Breeding Ground
Page 22
We had upgraded our weaponry and had one proper flamethrower recovered from Hanstone’s gardening lock-up, a shotgun and one of the semiautomatics left behind by the army, which I’d been elected to carry. John had the flamethrower, and grinned beside me. “Whatever you do, Matt, don’t shoot the dog.”
“Very funny. A little more respect for your elders, young man.”
“Oh, no worries there. I’ve got plenty of respect. You’re the one carrying the fucking machine gun.”
“So I am.” Not that I needed reminding of it as we trudged down the last few yards of the drive. My hands were sweating even though I was keeping my finger well away from the trigger. All I could see happening if I touched it was blowing my own toes away and then shooting everyone around me. The gun should have made me feel safer, but I felt like a walking hazard. Yes, we may have been mentally toughening up, but all those years as a mortgage advisor hadn’t really given me the skills I needed for handing powerful weaponry. And over the previous few weeks while we’d been safe in Hanstone, the struggles we went through getting here had faded slightly.
We came to a halt at the gate, but my stomach continued to churn.
“Are we all ready?” George had the shotgun, still carrying it calmly over one shoulder. It was a last resort weapon, really. If the flamethrower and semi didn’t do the job, then it was unlikely the shotgun was going to be that much help.
We nodded. It was Chris’s job to pull the dog in and he got himself placed closest to where the gates would open and crouched down. John and I took our places standing above him and slightly on either side. George was a few feet back, the gun now pointing forward and straight.
“Matt,” John removed the nozzle cap from his weapon.
“Yes?” Inexpertly releasing the safety, I let one finger rest very lightly on the trigger. My heart pounded in my ears with relief that nothing happened.
“Let’s say the widows don’t attack when the door opens. Shall we still let them fucking have it anyway? They’re close enough to hit, and once the dog’s in we’ve still got a few seconds firing time while the gates shut.”
I mulled it over, while George raised his hand to the camera. Our signal to Daniel that we were ready. Why the hell not? And we sure as fuck needed the shooting practice.
“Sounds good to me.”
Beneath us, Chris groaned. “Oh, that’s great. Just great.”
Buzzing into life, the thick metal squealed as it started to drag its doors apart for the first time in almost a month.
“Here we go.” George called from behind us, and it took all my strength to stop from panicking and squeezing the trigger. I could only imagine all those widows clawing over each other to get to us. Which was ridiculous, I knew. If they were too close then Daniel wouldn’t have opened the gates. Although on the other hand, it took the gates a few seconds to get themselves moving, during which time several widows could have come a whole lot closer. Great. Fucking great.
By the time I’d finished winding myself up into a full-scale terror, the metal was screeching and a small gap of daylight had appeared. Below me, I saw a black nose pushing and snuffling in, as if the dog could sense our urgency to get it inside. One inch became three and then four and then six and within twenty seconds the dog was wriggling its thin torso through the opening, tail wagging in its thick black fur, tongue licking Chris’s face furiously, the weight of its body pushing the thin scientist tumbling backwards to the ground.
But twenty seconds was a long time, and when I looked up I could see that it wasn’t going to be target practice after all. Four widows were closing in on us fast, and further back more were emerging from the hedgerows.
“Oh shit.”
Without hesitation, John surged the flamethrower into life, sending a huge burst of flame out through the gap, his stance solid, no sign left of the hesitant teenager who had fought with me against the widow in the farmhouse. Through the shimmering heat and roar of the jet of fire, I could see that the widows were still coming. God, these fuckers were hard to kill. Shutting my eyes, I braced myself and pulled hard on the trigger, the gun thrusting back into my shoulder as it burst into aggressive life.
“Shut the fucking gate!” The noise of the gun blazed in my ears, but now that my eyes were open I could see that we were at least keeping them back. One was up on its hind legs, still somehow coming forward, barely four feet away. The gate was closing, but too slowly for my liking.
