by Casey, Ryan
He just hoped Hayden wouldn’t show up again to spoil the party.
He just hoped this was over—really, really over—and he could move on with his new life sooner rather than later.
A few minutes later, when 2 a.m. arrived, Gary felt the helicopter start to lift.
He bit his lip. His heart raced. He saw the apprehensive smiles around the helicopter. Heard the laughter. Heard the joy. And as the hell beneath him got further away, he felt his own hope building. He felt the old Gary returning. The Gary he’d been before this world fucked him up. The Gary he’d been to his friends. To his mother.
The real Gary.
He knew he could be that Gary again. He knew he could start all over again from scratch, get things back to how they used to be.
And as the helicopter got higher and higher, he looked down, and a morbid part of the Gary that’d existed in that apocalyptic world couldn’t help smiling at the thought of the next step. At the truth he’d overheard the UN troops discussing. The fate of Britain, of every inch of this island, half an hour after that final extraction was completed at five thirty a.m.
In four hours time, the entire length of Great Britain was going to be pummelled with nuclear weapons.
Every inch of the island was going to be cleansed. The virus was going to be bombarded. It’d be years before Britain could ever recover from the radiation, but it would. Eventually it would.
And as the helicopter got higher, the old Gary felt a tingle of excitement at the thought of watching this world burn.
At the thought of Hayden’s eyes as he watched the nukes fall.
He enjoyed that moment of excitement for a moment, and then he let it go.
He turned to the woman opposite. Smiled. “Hi there,” he said. “I’m Stefan. Pleasure to meet you.”
She smiled back. Took his hand.
Stefan felt the seeds of his new life starting to sprout already as the helicopter flew onwards.
Chapter Forty
Hayden walked with Miriam in his arms.
It was still night, around three a.m., but he could see the first signs of the sky getting gradually lighter. He felt cold to the bone. Wasn’t sure whether it was because of the actual weather or because he was feeling sickly like he was turning. Or simply because of what’d happened to Miriam.
He just held on to her heavy body.
Headed back towards New Britain.
Walked.
He passed by many infected on the long road back. He didn’t even try fighting them off. But they never attacked him or Miriam, which meant that Amy must be dealing with them.
He didn’t know why she was still by his side. She should’ve walked away a long, long time ago. Because he couldn’t protect her anymore. He’d failed to get her to the extraction point on time. The one final opportunity to get away from New Britain, snatched away from her, and all because Hayden hadn’t been able to let Miriam go.
Well, maybe that was right. Maybe it was right not to let Miriam go.
Because Miriam had always been there for him. Miriam had been the one he’d been in love with.
It was just right that he was with Miriam right now.
“Where are we going?” Amy asked.
Hayden heard her voice, but it was fuzzy, unclear. His mouth was as dry as sandpaper. The air was thick with the smell of rot as he and Amy were still covered in the infected’s blood and body parts. Miriam wasn’t smelling too great either. But Hayden tried not to think about that. Tried not to even look at her.
He just carried her back towards New Britain.
Back towards the only safe place he knew.
Back towards his cocoon.
“We can’t just give up,” Amy said.
“We’ve nothing left to fight for.”
“We’ve—we’ve got each other.”
Hayden looked at Amy. Her face was covered in tears. She was a strong kid, to her credit. She’d only lost her mum yesterday, watched her home collapse around her. And now she was telling Hayden there was still hope. Even if he wanted to be annoyed with her, he couldn’t be. The kid had been through enough as it was.
“We’re heading back to New Britain,” Hayden said.
Amy narrowed her eyes. “Why would we—”
“There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
“But the other extraction points. The—the one at Sheffield. The last one at 5.30. We could try getting to—”
“It’s no use,” Hayden said. “We won’t make it on time. It’s over, Amy. Just… just forget about it.”
They kept on walking onwards, the weight of Miriam’s dead body weighing down Hayden’s shoulders. He’d lied to Amy. They had a chance of making the Sheffield extraction point—the final one—if they found some kind of vehicle anyway. But even then, it was a good two and a half hours away, and that was assuming nothing got in their way.
Besides, what was it for?
What was the point anymore?
There was nothing left to fight for. Besides, it’d probably all be some kind of con anyway. Some kind of setup.
No. They had to go back to the only place they really knew was safe.
They had to go home.
“What’s this?” Amy asked.
Hayden didn’t turn around. Not at first.
Not until he caught a whiff of death.
An unavoidable stench.
And then he saw them.
There were bodies on the ground all around him. Bodies, with bullet wounds in their skulls. Eyes wide open. Arms and legs splayed in unnatural positions.
Some of them were holding on to weapons.
The infected were leaning down over some of them, ripping their guts out of their torsos.
The crows were joining them.
But it wasn’t just the mass mound of dead that threw Hayden. Finding dead bodies was a normal enough phenomenon in this world.
What caught Hayden’s attention more than anything was the fact that he recognised some of these people.
