by Ryan Casey
Hayden swallowed a lump in his dry throat as he stood near the door to the second hangar, the one they used as a living quarters now. Matt and Karen were opposite him, pottering about washing clothes in icy cold water, the smell of sweat strong in the air. Matt was in his forties or fifties, with grey hair that looked slicked back even in times of crisis. He was dressed in a white shirt and black trousers like he’d just stepped out of a business meeting and into the end of the world. His wife, Karen, had shoulder length dark hair and looked like she’d been a little on the skinny side even before the world went tits up. She was constantly smiling though. End of the world and a smile was always etched on her face. Hayden admired that. But what he didn’t admire was the way they let their kid run amok.
“I’m not saying kids can’t be kids,” Hayden said, keeping as cool as possible while Matt and Karen continued to potter around. “I’m just saying we have to be more … more careful. The world we live in right now, it’s different to—to how it used to be.”
“And you think we don’t know that?” Matt said. There was never venom in his voice or malice in his grey-green eyes, but Hayden could sense the frustration bubbling underneath. Like banter gone awry.
Another deep breath of the cold but stuffy air. “Not accusing you of anything. I just—”
“Tim’s always been hard work,” Karen said, wiping her damp hands on her grey jogging bottoms. “Right from being a baby. Used to moan all through the night. Tried to stop it but to be honest, some kids are just wired up that way. He’s a decent kid at heart though.”
“And I don’t doubt that,” Hayden said. He wasn’t one for conflict, but he could feel the adrenaline surging through his body and prompting him to fight. “He seems a good kid. But he can’t go wandering—”
“You don’t have kids, do you?” Matt asked.
Hayden closed his mouth. Shook his head.
“Or siblings? You don’t have any younger … Oh. Sorry. I really didn’t …”
The words cut into Hayden’s body and, at that point, he couldn’t help himself.
“I just dragged your boy down from the frigging wall,” Hayden said, arms shaking and palms sweating. “I just pulled him down from the wall we’ve put sweat and blood into building this last ten days. So excuse me if I’m a bit agitated or if what I’m saying goes against your idea of raising a kid, but I’m just being careful, that’s all. Now can you please just keep a closer frigging eye on your son?”
Hayden could tell from the silence that followed his outburst that maybe, just maybe, he’d crossed a little too far over the line. Matt stared at him with puzzled eyes. Karen’s smile dropped. They both looked at him like they were seeing him for the first time, seeing the real Hayden with all his walls and defences broken down, looking inside his soul.
Hayden tensed his fists and looked at the tiled floor in front of him. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“No,” Matt said, an assertiveness to his voice that Hayden wasn’t used to hearing. He rubbed his hands together and walked towards Hayden. “I understand. You have a problem and you’ve aired it. I appreciate your honesty. We appreciate your honesty.”
Hayden couldn’t help but feel shitty at how damned reasonable Matt was being about his outburst. He struggled to focus on Matt’s eyes so he kept the most of his focus on the brown shoes on Matt’s feet. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like—”
Matt placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. The dampness from his palms spread through his coat. It was a gesture that forced Hayden to lift his head, to look Matt right in his eyes. Hayden could see his eyes were bloodshot. He was half-smiling. A genuine smile of appreciation. Respect. “You’re looking out for our boy. You’re stressed. We’re all stressed. Sorry we couldn’t keep him more … more under control. But we appreciate what you do, Hayden.”
“We really do,” Karen said. But her smile was too wide, too false to take seriously. Hayden knew it, Matt knew it, and Hayden knew that Matt knew he knew it and vice versa.
Okay, cutting through the complicated way of putting it: Karen could be a bit of a bitch where other people were concerned.
“I’ll have a word with Tim when we eat later. Hear Martha’s cooking up a delicious—”
“Wait,” Hayden said, lifting a hand. “Let me guess. Baxter’s Chicken Soup?”
