by Jack Lewis
“You understand what they’ll do to you?” he said. “When they find you? And what they’ll do to your daughter?”
Heather hugged her arms close to her chest. All she could worry about was what she was going to do, yet thinking didn’t bring her any closer to an answer. She couldn’t come up with a single solution that didn’t end in the depths of a Capita dungeon.
“Unless you kill me, that is,” Charles carried on. “Because if you let me go I’ll come back with the full force of the Capita and I’ll cut your daughter’s throat while you watch.”
He nodded as if in agreement with himself, and the beak of his mask rose and fell like a vulture pecking a corpse.
“If you kill me, your problem goes away. For a while at least.”
She couldn’t work out what his game was. She thought he’d be angry, but his voice was so calm. It was so cold it chilled the room, a wind sneaking in through cavities in the wall.
“Do you want to die or something?” she said.
“Don’t we all, in a way?”
She ran her hand through her hair. “Just shut up a minute.”
She walked to the doorway and stared into the hall. Kim and Eric were downstairs in the living room. The afternoon sun was setting and darkness had started to stream in through the windows and cover the walls and floors. Behind her, Charles spoke.
“You have my knife, Heather. Don’t deny it. You found it while you tied me up.”
He was right. As well as the pickaxe on his back, Charles carried a machete which hung in a leather strap around his torso. The handle was brown and had stickers of yellow smiley faces on it, and along the blade was a manufacturer’s mark printed in Chinese.
“Pick up the knife, Heather.”
Maybe he was right. Perhaps Charles dying would solve all her problems. She picked up the machete from Kim’s bed. The handle felt cold against her palm, and she wondered how many skulls it had cleaved and how much flesh the blade had sliced.
“Now stand in front of me and take off my mask,” said Charles. His voice was goading, and he spoke so quietly that she thought it may have been a voice in her head. “Come on, Heather. You don’t have all day.”
She grabbed hold of the sides of his mask. The leather was slippery, and it felt like something that was living. It was as though it was a creature which had attached itself to his face, and rather than fight it the bounty hunter had accepted it and over the years they had fused as one. Plenty of people these days felt uncomfortable in their masks, and she knew that many took theirs off in their own homes despite the risks. There was an unnatural feeling about covering their mouths and noses that their human instincts hadn’t shaken off yet.
“Untie the straps,” he said.
She wondered why she was listening to him, but at the same time couldn’t stop.
“Don’t worry,” said Charles, his voice almost a whisper. “The air in here is fine.”
She started at his neck and felt for where the straps were tied. She unravelled them and then unwound the mask from his neck. She took hold of a fleshy part of the mask underneath his chin and lifted, and she swore she heard a hiss as she pulled it away. She saw Charles Bull for the first time.
His skin was grey and looked clammy, and the bridge of his nose was red from where the leather had pressed. That aside, his face was shocking only for the fact that there was nothing surprising about it. For a second, and she knew it would last no longer than that, Heather felt like she was looking at a human being. His cheeks puffed out like he was storing air in his mouth, and his nose reddened at the top. His jawline was still visible but it was losing the fight as his skin fattened.
He lifted his head and she saw the skin below his chin wobble. The lack of a mask robbed the menace from his face but replaced it with sadness. Heather had the sense that she was staring deep inside him where an endless tunnel ran in darkness.
“See the red lines that run across my Adam’s apple?” he said.
Without the mask, even his voice was different. It was clearer, for one thing. Seeing his lips move made his voice less threatening and more like the whisper of a desperate man. It reminded her of seeing her grandfather an hour before he died. The man had lived a life filled with fists raised to his wife’s face and abuse shouted at the rest of the family. Heather dreaded visiting his house, and plenty of times she had faked stomach aches and sickness to avoid going. Despite a life of temper, an hour before he died the volume of her grandfather’s voice dropped lower than it ever had before, and he whispered tender words to his family.
“Heather. My neck.”
A jagged red line ran across the flappy skin on Charles’s neck. It crossed it, starting at one side, bridging his Adam’s apple, and ended at the other. It looked like a smile had been drawn across his neck, except it had been drawn by a knife.
“Is that - ?”
He nodded.
“There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done already.”
She knew then that she couldn’t kill him. It wasn’t that he was invincible; she didn’t care that his throat had been cut once before, it didn’t mean it couldn’t be done again with a little more determination. It was something inside Heather. She knew that no matter how close she brought the knife to his skin, something would always stop her from making the cut.
