by Jack Lewis
His voice had become menacing again. It boomed throughout the room. His skin was red now, flushed with anger so tremendous it seemed to shake the walls.
“You’ll die in the dungeons,” he said. “Your death will take weeks. Your daughter won’t be so lucky. She’ll wither away her last months on the farms. They’ll drain her blood and cut the flesh from her body, but she’ll live. They’ll keep her alive as long as her little body keeps giving. She’ll die so that the Capita infected can live.”
Charles reached to the floor and picked up his pickaxe, and it seemed as though he found it as light as a twig. He lifted it in the air.
Eric appeared in the doorway. Without a second for pause he launched himself at Charles. Heather saw the glint of a screwdriver in his hand, and then she saw it pierce a hole in the bounty hunter’s arm. There was a thud he as dropped his pickaxe, and Heather thought the floor might collapse under the weight.
She got to her feet. The knife was too far away, and her shoulder ached. She could taste the metallic tint of blood in her mouth.
Eric pulled way the screwdriver. He plunged it back into the bounty hunter’s arm again and again, and blood spurted over the carpet and walls, making them look like the victims of a paint fight. Eric brought the screwdriver back and went to stab Charles again, when the bounty hunter threw a hand out and pushed him away. The force of it was so strong that Eric staggered back and almost fell to the floor.
Charles picked up the axe with his good arm. There was a moment when Heather thought he might start swinging wildly at them and turn the room into a bloodbath, but instead he grabbed his mask and then stormed out of the room, went down the stairs and out of the house.
16
Heather
When Heather was growing up she felt like stupid things could protect her. Tapping five times on her bedroom wall before getting in bed. Carrying the same coin in her pocket every day. Blinking in even numbers, counting back from ten while brushing each tooth in her mouth. Twisting a key in a lock back and forth, counting each turn until the number felt right.
When she was thirteen she saw it for what it was. She’d just finished football practice. She waited on the curb of the street, despite the fact that the road was clear, counting back from twenty before she could cross. When she hit zero she stepped off the curb, and there was a squeal as the driver of the car that had just turned the corner hit his brakes. He slowed as much as he could from thirty miles an hour but he couldn’t avoid the girl who had stepped in front of him. Heather spent the summer at home with her legs in plaster. Her football skills waned, but so did her belief in an elusive thing like luck.
She wished she could believe in such protections now. No matter how agonising it was to know that you needed to leave a room yet couldn’t because you needed to tap the wall sixty times, it was much scarier to have nothing. She was a woman with two kids in her care. One, her most precious, might be sick, and the other was being hunted by the Capita. No, she corrected herself, we’re all hunted now.
The smell of food hung in the air as she crossed into the trader district. From a house a few streets down she saw wispy smoke drift from a chimney. A few days ago she had watched as a horse and cart carried Capita soldiers down this street. She could only hope that there wasn’t a repeat today.
She squeezed Kim’s hand and her daughter did the same. She gripped it again, and in her head she had counted three.
“What are you doing, mum?”
I’m not going back there, she thought. Those things didn’t protect you.
Wes’s house was ahead of them. On the front of the house was a sign that proclaimed the house to be named “Brown Elm”, thought she knew the sign had not come with the building. Instead it was an addition that played to Wes’s vanity. Whenever she saw his house she always had the urge to turn back, but not today. There was nothing that could keep her away today.
She thought about the room with the beds. She remembered the dread that crept across her chest as she heard bare feet pad across the floor and saw a black mass move toward her. Wes said he was taking money to help the Capita with their trials of a cure. She hoped that their new cure, whatever it was, worked and didn’t involve ingesting flesh.
As she got closer to Wes’s house the aroma of food was overpowered by the nostril-tingling smell of fire. Black smoke rose above the roof, but she knew his house wasn’t on fire. It seemed like it came from behind it.
“Will I be infected, mum?” said Kim.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She glanced at her daughter’s face. It was only a brief look, because she didn’t dare risk more. Kim’s skin looked tired. It looked as if the colour was draining out of it. The skin around her eyes sagged so heavy it seemed like something was pulling it down. She hadn’t seen her daughter like this since she caught a bug and spent six days in bed with a bucket next to her. Kim had paced the floors worrying that her daughter had somehow caught the infection, even though she knew it was unlikely.
The house had been emptied. Marks on the floorboards showed where Wes’s desk had once rested. The book case was replaced by bare wall, and the chairs that was lined the side of the room had vanished. Near the door were sprinklings of smashed glass, as though Wes had left in a hurry, dropped something and not bothered to clear it up. Heather went to test the door at the other side of the room when she heard a thud behind her.
“Kim,” said Eric, and scampered across the room.
