by Ryan Casey
“We stay put. Scott’s right.”
I looked up.
Jenny was speaking.
“But Jenny—”
“You’re right that we should be afraid. We should be concerned. Our guards should be up. But that’s how it should be anyway. We should never have let our guards slip. If anything, we should use this as a reminder. Of what we’ve got. And of how much we have to lose.”
She looked around at the group. I knew what she was referring to—we had each other to lose.
“We stay here. Even if it’s just for now, we stay here. We don’t rush away from this place. We make a plan B, starting tomorrow. A backup, in case we ever do need to get away. But for now, there’s a good bottle of wine in front of us, and we’re all very tired. We finish the wine, and we sleep. Then we go again tomorrow. Okay?”
I saw the resigned look on Hannah’s face, and the sidewards glance Remy gave me.
“Okay,” Jenny said, repeating her question.
She looked me in the eye, lifted her glass, and before she took a sip, she smiled.
I let the relief of her bailing me out fill my body. Then I lifted my own glass, smiled back, and took a drink.
I was relieved. Of course I was relieved.
But deep in the back of my mind, I could hear a voice taunting me.
You’ve made the wrong decision.
You’ve sentenced everyone to death.
And I wouldn’t stop hearing that voice for the rest of the long, rainy night…
Chapter Ten
Mike Crayford stared out at the suburban town in the light of the stars and wondered just how things were going to play out, especially now he’d planted his seed of authority into the minds of yet another group.
It was cold, and he could see his breath frosting up in the light of the moon and stars. He was on the side of a hill, a tent set up in the open. Camping in the open had both its advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, you could see what was coming for you. On the other, they could see you too.
Fortunately for Mike and his people, he was armed with a gun, something that the vast majority of ordinary people did not have. A few of his other people back at camp were armed, too. They’d stumbled upon a farmhouse, which was run by some whack job conspiracy theorist. He’d had weapons and all sorts. Even a working vehicle.
Mike had been sure that he wasn’t left with many guns when he’d finished with the guy, that was for sure.
And he was not afraid to use that gun.
He listened to the total silence, other than the breeze brushing against the trees, the snoring of Will and Kev inside the tent. They were good, loyal people, but they weren’t exactly the right-hand men he’d had in mind when he was growing up. His mum always told him he could command an army someday if he wanted. An army with the same dreams and desires as him.
Mike found that a strange thing for his dad to say, mostly because he wasn’t sure if anyone had the same dreams and desires as him…
He licked his lips and stared further down the hill, and at that perfect slice of suburbia. He’d run into a lot of people in the months since the electricity collapsed. He’d killed a lot of people. So many that, truthfully, he couldn’t remember exactly how many.
Another one would be no problem to him. Not really.
But there was something about those people down in suburbia. The way they’d looked at him and stood up to him, as he’d stood over the dead and dying bodies of his latest kills.
They hadn’t looked afraid of him.
And Mike didn’t like that.
He wasn’t used to anyone not being afraid of him.
Perhaps they could come in handy back home…
He felt a smile creep across the corners of his face as he remembered the time he’d made his younger brother, Patrick, piss himself. He’d locked him inside a wardrobe, barred it up. At first, Patrick laughed. He saw the funny side. Boys will be boys, and all that.
Then he started to get frustrated, banging hard against the door, as Mike kept his silence.
Then he went quiet. And then he started to cry.
Mike smiled as his younger idiot brother cried. He had to be careful not to laugh too loud because he didn’t want him to know that he was there.
He waited, right outside that locked wardrobe, right through the night. The sun set, Dad didn’t come home—as usual—and then the sun rose again.
The cycle continued. Banging. Screaming. Crying. Silence.
It went on right until that evening, when Mike smelled something strong coming from the wardrobe. Something familiar.
Right on cue, he’d opened the wardrobe up and found his tear-soaked, piss-stinking little brother. He’d expected Patrick to fight back against him, to scold him for what he’d done, like he often did.
But Patrick had been… well. He’d been broken. He never was the same, not after that.
Mike showed a little mercy, though. He was originally planning on telling their carer that Patrick had pissed in the wardrobe. But he’d cleaned it up, spared Patrick a beating.
Patrick had been through enough pain.
At least for one day.
Mike heard footsteps. He looked around and saw Barry walking towards him. Barry was from another tent. He was a fat bastard with a face that Mike would love to punch, but again, he was loyal. He believed in Mike’s philosophy.
Take.
Take everything.
Show no mercy.
These are the glory days.
“What’re we going to do about the nice little suburban group, hmm?”
Mike’s heart began to pump, as he sat there in the silence. He looked down at suburbia, thinking of all the things he could do, all the ways he could make them pay.
For what?
For not being afraid of him.
Not being afraid of him was a big mistake.
“I mean, they looked kitted out. We didn’t see any guns. I reckon they were bluffing.”
