by Casey, Ryan
This man had something on them.
Hayden didn’t want to know what.
He held a hand out and it took a few seconds for Hayden to realise he was offering it to shake. “Callum Hessenthaler,” he said.
Hayden didn’t want to take his hand, but he had to. He had to play it cool if he wanted any chance of his sister surviving. He wondered where she was. How she was. He hoped to God she was okay.
He took Callum’s hand and shook. There was no strength to his grip, and his palm felt as greasy as an eel’s back. Callum fast pulled it away, and shook Manish’s hand.
He didn’t even look at Sarah.
“So, go on then,” Callum said, like a bemused teacher waiting to hear why one kid had another in a headlock. “What happened with Dave?”
It was a direct question that Hayden wasn’t expecting. “We … I didn’t mean to—”
“Just tell me. Straight up. No time for nonsense in this world.”
Again, the directness of the guy startled Hayden. He’d been expecting a boss of this place to be full of grandiose speeches about why it was safe, why it was the place to be, that kind of thing. But Callum was direct. Straight up. A man who seemingly practiced what he preached.
Hayden replayed the events as he remembered them. “I … We went into the cottage to find some food. We just needed a vehicle. But we were heading here. We were heading to this place. We heard the transmission and … and Newbie wondered if maybe his kid was here.” Hayden wanted to spill everything out at once. Newbie’s death. The standoff at the cottage. Clarice being shot.
But then Callum interrupted.
“I’m assuming Newbie isn’t with you anymore?”
Hayden thought back to the sight of Newbie’s body sprawled out on the driveway outside his house. He shook his head. “No, he—”
“Surname?”
“Erm … Pearce. I think. His wife left a note. A note saying they were heading here. His … his daughter was called Amy.”
It struck Hayden then how strange it was that this place should be so quiet, so empty, if people had actually left for it. Had people just not made it here? Surely some people had made it, beyond the gun-toting nutters who he’d seen up to now?
Callum half-smiled. His lips were dry and cracked. “I can investigate into that for you.”
He walked back around the desk and pulled out his chair.
“Where … where is everyone around here?” Hayden asked. “Families, and …?”
Callum picked up his pen and clicked the top of it again. He looked up at Hayden as if he’d only half heard him.
But there was a new kind of look on his face this time.
A different kind of twinkle to his eyes.
“Ally, Gav, why don’t you show them where the families around here are?” he said. He opened his drawer and threw a key to Ally.
Ally sniggered. The guard called Gav let out a little laugh. Sammy’s cheeks went redder. Something was wrong. This whole exchange was just wrong.
“I need to see my sister,” Hayden said.
And then he felt the gun against his back again. He felt Ally grab hold of him, drag him back.
Callum smiled. “Oh you will. She’ll be just fine here. Promise.”
And then he looked at Sarah and Sammy.
“You two stay. I want a word with you, Sam. And with this new girl here.”
“She comes with us,” Hayden said, struggling.
“Why?” Callum asked. His eyes split through Hayden. “Do you know her or something? I’ll take the expression on your face as a ‘yes’.”
Fuck. He didn’t want to give that one away. And by the way Ally whooped, he’d really dropped himself—and Sarah—into it even more.
“Got an extra one of your lot!” he said, as he dragged Hayden back, his grip sending stinging pains right through his arms. “Even better.”
Hayden tried to fight back, tried to shout out, but before he knew it he had a damp-tasting gag around his mouth and all he could do was mumble.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Callum said, as Gav and Ally dragged Manish and him further away. “We’re going to take extra special care of your sister. I promise you that.”
Hayden saw the fear on Sammy’s face as she looked back at him.
He saw Sarah getting further away.
And then he turned the stairs and he saw nothing but the grey concrete walls again.
But as he struggled and shook to get from out of Ally’s grip, it was the look on Sammy’s face when Callum mentioned Hayden’s sister that terrified him the most.
