Chapter Text
"Right! Bravo! Listen Up!"
I had been cleaning my gun when Gabby came into the room and I only half glanced up at him. Gabby tended to announce things in a `dynamic' and `authoritative' fashion. Most of us had taken to waiting for the follow up before we jumped to attention. It wasn't that he was a bad squad leader so much as that Bravo squad was an insubordinate bunch of misfits. Gabby was the youngest member of the squad, which didn't help his authority. He was tall and thin with untidy brown hair that wasn't cut as often as it might be. His main interests, outside surviving the zombie apocalypse, were rock guitar and Marxism. The squad liked him though. We might have been insubordinate and difficult but I don't think we'd have wanted anyone else in charge.
"Bravo!" It was more a whine than a command.
"We're listening," said Pedro, one of the three Australians in the squad.
The Aussies were all as mad as each other, though in different ways. Jim Extreme was fond of explosions. He was a solid block of muscle which he kept toned through regular work outs. He had a strange tendency to refer to himself in the third person, particularly when he had, or was about to, blow something up. We'd all learned to treat it as a warning sign. Pedro had a similar devil-may-care gleam in his eyes, but was more interested in absurdly difficult free running techniques than in explosions and fire-power per se. He was wiry where Jim was solid but there was no doubt that both were strong and fast. Doctor Sy, on the other hand, was weird in a creepy mad scientist kind of a way. He was a former Necrotech employee and he never seemed to have quite shaken the mind-set. He dressed neatly with smoothed-back brown hair and a way of looking at you that made you feel like an experimental subject. On the whole he kept himself to himself, but he was our resident expert on zombies and we valued his knowledge if not always his sarcasm.
"Right! Cool!" Gabby looked around at us. "We're going to Fort Creedy."
That made us all look up. Fort Creedy was part of the former US army base that had sprawled across eastern Malton. It was a solid lump of concrete with a tiny entrance which formed a natural defensive structure, until the zombies broke in that was. Once the zombies were inside the fort, it proved so difficult to dispose of the bodies that the defence had crumbled, defeated by the sheer number of dead bodies inside its walls.
"Why?" asked Hali.
Haliphax was our resident tech head. He could fix not just generators, radios and phones but, on the odd occasion we'd found a working computer, he'd usually managed to get it up and running and connected to the internet, giving us a sudden glimpse of the world beyond Malton's high walls. He was a tall man, genuinely skinny in contrast to Pedro's muscles. He had long darting fingers and a penchant for balaclavas. He was American, a computer technician who had been working for Necrotech when the quarantine had trapped us all inside the city.
"Brass want us to fetch... a thing," said Gabby.
I frowned. "A thing?"
Gabby shrugged. "A box thing, apparently it was in a safe. I've got a serial number we can check."
"What's in the box?" Hali leaned forwards, looking interested.
"Fuck knows. Brass don't know anyway. Apparently it's locked up tight."
Now Sy butted in. "It seems eccentric, even for Brass, to send us to collect a box when they don't know what's inside."
"The British military have contacted them. They want the box. We want supplies of food and ammo. Once we've got the box we take it to Ostrehan Towers and a helicopter will meet us and make the exchange."
There was a moment's silence.
"Fuck the military," Pedro said succinctly. "They've trapped us in here with a fucking five metre wall around the town and now they want us to play errand boy for them?"
"Ammo. Food. Supplies," said Gabby, suddenly looking a lot older and more serious than he usually did.
"We need those supplies," said Steve suddenly. He was leaning against the back wall of the room, cleaning his gun. Steve had actually been a cop before the quarantine, though he didn't usually make a lot of the fact. But he was slightly older than most of the rest of the squad and had somehow managed to maintain a reasonable girth through five years of quarantine and running battles with the undead. "We could use a break from scavenging supply dumps. It would give us a chance to regroup and consolidate."
"That's what Goldy said," offered Gabby, referring to the chief of the DHPD.
Hali grinned. "We can always take a peek in the box."
"It's got an electronic..." Gabby tailed away, stared at the gleam in Hali's eye and then shrugged. "Just don't tell me what you're planning, OK?"
That leaves me, I suppose. I'm Cat. I'm older, shorter and less nimble than the rest of them. Some say I joined the DHPD because I got bored of being a zombie and that may even be true. It's a life, of sorts, with a bunch of people I'd almost count as friends and there really isn't much else to do in Malton these days. I have bad dreams, but they are not all about the taste of human brains. Being dead is a little like being asleep, but I woke up and it felt like I'd been asleep for a long time before our localised apocalypse started. I get by, I suppose, and I'm tolerated.
We left the following morning. We decided not to bother with free running across the rooftops and risk the streets. We were a large group and there didn't seem to be many zombies in the area.
It was mid-winter and the winter had, so far, been a hard one. It looked like the weather wasn't going to let up. Snow had fallen overnight blanketing the ground with soft white.
"This is where we find out if anyone's shoes leak," said Hali.
"Everyone's shoes leak. When did you last get a new pair?" I grumbled.
"Went to Caiger Mall last month. Place was crawling with zombies but I found a couple of undamaged supply crates."
I craned my neck back to scowl at his grinning face. I thought I saw a flicker of movement up on top of one of the buildings behind him and I squinted through the dull winter sunshine.
"What is it?" asked Hali.
"Thought I saw someone."
"There must be plenty of survivors around, keeping out of sight."
Hali looked backwards too but really all there was to be seen was our footprints where we had walked down the street. He sighed.
"If someone wants to shadow us, they'll just follow the footprint trail. There's no way we can be inconspicuous right now."
We slept that night in an anonymous suburban house with boards nailed across the ground floor windows. Gabby worked us into shifts and the rest slept on the bare floor in one of the upstairs rooms, our sleeping bags crammed close together for warmth.
"Winter in Malton fucking sucks!" complained Pedro.
"Just be glad you're not somewhere land-locked in the middle of the continent," murmured Hali as we all dropped off to sleep. He had been born in Missouri. At least Malton was mostly just damp in the winter. The snow was rare.
I woke up in the middle of the night into immediate alertness. I lay still, trying to analyse my surroundings in the dark, straining to detect what had woken me. It was then I saw the silhouette at the window, framed against the winter moon. It was a man in a tailored suit with a bowler hat, umbrella grasped in one hand. A shiver went down my spine. I'd never met him but the reputation of the Duke D'Oeuvre preceded him and if he was here then that meant there was a hunt on and it wasn't impossible that we were the prey.