by Jack Lewis
Whittaker’s cheeks quivered and creases lined his mottled forehead. “You don’t know what you’re doing. I can’t die; humanity can’t afford it.”
Alice screwed up her face. “Humanity would come out better for being one wanker short.”
I nodded toward Justin. “Tell me what you’ve done to him.”
Whittaker dropped back into a sitting positon. He rubbed his knees. “He’s in a coma,” he said.
My throat burned, my arms tensed. I thought about the knife on my belt.
“Reverse it,” I said.
His eyebrows arched and he looked at me as if I was speaking German.
“Take him out of the coma,” I repeated.
He closed his eyes for a second. “He has to come out of it on his own.”
Alice dabbed at Justin’s face with a tissue. “And will he?”
Whittaker shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know.”
He said it as if he’d been asked what time the shop closed, as though the question meant nothing. Sweat pooled on my forehead, and my arm twitched.
“You seem pretty fucking blasé about this,” I said.
“My calling runs higher than people, or individuals. I have to separate the ego from the id,” said Whittaker.
“You’ve got your psychology terms mixed up,” said Alice.
I put my hand to my belt and gripped it around the handle of my knife. “And just what is ‘your calling’?”
Whittaker straightened his spine, and his gaze hardened.
“There is a cure for the infection. And I’m the man to find it.”
Recognition flooded my brain. I knew who he was, how I knew his voice. He was the man we’d been hearing on the radio broadcasts in Vasey, the one who had given us hope that there was a way out of the hell the world had been thrown in to.
To think that Justin had spent hours by the radio trying to communicate with the same man who would put him in a coma. How many other lives had Whittaker ruined in his search for a cure? I couldn’t let him go on. There was no cure; just a man who got off from playing God.
I pulled my knife from my belt and grabbed Whittaker by the collar. Sweat poured down the back of his neck, and he put his wiry fingers on mine and scratched at me.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, his voice a mixture of contempt and fear.
I clenched my teeth, bit my cheeks. My heart pounded and my fingers shook, so I tightened my grip around my knife.
Tears hung in the corners of Whittaker’s eyes, and the flesh of his face was a sickening grey. A thick vein on his neck pulsed. One stab and this would be over; Whittaker would bleed onto the floor, and he could never hurt anyone again.
His eyes were bulbous. He rested his cold fingers on mine. “Please don’t do this. Everything I did was so we could survive.”
I paused a second too long. I should have raised my knife and plunged it into his neck, but instead I let his words worm their way into my brain. I relaxed my grip on my knife and took a step back.
“For fucks sake,” said Dan at the back.
Lou looked at me, her eyes questioning. “What’s wrong?”
I hung my head. “I can’t kill him.”
Whittaker sank back into a sitting position, and his whole body sagged. “Thank you.”
Hate spat in my voice. “Don’t thank me. Just tell me what the hell we can do to bring Justin out of the coma.”
Whittaker traced a hand across his head and wiped away the sweat. “I told you, you can’t. He has to wake up himself.”
I looked at Lou. “There’s rope in my pack,” I said. “Tie him up, and we’ll decide what to do with him later.”
22
Maybe there was a way Whittaker could live. Perhaps somewhere inside him was a man who could be redeemed. After all, his motives were to help the human race to survive. It was just that where his motives were grey, his methods were black.
I rolled my sleeve over my hand and wiped a smear of dust off the window. The streets below were empty save for a few infected stumbling across the concrete. I still couldn’t believe that somewhere out there, there might be half a million of them travelling as one.
The hours went by and the need to make a decision grew. Alice and Ben stayed with Justin. She still hadn’t spoken to me, but looking after Justin seemed to make her feel better. I knew that she had a soft spot for him after he had protected Ben from Whittaker.
The door behind me opened. Lou walked in, a clutch of notepads in her hands.
“You’ve got to see this,” she said.
She slammed the papers down on the desk in front of me. There were at least a thousand sheets of A4 lined paper, and each one was covered back-to-font with tiny black handwriting.
“What’s this?”
Lou turned a paper over. It was dated three years earlier. “It charts his research for ‘the cure’. Every fucking minute of it.” She slid the paper over to me. Her forehead creased. “Who the hell is he?” she muttered.
I arched my eyebrow. “Thought you knew him?”
She shook her head. “This isn’t the man I used to know.”
I lifted the paper to my face. It was covered in black scratches of ink. “I don’t have time to read this.”
She dragged a stool out from under a workbench and sat down. “That’s okay, because I already have.”
“And?”
“It’s disgusting.”
