WalkerZ - A Zombie Apocalypse Story

Chapter 28 - Movement

The station medical team whisked Gareth away as soon as the group arrived at the main gate. The scout was unconscious, pale and had a bandage swathing his upper chest, but seemed to be breathing without trouble. Merryn smiled and greeted Andrew and Tom with a joint hug.

"It's good to see you both. And don't worry, Gareth's in good hands."

"I shot him with a high-power slingshot, I'm so sorry."

Merryn looked over at the teenage boy who had walked through the gate with Tom and Andrew. "If I'd known he wasn't a deer, then I wouldn't have shot him. I'm sorry."

"Merryn, this is Shawn. He lives with his mother Darcey, who we've also brought with us. Darcey is er... non-verbal." Andrew kept his voice calm and quiet, and Merryn took her queue from him.

"It's very nice to meet you Shawn, and your mother too. Don't worry, I'm sure the medical staff here will help Gareth. Would you like something to eat?"

"Yes please."

One of Mark's staff gestured for the boy to follow them, and Shawn plucked at the sleeve on his mother's dress prompting her to follow him.

Tom looked around him. "Quite a setup here isn't it?"

Merryn nodded. "It is. Right, come on you two, we need to sit down in a quiet corner somewhere and have a chat. Then you can bring me up to speed as to why Gareth's unconscious, and why you have teamed up with someone who appears to be somewhat unusually wired, and the female equivalent of Stan."

~

Tom and Andrew sat in the canteen with Merryn, hands clasped around mugs of soup, their gear dropped on a nearby table.

"Well," began Tom. "We did pretty well to start with. Although we were walking, the motorway was easy going and we walked one in each lane, tapping windows as we went to try and gauge how many walkers were trapped in cars. There weren't that many, and the premise there is that once people saw deadheads walking up the road towards them they would've got out and run away if they could.

"We did find another car with grey goop in it though, scared the hell out of me when it slapped back onto the window. We've sent through GPS coordinates for that one to base and they're going to investigate. I found a road traffic cone and put it on the roof of the car so they can find it with a drone if they want to.

"The journey was uneventful and we got all the way up into Somerset, past Taunton and Bridgewater, then we hit the River Parrett and went west, cross country, following field tracks and green lanes.

"Then, in the middle of nowhere, we came across an old farmhouse. It was an amazing old place, with high walls, an old manor house back in the day I guess. Gareth decided to go on ahead to see if it would be a useful place to spend the evening. But, after a couple of hours, he'd not come back so we went looking for him. He'd left tracking sign behind him as he went, just in case, so we followed his trail, and then in the middle of some woods a few hundred yards from the house we found blood on the ground. Two sets of prints were in the mud, so we followed them back to the farmhouse.

"We took it steady, as we assumed that Gareth had been killed or taken hostage, but when we got to the house, there was a warm glow of a log fire in one of the windows. We looked in and there was Gareth, laid out on the couch being tended to by Shawn who was looking worried."

"How did you get him to trust you?" asked Merryn.

"I knocked on the front door," said Andrew. "And he let us in."

Tom laughed at Merryn's expression. "Yup. He did."

"It worked didn't it?" retorted Andrew. "No walker is going to knock on the door, and neither is anyone who means any harm. I wasn't going to try and sell him double glazing.