by Jack Lewis
A meadow, 3 miles away from the Dome.
There were no infected on the meadow. Or it seemed that way, at least. The grass reached up to Dale’s knees and shook in the wind, but it didn’t seem to hide any infected within it. They were too stupid to sneak and only crawled when severed at the waist, so the danger today was the infection in the air.
The wind carried the muffled shouts of two children. Dale watched Luna and Eric chase each other up the hill in the same way that he and his brothers had chased each other decades ago. It was strange that the context of the world had changed, yet the behaviour of children was exactly the same. Luna, the younger and more boisterous of the siblings, reached her brother and tugged the hair on the back of his head. Eric gave a yelp that was smothered by his mask. He stopped and tried to punch his sister’s arm, but the girl was too quick and side-stepped at the last moment.
“Come on, idiots,” said Dale, hoping the command was loud enough for them to hear him through his mask, and that the word ‘idiots’ was taken affectionately.
Stephanie stood at the bottom of the hill with her hand sideways across her forehead. She stared out into the distance, her body still, her ears oblivious to the antics of her kids. Dale followed the direction of her stare until he saw what she was looking at.
Miles away, but still large enough to cover the horizon, was the Dome. It was a man-made spherical construction of Plexiglas and plastic that looked like an onion. One day he hoped someone would take a knife to it and cut through the plastic so that they could see the slime and corruption ooze out of it. When he thought of the occupants of the Dome and the power they thought was theirs, he felt his teeth grit together.
He turned away from the Dome and looked at Stephanie, and straight away he felt lighter. The grass blew against his knees, twisting tendrils that seemed to want to climb up his body. How long had it been since he was last here? He reached down, grabbed hold of a couple of blades of grass and snapped off the ends. As Stephanie turned and walked up the hill toward them, Dale tucked the blades in his pocket.
“Luna, Eric, come here,” he said.
The kids looked at him, and for the hundredth time he was stunned by the absolute symmetry of their faces. He’d seen twins before, that was nothing new, but none of them had ever seemed such flawless copies of each other as Luna and Eric.
It was crazy how much his life had changed since he had taken them in. Since the day he opened his bedroom curtains and saw Stephanie and the kids fleeing down the street in terror. Capita soldiers followed shortly after, but by then the woman and children were stood in Dale’s hallway, their white faces panting. They were just strangers back then, but what were they now? Could he call them his family?
A rush of nerves hit his stomach and made him uneasy. Today was the day, he knew. The day he would let Stephanie know how he felt. It seemed so long since he had taken them in, but at the same time the months had gone by with the speed of a runaway train. He wanted to tell Stephanie that they should be more than just people sharing the same living space. The truth was that he’d wanted to say something since the first week after they’d started to live with him, but he never knew if she thought the same way. It was hard to gauge how people felt about you even when their masks were off, and the consequences of failure made it dangerous to take a chance.
He looked at the grass of the meadow. Green bases and yellowing, knee-height tips, every so often interspersed with dandelions. Despite the decades between visits, he still remembered what the flowers smelled like. It wasn’t a usual memory for a man to keep, the smell of flowers, and certainly not something a school boy would normally pay attention to. But this meadow was pure, distilled nostalgia for Dale. The curve of the hill, with memories of pushing his brothers down it. The ditch at the far end, just short of the road into town, where they used to play Prisoner of War.
The sky above them was streaked red as the sun started its fall. He looked down at the dandelions and wished he could breathe in their smell now. He put his hand to his face and felt his mask. The straps that secured it around his head felt tight. He ran his fingertips over the grooves of his mouthpiece and felt his filtered breath drift through. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his Air Virus Sensor.
Stephanie approached him, her hips swaying like the grass. He felt his throat tighten and his well-rehearsed words disappear into the cracks of his mind. Was he going to be able to tell her?
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Checking the AVS.”
The solar-powered sensor registered three out of four bars worth of power, which was reassuring. He held the sensor above him, pressed the button and held it in until an LED blinked green twice. The sensor sucked in air, whirred, and five seconds later flashed red five times. Damn.
“Five reds? You shouldn’t be here Dale, mask or not.”
He remembered the day the government planes flew over every city and town in the country. The eerie drone that grew louder as the four-engine aircrafts swopped overhead, opened their cargo doors and dropped parachute-covered boxes to the ground. All told, around sixty million cheap air filter masks and ten million AVS modules were dropped across the land. Those were optimistic days, when the government still had vehicles, planes and a vague clue of what to do. They still thought they stood a chance. Dale remembered his disgust of the government’s mishandling of the crisis, as he had perceived it back then. In reality, the government were just guilty of the same things as the rest of them. They thought they had a hope.
