Hoping to buy himself a few precious seconds' breathing space he yanked the loose helmet off the withered head of a dead motorcyclist which lay at his feet. With vast swathes of disintegrating corpses advancing from all sides it didn't seem to matter which direction he chose. Basic or not, over the weeks he'd used it to get rid of literally hundreds of these vile, germ-infested bastards and he was thankful for it. A baseball bat with four six-inch nails hammered through its end, it was a rudimentary but undeniably effective, modern-day variation on the medieval mace. Webb surveyed the opposition and gripped his weapon tight. He didn't relish the prospect of being stranded on top of the tanker all night, soaked through and surrounded by rotting flesh. Although clear and blue immediately above him, the skies all around had been filling with threatening gray rain clouds all afternoon. Could he climb on top of it and sit and wait until something else distracted them? It might well have worked, but it would have taken time. He glanced across the forecourt at the green and yellow liveried tanker they'd been siphoning fuel from. They'll follow me in and I'll be trapped.
What are my options? Can't go back into the store, the back door's blocked. Still coughing, Webb covered his mouth, desperate to stifle the noise but knowing it was already too late. The whine of the engines faded away into echoes. Alone, that was, apart from a fractious mob of more than two hundred dead bodies closing in on him. It was just a momentary flash of sunlight on metal, gone in a second but visible long enough to leave him in no doubt that he was now completely alone. Bent over double coughing, he glanced up and caught a glimpse of the roof of one of the vans as it raced back toward the flats. "Wait!" he screamed, his voice quickly deteriorating from a strong yell to a strained smoker's rasp. He scrambled back over the counter, stepped through the mess of twisted metal and broken glass where the entrance door used to be, then ran out into the middle of the forecourt. Bloody hell, they were going without him! The fucking idiots were leaving him behind! No time to think.
More than that, he could hear three engines-the bike and both the vans. Christ, what he'd give for a can of lager right now. They'd been here several times before and had cleared the place out, but maybe today he'd find one last packet of cigarettes that he'd missed last time, or a previously overlooked bottle of drink. Webb kicked his way through the litter behind the counter of the petrol station kiosk.
0 kommentar(er)
