A New Type of Realism

(4) Reunite

I smiled and shook my head. I caught Maggie's attention in the rear view mirror. "So, Where're we going Mags?"

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The car finally pulled up at our destination. I parked it outside of a fence that was at least eight feet high. "So, this is it?" I asked Maggie. I saw her nod her head in the rear view mirror. Martin was slumped against the window, sleeping. I turned in my seat and saw Ben behind me, with his arms crossed in a sulky manner. He stared out of the window, not seeming to have noticed that we had arrived. I pulled the keys out of the ignition and pocketed them. I looked through the windows, checking for any more infected and opened the car door gingerly when I had confirmed that the coast was clear. I stepped out and stretched my back, we'd been driving for a long time. I thanked my lucky stars that we'd had just about enough fuel to get us to this place. We definitely didn't have enough to take us anywhere else. Unless there was a sufficient amount of fuel in the compound, we were hopelessly stuck.

I heard car doors slam behind me, and remembered to close my own. The group assembled in front of the Mercedes.

"How are we going to get in?" Martin asked. I looked around at the fence. There was no way we could climb over it, and even if we somehow managed to do that, there was still the matter of getting over the second fence, which was just as high. The gate seemed like a secure system. Second gate would probably only open if the first gate was closed.

"We could always cut our way in." Ben suggested.

"With what?"

"No, it would be open to the others." Martin refused to humour Ben. We all knew what he had meant by the 'others' His child's mind couldn't cope with accepting what had happened and had reverted to referring to the infected as 'them', and the 'others'.

"What if we just shouted really loud? My friend might still be here." Maggie suggested. Ben sent a glare her way, as if to say 'don't be stupid'.

"Well it might work, we won't know until we've tried it." I said. It was a risky idea, but I hated the way that Ben kept putting Maggie down. Not all of her ideas had been awful so far. Ben, meanwhile, hadn't contributed in anyway other than copying exactly what I'd said, and claiming my ideas as his own.

Ben took a moment to think before he announced, "So, here's what yous are gunna do, yous attract whoever might be living here's attention, there's bound to be a camera around here somewhere. But if that don't work, yous look for a sharp object to cut them fences with." He began to walk off, looking all around him.

I quickly spotted a camera above the gates and begun to wave my arms up and down in clear view of it. Hopefully my antics wouldn't go unnoticed. I motioned to Maggie to help in my silly goose impersonations. Martin stood by the side lines, watching for any infected.

Soon, I noticed one of the doors beginning to open from within the compound. A man stepped out from behind the door and began to walk towards us. Maggie screamed in delight. I assumed that she'd spotted her friend that was supposed to have waited for her. I was glad that at least one of us had managed to find the person they'd been looking for. Once the man had seen Maggie, he ran towards us with all the athleticism of a rubber duck. I knew that I didn't want to be stuck with him if we were trapped in a building surrounded by the infected, and for whatever reason, he was my only hope of getting our alive.

He held a small black box in his hands, which I figured was the key to open the gates. He raised it and pointed it in our direction as the first gate began to open. I grabbed Martin's hand and pulled him within the area between the two gates. Maggie was pressed up against the second gate, involved in an in-depth conversation with the man who had technically saved our lives. Finally, the second gate opened and we began the walk to the bunker that the man had come out of.