by Jack Lewis
“Justin,” I said. “Shut it up.”
Justin leapt up the stairs, tried to grab hold of the dog. The collie shifted out of his grasp and carried on barking as if it were possessed. More infected appeared. They had obviously been there all along, but they had stayed dormant until outside stimuli woke them up.
Justin moved from side to side trying to trap the collie, but it was too quick for him. Dan sat on the bench and watched with disinterest.
“You’re going to have to do this by force,” he said.
Two infected were on the high street and walking toward the pub. Four lurched out of an alleyway. A family of five stumbled out of a doorway. The collie’s barking would bring even more of them. We weren’t ready for a fight like this.
I scrunched up my face, turned to Dan. “You mean kill it?”
More barking. The sound echoed against the walls of the houses, a siren call for the infected.
Dan nodded. “Only way to shut it up.”
Guttural moans drifted across the street.
I knew Dan was right. The only way we would shut this dog up was by killing it. And if we didn’t, it was going to draw out every single infected in a four mile radius.
I gripped my knife, tightened my fist around it. My heart hammered, my stomach lurched. I took a step toward the dog.
“Please don’t Kyle,” said Justin, his eyes wide.
More barks.
“I’m sorry.” I said. I held my knife tight.
I stopped. My hand felt weak around my knife. I couldn’t bring myself to kill it. I knew that we couldn’t let it continue to make the noise, but a tension in my arms dragged me back.
“Jesus Christ,” said Dan.
More infected walked around a corner, stumbled on thin limbs, their eyes burning with hunger.
Faizel took two strides forward. He pulled his fire axe from the loop of his belt, bent down and grabbed the collie by the scruff of its neck before it had the chance to react.
Justin’s face drained white. He held his hand out, as if to shield himself from a blow that wasn't even coming his way.
Faizel’s eyes hardened. He lifted the axe in the air and brought it down in one heave. There was a crunch as it swiped through bone. The barking stopped, and the collie’s head dropped onto the floor. Its eyes were glassy, and blood sprang from the wound.
Justin turned away, his face grey. He took deep breaths as though he was fighting the urge to be sick.
Dan stood up, brushed a few meat crumbs from his shirt. “Now we’ve got a problem,” he said.
There were over thirty infected on the high street now, far too many for us to fight. If we let them move any closer they would trap us.
Faizel stroked the fur of the dog’s severed head, his eyes shut. He stood up and wiped the blood from the blade of the axe and then slipped it into the loop on his belt. He caught my eye and I knew I had to say something to him, but there wasn’t time for the words to form.
“We have to move,” said Faizel.
I pointed at the farmhouse with the solar panels. We needed to slip out of the village centre and hide out for a while. We could spend the night there, and then in the morning this should have blown over.
I grabbed Justin’s arm and helped him to his feet. “We need to go, kid.”
***
We managed to leave the high street without having to kill any of the infected. We skipped over a stone wall and hiked up an overgrown field. The farmhouse lay at the top, and as we got closer I realised how big the place actually was.
Whoever had built this was filthy rich. There had to be at least ten bedrooms. A balcony jutted out of one side of the house, and there was a Jacuzzi on it. A thought flashed into my mind. Solar panels. Jacuzzi. Is it possible that it was working, and that the house had power?
Faizel reached the front door first, the incline of the hill having no effect on him whatsoever. He tested the handle and the door opened straight away.
“Wait,” I said.
I got to the top of the hill and stood outside the front door. I let my breath catch up with me. My left leg throbbed, so it was a good thing we were stopping for the night.
“Let me go first,” I said.
I hadn’t been able to handle things back at the pub. I knew the dog had to be silenced, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and Faizel had to step in. Now I needed to make up for it.
“I’ll check it’s clear,” I said, “and then I’ll signal you guys in.”
I took my knife out of my belt and gripped the handle. I took one step over the doorframe and into the house. It smelt damp as though water had gotten into the walls and started to rot them, and the floor was paved in stone that looked like it would be cold to the touch. A staircase was in front of me, and on my right were two doorways.
When I turned to my right something dark and heavy swung at me, too quick for me to react. My head burst in agony. Everything flashed to black, and I fell to the floor.
8
I opened my eyelids and light seeped in through the cracks. A sting of pain pierced my temple, and my stomach lurched as though I was going to be sick. My eyes adjusted to the light. I got to my knees and let the room stop spinning.
Voices drifted in over the ringing in my ears. I saw walls. A bookshelf. Paintings hung up. A woman and a boy tied to chairs.
