The Dying & The Dead (Book1): The Dying & The Dead

by Jack Lewis

  Once the girl was dead the soldiers steered the flock of infected down the streets. They went from door to door and barged their way in. Heather knew that the residents of the trader estate weren’t the focus of Charles’s search. He was looking for her, and he wouldn’t have long to wait.

  19

  Ed

  In the morning Ed felt a sense of shame that he used to associate with waking up with a hangover. As the light outside the window fought its way through the stubborn Golgoth sky, Ed knew his head was clear. He didn’t have the throbbing temples of a hangover nor the blanks in his mind where his memory had been sucked into a black hole.

  From his spot on the floor he could see Bethelyn’s form in the bed, and he felt the shame wash over him. He replayed what he had told her the night before, and he could say it word for word in his head. He’d told her how he’d felt about everything. First about his brother, and then about his father. He’d let the whole mess spill out, and Bethelyn, a woman who had lost her girl hours before, had been more than happy to help clear it up.

  He shook his head. Why should he feel like this? Why should he be the person who never had anyone to talk to? His dad had never shown his feelings toward him, and he’d always made James and Ed feel weird whenever they did so. Year by year Ed learnt that feelings started in your mind and that’s where they were best kept. The thing was, shame or no shame, he felt lighter. He had the strange feeling that for the first time in his adult life he’d had a real conversation with another person.

  He stretched out his legs and felt his knees crack. The room stank of sweat, and Ed came to the realisation that he hadn’t been to the toilet in over twelve hours. Not that it mattered; it was just strange how your body clock could be put on stop when it looked like you could die.

  He walked to the window to let some air in, but as he reached for the latch he saw movement. He pushed the window open slowly and felt a gust of air smooth his rough skin. He watched as a figure ran down the street near his house. It was a man sprinting down the sloping hill, arms flailing and legs galloping at a speed that could rival a racehorse. As the person got closer, he realised that it was Gary.

  The bedsprings groaned as Bethelyn sat up.

  “Come look at this,” said Ed.

  As Bethelyn got out of bed, Ed turned his attention back to Gary. As soon as he reached the road outside Ed’s house, he fell face-first into the ground without even putting his arms out to stop himself. There was a second where Ed’s brain registered the movement as a simple trip, but then he realised he was wrong. Gary’s mouth was wide open as if in mid-scream, and there was a spear sticking out from his back.

  More figures emerged at the top of the street and began to make their way toward Gary. There were eight of them. All of them wore masks on their faces and thick fur-lined coats that reached down to their boots. It looked like the coats had been taken from the pelts of animals that the strangers had hunted, but for all Ed knew they may have simply raided a clothing store on the mainland. He assumed that was where they were from. There were other islands, thousands of miles across the sea, but it seemed more logical that these men and women were from across the channel.

  One man walked in front of them all. A good foot taller than the rest and with a thicker coat, he walked with the ease of a man on a sunny afternoon stroll. Though he couldn’t see his face properly, Ed could almost imagine him whistling to himself as he took in the view of Golgoth.

  The rest of them lifted their feet in uniform steps that reminded Ed of a military unit marching in a parade. As they went by Gordon Rigby’s house an infected sprang from behind a bush, arms raised. The leader of the strangers spread his right hand and grabbed the monster by the forehead. It looked like he was going to crush its skull between his fingers, but instead he pushed it away. Another of the strangers stepped forward with his knife and dispatched the creature.

  The leader stopped outside Ed’s house. He stood over Gary’s body and took hold of the spear that stuck out of his back. He put his boot on Gary’s calf and pulled, and Ed saw a spray of blood as the spear left his back.

  Ed moved away from the window and to the side so that he could see what was happening outside without being spotted. Bethelyn lifted herself off the bed, but Ed raised a hand in the air. With the window open, Ed could just about hear the conversation outside.

  “Do you think this will work, Savage?” said one of them, looking at the leader.

  The Savage wiped his spear on his pants.

  “We’ve seen it plenty of times before.”

  “I know but it’s been so long since he got bit.”

  “We have to try.”

  “We might not have got to him in time.”

  The Savage put his spear behind his neck and then rested the crook of his elbows on it. In a way he reminded him of James and the way he used to lean his cricket bat behind his head during the games they played in summer. James had never been a serious sportsman and found it hard to get emotionally invested in the game, and most people on the island saw him as easy going. Ed knew different. He’d catch glimpses of his brother’s face when the cheeky expression dropped, like the fall of an actor’s face when the camera left him.

  “We’ll know soon enough.” The Savage nodded at Gary’s lifeless body. “Was this one definitely immune?”

  “You saw him, Savage. Guy was running like a girl. He hadn’t turned.”

