It strikes her then, that she’s alone in the house with this man she hardly knows at all. What was it William said he suffered from? Paranoia? Are paranoid people prone to violence? She has no idea.
So far, Holger has acted pretty normal, except for those conversations in his head he tends to have, which makes him fall curiously unaware to what’s going on around him.
But right now, he looks upset, and it makes him restless, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Rubbing his sides with his palm.
“Guess it’s just you and me for a while,” she says to break the silence, trying out a nervous smile at Holger.
He meets her eyes briefly, then looks down at the floor again. “I need to rinse these,” he mutters, gesturing to the tray of vegetables.
“Oh, sure,” she says. “You need me to help?”
“No!” He shakes his head emphatically.
Mille takes a step backwards, surprised at the sudden rise of his voice.
“No, thank you,” he repeats, more calmly this time.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” She turns to go back to the living room, when Holger speaks again.
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen her before.”
“What’s that?” Mille says, turning around.
Holger has already begun working on the vegetables. He looks over his shoulder, but not directly at her. “Where did you live? Before this went down, I mean. Did you live in town?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Did you live with anyone?”
“Uhm, no. I lived alone.”
“Were you born here?”
“I moved here just last year.”
“Oh, that explains it.” Holger concentrates on the vegetables again, turning on the faucet and scrubbing them briskly. The weird interview is apparently over.
Mille broods for a couple of seconds, deciding it might just be Holger’s strange way of small talking. But just as she’s about to leave the kitchen for the second time, he says in a low voice: “She claims she moved here last year.”
Mille turns once again and looks at him.
Still with his back turned, Holger shakes his head. “No, I don’t. But William does. He wouldn’t have brought her here if we couldn’t trust her.”
Mille squeezes her lips together. She suddenly feels bad for Holger. She gets the clear sense that Holger is basically friendly, if a little reclusive, but his illness makes it very hard for him to interact with others.
She feels like saying something to him, anything to make him feel a little less anxious, but she doesn’t know what, and suddenly she catches a movement through the window.
It’s not the zombies, there are no zombies at this particular window at this moment. It’s farther away, too; all the way over where William’s car was parked. Mille frowns. It seems to her she just saw the hatch to the secret exit close. Her first thought is that William or Dan might have returned—but would they be back already? It’s been less than five minutes. Besides, where is William’s car?
She’s not even sure she saw anything. Maybe it was just a bird taking off. Maybe it was pure imagination.
But her pulse has risen slightly.
“Holger?” she asks, stepping closer to the window. “That exit William and Dan just left? Can you come in that way too?”
Holger looks at her, then shakes his head. “No. No one knows that exit, and it’s very difficult to find.”
“Yeah, I know, but what I mean is, if someone did find it, could they open the hatch? Is it possible to open it from outside?”
Holger considers for a moment. “I guess so, in theory.”
“So there’s no lock on the inside?”
“No. Why would there? It’s hidden.”
A noise from out in the hallway.
“What was that?” she asks.
Holger looks at her. “What was what?”
“Didn’t you hear that?”
He shakes his head and keeps rinsing the vegetables.
Mille bites her thumb—a habit she developed when she was very young and hasn’t been able to shake—and looks at the open doorway.
Did I just imagine that noise? I must have. The situation is eerie, that’s why I’m so jumpy.
Then the woman steps into view, and Mille lets out a scream.
She’s tall and wiry and surprisingly pale considering the sunny weather these last weeks. Her skin is freckly and her hair is reddish and curly. She’s dressed in cut-off shorts and a blue tank top clutching her ribs and pointy breasts. Around her neck is a heavy necklace full of weird objects like feathers, crystals and what looks like tiny bones. Her thin fingers are full of rings. Her eyes are piercingly blue and staring right at Mille.
Holger turns towards Mille with a look of alarm. “What? What is it? What’s wrong? Why are you screaming like that?”
Mille can’t answer, she can only stare right back at the woman in the doorway.
“It’s okay,” the woman says, raising one slender hand. Her voice is surprisingly deep. “No need to be scared.”
Holger spins around, almost knocking the tray to the floor, and gapes at the woman. “How … how did you get in here?”
“Sorry for intruding like this, Holger,” the woman says, not moving. “You remember me, right? I’m Birgit. I live down the road.” She talks very measured and calmly.
“What are you doing here?” Holger demands. “How did you get in?”
“We used the underground tunnel,” the woman tells him. “Like I said, we’re sorry for barging in, but we had no choice.”
“‘We’?” Mille says, finally finding her own voice again. “Who else is here?”
The woman turns her head and looks at her for a moment. Then she steps aside slightly. “This is my son.”
Nothing happens for a few seconds. Then, a tall, chubby teenage boy peeks out from the doorway where he was hiding.
“Hello,” he says, his cracking voice a stark contrast to his mother’s. In fact, he sounds just as insecure as he looks, like a little boy on his first day of school. “My name is Dennis,” he tells Mille, smiling shyly. “Nice to meet you. Hi, Holger.”
