by Jack Lewis
We had wasted enough time in here. Both rooms were small, and the air supply was starting to get diluted with the putrid smell so that every breath felt like I was filling my lungs with death.
I moved into the room, stepped over the dead bodies. It was hard to tell what they’d looked like from the decomposition, but it was a man and a woman, and they seemed old. The man had a brass bracelet around his wrist which had stayed untouched, the microbes that feasted on death choosing to eat around the metal rather than through it.
On the right side of the room there was a worktop counter. Above it were four TV monitors and a console that was used to control them. On top of the worktop there was a thick book, a pen, a champagne bottle and two glasses. On the other side of the room were two shelves, empty, and a mini-fridge – also empty.
Faizel stepped over the bodies and stopped in front of the TV screens.
“If the backup generator is working, the monitors should also be running.”
The console that controlled them was simple. On, off. Record. Rewind. I pressed the on button and the monitors fizzed to life.
“There’s Ben!” said Alice, excitement undercutting her voice.
The pixels came to life on the screen, and for a second it took me back to before the outbreak, of nights watching TV with Clara and killing time before going to bed, not realising how precious that time was because we thought we had enough of it to spare. It occurred to me that I’d gone over a decade without turning on a television or using a computer.
On the monitor, Justin and Ben sat on the bed waiting for us. They seemed okay for now, but I knew that the separation was getting to Alice. We needed a key, but in such a small room there weren’t many places it could be kept. It must have been with one of the bodies on the floor.
Faizel picked up the book that was on the worktop. It was thick and the edges of the pages were warped as though something had been spilled on them and then had been left to dry.
“You might want to read this, Kyle.”
I glanced at the open page.
August 16th, 2031
There’s always a strange calm that comes over you when you come to a decision, and today I made one that is final.
“This was written two weeks ago. Seems to be his diary,” I said, looking down at the dead man on the floor.
Faizel nodded. “Read out the last entry please, Kyle.”
‘All my life I’ve been in business. Fourteen hour days. Missed birthdays, broken promises, crying children. It was all to build a better life for us. Look where that got me. We’re rich, alright, but now that the end is here, there’s nothing to spend the money on, and I’m left regretting my life and wishing I’d spent more time with the kids and less time with spreadsheets. Valerie won’t have that regret. She is a good mother.
We’ve decided to die. We’ve hidden in here for 72 hours now, and the man is still hanging around the village. For a while I watched him. Saw him glancing up and the farmhouse from time to time. There’s something about him that sickens me.
He’s going to come here. He’s going to take us away in his van, like he did all the rest. I’ve got enough guns here to kill him a thousand times over, but I can’t shoot for shit. I bought them all when the outbreak started, but things went to pot before I could even learn to shoot. Another thing I didn’t get time to do.
The man’s name is Whittaker. He comes and he collects people. Sometimes living, sometimes dead. We don’t see him for weeks because he visits every village in the area, but he always comes back. We think he does it in rotation.
I’ve decided that Valerie and I will die tonight. There’s nothing left for us now that the world is like this. I’ve taken all the pills from the medicine cabinet and we’ll swallow them down with a glass of champagne that I saved for our retirement.
We’ve locked the door and swallowed the key, just in case we turn after death. I doubt you still have cognitive function when you become one of them, but I won’t take any chances. I don’t want us to get out of here and eat someone, like the rest of the creatures.
If somebody gets here, and you are reading this, you are welcome to the guns. And I hope to God we haven’t hurt you, that we aren’t one of them.
For God’s sake, be careful. Stay away from Whittaker.
I snapped the book shut and tried to imagine the lonely hours they’d spent in here, too scared to leave the tiny room because of this man, Whittaker. I tried to imagine the desperation in their minds that made suicide seem like the only way out, but I couldn’t. Even at my lowest, I’d always wanted to survive.
“Poor bastards,” said Alice, shaking her head.
Maggots had burrowed into their flesh and begun eating the dead tissue. The rot hadn’t spread through them completely, and large parts of their bodies were still whole. Their stomachs swelled, and their skin stretched tightly around like a drum and threatened to explode. I couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t turned after death.
“We need to cut the key out,” said Faizel.
From the other room, Dan called out. “I’ll sit this one out.”
“You sit everything out,” said Alice. “Maybe you should have waited outside, and Ben could have looked after you.”
“Looks like we’ve got to do it. But the diary doesn’t say who actually swallowed it; it says ‘we’.” I said.
I didn’t feel like getting on the floor and cutting through corpse’s stomachs, but there was no choice. Back outside the pub, I’m sure Faizel hadn’t wanted to kill the dog, but he’d still done it.
