by Jack Lewis
“Those’ll kill you,” said Faizel.
I let out a billow of smoke. “I’ve got better things to worry about right now.”
He leant against the balcony wall, his back to the street. His face was shrouded by the night. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
I flicked ash onto the floor. I pressed my finger to it and smeared it into the stone, leaving a sooty stain. “Haven’t had one in twenty years.”
“Then why start now?”
“Better time than any,” I said. “Found them in the house.”
He turned his head to the east and then put his hand to his brow as though it would focus his vision. “You can see Vasey from here.”
I sat up straighter. “Yeah? Take it they haven’t all packed up and gone?”
“They’ll all be in bed. The place looks fragile, though. It’s hard to believe those walls keep us safe.”
I took another drag, then coughed. It tasted like crap. I stubbed the cigarette out onto the floor, screwed up the packet and threw it across the balcony. “Believe me, those walls are as good as it gets.”
“I know, Kyle. I’ve been scouting for Vasey for years, and I’ve spent my fair share of time in the Wilds.”
I remembered back to when I’d first met Faizel a year ago. I’d been out in the Wilds, alone, and I came across a wooden shack he and Dan were staying in. It was the dead of night and the stalkers were coming out, and I needed a place to crash. They offered to let me stay in the scout shack with them, but despite how much I needed it, I refused. I didn’t trust anyone back then.
“Why did you come, Faizel?” I asked. “Your wife wasn’t talking to you. Your kid was crying his eyes out. You didn’t have to do it.”
Faizel crossed his arms. His shirt was folded up to his elbows. A long white scar ran along his left arm, as though the flesh had been seared.
“I didn’t want to leave them. But I believe in Vasey. I know it’s the only way forward for us, and if we give it up, then we’ll have nowhere else to go. Sometimes you have to do something you don’t want, to get something you do want.”
A bird flapped its wings above us and then flew under the glow of the moon. The grass swayed in the fields surrounding the house, and something barked in the distance. I thought of the collie again, of its cold, dead eyes and its dismembered head. Sickening as it was, I admired Faizel for what he’d done. If he hadn’t had killed the dog, we’d have had a few dozen of infected on us in minutes. It was a horrible thing to do, but he’d stepped up.
The rumbling sound of a car engine cut through the silence of the night. Faizel turned round. I got to my feet. My left leg ached, and standing up so suddenly made my head light. I walked over to the balcony and leaned over.
A van pulled into the middle of the high street and stopped. The driver cut the engine, got out and shut the door. I couldn’t see much of him from here, other than he was of average height and he wore a black coat that reached to his waist, and the lapels of longer coat trailed out below. It was white, and looked like some sort of lab coat. He held a long metal pipe in his right hand.
An infected saw the man and shifted in his direction, dragging one lame leg behind it and fighting to stay balanced. As it got closer, the man swung his pipe. It connected at the infected’s knee, twisting the cartilage so badly that I could almost hear the sound of the gristle popping. The infected swayed backward, and the man gave it an awkward kick and sent it to the floor.
There was a sense of panic in his movements as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a rope. He tied it around the infected’s arms and legs, staying as far away from its straining head as he could. When this was done he opened the back of the van doors, heaved the infected into the back of the van and then shut them again.
More infected had heard the struggle by now, and they moved toward him. He got in the driver seat and the engine came to life. He turned on the headlights and drove away.
Faizel and I had kept quiet out of instinct, but as we saw the van drive away from Stowham, I turned to him. For a second his eyes held the faint glimmer of surprise, but then the slate was wiped and his face lost expression.
“Who the hell was that?” I asked, knowing that Faizel didn’t have an answer.
10
A voice cried out from inside the house, but the volume was blunted by the door behind us. I got up and opened it.
“Kyle!” said Justin.
I ran inside the house, Faizel following me. There were so many rooms upstairs that it was hard to locate Justin at first, but we eventually found him in what looked like the master bedroom.
There was a king sized bed, one of the biggest I’d ever seen, and a large built-in wardrobe full of dozens of shade variations of the same suit on one side and an array of party dresses on the other. On one end of the room there was an ensuite bathroom. Justin stood next to a pastel green wall with a wooden dado rail running along it, terminating in a door-shaped opening that didn’t belong there.
“Check this out,” said Justin.
The door was painted the same shade of green as the wall, and the handle was disguised under the dado rail. This was a door that was not meant to be found.
The commotion brought Alice and Ben into the room, the kid rubbing his sleepy eyes. Dan followed them and a sour whiskey aroma trailed in with him. His cheeks were tinged red.
Faizel ran his hand along the side of the door. “Clever,” he said.
