Free Bay of the Dead by Mark Morris Page A

levelling her gun, intending to blast the zombie off the car. Then she saw that they were veering towards a tree on the pavement and ducked back inside.
' Rhys! ' she screamed.
Too late he slammed on the brakes. The zombie on their bonnet slithered off in a tangle of arms and legs. There was a sickening crunch and a sideways lurch as they ran over it. Gwen and Rhys both yelled, as if on a fairground ride, as the car skidded, out of control. Gwen managed to clip her seatbelt back into place a split second before they slewed sideways into a line of parked cars. There was a crunching, jolting impact, and then silence.
Gwen's head was ringing. She opened her mouth, rotating her jaw. Already her brain was working, assessing the damage to her body. She'd whacked her hip and her shoulder badly enough to bruise, but she'd be all right. Trying to blink her vision back into some sort of equilibrium, she glanced across at Rhys. He was sitting upright, eyes closed.
'Rhys? Are you OK?'
He opened his eyes. 'Have we stopped?'
'Are you OK?' she repeated urgently.
'Yeah, I'm fine. You?'
She nodded, then wished she hadn't as a sharp but momentary pain lanced through her neck. 'Start the car again,' she said. 'We're sitting targets here.'
Rhys tried the ignition. The car wheezed and coughed, then died. He waited a few seconds, and then tried again, with the same result. The third time nothing happened at all.
'It's knackered,' he said. 'Bloody company car an' all.'
'Oh, that's brilliant, that is,' Gwen exclaimed. She glanced out through the cracked windscreen. The majority of zombies were still milling around the police car, from which the terrified screams of its occupant had now ominously ceased. One or two, though, were shuffling towards them.
'We have to get out,' she said.
Rhys tried his door, but it was buckled and jammed up hard against the vehicle they had collided with. 'I'll have to get out your side,' he said.
Gwen threw her door open and scrambled out, clutching her gun and gritting her teeth against the pain in her hip. She looked around, and was horrified to see that the front doors of houses were now opening up and down the street, and that local residents were venturing out to see what the commotion was. Even as she watched, Gwen saw two zombies go blundering up a garden path towards an old lady who was silhouetted in her doorway. Wearing a pink nightgown, the lady held a cat in her arms, and seemed to be rooted to the spot in terror.
' Back inside, all of you! ' Gwen yelled. ' And lock your doors! This is an emergency situation! '
As if to emphasise the fact, the zombies reached the old lady and grabbed her. The cat fell yowling from her arms and streaked away as one of the zombies, a fat man in a blood and grime-stained traffic warden's uniform, tore her throat out. People began to scream. Some fled inside and slammed their doors. Just as many, however, ran away from their houses, as if intending to rush to the old lady's aid.
Gwen fired her gun into the air. The sound was shockingly loud in the suburban street.
' Go back inside! ' she shouted again. ' Secure your doors and windows, and stay there until you're told it's safe to come out! '
Behind her, Rhys had scrambled across the front seats of the car and was now sliding forward out of the passenger door, hands reaching down to the ground to support his weight.
'Er. . . Gwen,' he said.
She turned and saw a zombie appear around the back of the car, a tall, thin woman with an untidy beehive of black hair, wearing what appeared to be a silk ball gown. Part of the woman's bottom lip had been torn away, which made her look as though she was baring her teeth like a dog. Another three steps and she would have been close enough to Rhys to grab him.
Without hesitation, Gwen raised her gun and fired. The woman was thrown backwards as a hole, leaking thick, blackish blood, appeared in the centre of her chest. As Gwen pulled Rhys out of the car and helped him to his feet, the woman