by Ryan Casey
But this was different. I was on the move now. And I wasn’t in a great state.
Eventually, dehydration would catch up with me. Maybe that would be the thing to kill me before the stab wound did.
I stared at the ground. I could smell dampness in the air, and I knew it was from me. So this was what my life had come to. I was a dirty, wandering bastard who didn’t have a soul with him. I’d failed everyone I’d got close to, except for Lionel. And I’d fail him eventually. That much was for sure.
I thought about my home and I wondered if maybe it’d be a good idea to just go back there. To bide my time until I either starved, dehydrated or bled to death.
But no.
I couldn’t do that. In fact, I was less inclined to do that than ever before.
Holly was waiting for me.
I had to go after her.
I had to find her.
Nothing could get in my way.
I walked a little further, gasping for air, and I saw something.
There was a necklace on the ground in front of me.
I crouched down to it. Picked it up with my shaky hands.
There was no doubting whose this necklace was.
The little diamond-like studs in the silver.
It was Holly’s.
I held it tight and I felt my chest well up. She’d dropped it. She’d dropped the thing she held so dear to her, and she’d done it to draw me in her direction.
Well I was going in her direction.
I was coming for her.
I went to stand back up, renewed in my goal.
But I toppled forward.
My head spun. My eyes filled with colours.
I tried to stand again, but my body was so weak.
I listened to the wind rustling louder around me and I saw something on the road beside me. Blood. My own blood.
So this was how it ended for me.
This is what my life had come to.
Dying on the road, bleeding out, just like Harriet.
“No,” I said.
I tried to drag myself up. I had to get back to my feet. I couldn’t give up on Holly. I couldn’t give up on life.
But as I tried to pull myself up, the colours filled my eyes completely.
The rustling wind blasted around my head.
The taste of metal covered my tongue.
And then I felt softness, as I drifted into a sleep-like state, and…
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I opened my eyes and reached out for Harriet beside me.
I knew there was something wrong; something amiss. There was a reason why I couldn’t feel Harriet beside me, and I knew what that reason was, deep down. I just didn’t want to entertain the thought. I didn’t want to give it any attention. I wanted to blissfully, ignorantly believe that I was back home, back to my perfect old life where everything was okay, where everything just worked.
It was morning, I knew that. I was in a soft bed, even softer than I’d remembered my big, luxurious double bed back at home to be. We’d argued about the mattress a few times, Harriet and me. I found it too hard. Harriet found it too soft. Both of us agreed that it wasn’t right, but neither of us could agree on what the solution to our problem should be.
It was one of those irrational little problems that every couple runs into from time to time. It was an argument that, in the grand scheme of things, meant absolutely nothing. The kind of argument to spark an extra flare of energy into any relationship.
But looking back, what I’d give for that bed again, and all its imperfections.
What I’d give for Harriet to be beside me.
What I’d give for…
Dread.
Dread, rich and unwavering, right in the middle of my stomach, then spreading through my body.
I remembered everything in a flash. Everything I’d been holding off and trying to repress.
Harriet’s death.
My depression.
And the EMP, and everything that came with it…
I kept my eyes squeezed shut because I wanted to keep myself closed off from the world for just a little while longer. I wanted to believe that things weren’t as bad as I’d remembered them; that it was just a product of my over-active, over-sensitive imagination.
But I did open my eyes.
And what I saw was… not what I’d expected.
I was in a bedroom. I was lying on a mattress. A damned soft mattress at that.
For a few seconds, I wondered if maybe I was back home. I allowed myself to luxuriate in the possibility.
Then it struck me that this wasn’t my bedroom at all.
It was someone else’s.
I looked around. There were some white curtains to my left, which the sun shone through. I could feel a breeze blowing through the window, which made me shiver, otherwise I was warm under these covers.
I looked around this bedroom. I saw photographs of a family—a young family, dark haired, very beautiful couple. I saw jewellery on the dressing table. I saw neatly packed wardrobes, half open.
It looked so beautiful.
It looked so real.
I wanted to believe it.
Then something else hit me.
“Lionel,” I said.
He’d been with me. He’d been by my side. Wherever I was, I couldn’t leave him on his own. I had to know what’d happened to him. I had to…
In the corner of my eye, I saw Lionel lift his head.
“Lionel?”
He ran over to me and jumped on the bed, muddying it with his paws. As he licked my face, I wondered what this was, how we were both here, and more pressingly, who had got us here.
Because as idyllic as this seemed… I didn’t trust people.
And sure. Maybe that was my problem. Maybe my desire not to connect with anyone else because of the times I’d lost those I’d bonded with in the past was just making me anxious to connect with anyone.
And yet… here I was.
I looked down at my side. The bad tape job I’d done had been removed, replaced with a clean tourniquet.