“You … you can’t be here,” Holger says, shaking his head. “You’re trespassing. You’ll have to leave—right now! Leave!”
He steps forwards, holding out his hands in a pushing-away motion, like he’s hoping to shove them back without touching them. In his right hand he’s holding the peeler.
Dennis takes a step back, but the woman stays put, looking at Holger with fiery eyes. “Don’t do anything stupid now, Holger. We don’t want any violence.”
Holger stops abruptly, gasping, and as he steps back, Mille can see why.
In the woman’s hand is a knife. Or rather, it looks more like an old-fashioned dagger, like something out of Game of Thrones, bronze colored and decorated hilt. The woman doesn’t do anything with the knife—it just hangs there casually from her hand. But Mille gets the clear feeling she knows exactly how to use it—and that she wouldn’t hesitate to do so.
“Like I said, we had no choice,” the woman goes on, still looking at Holger, still talking very calmly. “The dead came to our house and drove us out. We managed to get to the car, but we crashed a mile from here. We had to come here; we had nowhere else to go. If we hadn’t, we would have been surely dead by now.”
She gestures towards the windows. Mille doesn’t need to look to know what she means. Her heart is pounding away in her throat, as she tries hard to discern whether their uninvited guests have clean intentions or not. The situation feels like it could go either way.
“I knew you wouldn’t let us in if we had simply knocked,” the woman goes on, still addressing Holger with her calm, commanding voice. “And I don’t blame you. I probably wouldn’t have done so myself. But when we saw those two boys come up from that tunnel, I knew it was our last chance to get to safety. So, we took it.”
Holger keeps shaking his head while the woman talks,
his eyes darting from the floor to the window to the dagger in the woman’s hand. “You can’t be here,” he mutters. “You can’t, we’re too many now. With Dan’s parents coming, we will be eight people. Eight people is way too many. We won’t have food for more than a few months.”
“I’m sure we can make it work,” the woman says. “Perhaps we won’t even have to stay here for very long. We might leave again if it becomes safe to do so.”
This last statement seems to calm Holger down a little. He stops stepping and looks sideways at the woman, his lips moving. “You … you will leave again as soon as you can?”
The woman holds out her hand—the one not holding the dagger. “We don’t want to be here any more than you want us here. But the situation is quite extraordinary. You can at least grant us refuge till tomorrow, can’t you, Holger?”
Mille can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not, but the woman moves her dagger-hand ever so slightly as she talks; only just enough for Holger to notice. It might be a coincidence, but Mille thinks not.
Holger, still looking on the fence, begins shaking his head again.
The woman’s expression changes ever so slightly. Mille senses her patience running out. And she reacts instinctively.
“I think it’s okay, Holger,” she says, stepping towards him. “I think there’ll be no harm in them staying the night here. I’m sure we can spare a couple of meals, right?”
Holger glances at her, clearly uncomfortable with her being so close, but Mille stays put.
“I … I should call William,” Holger murmurs, going to his pocket.
“I’m sure William will agree this is the right thing to do,” Mille says, putting her hand on Holger’s arm, so he doesn’t take out his phone. “Besides, he’ll be back any minute, so we can ask him.”
For a moment, no one says anything.
The woman, her son and Mille all await Holger’s decision.
Mille tries to catch his eye, but Holger is staring at the floor again, conversing with himself internally. She tries to send him a mental message. Tries to warn him that he only has one right call to make here, if he doesn’t want things to escalate. Because the woman in the doorway obviously means business, and Mille feels certain she won’t take no for an answer. In fact, she strikes Mille as someone willing to do just about anything to ensure her own—and her son’s—survival.
Then, Holger darts a glance at the woman, and asks: “Just for tomorrow?”
A trace of a smile appears at the corner of the woman’s thin lips. “Just for tomorrow. Then we’ll see.”
Holger chews his tongue, then nods. “All right. All right, we can be eight people until tomorrow. That won’t be too big of a problem. We can manage that. But just for tomorrow.”
Mille draws a discrete sigh of relief, noticing the woman sliding the dagger into her belt.
Holger turns to the sink, muttering something to himself about getting on with work, then he continues scrubbing the vegetables.
“Well,” Mille says, realizing Holger isn’t going to play host. She tries to smile at the newcomers. “Is there anything you need? Something to eat or drink?”
The woman smiles back at her. “I could really use a glass of water. How about you, Dennis?”
SIXTEEN
William has barely gotten the car into fourth, before Dan leans forward and exclaims: “There! I see them!”
William sees them too. That is, he sees the rear end of a blue station wagon protruding from the roadside ditch and a flock of zombies crowding it, shoving and stumbling over each other to get close to the potential meal.
“That’s your parents’ car?” he asks, letting off the gas.
“No,” Dan says, shaking his head. “But it’s got to be them.” Dan looks at him. “Why are you slowing down? Hurry up!”
“We need a game plan,” William says. “We can’t just rush over there.”
“Just drive close enough that they’ll come for us, then back up and lure them away from the car, so my mom and dad can get out.”
William bites his lip. “I’m not sure that’ll work. I don’t think we can get close enough.”