Stephanie put her hand on his shoulder, and her touch seemed to tingle through his woolly jumper and coat until it zapped his skin.
“Would you have taken your mask off even if it were clear?”
He sighed. “Guess not. One gust of wind and the air’s thick with it.”
“What are we doing here, in any case?”
“I got you a present. Take off your mask.”
Stephanie scanned the meadow around her. At home, she was the boss. It was Dale’s house, technically, but there was no disputing who ran it. Out here though, in open air, she looked vulnerable. It was strange that she should seem that way when out of the two of them, she clearly had the natural advantage when outdoors.
“There’s no one around,” said Dale, “Take it off.”
Stephanie gave another look around her and then she reached to the back of her neck. She unstrapped her mask delicately as though it was the top of a cocktail dress, and then pulled it away from her face. When she took a deep breath her eyes widened.
“It smells beautiful. That’s the only way I can describe it. Beautiful.”
At the top of the hill Eric walked toward his mum, but he didn’t see his sister’s outstretched leg carefully placed to make him trip onto the floor. Within a second he was back on his feet and had turned to meet his sister, fists clenched.
“You wanker,” he said.
The curse made Dale angry and amused at the same time. To hear it from a ten year old just seemed wrong, and he felt that he should say something. But they were Stephanie’s kids, and he still didn’t feel right reprimanding them. He had been guilty of every curse word ever created when he was growing up, before he mellowed out, so it seemed hypocritical to scold the boy.
“Stop pissing about and take off your masks,” said Stephanie in her blunt northern accent.
Eric and Luna fiddled with their masks and took them off. They took deep breaths, but the smell of the meadow didn’t seem to have the same effect on them as it had their mum. Stephanie sucked in more of the air as though she savoured it.
“Does it not make you sad?” she aske
d Dale. He knew she was alluding to the fact that he couldn’t take off his mask and smell the air himself.
“Sometimes. But this is what makes you special. You, Luna and Eric. You’re the future of this world. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. I guess there will come a time when you don’t need to wear masks or pretend you’re something you’re not. I hope there will be, at least.”
Stephanie's stare turned hard. “You haven’t seen what the Capita do when they know you’re immune. May as well get my mask grafted to my face. ”
He thought for a moment of the Dome and the Capita. Nobody had ever seen the men and women at the top, but their soldiers were a daily intrusive presence in everyone’s lives. Still, there weren’t many places in the world that could say they were safe from the infected. Perhaps intrusion and loss of freedom were the cost of safety.
The sound of galloping came from across the field. The pounding of horse hooves wasn’t so strange a sound these days, but rarely did they carry riders with good intentions. Dale turned to Stephanie and the kids.
“Get your masks on. Come on, don’t mess about.”
Stephanie and Luna put theirs on with fluid movements, but Eric fumbled with the straps of his. Dale bent down and helped him, aware that the galloping sound grew louder as he put the mask on the boy’s head.
Fifty feet away a horse’s angry face came over the crest of the hill. Since petrol was no longer a viable option, horses were the go-to mode of transport. You had to be part of the Capita to get one unless you lived far away from their borders, somewhere remote where their fingers didn’t reach. But living in such places often gave you a heap of other problems, such as mobs of infected waiting to tear you apart.
A man sat on top of the horse and held its reins in one hand, directing the animal across the meadow with smooth control. He cut a frightening sight. He wore the mask of a fourteenth-century plague doctor, his face completely covered by black leather and with a sharp beak extending eight inches from his face. Eyeholes were cut into the mask and stern eyes stared out from them, and their glare seemed to be trained on Dale’s face. The man wore a long leather coat that flapped against the side of the horse and made him look too bulky to be carried by the mare. On his back, extending just above his shoulders, was the head of a pickaxe.
Dale’s heart thudded against his chest, and the wind felt colder as it teased its way through his jumper and over his skin. He knew who this man was and what he did. He knew his reputation. He suddenly wanted to be far, far away from the meadow, and wished he had never had the idea to come up here. As the man got closer, Dale looked at Stephanie and tried to catch her eyes. He wanted to tell her to be calm, but he was far from that state of mind himself.
The man stopped his horse in front of them. Up close the mare looked thick with muscle and probably weighed half a ton. It could have crushed Luna or Eric with the rise and fall of one hoof. The horse snorted and spit flew from its nostrils.
“Do you know me?” said the man.
Dale tried to keep his voice level. “I know of you, yeah.”
“What’s my name?”
Dale’s throat felt dry. He swallowed and tried to lubricate his vocal chords, but they felt cracked.
“The Bull,” he said.
The man swung a leg over the side of his horse and dropped to the ground with more agility than his body should have allowed. The grass trembled against him as he walked. He was the same height as Dale, but something about him made him seem much taller.