“To the left!”
John pulled his flame round and I finally managed to aim my gunfire in a specific direction—straight at the bitch. The results were pretty satisfying, and as it jolted backwards, the power of the rapid-fire bullets and the flame too much for it to take, I heard it squeal in anger and pain. The grey of the gate finally closing off my vision, I gritted my teeth, suddenly surging with anger, and preferring it to fear I set it free, concentrating my aim on the eyes of another widow creeping in from the right.
It kept on coming and I kept on firing, sure I was damaging it, some of that bank of red bursting and oozing pus-like gel as the bullets hit home, but I seemed to have enraged the widow as much as it had enraged me, and shrieking, the strange sound still coming unnaturally from somewhere inside and outside the mandibles and suckers on its revolting body, it launched lithely at the gate just as the two sheets of metal clanged shut.
Self-preservation instinct forced the muzzle of the gun upwards so that the last few bullets went stray into the air as my brain tried to release the grip of my finger from the trigger.
Finally, the world was silent apart from the sound of our panting breath and the satisfying hisses and shrieks of frustration and pain from the other side of the thick metal.
“Stand back, boys. They’ll be putting the electric back on.”
The rest of the perimeter had stayed live, but this section had been shut down in case one of us made contact while getting the mutt. I wasn’t sure what came first, the end of George’s sentence or the soft crackle of live electricity humming along the gate. The widows must have been coming fast for them to get it going that quickly.
I took a safe step back before turning round. John nodded at me. “Good work, mate.”
“You too.”
“God, that gun is noisy. I thought my eardrums were going to burst.” Whitehead was back on his feet, standing next to the dog, which seemed to have been sitting calmly throughout the small war raging in the ten inches of space that had been required to let him in.
George patted the sheepdog on his head. “Good boy.” The dog looked up and licked his hand. “Now, let’s see who you are, shall we?” Bending forward, he looked at both sides of the silver tag hanging from his leather collar. “There’s no name. That’s odd. There’s just an address.”
“Some people do that.” John wiped a stream of sweat from his face. “So thieves can’t call the dog and make it come. It’s probably microchipped or something.”
George paused and looked at the tag again. “Look at this address, Matt.”
Pointing the gun away from us all, taking no chances, I pushed back the safety with more than a small sense of relief, and peered down to see what had puzzled George and read the address aloud.
“Nine Victoria Road, Chester.” There was a telephone number, too, but I didn’t bother to recite it. “Chester? Isn’t that up near Manchester somewhere?”
George nodded. “How did he get all the way here from Chester? That’s an awfully long way for a dog to travel by itself.”
“Maybe his owners were down this way on holiday or something when all this shit started.” John lit a cigarette and I hoped that the flamethrower wasn’t leaking.
“I don’t think so.” Crouching, Whitehead examined the affectionate dog. “He’s covered in little cuts and bruises, and he’s pretty thin under this coat.” He picked up one paw and looked at the pads. As he pressed into one, the animal let out a small yelp. “Yes, this boy’s been on a long walk, that’s pretty certain.”
“Maybe that’s what we should call him—Chester.” I looked up to see if the others agreed, and John laughed.
“Yeah, I like it. Chester. That’ll do.” He whistled loudly at the dog. “Hey, Chester, come on.”
The dog didn’t even look up at the sound.
“He’s very calm, isn’t he? He didn’t react to the gunfire at all.” Chris followed his comment with a whistle of his own. Again there was no reaction. Whitehead checked the dog’s underbelly. “Oh, yes. Definitely a he.”
I smiled. “Lucky we had a scientist here to find that out for us. Don’t know what we’d have done without you.”
“You’re very funny.”
We turned to walk back to the comms hut and Chester trotted alongside. John whistled again, but the dog’s ears didn’t even twitch. He tried again. Still nothing. He was intriguing me now.
“What’s bugging you, mate?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” He waved his hand slightly, causing a shadow of fingers to drift into the animal’s sight range. The dog immediately lifted its head up, eager and alert.
