The Survival Games (Book 2): Hide & Seek

by Everheart, AJ

  “You didn’t want to come last time,” Alex reminds him softly. It isn’t a dig, he’s trying to gauge whether Lee understands the risks that come with Alex’s plans. Someone always dies. It’s not Alex’s fault, it’s just a truth these days. It’s life, intertwined with death.

  “I’m here, man,” Lee says with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

  I know he feels like maybe he could have done something last time and saved Hazeldine or one of the others, but it doesn’t work like that anymore. He has someone he cares about this time too, and that always makes it harder. At least I don’t have anyone anymore.

  “Alex, have you thought this through?” I ask, tiredly, exhaustion settling in every word. “Who will go? Who will want to? And how can you ask them to?”

  Who in their right mind is going to want to go back to London, without Kelp’s support, limited supplies, and hardly any backup?

  Alex looks around the hall for a moment, and there’s something about the glint in his eye that tells me he’s already got it all figured out. He hasn’t just thought of this recon mission, it’s clearly been playing on his mind just as much as mine.

  “Pete could go.” Alex swipes a thumb across his bottom lip, as if he was wiping the words away so no one else could catch them. Kelp would lose his shit if he caught even a whiff of what Alex was saying.

  Both Lee and I watch Pete carefully; he’s in his forties, relatively fit, and fast on his feet. Pete was one of the survivors who’d escaped the Wharf and come to Litchfield. He liked swimming and running 5ks for charity, but that was about it, and it was before two years of poor nutrition and unbelievable stress. He’d be no use in a fight—something we learned as we had navigated our way back here.

  “Why would he want to?” Lee asks, curiosity clear on his face.

  “Because Leon killed his wife,” I murmur as I catch Kelp’s eye on us as he enters the line for food. “We can’t ask someone to go back, it’s too much of a risk.”

  “Donovan, he’s not returning, just going to scout around and see what he can find out,” Alex sips tea from his mug and smiles as Mia heads towards us. “Besides, we still need to find out what happened at Basecamp.”

  Lee mutters, “C’mon, man. You know what happened.”

  “No,” I reply. “We only know what we were told.”

  “Basecamp was compromised...no survivors.” Lee groaned as if it was a huge weight resting on his shoulders, and I understood that. We left them. We went out for supplies and never returned. Would things have been different if we hadn’t found Rosehill Academy?

  “I refuse to believe that no one survived,” Alex says firmly. “Someone must have.”

  “How can you not believe it, Al? This is the end of the world, none of us are making it out of here alive,” Lee pouts.

  Mia snorts at that harsh truth as she slides into the seat next to Alex and takes his hand in hers. I almost feel envious as I watch her lay a gentle kiss on his knuckles; they have something worth fighting for. But then I remember. I remember what it was like to have that all slip away in the blink of an eye. and there are no words for that feeling when the bottom drops out of your world. I don’t want that kind of love again. I can’t…

  I push away the thoughts of Elise and Layla that start creeping back in and focus on Luke. He needs us to do something. We owe Anna.

  “Fine,” I agree reluctantly. “But I want to go out and help with the next raid.”

  Alex narrows his eyes at me, as if I’m some sort of code he’s trying to decipher. I don’t know if he thinks I’ll try something heroic, stupid, or both. “I thought you wanted to stay and keep the kid safe?”

  With a sharp laugh, I reply, “And what good is staying here if we all slowly starve?”

  Alex sighs again, he knows that we can only hold out for so long. With stragglers finding their way to us and rescuing those we come across, Litchfield resources are dangerously thin, but we can’t exactly start turning people away.

  “That’s why we need to get back to Rosehill, start rebuilding.”

  That was our long-term aim, we wanted to get Rosehill and Litchfield both self-sufficient to a point, and then we could work on creating some sort of safe passage between the two.

  Mia grumbles, “Hmph, and you think Kelp will agree to that? That man is a knob.”

  There was definitely a personality clash between Kelp and Mia, and in the days since we’d returned, there had been several screaming matches across the yard, but I had a feeling there was more to it than a control thing.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Mia could bat her eyelashes and I reckon we’d stand more of a chance,” Lee says casually and then freezes when he realises the daggers Alex is shooting in his direction.

  He’s only voicing his opinion, which is something I happen to agree with, but he soon shuts his mouth, knowing he’s in dangerous territory. What Alex and Mia have is...intense. They would die for each other. They would kill for one another. I guess that’s what survival does to you.

  Mia’s face crumples up in disgust. “I wouldn’t piss on that man, even if he was on fire, let alone flutter my eyelashes at him. You have more chance of my bow cosying up to him.”

  When she gets mad, that’s when you remember that she’s only eighteen, and she’s barely lived. She hasn’t had to deal with adult relationships, unwanted attention, or diplomacy the way that she would if she was older and had more life experience. But the apocalypse robbed her of that; now she fights, she hunts, and she keeps surviving, one day at a time.

  “Now, now, you can’t go around shooting people willy-nilly,” I tease with a grin.

  “Donovan, if he looks in my direction again, I will.” She shudders. “And I won’t say sorry for it either.”