“Charles Bull, actually,” he said, walking closer and then stopping a few feet in front of the family. “Mum didn’t christen me The Bull, you know. It’s just a nickname so please, call me Charles. What else do you know about me?”
Dale didn’t want to offend The Bull. He knew what the man did but it felt wrong to say it, as if the words were too blunt.
“Go on,” said Charles.
Stephanie found the words before Dale.
“You’re a hunter,” she said.
Charles straightened his leather coat and his pickaxe swung behind him. He back must have been made of steel to carry it around with him all the time.
“A hunter is a person who hunts game for food or sport. A bounty hunter hunts criminals or fugitives for reward. I hunt the enemies of the Capita, and they reward me for it. Do you know what I want?”
“I’ve heard the rumours,” said Dale. In the corner of his eye, he saw Eric step closer to his mother.
“And?”
As Dale wondered what to say, not even the breeze made a sound. Stephanie stepped forward, next to Dale, and squeezed his hand. Her movements were small and hidden, but they were not missed by Charles.
“I can see I’m interrupting something,” he said. “Such a sweet family, and an even sweeter moment. I apologise. Hold on a tick, I need to write this down.”
He opened his leather coat, reached inside and took out a battered notepad that was tied together with string. A stain streaked across the sky the colour of weak red wine as the sun started to fall, and on the ground Dale and his family watched in silence as Charles slowly unwound the string from his book. The clouds drifted lazily past them, and the grass and dandelions wafted in the wind. Dale wished for the seconds to pass quicker, for Charles to say what he wanted and then leave. If only it were that simple.
Charles flicked through his book and opened it at a blank page. He reached into the same pocket, took out a pen and started writing, murmuring as the ink stained the paper.
“Meadow of flowers. Twins. Happy parents.”
When the page was half-covered in his squashed handwriting he shut the book and put it back in his pocket.
“I like to write these down, the little moments that warm the heart. It helps during the bad times. Just a little self-help technique I picked up from my reading.”
Charles took a few steps closer. Dale felt he should back off, but instead took a deep breath to plump up his chest and stayed where he was. Despite the ominous figure Charles cut in front of them, Dale felt the tingles from Stephanie’s hand as she held his. Had they ever held hands before?
Charles stroked the bloom of a particularly high sunflower that reached up to his waist. The petals seemed to shrink from his touch.
“I miss the air,” he said. “I know we still breathe it, but it seems that it’s only my lungs that get the benefit these days. It used to be my nose as well. Our senses are the biggest losers in all of this.”
He snapped his glance down to Luna and Eric, and his eyes were cold stones under his plague-doctor mask.
“Do you miss it, kids?”
Luna stared back defiantly at Charles. Eric looked up to his mother.
Charles put his hand to his mask and rubbed his fingers across the leather beak.
“Silly me. You’ve never known the smell of the air, have you? The only ones that have are the Darwin’s Children, and I hope there aren’t any around here.”
The words hit Dale like a hammer on stone. Darwin’s Children. That was the name given to those who were blessed with immunity to the virus, those who could breathe the tainted air without lapsing into a virus coma and waking up with a hunger for flesh. The DC’s were blessed, and the Capita responded to their blessing by hunting them down.
“Do you wish you had the gift, Dale?” said Charles.
Stephanie’s hand tightened around his. Dale squeezed back. “The gift?”
“The gift of immunity. Of lungs that can breathe in the decay and stay pure.”
“No,” said Dale.
“There are rumours of a family around here. I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I’m here and not at my house near the Dome where a hot bath is waiting. There are rumours of a family of mouth-breathers living nearby. Someone saw them passing through months ago, but the Capita has a feeling they may have settled here. God knows why, they must be crazy to live so close to the Dome”.
Dale rubbed the back of his neck. His hair felt rough and needed cutting.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Did his voice sound different? Did he sound nervous? His heart hammered into his chest, and his throat closed tighter around every word he spoke. He hoped Charles couldn’t sense it.
“Forget the mouth-breathers, then. I’m sure we’ll catch them. Have you heard anything of the rats?”
“Rats?”
“The Resistance, Dale. Rats that live in plain sight.”
How did Charles know his name? He didn’t remember telling him. His stomach sank so low it felt as though it was going to leak out of him somehow. He looked over Charles's shoulder, to the distance, to the road that led into town where the buildings were empty and the infected wandered freely. Right now, streets full of the cannibal infected seemed safer than sharing a meadow with Charles Bull.
“We haven’t seen the Resistance,” said Stephanie. “But you’re a flawless investigator. Tell me, have any Resistance members ever given themselves away when you just came out and asked them about it?”