Something banged outside the room. It hadn’t come from the bedroom, but it was definitely somewhere inside the house. Dan stood up against the door, turned round.
“What was that?” I said.
He pressed his ear to the door. “Something’s in the house.”
Alice’s eyes widened. She ran to the door, pounded on it. “Ben! Justin!”
I put my hand on her shoulder, gently pulled her away. “They can’t hear us,” I said.
I tried to keep calm, but the truth was that my heart drilled inside me and my chest felt like a vice was crushing it. We had to get out of this room. I needed to bury the feeling because they needed someone strong. Maybe one day I’d get chance to dredge up my own feelings, but for now I couldn’t afford to have any.
Outside, there were footsteps walking up the stairs.
Adrenaline rushed through me, electrifying my whole body. I slipped my knife from my belt and knelt down next to the decaying man. I choked back the rancid fumes, tried to stop thinking of the corpse as a human being. Think of it as a rabbit. You’ve gutted hundreds of them, why should this be different?
Alice thudded on the door and called out for her son. “Fuck this,” she said. She walked over to the dead woman and knelt by her. She looked up. “Give me something sharp.”
Faizel handed her his axe. Alice drew it back and then plunged it into the woman’s stomach. There was a squelch as the blade tore through flesh, and then a hiss of sickening gas leaked out from her belly.
I stabbed my knife into the man and cut with enough precision as I could muster, leaning my head back to escape the smell. I carved a big enough opening to slip my hand inside.
“Someone’s in the room,” said Dan. For the first time, I heard something other than sarcasm in his tone.
Faizel grabbed hold of the monitor, twisted it in his direction. “Cut faster,” he said.
I looked at the monitor. There was a man in the bedroom with Justin and Ben. He wore a black jacket that reached his waist, and a white lab coat trailed underneath it.
12
Ben screamed. Alice turned to the door, then to the monitor. She saw the man in the room with her son. The whites of her eyes pooled and she tightened her grip on the axe until her knuckles were pale.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt you,” the man said.
There was no doubt as to who this was. It was the man who Faizel and I had seen before, when he�
�d thrown a live infected in the back of his van. It was almost certainly the man called Whittaker who was mentioned in the diary.
I stuck my hand in the corpse’s stomach, felt the cold juices run all over my fingers. My fingertips slid over various textures. I had no idea what they were, but the sensation twisted my stomach.
Every so often I glanced at the monitor. Whittaker took a few steps toward Justin and Ben. Justin stood up in front of Ben and shielded him from Whittaker.
“What are your names?” said Whittaker. He smiled, but the expression hung awkwardly on his face as though he’d never done it before.
He was tall, and despite the bulk the two coats gave him, he looked like he needed a good meal. His hair had been clipped short on top but the back of his hair was uneven, and long black strands stuck out in places like patches on a badly-mowed lawn. His cheekbones jutted out like a skeleton that had just been given flesh.
Justin looked around him, trying to find a weapon to pick up. The man grinned.
“I’m Whittaker. It’s nice to meet you.” He tried to make his words sound friendly, but they were barbed.
Justin put his arm behind him and pushed Ben back. He took a step forward, looked Whittaker in the eyes. The smile on Whittaker’s face dropped and was replaced by cold steel.
“I’m glad you don’t want to play games,” he said. “My work means too much to waste on that. It’s easier if you just come with me.”
He slipped a metal pipe from his pocket, raised it in the air and swung it onto Justin’s head. There was a sickening crack as the metal connected with skull, and Justin flopped to the ground.
Whittaker knelt in front of Ben. “Don’t be scared,” he said.
He pulled a chord of rope out of his pocket and began tying Justin’s legs together.
Alice’s face lit up with the fury that only a mother can summon. She stuck both of her hands into the stomach of the corpse and dug in it like a dog making a hole in the dirt.
My heart rate spiked. I had no idea what Whittaker was doing, but I had to help Justin. I stuck another hand in the corpse’s stomach, ignored the sensation of the juices washing over my fingers.
Alice stood up. She was covered in blood up to her elbows, and some of it had splashed onto her chin. She looked like an infected who had just finished a feast.
“It’s not in mine,” she said. “Hurry up Kyle.”
She watched the monitor, gripping the hem of her shirt and twisting the fabric in her fingers.
Whittaker had made short work of tying up an unconscious Justin. He moved around his body until he stood at his feet, then gave them a heave. Justin was a skinny guy, but even his light frame seemed to give Whittaker trouble.
His face went red with strain. Inch by inch, he dragged Justin out of the room. Soon we heard thumps as he moved down the stairs, and finally the crash of the farmhouse door as he shut it behind him.
