by Jack Lewis
“For god’s sake hurry up,” said Judith, with more irritation in her voice than panic.
Bethelyn climbed up the drainpipe and joined them at the ledge, leaving Gary alone on the ground. The infected were ten feet away now, and the closer they got the hungrier they looked.
Gary took hold of the pipe and lifted his feet. As he climbed the infected got closer, and their groans sounded loud. It reminded Ed of the wail of the wind, but it was worse because it came out of mouths that were once human.
When Gary was halfway up the pipe the infected had closed the gap until they stood underneath him. They stretched their arms toward him and cried out. The look on their faces was desperation, the hunger in their voices enough to make Ed feel pity.
Gary lifted a leg and tried to hook it on a gap in the wall, but his foot slipped. While the infected reached out for him, Gary started to lose his grip on the pipe. His eyes widened and he opened his mouth, but instead of words he only screamed. Ed reached forward, grabbed the man’s hand and pulled. He felt his arms strain as he tried to haul him up on to the roof, but with a sense of defeat he knew he couldn’t hold him.
The infected opened their mouths like lions expecting meat, and Ed’s muscles burnt to the point where he thought he might drop Gary and give them their meal. A cold sweat made his forehead wet, and he made a grunting sound as he put in one last effort. Judith reached forward, took Gary’s other hand and helped pull him up. Together they got him onto the ledge.
Gary lay on his back and took shallow breaths. The groans of the infected drifted up to them. Ed sank back against a wall. He held his arms out in front of him and felt his muscles ache. He’d never been a strong man and he’d never wished for a better body, but it shocked him that his own weakness had nearly killed someone.
“Thanks,” said Gary, his voice wobbling.
The windows were less than an inch thick and they smashed with a kick of Bethelyn’s boot. The drop to the floor was small, and none of them had a problem lowering themselves down. Inside the town hall everything was black, and their footsteps echoed as they walked through corridors that had seen happier times.
As they walked it seemed like they all stepped softer, as though the silence was something they shouldn’t disturb. Judith was the first to break it.
“I’m still trying to get my head round this. How did the infection get here?”
“Someone must have got bitten,” said Gary.
Bethelyn held a hand in the air and motioned for them all to stop. They were outside a wooden door with frosted glass, and a sign next to it read “Bursar’s office”. Bethelyn pressed her ear against the glass. She listened for movement for a few seconds, but when none came she seemed satisfied. They walked down a hallway that smelled like chalk.
“For someone to get bitten,” said Judith, not caring to limit the volume of her voice, “Someone had to be infected in the first place. And there’s been nothing for years, so it doesn’t add up.”
“Maybe there’s another way of getting infected,” said Ed.
The television and radio reception on Golgoth had been terrible at the best of times, but when the outbreak got into its stride things had faded fast. It didn’t take a long time for Golgoth to be cut off from all lines of communication. Add to that the fact that the government rarely told all they knew in the newscasts, and it wouldn’t have surprised Ed to learn there was another way of getting infected.
“It’s the storm,” said Bethelyn. “Something about the storm.”
Bethelyn led them through hallways, down a stairway and into the depths of the building. They didn’t hear any movement nor did they come across anyone else, living or dead. The cellar door stood in front of them.
“I always hated coming down here,” she said. “But man, am I glad we stocked it.”
Ed couldn’t help but agree. He’d seen enough films to know that when disaster happened, it usually caught people with their trousers down. The Golgoth council had the foresight to plan for infection on the island, and their actions gave Ed, Judith, Gary and Bethelyn a chance. It was a small chance, so frail that the lightest of touches could break it, but it was a chance.
“Let’s stock up and then find the others.”
“And then what?”
“Then we fight our way off Golgoth,” said Ed. “An island of infected isn’t so big a number when you have guns.”
Bethelyn pushed open the cellar door, and as soon as it swung open Ed felt a rock sink in his stomach. For a second stood motionless, not able to speak, unable to do anything but stare at the sight in front of him.
The cellar was full of provisions and guns, just as Bethelyn had promised. Only now they sat under five feet of rain water. The window at the far end of the cellar was smashed, and water trickled down the stone wall. Their fragile hope had been weaker than they thought.
12
Charles Bull
Inside the Dome
The bounty hunter found it hard to choke back his disgust. He stood in the centre of the cavernous Great Hall. The marble floors and faraway walls echoed the slightest sounds and meant that every word he spoke came back again as though dangled in front of him for judgement.
In front of him, screened by a twenty metre sheet of bullet proof glass, were the Capita Five. They sat along a table that reminded Charles of the last supper. A shadow obscured them but he could just about see the masks on their faces and cloaks that hung on their shoulders. Nobody had ever seen the Five without their costumes. They were as anonymous as it was possible to be in this world, never taking off their masks, never speaking in public. It was rumoured that if one of them ever died, they had all made a pact to disfigure the corpse’s face with acid, and that each of them carried a vial in their cloaks.
