After the Plague,

Plague, written and performed for podcast by Mike Bennett. This podcast is intended for an adult audience. Episode 4.

The car alarm was Terry's doing. He'd heard them arguing about the barricade at the bottom of the stairs.

The woman was right, except to see meer was a given if they got cut by the barbed wire, and they would get cut by the barbed wire.

That's why it had been used.

But the man was showing no signs of giving a damn. That meant the women would

die, clearing the barricade, and then the idiot couple would be able to get up past it unscathed. By triggering the car alarm he might have prevented that,

maybe even given the women a chance to escape, but if they didn't make it, it wasn't his problem.

To make the shot, he'd had to run along the fourth floor corridor to one of the rooms that

overlooked the front door of the hotel.

There were abandoned cars all over the car park. Some had belonged to guests and staff before the plague, others to intruders who had come after it. He wanted one near the door. There were four in a line there. He'd

opened a window, put a heavy lead line weight into the rubber cup of the fishing catapult,

aimed for the car nearest the front of the hotel, and fired.

The distant crack and spider webbing of the windscreen told him he'd hit his target, but

there was no alarm. So he'd hit his target, but there was no alarm.

So he'd fired at the next car, and hit the jackpot.

It burst into life, the alarm alternating back and forth between two types of maddening siren and the

side lights flashing wildly. Perfect. The zombies that had congregated in the car

park had all been standing around, deprived of whatever

it was that had made the sounds that had drawn them there.

Had they been able to think they might have realized that their quarry had flown, and so wandered off somewhere more interesting, but lacking thought they simply stood around as oblivious to each other as they were to their location.

The car alarm changed all that. They turned to the screaming

...