by Lewis, Jack
It was Torben’s.
Chapter 12
The vice around us tightened with the infected on one side, and Torben and his hunters on the other. Without any clear escape and certainly no chance of winning a fight, I was struggling to work out what we could do. I knelt down in front of the shelf and tugged at Justin’s coat. He got to his knees.
Torben turned the corner and entered checkout area of the warehouse. One of the hunters walked next to him, and two others hung behind. From their faces, and their lack of curiosity about the place, I got the impression they’d been here before.
“You reckon they’re still around?” said one of the hunters. It was the driver of the pick-up truck. He was tall and his belly pressed tightly against his shirt and spilt over his belt.
Torben looked down and spat on the floor. “I imagine that on foot and with nothing to eat, they won’t get far. Come on, let’s load up and head out. I want to be back on the road before it gets dark.”
The driver shoved his hands in pockets. On his left arm he had a tattoo sleeve, but I couldn’t make out any other detail of it in the dark other than the fact it covered all of his skin. “Not many shelves left.”
Torben brushed his thumb across his moustache. “Just find one with food and take it all. I don’t want to kick my heels here when I could be out there finding them.”
Listening to Torben talk about us like that made it hard to stay hidden. I’d never let a man make me hide before, and doing it now was like swallowing glass. All things being equal, I could take Torben. That was the problem though; nothing was equal. The gun slung around his neck and the three guys he had with him guaranteed that.
I looked at Justin. “We can’t hang around,” I whispered.
Justin turned away from me and looked back at the shelf. The food crates were twenty feet up at the top. “We’re not going to get another chance like this. Look at it all, it’s enough to last a month.”
“A month of food is no good if we’re going to die in a few minutes. We need to leave.”
Across the warehouse Torben’s footsteps echoed up to the rafters. He coughed, cleared something from his throat and spat again on the floor. He turned to the driver. “They’re still around here, I know it. Lancashire’s a big place, and they won’t have left it yet.”
“What if they don’t want to be found?”
“Just cause someone doesn’t want to be found, doesn’t mean they can’t be. “
He was talking about us, I knew, and he was right. There was no way on earth I wanted him to find us, but then again, that didn’t mean he couldn’t. This was a prime example – here he was, just metres away. We were both here by coincidence and with the same goal, but nonetheless it showed how easy it was to slip up.
Fifty yards behind me, toward the back of the warehouse, I heard the faint cries of the infected. The ones from the yard were piling in now, and it wouldn’t be long before they reached us. With them on one side and the hunters on the other, we didn’t have the luxury of choice or time. We either fought our way out of either side, or we found another way to escape.
I turned back to Justin. “You see any other way out?”
He looked around him, but his gaze drifted back to the food behind us. “No,” he said.
“Forget about the tins,” I said.
In front of us, Torben pulled a torch from his belt and turned it on. The beam of yellow cut through the shadows and moved through the shelves like a search light. The driver walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Torbs,” he said, “It’s been two months. Think we gotta accept that Alicia and Ben are gone. I’m not saying they’re…no longer with us…, but if they’re still breathing then they don’t want to do it around us no more.”
The familiarity of the name ‘Torbs’ as well as the hand on the shoulder told me that these two men were friendly. Yet when Torben turned his face toward the driver’s, there was a definite look of scorn.
“I’m not giving up on my wife and son,” he said.
My head span. The driver mentioned searching for someone for two months. Justin and I only met Torben a day and a half ago, and if he’d been tailing me for a couple of months I’d know about it. Now there was the mention of his wife and kid. What the hell was going on?
Who was Torben looking for? Justin and me, or his wife and son? I hadn’t just imagined him telling me he was going to hunt us.
Either way, I knew that if he saw us, he would kill us. That much was obvious, and I wasn’t staying here to chance it. We were going right now, and no matter how screwed we were by leaving empty-handed, we would deal with the consequences later.
I turned to look at Justin, but I saw that he was gone. I looked back at the shelf with the food on it, and I saw that he was already halfway up. I felt my face start to heat up. He’d done it again; he’d disobeyed me when I specifically told him to do exactly as I said. The kid was a cheeky little bastard and a liability, and I was done with him. I clenched my fist and felt the blood drain out of it.
I was going to have to drag Justin off the shelf and pull him out of the building by his hair. After that, I didn’t know what I would do with him. But I couldn’t trust him to do what I said, and that made him a danger to me. I’d already broken enough of my rules by taking him with me, and now it was time to stop.
As I got to my feet I banged my head straight into the shelf next to me. A metal clang rang out into the acoustics of the warehouse, and I saw Torben’s head snap in my direction. Out of instinct I ducked down. My head stung from where I had hit it, but for the moment my heart was beating so quickly that I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.