A look of pure, pale-faced dread.
Twenty-Six
Callum Hessenthaler had been hoping for a good session on his work-in-progress before that goon Ally Chester came storming in.
He was working on a non-fiction book. Well, partly non-fiction: there were elements of it that were fictional too. It was about a fictional man’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world, and how society reacts to the challenges it has posed to it.
But the experiences he documented were real. Very real.
He just had to hope his pad didn’t get damaged anytime soon.
And now Sammy Harrison and some other new woman were in his office area. He could smell the sweat coming off both of them and it was disgusting. They needed a wash. A proper shower.
They had a duty. A role to fulfill. They couldn’t fulfill that role smelling like this.
“Sammy, what happened back there? At the cottage?”
Sammy tilted her head in that pathetic way she always did. The way she’d done when she first got here, when they found her out in the open wandering through the streets with her two children. The streets Callum’s people had saved her from.
Ungrateful behaviour she’d displayed since, really. Not the kind of behaviour you expect from someone in her position.
“I … I tried to stop him but it was just—”
“You didn’t try hard enough,” Callum said. He got up from the leather office chair. Walked over to Sammy, keeping a smile on his face regardless of the bubbling frustration within. The other woman—the gagged woman with the bruised eye and the brown hair—was completely quiet. Callum could see the fear drifting into her face. It wasn’t ideal. He didn’t want people to fear him.
He just wanted people to understand him.
Or specifically, he wanted women to understand him.
He stopped opposite Sammy. Reached for her chin and lifted her head. She was tall. Or at least, as tall as him, which admittedly wasn’t all that tall after all.
He looked into her crystal-like eyes and he saw nothing but misery, nothing but fear. “Do you want to see your children again? Your Renate and your Sebastian?”
Her eyes lit up with hope. That was nice. Hope was nice. Everyone needed a little hope in this world.
“Then turn around. Look over by the stairs. Look who’s coming to see you.”
Sammy frowned. Her cheeks flushed. She turned and looked over her shoulder.
And that’s when Callum Hessenthaler held his breath and grabbed the long, sharp razor from the edge of his desk and wrapped a hand around Sammy’s mouth, pulled her back, pressed the razor blade deep into her neck and slit.
He listened to her mumble and cry out as blood spurted out of her neck all over the dusty floor. The gagged woman looked on in wide-eyed horror as Sammy twitched, shook, convulsed. As warm, thick streams of blood splattered down her front and covered Callum’s hand.
“I’m sorry. You hush now. You’re nearly with your children.”
He held Sammy’s mouth and waited for the blood flow to ease, waited for her mumbled screams to stop.
He didn’t like killing people.
He didn’t want to have to kill Sammy.
But she’d misbehaved. He’d trusted her, and she’d stepped out of place.
And this is what happened when people stepped out of place.
He gently lay her body down on the floor and he turned to the gagged
woman.
Blood dripped from the razor and onto the dusty floor and fear sparkled in her striking blue eyes.
Twenty-Seven
Hayden knew something was wrong the second he caught a whiff of the smell.
Ally pushed him in through a rusty metal door at the back of the CityFast hangar, which he’d unlocked with a similarly rusty key dangling on a chain. He still had that gun wedged in Hayden’s spine, and it was growing more painful by the minute. He could hear Manish whimpering as Gav eased him in through the door, in towards the darkness, the smell.
Hayden wanted to shout out, but he knew it was worthless. There was nobody here who could help them. And all shouting out would do was attract zombies to their location.
He didn’t have a gag wrapped around his mouth, but he might as well have done. He understood that, everyone understood that.
“You’re gonna move where we push you,” Ally said, his voice echoing against the narrow walls. There was a chill to this corridor, and that horrible smell—urine, sweat, faeces. All of them mixed in a horrible cocktail that made the hairs stand up on Hayden’s arms; made him wonder what he was going to find. “Any wrong move, you’re gettin’ a bullet in your back, sunshine.”