  Both Lee and Alex laugh at her, drawing the attention of Kelp, who instantly frowns at us. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we let Mia loose on him, it would certainly lighten up the atmosphere around here.

  Chapter Five

  Anna

  We make it through the night with no issues, something that makes me uneasy as the morning light begins to creep in. I’m not used to everything being so quiet and still. At least at the Wharf there was still the hustle and bustle of people and background noises as we tried to live some sort of life.

  “Can’t we just stay here?” Lily mumbles when I wake her. I know she doesn’t mean it. Her children are in Litchfield with Luke, and our only goal is to get back to them in one piece. I understand why she says it though, uninterrupted sleep, no one holding a gun to our heads or trying to eat us, and an amazing view. We need to move soon, my bruises have developed today and ache with a heavy feeling that makes every step agony. If we don’t leave in the next half an hour, I’m going to struggle to find any motivation until I’ve healed.

  I think I’ve managed to work out where we are, and where we need to go, but it isn’t going to be easy. I’m pretty sure the British Library is around here somewhere, I remember taking Luke there on the bus last summer and the buildings look familiar.

  I pull my clothes on, wincing with every move. “We need to get to the M40, going along the motorway might be our best bet.”

  “On foot?” Lily asks with a frown as she gets up and stretches in front of the huge windows.

  “What other options do we have?” I shrug. Getting a car these days wasn’t impossible, but it drew unwanted attention. Besides, neither of us had a clue about jump-starting a car or what to do if it didn’t start.

  “Okay, let me think…” Lily grabs a pen and paper off a nearby desk. After a few moments, she waves the paper triumphantly in my face. “We need to head towards Hammersmith Hospital, from there it’s easy.”

  I look at her crudely drawn map, and raise my brow at her use of ‘easy.’ I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

  “Okay, so how do we get there from here?”

  She nods as if convincing herself it’s the right move as she explains, “We go out t
he front and head left. Along the main road.”

  “Along the main road?”

  “It’s the quickest route. And look, it’s fairly quiet out there.” She drags me over to the window, and we stare out onto the streets below.

  Yes, in terms of how busy London used to be, it’s a slow day. However, they aren’t tourists out there, they’re flesh-eating lunatics with no concept of pain or empathy. We are just food that tries to run away, and we can’t even do that well, both of us banged up like broken dolls.

  “I know it’s shit, but what choice do we have?”

  There are a few deserted cars, a van or two, and an abandoned double-decker bus blocking the road. We could use them as hiding spots if we move quick enough. If.

  “How long will it take to reach the hospital?” I’m going to hate the answer, I just know it.

  She grimaces. “Three hours, maybe…”

  “Fuck.”

  Lily takes a deep breath before she mutters, “Anna, what else are we going to do? We need to put our big girl knickers on and just get it over with.”

  I laugh at that. She’s right, we don’t have any options, and this way is going to be the quickest back to our kids. We’re two mums stuck in a random building, miles away from our children, surrounded by monsters—this is some real superhero shit.

  We do another raid of the offices before making our way downstairs, then floor by floor we strip the rooms of any food or water we can find, not that there’s much left. Armed with some more out-of-date pop cans, some snacks, a scalpel, and a pair of scissors I found in one desk, we head down to the building’s reception area.

  Lily’s a much better scavenger than me as she finds some painkillers and shares them before we tuck what’s left into our pockets.

  “Let’s do this.”

  We move as quickly as we can without drawing attention, weaving in and out of the abandoned vehicles and ignoring the carcasses and rubble on the streets as we try to get to the bus. People died here. Everywhere. There is no escaping the harsh reality of that as we try to leave the city. We’d put our filthy clothes back on, despite not wanting to, in the hopes that they would provide a little more cover by masking our scent, and it seems to be working as we slip past the zombies.

  Lily pulls me down as we wait behind a transit van. Through its window, I can see one of those monsters up close, shuffling by like it doesn’t have a care in the world. Its skin looks like melted cheese as it sits loosely on its face. The eyes are sunken and glazed over as it just ambles about aimlessly. Dark, limp, straggly hair and a torn, stained dress tell me that this was once a woman, and briefly, I wonder if she was a mother too. It’s covered in blood, not fresh, and a small part of me wants to know if it is her own, or someone else’s. Her thin arms are covered in bites, but they aren’t neat or small. When they killed her, they literally tore chunks out of her, the agony she must have felt before becoming exactly like the things that ended her life.

  Motioning over to me, Lily gets ready to move, but as she does, the female zombie turns towards us. A blank face stares through the glass for a moment, before it wanders off again. Christ, that was close.

  This time, I’m ready, and we move to the next vehicle, keeping low so that we can hide if needed. And it is needed. Three hours, she told me, but it takes almost five by the time we reach the hospital.

  We hide behind a wall and look at what our options are. While I’d love to go to the hospital and grab some supplies, especially antibiotics for some of my wounds that are beginning to look infected, the number of undead fuckers walking around it tell me that it’s an awful idea. I don’t want to die in this bloody city.