Torben flicked his torch in my direction and the beam of light hit my eyes. I squinted and ducked my head.
“Boys,” he said with joy in his voice, “They’re here. The hunt is on!”
There was no point in subtlety now. I ran over to the shelf, not caring about the sound my boots made on the floor. AS I ran I could just about make out the bodies of the infected as they shuffled closer toward us. When I got to the shelf, Justin was already at the top of it.
He looked down at me. “Kyle – heads up.”
Adrenaline shot through my body. Trying to keep track of both the scuffling of the oncoming infected and the scrambling movements of the hunters as they ran toward us fogged my brain, and I couldn’t comprehend what Justin was saying.
“Stop screwing around.” he hissed. “Catch!”
When the crate was halfway through the air my brain cells fired and I realised what he meant – he wanted me to catch the crate of cans that was hurtling down toward me. I took a step back, tensed my muscles and readied myself. As the crate hit my forearms I felt my thigh muscles buckle a little, but I steadied my feet and stood firm. I put the crate down on the floor next to me. My face felt red with the strain, and I realised I was badly out of shape.
“Flank them,” said Torben somewhere behind me. “Trap them in, and if they come at you, don’t kill them.”
The footsteps scattered out from all directions. Although opening the delivery doors had let in a little light, the warehouse was still too dark to make out anything but the most immediate space around me, so I couldn’t see where the hunters were coming from. The only person I was sure of was Torben, and that’s because he had his torch pointed in my direction. Above, on the top shelf, Justin looked down and waited for me to tell him what to do.
I needed to do something. This was no fair fight, and if all four of them managed to corner me then my odds would drop to zero.
I looked to my right. The shelves were all arranged in rows, and they were all so close that if one fell, it was possible the rest could topple. If I could get a domino effect going, maybe I’d get lucky at hit one of the hunters. Maybe this was a ridiculous plan, but in my head I could see the shelves toppling. At the very least, a bunch of giant metal shelves falling in front of them ought to slow them down.
“Hang on,” I s
aid to Justin.
I walked to the row of shelves next to us pushed against it. Although the shelves of this one were empty it was still a twenty-foot high metal construction, and I wasn’t exactly in a peak physical state. It took a lot of straining, but soon I managed to get it moving. As I kept my weight on it and shoved, the shelf started to rock with its own momentum. Soon it tipped so far forward that for a second I thought my plan was going to work.
When it turned the other way and rocked back in my direction, I felt my chest flood with panic. I moved out of the way and watched it fall. It was going to hit Justin’s shelf, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Jump,” I told him.
I was too late. The shelf leaned back like a tower block blasted with a demolition charge and it smashed into Justin’s shelf. Both metal structures made a creaking sound and fell to the floor, spraying metal and loose cans around the warehouse.
“Justin!” I said. I couldn’t see where he had landed.
The hunter’s footsteps were closer now, but I still couldn’t see them. To my left the moans of the dead were getting louder. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Justin’s body, nor could I hear him. This worried me; if he had fallen and hurt himself, I would have heard him shout about it. Injuries meant pain, and pain meant screaming. Screaming meant you were still alive.
Silence could mean anything.
I was about to take off to my left when I heard the stomp of a boot to the right of me. I turned my head and saw a hunter in front of me. He was a giant guy; six foot three, completely bald and he had a butcher’s knife in his hand.
“Got ‘im!” the man shouted.
There were a few acknowledging shouts, and footsteps started in our direction.
He looked at me and a smile spread across his lips. “The man who catches the pig usually gets first choice of cut,” he said.
I thought about reaching for my own knife, but judging from the size of this guy there was no chance of me beating him. I looked over at the collapsed shelves. If Justin was buried underneath them there was no way he’d be coming out of nowhere to help me, like he had back at the barricade. I hoped he wasn’t buried. Wherever he was, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.
As I desperately tried to think up any solution that didn’t result in my complete surrender, an unseen ally came to my rescue. Behind the hunter, the head of an infected appeared, and he had his eyes set on the human flesh in front of him. I could have warned the man, I could have told him what was happening, but I said nothing. The sight of the infected made me instinctively flex my hands, but this time I kept them at my sides.
The infected sank its teeth into the hunter’s shoulders and tore at the skin and flesh that covered his shoulder blade. The man screamed, and blood splashed all over his clothes and onto the floor. He made a sound that was almost a gurgle as the infected dragged a stringy sinew of skin off his back. He turned and tried to fight it, his eyes wide with sheer panic.
This was my only chance. Torben and the others would be here in seconds, and the other infected were closing in. I looked across to my left and saw a sign for a manager’s office. Surely there would be a way out through there?