Kim had dropped to the floor with her legs splayed underneath her. Sweat dripped across her forehead and her skin had lost any trace of colour.
“Mum?” she choked out.
Eric took off his coat, lifted Kim’s head and wedged it underneath. Kim leaned her head back and made a gasping sound that tore at Heather’s ears. It was a sound that every mother feared; it was hard wired into any parent to be scared of the sounds your child made when they were in pain. It made her want to do something, but at the same time it stuck her to the ground in fear. As Heather looked on, Kim’s eyes rolled back until only the whites showed.
She knew what this meant, of course, because they were told about it on the news when the outbreak was young. Heather knew what to expect, but she didn’t know what to do. It didn’t matter what the white-teethed, overly-positive newscasters had said. When someone fell into a virus coma you expected them to wake as a monster.
She couldn’t waste time being upset. In a crisis the minutes were precious and if she wasted them on tears, then she would be throwing away hope. She walked across the room and stood in front of the door where she had once hidden. She put her hand on the door handle.
What was she going to find behind the door? A row of beds with people in them? Would they be dead this time? Maybe the cure didn’t work and she’d open the door to find a room full of infected. Come on, Heather.
She gripped the door handle so hard she felt the metal dig in to her skin. With a beating heart she twisted, and as the handle turned the door was opened from the other side with such force that Heather almost spilled over the doorframe. Wes stood in front of her.
Instead of his usual suit and jogging bottoms he wore stonewash jeans stained with dirt, and a t-shirt with more holes than fabric. His hair was combed down to his forehead and covered in grease. He looked like Wes’s slobbier brother.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said.
“What’s the smoke out back?” asked Heather.
“The Capita have turned up the heat, so I turned it up even more. Everything that could get me into trouble is in a heap of ash in the yard. It hasn’t left me with a great deal of stuff.”
“There’s nothing here, Wes,” she said.
“Like I said. It’s all ash.”
Wes moved to get passed her. Heather stepped out of his way and then followed him into the main room. Wes stopped when he saw Kim on the floor in the middle of the floor. He put his hand to his forehead.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“What about your deal with the Capita?” said Heather. “You were testing a cure for them. I need to know about it.”
He walked closer to Kim until he was stood above her. He shook his head.
“A deal with the Capita is a flame flickering in front of an arse that’s just farted. And you never know when the next gust is coming.”
“What about the cure?”
“There’s no cure, Heather.”
She felt acid rise from her stomach.
“You told me about the trial.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The acid started to burn. It slid up her chest and into her throat. She felt her body heat up and her hands became tense. She felt like steam was rising off her.
“I saw them,” she said, every word coming from between gritted teeth. “The people. The beds.”
“You’re getting into things you know nothing about.”
She looked at her daughter on the floor. She thought about what Charles had said about the cure. The boy could have cured her, but Heather couldn’t do it. The fact she couldn’t bring herself to sacrifice a person who until a week ago had been a stranger, shamed her. Kim was flesh and blood but the boy was nobody.
Yet this nobody sat next to her daughter. He looked at her with concerned puppy eyes, dabbing sweat away from her forehead with the palm of his hand. She was wrong to blame him, she knew. It was her own fault, all of it. She was the parent. She should have made sure Kim never took off her mask. She should have had the thing stitched into her skin, if that’s what it took.
“Listen Heather, you need to go,” said Wes.
She felt the heat in her reaching a temperature so hot she was likely to melt unless she released it. Here she was, more desperate than she’d ever been in her life, with a daughter on the verge of becoming a monster, and this pathetic trader wouldn’t tell her about the cure. Who did he think he was to play with Kim’s life?
She punched him in the stomach. It felt good as her fist sunk into the rolls of fat on his belly, and it felt better when the trader bent over and coughed, flecks of his spit flying from his lips and hitting the floor. She realised that he didn’t smell of aftershave today; he smelled like sweat.
After seconds of coughing he straightened up. There was saliva around his chin.
“You stupid bitch. It wasn’t a cure that I was trialling. Can’t you read between the lines? Don’t you know how the world works now?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Capita isn’t trying to find a cure. They already have one.” He pointed at Eric, who looked up in alarm. “I’m assuming that’s the mouth-breather? There’s your cure. Do you know what the farms are?”
“I’m beginning to piece it together.”
Wes sneered. “They sure as hell aren’t farming potatoes there. They farm people, Heather. The DC’s. The Capita collects them and feeds them. They keep them alive and then they bleed them or cut away their flesh.”
She felt sick.
“This is too much.”
Wes seemed to be on a roll. It was like he’d held in his secrets for so long that he couldn’t stop them from spilling out.