In the centre of the table was Grand Lord Ishkur, and around him were Marduk, Nabu, Sin and Tammuz. The other four looked like Ishkur’s disciples, nodding at his decisions and waiting on his words. Outside of the Great Hall they all wielded power of their own in the Capita, but in here they answered to one man.
Their names didn’t fool Charles. Nor did the gentle heartbeat which sounded faintly across the Hall, something he knew to be a psychological trick. He knew that a lowly Capita worker stood outside the Great Hall beating a drum to make the sound effect. He knew that the Board, underneath their masks, probably had bad breath, wore glasses, had acne and were unhappy with how their nose stuck out or how their bodies looked. They were just people, and behind the act they weren’t called Ishkur or Sin. They were probably called Clive and Sue, and James and Kelly. Ishkur was the only one who bothered Charles. The number of people in the world who could make Charles pause to think were few, but he always watched how he acted around the Grand Lord.
Charles approached them and stood forty feet away from the glass. The five shadowed faces watched him.
“The farms are ready for production,” said Ishkur.
His voice was a tremor, a mini-earthquake that could tear down the Hall if he cared to raise it loud enough.
Another, Nabu, placed his hands in front of him on the table and folded his fingers.
“We need you to round up as many of the Darwin’s Children as possible.”
It was something Charles had already been doing for the last few months. The mouth breathers were easy to find, really. They were the ones who tried too hard to blend in. The ones who learned all the Capita’s pathetic slogans off by heart, the ones made a show of saluting any Capita soldiers they saw. Charles had become so good at finding them that he could almost smell their genetic mutation.
It was like when he had met the family on the meadow. They were lovely people. They all maintained respect when they saw him, and they all wore their masks. It almost made him upset to tear the unit apart. But within seconds of meeting them he’d known they were DC’s. They tried to trick him, but he was too savvy for it. Now the girl and the mother were on their way to the farms. He’d find the boy too, before long.
He ho
ped that he could stop soon. All the heartbreak he’d caused, all the families he’d broken up. It was beginning to put a strain on his soul. He always thought of himself as a practical man, but he was beginning to see that extreme practicality had extreme spiritual consequences. He was starting to think that god, or gods, existed and that they looked down on him with stern eyes. That they wrote his down his deeds in a tattered notebook, the same way that Charles kept record of the memories which made him smile.
It was theft, really, the notes he kept. The family on the meadow had made him happy with how content they all were. It reminded him of better times, ones that he fought hard to forget but all the same didn’t want to see vanish. He’d written a page about them in his book, describing them the best he could so that later, alone in his room, he could read it and relive the experience. Only straight after meeting them, he’d ordered the father killed and sent the mother and child to the farms. He’d stolen some of their happiness and written it in his book for his own benefit, and then he’d destroyed the family.
“I wonder,” he said, not caring how much his words echoed in the chamber. “How will we be judged in history?”
Ishkur, in the middle of the table, larger than the rest of them, spoke.
“Are you having an attack of conscience, hunter?”
“I’m wondering where my place will be in the annals of time. When they weigh up how cruel we were and the things we did.”
“Your place is in the Dome.”
“That is,” said Marduk on the far left. “If you can prove yourself further. You still have … part of your family, do you not?”
“I do.”
“And wouldn’t you like to be in the Dome?”
It wasn’t a question of like for Charles, it was a question of necessity. After everything he had done, and with all the power he had, they still wouldn’t let him in the Dome. He knew exactly why. A long time ago, one of them had told him the reason.
“If your daughter were no longer a variable,” they said, “Your entry to the Dome would be a lot swifter.”
For the Board, those in the Dome and in the areas surrounding it weren’t people. They were numbers; resources to be shifted from one part of a map to the next. If a town needed clearing from the infected, a hundred residents would be sent with knives and clubs. If only twenty returned, it was no bother.
In truth, Charles didn’t enjoy his work. He didn’t agree with the principles of the Capita nor did he hate the mouth-breathers. He simply had the foresight to know that it was his only option, and he had the ability to turn his conscience off and on.
He looked at the silent, unmoving Board.
“I’ll round up as many as I can,” he said.
***
He left the Dome behind him and rode to the furthermost corner of Capita territory. His horse, Ken, knew the way on his own by now. He understood when to cross the busy stream and when the slope of a hill dropped sharply and he needed to slow down. Charles could probably have shut his eyes and let Ken guide him all the way home.
