“She’s too much like her father.”
“I know.” God help me, I did.
Chapter 7
I laughed aloud as the struggling raider was held firm against the old barn door. Two put her knife against his throat and he subsided, wide eyes staring at the heavy mallet I held in my hand. He licked his lips and whimpered as I took a step closer.
“Hold his arm up.”
The women complied, forcing his bare arm up against the door and holding it flat against it. I grunted as I placed the six-inch nail against his wrist and swung the mallet with all my strength. His scream cut the air and I ignored it as I placed a second nail beside the first and drove it through the wrist and into the wood beyond.
Two more went beside the first before I gestured for them to lift his other arm. The only sound beside his screams was that of the mallet striking the nail head and driving it deep into the wood.
Gregg watched from beside the farmhouse door, lone eye dark and troubled, while Abigail whispered poison into his ear. She had been becoming more vocal for the past weeks as we travelled along the fields and backroads between Worcester and Birmingham.
“Let him go,” I said, as I drove the last nail into the wood.
The women complied and the young man sagged, then screamed as the nails pulled at his flesh. He vomited abruptly, coughing and choking as the women laughed, enjoying his pain and misery. I glanced down at the box of nails I had found in the barn and grinned.
There were plenty more.
By the time I had finished the young raider had lost consciousness but he remained in place, hanging from the wood with blood running down his pale, naked, flesh.
“I want his balls,” One muttered and I cocked a brow and tilted my head as I glanced at her.
“Why?”
The young woman, barely out of her teens with a face that was all sharp angles, thought about that for a moment. It was clear that her life had been difficult. There was a wariness around her eyes, and lines on a face devoid of the puppy fat of youth that shouldn’t have been there for years to come.
“Because I want to take something from him,” she said, finally. “I want him to feel that same pain and violation that I felt for every night since they first took me to their camp.”
I considered her for a moment before finally shrugging. “Do as you please, just make sure he doesn’t die.”
The stench of death hung in the air and I breathed deep as I crossed the muddy yard to where Gregg waited. He looked, with some distaste, to where Emma was using an axe to cut the heads off of the other raiders we had found at the farm.
“Really?”
“It has a purpose.”
“What purpose? What makes you even think that anyone will be coming this way any time soon?”
I glanced around at the farmyard and held back a sigh. He didn’t seem to get it, even though he should. Part of me suspected it was willful ignorance on his part due to his growing unease with our journey.
“Look, the farm is next to the road that leads straight from Birmingham to Worcester, passing through two other towns. We’ve seen before that when they travel they have safe houses to stay in overnight.”
“True.”
“Aye, well, this patrol will be missed, and others will come looking. They’ll find this man, hopefully still alive, nailed to the barn door beside a small pile of skulls and they will know fear.”
“Or they’ll just be angry and think a psycho is attacking their people,” Abigail added, and I shrugged.
“Either way, it accomplishes the same purpose. They will be on edge and they will be scared.” I swept my arm over the bodies, surprised they hadn’t seen it. “These people aren’t warriors. They are thugs with armour and weapons who are used to bullying survivors who are still reeling from the zombies.”
“All they have going for them is numbers and we are whittling those down with every group we meet.”
“Our numbers too,” Gregg pointed out with a nod to the group of women beside the barn.
He wasn’t wrong. Only four of the original women remained and the base in Worcester hadn’t provided much of use at all. It seemed that the place was more of a way station than anything else with some stored supplies and weapons, but no prisoners.
We’d released the horses and dumped those supplies and weapons we couldn’t carry ourselves. As wasteful as it was to toss it all into the river, I would rather do that than let the raiders have it.
“Six is enough.”
“Hardly,” Abigail muttered. “I’m no fighter, so it’s you five.”
“She’s right, mate. Each base we’ve found has had anything up to thirty raiders. How many do you think will be at their main base?”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
A high pitched squeal from the barn had me grinning as Gregg shook his head in dismay. He wasn’t happy at all and I could understand that. Not everyone was going to be as amused and, to be honest, delighted at the chaos and murder I was sowing, but so long as he didn’t try to stop me we would be fine.
I glanced up at the grey sky and lifted my backpack from where I’d left it. The women, seeing this, ceased their torment of the raider and sheathed their weapons as they marched over to stand ready.
“We should get going. Find a place to sleep for tonight.”
“Surprised you don’t want to stay here.”
A single glance cut off any further comment from Abigail. Her attitude was beginning to grate and if I didn’t need her, I would have left her behind a long time ago. To be fair, she seemed to have realised how much she needed us and was eager not to cross the line too often.
I led the small group out past the barn and over the wall into the backfields. As close as we were to Birmingham, it was a good idea to avoid the main roads. While I knew that the base was in the very heart of the city, I didn’t have the exact location.