“These are Gary’s people,” Hayden said.
He walked through them. Saw one of the infected rise. He pulled out his knife and rammed it into the side of its neck before it could attack.
“What you think happened to them?” Amy asked.
Hayden looked around at them. They’d clearly been shot. “Could be these people pretending to be the UN,” he said. But there was something else tugging at his chest, convincing him otherwise. “Or it could be… someone else.”
“Like who?”
Hayden didn’t tell Amy who. But the fact was, he’d found Gary’s people.
Gary was nowhere to be seen.
“Come on,” Hayden said. “We can’t stay here. We have to—”
He nearly fell from his feet when he saw the man standing opposite.
He wasn’t infected. But he was bleeding from his chest. Gripping onto it.
There was a bite wound right across his stomach.
Hayden put Miriam’s body down. He recognised the man as Carl, someone he’d known from back at New Britain. He lifted one of the guns he’d found. Pointed it at Carl.
“Nukes,” Carl said.
Hayden narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“Nukes. They… After the last extraction. At six in the morning. Nukes. Boom. All of it.”
He dropped down to his knees. His eyes drifted. This man was dying.
“What happened here?” Hayden asked. He kept the gun pointed at Carl.
“Kill me.”
“Not until you tell me what happened here.”
Carl looked up at Hayden. Hayden could see the tears, the pain, in his eyes. His bottom lip quivered on his pale face. “Gary did this. Said… said we belonged to this world. That it’d—it’d be all over soon.”
Fuck. So Gary had done this. That son of a bitch had done this.
“Kill me,” Carl said. “Before I turn. And before… before the explosions. I don’t want to die that way. I don’t want to—”
Hayden pulled the trigger.
Put Carl down before he could say another word.
The gunshot echoed across the vast, empty expanse of fields.
“What’s nukes?” Amy asked.
The words sent a sickliness through Hayden’s body. He knew what the transmission meant now when it said the final extraction would be the final chance to escape.
They were bombing Britain.
At six a.m., after that final extraction at Sheffield at five thirty, they were wiping Britain clean of infection and starting again.
And who could blame them?
“Come on,” he said, reaching down for Miriam.
“We’re still going back?”
“We… we have to.”
As Hayden went to lift Miriam up, he got a flashback to Martha. To those final words she’d said to him.
“You’re going to get everyone killed.”
And Daniel.
“You keep these people safe no matter what. Even if it means doing something you really don’t want to do.”
And then Miriam, too.
“If we can force ourselves into doing those impossible things—then we can do anything we want. We can be anything we want.”
And her final words.
“You can’t give up.”
But the most prominent words of all were Annabelle’s. Annabelle’s, all that time ago at the swimming pool.
“The worst monsters of all are the ones inside your head.”
He heard those words as if being spoke to him directly; as if someone was saying them out loud to him right now.
And Hayden heard them clearly. Clearer than he’d ever heard them in his life. Like they were speaking directly to his soul.
Miriam was gone. Yes, she was gone.
But Amy was still here.
And no matter how close to death or turning he might be, he had to protect her.
He couldn’t just leave her alone in this world.
He couldn’t leave her to die.
He put Miriam back down. Looked into her wide open, dead eyes.
“I told you I’d never give up,” he whispered, leaning close to her.
He kissed her sour, dead lips.
“I never will.”
He held on to her for a few seconds. Felt the final warmth seeping from her body, into his.
And then he stood.
Turned around. Looked right at Amy.
“It’s time,” he said.
Amy narrowed her eyes. “Time for what?”
Hayden walked up to her. Held out his hand. “We’re leaving this place. Both of us. We’re going to fight and it’s going to be a struggle, but I made a promise. A promise never to give up. A promise to so many people never to give up. And I’m sticking to that promise. I’m sticking by it because I want you to be safe, Amy. I want you to have a chance. A chance of living a normal life again. A chance at living in the new world.”
Amy narrowed her eyes some more. She kept her stare up at Hayden. “Where are we going?”
Hayden took in a deep breath. He turned around. Looked at the walls of New Britain—of his “perfect little bubble”—well in the distance.
Then he looked down at Miriam. Remembered what she’d said. So many times, she’d told him to break out of his bubble. To defeat his comfort zone. And by doing that, he could achieve the one thing he wanted more than anything else.
Protecting his people.
“Hayden? Where are we going?”
He looked around at Amy. Smiled. “We’re going to the final extraction point. Sheffield. We’re leaving this place. And we’re not giving up until the end.”
He kept his hand out for Amy.
It took her a while, but eventually, she took it.
“Now come on,” Hayden said, “let’s get moving.”
As they ran back in the direction they’d headed from, Hayden felt the grip of New Britain trying to tug him back.
He felt the fear of this outside world tightening around him.
But more than anything, he felt Annabelle’s words radiating inside.
“The worst monsters of all are the ones inside your head.”
He was conquering his own monsters.