Justin stepped inside the room beyond the door. “You gotta see this, Kyle. I can’t believe it.”
Me, Faizel and Dan walked into the room. When I followed them, my jaw almost dislocated from shock.
It was a windowless room only slightly larger than a shoe cupboard. A dark brown rack was fastened to one of the walls, and dozens of shotguns and rifles hung off it. Underneath each gun was a box with the relevant ammo calibre written on a white label.
My blood pulsed so fast I thought I was going to faint.
“Holy shit!” said Dan, and laughed. He walked over to the rack, picked up a shotgun. It was a pump action, double barrelled death stick. It looked too big in his hands, and he held it in the air like Rambo.
“How good is this?” said Justin. He ran his finger along the handle of a bolt-action rifle. Most of them gleamed like they’d never been used.
For a minute, I was at a loss. Over the last sixteen years the world had shit on me at every available opportunity. Tonight, though, it seemed like Karma was finally rocking in my favour. Guns were rare in Britain, because pre-outbreak you needed a gun license. I had a revolver once, but since firing the six bullets in the chamber, I hadn’t found any more ammo. Now we had enough firepower to take down an army.
I turned to Faizel. “We need to take this stuff down straight away,” I said. “If something happens, and we need to go, I’m not leaving it behind.”
“I’ll help, “said Faizel, and stepped into the room.
I nodded. “Good. Dan, since you’re already in love, you can take down the shotguns. But for God’s sake don’t load any of them.”
Alice took a step forward. “I want to help,” she said.
“Don’t you need to look after Ben?”
She looked at the bump on my forehead from where she’d hit me. “I think I owe you a little help.”
I put my hand to my chin. “Okay. Me, you, Dan and Faizel will take down the guns and whatever else is in that room. Justin, you keep an eye on Ben.”
Justin frowned. He stepped into the doorframe, a rifle slung over his shoulder. “Why me?”
“Just do it.”
He tutted, put the rifle on the floor and walked over to Ben. He leant down to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go downstairs buddy.”
Ben looked over to his mother. His eyes always looked like they were going to start leaking tears down his young face. Alice smiled at him.
”I’d rather they stayed up here,” she said.
I nodded. “No problem.”
Ju
stin and Ben sat on the edge of the bed. Ben wouldn’t take his eyes off his mother.
“Okay everyone,” I said. “It’s our lucky day. Let’s take stock of what we have and then get it downstairs.”
Alice stepped into the room, and as she walked past me I got a whiff of what I was sure was men’s deodorant. Anything beat the smell of grime the wilds gave you, I guessed. I followed her.
The minute I stepped into the room, I heard a snapping sound and the door started to shut behind us. I span round and stuck out my hand, but it was too late. The door slid into place with a thud. The door obviously had some kind of mechanism that made it shut automatically.
This didn’t make sense. How had Justin opened it? Or had it already been open when he found it? If so, why hadn’t the automatic mechanism already shut it? Maybe it was triggered when you stepped into the room.
Dan turned round. He had a shotgun in each hand. “What was that?”
“Doors shut,” I said, looking for the handle. “Can’t find where to open it though.”
Faizel put his hands to his chin. He stroked his goatee and stared at the door. He put his hand to it and traced his way along where the edges had been, but it was almost as if it had disappeared. What the hell was this place?
“There’s no handle,” he said. “But here’s a keyhole.”
“Where’s the key?” said Alice, her voice level.
I thought she would be worried about Ben, but she seemed calmer than I was. My heart hammered and my hands were fidgety. I didn’t like being shut in, and I had the irrational idea that the air supply would start to thin out.
Faizel moved away from the door. “Hopefully the key will be somewhere in here, because there’s no other way to open it.”
Dan dropped his shotguns to the floor. His face was bright red and his head was covered in sweat. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He pounded on the door as hard as he could, but the material absorbed the noise.
“Justin!” he shouted, then pounded some more. “Open the door you moron!”
Shuffling sounds came from the bedroom, but no movement was made to open the door. We could still hear what was going on outside, but any noise we made was absorbed by the walls. The realisation of where we were hit me in the guts.
“This is a panic room,” I said.
Alice arched her eyebrows. “Thought that was an American thing?”
I shook my head. “It’s a money thing, doesn’t matter where you’re from if you can pay for it.”
Dan pounded on the door again. “Justin! Open the door you little shit!” he shouted, his voice straining.
I put my hand on his shoulder and pulled him away. He threw me off.
“Fuck this.”
He took a step back, breathed in, then kicked at the door with all the force he could give. When his foot hit the wood he screamed in agony. “Jesus Christ, my knee!”
Alice shook her head. “Get control of yourself.”