That would mean a cautious approach and a great deal of time scouting the area. If it was like any of the other cities that had been overrun early in the fall of the world, it would mean there could still be food and other useful supplies available.
I certainly hoped so because we were running on fumes. Weeks of travelling, hiding from larger groups of raiders and watching for danger meant little time for scavenging food. That which we had taken from the raiders' base in Worcester was almost gone and the farm where we had just found the small patrol had almost no food cache.
That told me that it was a temporary place to stay as a group travelled to and from the city. The raiders hadn’t been planning to stay their long which meant they would be missed. If all they had was a day's rations, then I expected that by the morning someone would be coming looking for them.
As amusing as it would be to see their reaction to what had been done at the farm, it was prudent to be far away. We didn’t have the numbers to take on any large group, so it would be guerrilla tactics.
Of course, first, we needed to reach the city. A task that seemed all the more difficult as we crossed the weed-choked field and into the trees.
The green and pleasant land had become overgrown and almost impassable in places during the years after the fall. Small wildlife abounded but seemed particularly wary of any traps I tried to set. Still, after years of any rustling from the bushes meaning the undead were near, it seemed to set my companions nerves on edge whenever we walked through the wild fields.
Gregg looked away as I glanced back over my shoulder. He’d kept our interaction to a bare minimum since the conversation in Worcester and I wondered when he would get over his upset with me.
I missed my friend. Which was strange for me, but after so many years together in that bunker, I had become accustomed to his chatter. Where once it had annoyed me, its absence left me with some emotion that I lacked the ability to process and no one to explain it to me.
We travelled in silence for the rest of the day and I found my thoughts to be less than pleasant. With my mood darkening,
it was not helped when we had to make camp beside a burned-out farmhouse that was the best of a bad lot.
A small fire was built as Emma took the first watch. Two and Five gathered wood while I sharpened my weapons. Gregg had taken over the cooking duties and heated the last of our tinned food in a pot that he placed in the very edge of the fire.
There was little chatter and after eating a bland vegetable soup, we settled in for the night. I used my backpack as a pillow and lay back, staring up at the star-filled sky above and wondered just what Lily was doing right then.
My thoughts had been drifting to her more often as we moved further north and without the distraction provided by my friend, I had little left but my own thoughts.
I missed her.
It was almost hard for me to admit that, even to myself, but there it was. I had found love and it had become a part of my life. Its absence created a sense of loss, almost like mourning. Or at least what I thought mourning to be as I had never before experienced that.
With a sigh I rolled onto my side, a restlessness inside of me chasing away sleep. I tried to force my mind back to the raiders and what I planned to do once I reached Birmingham but even that brought little lightening of my mood.
There was something missing. I could try to hide from it with blood and violence, but it was still there, buried deep within me. That need to be with the only person I had ever truly loved.
For a moment I allowed myself the fantasy of returning to the island. I would march in and kill any who stood between us. I would wade in the blood of her suitors and show to her that I was very much alive.
But I couldn’t do that. She would have moved on. I would have no right to destroy whatever happiness she had found just because I wanted to be with her once more.
Which was a bizarre thing for me to think. I was putting her needs above my own and I was pretty sure that meant something though I had no idea what.
I looked over to where Gregg lay, but his one eye was closed, his face lit by the low burning fire, and I sighed before rolling over to my other side. He might have been able to explain it to me, but he wasn’t talking to me, not like he used to.
There was a way to fix things with him, I was sure. I just didn’t know what that was, and I lay there trying to figure it out.
Sleep was a long time coming.
Chapter 8
“Is this a good idea?”
I pulled my coat a little closer as the wind sent cold salt spray against me and I forced a smile for my friend. She knew the answer, of course, but she needed to speak because standing on the dock in the cold morning air watching an approaching boat was not what she wanted to do.
“We need a win.” I dug my hands into my pockets, wishing I had brought gloves. “It’s been almost three months since we arrived, and the progress has stalled. People are getting restless.”
After the initial surge of excitement with the sawmill, it seemed that anything that could go wrong did go wrong. First one of the saws broke with parts needing replacing that they didn’t seem to have anywhere around the sawmill.
With production dropping fast, I sent some of Samuel’s cultists out to search for the parts with little result.
On the back of that frustration came the next problem, the crumbling wall of the well collapsed leaving us without a ready source of water. It wasn’t the end of the world as we had found a fast-flowing stream of clear water to the south of the village.
It did mean that people had to be tasked with collecting, filtering and boiling that water, which reduced the number of workers we had for other tasks. Not to mention the security teams that needed to provide guard duty on those trips.
To add insult to injury, the wagons that had been fixed up to transport the wood died on us. As with everything else, years sat in the open air with no protection had left them in poor condition and we couldn’t just nip to the local garage for parts.
The engineers were working on a solution, but it wasn’t looking great and had effectively halted production at the sawmill. Which, in turn, had ended my hopes of having something vaguely boat-shaped built before the end of summer.
