you mean am I telling the truth? Let’s not start that again.”

“No, no, no. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve smelt it. I’ve felt their cold skin. I get it,” she said, holding up her palms. “I mean the work they were doing, was it legit? Is it the government doing this to us, or is it some rogue outfit?”

I thought about her words. Another sensible question.

“Like a super villain?”

She laughed. I wasn’t smiling.

“I guess, but less like a comic. If they sanctioned this work, then surely they would be better prepared. They’d have protocols for protecting against a release. A back-up plan. Enough protection, enough troops to contain any situation.”

“You don’t know the government like I do,” I said. “But still you could be on to something.”

I looked up, realising the light was rising quickly and we were heading downhill, the sun blueing the sky enough for us to see the buildings looming large. My gaze drew to the dark smoke-columns rising on the horizon.

With each step I could make out more detail. Houses. A tall metal fence wrapping around the village, only breaking where the original wooden fences took up.

It hadn’t been there when I’d escaped, nor had the olive drab trucks I could only see the tops of over the other side.

I saw the wooden fence over which I’d jumped and where I’d run along. The house I’d run from.

Its sight sent a shiver down my spine.

I slowed, gripping the gun tight. Alex kept at my side, staring at the tops of the heads just visible over the fence as they moved in the streets, our brains trying to find any other explanation; looking for any other reason than a sea of zombies looking nothing like they did in the cartoons.

66

“What now?” Alex said, but I hardly heard the words, my concentration fixed on scouring everywhere but the house where I’d been held. The house where I’d shot the gun. The house where I’d done what I couldn’t bring myself to think about.

Glad of her interruption, she spoke again.

“I have a cousin in the next village over. We could hold out with him?”

I sped my pace, twisting back to see her face in the burgeoning light and her soft complexion for the first time without the shadows. Still I had to remind myself Alex wasn’t a man without facial hair and a protruding Adam’s apple.

For a moment my mind drifted, mood lightening as I stared, until something reminded me of Toni. Reminded me of the look she would shoot in my direction if she could see me holding my gaze on someone other than her.

“Nothing’s changed,” I said.

“You’re looking at the same place?”

I nodded and she stared back.

“They’re packed in like kippers.”

“Sardines,” I corrected.

“Yeah, whatever. Fish in a tin. They’ve shut them in there for a reason,” she said, looking to the sky which had more than a hint of blue.

“I get it,” I said, and sped my descent towards the village.

“And you’re still going in?” she said,