And conquering his own monsters was going to save Amy’s life.
Chapter Forty-One
“Come on. We don’t have much time.”
The sky was getting lighter, now. The weather was still cool. Up ahead, Hayden saw a road stretching onwards. His stomach writhed with the pain of a stitch, not to mention all the other pains that he was experiencing right now. Sore legs. Tight chest. The fever was intensifying.
But he and Amy had been jogging for the best part of an hour.
They only had around two hours before five thirty a.m., according to Amy’s watch. Two hours until this entire country’s destruction.
Their destination was still around two hours away. And that was in a car.
“Don’t think I can… I can run any… any further,” Amy said.
“’Course you can,” Hayden said, as much as he too was struggling. “Just hold on to my hand and let me do all the work.”
“I can’t feel my legs.”
“That’s a good thing then. You can keep on running.”
“Can’t we find a car?”
“I’m trying, Amy. I swear I’m trying.”
And he was. He looked around at the empty streets, listened to the sounds of ancient crisp packets and drinks cans scraping across the ground in the breeze. He’d been searching every car he could, without fail. Truth was, he was a waster. He’d never been a pro at sneaking inside cars and stealing them without a key.
Sure, he needed a car. He needed some kind of vehicle if he was to get to the final extraction point in anywhere near the time he needed to.
But it had to be a car that already had the keys inside it.
On paper, in the midst of the panic at the beginning of the apocalypse, that shouldn’t have been too difficult.
On paper, anyway.
Because he hadn’t found anything of the sort yet.
He stopped. Put his hands on his knees. The stitch in his chest was crippling.
“You okay?” Amy asked.
Hayden nodded. He had to be okay, for her. But he wasn’t. His headache was getting stronger. His body, on the other hand, was getting weaker. He could feel himself slowly slipping away.
And that was okay. He’d accepted death might just be a by-product of this current situation. He’d accepted death once before, months ago, when he shot that infected bullet into his chest.
As long as he got Amy to safety, that was all that mattered.
All he’d cared about was making sure his people were safe.
Amy was the last one of his people remaining.
And as painful a truth as that was, it made Hayden even more determined to protect her. Even more serious about doing things he didn’t want to do; about doing things he was damned terrified of doing.
Because if he couldn’t protect her, then she’d die on this rock, and a whole life would go down the pan, wasted.
“Watch out!”
Hayden heard Amy’s voice.
But it was already too late when he realised what was happening.
He felt the fingers dig into his left side. Felt them punch the life from his kidneys.
He turned and saw an infected snapping its jaws right beside him. Its eyes were nothing but sockets. Maggots crept inside it, eating away at its skull.
Its teeth were crooked, wobbly.
But it was hungry.
He pushed back against it. He didn’t have much strength or energy left inside him. He tried to reach for the gun he’d taken from Colin’s dead body, but the infected latched on to his hand.
He was about to ask Amy for help when he heard her yelp.
He looked over at her.
Three infected surrounded her.
One of them clung to her arm.
Pulled it closer to its dead lip
s.
Hayden felt anger burning inside. He felt frustration. All the pain of everything he’d lost, of everyone he’d lost, all of it bubbled up inside him, spewed over the surface.
He dragged his arm away from the infected. Fought the burning sensation, blocked it out, denied it.
And then he stuck his thumbs into the infected’s eyes.
Wrestled it to the ground.
He bashed its skull against the road. Kept on bashing it until it let go. Until he knew for certain that it was down—for now.
And then he rolled down his sleeve and ran over to Amy.
He lifted the gun. Popped a bullet in the head of the first infected, the one pulling on her arm.
And then he lowered the gun and lifted his knife.
Rammed the blade through the side of the next infected’s head.
Slashed the next one across its neck, kept on going until he was sure it was dead.
“Hayden!”
He heard Amy cry out again. And he didn’t understand why, not at first.
Then he saw the half-body of an infected dragging itself across the road.
Its mouth wrapped around her ankle.
Started to lower down.
Hayden threw himself at it. Landed on top of it.
He dragged its head away. Stuck his hands in its mouth and made sure its jaws couldn’t close, as powerful and as hungry as they were.
He pulled them. Pulled open the infected’s mouth. Pulled it ’til he heard a crack, then kept on pulling after that.
And when the infected’s jaw split apart, Hayden reached for his gun.
Stuck it down the infected’s throat.
Fired three bullets, right down into the empty space towards its spine.
The infected shook a few times. Shook, like it was having a seizure.
And then it went still.
They sat there a few moments, Hayden and Amy. Sat there, catching their breath. Hayden’s head spun. He didn’t want to think about what had happened. He didn’t even want to consider the new truth of the situation.
And he didn’t have to.
“Keys,” Amy said.
Hayden lifted his head. Looked at where Amy was looking.
She was standing by the side of a Land Rover. Inside it, dangling out of the partly closed window, there was half of the body of an infected.
