by Jack Lewis
He reached to his side and took hold of the chair. It scraped across the floor as he moved it over to wardrobe.
“You’ll repeat yourself. You’ll tell me more than I need to know, because you think that sounds more truthful. You’ll cover your mouth and you won’t blink. Your eyes will point in directions your mind doesn’t want.”
He made sure the chair was firmly against the wall and then climbed onto it.
“In short, Heather, your body will tell me what your brain is trying to hide. What do you think I’ll find if I look in here?”
As he reached up toward the top of the wardrobe, Heather knew that the game was finished. She felt Kim press against her, and her blood rushed to her head so fast she could hear it pounding in her ears. Dimly, from somewhere in the future, she could hear her own screams as they locked her in the Capita’s dungeons.
Her numbness began to thaw as she pushed Kim away from her. She reached over the book case next to Kim’s bed and picked up the ceramic jug that her daughter had made in school. Her body warmed as she crossed the room, and by the time she reached Charles she was red hot.
She kicked out with her right leg and hit the chair so hard that a wooden leg snapped. The chair tipped over and the bounty hunter fell to the floor and landed on his back. He turned around with more agility than she believed possible. As he went to get onto his feet, Heather raised the jug and swung it at the bounty hunter’s forehead. His eyes grew large and she saw little red veins in the whites. He moved his body and again she brought the jug down on him, and this time it smashed into hundreds of pieces.
She stood over the bounty hunter and gasped for air. Above her, the wardrobe panel swung open and Eric poked his head out. The bounty hunter lay still on the floor.
14
Ed
It was almost as if Golgoth had forgotten the storm. When they left the town hall and walked out onto the streets, a blue sky awaited them. Rather than cheer him up, the lack of a dismal sky actually annoyed Ed. It seemed like there had been just enough rain to flood the basement and ruin their plans and then, job complete, it had dried up.
Rather than existing solely to ruin their plans, Ed was beginning to suspect that the storm had brought something else down on the island. There was a dim light flickering somewhere in his memory, and he tried hard to find it.
He remembered being a kid and being in bed. Hearing James retching into a bucket beside his own bed, and hearing mum vomiting in the bathroom down the hall. It was a week where the island of Golgoth had stood still, where the entire population had been too ill to leave their homes.
Farmers lost days of labour. One cow, through lack of milking some claimed, dried up. Even the weekly council meeting was missed when Gordon Rigby, sickest of them all, had covered the stone wall of his bathroom in vomit. One by one people had dropped, and then one by one they recovered. After days of malnourishment and dehydration, with stomachs too weak to even absorb soup, the island began to recover. After that, fingers were pointed. Food producers were blamed. Some said it was the milk. The recent lamb slaughter caused it, said others.
Finally, after months of town hall debates, Gordon and the council voted to fly a scientist and a food hygienist to the island. The mainland experts took thousands of swabs and spent weeks pouring over them. The dairy farmers waited. The cattle farmers paced their land. Nobody knew where the judgement would fall and whose livelihood would be ruined. It turned out to be an airborne virus that had nothing to do with the local produce.
“We need to get to the harbour,” said Judith.
She lifted her foot over a crack in the cobbled street and took a comically overstretched step. Ed noticed that she did this a lot. No matter how much it took her out of her way, Judith would never place her foot within an inch of a crack in the cobbles.
Bethelyn walked with her head staring at the floor. Her eyes were dull. She tapped the poker against her shoulder.
“Does anyone know how to sail?” said Ed.
“Nope,” said Garry.
“No,” said Judith, stepping to her right to avoid a split cobble.
Bethelyn shook her head.
“Damn,” said Ed. “That would have been incredibly fortunate.”
Judith looked ahead of her down the street. Ed hadn’t seen any infected since they left the hall. If any were nearby, they were good at hiding.
“Well, this bodes well. Doesn’t make much sense to take a boat when none of us can sail.”
Gary had his hands stuffed into his pockets. His chin was spotted with flares of acne and his eyebrows met each other above his nose.
“Don’t see much of a choice.”
Judith rolled her eyes. “It’s not the sort of thing that can be learnt off the cuff.”
Ed knew what he had to do next. He was trying to avoid it if he could, hoping that someone else would be able to sail. In their present situation, though, it made no sense to carry on the pretence. If nobody else could step up, then he would have to.
“I can sort of sail,” he said.
This time Bethelyn looked up.
“Sort of? As in, you could paddle a dinghy if you had to?”
Ed shook his head. “James used to have a boat. He tried to teach me, but I couldn’t get past the basics. And I never sailed without him.”
Bethelyn tried a smile but her lips barely moved.
“In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. But we’ve all got two eyes and we’re going to watch how shit you are at sailing.”
