Free Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent by Trevor Donnelly Page A

tired and too relieved to be embarrassed.
                  “What the fek were you doing?”
                  Siobhan sighed, “That could be the last rain we ever feel on our skin Will, I just had to get out in it while I still could.”
                  “Aye, well, it’ll be a night to remember, anyway.”
                  They laughed.  Not the hysterical laughter of crumbling sanity, but genuine, good-humoured, glad-to-be-alive laughter.
                  “But you really should put some dry clothes on love.”
                  “I need to get my breath back first.”  However, Siobhan fell asleep, cold and muddy, within ten minutes of Will driving.
                  When Will felt his eyelids droop he pulled over to the side of a deserted road and slept.
     
    *   *   *
     
    In the morning it was still raining.  Siobhan opened the car window to wet a T-shirt with rainwater, and she used the cold damp material to clean the mud from her body before getting dressed awkwardly in the confines of the car.
                  Will pretended to be asleep, and watched her through eyes open just enough to see.
                  He realised that pretending to be unconscious while watching her wash was probably not the most gentlemanly thing to do, so he turned away from her, pretending to roll in his sleep.
                  He opened his eyes fully now his back faced her and looked out across the fields.  There was no sign of life or unlife.
                  Finally he spoke, his back still turned, “We have to finish our shopping today.”
                  Siobhan sighed, “Yes, I wonder where’s still open?”
     
    *   *   *
     
    As soon as Danniella and Tina crossed the M25, the massive motorway that encircled Greater London and formerly the busiest road in the United Kingdom, the number of undead on the streets rose exponentially.
                  In the countryside they could travel for a mile without seeing anything, and when they did stumble across an isolated pocket of zombies they could speed away.  The city was an entirely different proposition.  An alarming number of roads were blocked: some by army barricades, but mostly by crashed cars or jams of cars overrun as they tried to escape London.  The roads that weren’t blocked still required careful negotiating.  But worst of all in the city the number of zombies had increased.  They now had a permanent and growing crowd of zombies following them.  They were not able to gain enough speed to shake them off, as the roads were littered with obstacles, from dead bodies to smashed-up or burnt-out cars.
                  Danniella clutched a map of London, while Tina sat hunched over the wheel on the lookout for obstructions.
                  Twice they had to drive into a crowd of zombies, which did the car no favours, and splattered the windscreen with reddish-black blood.  The wipers were out of water, so the window remained smeared and their visibility limited.
                  Their chosen route into London was to run parallel with the main A2 route, and then drive through Blackheath to Greenwich, where they hoped to find a boat to take them back to the centre of the city and the entrance to Down Street.
                  They would have to fight their way through several of the undead in order secure the labs, but there would hopefully be no more than half a dozen, and the research centre was divided into small, securable areas.
                  “As long as we don’t have to deal with too many of them at once we should be fine.”  Danniella was trying to reassure herself as well as Tina.
                  “Anything is better than living in the dark waiting to die,”  Tina spoke with a sigh.
                  Feeling responsible