Dealing with that and my own issues, I had been a little self-absorbed and names had not even been a blip on my radar.
“I… apologise. I shall try harder.”
“You don’t need to apologise. I know who you are, remember? I’m not going to force or nag you to do something. You do notice things eventually.”
True enough, I supposed, but without Gregg’s prompting, I could well imagine that the twins would have been school age before I really noticed or cared.
I glanced at her suspiciously at that thought. Perhaps Gregg’s prompting wasn’t so random at all and while she wouldn’t nag or force the issue, I had little doubt that she would be willing to manipulate things to speed the process along.
“Should we do it now then?”
“No. Have a think about it and we can discuss it later. For now, focus on what you need. Get it out of your system and come home to us.”
I turned to reach for the door handle and stopped, looking back for a moment at the woman I loved. I had long since grown used to that idea and I acknowledged that I enjoyed spending my time with her. Waking in the morning beside her or holding her in my arms.
Something I would never have considered possible at one point in my life. She had changed me for the better, I knew that, as much as I knew it was a process and she was showing immense patience with me at times.
I couldn’t ever change my nature. I was a killer, a murderer. But I could be better. For her, for our children. I’d find a way to control it better, to avoid the chance of ever breaking that promise I had made to her, two years before.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I love you too.”
I stepped out into the corridor and stopped, sucking in a deep breath of air. She was my weakness. I knew that and when I was with her, the darkness I carried seemed to quieten, but not enough, and as soon as I was out of her presence, it came back full force and I felt a quiet rage, a need for death, that I couldn’t ever shake.
“Where to,” Gregg asked.
“Mainland.”
“Great.”
His quiet groan said that perhaps it wasn’t so great, but I ignored that for the moment. He didn’t have to come with me. I turned to Isaac.
“We need transport. Something big enough for twenty or so minions.”
“Minions?”
“His death culty followers,” Gregg whispered. “Just go with it.”
“I can do that, laddie. Where we headed to?”
“Liverpool.”
Without waiting for a response, I marched off. I had an urge to be away, the adrenaline rising in me at the thought of what was to come.
It wasn’t such a foolish place for them to be, not really. Back at the beginning, when all hell was breaking loose, it would have been disastrous to go near the cities. Two years later, a great many of the undead had died off.
The summers were harsh on them and when the food source had gone, there was little to sustain them and they had withered away. The parasites that infected them could only do so much. They weren’t magical creatures after all but worked on the same basic principles as the rest of us.
When they infected their host, they would grow and take over the body, animating it. With limited control and only the most basic, primal urges, they would devour the living to feed the parasite within.
Some of them would develop enough to see other dead flesh as a food source. Those feral creatures would still be around for a while yet. The Reapers, well, I suspected that they would be around for decades.
So, we could expect that a great many of the slower, stupider, most basic zombies, would have died out. In a city with almost half a million people, it would be a fair assumption that if most of them had become zombies, seventy per cent or so would have died by now.
That still left a hell of a lot, but not so many that they couldn’t be avoided if needed. A determined force could clear the dockyards and marinas. They could seize boats and sail them along the coast to where other groups had abducted survivors.
Those other groups could wait. They wouldn’t infect those prisoners until they were ready to board a boat anyway, so as long as we wiped out the source of the boats, the island would be safe long enough for us to head south to the Genpact base.
In theory anyway.
I ignored the salutes of the minions standing guard and walked straight past them and into the building. It had been some kind of spa or health centre before the fall. The gym was useful for training and the minions made use of the shower and bathroom facilities that were designed for a lot of people to be using them.
Most of them slept on blankets on the floor, or in sleeping bags. Comfort wasn’t necessarily a priority since their whole reason for existing was to die fighting the undead. Once you had accepted that, not much else really mattered.
There had been a café of sorts and that had been converted into a general mess area, which is where I found most of the minions, eating their morning meal.
As I stepped into the room, silence fell and almost a hundred black-garbed minions rose to their feet, fists hitting their breasts in unison with a sound like low thunder. I scanned their faces, searching for one in particular.
“My Lord Death,” Samuel said as I finally located him. “Your orders?”
There was something different and I wasn’t sure what it was. Something in the air, in the way the minions were watching me. It set the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end and some of that old paranoia reared its head.
“What’s the problem?” I asked, voice barely more than a growl as I scowled at the watching men and women, my hand twitching towards the knife on my hip. “Why are they staring?”
The older man moved lithely through the crowd towards me. He didn’t take his eyes from mine and his hands remained far from his weapons. He too remembered my paranoia back in Glasgow.
“My Lord Death,” Samuel said, voice barely above a whisper yet still carrying easily in the taut silence. “They bear witness.”
“Bear witness to what?”