“Well, try it anyway!”
William drives closer to the crashed car. None of the zombies react, even as they come to a halt right next to the station wagon. Dan moves around in his seat, stretching his neck in an effort to see his parents.
“There’s my dad!” he exclaims and waves frantically. “Dad! We’re here! We’ll get them away now!”
William sees a man in the passenger side of the car, leaning against the inside of the door so as to keep out of reach of the zombie girl standing by the driver side window. She appears to have gotten the window a little open and managed to squeeze both arms in, pushing eagerly to reach Dan’s father. The glass of the window is cracked and looks like it might give way any second.
In the backseat is a girl somewhere between Dan and William’s age, hugging a kid tightly and looking out at them with big, scared eyes. They look Arabic, and William recalls the name he heard on the phone. Something with a Middle Eastern ring to it. He can’t see Dan’s mother anywhere.
Ozzy growls from the backseat, eyeing the zombies menacingly.
“Settle down, boy,” William tells him, surprised at how quickly Ozzy has caught on about the undead posing a threat.
Dan rolls down his window and leans out, flailing both arms. “Hey! Hey, you! Look! I’m right here!”
None of the zombies pay any notice to him, they just keep working the station wagon, groping and biting at the windows. One of the closest briefly turns its head their way, but then apparently decides the station wagon is the better bet, turning towards it again.
“It’s no use,” William says. “The distance is too big. We would have to drive into the ditch to get their attention.”
Dan runs his hand through his hair. “Okay. I’ll get out, then. I’ll lure them away.”
“You sure about that? I mean, can you run with your bad ankle?”
“It’s better now. And there’s no other way.”
“I could go out and sick Ozzy at them. He already did it once, and he can’t get infected. Plus, they don’t care about dogs.”
“But you have to get out, too,” Dan points out, “and who would drive the car, then?”
William eyes him, as Dan—not waiting for an answer—resolutely unbuckles and opens his door, and he can’t help but admire the kid. When he first picked him up in town yesterday, he took him for a bit of a wuss. But after learning what Dan had been through, William’s respect is growing. And now, at the thought of his family being in danger, Dan was acting with more courage than William himself would probably be able to muster.
Dan steps out of the car, then looks back in at William. “You be ready to help them over as soon as I get the zombies away from the car, okay?”
“Right. Be careful, man.”
“I will.”
Dan closes the door, and William sees him take a deep breath before he walks towards the crashed car and the zombie herd.
Ozzy growls again, staring across William’s shoulder.
“I know, buddy,” he whispers, not taking his eyes off Dan. “This is a bad fucking idea …”
SEVENTEEN
Mille shows Birgit and Dennis into the living room, bringing them each a glass of water.
“Try and find someplace to sit down,” she offers, gazing around the over-stuffed living room. “I know it’s not exactly easy.”
“Thank you,” the woman says, taking a seat in the chair by the window. Even sitting down, she seems taller than Mille, with her straight posture and her chin lifted slightly.
Dennis squeezes down into the couch at the spot where Mille was sitting earlier, meditating. He takes a few big gulps of water, then begins studying all the stuff Holger has stored up.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” the woman asks, holding out her hand.
Mille hesitates for just a second, then takes i
t. The woman’s grip is firm and cool.
“Mille,” she says.
“Nice to meet you, Mille. So, how did you end up here?” Her tone is curiously nonchalant, like they had coincidentally met at the bus stop.
“I … well, I was supposed to go on a trip with my class, and we had just left town when the bus was attacked.”
The woman raises her thin eyebrows. “Oh, you were one of the poor kids on the bus?”
“Yes. I think I might have been the only one who made it.”
“Awful,” the woman says, frowning. “I’m so sorry to hear that. You must be mourning the loss of all your friends deeply.”
“Well, yes,” Mille says, a little befuddled by the way the woman talks. Who uses the word ‘mourning’? She gets the sense the woman is a lot older than her age—which can’t be much more than forty.
“And you probably saw most of them die, didn’t you?” the woman goes on, still frowning. “They said on the news it had been quite bloody. I believe they used the term ‘massacre.’” The woman shakes her head slowly. “I can’t even begin to imagine how traumatic that must have been for you.”
The empathy in the woman’s voice is almost genuine—almost. Yet Mille gets the sense she could really care less about the bloodbath Mille had witnessed.
“Yes, it … it was awful,” Mille says.
“So, you sought refuge here?”
There it is again. That old-fashioned way of talking.
“Not exactly. I went back to town. I tried to … to help one of my classmates who had been bitten. We tried to get him to the hospital in time, but … it was too late.”
“Oh, dear. Well, it was brave of you to try and help.”
“Then I …” Mille decides to skip the part where she fainted. “I was picked up by William and Dan. They brought me here.”
“That’s the two boys who left just before we came?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know them?”
“No. They just picked me up because they wanted to help.”
The woman smiles. “It’s true what they say; crises like these really do bring out the best in people.”
Dead Meat (Book 4): Dead Meat [Day 4] Page 10