He brought the horse to a halt in front of a cottage. The exterior walls were painted white but the process of fading had begun years ago. There used to be dozens of holes in the brickwork but one by one Charles had filled them in to stop a family of rats from taking residence in their attic. Despite its age it was a sturdy house, and it had probably been home to many a family before Charles had found it. It was the kind of place he loved; somewhere so far away from everyone else that if he wanted to, he could just stand outside his house, look into the night sky and shout obscenities at the top of his lungs. There’d be no complaints. His only neighbours had been the infected, and the week he spent mercy killing them had stopped their grumblings.
From outside it seemed like nobody was in the house. Behind the windows, the rooms were dark and still. Charles took his AVS out of his pocket and held it in front of him. He thought about testing the air out of curiosity, but what was the point? He was becoming sick of pretending, sick of being part of the pantomime.
He knew his role in this world. He was to be the villain. If that is what it took for him to protect who he loved, that was fine by him. He used to watch the news and see videos of killings and massacres, and he’d wonder how people were capable of such things. That was a different Charles. That was the young Charles who stood with a crowd of thousands and shouted his protest at the Oil War. That was a Charles who saw morality as an absolute.
Since then he’d learned better. He knew now that morality had a context, and that a person can justify anything if they have a reason. Charles did the things he did because he needed to, because it was the only way to get himself and Inez into the Dome. If he was alone, would he have done the same? If he didn’t have a sick child, would he still hunt the DC’s? The answer was no. He’d retire to a place far away from the Capita, get a stable full of Kens, grow crops and sit and watch the seasons turn.
He opened his fingers and let his AVS fall to the ground. He lifted his boot and brought it down as hard as he could on the sensor, smashing the plastic and circuitry into the mud. Then he reached to his neck and began to uncoil the tail of his mask, unwinding the straps until finally he felt the wind on his neck. He unstrapped it at the back of the head and with one heave pulled it free from his face. The breeze washed over him and bathed skin that had sat under leather for too long. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and drank in the air.
The front door of his house opened. The front wheels of Inez’s wheelchair rolled over the doorstep and Charles felt a rush of energy in his chest when he saw his daughter. He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face, though the sensation felt strange, as though his muscles weren’t used to it.
He walked across the tarmac path that winded towards his house and he stood in front of his daughter. She wore a dress today, and he could see the scratches and bite-marks which covered her bare arms and legs. He looked at her face. Her beautiful eyes – her mother’s eyes – her blonde, curly hair. She had her mother’s face; that much was certain. There was little of Charles in the way that she looked. Not now, anyway.
She had had Charles’s nose, once. Now when he looked at the stub where her nose had been he felt a welling of sadness mixed with anger. The feeling of wanting to cry, but wishing there was a wall he could punch. He looked at his daughter’s face and saw her half-eaten nose, and he wanted to scream into the sky.
“Hi daddy,” she said.
He gave his daughter a long hug, pressing her close to him. When they separated, he reached into his pocket. He pulled out a clear plastic bag. The inside of it was splattered with blood, and a lump of meat rested in the bottom.
“Is that for me?” she said.
Charles nodded. “You need another dose.”
“It’s been a month already?”
“It has.”
This was their life now. This was why they could never be far away from the Dome. This was why Charles, more than most people, needed to stock the farms. Immune flesh was a difficult thing to find, but Charles knew all the hiding places.
13
Heather
Normally Heather would have walked straight by Kim’s room, glad of the chance to be free of her and Eric for a while. They weren’t exactly children, not really, but having two young people in the house was more trouble than she needed. Though Eric was a kind hearted boy he’d proven difficult. He ate so much you’d think he was a hamster storing it in his cheeks for the winter, and it seemed that at some point every night Heather would be woken up to the sounds of him screaming his way out of a nightmare.
The first time he did it she went into his room and found him sat up in bed, panting. There was a chill in the air but when she put her hand to his head she felt warm beads of sweat on his burning skin. She asked him what was wrong.
“I see them when I sleep”, he said.
“Who?”
“Mum and Luna. And Dale.”
Heather sat next to him on th
e bed and put her arm around his shoulders.
“After my grandad died I used to have nightmares,” she said. “I’d get a phone call from a nurse telling me that grandad was dying and that I had ten minutes to get to the hospital to save him. I’d run around my house but it was so pitch black that I couldn’t find mum and dad. So I’d go get my bike but find that the chain had rusted and snapped off. Then I’d go outside and start running but the streets were covered in thick, oil and the harder I tried to run the more stuck I got.”
Although sharing this with him didn’t seem to help with his night terrors, it had the effect of making Heather feel warmer toward him. She found herself smiling when she saw him. At the same time, he made her stressed. She’d sometimes find him hidden in the closet in his room, or under his bed. He could develop a temper out of nowhere and his mode of defence was to scratch. Heather knew she had to get him well away from the Capita. It was only through distance that he’d be able to put it behind him.