I had no memory of what’d happened. Well. Faint memories. Blurry images. Attempting to fight people off. But I’d been too weak to really do anything, and ultimately too weak to remember.
But whoever had brought me here had helped me out, too.
I wanted to stay put. I wanted to wait here for whoever had helped me out to come in and introduce themselves.
But at the same time, I wanted to get out.
I couldn’t trust anyone.
I had to question their motives, always.
They’d helped me out. Now I had to get away.
“Come on, Lionel,” I said.
I got off the bed and stumbled over to the bedroom door. I was still hurting on my side, but that was to be expected. I slipped on my shoes, which had been placed by the door. Then I grabbed my coat, and I turned the handle.
Before I left the room, I looked back.
It was so welcoming. So homely.
But it wasn’t for me.
Not while Holly was still out there… wherever there was.
I swallowed a lump in my throat and looked down at Lionel. “Come on, lad. Time to go.”
I turned the handle some more and I opened the door.
When I opened it, I froze.
There was a boy standing there. He had dark hair, and weedy arms. He barely looked out of his teens.
He was smiling at me.
“Leaving without saying thanks?” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I sat at the dining table opposite my host and I tried to get my head around this weird situation.
Turns out Billy, as the guy was called, wasn’t one of the freaky kids who was with the masked group. And he wasn’t alone in this place either. He had a lot of friends here. All of them were in their late teens, all of them looked… surprisingly optimistic, considering the circumstances of the world.
And they all looked a whole
lot cleaner than I did, that was for sure.
It was late afternoon, apparently. I was sitting at the dining table in the kitchen area of this semi-detached house in Preston. It wasn’t all that far from where I’d collapsed. Apparently five of this ten-strong group were out on a scouting mission of sorts when they’d come across my collapsed body, Lionel resting his head on my chest.
They’d carried me back to their place. They’d stitched me up. They said I was conscious throughout it all, but I couldn’t remember a thing.
I was grateful for what they’d done. I appreciated it, of course. There were far worse out there than these people. A lot worse.
But I still knew what I had to do, and which direction I had to head in.
“You still haven’t thanked us,” Billy said, sitting back in his chair, a small glass of water in hand. It was just him and me now. “At least not sincerely.”
I swallowed some water of my own, savouring it, even if it did taste a bit rusty. “I’m grateful. Really. It’s just…”
“You had a run in with some bad people,” Billy said. “I get how it is. We all do. And boy is there some bad people out there.”
“You know about the—”
“Masked creeps? With the kids? Yeah. We ran into them just before we bumped into you, actually.”
“Did you see a girl with them? A young girl?”
Billy shrugged. “I couldn’t say. But they headed west out of Preston, down the railway tracks. They’ll probably be heading to Blackpool, over to the coast. There’s rumours of some kind of messed-up camp at the railway station over that way.”
I’d heard enough rumours of camps for a lifetime. “Somehow these people don’t strike me as the kind that care too much about whether a place is ‘messed-up’ or not.”
“Fair point,” Billy said.
He leaned across the table then. And I could tell from his body language that he wanted something from me. I knew that look. I knew those expressions. “Look,” he said.
“We can’t help.”
He frowned, narrowing his eyes. “How do you know we’re asking you for help?”
“Everyone is asking for help,” I said. “Everyone wants something, one way or another. Because if they didn’t, people would just go their own ways. Groups would stay out of each other's shit.”
Billy smiled. “You’re a very cynical guy, Scott.”
“I’ve seen enough crap in this world to be cynical.”
Billy leaned back and sighed. He sounded like he was preparing to make me a final appeal of sorts. “Look. I’m not going to pretend what I’m offering is mutually beneficial. Basically, we’ve had problems with a rival group. They took some of our supplies, and we want them back.”
“So you want me to help you fight them?”
Billy shrugged. “Every little helps.”
I looked around this kitchen. The bottles of water. The stacks of tins. “Just how the hell did you manage to find a place like this?”
Billy grinned. “Funny story, actually. My grandma, she was a hoarder. I suppose by modern definitions you could call her a prepper. But she wasn’t really prepping for anything, per se. She collected food. Drinks. All kinds of stuff like that. So I came over here, got a few friends to join me and we’ve just been sorta living the life ever since.”
“Ever wonder what you’ll do when the supplies run out?”
Billy shrugged, smile on his face. “Live fast, die young. That’s the only way, right? Sorry. I wasn’t meaning to call you old.”
“Yeah yeah,” I said.
I wanted to tell Billy I could help him. He seemed like a good kid. And to be honest, I was concerned. Concerned that he hadn’t really planned out a long-term future. He couldn’t just hope that the supplies would last. And when they did run low, he couldn’t expect his group not to come to loggerheads over the last of those supplies.
But I had a mission of my own. A duty of my own. “Those masked people we spoke about. They… they took something important of mine.”
“Hey, look around, man. We’ve got all the supplies you need right here.”