Lou picked up a sheet of paper and talked me through it. Whittaker’s records told of his search for the cure, starting from years ago, seemingly after he and Lou had parted ways.
“What happened with you two?”
She lifted her head. “You’re never letting this go, are you? We had a relationship, okay?”
“And then what?”
“He fell away piece by piece.”
I put my hand to my chin. “You’re not upset?”
She shook her head. “The person I knew died a long time ago.”
She carried on reading. Whittaker’s research notes detailed everything from his theories to how he put them into action. In one section, he mentioned that he needed live research specimens.
“Does that mean infected, or people?” I said.
Lou stared at me. “I think it means both. Listen to this.”
Specimen four. Female, dark hair, green eyes. Rendered unconscious during capture, visible signs of distress when awakened in the lab.
Injected batch 4 into her arm. Subjected thrashed, begged for her life. Her body shook. Blood pooled in her eyelids and ran down her face. As it progressed blood loss occurred through every orifice. Subject screamed throughout. Number seven marked as failure.
Bile rose from my stomach. What kind of sick person could do this, and then write about it in such a neutral way? I couldn’t see any way back for him. Searching for the cure had turned Whittaker cruel beyond belief.
“There’s more. Much more,” said Lou. “And there’s an entry for Justin. You might not want to hear it.”
“Read it,” I said.
Specimen thirty-six. Male adolescent. Hopes are high as this one was born post-outbreak.
Batch 36 injected at four AM. Four hours later, specimen entered coma. Vital signs stable but subject is unresponsive.
Research note: May consider move away from vaccine, and look at treatment.
The words swam in my brain; specimen, subject. Justin’s life meant nothing to Whittaker. For all his talk of saving the human race, the man wasn’t human himself. In a way, he was worse than the infected. At least they had no control over their instincts.
“There’s something I gotta show you,” said Lou.
She led me out of the room and into the corridor. The building ran on a generator that powered the lights and electrical outlets, and apparently Whittaker had found a way to keep it running. Even so, the lights above us gave off only a pale glow, so that the corridors seemed like a tunnel system.
Rooms spread out on each side of us. A
ll of them had blinds on the outside that covered a window, some open, others wound shut. Lou stopped in front of one and put her hand to the blind.
“Watch this.”
She twisted the blind and the room came into view. It was completely bare save for the three infected inside. Two of them were slumped against a wall, and the other one paced the room. It snapped its head toward the window and saw us.
It let out a groan and pressed its head against the glass. With the window separating us I moved to within an inch of its face, closer to an infected than I had ever been without having to kill it. I looked into its eyes and blinked in surprise. Little red flecks floated in the middle of the infected’s pupils.
“You ever noticed that?” I said.
Lou leaned in to the glass. “What?”
“Look at the eyes.”
“They look like parasites,” said Lou, and screwed up her face.
The infected banged on the glass, and Lou jumped back. So many questions formed on my tongue, but I could only ask one. “What’s his game?” I said.
Lou twisted the blind, hid the infected from view. “Same as everything he does. Research.”
We paced further down the corridor, passing multiple rooms with their blinds shut. Lou assured me that she had checked each one. It seemed Whittaker had been busy building his infected collection. We stepped outside a room at the end of the corridor.
Lou turned to me. “You won’t believe this one.”
I arched my eyebrow. “Nothing surprises anymore, Lou.”
“No? Then look at this.”
She reached for the blind and twisted. When the window cleared I realised she was right. My veins froze, and it felt like my heart had stopped beating entirely.
Two stalkers lay on the floor. A halogen light bulb hung from the ceiling of the room, and the stalkers shook under the white rays as if every splash of light caused them pain. I would have felt sorry for them if I didn’t know how dangerous they were.
Lou held Whittaker’s research notes in front of me. “He’s got a whole section on stalkers. He thinks he knows where they’re from.”
I nodded. “Put them in my pack.”
We walked back down the corridor. My mind raced, and my body was only just recovering from the flood of panic that seeing the stalkers had brought. It didn’t matter that they were locked in a room and weakened by the light; the fear response triggered by seeing them washed over any sort of rational thought.
“Listen, Kyle,” Lou said.
“Yeah?”
Lou’s boots thudded on the stone floor. “You know he’s gotta die, don’t you?”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
Lou squeezed my shoulder. “Sometimes good people have to do bad things, and sometimes a person has to take a little stain on their soul to stop others from dirtying theirs.”
