Refuge by Warwick Matthew

Author:Warwick, Matthew [Warwick, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Infected
Published: 2018-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

A relentless storm tore across the countryside, conflicting winds ravaged through treetops and rain blasted the pipe entrance. Zac woke to a morbid grey atmosphere, the summer sun, was nowhere to be seen, in the afternoon sky. All concept of time had been lost, and he found himself struggling to comprehend just how long he had been unconscious. The rapidly rising water level in the ditch had clawed Zac back into reality with a shockingly cold shot of adrenaline.

He raised his hands to his face and tried wiping his blurry, dirt filled eyes. His frozen finger tips trembled uncontrollably and his skin hung from his arms, wrinkled by the bitter water, like the skin of an old man. Initially he could only make out shadowy black and white images, as his sight slowly returned. As the tortured abyss of the fields came into focus, he examined the aftermath of the steering herd of screamers that had torn through the landscape.

A few yards in front, a pile of splintered, blood stained bones, rested on top of a muddy puddle of intestine, shredded fatigues and strands of matted blonde hair. Zac listened intently for any indication of infected, but the force of the gale force winds made this impossible and he soon found himself shuffling to the lip of the pipe and inspecting the exterior.

He looked intently across the fields, to the left and right, before slowly shuffling from the sanctuary of the pipe and into the ditch. Zac instantly found himself blasted by a torrent of rain laced winds that spiralled around in every direction. Steadying himself on the top of the pipe he slowly raised himself to his feet. An electrifying ache fired down each leg as his exhausted muscles, barely took the weight of his body.

He sluggishly rotated on the spot, looking in every direction, in a vain effort to reassure himself that a lone infected wasn’t charging down on him for an easy feed. The once lush towering maize of the field through which he’d fled was flattened beyond recognition, and the charcoaled skeletal remains of the helicopter, laid barren on the far side of the field.

Zac found his attention drawn to the south side of the field, along the trail of devastation left by the crashed aircraft. A large dark treeline was silhouetted by an intense warm glow that breached the tops of the trees like a penetrating sunrise. He agonizingly shuffled across the flattened maize and finding a rupture in the hedgerow made by the charging infected, edged through the treeline into the field beyond.

Zac immediately understood what had happened. The panic of the aircrew, the power failure, the crash that drew the infected in like moths to a flame and lastly the biblical storm that raged all around! Beyond the fields a fire burned, the ultimate fire. An immense halo of radioactive cloud hung over London, a tornado like plume of debris filled with burning ash, channelled from the halo’s eye to the desolated, fire consumed city at its heart.

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