Cat was desperate to get off the High Road. She guessed there would be hundreds of zombies littering the shops, restaurants, cafés and pubs along it. They would surely spot her and spill out to join the hunt.
The problem was, there were zombies down every side street that she came to, a small pack on each. As soon as they saw her, they started forward, moaning hungrily and gnashing their fangs. It would have been suicide to try to slip past them on the small, tight streets.
Cat couldn’t understand what was happening. You got the occasional undead straggler outside in the daytime, but nothing like this. Also, it was bizarre how they were in every street, and always at the far end, not close enough to dart out and grab her.
At least the buildings on either side of the road appeared to be clear. Or, if there were zombies inside, they were resting away from the doors and windows, unaware of what was happening outside.
Cat ran at a steady pace. She tried not to pant or surrender to panic. She was in a bad spot, but it had been worse in the school and she’d gotten out of there alive. She had to keep her head, stay focused, search for a way out.
She thought about ducking into a shop or a pub and barricading herself in, then looking for an escape route out back. But that would be a serious gamble. There were dozens of zombies chasing her. It wouldn’t take them long to tear through any barrier that she might set in their path. And if she wound up in a building with no back door…
No, it was better to keep running, so she did. At first she counted the side streets, but she lost track pretty quickly. There seemed to be an endless number of them, and every one was blocked off with zombies.
She heard a few more whistles as she fled. They confused her. She didn’t know who was making the noises. If it had been just the one, she’d have assumed it came from a zombie who had swallowed a whistle at some point. But the sounds came from different places, behind, ahead and to the sides of her.
The whistles actually scared her more than the zombies. She felt confident that she could outpace the living dead and lose them once she got off the High Road, but the whistles were an unknown factor.
Perhaps they were the work of soldiers. Maybe survivors like her were clearing out this area and herding zombies ahead of them. That would explain why the undead were coming from all over the place. She had heard of the army doing this in towns around the country, reclaiming them for the living. Maybe this was their first such venture in London.
Cat would have been delighted to learn of such an operation any other time, but right now she was caught in the middle of the rush and that was bad news. Because if the people with the whistles were directing the zombies toward a dead end where they could be picked off by snipers or scorched with flamethrowers, there would be no way for them to tell Cat apart from the monsters they had targeted.
Cat was certain that if she didn’t make it off the High Road within the next few minutes, she’d be as damned as those who were trailing along behind her. But with nowhere to turn, she had no choice but to keep going as she was, and run.