“To you.” Samuel smiled at my clear confusion and took a hesitant step closer. “Many have seen you fight, and it has inspired them. But, just a short time ago, two of your followers witnessed you bring death to the scourge in a manner they had never before seen.”
I wanted to sneer, to laugh at their idiotic beliefs but I didn’t. Lily would need them, the twins would need them too. While I was away, they would ensure my family were safe and for that, I would put up with any amount of foolishness.
“It was just some zombies. I killed them.”
“We saw death made flesh!” a voice called out.
My eyes narrowed and I tilted my head as I stared at the young woman who had spoken. She gazed at me with something close to worship on her face and my mood grew darker. What had begun as a way of ensuring my own safety, had moved way too far out of hand.
At some point soon, I would have to put a stop to it else it would become a bigger problem in the future. I needed no adoration, no worship of lesser men and women.
“They saw their beliefs made manifest,” Samuel said with some amount of glee, but low enough that only I heard. “They saw Death walking the world, as I have done.”
It was a problem and one I would need to discuss, but that would be for another time. For the moment, I needed willing followers for a dangerous task.
“Twenty of you,” I said loud enough that all could hear. “Will come with me to the mainland to stop these boats coming. Be at the docks in one hour.”
With that, I turned away, headed back out into the early morning light as it broke over the horizon. Behind me an argument began, everyone demanding their right to come and risk their lives with me.
Fools, all of them.
Chapter 17
I stopped at our apartment, just long enough to cuddle my babies and distract myself from the worry and the guilt I couldn’t shake. He was leaving the island and going into a city! With far too few people to keep
him safe.
We’d watched the shamblers become slower, weaker, as they began to die off but there were millions still about. Our resident scientist and the researchers had worked up an equation that suggested that it would be another year for them all to have died out fully.
Many had died, sure, but there were still many more left. Weaker, perhaps slower, definitely starving and all the more dangerous for that. It didn’t help that hordes had been forming around Reapers that were waging war on one another.
The mainland was in chaos and the information provided by those survivors still there who had radios to contact us, it was more dangerous than ever before. And I had just sent Ryan there.
“You okay?” Evie asked.
She held my baby boy as I cradled my daughter, holding on to her like a drowning woman would a reaching hand.
“Just worried.”
“Understandable.” She gave me a considering look, pursing her lips. “Any news on these infiltrators?”
“Three are dead and the fourth should be caught or killed today.”
At least I hoped he would. The information the prisoner had provided wasn’t much to go on. Sure, he had the location of where the boats were being launched from, but the best he could do about the infiltrator was list the targets they had been told would cause the most chaos.
It had been a depressing list and showed that they knew far too much about us. That could only mean that they had working satellites and all the other things that we’d had before the fall of the world.
They could probably make medicine and electronics that we might never regain, and they were keeping that knowledge to themselves. I could see ahead into the future and it was fairly bleak. Every day that passed, more knowledge was lost.
Books rotting in libraries, electronic databases being lost or destroyed, people with skills and knowledge, dying.
We had spent months settling on the Isle of Man, and for many people that had meant starting by cleaning out the homes that they were going to live in. Then it was getting water and sewage back online, along with power.
The fleet was supplied with fuel and we were producing enough to keep the vehicles on the island going too, but when machinery on the oil rigs began to break down, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to replace them.
Even if we could make them, we didn’t know how.
I was afraid that our people were becoming complacent, imagining that things were going to go back to normal. They weren’t. At best, we had bought ourselves a few years, a decade at most, but in time we would be learning how to be blacksmiths and herbalists.
Genpact had the knowledge we needed to avoid that, and they didn’t seem inclined to share it. Only a few of us knew that the real objective in our war with them was to gain access to that treasure trove of knowledge that they had.
“Lily.”
I glanced back at the sound of the familiar voice and smiled as Lisa, my personal bodyguard, entered the apartment.
She wasn’t wearing the black hood like the other cultists were, but she still wore all black. Her clothing was worn and soiled from travel. She reached up and swept stray strands of greasy hair from her face as she approached.
“It’s done?”
“Yes.”
A little bit of good news then. I had given her a task that I couldn’t trust many others with, and she had been away long enough that I was beginning to worry that she wouldn’t have good news when she returned.
“We should go then. Charlie will want to know.”
I leant down, brushing my lips against my gorgeous daughter’s forehead and then carefully rose and placed her in her bassinet. She didn’t cry or fuss, just looked up at me with her father’s eyes.
“When will you be back?” Evie asked and I forced out a smile.
“Tonight, hopefully.”
“Take your pump then because there’s only a few bottles of milk left in the fridge.”
“Will do.” I gave her a considering look. “Thank you for your help. I really do appreciate it.”
“Any time.”
I hated how I was spending so much time away from them so soon after they had been born, but I couldn’t refuse to do my duty. I hoped that they would understand that.
