Bay of the Dead - By Mark Morris Page 0,26

window. Drizzle sheened the streets and blurred the light from the overhead lamps. The pubs had shut and there were very few people around.

'You girls ain't too cold with the window open?' Winston said between puffs on his straw-thin cigarette.

'No, we're fine,' said Sophie, though in truth she was a bit cold; she had goose bumps on her bare arms.

'I'm never cold,' Kirsty said, and touched her forearm with the tip of an index finger, making a tsss sound. 'I'm always hot.'

Winston chuckled. 'I can believe it. So how come you girls are out partyin' so late at night? Ain't you got work in the mornin'?'

Kirsty leaned forward, resting her arm on the back of his seat. 'No, we're—' she began.

And at that moment a chalk-white hand with black fingernails reached in through the driver's side window and ripped Winston's face off.

It happened in an instant. The hand seemed simply to dig its fingers into the soft flesh beneath Winston's jaw and peel off his skin like a balaclava. Winston fell backwards without a sound, sprawling across the front seats, his roll-up still held daintily between the forefinger and second finger of his right hand. Blood fountained from his severed jugular vein, an arterial spray which drenched Kirsty in an instant. She screamed and threw up her hands. All Sophie could do was gape in utter disbelief.

Then the door next to Kirsty was wrenched open, and half a dozen hands shot into the car, grabbed hold of the screaming girl and dragged her out. Sophie couldn't believe what was happening, couldn't believe that less than ten seconds ago she, Kirsty and Winston had been chatting and listening to music. She sat there, frozen in terror, as she heard Kirsty's screams rise in pitch and agony, until they became almost too unbearable to listen to. 'No!' Kirsty was screaming. 'No, please. . .' There was a final gurgling scream and then silence.

Shaking from head to foot, her sparkly top speckled with Winston's blood, Sophie reached for the door handle. At first she wasn't sure she even had the strength to turn it. Then the door clicked open and she all but fell into the road. She got up, sobbing, her legs shaky and weak, her stomach juddering, as if she was frozen to the core. She looked over the roof of the car and saw a group of. . . things, tearing at something that was covered in blood. Something that no longer looked human. Something that Sophie refused to believe had been her best friend less than a minute before.

Head spinning, her breathing coming in sobbing, shuddering gulps, she tottered away on her high heels. After a few steps she paused to kick them off, and then, with the chill wetness of the ground soaking into her stockinged feet, she ran.

***

'Left here, Jack,' Ianto said.

Jack swung the SUV into the sharp turn without even slowing. The tyres made a screeching hiss on the wet tarmac.

'Whoa there, Mr Testosterone,' Ianto said drily. 'There's no need to impress me with your crazy stunt driving.'

'Never walk when you can run, Ianto,' Jack said heartily.

'Never die when you can live,' Ianto muttered, and then added, 'Oh, I was forgetting – you don't.'

They were 'zombie-hunting', as Jack kept insisting on calling it, the monitoring equipment inside the SUV acting as a kind of 'zombie' satnav. Ianto was using the readings to give Jack directions; only problem was, the 'zombies' – whether by accident or through some kind of flocking instinct – tended to congregate in large groups, and that was something they were trying to avoid. They were in Trowbridge, on the trail of a quartet of the creatures, which appeared to have been stationary for the last five minutes or so. Trowbridge was an area of tight suburban streets and public housing, though it was presently undergoing something of a facelift. The 'zombies' – or at least their Rift traces – had been detected on a road with pre-war housing on one side and a building site (which would soon become desirable new dwellings) on the other.

'First right,' Ianto said, and raised his eyebrows when the wheels on the passenger side of the SUV briefly left the road as Jack took the turn. A dozen metres ahead, parked in the middle of the road, was a blue Passat with its lights on. Jack drove towards it at speed, as if he expected it to simply get out of his way.

'Brake,' Ianto said mildly.

Jack hit