“I hope they weren’t,” Mike said.
Barry frowned. “What?”
“If they weren’t bluffing, then that means they have more weapons for us to take back to camp with us. Doesn’t it?”
He looked at Barry, and he smiled.
Barry shot an uncertain smile back at him. “So when are we going to attack?”
Mike stood. He looked back at the tents. There were five of them in total. Each housed three people. Fifteen people, himself included, all armed with some form of weapon, and all on the same wavelength.
Then, he looked back at the suburban slice of perfection.
“We make them feel safe again. We wait until they’ve as good as forgotten about us.”
“And then?”
Mike licked his lips and thought about the man who’d looked up at him, not a glimmer of fear in his eyes.
Then he looked back at Barry. “And then we go down there, take what’s theirs. And if they’re lucky… we take them back to our real home.”
He glanced over that suburban perfection once again.
“And if not?” Barry asked.
A pause. A moment of contemplation.
Then: “If not, we kill them. We kill them all.”
Chapter Eleven
Five days passed and talk of the rival group had pretty much disappeared.
The weather was taking a real turn—finally. I was drenched, regardless of the waterproof North Face coat I’d been wearing. Problem with waterproof coats was the way they dripped down onto your jeans, making you look—and feel—like you’d pissed yourself.
Naturally, I tried not to bring too much attention to myself, as I walked towards the farm with Hannah and Remy.
The farm we were heading to was run by a friendly couple called Jill and Ian. Honestly, I couldn’t get over their warm and welcoming nature. They were always happy to give us milk and meat. It was like having our own takeaway collection service—the nearest thing we could hope for in a world like the one in which we were living. Dairy
. Meat. All of it, just a… well. A several mile trek away.
But we couldn’t complain. Not a lot of people were fortunate in the way that we were.
“Maybe we could move to the farm,” Hannah said, as she walked beside me. “I mean, there’s plenty of room there.”
“It’s not fair on Jill or Ian,” I said.
Hannah sighed. “Haven’t you got the memo, Scott? This world isn’t fair, full stop.”
“The longer Jill and Ian keep themselves isolated from the rest of the world, the better. There’s a lot of bad people out there. People who would love to take away what they have.”
“People like us?” Remy said.
I felt my stomach sink. I turned and faced Remy. “No. Not people like us. Opportunists. Looters.”
“And are we not opportunists? Are we not looters?”
I shook my head and continued my walk. “We are good people. Honest people.”
“Sure,” Hannah said, clearly sensing the shift in the mood where Remy was concerned. “You keep telling yourself that.”
We arrived at the farm. Jill was waiting for us, a smile across her big face, and a bag of chicken meat in one hand and eggs in the other.
“We owe you so much,” I said, taking the bag from her.
Jill shook her head. “Don’t be daft. More than happy to help.”
“How’s Ian?”
“Oh, he’s okay. He hurt his foot. He’s taking a few days down. But with the weather turning, there’s no rest for the wicked. Me being the wicked in this case!”
“You’re anything but wicked,” I said.
“Stay safe,” Jill said, as she walked away. “I’ll see you again next week.”
“You will,” I said. But every time we said our goodbyes, I felt a lump in my throat. It was a lump of knowledge, a lump of inevitability, that one day, we were going to go back there and Jill and Ian weren’t going to be home. They would have nothing for us.
They would be dead.
But for now, we walked away. I held on to the bag of chicken meat, wafting away flies as they tried to make for the prize.
When I glanced up as we trudged through the muddy earth, I saw Hannah looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
She looked away. “Nothing.”
“No, really. We’re out here. We’ve all the time in the world. We can talk. What?”
She sighed, then shook her head. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
“Try me.”
“I don’t think you’ll survive.”
I felt like I’d been shot. I frowned. “What?”
“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
“No. You can’t just say that and then leave it. You don’t think I’ll survive. What is that supposed to mean?”
Hannah brushed back her hair, which was rain soaked, and looked me in the eye with those bright blue eyes of her own. “Other than Jill and Ian, you don’t trust anyone.”
“And I’m wise not to.”
“You can’t run away from the outside world forever.”
“I’ve been doing okay so far.”
“Listen to yourself, Scott. I understand it’s difficult. Really, I do. But the life we’re living… it’s a fantasy. It’s a lie. Take our home, for instance.”
“Our home. The place you said wasn’t safe.”
“How do you know it’s safe?”
“It’s been five days. Those idiots aren’t coming back.”
“And you know that for certain?”
“Look,” I said, raising my voice. “I’m doing what I can to keep us all alive. Sometimes the decisions I make aren’t easy. Sometimes I do things I don’t enjoy. We all do. But that’s the world we live in now. That’s who we are.”
Hannah opened her mouth like she was about to say something else.
Then, she sighed and smiled.
“I just hope you realise what road you’re going down and dragging us all on down before it’s too late.”