She walked out of the room and down stairs. She wanted nothing more than to grab her daughter and give her a hug so fierce that it hurt. After that they’d gather together whatever supplies they could, and then she, Kim and Eric would have to get out of there. Maybe Wes knew somewhere they could go.
She wondered where the kids were. The soldiers were long gone with Heather’s food, and she realised that downstairs had been silent for a long time. She walked through the hallway and into the living room.
“Kim, Eric?” she said.
The living room was empty, and so was the kitchen. It wasn’t a large house, so there were precious few places to hide even if that had been their intention.
“Don’t mess around,” she said.
She walked around the living room and checked behind the arm chairs and couch as if the kids had somehow learned the octopus-like ability to squeeze into small spaces. Movement flickered in the corner of her eye, and through the patio doors she saw two small figures with their backs to her.
At first she wondered what the two of them were doing in the garden. When she realised, her heart froze in her chest. Ice spread over her arms and down her legs, and she was so tense that the slightest movement might shatter her into a thousand pieces. Outside, Kim and Eric stood hand in hand and looked up at the sky. In each of their free hands, they held their masks.
She opened the patio doors with such anger that she thought she might smash them. She stepped out into her garden and saw the mess of splattered mud that had once been her crops. Kim turned round, saw her mother, and opened her mouth.
Heather almost gasped. It was the first time she’d seen her daughter’s bare face outside the house. She never let her take her mask off in open air, and she rarely took it off even indoors. To see her breathing unfiltered air made her feel sick.
“Get your masks on and get inside, now.”
“Don’t worry it’s –” Eric began.
Heather cut off his words by grabbing his neck and throwing him behind her. He shook himself free and, with a reddening face, adjusted his collar. Heather turned back to her daughter. The ice was melting now and the anger was subsiding. Replacing it were stabs of fear that poked up and down her body.
She needed an AVS. She needed to test the air and see if it was infected, but she hadn’t been able to find hers for days. She enforced a mask-indoors policy and always sealed their bedrooms at night as much as she could, so it hadn’t seemed much of a pressing issue. She knew she’d be able to get one from Wes or one of the other traders easily enough. She thought it wasn’t a big deal, but how wrong she was.
The rational part of her mind ran away and hid
while another part flew into crisis mode. The outside of her vision seemed to blur, and thoughts flashed through her brain too fast for her to catch hold of. She made sure Kim and Eric were in the living room and then locked the patio doors. She walked away from them without saying anything, because her throat was so choked that she didn’t think the words would come.
She walked upstairs, each thud getting louder as she brought her feet down on the wood. It was windy outside. That much she’d noticed. That meant the virus could easily have been airborne. It meant that as Kim stood outside and took deep breaths the virus was crawling into her mouth, slivering down her throat and infecting the cells of her body.
Charles greeted her with a nod.
“Have you got an AVS?” said Heather.
“You’re quite safe indoors.”
“Have you got one?”
“In my pocket.” He jerked his head to the side. “I’d get it, but I’m a little tied up. You’re lucky; this is my last one.”
She reached into the bounty hunter’s pocket and took out his AVS. It didn’t alarm her to be so close to him now. As much as she feared him, there was something that scared her even more. Something almost everyone was terrified of these days. What if the air was infected?
She ran down the stairs. When she got into the living room the children turned to look at her, but she had no words for them. Instead she walked outside. The cool breeze flapped at her hair and sent a chill through her. She held the AVS in the air.
Please don’t be infected.
She pressed the button and the green led blinked. The AVS opened and took in air.
Please be clean. Please be clean. I’ll do anything. I’ll give myself up. I’ll let them take me into the Capita dungeons. Just let her be safe and let the air be clean.
The AVS whirred and began to process the air. Time slowed, and it looked like even the birds froze in the sky as the metal gadget in Heather’s hand processed her chances of a happy future. If the air’s infected, then so is she.
It stopped whirring. Heather’s heart thumped against her chest. She put her hand over it. She wanted to close her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t. It felt like the ground was shaking underneath her, and she realised that her legs were shaking.
The AVS lit up. Five red blinks.
She fell backwards into the glass of the patio door, slamming against it so hard that it wobbled. She slid to the floor and sat against it. She brought her head forward and then smashed it back against the glass with a great thumping sound. The patio doors opened and the children came into the garden.
“Oh fuck,” said Heather.
Kim sat next to her mother.
“I just wanted to know what it was like,” she said.
“It’s my fault,” said Eric.