“They took my daughter.”
I wasn’t sure why I called Holly my daughter. But when I thought about it… well, I guessed that was what she was now, in a way. She was mine to protect. She was mine to look out for.
And I would. I wasn’t going to give up on her.
“I’m grateful,” I said. “For what you’ve done for me. Really. But I can’t risk anything when my daughter is out there.”
Billy looked disappointed. “If you helped us, we could help you.”
I remembered Phillip saying those words. And as sure as I was that Billy wasn’t Phillip, I’d fallen into that trap one time too many. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”
I stood up, then. I shook hands with Billy, then said goodbye to a few of his friends. I walked over to the doorway with Lionel. I looked back when I got partway down the street—I had to get to the railway lines, I had to head towards Blackpool. That way, I would find Holly. I would get her back.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Billy said.
I looked back at him and I smiled, and I felt my faith in humanity being restored. “I’ll never change my mind.”
Billy nodded. “Good luck.”
“You too.”
I turned around.
“Just you and me again, eh lad?” I said, looking down at Lionel.
He looked better for the rest he’d had at Billy’s place.
I looked at the road ahead.
I thought about the train station, of the train lines, of where I had to head.
And then, knowing full well I was doing the right thing, I walked.
The clouds thickened overhead.
CHAPTER THIRTY
All these days with minimal rain and it was just my luck that a damned storm had to rear its head.
I had been walking all afternoon. The sun was beginning to set. I was on the train tracks. The train tracks were weird. There were trains everywhere that had been abandoned, their power cutting out when the EMP hit. It was weird, seeing these massive vehicles just neglected and left to rust on the lines. Even weirder looking inside and seeing them empty. It was eerie. One of the eeriest things I’d seen.
It didn’t help that every now and then, I swore I saw people inside the trains.
Dead or alive? At a glance, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t want to know.
I wasn’t sure which of the options was scarier to me right now.
The storm was raging. Rain lashed down so heavily and sharply that it actually hurt. It was more like hailstone, massive blocks of it slamming against me. Lionel didn’t seem to be enjoying it much, either. He kept stopping and curling up, like that would help shield him from the assault from the skies.
But we had to keep on pushing through the hail, and against the wind.
We were getting closer to Blackpool.
I thought back to Billy and I wondered if maybe I’d made the wrong call when he’d asked me to help him and his people. If I’d helped, perhaps we could’ve worked it out. And having his people alongside me when I went after Holly was surely something that would come in handy, especially when I didn’t know exactly what the group I was going up against were capable of.
Then again, I’d seen what getting other groups involved in conflicts could do, when the whole Phillip and Mike situation had gone down.
I wondered where Mike was now. Whether he’d found a place of his own. Whether he’d turned his life around after the horrible things he’d done.
Somehow, I doubted it.
I zipped my coat up tighter and I stopped by the side of the train. It was no use pushing on when the hail was so thick and intense. Might as well shelter for a while. We could sleep on one of these trains if we had to, as eerie a thought as that was.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but we had to be prepared for anything now.
I leaned back,
Lionel squeezing against me, and I thought back to Billy again. Maybe I should have helped him. Maybe his help would’ve been the thing that got Holly back. And maybe refusing to help and refusing to accept help in turn was what had been holding me back all along.
I saw that now, clearly. I’d been living on this dreamlike life premise where it could be just Holly, Lionel and me forever. But that was never going to be sustainable. We were always going to reach some kind of group eventually.
Holly was right. I’d been wrong to be so trigger happy—figuratively speaking.
I should’ve used diplomacy and peace as my weapon.
But it was too late to dwell on that now.
I squeezed Lionel. I hugged him tight. And as I sat there, I found myself crying. Not through fear. Not through anything like that. Just through relief that at least I had Lionel beside me. At least he was going to help me. At least he was going to be by my side at all times.
I tickled his head and he licked the tears from my face with his big, sloppy tongue.
I smiled at him and started laughing. “We’re going to be okay, you and me. We’re going to get to Holly, aren’t we? We’re going to…”
I stopped talking when I heard it.
I couldn’t make it out. Not at first. I thought maybe it was footsteps, or a gun. It made me lean back against the train and hold my breath for fear of what it might be.
But then I heard it getting closer, and I knew what it was.
I rubbed my eyes. I cleared out my ears. I tried to convince myself that it was just a figment of my imagination, because what I thought it was wasn’t possible. Not anymore.
But I could still hear it.
I stood up and looked around for it. I could hear it, but in the hail and the cloud I couldn’t see a thing.
I begged for it to reveal itself. To prove to me that I wasn’t going mad.
Then I heard the sound getting further away.
“No!” I shouted, running down the tracks, looking very much like a madman now. “Wait. Please!”
I tripped over. I split my lip as I slammed against the tracks, and felt that wave of dizziness all over again.
