by Casey, Ryan
“There’s…there’s nothing we can do for him,” Jordanna said. “We’ve got to leave it to these two to fight it out now.”
They disappeared around the side of a blue van at the side of the road. Bullets whacked against it, rattling the metal. Chloë just wanted to hold her ears and squeeze her eyes shut. She wanted to hold her mum’s necklace and ask her for help, ask her to be there for her like she always was.
But she couldn’t. She was gone.
So instead, she cried.
Chloë heard another thump, like an apple hitting the ground. When she peeked around the side of the van, she saw Goggly-eyes’s other friend on the floor now, holding his neck and gargling as blood splurged out of it and his mouth. Goggly-eyes stared at him with even gogglier eyes than before.
Chloë looked at the people firing. She couldn’t properly make them out because they were all wearing weird black masks with binocular things on. She hoped they were good people. All she wanted was some good people on Christmas Day.
All she wanted was her mum, but she wasn’t going to get that either.
“Hey!”
The shout came from Goggly-eyes. Chloë’s tummy tingled for a moment as she thought he was shouting at her. But when she looked, she realised he was doing something else.
He had Dom on his feet. He was holding a gun to his head, shuffling backwards. Dom was bleeding out onto the road, trying to struggle free. The firing had stopped.
“Why aren’t they shoot—”
“Ssh!” Jordanna said.
Goggly-eyes edged further away, Dom still wrapped in his arms.
“You’ve got a choice here,” Goggly-eyes shouted.
“Looks to me like you’re the one with a choice, bruv. Hand him over.”
Chloë recognised the voice and her heart jumped. Pedro.
Goggly-eyes smiled. He twisted the gun right into the side of Dom’s head, so hard that there’d be a bruise there. “No. You see, I know how you people work. I know you wouldn’t dare put a bullet in me, especially not when I’m holding one of your men at gunpoint. No. I’ve heard about yer little peace treaty. So here’s your choice.”
“Don’t make us prove you wrong,” another voice said. A man whose voice Chloë didn’t recognise.
“You can fire,” Goggly-eyes said. He burrowed his head into Dom’s back so that he was hidden underneath him, using him like a shield. Pressed his gun against the back of his skull. “You can fire your bullets at me or get your snipers to mush my brains in. But you’ll have to hit your pal here to get to me.”
He turned his gun away from Dom and pointed it over at the blue van where Chloë and Jordanna were.
“And the second you pull the trigger, I’m gonna pull this trigger and fire three shots over at that blue van there. That blue van where your lovely ladies are. And trust me, they don’t wanna be standing behind that van when I hit the back of it. Fucking miracle they’ve not exploded into a thousand pretty little pieces already with your wayward shots.”
Jordanna, who was holding Chloë, went rigid. Chloë’s heart pounded. She understood what Goggly-eyes was saying. There was a bomb in the blue van. A trap of some kind.
“Bullshit,” Pedro shouted. “Why should we believe you?”
Goggly-eyes smiled. He teased the trigger with his finger. “I’ll show you if you—”
“No, no, wait,” another one of the six masked people said. “We…we don’t have to do that. Just—what is it you want? Who are you and what do you want?”
Goggly-eyes kept on smiling, kept on backing away with Dom, using him as a human shield as he bled out onto the road.
“You can call me Cameron,” he said. “As for what I want, well. I wanted the bald cunt who killed my friends. I wanted him and his blonde bitch to suffer for what they did to my friends down on the motorway. He’ll remember.”
Pedro was quiet at this. What had Pedro done? Had he done something bad? Is that why this was all happening?
“But now, now I’m not so sure. Now, I’m looking at you all kitted out and all organised, and I’m starting to figure I could get summat else from you. Something more…substantial.”
He looked up at the wall.
“You aren’t getting inside those walls in a million years,” an unrecognised voice said.
Cameron smirked as he reached the side of a silver Mercedes like Chloë’s friend’s mum used to have. Sweat dribbled down his head. “We’ll see about that.”
And then he yanked open the car’s rear door and pulled Dom onto the back seat.
A few stray bullets flew at Cameron as he climbed forward into the front seat. The window of the Mercedes shattered. It couldn’t work. No cars worked.
But this car spluttered to life. It spluttered to life, turned around, and sped off down the abandoned street.
“Follow him! Follow the fucker and—he’s got Dom. He’s fucking got Dom.”
But nobody followed him. Gunshots fired at him, hit the back of the car, but it made no difference.
Everyone watched as the Mercedes took a left and disappeared.
Everyone watched as Cameron took Dom away.
“Come on, kid.”
Chloë turned around. Saw that Pedro was standing over her. His face looked thinner and more beardy than she remembered. But he was holding a hand out to her.
Holding a hand out to her, but looking at her face. Looking at it like people usually looked at the monsters. Her face, it hurt so bad. So, so bad. She hoped she was still pretty.
She turned back. Looked at the mess that was her mum’s necklace in the middle of the road. Thought about all the horrible things she wanted to do to goggly-eyed Cameron for slicing the knife across her face, for what he’d done to her, what he’d taken away from her.