I picked up my knife again and sliced it against the dead man’s stomach, this time cutting a hole so big that it opened up the stomach completely. I dug in the stomach until my hands were coated in sticky crimson, the blood thick and clotted like raspberry sauce. I touched something metal and grabbed it between my fingers.
“I’ve got it.”
My chest felt like it was going to explode with pressure and my whole body felt like it had been injected with caffeine. I needed to get out and stop Whittaker.
I put the key in the lock, twisted it. The door didn’t budge. Seconds ran away from us. The only sound from outside was Ben crying. Then footsteps thudding down the stairs, getting fainter as time passed.
“What the hell is wrong with this?” I said.
Finally there was a hiss as the lock clicked and the door opened. We all stepped out. Dan took big gulps of air, glad to breathe something that didn’t smell like death. Faizel went to the window, drew back the curtain. Alice scooped up Ben and held him tight enough to squeeze the air out of him.
The door of the panic room clicked against the hinge and triggered the mechanism, shutting it behind us. The lock clicked back into place. There was no way we would get it open again. Finding it in the first place had been blind luck, and we didn’t have much of that left.
“He’s got to the van,” said Faizel behind me.
I ran down the staircase, almost losing my footing at one point as my hand, wet with blood, slipped on the bannister. I managed to straighten myself and get to the bottom without breaking my legs.
The front door hung open. I got outside just in time to see the white van turn a corner and drive out of the village with Justin in the back.
13
Dan traced his fingers along the wall where the door had been. It blended back into the décor with no visible sign that it had ever existed. That was the point of it, I guessed. No use in a panic room if potential intruders knew that it was there.
“Forget it,” I said. “You’ll never get it open.”
Dan punched the wall. It made a hollow knocking sound, but didn’t do much else. He turned and slumped against it. “All those fucking guns and we can’t get at them. Wish I’d grabbed the shotgun.”
I couldn’t think about the guns. I imagined Justin tied up in the back of the van. The thought filled my body with nervous energy.
“We need to leave, now. We need to go after the van.”
Faizel stood at the window. “He could have gone anywhere.”
I tightened my fist and curled my fingers into my sweaty palm. “I don’t care. We should start looking. I say we start in Bury – that’s the direction he headed in, right?”
It felt like all I ever did was chase after Justin. I’d only known him a year, and this was the second time he’d been kidnapped. Forget him watching Ben; maybe Ben should have been looking after him.
A thought sent a cold shock up my spine. Earlier, Whittaker had thrown an infected in the back of his van. Now, he’d taken Justin. Was Justin lying next to the infected? We’d seen Whittaker drive away earlier in the night, but we had no idea what he had done with living corpse he’d tied up.
Alice wrapped her arm around Ben. The boy clung to her torso. “He took the road toward Bury, but it splits off toward Manchester not too far from here.”
Dan let out a huff of air. “Do we really have to go to Manchester? I know I signed up for it, but I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.”
I paced to the end of the room, then back again. “I doubt Whittaker will have gone there either. Even if there aren’t half a million infected heading from there, it’s still the most populated place in the North. And that means a hell of a lot of dead people.”
Alice put her hands over Ben’s ears. “Don’t say that.”
I screwed up my face. “Didn’t have you down as the scared type.”
“I don’t want him listening to this,” she said, and nodded down at her son.
Dan gave a sarcastic laugh. “Stop trying to protect the kid. Sooner he knows how fucked things are the better.”
As much as I hated Dan’s attitude, I agreed with him. There was no use protecting kids from the truth. If you shielded them from danger they grew up weak, and we lived in a world that didn’t tolerate weakness.
Faizel held the crimson curtains above his head so that he could see out of the window. He stepped back and let them fall, cutting away the pale glint of the moon and covering the room in shadow.
Dan stood up. “Moe’s not going to wait around forever. Personally, I don’t give a shit, but if you’re bent on keeping him in Vasey, we need to forget Justin and go check out this wave.”
I shook my head. “I’m not leaving him.”
“The kid’s gone,” said Dan. “If you take a detour for him, Vasey will be gone too.”
I bit down on a glob of anger that rose up my throat. There was a mocking look behind the beady black balls of Dan’s eyes. I wondered why Moe insisted on him coming along. The man was a selfish as they came, and he was impossible to trust.
“Leav
ing him isn’t an option. We’ve been through too much, and I’m not letting this guy take him. We don’t know what the hell he’s going to do to him.”
Alice bent down to Ben, pushed him gently to the bed. “Sit down,” she said. Then she turned to me. “I’m with you. If it weren’t for Justin, he would have taken Ben.”
Faizel ran his hand through his long hair. Black strands fell away from the tightness of his ponytail, and his goatee was a couple of days shy of its usual immaculate grooming.
“Justin is one of us. I won’t leave him either.”