  The Savage turned around and made a beckoning gesture to his people. Two of them carried another man between them and laid him at their leader’s feet. This one was dressed like the others, but his long grey hair marked him as much older. He had the skin of a fisherman who had spent years at sea with salt water lashing at his face. His eyes were weak, the pupils so diluted it looked like the whites were going to swallow them.

  The Savage bent to his knees beside Gary’s body. He turned him over, and for a few seconds gazed into Gary’s dead eyes as though communicating telepathically. He took a knife out of the inside of his coat, and without a pause began to saw off Gary’s right arm. Ed looked away to spare himself the sight of it, though he wished he’d had enough warning to miss the knife slicing into skin.

  When he looked back he saw that The Savage cradled a piece of flesh in his hands. Blood trickled over his fingers and ran down his arm, where it disappeared under the sleeve of his coat. The flesh looked soft, almost like jelly, and Ed was surprised how much like beef it seemed.

  The Savage bent next to the grey haired man. He put one hand on the man’s leg, and with the other hand offered the meat to him.

  “Open your mouth.”

  The man chewed Gary’s flesh, his face turning into a grimace with the gnashing of his teeth. The Savage watched in silence, while some of the other strangers began to hum a tune. It sounded like some sort of old sailing song, the kind Ed expected fishermen to sing in a storm. As the old man ate Gary’s arm and the strangers, in their masks and fur coats, sang wordlessly, Ed felt like he’d been sent back in time. It felt like he’d fallen into a portal and in a dizzying few minutes had seen the centuries rewound.

  The grey haired man brought his hands to his eyes. Seeing that they were covered in blood, he started to cry as if the realisation of what his meal was had just hit him.

  “You know it was the only way,” said The Savage.

  Ed had been so mesmerised by the scene that he forgot Bethelyn was watching too. He almost gasped at how white her skin was.

  “Shut the window,” she said. “Please.”

  “What the fuck did we just see?” said Ed.

  Bethelyn interlocked her fingers behind her head. Her eyes stared out of the window but it didn’t seem like she focused on anything.

  “I mean,” said Ed. “He just ate part of Gary. Sliced off some of his arm and fed it to his friend.”

  “He was sick,” said Bethelyn.

  “What?”

  “The old man was sick. Don’t you get it, Ed? They were talking about people being immune
. We’re all immune.”

  “Give me some credit. I had that much figured by now.”

  Bethelyn looked angry. “How are you not getting this? The man out there was sick. Gary was immune. They made the man eat part of Gary.”

  The clues came together so suddenly they knocked the breath out of him. Two days ago he had never even come into contact with the infection. Now, most of the residents were infected and a group of strangers were eating the ones who had survived. He realised why, though it didn’t make him feel better. The strangers weren’t cannibals. If they were, they would all have eaten Gary. They’d have had themselves a good old feast. Instead, only the sick old man had tasted flesh.

  “They made him eat the immune to stop his own infection,” said Ed.

  Bethelyn nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense, screwed up as it is.”

  Ed was stuck so fast in a quagmire of thoughts that he didn’t realise he had moved into full view of the window. He looked down at the street again and almost collapsed to the floor. The strangers were still on the street below, but they weren’t singing and we’re focused on the old man. Now they all stared back at Ed.

  ***

  The run to the harbour was a short one but it meant a descent down a hill made slippy by days of rain. Ed imagined that he heard shouting behind them as the strangers pursued them, but he knew this it was probably his panicked mind. By the time they reached the bottom of the hill, though, he knew the shouts were real.

  The harbour was in front of them but it didn’t offer any promise of escape. Instead Ed felt the breath leave his chest as he looked at the boats tethered to the dock. All of them still floated on the water, but it was clear that inch by inch they were sinking into the sea. One, a leisure yacht called the Claret Princess, had a hole in the hull which looked like the work of an axe.

  “Someone did this on purpose,” said Bethelyn.

  “No prizes for guessing who.”

  As if summoned, the strangers appeared at the top of the hill. They looked like natives seeing off a raiding party, and Ed had to remind himself that they were the strangers on the island, not him. Yet it was him being chased off it and away from his home. The Savage stood in the middle of the group and leant on his spear. He could have been a golfer surveying the range of a course.

  “What now?” said Bethelyn.

  The Savage shouted into the air. Perhaps he had meant it to be a menacing cry of war, but instead his delivery was too high pitched and the sound didn’t scare Ed. It was only when the strangers began to clamber down the hill that he felt adrenaline run through him.

  The boats were ruined, and the strangers were running down the slope that was the only way back to the island. Ed realised that their already limited options had narrowed to a single choice. He reached grabbed Bethelyn’s hand. She seemed surprised at first, as if not expecting the contact.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He looked ahead of him, all the way across the wooden planks of the harbour to where the wood met the lapping sea. The boats were gone, but the sea remained their only escape. He knew they wouldn’t be able to stay in it too long in the cold climate, but there wasn’t a choice.