Then, she took Pedro’s hand and walked towards the other five people, Jordanna by her side.
Chapter Nine
“Hold still, love. Hold still and it’ll be okay.”
Pedro winced as a nurse pressed an alcohol-laced sponge onto Chloë’s face. The nurse was dark-haired and dressed in a white lab coat, and she was pretty attractive. But hell—didn’t every woman look attractive after so long without screwing?
Didn’t all women look attractive anyway?
As Chloë screamed out when the sponge pressed against her disfigured, bloody, sliced-up face, all Pedro’s thoughts of hot women petered out. He bit into his lip as he watched the poor girl shaking, tears rolling down her mangled cheeks as she lay on a table. The stench of alcohol made him dizzy, which was a turn for the frigging books. Tamara, the meth-face called Jordanna, Jim Hall and a bloke called Harry looked on with similar wide-eyed expressions.
“And you say he just drove away?” Jim said. His voice was shaky. He sounded more gutted about that prick called Cameron driving off than he did about what he’d done to Chloë—the cuts on her face, stripping away her normality and her innocence forever. Then again, they did have one of his men, Dom.
Harry shrugged. He was wearing his goggles on top of his head—goggles that Pedro still had no idea what they were for. He had a gaunt face, and specks of wispy blond hair peeked out from under his black hat. “We tried to stop him. Shot at him. But—but the bomb—”
“Ah yeah,” Jim Hall said, nodding. “This mystery bomb in the blue van. How did that turn out?”
Harry lowered his head as Chloë let out another stomach-turning squeal of pain, the nurse reassuring her all along. “The…no bomb. Nothing—nothing we could find. But we didn’t want to—”
“No, no,” Jim said, raising his hand and shaking his head. “It’s…no. You were right not to engage in combat earlier. Although an explosive is always unlikely, so too is…well.” He looked at Chloë through narrowed eyes. “Sadism for sadism’s sake.”
“You’d be surprised,” Pedro grunted. “Might want to pay a visit to the outside world, bruv. Not as pretty as you think.”
>
Jim Hall sighed. Nodded. He looked stressed—really fucking stressed. Kept on scratching at his bald patch in the middle of his short dark hair, making nasty flakes kick up into the air. Figured he wasn’t having the happy Christmas he thought he was gonna have when he woke up this morning.
“Engaging in combat with the outside world is not what we want, Pedro. It’s not what we stand for. In fact, we actively stand against it. If anyone wanders into these walls with existing enemies that might pose some kind of threat to our well-being, we respectfully turn them away.”
Chloë squealed as the nurse applied a bandage to her face.
“So what’re you saying?” Jordanna cut in. She was frowning all the time, and she looked as convinced about this place as a clever little lamb in a slaughterhouse. “You’re just gonna turn us away? Send us back on the road because some nutjob decides he wants to slice up little girls’ faces?”
Jim cleared his throat. “I…I think it’s a little too late for that already. This—this Cameron. You said he expressed an interest in what was behind the wall?”
“Just sounded like a bullshit threat to me,” Harry said. “Trying to save his own skin now all his mates have fallen.”
Pedro thought back to the incident on the motorway a few days ago. The brutality he’d shown towards those men, hats over their faces just like this Cameron. “Their group might be bigger,” he said. “On…on the motorway. A small altercation we had. People dressed similarly to this Cameron guy. We might…They might be bigger. That’s all I’m saying.”
Jim Hall shook his head, like Pedro was a kid who’d just got shitty results in his science exam or something. “So we might just have engaged ourselves in a full-blown conflict.”
“I’m not saying that,” Pedro said. “I mean, these dudes are obviously weaker than us or they wouldn’t be looking at this place and hoping for a piece of the pie. I just think…I think there could be more of ‘em. And I think we could take ‘em. Take ‘em and get Dom. I don’t think they’ll kill him. He’s leverage. But it’d have to be a few of us. If there’s a few of them, there has to be a few of us.”
Jim Hall’s eyelids twitched. “And how do you propose we find this Cameron?”
A silence. A silence, but for Chloë’s panting, her crying.
“I think I know where he’s gone,” Jordanna said.
There was an even bigger silence now.
“He talked about a supply tent or something. Over at…at Trafford.”
Jim tutted. Tutted and turned around.
“Okay. Okay so he’s gone to Shelter 48. Right. That’s progress. That’s—”
The door behind Jim opened. Standing there was a man in a white coat similar to the nurses. He had thick dark hair and a distinctive monobrow. But mostly, Pedro noticed the look on his eyes. The look of shock.
“I won’t rest until he’s dead,” Tamara said.
Pedro didn’t quite turn around from Jim Hall and this labcoat guy. The labbie whispered things to Jim. Whispered things—things that were making Jim whisper back, angrily or excitedly, he couldn’t tell.
“Make that two of us,” Jordanna said. She rose from the floor and walked over to Chloë, who was sitting up with a load of white bandages across her face. “Okay chick?”
Chloë wiped the blood-soaked tears from her eyes. Nodded her head. “He…He broke my mum’s necklace. My mum’s necklace that was supposed to be for her Christmas.”