She walked on, catching Remy up. And for a moment, as I stood there in the woods, I felt alone. Totally alone.
At least until I saw the movement in the trees.
Up ahead.
Hannah stopped.
Remy stopped.
My heart stopped.
“Well well,” the man said, two people by his side. “Fancy seeing you again.”
He lifted his gun, and as I began to recognise his voice, I saw his smile.
The man from the rival group who’d killed the Wilson family.
“I don’t believe I had a chance to properly introduce myself,” he said. “I’m Mike. And you are dead if you don’t cooperate.”
Chapter Twelve
I looked ahead at the three people standing in front of us, led by the man who called himself Mike, and I knew we were in deep, deep shit.
The clouds had greyed over the sky as the afternoon powered on. All I could think about was Jenny, Haz, Sue, Lionel and the kids, who were still back home. Something could happen to us and they’d have no idea; they’d just have to live with the knowledge that for some reason, we’d left them. We hadn’t been able to protect them.
Because this didn’t look like a situation we were going to be getting out of anytime soon. That was something I had to look in the eye and face.
“Not so talkative now, are you?” Mike asked. He stood there, gun in hand, pointing it from Hannah, to me, to Remy. Behind him, in front of a thicker section of trees, there were two other men. I couldn’t be totally certain who they were, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out they must be the people who had been with him when he’d killed the Wilson family. “Not so full of threats now you’re cornered, are you?”
“Please,” Hannah said.
Mike turned. He looked right at Hannah. He walked towards her, gun still raised. “What did you just say?”
Tears rolled down Hannah’s cheeks and just seeing that made me feel so, so guilty. Because it was my call to stay put at the place we were heading to—the place we called home. It was my decision to play down our fears of the rival group, insistent that they weren’t going to come back.
But demons always came back. That was something I realised now, and something I was going to have to learn more deeply if I wanted to survive.
You won’t survive.
I had to hope Hannah was wrong. I couldn’t imagine the consequences if she wasn’t.
“I told you there’s a simple way this can end,” Mike said, as he stood in the middle of the rain-drenched woods, his boots covered in mud as it powered down heavier from above. “You cooperate with us. If you do, we might just let you live.”
“There’s more than enough stuff for all of us,” I said.
Mike turned his attention to me. So too did the men behind him.
“What did you just say?”
Fear took hold of me. I tried to calm myself, ready myself to be assertive and say what I had to say, do what I had to do. “I—I said there’s more than enough stuff here for all of us. We don’t have to fight. You can go on your way, and we can go on ours.”
Silence followed. And in that silence, broken only by birdsong and the nervous inhalations of my people, I thought maybe I’d got through to Mike. Maybe I’d won him over to my ways, convinced him that there was an amicable, peaceful resolution to this whole situation.
And then Mike and his people started laughing.
I swallowed a lump in my throat as the three men laughed. I wanted to say something, to intervene, to act in some way, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t see the way forward.
“Oh,” Mike said, regaining his composure. “Oh it’s nice of you to make such a generous offer to us. I mean, a few pieces of chicken?”
He snatched the bag from Hannah and poured it out all over the ground. Mud coated the fillets.
“And some eggs?”
He smashed them all, one by one, and I felt the pain of defeat setting in.
“Nah. We don’t give a shit about eg
gs or chicken. Where we come from, we’ve got all bases covered.”
He lifted the gun then and pointed it at me.
“What we want you to cooperate about is your surrender.”
I narrowed my eyes. I looked over at Remy, who looked as baffled as I did. “Our surrender?”
“You might think you can fight this, but you can’t. Really, you can’t. Now, you’re strong people. You’re resourceful people. You’re the kind of people we like to keep around. So if you come with us, wilfully, then we’re all gonna end up happy campers.”
“And if we don’t?” I said.
Mike’s smile twitched. “If you don’t, then I’m afraid I’ll just have to go searching for some other resourceful people. Like whoever’s provided you with this meat and eggs here.”
The thought of Jill and Ian, so friendly, so welcoming, having to deal with a monster like this made my skin crawl. It crawled to the point where it felt like giving in was the only option.
But I didn’t want to give in.
I wasn’t going to.
“So make your choice,” Mike said. “Come with us, right now. Or run. And good luck to you if you do run. You’ll need—”
The next split second happened so fast.
I punched the gun from Mike’s hand.
It fell to the ground.
I thought about grabbing it. Putting a bullet through him, through his people.
But in the end, with the advantage of time on our side, there was only one thing we could do.
“Run!”
We ran through the trees and away from Mike and his people. Behind, I could hear footsteps and shouting. I didn’t want to look back, because the last thing I wanted to see was a bullet coming towards me.
“Keep going!” I called. Remy and Hannah were keeping pace with me. I was getting a stitch, and I was afraid of running too far in case I got disoriented and lost.
But the most important thing was getting back home.
Warning the others.