  Like Lily, I never moved here for me. London wouldn't have been my first choice for bringing up Luke, but my father was here, and when he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, what choice did I have? He died about six months before the outbreak, and I’d been debating moving back to Shropshire because it was where I grew up and where my mother was buried. I had been waiting for my father’s estate to be settled, and then I was going to use the inheritance money to buy a nice little two-bedroom house with a garden. Luke’s father hadn’t been on the scene for a long time, in fact I couldn’t even find him to tell him we were moving to London. His own mother wasn’t even sure where he was...although now, I guess he was likely dead somewhere. Either a rotten body, feasted upon, or an undead body, walking around aimlessly until it found food. The odds of survival were bleak these days, and it was global. The outbreak had happened all around the world, a government virus created to control the population growth. How horrific is that? Our own governments tried to kill us. They poisoned our water and, in the process, wiped out almost all of the human race.

  “Do we keep going?” Lily pleads as she starts to drag her feet.

  “We have to.”

  “What time is it?”

  I pull a small sundial I’d made back at the settlement out of my bag. “Around nine.”

  It had been Luke’s idea, something he’d made in school when they studied the Greeks. He was a bright kid. When the world lost its shit, we were tucked up at home, and he’d had a tummy bug and a temperature so I’d kept him off school. We may not have survived together if I hadn’t. I don’t know how I would have made it across the city to get to him in the chaos that ensued. We watched the news, glued to the screen as the emergency broadcast was played and as the story broke that the government was responsible. My stomach felt like it was filled with rocks as I locked our front door and pulled all the curtains shut. We hid for days in the upstairs bedroom, ignoring the screams, begging, and cries that filled the air as everything fell apart.

  Lily sighs, and I understand that noise. The days felt longer in this new world. Every minute dragged, laboured and heavy. Some days, it was unbearable, and others, it was manageable. Just about.

  “Once we get out of the city, it'll be easier,” Lily says with a hopeful hint to her voice, but try as I might, I don’t feel that. I just feel sore and tired, so I nod in reply.

  Hammersmith Hospital is a beautiful red brick building with a black iron fence around it. I think I read somewhere that it was a research hospital, but it must have been a busy one given how a clump of zombies seem to gather near the entrance to the building. Luckily, we don’t actually have to get close to it because it’s just our marker. Our goal is the railway track, where we’ll follow it along before switching to the motorway. Hopefully, the railway lines will be empty, and as we move further out of the city, the number of threats will taper off. Once on the motorway, it's just a case of following it along the M40 until the M5. I’d made this journey so many times in my car, knew it like the back of my hand, but I’d obviously never walked it. I especially had never walked it while trying to hide from zombies.

  There was another problem we’d face as we got further out of the city: human survivors. It was every person out for themselves in our new world; Leo was a testament to that. I can’t even remember how I came to be part of his little kingdom, I just recall that he offered me a safe place to sleep, food, and protection from the zombies—I never asked him at what cost. I never looked at the fine print of his deal, but I was giving him everything. He sent my son out on raids and gave my body freely to his men like I was a box of chocolates he was generously sharing. In exchange for scraps. For tents. For masochists with guns patrolling us. But needs must, which was my new motto in this fucked-up world.

  Chapter Six

  Donovan

  I sling my bag and my bow over my shoulder and head out to the main gate, aware of the gentle footsteps following, echoing mine.

  “Go back Luke,” I call over my shoulder, not stopping.

  The tip-tapping continues. He’s a persistent fucker, I’ll give him that. I dart behind the corner of a nearby bunker and wait for the soft footfalls to get closer before I snatch my arm out and grab the boy by the scruff of his jumper.

  “What did I say?” I growl as I pull him up onto
his tiptoes. If he couldn’t listen to commands then he could get killed, and I wasn’t having that. Anna would flay me alive.

  He crosses his arms and huffs, “Go back.”

  “And what did I mean by that?” I coax.

  Grinning, he replies, “Come with you?”

  I want to give him points for effort. I mean, I had to wait until I thought he was asleep to sneak out...which means he waited until I left to rush after me. If I hadn’t seen his shadow over by the hangar, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him until it was too late. He was quick. And quiet. Sneaky shit.

  “Luke…” I raise a brow at the kid, trying my best to be stern with him.

  “You’re going out on a raid,” he says with an accusatory tone in his voice, as if I’ve just eaten the last bloody Rolo instead of trying to risk my life for supplies. It had been hard enough convincing Alex I was ready for this, without Luke shadowing me. Kelp was only too happy for me to go, he’d practically shoved me out of the gate already. It was only Alex insisting that it would be safer if we leave at dawn that Kelp backed off. That, plus Mia told him to go and suck her dick. That was yet another memorable argument breaking up the monotony of the day, but Kelp was going to snap at some point, and then Mia’s pretty face wasn’t going to be able to save her.

  “What about it?” I ask as I let go of Luke and cross my arms.

  “Let me come with you.” His chin is raised defiantly at me, and I know this kid is a fighter, but does he have to be such a handful?

  I chuckle. “Yeah, right. Your mum would kill me.”

  His eyes gleam as he tells me, “I’m good. Fast.”

  I bite my tongue for a moment before agreeing. “Yeah, I can tell.”

  My words make him stand a little straighter, a smug look on his face.