Matt patted Hayden’s shoulder. His half-smile widened into a full one, and it was as if the confrontation that occurred just moments ago had faded into distant memory. “Tomato soup and ready-packed toast, fresh from the dusty, damp cellar. Featuring cobwebs and rat shit.”
“Sounds delicious,” Hayden said, his stomach turning in the complete opposite reaction to hunger.
Matt chuckled and returned to his wife’s side, grabbing a soaked shirt from the icy cold water basin and rinsing it out. Later, they’d start a fire and dry out the clothes over it. Laundry, cooking—the Riversford group were a well-oiled machine. They’d made serious progress in the last ten days. There was still something dreamlike about it all, though. Like they were just playing house and someone was going to appear out of thin air and rescue them from this eternal struggle. The fantasy.
There was the knowledge, too. The knowledge that this place wouldn’t last forever simply because it couldn’t last forever. No place lasted forever. Something would happen. Something would lead the group astray like they were destined to be led for the rest of their aimless lives. And it was strange, for Hayden, because he realised now just how similar his life was before the rise of the undead to now. Life really was just an endless loop of waking and drinking and eating and smoking and video-gaming and napping and takeaway-ing and …
On and on and on, without an end goal, without direction.
And sure, he didn’t have video games anymore, but in terms of profession he was as much a layabout as he used to be.
But the beauty of his old life was that he could live without direction through choice. He had the option to live some other way, but he chose a life of booze and weed.
Now he had no choice but to sit around and do fuck all, he wanted something else. He wanted to see the world. He wanted to stand at the top of the Rockefeller building and look out over Central Park on a gorgeous, blue-skied day like he’d seen in so many movies. He wanted to step inside the Coliseum in Rome and feel the adrenaline kick of a million spectators before him.
He wanted to live.
Instead, he was being forced to survive.
“I should head off, anyway,” Hayden said. “See you for food in …” He started to say “in an hour,” but he knew how futile the suggestion of time was now. Sure, the clocks kept on ticking and the days kept on turning. But eventually the batteries would stop. Calendars would rot, just like bodies. Time would go on, but human perception of it wouldn’t.
“See you for food when we smell it,” Matt said, a chuckle in his voice.
Hayden nodded. “When we smell it.”
He turned away from Matt and Karen and stepped out of the hangar.
When he saw Sarah standing in front of him, he knew from the whitewashed look on her face that something was wrong.
He knew from the glassiness of her bright blue eyes that something terrible had happened.
“What—”
“You need to see this, Hayden,” Sarah said, her voice shaky and quivery. “You—you need to see this.”
It was only then that he saw the blood on her hands.
Four
In the three weeks since the start of the outbreak, Hayden McCall had seen a lot of horrifying things.
But few things unsettled him more than what he saw in the yard outside the hangar.
The first thing he saw was Amy, Martha and Newbie’s daughter. At first, Hayden thought she was smiling or laughing like she always seemed to be.
But when he looked closer, he saw the tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bloodshot eyes. Snot dripping from the end of her nose like a leaky tap.
There was a complete stillness to
the grounds of Riversford as Sarah led Hayden outside. A stillness, a complete silence but for the cawing of birds, the scraping of tree branches in the breeze, and the shakiness of Sarah’s breaths. The moment Hayden saw the blood on her hands, he knew something was wrong. He knew some kind of accident had happened.
That accident lay on the concrete six metres away from him.
Tim’s body was completely rigid. In fact, it was so rigid that he looked like he was playing a game of musical statues. His right arm was pointing up into the air, his fingers twisted like he was reaching out for something way beyond his grasp. His eyes were wide open—really wide, wider than any eyes Hayden had ever seen. And as Hayden stepped closer, as Sarah’s shaky breaths became sniffs and Amy’s sobs grew louder, Hayden noticed the paleness of Tim’s skin. His cheeks were a pasty yellow colour, but thick blue bruises under his eyes contrasted it like the difference between day and night.
