Chapter 7

Daniel dragged Rebecca backward just as the infected creature snapped its teeth at the empty space where her neck had been, its jaw clacking so violently that a string of bloody saliva stretched between its teeth before breaking across her blouse. Rebecca stumbled against Daniel's chest, grabbed his shirt with both hands, and nearly dragged him down with her while he swore at the creature and tried to keep the hammer raised, but the thing had already turned away from them, its cloudy eyes fixed on the end of the street where Doom was disappearing between the abandoned vehicles. Nina stood beside the broken car with Elise's restraints wrapped around her wrist, watching the dead gather their attention on one man while the rest of the world screamed around them, and she couldn't decide whether to run after him or drag her infected best friend away before the bitch remembered that living people still had blood inside them.

"Somebody needs to tell me what the hell just happened, because that thing was about to rip my wife's throat out and now it's staring down the street like somebody has forgotten to feed it," Daniel shouted, backing away while he kept the hammer pointed toward the nearest corpse. "Nina, get hold of Elise properly, and Rebecca, stop standing there looking like you're about to faint because we have to get the hell out of this street before those bastards change their minds."

Rebecca wiped the blood off her blouse with a trembling hand, looking between the infected and the road where Doom had vanished, while Nina pulled hard on Elise's restraints as her friend suddenly jerked forward with enough force to nearly wrench Nina's shoulder out of place. Elise's mouth opened, revealing the blood packed between her teeth, and she dragged her feet across the pavement while making a horrible choking sound that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her chest. Nina tightened her grip around the restraints, refusing to let go even when Elise snapped at her fingers, because she had already watched her friend disappear behind those cloudy eyes and wasn't ready to abandon the last piece of her that might still be trapped inside.

"Elise, stop trying to bite me like I'm a bloody chicken leg, because I am not dragging you through this nightmare just so you can chew my fingers off before we even find somewhere safe," Nina pleaded, pulling her friend's arms behind her when Elise lunged toward Rebecca. "Please don't make me hurt you again, because I swear to God I cannot keep doing this while everybody around us is getting eaten alive."

Elise answered by throwing her entire body against Nina, and the sudden movement sent them crashing into the side of a parked car hard enough to make the metal groan beneath their weight. Daniel rushed over, seized Elise around the waist, and helped Nina drag her away while Rebecca searched the road for somewhere they could hide, her eyes moving desperately between the houses whose windows were broken and the bodies crawling through the gutters.

They ran toward a narrow service lane between a pharmacy and a row of shuttered shops, stumbling over discarded bags and a bicycle whose front wheel continued spinning after Daniel kicked it out of their path. Nina kept looking over her shoulder, expecting Doom to reappear at the end of the street, because she couldn't get the image of those frozen flames out of her head or understand how a man could walk through a crowd of infected without a single one trying to tear him apart. Whatever had happened back there, the moment he disappeared had returned the world to its usual bloody insanity, and Nina didn't particularly fancy finding out what would happen if the dead decided they had finished watching him.

Daniel stopped so abruptly that Rebecca crashed into his back, and Nina nearly stumbled straight into both of them before she noticed the infected man crawling beneath a delivery van ahead. His legs were crushed beneath the vehicle, one shoe missing and the exposed bones of his ankles scraping against the asphalt, but his fingers kept clawing at the road as he dragged himself toward the sound of Elise's ragged breathing. The creature's fingernails had been worn down to bloody stumps, leaving red streaks across the pavement, and when it raised its face toward them, Nina saw that half its cheek had been torn away.

"Keep that thing away from my daughter, because I am not letting another one of these filthy bastards put its mouth anywhere near her," Rebecca snapped, reaching for Elise's restraints when the infected began dragging itself faster. "Daniel, hit it before it gets close enough to grab somebody, and please don't stand there arguing with me while it crawls over here."

Daniel swung the hammer into the creature's skull, but the first strike only knocked its head sideways, sending a spray of blood across the underside of the van while its fingers continued scraping toward them. He struck again, harder this time, and the infected finally collapsed against the asphalt, its mouth still working as though it was trying to bite something invisible. The noise echoed between the buildings, and Nina heard answering groans rise from somewhere behind the pharmacy before a series of heavy impacts began rattling the metal gates along the service lane.

"Brilliant, absolutely fucking brilliant, because apparently we cannot walk ten bloody metres without attracting an entire collection of dead idiots," Nina muttered, tightening her grip on Elise as Daniel grabbed Rebecca's arm and pulled them toward a fenced courtyard behind the shops. "Can we please find somewhere to hide before every corpse in this neighbourhood decides our family looks like a free buffet?"

They squeezed through a gap in the fence just as an infected woman stumbled into the lane behind them, her fingers dragging across the wall and leaving bloody marks in the peeling paint. The courtyard stank of stagnant water and rotting rubbish, with overturned crates scattered beneath the windows of a small storage building, and Nina hurried after Daniel while trying to keep Elise from throwing herself toward the woman crawling through the fence.

At the far end of the courtyard lay a man wearing a hospital wristband, his body twisted across the concrete as though somebody had dragged him from a vehicle and abandoned him there. Nina crouched beside him despite Rebecca's warning, because the wristband was clean enough to read beneath the blood covering his arm, and the hospital name printed across it belonged to the same place where Martin Cole had been taken.

Her stomach tightened as she reached toward the band, remembering the reports of missing bodies and the patient who had stood up after being pronounced dead, but before she could examine the man's name, his eyelids fluttered open and his fingers closed around her wrist.

Daniel brought the hammer down before the corpse could pull Nina closer, crushing its skull against the concrete as Rebecca dragged Nina backward and Elise began thrashing so violently that the restraints cut into her skin. They scrambled through a broken gate on the opposite side of the courtyard, leaving the body behind, while the groans from the service lane grew louder and something began slamming against the courtyard wall hard enough to shake loose pieces of brick.

Nina looked back through the broken gate as they reached the road, expecting to see the infected crawling toward them, but every creature inside the courtyard had stopped moving, including the woman whose fingers were still hooked around the fence. Their faces turned toward the empty stretch of road where Doom had disappeared, and the hospital patient Nina had watched Daniel strike began dragging himself upright despite the ruined mess of his skull.

Then he pressed his forehead against the wall and started beating it against the bricks, again and again, while the other infected followed his movement and the sound spread through the courtyard like a signal calling the dead toward something Nina couldn't see.