Hands hooked under my armpits and lifted me onto a couch. I sank into it and let the room move into focus. It was the living room of the farmhouse. Justin sat next to me and stared with concern on his face, as though he expected me to die. Faizel stood by the window, and Dan perched on the edge of the couch, a hammer in his hand.
In the centre of the room a middle-aged woman and a young boy were tied to wooden kitchen-chairs. The boy’s eyes were wide with fear and he struggled against the rope. The woman sat quietly, her arms gripping the arms of the chair but not straining against her bonds. There was a big red bulge underneath her left eye.
I leaned forward, rubbed my temple. The thudding slowed. “Who the hell are they?” I said.
Faizel shrugged. Dan wouldn’t take his eyes off the woman. “She’s the bitch who hit you,” he said.
I got to my feet and a wave of nausea sent me woozy. “What happened to her face?”
Dan looked at his right hand. His knuckles were swollen red.
A deep thud boomed through my head, and I took a faltering step back. Justin stood up and put his arm around my back. I shrugged him off.
“I’ll be fine.”
I walked over to the boy and took out my knife. His eyes grew so white it looked like his pupils had been swallowed up. He struggled against his chair, rocking it so much that a leg lifted off the ground. He was strong for his age. I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Easy,” I said.
I ripped the tape from his mouth, peeling off skin as I teared back the adhesive. I held my knife to the ropes around his wrist and cut through them.
“Are you mad?” said Dan.
“He’s just a little boy.”
“And she looks like a lunch lady, but she still knocked you out cold,” Dan said, and pointed at the woman.
I nodded at Faizel. “Can you cut her loose?”
He stood up and walked over to her. In a minute, both the woman and the boy were free. The boy stood up and climbed onto his mother’s lap. I took the seat he had left, turned and faced the woman.
“What’s your name?” I said.
Her hair looked tough and wiry, and strands of grey ran through it. She had a large frame and her arms looked strong. She’d certainly been able to swing something with enough force to knock me out, anyway. I expected her to be scared, but aside from the purple-red bump that stuck out underneath her eye, she seemed fine.
She rubbed the top of her son’s head. “This is Ben. I’m Alice,” she said in a Yorkshire accent.
I didn’t see any point in skirting round the issue with her. She still had one good eye, so she could see what position she was
in here. There were four of us and one of her, and she’d already attacked us. She was dangerous, and we would be on our guard.
“Alice, my friends and I have to decide what to do with you,” I said. My temple throbbed, and I put my hand to it. A knife of pain stabbed through my head so sharply that I winced.
“There’s paracetamol upstairs,” said Alice.
I turned to Justin. “You mind?” I said.
He got up and walked out of the room.
Faizel crossed his legs. “What are you and Ben doing here, Alice?”
She bit her lip and half shut her eyes, as if she was sizing Faizel up. Then she turned to him. “Running away from my husband.”
“Why?” I said.
Dan stood up. “Enough of this shit. Who cares why she is running away? If her husband had any sense, he’d run away from her. Let’s tie them up again, get through the night then get the hell out of here.”
Faizel grabbed hold of Dan’s belt, tugged him back to his seat.
My stomach rumbled, and bile rose up my throat. I took a deep breath. “Why were you running?” I said.
Alice looked at her son. She put her hands over his ears.
“My husband has gone mad,” she said.
I nodded. When the outbreak first happened, I’d seen a lot of people lose their minds. Not everyone was built to cope with the transition from normal to nightmare, and the only way some people held on to their mind was by sacrificing the majority of it to madness.
I dragged my chair closer to them. “You two can’t survive alone. Take us to your husband. Maybe we can help him.”
She shook her head. “No, Torben can’t be helped. He’s so far gone that there’s no bringing him back.”
I bolted upright. That name. I hadn’t heard it in a year, and the sound of the syllables sent a cold shiver through me, made the gunshot scar on my leg sting as if it was fresh. Torben Tusk, the man hunter.
He’d stalked Justin and me over a year ago for the sole purpose of killing us. I had a suspicion that he planned to eat us, but that wasn’t his end game. Torben took joy in the hunt, from watching someone run and then killing them. He had killed my brother in law, and he’d put a bullet in my leg.
“You okay Kyle?” said Faizel.
My face was cold. The throbbing in my temple had disappeared, wiped out from the shock. Faizel looked worried, and even Alice stared at me with concern in her eyes.
Footsteps moved into the room, and Justin held out a packet of paracetamol. I threw two in my mouth and swallowed them back.
“You need one for your eye?” I said.
Alice shook her head. “I’ve had worse.”
Alice said she was running away from Torben, so she obviously didn’t know he was dead. I’d killed him a year ago, during the battle at the farm. I shot him in cold blood because it was a simple choice between his life and my own.