For a second she thought about leaving the boy in her house and fleeing with Kim. It seemed like it would be fitting punishment for what he’d made her daughter do. What was the point in helping people if it made a mess of your own life? It was no coincidence that before the outbreak, people who donated all their money to charities more often than not had lives more messed up than those they were trying to help. It had been stupid of Heather to think she could make a difference.
Minutes later she found herself upstairs and in front of Charles again. His face was free from emotion save the suggestion of a grin on his thin lips. She saw that the skin around his mouth was chapped.
“Is there a cure?” she said.
“You’re wasting time,” said Charles. “You need to leave. My soldiers will look for me.”
“Stop messing about. Has the Capita found a cure?”
Charles rolled his eyes. He looked like he was in a meeting which he found boring, rather than tied to a chair in front of a desperate woman.
“The Capita has borders to guard, Heather. A land to run. People to serve. They don’t have time for a cure.”
She was close to slapping him again.
“Don’t fuck around. Everyone knows the experiments they do. They must have something.”
The bounty hunter looked her up and down, from her feet to her head. Once again she felt like he was peeling away her layers of defence and staring into her secrets and shameful emotions.
“You look fine to me,” he said.
She tasted salt, and she realised that a stray tear had escaped the corner of her eye and trickled down her face and onto her lips.
“It’s Kim, alright? She took off her mask and the air’s full of it.”
Charles closed his eyes. There was a few seconds of silence, and when he opened them again the grin was gone.
“There’s a cure. It’s not palatable to most.”
“They found something and they’re holding it back?”
“You don’t understand, teacher. The people aren’t ready for it.”
She moved closer to him until only a couple of feet separated them. She held the knife in her right hand and pressed it against his cheek. With one slight movement she could pierce his skin, and part of her knew it would feel great.
“Your knife doesn’t scare me.”
She knew the words were true. He may have looked more human without his mask, but she knew there were some emotions that he just did not feel. She threw the knife against the wall on the far side of the room and heard it clatter to the floor.
“Fuck,” she said.
Her chest started to hurt and air felt harder to get. She stared into Charles’s eyes and tried to see the human in him. She tried to do to him what he routinely did to others; she tried to peel back his layers and see him from the inside.
“Just tell me,” she said. “Please. For my daughter.”
He shook his head.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Just tell me.”
She was aware of how strained her voiced was. It was undercut with emotion and it made the sentence sound more like an agonised wail than a collection of words. It must have surprised the bounty hunter too.
“It’s human flesh,” he said.
Silence. She couldn’t even feel the beating of her heart. She was numb.
“What?”
Charles cleared his throat.
“Eating the flesh or drinking the blood of one who is already immune. That’s the only cure.”
“You mean – “
He nodded.
“The mouth-breathers, Heather. Their flesh and blood.”
She felt like her head was swelling with the information fed into it, but at the same time nothing was being retained. She wanted to sink to the floor and close her eyes, but it was only thoughts of Kim slipping into a coma that kept her body from folding in on itself.
“I don’t understand.”
“If someone thinks they have been infected, they can eat the flesh of one who is immune. The DC’s. Mouth-breathers. But they must do it before they enter the virus coma.”
“But some people come out of the coma and find out they’re immune anyway. So you might…eat someone for nothing. I just don’t understand.”
“That’s the price you pay if you want certainty,” said Charles.
She thought about Eric. There was nobody in the world she would protect more than her daughter, and she always told herself she would do anything for her. But what about the boy? He was immune. In his body, somewhere in his flesh or his blood, was the cure. Could she do what she needed to make sure she didn’t lose Kim to the virus?
I’m not a monster. I can’t do it.
Charles was wrong. There had to be another way. What about Wes? Didn’t he say he was trialling a cure for the Capita? Surely it was worth a try. She didn’t know how long it would be before Kim fell into a coma, but she knew she had to go. Heather turned and went to leave the room, when Charles spoke.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I need to leave.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Heather.
“Oh, I think I am.”
She heard the scrape of a chair beh
ind her, and she turned in time to see Charles rise out of his chair. The ropes that tied his arms and legs flopped to the floor.
She looked at the ropes on the floor and wished she had listened more when her father had tried to teach her about knots. She thought about her daughter downstairs and wished that she’d been a better parent.
Charles crossed the room, grabbed her shoulders in a firm grip and before she could move he slammed her into the wall. Pain exploded in her back and she fell to the floor.
“You don’t understand what the Capita will do to you,” said Charles.