“The Capita didn’t pay me to find a cure. They pay me to house the infected and see if they turn. The ones who turn, I burn. The ones who don’t, I sell.”
She thought back to when she had hidden in the room. She remembered the figure stopping feet away from her and speaking to her. The person that asked ‘where am I?’ had obviously been infected, and they had woken up immune. Where were they now? Had Wes taken the Capita’s credits and sent them to the farms?
What about Kim? Now that a cure wasn’t an option, the only thing she could do was wait. It would be a long, agonising one. What if Kim woke up and was immune? Would Wes’s conscience allow him to sell even Kim’s daughter? She looked at the trader and tasted bile in her mouth.
She threw herself on him. Despite being lighter than him, she was able to get him to the floor. She put her knees on his arms and, satisfied that he couldn’t move, made a fist and pounded it again and again into his face. Anger burnt through her as she watched his nose squash and as she felt his thick blood splatter back on her own face. She thought of all the people Wes has sent to their slow deaths and she felt a rage fill her so completely that she could hardly breathe.
She felt arms drag her back, and when the fog of anger cleared she realised that Eric had pulled her away. Wes lay on the floor and resembled a pulverised piece of meat except for the rise and fall of his chest.
She didn’t care what happened to her anymore. She didn’t care if she spent the rest of her life in the Capita dungeons. She was going to do something. Once Kim was better – she will get through this – she was going to stop the Capita. She didn’t know how, but that was just a detail.
“I need to find the farm,” she said. “And the Resistance.”
The trader didn’t speak. Air left his nostril, mixed with blood, and formed a bubble. When it popped, Heather felt sick. She wondered if she had knocked him out. She moved closer to him, but she heard his raspy breaths speed up the closer she got. She realised that he was scared of her, and looking at his mince-meat face she could understand why.
“They have someone on the inside,” said Wes, voice weak. “Someone working for the Capita. Someone close enough to learn things.”
“Who?”
The trader didn’t speak. All Heather needed was a name. From there she could make contact. She could learn about their fight and what her part in it could be. There was nothing they could do to her, she realised. Though they might put her body in a prison, but there was no dungeon they could keep her mind.
“Damn it Wes, give me a name.”
He turned his head to look at her. His face was already beginning to swell and his eyes looked pathetic. She thought of the people in the beds and felt her empathy for the trader melt away. Wes opened his mouth. Just a name, she thought. That’s all I need.
When he spoke, he didn’t give a name. Instead his face took on a look of defeat.
“I don’t know,” he said.
17
Ed
Ed was back in his house, hearing the wind whistle through the cavities. They were in his dad’s old bedroom this time, one of only a handful of times Ed had been in it since he’d died. Bethelyn stood at the window and stared out onto a Golgoth covered by darkness. Ed opened the drawers of his father’s bedside cabinet. He didn’t know what he was looking for; it was just the first time he’d had the courage to spend more than a few seconds in there. It only seemed right that he look at his dad’s things and maybe find a memento to remember the old man by. When he saw what was in the drawer, he laughed.
“What’s so funny?” said Bethelyn.
Ed reached into the drawer and pulled out two candles.
Bethelyn shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s an inside joke. Never mind.”
“Guess we can have some light in here, at least.”
Ed shook his head. “We can’t light them. They might see.”
Bethelyn turned away from him and stared out of the window again.
“Did you just sit in the dark eating cold food before you met me?” she said.
“You make it seem depressing.”
“I’m sure it’s way more fun than it sounds.”
In the distance, toward the village centre near the town hall, was the orange glow of lamps. In the darkness they couldn’t see the figures of those who carried the lamps, so it seemed like a parade of ghosts lit their way across the village.
“Who are they?” said Ed. The strangers had diverted the attention of the infected, but Ed and Bethelyn hadn’t stayed around long enough to find out who they were.
“Never seen them before in my life.”
Golgoth looked so quiet that it seemed only right that they whisper even indoors. It seemed like the whole island was under a spell of silence and that unt
old horror would be visited upon anyone who broke it. In reality, Ed knew that if he stepped outside now he’d hear the crashing of the tide as it beat against the island and the groaning of the wind.
“I knew I saw a ship out there,” he said.
“Maybe we should go speak to them.”
Bethelyn’s voice was monotone, as though minute by minute her energy was leaving her. She looked away from Ed now, but for the last few hours it seemed that even when her face pointed at his, her eyes looked straight through him.
“They aren’t friendly,” said Ed.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
He thought of the masked men. Their appearance on the island had given Ed and Bethelyn a chance to escape, but something told Ed that they needed to run away from the strangers just as much as the infected. Seeing them had confirmed one thing to him though. Their masks were a nod of approval toward his theory about the virus.