  Together they sprinted across the pier. As they approached the end of the small boardwalk they lifted their legs in unison and jumped into the freezing sea. Mid jump, like the freeze frame in a movie, Ed realised how close to death they were. As his legs crashed into the icy sea and the cold slid up his skin, he kept a tight grip on Bethelyn’s hand.

  20

  Heather

  It wasn’t hard for them to sneak out of Wes’s house. A medley of voices drowned the silences that might otherwise have betrayed them. Men and women screamed out in fear of the infected. The Capita soldiers issued commands filled with curses. The groans of the monsters travelled with the wind.

  For Heather it was an echo of the last weeks before the outbreak. Until then people had clung on to their routine. Some people still dressed in the mornings and went to their jobs, and others continued to save their money in the naïve idea that they’d ever have a use for it again. Restaurants kept their doors open with whatever skeleton staff they could find. Bus drivers wedged themselves into their seats, post men shouldered sacks off mail and everyone wore painted smiles. Then, like scissors snapping a thread, the whole thing broke.

  The newscasts gave their final broadcasts and then shut down. The government airdropped millions of masks. People ventured out less and stayed at home more, but those that did go outside found themselves trapped in a cyclone of violence and looting. There was widespread abandon as people realised that laws were a forgotten concept. Some, their minds clinging to the idea of a government conspiracy, wandered the streets with their mouths and noses unmasked. There were shouts, screams, cries. An orchestra of human emotion played all around them, and it got so bad that the idea of walking the streets made Heather lose her breath. In the last few days, she locked her doors and closed the blinds on her windows. Cut forward just a month, and the streets were empty.

  A Capita soldier shouted for someone to stop, but Heather didn’t see anyone nearby. She put her arm around Kim and supported her daughter onto the street. Eric looked around him, so on edge that he was like a fly buzzing in the breeze. Wes followed them like a ghost, with one hand tucked in his pocket gripping his gun.

  “If we’re quiet, we can slip through the streets,” said Heather.

  “Where are we going?” said Eric.

  They moved east away from Wes’s house now, along a street that had four semi-detached houses with big spaces out front, some of them still home to family hatchback cars that hadn’t been driven in years.

  Heather held her daughter close to her. Kim could just about walk by herself, but she felt as frail as a leaf at the end of autumn where even the slightest motion could make her flake away into dust.

  “We just need to get off the estate, that’s all I can think about right now. Where is a big question, and I don’t have the stomach for it.”

  It wasn’t a big estate. Years back it had been the type of place where ten-child families lived, the parents paying rent by filling out a form at the benefits office every Wednesday. It was the kind of the estate that was spatially small but made even smaller by how everyone knew each other’s names. Those days were long in the past now, and most people stayed nameless to each other.

  It wouldn’t take them long to leave. If they were sure-footed and walked close to the buildings they should have been able to slip the eyes of the Capita soldiers and their chained infected. Charles was somewhere, on his horse, but even he couldn’t see though walls.

  They carried on along the street. Next to one stretch of pavement, a metre away from a drain by the roadside, were the rusted remains of a pram. The black mesh was torn and twisted wires stuck out. It was like a ribcage smashed open from the inside. Drips of rain ran off it and soaked into the fabric where once, a baby would have slept.

  Kim slumped against Heather. Eric joined at her side, lifted her arm and hooked it around his neck. Together he and Heather carried Kim away, though the differences in their heights meant Kim was slightly off balance.

  “Not far now,” said Heather.

  The groans and shouts became something they were accustomed to, as if they were part of the background noise that a person should expect to hear every day. Heather even began to feel the rushing of her pulse slow into a smooth flow. It was short-lived. When she heard the barking of the dogs, it accelerated again, and the pounding of her heart became so hard she could hear it. Wes turned his head.

  “Sounds like a pack,” he said.

  Heather adjusted Kim so that she leant more easily against her.

  “I saw a stray in Cresstone,” she said. “They’re getting angrier every day. Thought it might attack me.”

  “These aren’t strays. They’re Capita dogs.”

  Wes ran his hands through his hair as if it gave him comfort. Then he took his gun out of h
is pocket and gripped it as a good luck charm. The paint of the barrel had worn away and a slice of duct tape stuck around the handle was the only thing stopping it falling apart.

  “Oh shit. Oh fuck,” he said.

  He looked like he might tear his hair out. The person she used to know, so calm and collected behind his desk, was gone, replaced by a beaten excuse of a man who had bitten his nails to the skin and gripped his gun so tight his knuckles were white.

  “What are you so worried about? You sell to them, don’t you?”

  He scoffed. “Think how it looks, helping a woman sneak away two DC kids.”