“I guess I’m the best you’ve got.”
Judith looked in horror as she almost put her toe on a crack. She moved so quickly to avoid it that her walk turned into a skip. As they moved down the street the silence became oppressive. Houses stood alone on each side. Hundreds of years ago, Golgoth had been built one house at a time as families left the mainland in search of privacy, and there was a rule that no two houses could be built within fifty feet of each other. The residents were already cut off from the mainland, and it seemed that even on an island as small as this they wanted to be isolated from each other.
Ed remembered what it had felt like in the Dirty Feathers, the only pub on the island. He remembered the way people would stare at each other from across the table, and how one man would eye another with suspicion as he bought a round of drinks at the bar. Despite how they pretended otherwise, nobody really liked each other on the island. They’d come all this way to be away from other people, after all. The problem was that living in such a small place was worse than living in the most populated city on the mainland. No matter where you went, eyes watched you and judged.
So it was as the four of them walked down the street. The infected began to file through gates, out from behind walls, and emerge from around corners as though waiting for their cue. Bethelyn walked with her eyes on the ground. If they bothered her, she didn’t show it. Gary moved closer toward Judith.
“Walk fast and they can’t catch us,” said Ed. “Just watch out for anything that might hide them.”
Before long they reached a familiar house. It was one Ed dreaded seeing, yet he knew that if they were going to the harbour, they would have to pass it. It was a house where ivy clung to white walls and the remains of once healthy crops had been scattered by the wind. Above the garden, higher than the walls, was a roof which had caved in.
It was only here that Bethelyn looked up from the floor. She gazed briefly at the house she knew so well and for a second something entered her expression. Ed couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it was an emotion of some kind. As quick as it appeared, Bethelyn hid it.
Ed felt like he should do something. Put his hand around her shoulders maybe, just like she’d tried to do for him the day before. He knew that people needed it sometimes. There was something about human contact that reassured people, not that Ed had ever felt that way. But maybe it wasn’t about what Ed felt. Sometimes you had to play someone else’s game and try to think the way they thought. He stepped
in beside her and was about to put his hand across, when something wailed in the air above them. It was a sound so sudden and so deafening that he had to put his hand to his eyes.
“What the fuck is that?” he shouted, his words straining against the wailing.
Judith pointed at the road behind them where a wooden pole which stretched thirty feet high. It was a telegraph pole, one that Ed had probably seen several times every day of his life. Until now, he had never really noticed the speakers that were at the top of it, and he definitely hadn’t known they were capable of a sound like this. It was the kind of sound he imagined they heard in the Old Wars when the enemy planes swooped overhead. Back then it would have sent people running out of their house and spilling into air raid shelters. Today, the sound brought something else.
From behind hedges, trees, doorways and walls more infected headed toward them. At first they were drawn by the sound but they soon saw something else that interested them more. One by one the dead, who had once sat across from each other in the pub, who had once chatted with one another in town meetings, locked eyes on the four of them. They opened their mouths and bared their teeth. They growled and groaned, cried and moaned.
There were so many that the road behind them was cut off. Bethelyn held her poker in her tense hands. Ed raised his knife. Gary held a thick stick but looked awkward with it, like a publicity-seeking politician taking a penalty kick in front over a thousand drunken football fans.
“The harbour,” said Ed.
It was a fight they could never win, and to attempt it was like blowing their own brains out. The group headed by Bethelyn’s house and towards Ed’s, beyond which was the harbour. It seemed too fortunate to Ed that the way to the harbour would be clear of the infected, and as soon as he had the thought, five of them stumbled from behind a hedge.
They were less than three feet away. They reached out toward the survivors with twitching fingers. One almost took hold of Gary but he sprang away to one side. He let out a scream so surprising that Ed stepped back. Gary’s face grew as white as the chalk of the island’s cliffs.
As one of the infected reached for him again he yelped and dropped his stick to the floor. An expression took over his face like that of a rat trapped in a corner. As the infected reached for him Gary stepped back, took hold of Judith and pushed her into the waiting arms of the monsters.
Before Ed could even react, the infected had pulled Judith down to the ground. One of them tore a hole in her arm, and another pulled sinewy flesh from her throat, silencing her mid-scream.
Ed’s stomach felt taut and his breath jammed in his chest. He moved toward Judith but time seemed to be running at a quarter-speed. As he reached the first of the infected he could only focus on the look on Judith’s face as she screamed soundlessly in pain. One of the infected sat next to her and chewed on her vocal chords. Ed wanted to save her, he wanted to say something, but all he could do was think was why isn’t she dead yet?