“We could have gone back to the island for this.”
“No, here is fine.”
I’d put a lot of thought into it before making that decision. We needed to do things differently if we wanted to build a better world for everyone. That meant being entirely open and what we were doing.
“Whatever you say.”
I ignored her sigh and reached out to put my arm around her and pull her close. Her smile was natural and unforced, and I returned it as the boat finally reached the dock.
“Ready!” Isaac barked the order, and his security team raised their crude crossbows to their shoulders. “Hold on my command!”
They’d been practising daily with those crossbows. Wooden stocks with a metal bow, that looked like something out of the middle ages. I’d not seen them manage to hit much in the way of targets, so I figured they were there more for show than anything.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t be needed.
“Here they come,” Cass said, watching the figures climb from the boat to the dock.
The lead woman’s auburn hair had been cut short since I had last seen her and she had lost a great deal of weight when she didn’t have much to lose. Her face was all sharp planes and her arrogant sneer of before had faded.
Behind her was the man, once balding head shaved completely. He walked slowly, as though he lacked the strength to move with any real speed. Both of them looked to have aged.
“Eunice,” I greeted her with a nod. “Welcome to Mostyn.”
“Thank you.” She turned her head to look back at her companion. “You remember, Albert?”
“Of course, a pleasure.”
“I doubt that.” He coughed and hunched his shoulders against the cold. “But here we are, heh?”
“We have a place waiting, out of the cold,” Cass said, gesturing back towards the village. “A short walk.”
The two nodded and waited as Isaac turned his team around and led the way. Cass made small talk with them as we walked and I watched, gauging their demeanour. Something was off about them and I wasn’t sure what it was, but it set my teeth on edge.
It wasn’t a long walk but the chill and the need to walk slowly for the sake of the Genpact people made it considerably longer and I was chafing at the time taken by the time we reached my home.
Whether they were impressed or not, they didn’t show it as we settled into the dining room. The table was large enough to seat eight so there was no problem with the two of them taking one side while I sat opposite beside Cass.
Isaac dismissed his team but waited by the door, leaning back against the frame with large arms crossed over a barrel chest. He kept his gaze squarely on our guests and, once again, they ignored him and showed no sign of unease.
A small cast iron log burner sat in the corner, added at my request when we moved in, and had been lit before we left. It meant that the room was pleasantly warm and the four of us took off our coats.
I shared a glance with Cass and gave a slight shake of my head at her upraised eyebrows. There was no need to comment on their appearance, but it was hard not to notice just how thin they both were. Their clothes practically hung from their bony frames.
The years had not been good for them, and while I tried to sympathise, I couldn’t help but feel some satisfaction at seeing them brought low. They had destroyed the world after all.
“A parasite has destroyed one of our satellite bases,” Eunice began without preamble. “Forty-three lives lost and reams of data that will never be recovered.”
Her tone suggested that the loss of the data was far greater a loss than the lives.
“Where?”
She didn’t answer Isaac’s question as she stared unblinking at me.
“That base produced a significant portion of the bioengineered algae that has sustained us since your former lover's act of terr
orism.”
“Terrorism!” Cass slammed her hand palm down on the table with a loud smack. “How dare you!”
“Enough.” I didn’t need to raise my voice and Cass subsided. I could understand her anger for she had lost someone she loved in that destruction of the evil corporation. “We do not need to rehash this.”
“Agreed.” Albert coughed again into his clenched fist before waving away my concerned look. “We are weary from travel and have little time.”
“Why is that?”
“The parasite that destroyed the base is larger than any we have located. It is spreading fast-“
“Feeding on the algae,” Eunice interrupted to add.
“Yes, likely so. It has increased its size significantly and will be a threat to another of our bases soon.”
“We can’t kill it,” Isaac said. “So not sure what you want us to do.”
“Someone has killed one.”
Ah, they knew about the Parasite outside of London. That meant they still had access to satellites at least.
“We don’t know who,” I pointed out. “In fact, our attempt to gather data resulted in the murder of an incredible researcher and her team.”
“Yes, we also were unable to gain a sample.”
I narrowed my eyes at that. She’d just admitted to visiting the site in London and since they still had access to assault rifles and god knows what else, it meant that Sebastian’s people were more formidable than I had imagined.
“What then, can we do?”
The two Genpact scientists exchanged a lingering glance before Albert gave a barely perceptible nod of the head to his companion. She heaved a soft sigh and folded her hands together on the desk before her.
“We need help. Food and fuel, mostly.”
“That can be arranged.” We’d always been willing to provide that for any who needed it, so long as we had it to spare. “Is that all?”
“Well.” Eunice pursed her lips, seemingly taken aback. “I mean, are you not going to demand something in return?”
Killing The Dead | Book 22 | Fury Page 5