The only problem was that escaping now meant leaving Justin behind. I still didn’t like the kid, but there was a chance he was still living. And if he was, it meant that he’d feel it when the infected found him and started to tear shreds off him.
I couldn’t abandon him to that.
I sprinted over to the collapsed shelves. My heart juddered like a drill, and the adrenaline shot that had been dumped into my bloodstream was so intense it felt like I was on speed. Just before I reached the shelves I heard a voice above me. I looked up.
In the ceiling, his head poking out through an air vent, was Justin.
I opened my mouth to speak.
“I’ll explain later,” he said, cutting me off. “Meet me out front. And don’t forget the food.”
I found the crate of tins on the floor and heaved it onto my shoulder. My body was so jacked up that I felt like I could have carried six of them. I left the moans of the infected and the cries of the hunters behind and ran toward the manager’s office. As I grabbed the door handle and started to turn, I heard a familiar voice.
“Didn’t expect this to be over so soon,” he said.
I span round and saw Torben stood there, his gun pointed at my chest. Behind him was the body of the giant hunter who I had let get attacked by the infected. The monster that had bitten his shoulder was dead, its head completely crushed, but two other infected had taken its place and they dug through the hunter’s stomach with their hands and shovelled parts of him into their mouths.
Torben stood in as casual a posture as you could imagine, oblivious to sounds of the monsters eating his friend and the danger of the other infected that moved through the darkness.
“How about we pause the game,” I said, knowing I didn’t have many options open to me but to buy a little time.
Torben raised his rifle at my face. He was fifteen feet away, and something told me that there was no chance he’d miss.
“I think not. I promised I’d hunt you down, and I’ve done it. I hope the boy isn’t dead yet though; he looked like he had potential.”
He moved his finger to the trigger and was about to pull it, when the driver ran up to him. His shoulders were tight and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Torbs – we gotta get out. Mick and Bailey are dead, and there’s about forty of the fuckers coming in.”
This was my chance to leave. The manager’s office was behind me, and through it there had to be an escape. As I was about to turn I heard a gunshot and felt the impact of something hit the front of me, knocking the wind out of me. I dropped the crate of cans to the floor. I couldn’t breathe, and for a second, I couldn’t even think. I’d been hit. This was it.
Only, I wasn’t dead yet. And while I was still living, I wouldn’t let him get back. I turned and stumbled into the office, slamming the door behind me. From the warehouse I heard the cries of the infected and Torben’s gun fired again, but this time it wasn’t in my direction.
In the manager’s office I stopped to catch my breath. I looked down at my chest and expected some gaping hole from the gun shot. Instead, I saw red spaghetti stains splotched down my shirt. Torben’s bullet had hit the food crate.
I let out a long sigh, and then collected myself.
I followed a series of doors that took me out of the manager’s office, and sure enough they led me out of the warehouse. When I got outside and the sunlight hit my eyes I felt a wave of relief. I squinted and let my eyes adjust to the sun shine.
“Kyle!”
I looked up. Justin was perched above me on a ledge about thirty feet in the air. His eyes were wide, and he shook slightly as he stared at the ground.
“Get down, we need to move,” I said.
He held the ledge tightly. “I can’t do it,” he said.
I didn’t have time for this. Right now, the hunters were occupied by the infected. This was the best chance we would have to get out of here.
“Kid, get the fuck down or I’ll leave you. That’s your choice – jump or die.” I turned my back on him and started to move away from the warehouse, my pulse racing and my lungs struggling to take in enough air. I had to get away.
I heard Justin let out a cry behind me, and then there was a thud as he hit the floor. He screamed. I snapped round, and saw him on the floor.
He led on the floor like an injured footballer, clutching his ankle and groaning.
“Can you walk?” I said.
He put his hand on the floor and tried to move his weight onto it. I walked over, put my hand under his armpit and pulled him up. He tried to take a few steps on his hurt ankle, but he winced with each one.
“Think I’ve done it in,” he said.
I looked at Justin nursing his ankle and I wondered if things could get any worse. The hunters knew exactl
y where we were, we were leaving without any food and after his injury Justin was going to slow us down even more.
The world had it in for me.
Chapter 13
Waves rippled out from one end of the reservoir to the other. The water beneath was murky and gave no clue as to the depths it held, and the darkness inside it seemed to hold the promise of dark secrets. I wouldn’t have liked to swim in there.
The path to David’s ran alongside the reservoir and span out into a country side full of knobbly hills and, further on, patches of forest. This particular route had once been used by seventeenth century merchants who shipped wool across Lancashire, and years ago, Clara and I had walked it on sunny Sundays afternoons when we wanted to get out of the house.