“Look at that.”
I looked at George and Chris to see if they had any more of a clue to what John was on about than I did. Neither of them seemed entirely sure of what it was that the teenager wanted us to look at. He stopped and we stopped alongside him, as did the dog, who looked obediently up at us.
“Sit.” John looked right at the dog as he spoke. “Sit.”
Chester stayed standing, tail half-wagging, decidedly unsure about why we’d stopped.
“Can we leave the training until later? I don’t think you’re exactly the Barbara Woodhouse type and I really don’t want to carry this gun for any longer than I have to, safety on or not.”
“Don’t you get it, Matt?” John looked at me like I was stupid, and I was beginning to think he might be right. “It’s not that he needs training. He’s obviously fucking trained, he was walking to heel, stopping when we stopped. No, there’s nothing wrong with his obedience.”
“Get to the point, John.” George was obviously equally confused.
The young man sighed and scratched Chester behind the ears. “Well, I’m just trying to figure out what the odds are that amongst our little group of survivors we’d end up with a deaf girl and a deaf dog.”
“What?” Head tilted, Chris spoke for all of us.
“It’s obvious. He doesn’t respond to whistles and commands, and more than that, he wasn’t at all freaked out by the racket from that gun. There’s only one answer. Chester’s deaf as a post.”
Two hours of fussing and laughing later, my shepherd’s pie was eaten, and it was agreed that John was spot on. Chester was a great dog, but he couldn’t hear a thing. Just like Rebecca, he could pick up vibrations, but no actual sound. He was obviously clever, with a slightly mischievous edge that was to be expected in a dog bred for working, and although Chris couldn’t put an age on him, after having a good look at his teeth he reckoned that he wasn’t much more than three or four. I liked him straight away, stupid as that sounds, but at the centre of that coat flecked with brown there was a good dog. And it was good to have something perhaps saner than human company amongst us.
Jane and Oliver had made pretty strong bids to become Chester’s favourite friend, mainly with overzealous hugging and food bribery, but it was Rebecca’s chair that he gravitated towards when left to his own devices, nuzzling his black and white head under her hand so that she had no choice but to pet him. Perhaps he recognised that they were two of a kind, or perhaps he just recognised her kindness. Whatever it was, I figured Chester had made his choice.
“He’s very affectionate, isn’t he?” There was no animosity in Katie’s voice now, and I wondered if she’d even noticed that the dog had studiously avoided her since he’d arrived. There was no growling or barking, he just evaded her touch. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I kept thinking about what Jane had said. She smells so bad. Dogs had great senses and I wondered how much more acute Chester’s remaining ones were to make up for his lack of hearing.
“I’m not surprised. He must be pretty pleased to find some friendly people. We’ve all had our share of shit getting here and it probably wasn’t any different for him, poor thing. I bet he’s had a rough time of it over the past few weeks.”
I was surprised by Dave’s sentimentality, but he had a point. After all, what had happened to the people that lived at 9 Victoria Road, Chester? Nothing good, I should imagine, and then Chester had been left to fend for himself. We’d doused some of his cuts and bruises with witch hazel and iodine, and there was plenty of evidence that his journey hadn’t been any fun. It was a surprise he was still tame and not a nervous wreck.
The door opened and Jeff and Dean came in from patrolling, an awkward atmosphere instantly falling across the table. When we’d come back from the gate with Chester, Nigel had offered to take over on the radios, and Mike had stayed in there keeping him company. The other two had then gone out, changing the rota duty to take the patrol, and Daniel was checking out the petrol levels for the generator.
Dean had mumbled something about how we’d already done our bit for the day, but it was pretty obvious that they felt a loyalty to Nigel and would try to not make a fuss or pay any attention to the dog. I wondered if they realised how ridiculous that was. Maybe Dean did. He kept his eyes down as they took their dinner from the hot plate and sat at a bench a little away from us, occasionally talking quietly with each other. For his part, Chester had not shown any interest in them, either, and I was glad about that. If our group was going to divide into two factions then it seemed that the dog had decided which one he wanted to be part of. And that was ours.