He stabbed his knife through the skull of the first infected and let it fall to the floor. Judith reached out and grabbed his wrist in a grip so strong it felt like she was going to snap his bones. An infected leaned toward her ear as if it was going to whisper to her, but instead it took hold of her fleshy skin and ripped it apart.
Ed opened his mouth to say something, he didn’t know what, but before he could tease out the words Bethelyn’s poker pierced Judith’s throat and destroyed what the infected hadn’t yet touched. Judith’s eyes glassed up and the life left them. Ed felt as if his own windpipe was stabbed, and any words that were on the brink of forming fell away.
Gary, his mouth spewing sounds that sounded too savage to come from a person, pushed away from Ed and started to run. Without pausing to look behind him he disappeared behind a house and out of view, leaving Ed and Bethelyn alone.
The rest of the infected closed in on them in from all sides. Ed took a couple of steps so that he was next to Bethelyn. This is it, he thought. This was the end, and somehow he felt that it was only right he go feeling some kind of closeness with someone. It didn’t matter that Bethelyn was a stranger; she was as good a person as any to die next to. He wondered what he’d missed after shutting himself away all this time, and wondered if their son and brother becoming a hermit was what his dad and James would have wanted.
He watched the infected pour toward them. There were over fifty island residents, including children. In the seconds he had remaining he didn’t want to do the math, but he knew that no matter what, there were too many to fight. Bethelyn pulled her poker out of the brain of an infected. She stood next to Ed so that their shoulders touched.
The infected walked toward them. Their faces were blank, their eyes white and empty, like fish eyes. It was a sea of them washing into shore, and it was time for Ed to plunge into it. Screaming in pain wasn’t the way he wanted to go, and somehow the lack of choice made it seem impossibly worse. He tried to control his shaking, tried to convince his brain to accept a fate which the survival instinct of any person would reject.
At the top of the street more figures joined the infected. He didn’t believe it at first, but soon Ed realised that these figures didn’t have blank faces or dead eyes. In fact their faces were covered in masks, and as they passed the infected they raised weapons and brought them down on the skulls of the dead.
He couldn’t believe it. He thought that in the last few seconds before death his brain was playing a trick on him. Then he remembered, and suddenly it made sense.
The boat in the storm. So he had seen it, then.
The strangers who walked the street turned the attention of the infected away from Ed and Bethelyn, though that didn’t lessen the fear in his chest. He looked at these strangers with their fur coats and the masks covering their faces, and he felt his blood freeze.
Somehow he knew that no matter the fate they had just saved him from, the strangers on the island were much worse than the infected ever could be.
15
Heather
Heather knew all too well the feeling of taking just a step too far. It was too easy to let a word stray from her mouth that was best left in her head, to take action on something should have stayed a thought.
There were no words to describe her latest mistake. In Kim’s room was Charles Bull, tied to a chair by rope she’d found in a crate in the garage. The most feared bounty hunter in the Capita, a man who made the mercury drop when he walked into a room, a man who made the bravest people turn away as he passed.
His eyes were closed. Heather had tied a rope around each arm and each leg, and another around his waist to be sure. Charles had strength in bulk, and though his body wasn’t trim there was a lot of it. To keep him secure she had used a knot taught to her by her father. She couldn’t remember the name of it, but she could remember the stink of her father’s cologne as he showed her how to make the loops. Trying it again years later, her muscle memory kicked in and she could almost hear her dead father whispering in her ear.
She walked to the window and stared at the street outside. The house was in an area that years ago would have been described as up-and-coming. Just thirty minutes commute from what used to be the Capital city in the mainland, it was an area where young families hunted for bargain properties that had low prices and lots of character. The room behind her reflected dimly in the glass, and she could just about make out the black outline of Charles. There was no escaping him, it seemed. No way out.
What the hell have you done?
She’d been putting off the day of their Great Escape, and now she wanted to slap herself. She had fussed and worried over one detail or another until the point where it had been too late. Charles’s soldiers had taken all their food, so that meant they couldn’t travel for long without needing to find some. Yet there was no way they could stay. If she let Charles go, he would come back for revenge. If she could bring herself to kill him, then she’d have half the Capita looking for her. It was fire on one side and a volcano on the othe
r.
She heard a raspy sound, and when she turned around she saw Charles shoulders move. It was a tremble at first, but then his head jerked up. His body tensed, and he shook himself from side to side, his movements becoming quicker as he realised he was tied up.
Heather picked the end of his pickaxe off the floor, gripped it with both hands and grunted as she dragged it even further away from him. How he managed to walk around with this thing, she had no idea.
Charles stopped struggling and became so still it seemed like he could have been asleep. Heather walked across the room until she faced him. Charles’s eyes were open, the creamy white of his eyeballs staring back from the holes in his mask.