Gav mumbled something in Manish’s ear and, judging by Manish’s shivery breath, it couldn’t have been good.
Hayden followed the push of Ally’s gun and moved through the narrow corridors. When the door had closed, it went completely dark. There was a dampness underfoot that Hayden could feel seeping through the broken tips of his shoes. And somewhere ahead, somewhere in the distance and down the corridor, he could hear something.
A kind of … mumbling.
“Had a bet with Bob you’re gonna like what you see. Might be a shock to the system at first—shock to the old ways and all that—but you’ll come round. We always do come round. Or we die.”
Ally jabbed the gun further into Hayden’s back. Hayden wanted to turn around and punch the bastard, but he knew that would be no use. His sister was being treated somewhere. Sarah was with the boss, Callum, and that ginger woman, Sammy.
There was something wrong about all of this. The fear on Sammy’s face, and on the faces of a handful of guards Hayden had seen around this place since. There was some kind of unspoken secret. An unspoken secret that Hayden felt himself getting closer and closer to unearthing.
“Take a right,” Ally said, a flicker of spit hitting Hayden’s left ear. “And remember, no—”
“I’m not going anywhere until I know my sister is being looked after. Don’t worry.”
He heard a snigger from Gav. And then he felt Ally’s breaths get more frequent on his ear, on the back of his neck.
“Oh she’s being looked after alright,” Ally said.
He said it with just enough sincerity to puzzle Hayden.
Was he being serious? Was she actually being cared for? Or was something else going on here?
All signs pointed to the latter. Everything in Hayden’s mind screamed at him to do something, to save his sister from this place, to get the hell out of here.
But what could he do, really?
They took a right and at the end of the current corridor, Hayden saw a glimmer of light.
It peeked through the bars of a metal door just ahead. The smell got stronger as they approached, and the water under his feet deepened, pooling into his shoes and freezing his toes. As he walked towards the door, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what was inside.
And then he heard the whimpering.
“Please. Please. Please—please don’t.”
He didn’t recognise the voice but it sent another cold shiver through his body. It was a woman’s voice. Undeniably a woman’s voice. And judging by the lack of women Hayden had seen around here—Sammy aside, and she was hardly enthusiastic about her duties—it didn’t take a genius to figure out what might be going on.
They stopped right in front of the door. Hayden’s heart pounded in his chest as Ally reached around the back of him and unlocked the door. He looked at Hayden; his sweaty, bearded face lit up in the glimmer of light. He smiled, revealing his yellow, coffee and cigarette stained teeth. “Just hold your breath. Gonna be a bit of a shock to the system. But you’ll get used to it.”
And then he lowered the squeaky handle and pushed open the door.
When the door opened, Hayden didn’t understand what he was looking at. He could see where the light was coming from now—a small candle in a glass lantern flickering orange light around the dim, grey room.
And then he saw the hair.
He saw the dark, greasy hair of a woman. She was chained up to the wall by her neck. She was completely naked, covered in sweat. Her face was puffed up with bruises. Scratches and scars lined her inner thighs.
She looked up at Hayden as he stepped through the door, but he couldn’t see beyond her swollen eyelids. He could just see the fluid of a beating that looked like glimmering tears. He could just see a loss of humanity. Dehumanisation.
His body tensed. He wanted to run. He wanted to help this poor woman, bound by her neck, arms and ankles, and he wanted to get away.
But when he backed into the sharp barrel of Ally’s gun, he saw something else.
There was another woman beside her. A black woman with frizzy hair, also naked, also bound, also beaten.
And then there was another woman—a chubby woman with greying hair.
A skinny woman of eastern descent.
Hayden looked around at this room of horrors, heart racing, nausea welling in his chest, building up in his stomach.
“If the world’s gonna survive, we need two things: to breed, and to fuck,” Ally said. He grinned, and a little laugh came out of Gav’s mouth. “And you can’t have the breedin’ without the fuckin’!”
