Zombie Castle (Book 1) by Chris Harris Page A

to the virus as it raged uncontrollably like a wildfire sweeping through a tinder dry forest.
    We kept the radio tuned into the emergency broadcast but it was still repeating the original message. We turned down the volume until it was just background noise but so that we would hear if the message changed. Becky also kept checking her phone but it continually showed ‘No signal’.
    ‘I can see another car coming,’ I said quietly, and relayed the information to Shawn via the radio. A silver Ford Mondeo estate car was approaching down the narrow country lane. It was an old model and had two surfboards attached to its roof rack. I slowed down and the other vehicle did the same, until we were about fifty metres apart from each other.
    We all sat there for a while. I was unsure about what to do next. We could always just squeeze past each other and continue on our journeys but somehow making contact seemed the right thing to do. If nothing else, we could use the opportunity to exchange information.
    I flashed my lights, hoping that the other driver would interpret this as a friendly gesture. They returned the flash.
    ‘Oh well, here goes nothing,’ I muttered to myself. I put on my mask and stepped out of the car. Shawn joined me.
    Two young lads stepped out of the Mondeo and started to walk towards us. When they were about twenty metres away I held up my hand. ‘That’s far enough please, we don’t know if you’re infected.’
    ‘We don’t think we are,’ one of them replied. ‘We’ve listened to what the broadcasts and internet feeds that are still working have said. But the internet went down about an hour or so ago. We haven’t been near anyone, but we’ve seen enough to know that it’s true and that there are zombies walking about. It’s getting fucking freaky out here!’
    ‘Where have you come from?’ asked Shawn.
    ‘Scotland,’ said the other one. ‘We’ve just driven down to try out the surfing. We were driving through the night and didn’t know what was happening until a few hours ago when we got bored with listening to my music and turned the radio on and heard the emergency broadcast.’
    At that point, they explained, they’d suddenly realised that the roads were unnaturally quiet. They’d checked Facebook and YouTube and seen enough crazy videos to make them turn around and head back for home. They’d been prevented from doing so by a massive crash about ten miles back up the road, which appeared to have just happened. They’d been about to get out and help when they’d seen one of them feeding on someone right in the middle of the road.
    ‘We panicked,’ the lad said. ‘We just turned off the main road and ran into a field, smashing through the fence. Luckily it’s been really dry lately so we managed to get across a few fields until we found another road. We haven’t got a map and as my phone’s map stopped working we got lost. We’ve learned enough to realise that we need to stay away from people, so we’ve been trying to find somewhere safe. The problem is, we keep coming across the zombies. They’re freaking everywhere! The last village we went through, we had to run two of them over to escape. They surrounded the car as soon as we stopped at a junction.’
    I looked back at their car. It did look as if it had been through a lot; it was coated in mud and the front bumper and bonnet had big dents in them. Most of the body panels were damaged and one of the wing mirrors was hanging off.
    I thought for a second. These guys had been driving through the night so they couldn’t have been in contact with anyone. It was pretty much the same as it had been with Shawn. We’d been in contact with other people but so far had shown no signs of being infected. We were, I concluded, incredibly lucky.
    According to their story, there had been infected people in the villages they had passed through and they had seen more of them further up on the main road at the scene of the crash. This