“Fuck off,” said Dan, between painful moans. “How can we hear them, but they can’t hear us?”
Faizel pointed at the ceiling where a black speaker was fastened on a frame. “Hi-tech.”
Alice looked at Dan in disgust. She rolled up her sleeves, and for a minute I thought she was going to start beating him. She looked like she could take him in a fight. She had to have been tough if she was married to a man like Torben Tusk.
“Let’s not mess about. If there’s a key in here, let’s find it. Otherwise I’m all for loading up a shotgun and shooting our way out,” she said.
Faizel looked at the guns. “Firing one in here will burst our ear drums.”
“I know. I’m kidding. Let’s get out of here.”
Her can-do attitude impressed me, though something was off about it. After all, a locked door separated her from her son, and he was being looked after by someone she had only met the night before. Most people would be panicking.
“Aren’t you worried about Ben?” I said.
She tilted her head back, scrunched up her face. “Worry isn’t going to unlock the door.” She crouched down next to Dan, leaned in close to him. “I suggest you get off your arse and help us, or I’ll make sure you get one of these too,” she said, and pointed at the swollen plum underneath her eye.
Aside from the gun rack and boxes of bullets, there didn’t seem to be much in the room. If this was indeed a panic room, then surely there would be more to it? I couldn’t imagine a rich guy, the kind who had a Jacuzzi on his balcony, would build a panic room without fitting it with some degree of comfort.
Then I realised. The walls. The door to this place had blended right into the walls, so what was stopping there being another interconnected door?
I walked across the room and ran my hands along the wall until my fingers dug into a ridge. I gripped it and pulled. A bolt clicked, something hissed and the wall came apart, revealing another room.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?” said Dan, the pain in his knee dulled by the anaesthetic of surprise.
Darkness covered the room beyond so that we couldn’t see what was inside, but we didn’t need sight to tell us that it wasn’t good. A smell drifted out of the shadows and tore at my nostrils. I put my hand to my mouth and covered it to stop the smell seeping inside of me. It was the smell of death.
11
The rancid smell intensified every inch closer I got to the room. I hoped it was something innocent like a rat that had crawled in and died, but my luck wasn’t likely to go that way. I stuck my hand out into the darkness and felt the wall, running my hand along it until I found a light switch. I flipped it and the room lit up. Thank God for emergency generators.
I saw what caused the smell of decay. It was two dead bodies, a man and a woman who were deep into the decomposition process, their bloated skin turning to sludge and slipping away to reveal bones. Their skeletal arms overlapped, as though they had held hands in death. I stumbled, felt bile rise in my throat.
Dan got up, shoved his way to the doorframe. When he got there, he immediately took a few steps back. “Holy shit.”
Faizel shook his head. “Doesn’t look like they’ve been dead too long.”
Dan coughed, lifted his sleeve to his mouth to block the smell. “They don’t look fresh to me buddy.”
“The fact that they’re still decomposing tells us that they died relatively recently. Certainly within the last month or two, I’d guess. Although the room was pretty air tight, so maybe that could have slowed things down.”
I scratched my chin. “Why didn’t they turn?”
Faizel looked closely at the bodies, then shrugged his shoulders.
Unlike other unpleasant odours, the smell of death was something your senses never adjusted to. It was supposed to stay as a horrible smell because if there was death in the air, your body wanted to warn you to stay the hell away from it. In the Wilds, the decaying smell of the infected was carried away by the wind and diluted by the open air. In this enclosed space we weren’t given such a luxury.
I breathed through my mouth to try and stop the smell. To my right, Alice’s face had drained white. She darted her head back toward the door, her face twisted with worry.
“Sorry you have to see this,” I said.
She folded her arms and grimaced. “I don’t give a shit about them,” she said, nodding at the bodies. “I need to get out there to my son.”
Every so often we heard Justin and Ben laughing and talking. It told us that they were okay, but it was probably killing Alice to be locked in here. Whatever she was feeling, she hid it well. Maybe she’d been taking lessons from Faizel.
“The key must be in there somewhere,” I said. “So let’s get to it.”
Dan backed away from the room. “No way am I going in there.”
Faizel flashed an angry look at his friend. It was gone in a second, but it had been there. “We all have to pitch in.”
Dan slunk down to the floor, kept his back against the door. “I’ll pitch in on
things that don’t involve rotting bodies.”
It amazed me that someone who had lived through sixteen years of the apocalypse, someone who had completed numerous scouting trips that involved spending days in the Wilds, could be so squeamish about dead bodies. Maybe it was the fact that these particular dead bodies hadn’t risen from the dead; infected were one thing, but a death without the de-humanising reanimation was different.