Twenty-Eight
Hayden couldn’t stop the vomit from creeping up his throat and spurting out of his mouth.
He spewed up all over the floor, which was already wet with pools of urine, sweat, blood and other stuff. He could hear the chains of the tied up women in the room ahead of him rattling as they mumbled and cried out underneath their gags.
Women. Lots of women. All of them tied up for one purpose—to serve the urges of the sick bastards in charge of the Riversford Industrial Estate.
Ally laughed when Hayden threw up and patted his back. “Told you it’d be a shock to the damned system, didn’t I? How’s the raghead copin’, Gaz, huh? He pukin’ too?”
Manish was just staring ahead at the room of women, the whites of his eyes bulging in the darkness. His bottom lip was shaking, and tears rolled down his cheeks. A pure look of shock, of hopelessness, covered him.
“Makes a kind of sense though, huh?” Ally said, turning back to Hayden. “I mean, the world’s dying. And when a world’s dying, women ain’t all too keen on breeding. So the least we can do is enforce it. I mean, we’re gonna need kids. The new world’s gonna need kids. Otherwise what’s the point? We can’t just let the world die. Can’t just let it rot away. Huh?”
Hayden’s eyes burned as he stared at the chained up women. He felt bad even looking at them. He felt like he was contributing to their degradation by standing here and not doing a thing.
“Like I said, we’re gonna look after your sister. We’ll go easy on her. Although I’ve gotta say, she’s a pretty girl, so maybe you’ll let us off if we go a bit rough.”
Hayden couldn’t control himself.
A switch inside him flipped.
He swung around and smacked Ally’s head against the side of the alley wall. He heard the gun blast, felt his ears ringing, but he wasn’t hurting so it couldn’t have shot him, he was okay, he was fine.
He pushed Ally onto the ground and he grabbed his wrist, tried to pry the gun from him, tried to yank it out of his hand and shove it into his mouth and blow his brains out for even suggesting what he was going to do to Clarice.
But then he felt something press against the right side of his head.
>
“Don’t move another muscle,” Gaz said. “Or I’ll blow your frigging brains out.”
Hayden kept tight hold of Ally’s wrist. Ally was struggling and tensing, but that god-awful smile was still spread across his face. Like this was all some kind of joke, some sick game.
“They’re … they’re people,” Hayden said. “People with feelings. With emotions.”
“Emotions get you killed,” Ally said. “Just like they’re gonna get you and your friend killed if you don’t get the hell off me right this second.”
Hayden felt the gun move from his head then back to his head again, Gaz clearly struggling to keep tabs on Manish and Hayden at the same time. Hayden kept on holding onto Ally’s wrist. He could yank the gun from his hands. Blow his brains out and end this, right here.
He could rescue those women, rescue his sister, get the hell out of here.
“Y’know, when you mentioned that mate of yours, Newbie, I remembered his ex and his kiddy,” Ally said. An even bigger smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Delicious, they were. Woman was a bit frumpy and I don’t usually go for blacks, but the little flower … well, she was lovely. Just about ripe and ready for a plucking if you get me.”
Hayden felt nausea and anger work through him.
Grab the gun. Grab it and shoot him and—
No don’t he’s goading you he’s lying he’s goading you he’s—
“I mean I know she wasn’t technically legal. And it’s a shame we had to dispose of her. But some of them just ain’t as cooperative as the others. Too tight, to be honest. Way too—”
Hayden snapped Ally’s wrist back.
He yanked the gun away from his hand and he pressed the barrel right into his neck.
He’d expected to hear the sound of gunfire crack into his skull by now. He’d expected Gaz to pull the trigger, to end his life.
But instead, as he pressed the gun barrel further and further into Ally’s neck, blocking his windpipe, making him gasp and gasp for air, he heard a thud, felt the gun slip from his head and someone dropped to the floor.