Lisa, sensing my mood, walked beside me in silence. More acolytes fell in behind us as we left the building and headed towards the command centre.
The roads of the town were quiet, with few people out and about, which was unsurprising really. I would have been concerned if I saw people wandering around like it were any other day. Fortunately, the Admiral was good at his job and had managed to get word out to keep people inside wherever possible.
It helped that each home had an emergency stockpile of food stored away that was there for just such a situation. Each family then should have a couple of days of food. It would be basic stuff, but enough to keep them alive until we had dealt with the problem.
The guards parted before us at the command centre doors and I went upstairs with just Lisa following me. Inside the main room, it was much the same as it had been earlier, though there were empty plates and cups at every desk, indicating the techs had been working non-stop to find the last infiltrator.
Charlie came to meet us when she saw Lisa and greeted her with a nod. She took a cautious look around and then gestured for us to follow her before making her way through the technician's desks to an office.
Once inside, we seated ourselves at the table as the door was closed.
“Should we wait for the Admiral?” I asked.
“Nah, he’s off doing something with his navy guys.”
“What?”
“No idea. One of them came and spoke with him and they rushed off upstairs.”
I felt a frown forming at that because the only thing above the command centre was the long-range communications station.
We had a pretty good coverage over the island and could even speak with people in the mainland UK and Ireland, but that was about as far as we could reach. Too many communications systems had been damaged or destroyed.
Added to that was the interference. Theoretically, with short-wave radio, we should be able to transmit and receive globally, but that wasn’t happening. We suspected Genpact, as they had taken control of the satellites and internet too, it wasn’t hard to guess they were actively working to make it difficult for us.
Which meant that for anything long range, we had needed to go back to setting up receiving towers and bouncing the signal along them in short bursts. It worked, kind of, but was limited to what we could set up.
I rubbed at my temples because I knew exactly why the Admiral had been called upstairs and it wasn’t good news.
“So,” Charlie said. “What’s the news?”
“The data centre is powered and operational. All servers are running without any problems.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic!” Charlie said as she punched the air with one fist. “Now all we need is to get access to the internet and we can download pretty much everything we will ever need.”
“Won’t be quite that easy,” I muttered, and Charlie looked at me almost pityingly.
“C’mon, dude. Will be great. Your boy can go and do his thing at one of these bunkers. With my techs along, we can get access to their system and we win.”
I just didn’t think it would be that easy. We knew that Genpact could broadcast and we knew they had the satellites working. They were behind the message that was playing on a loop for anyone to see if they turned on a TV.
A message claiming to be from the real government of the UK, a message designed to create confusion and sow doubt about our government. If Ryan hadn’t come back home and seen it, confirming the man in the broadcast was the same man that had had him tortured, we might have actually believed it to be real.
“All we need to do,” I said, slowly. “Is break into a hidden bunker, capture or kill everyone inside before they destroy their systems and then persuade one of them to show us how to gain
access. Yeah, will be easy.”
“Never said it wouldn’t be hard,” Charlie said, sounding a little hurt. “But if we can do it, at least we’ll have a shit load of server space to download everything we can.”
It could work and if it did, we might be saved from being dragged back to dark age living conditions. If it worked.
“Okay, fine, draw up a list of people who can do what you need if we get them into the bunker. After that, we’ll see what we can do.”
“Will do, boss.”
Charlie headed for the door and was met by Admiral Stuart. He held the door open for her and stepped aside to allow her past before coming into the room and closing the door behind him. Which wasn’t a great sign.
“What’s the news?”
He gave a pointed look at Lisa and I just waved my hand impatiently.
“She’s fine. Just speak.”
“As you will, ma’am.”
Formal, great, I thought, that’s never a good sign.
“We have received a communication from Commander Lowery.”
“And what terrible news has our submarine commander got to add to my already unpleasant day?”
“The pirate fleet is in the Bay of Biscay and heading north. They will be approaching the English Channel in two weeks.”
“Great.”
Chapter 18
“How’s it looking?” Gregg asked for what seemed like the tenth time in as many minutes.
I scowled at him but he just laughed, hiding his nervousness. I went back to staring at the small screen on the controller I held, navigating the tiny drone as best I could.
We’d come ashore just to the north of Liverpool, at a small town whose name I had already forgotten, barely three kilometres from the dockyards that filled a great length of the River Mersey. From where it emptied out into the sea and all the way back to the other side of Liverpool. A couple of hours march, and we found ourselves on the edge of the city, crouched in the snow.
Isaac swore as he watched the screen over my shoulder. The outskirts of the city still seemed to have a substantial number of the undead walking through the snow-covered streets. Singly, or in small packs, they moved sluggishly, aimlessly, but they definitely moved at the sound of the little drone I was flying above them.
Killing the Dead Season 3 Box Set | Books 13-18 Page 78
