Free The City by David Moody Page B

city’s main shopping street. They watched as a single car forced its way down the middle of the crowded road, ploughing into random staggering bodies and smashing them to the side or simply crushing them beneath its wheels.
    ‘Let’s get our stuff together,’ Jack whispered in a surprisingly calm, collected and matter of fact voice before turning and sprinting frantically across the room, desperate to get out of the building before the car disappeared.
    Inside the car Bernard Heath and Nathan Holmes looked anxiously from side to side, trying desperately to see something through the rotting crowds which converged on them from all directions. From their low vantage point there seemed to be no end to the hundreds of bodies around them.
    ‘Where the fucking hell are we going?’ Holmes, a stocky security guard, cursed from behind the steering wheel.
    ‘I don’t know,’ the educated and comparatively well-spoken Heath replied. Until the world had been turned on its head last week he had been a university lecturer. More than twenty years spent in the company of students and other academics had left him dangerously under-prepared for the sudden physical danger and conflict he now found himself facing.
    ‘There are a couple of restaurants just up here,’ Holmes said breathlessly. ‘They’ll have food.’
    Heath didn’t respond. He was transfixed by the absolute horror he was witnessing all around the car. On every side there  was nothing but relentless blood, death and disease. Spending the last few days sitting in the relative safety of the university accommodation block with the rest of the survivors hadn’t prepared him for any of this. He knew that he had to keep calm and not let his concentration wander or lose his nerve. All they had to do was fill the back of the car with food and whatever other useful supplies they could find and get back to the others.
    And even if these countless creatures looked abhorrent and grotesque, he had to remember that individually they were weak and could easily be brushed aside. But there were thousands upon thousands of them, and more seemed to be arriving with each passing second.
    ‘How the hell did this happen?’ Holmes mumbled to himself as he struggled to keep the car moving forward through the apparently endless devastation.
    Heath lifted himself up in his seat to try and see over the heads of the mass of bodies and look further into the distance.
    ‘This isn’t going to work,’ he muttered. ‘It was a mistake coming out here. What the hell were we thinking of? Christ, there are so many of them we won’t be able to get out of the bloody car.’
    Holmes didn’t answer. Instead, as they approached the useless traffic lights at what had once been one of the busiest junctions in the city, he wrenched the steering wheel to the left and turned the car. He pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator and winced in disgust as they collided with body after rotting body, smashing them beyond recognition. They were weak and they were beginning to decay and it took little effort to destroy them. The constant thud, thud, thud of diseased flesh against metal was sickening.
    ‘Where are we going now?’ Heath asked anxiously. ‘I thought you said we were heading for a restaurant?’
    ‘I’ve had a better idea,’ Holmes grunted as he forced the car up the steep ramp entrance to a multi-storey car park built over a shopping mall. ‘I used to come here a lot,’ he said as he steered around the tight climbing curve of the entrance road, ‘we’ll get what we need here.’
    Heath relaxed back in his seat momentarily. Now that they had left the main road the number of bodies had reduced dramatically. Still numerous on the lower levels of the car park they passed through, by the time they had reached the top only one or two figures remained to be seen. The sudden relief the university lecturer felt was immense.
    Holmes stopped the car directly in front of the door which opened