I wondered if I should tell her. If she was scared of him, maybe she’d be glad to know he was dead. But then there was the kid. It took a lot for a kid to hate his father, and I bet Ben still had some love for Torben. I couldn’t tell them.
Dan stared at me, his head titled and his eyes squinting as if he knew something. I changed the subject.
“How far have you been travelling, Alice?”
“Not much further than here. We walked around some, but we ran out of food. Then we found this farmhouse and I decided to stay here a while. When you get over the damp smell it’s a palace.”
“Have you heard anything about a group of infected heading from Manchester?”
She pinched her earlobe between her fingers and rubbed it. There was a hole where an earring had once been. “Torben had a radio. We heard a broadcast from Manchester once, but nothing about infected. It was something about a cure. Torben said it was horseshit. “
“And what do you think?” I asked.
She put her arms around Ben’s chest. “There are lots of university labs in Manchester. Clever people doing clever things. It’s not impossible that someone’s found a cure.”
I sat back against my chair and my energy seeped out of me. Outside the sky started to turn black, the last minutes of daylight draining away like water down a plughole.
Faizel got out of his seat, walked to the curtains and drew them. “It’s getting late,” he said.
I checked my watch. It was six o’clock in the evening. Soon it would be pitch black, and the stalkers would come.
“Let’s get some rest everyone.”
Dan stood up, his hands clenched. His body shook a little, as though he were a ball of energy. “What about them?”
I smiled at Alice. For now, I’d forgiven the near concussion she had given me, because I understood why she did it. She was a mother looking after her son, and we all had the right to protect the people we loved. Some of us were just better at it than others.
“They need rest too,” I said.
9
By nightfall the paracetamol kicked in and my head cleared. A dark lump stuck out from my forehead and I had to stop myself from pressing it from time to time, but otherwise I felt human again. I wanted to be useful, so I volunteered for first watch.
I sat on the balcony that stuck out from the side of the farmhouse. Justin had found a power generator with a few dregs of fuel left in it, so the house had power. Despite that, the rainwater-filled Jacuzzi didn’t work. I leant back against the window of the house.
The streets of Stowham were bathed in darkness. A few infected lurched across the road, woken up by the events of the afternoon. Thankfully, none of them had followed us to the farmhouse.
The door behind me slid open, and Justin stepped out onto the balcony. He took a seat beside me.
“You should get some rest, kid,” I said.
He pulled his knees up to his chest and hung his head. His face drooped.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “It’s just Melissa.”
“What about her?”
He scratched his knee. “You think we’ll make it back?”
“Of course we will.”
He nodded. “I just miss her, I guess.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. I was still pissed at him, but I had to remember that deep down, despite everything he’d seen, he was just a dumb teenager going through his first crush. I changed the subject.
“I’ve been thinking. I want to tell Alice about Torben.”
Justin’s eyebrows arched. He swept the curls of his fringe back from his forehead. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I just think she needs to know what happened to him, maybe it would give her some closure. She needs to know what a dickhead he was.”
A sliver of the moon peaked from behind a cloud, and it cast a shard of white light on the balcony. Below, the faint moans of the infected were carried by the wind. Despite the danger it posed, the sound made me drowsy. I’d spent years sleeping rough in the Wilds, using their moans as a lullaby. When I got back to Vasey, I thought I’d done it for the last time. It was going to be a long night.
Justin tucked his arm behind his head and leant against it. “I think she already knows what he was like, Kyle. That’s why she was running from him.”
“She needs to know the truth.”
“Sometimes the truth doesn’t do any good,” said Justin, in words that sounded far older than he was. Sometimes he talked sense, and I had no idea where it came from.
I pulled my coat closer to my chin and tucked it in. “I’ll keep it to myself for now. Listen, you better go and sleep for a bit,” I said.
Justin got up and opened the sliding door. “Night Kyle.”
Justin had only been gone a few minutes when the door opened again.
“Listen, kid, you need to get some – “
“It’s me Kyle.”
Faizel walked onto the balcony. He went to the edge and looked down on the village streets below. Stood in front of me, cast in the moonlight, it was
hard not to be impressed by him. Despite everything he’d been through in the past few days – leaving his family, his wife not talking to him, killing the dog – he didn’t let the strain show. His back was straight, his shoulders high.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. I put one to my lips and flicked the lighter. The orange flame wavered in the breeze, and I hesitated before bringing it to the end of the cigarette. Finally I let the flame fan the tobacco, and took a deep breath of smoke that shot straight into my lungs. For a minute everything went fuzzy, and I closed my eyes.