“Don’t worry,” Jordanna said, kissing her head. “I’ll break more than a necklace when I get my hands on that shit again.”
Pedro wanted to join in but he noticed the labbie and Jim Hall walk out the door. Jim stopped, turned around. His face was completely pale, but he had a vibrancy to his eyes, like he’d just watched a cracking porno.
“I’ll…Please bear with me,” he said, trying to keep the formality in his voice.
And then he took a left and disappeared out of the door.
“So when’re we going out to nail this twat?” Jordanna asked, looking at Harry.
Harry, who was twitchy as they got, walked over to her and shrugged. “I…maybe later. Maybe tomorrow. It depends—”
“Later,” Tamara said. Her eyes were glassy, staring into nowhere. “As soon as we can.”
Pedro stepped towards the open door. Now that Harry was twitching his way into a conversation with Jordanna, Pedro took his opportunity to find out where Jim had gone, find out why he looked so damned shocked. He was through with secrets. And if this place was such a democracy, he was going to make sure he was on a level playing field for once.
He reached the door. Turned around. Harry was grinning at Jordanna, who kept glancing at Pedro as if she was on the same wavelength as him, encouraging him to creep on out.
So he did.
He stepped out onto the pavement. There weren’t many people around this part of town—he could hear laughter somewhere around a corner of shops, smell turkey and gravy…it made his stomach churn. What he’d give for a bit of that right now.
But there were other things at hand.
He walked down the road. Squinted ahead, trying to see where Jim had gone.
It didn’t take him long to find it.
A metal door that led into a pretty shitty looking building was ajar. Pedro reached for it. Looked over his shoulder just to check no one was looking.
No. He was clear. All clear.
He pressed against the door and was met by a cloud of shitty stink.
Jim Hall sneaking off into a shitty stinking scruffy little building? If that wasn’t off, he wasn’t sure what was.
He stepped through this door. Stepped through and found himself walking down a pitch black passageway. He could hear voices straight ahead. Voices echoing against the walls, just like his footsteps echoed against the tiles.
As he got closer and closer to the voices, the shitty smell only got more intense. So intense that he had to cover his mouth and his nose, breathe into his coat, which didn’t smell a whole lot better.
He stopped when he reached a door. Another door, another door partly open. There was a little light seeping through it. And behind it, he could hear voices. Definitely Jim Hall’s voice, and someone else’s too. He squinted. Tried to listen.
“… awake…”
“… know what this means…”
He couldn’t fully comprehend any of their words.
So he took in a deep breath of the nasty-smelling air and pressed on this second door.
When he crept inside, the first thing he noticed was Jim and the dark-haired labbie standing by a window in the middle of this room. This room that was white-tiled, so much cleaner and more inviting than the rest of the corridor he’d come down. The smell, too. It wasn’t as strong in here. It’d completely gone, replaced by an overpowering medicinal smell.
Which made Pedro think they were hiding something.
He crept through the door. Tried to keep his footsteps as quiet as he could as he moved into this dimly-lit room, so much cleaner than the rest of the place. He wanted to see what was behind that window. What was putting a smile on Jim’s face, making him so excited.
He got further into the room. Further into the room, trying his best not to make a sound, every step as quiet as possible. If he could get in and out without being caught, great. If he got caught, well shit—he’d had a good run anyway.
He squinted at the window. Tried to see what was behind it, what was under the bright light.
And then he saw it.
At first, he didn’t understand. He couldn’t wrap his head around what he was seeing. Fuck—he must’ve knocked his head. Knocked it and sent himself batshit crazy.
He blinked a few times. Stared at this figure behind the glass. At this figure with the pale, dead skin. With the bandages wrapped around his legs.
With the dead eyes.
The dead eyes that looked right at him.
&nb
sp; Riley’s dead eyes.
Pedro scuffled forward. Jim Hall and the labbie’s smiles dropped. They spun around. Spun and stared at Pedro, then looked at each other again, then back at each other.
“Pedro, you shouldn’t be—”
“My friend,” he said, his heart pounding, his skin burning as he approached the glass. Riley was a creature. He was dead. But then why the fuck was he in here? “You—Riley. That’s my…that was my friend. What the fuck are you doing—”
“Pedro?”
The voice made Pedro stop dead in his tracks. The impossible voice. Completely impossible, because he was dead. He had the dead eyes, the dead skin, and bandages wrapped around his legs. Wrapped around his bites.
But he was looking at Pedro, not through him.
He was looking at him.
He was alive.
But he…he couldn’t be.
Pedro turned to Jim. “What the fuck is this? What—my friend. Is he…what is he? Is he dead or is he…what’s going on?”
Jim Hall’s smile grew wider than Pedro had ever seen it before. Pedro’s mind spun, his heart raced, as he tried to get his head around what was happening, tried to understand.
“We’ve done it,” Jim Hall said, glassy look in his eyes, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Done what?” Pedro asked.
Jim wiped away his tears with his sleeve.
“We’ve…We’ve done it. We’ve cured him. We’ve cured an infected.”
Want More Dead Days?
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