And then there was the blood. The blood that had streamed out of his nose, his ears, his mouth. His black hair was caked with sweat and grease. His white v-neck T-shirt was covered in so much blood that it looked like Tim must’ve had some kind of accident with paint.
Hayden stepped over him. His mouth was dry and tasteless. He stared down at Tim’s body and a lump welled up in his throat. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t understand. All he could think of, his heartbeat pumping gradually faster, was how this had to be one of Tim’s infuriating little pranks. He’d been alive. Less than an hour ago, Hayden had climbed up the wall of debris and dragged him down. He’d had a stern word with him, then gone inside and spoken to his parents.
And now he was …
“Is he—is he dead?” Amy spluttered, tears dripping onto the dusty ground beneath.
Hayden crouched down beside Tim. Tim’s body was so cold that Hayden didn’t even have to touch it to know there wasn’t an ounce of life left inside. But he reached for Tim’s wrist, and then for his neck. He held his hand there in hope that this was all just some kind of messed up joke; all some kind of nightmare that he was going to wake up from soon, like the nightmare he had about his dead family biting one another and laughing and gasping and …
“He’s gone,” Hayden said.
He stood up. Wiped his eyes with his sleeve and looked back down at Tim. He couldn’t shift his eyes from him. He couldn’t understand. Something had happened. Some kind of accident had to have happened.
“Oh no no no,” Amy said, crying more freely now. Her sobbing turned to wailing, and soon Gary and Martha emerged from their respective hangars and came running over to see what the hell was wrong.
“Shit!” Gary said, stumbling when he saw Tim’s body lying on the ground. He backed away a little, and the colour seeped from his cheeks. “What’s … what’s …”
“Amy?” Martha said, running up to her daughter and wrapping her arms around her. She was a curvy woman who looked older than the forties she was in. Her hair was dark and frizzy, and she always wore a navy blue coat and khaki jeans that looked a couple of sizes too skinny for her. “What’s happened?” she asked, clutching the back of her daughter’s head and staring wide-eyed at Tim’s body. “What … Is he …”
“I don’t know what happened,” Sarah said. Her speech was slurred, distant, like she couldn’t catch up with her railroad of thoughts. “I—I just came out here. Saw him on the ground next—next to Amy.”
“What happened, Amy?” Martha asked, pushing her daughter away and rubbing up and down her arms. “Tell your mum. What happened?”
Amy sobbed some more. “He—he just fell. We—we were playing and he just fell.”
She descended into more tears.
Hayden didn’t like the way Amy said that Tim “just fell.” He was a kid, only nine or ten years old. And sure, they didn’t exactly have the luxury of three nutritious meals a day here, but he was a healthy kid who did a lot of running about.
Hayden found his gaze drifting to the blood that had drooled out of Tim’s eyes, nose, ears, mouth. But it was Tim’s eyes that he found himself settling on. That terrified look in his eyes, and the way he was holding his hand into the air as if to grab something.
Or push something away.
“Some kind of—of seizure or somethin’?” Gary asked.
Hayden just shook his head. He couldn’t suggest anything because he didn’t know what had happened. Just that one second, Tim was alive and the next, he was dead.
“What if—what if it’s a virus?” Martha said, panic creeping into her voice as she clutched her crying daughter. “What if something’s spreading? Something—something different to the undead?”
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Hayden said. The voice came from somewhere deep within, a part that he wasn’t in control of. He brushed back his sweaty hair. “We … we just need to find out if …”
His voice drifted away and his stomach turned.
Matt and Karen.
They weren’t out here.
They didn’t know yet.
Gary edged forward towards Tim’s body. “I’ll take him somewhere more sightly—”
“Don’t touch him,” Hayden said. “We don’t know if there is some kind of virus, but we can’t take any chances just yet.”
“So we just leave him here on the ground for his mum and dad to find?” Gary said.
“I … I’ve got his blood on my hands,” Sarah said.
Hayden and the others all looked at her. She held her bloody hands up, which quivered and shook.