Still the mood quieted down after that, and despite trying to chat to the other men about how the patrol had been, they weren’t forthcoming with anything more than one word answers and we eventually gave up. After coffee I went for a walk with George in the warm heat, talking without ever saying anything important in that way that makes you feel good afterwards. Shooting the breeze, wasn’t that what the Americans called it? Whatever it was, George was good at it, and I felt myself relaxing and feeling content in a way I hadn’t since all this started. Maybe I was starting to appreciate the small things in life. Maybe Chester was bringing us good luck.
Deciding to turn in, when we made it back to the dorm the argument that had been brewing all afternoon was just starting.
“I don’t see why he should sleep in here.” Nigel had his pyjamas on and the ironed crease down the middle reminded me that he hadn’t lost any of his uptight arrogance. However, he had gained something—a little extra confidence. Daniel’s large figure was slouching behind him, his body backing up Nigel’s words. “It’s a dog. This is a bedroom. Dogs sleep outside. Are you all retarded?”
“Calm down, mate. Nothing wrong with a dog sleeping in here.” Dave’s voice sounded far from calm, the rage bubbling beneath the surface like a volcano in the first stages of eruption.
“It’s a dirty animal and I don’t want it in here! His fur stinks.”
“Jesus fucking Christ! What is your fucking problem?” Dave finally exploded. “Why are you such a complete pompous shit? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“You had to make it personal, didn’t you?” Nigel sneered as he sucked air in, getting ready no doubt to start his own tirade against Dave and the rest of us, but George stepped in between them.
“What’s all this shouting about? Chester?” His voice was calm but hard. He stared at Dave, then at the dog lying down with his head between his paws, brown eyes peering upwards, and then brought his own eyes round to rest on Nigel.
“The dog sleeps in here. It’s not a safe world out there, so there is no way we’re putting him outside. For
a start, the weather’s too stormy. He’d be soaked through in minutes. It’s common sense that he sleeps with us.”
Nigel snorted. “That’s not much of a surprise. You were always going to take his side, weren’t you?” His twisting face made him look mean and ugly as he pointed. “You lot haven’t wanted me around since we first met, that much has been obvious! All you’ve done is talk behind my back and laugh at me. And I’m not going to put up with it anymore. Either the dog sleeps outside or we’ll go and use the other dorm. I’ve had enough!”
For a moment there was silence as we all stood, breathing hard, desperately trying to control our own tempers, so much pent up frustration with each other cutting into the air.
It was Katie, bless her, that broke the ice.
“See ya, then.”
The cheeky lilt in her voice almost made me laugh out loud, as did Nigel’s face. Did he really think we’d pick him over the dog? “Yeah, I hope it’s nice over there.” I couldn’t help but add my sentiment to Katie’s.
George, the grown-up amongst us, shrugged. “That’s your choice, Nigel. Obviously, we’d rather you stayed here with us. It would be a shame not to all do our best to get along and work as a team, but if you feel you can’t stay in here with a dog here, then the most sensible thing to do would be to try the other dorm.”
“Screw you.” Nigel muttered, coldly. “Screw all of you. You’ll be sorry. You wait and see.”
“Hey, there’s no need for that kind of talk, we’re all on the same side.”
“Just shut up! Shut up, old man, no one’s listening!” The shrillness of his words hinted at edges of madness, and Nigel must have heard it himself, because he stood still for a moment, hands on his hips, taking in deep breaths.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . . I shouldn’t have . . .” He sniffed. “I’ll just get my things then. I take it that someone will unlock the other building?” The pomposity was edging back into his voice, and I just couldn’t wait for him to be gone. The idea of a Nigel-free sleeping room was very appealing.