The Divine Infection

Chapter Thirteen: Undead Ahead

The sound of the engine stuttering and Crilly cursing bursts me out of sleep, and I come to one simple conclusion: the fuel tank is empty. Opening my eyes and looking out the car window, I see that we're stationary, surrounded by buildings on every side of us. The sky is still black, the stars hidden by clouds, and rain is bucketing down.

"Bloody fantastic!" Jim groans, hugging the radio to his chest. "Out of petrol."

"We're in Doncaster, at least." Barrone says, before thwacking Jake and Alex awake. "Wake up! We're here."

"Wha...?" Jake blinks a few times, stretches in synchronisation with Alex, and then smiles sleepily. "We're at the collection point?"

"Not quite yet. We're in Doncaster, but..." Jim frowns.

"The car's out of petrol. We'll need to walk from here on out." Crilly tells them, before grabbing his knife from the dashboard and opening the car door. Jim follows, holding the radio close to his chest as he steps out into the pouring rain. Alex mock-sobs as he tumbles out of the car and onto the road, and Jake lopes out after him, the pair still half-asleep as they wait for Barrone and I to leave the car, which we do after just a short moment.

"Guys...check this out." Crilly gestures towards a smashed-up phone box at the side of the road, with the emblem of flames frosted into the glass that remains. Around that emblem, the letters surrounding it read... "RedempCorp. The name from those microchips."

"Hm..." Barrone wanders over to the phone box, gripping his hammer tightly as he approaches it. "Do you think they're based here?"

"Dunno." Crilly says. "Could be?"

"I doubt it. Most people are fleeing north..." I muse. "Anyway, shouldn't we be trying to find this collection point?"

The others all murmur in agreement, and so we all begin trudging down the road in the pouring rain. No words are spoken for a long time, we all just continue to quickly walk down the street. No collection point is found, even though it feels like we've been walking for ages. Doncaster is a pretty big place, so this might take a while...

"I don't think they're here." Jim groans. Panic surges through me as he says that; what happens now, then? What are we meant to do?

"They will be." Barrone growls. "I have a feeling we're close." Well, he seems to be the only one with such a feeling then, because this seems hopelessly pointless, and the everyone apart from him just looks as spiritless and downtrodden as I feel.

"Should we split up and search?" I suggest. Everyone just looks at me like I'm insane.

"Do you have a deathwish?!" Alex asks incredulously. I shrug.

"Well, considering I'm in the middle of Doncaster, wandering around in the pouring rain when there's monsters out there... Yeah, I kinda do." I say, deadpan. Jake smirks at that, but everyone else just sighs and ignores me.

"This has got to be pretty ironic for me and Alex," Jake says, "first we were D.E.A.D, and now, well...we're running from the dead..."

"That was terrible." Alex grins. "Even for your standards."

"Still better than yours, Alex." Crilly laughs. Alex rolls his eyes at that.

Before anything else can be said, I hear a loud scream, so utterly human, coming from the end of the road. "What the hell?!" Alex exclaims.

"A bloat acting as a human?" Crilly suggests helplessly.

"I think this is actually a human, Crilly." Barrone says, beginning to run forward. We all follow suit, one by one, until we're pounding down the street at full speed, towards the sound of continuous screaming. Shivers run down my spine at the horrendous sound, until eventually the screaming just stops and is replaced by an eerie silence that leaves my stomach in anxious knots.