“I … I got his blood on my hands. So if there’s a virus, I …”
Sarah didn’t get to finish what she was starting to say because she must’ve heard exactly what Hayden heard.
Footsteps.
Hayden turned around. At the hangar door, he saw Matt and Karen emerge. Karen had that forced half-smile on her face like always, and Matt was wiping some suds on his white shirt. He frowned at the group; looked at them with confusion and then bewilderment and then, all of a sudden, fear.
Fear, as his eyes drifted from Hayden to Gary and then to Sarah, Sarah with blood on her hands.
Fear, as Amy sobbed her eyes out.
Fear, as he saw the body on the ground.
Hayden took a deep breath in and stepped towards Matt and Karen. “You two don’t want to—”
But Matt barged past him, and then he barged past Gary and the others and when he saw his son’s body lying there on the ground, Hayden actually saw the muscles in his face drop.
“Not my boy,” he said, lifting his son’s rigid body up, lips quivering. “Not—not my boy. Please not my boy.”
Karen’s fake smile dropped.
She fell to her knees beside her husband, beside her dead son.
And in the glow of the late winter sun, she let out a scream that Hayden would never forget for the rest of his life, however long that was.
Five
“No. You aren’t taking our boy away from us. You—you aren’t taking our boy away from us.”
Hayden leaned against the door to Matt and Karen’s room. It was a small, six by six-metre space in the confines of one of the abandoned Riversford hangars that the group had occupied. There were three sleeping bags laid out on the floor. Hayden felt a great sadness when he saw the bump in the little blue sleeping bag. Karen crouched beside it, cuddled up to it, throaty cries creeping out of her throat. She stroked her hands against the sleeping bag, stroked from head to toe and back again.
Blood seeped through the blue cover.
Matt stood in Hayden’s way. He glared at him with bloodshot red eyes. Hayden could smell the sweat coming from his body. The sweat that always came with shock. “Please. Just—just leave us in peace with our son. Leave us in peace.”
Hayden felt his insides turn. “I … I want that but—”
“Then you’ll walk away right now and leave us to mourn. You’ve lost people too. You … you have no idea how we feel right now, but you’ve lost people too. So you know what—what we have to do
.”
Hayden felt deep sympathy for Matt and Karen. Sure, Tim could be a bit of a handful, but weren’t all kids a bit of a handful from time to time?
The way he’d dropped dead. “Just fell,” as Amy put it. One second, alive, the next, bleeding out of his orifices on the ground.
Hayden thought too about Sarah. About her fears of this being some kind of virus. “We can’t be sure your son’s body is … is safe.”
Matt squared up to Hayden. “I told you to—”
“Did Tim ever have any … any funny turns? Seizures, things like that?”
Matt ground his teeth together. His cheeks flushed, and it looked for a moment as if he was going to lash out at Hayden just like Hayden had lashed out at him earlier.
“No,” he said. He wiped the sweat from the side of his head. “I … No. He was healthy. Good at … at PE.” He chuckled. “Little champion at the egg and spoon race. My little champion.”
His voice faltered at those final words, and once again the guilt welled up inside Hayden.
“I’m sorry,” Hayden said. “I … Really. I’m so sorry this happened.”
“We’ll get who did this to you,” Karen mumbled, stroking her son’s body and sniffing back her tears. “We’ll get who did this to you.”
It was at that moment that Hayden’s understanding and perspective shifted. Karen’s words—we’ll get who did this to you. She was suggesting murder. Foul play. “Karen, I don’t think anyone murdered—”
“What the fuck do you know?” Karen spat. She looked up at Hayden with dagger-like eyes. It was the most honest look Hayden thought he’d seen from Karen since meeting her.
“I … I’m just saying. I think it’s more likely we’re dealing with—”
“Are you a doctor? Are you a medical professional? Are—are you in any way qualified to tell me what’s—what’s right and wrong for my son? For my little boy?”