I knew what I had to do. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but I couldn’t let Whittaker live. Some men did bad things and came back from them, but Whittaker’s conscience was too black for redemption. Lou was right; I had to do this horrible thing so that other people didn’t. If I was going to be a leader, I was going to have to make a sacrifice.
***
We used Whittaker’s keys and locked him in one of the rooms in the corridor. At first I threatened to throw him in with the infected, which would have saved me some trouble, but I couldn’t do that to him. If he had to die, I would let him die humanely. First, I needed sleep. I would let Whittaker spend the last few hours of his life tied up with nothing but his own diseased mind for company.
After we locked him up, Lou looked at me. A question formed on her face, but she didn’t ask it.
“I’ll kill him in the morning,” I said.
The truth was, my body ached and my mind was exhausted. I knew that when it came to the final moment, Whittaker was going to beg for his life. In my current state, I didn’t have the resolve to refuse him. I needed to rest so that I could face what I had to do.
We decided to spend the night in the room with Justin. I took my sleeping bag out of my pack and gave it to Alice. She rolled it out next to the worktop that Justin lay on. She pulled the zip and opened it up, and Ben squirmed his way in. Dan sat at the opposite end of the room, his knees drawn up to his chest, his eyes staring vacantly at the floor.
“He hasn’t spoken in hours,” said Lou.
Usually silence from Dan would be a welcome change, but something was wrong. Perhaps it was guilt eating away at him. It was possible that he’d realised what he had done when he took the car and abandoned us.
I turned to Lou. “You take first watch, okay?”
She nodded.
“Dan, can you take second?” I said.
He lifted his hand in the air in acknowledgment but kept his eyes pointed at the floor.
I lay down on the cold floor. Every cell in my exhausted body needed to shut down and recuperate, but my brain wouldn’t rest. Instead, questions and worry flooded my mind. Was Justin going to wake up? What would I do if he didn’t? Would I be able to kill Whittaker? Was the wave of infected out there, heading our way?
Eventually my thoughts slowed to a stop. I shut my eyelids and felt the room fade. My arms and legs tingled, and then relaxed, and my mind drifted into darkness.
***
“Kyle, wake up.” Cold fingers touched my shoulder.
I bolted upright, reached for my knife, but it wasn’t on my belt. I must have put it down somewhere. My blurred vision snapped into focus. Lou was next to me, her eyes red. Alice sat below Justin with Ben’s head resting on her lap. Lou tapped my shoulder and pointed to Dan.
He was slumped against the wall, his head resting against his arms. My first instinct was a rush of anger as I realised he’d fallen asleep on watch. But something wasn’t right. His skin was a pale yellow colour, as though he were hit with jaundice. His eyes were closed, and I could hear the raspy sounds of his breath as he sucked in air.
I was familiar with this look and I knew what the symptoms meant. I walked over to Dan, put my hand to his cheek and felt the sheet of ice that was his face. I moved his head gently to one side. Dan’s shirt was open, and a red jagged line stretched from his neck down to his collar bone. He’d kept it hidden by his shirt collar until now, but there was no mistaking it. Dan had been bitten.
I turned to Lou. “He’s going to turn soon,” I said. “I want you, Alice and Ben to leave.”
Lou got to her feet, walked to the door. She turned the handle, but it didn’t budge.
“What the hell? Someone got the key?” she said.
“I thought you had it?”
She patted her cargo pants. “It was in my pocket. Hang on, where the fuck is my machete?”
23
The door was locked and our weapons were gone. Looking at Dan, it was obvious what had happened. He’d taken the watch after Lou, and in his weakened state he had passed out. Why hadn’t he told us he was bitten?
Lou pounded at the door. “Whittaker you bastard!”
I slumped against the floor. A wave of exhaustion flooded though me.
“It’s useless,” I said.
The glass of the door was three inches thick, and without a key the only way to release the lock was to press an access key against the reader next to it. The reader glowed red.
“We’re just going to have to wait for him to come back.”
“I’ll be ready when he does,” said Lou.
Alice sat at the back of the room with Ben. Her eyes were vacant as she was turning over thoughts in her head. I could guess what those were; she was thinking about her husband. No matter how much you hated someone, hearing they were dead washed some of that away.
I walked over to her and crouched in front of her. Ben leant against her shoulder, his eyes flickering with sleep. I rubbed my forehead.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “Back then, it was just him or me.”
She opened her eyes, looked at me with hard steel. “I don’t give a shit
about Torben.”
I nodded. “I know. But it can’t be easy.”
She spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t care that he’s dead; I used to feel sick when I looked at him. It’s that you didn’t tell me. When we met you guys, I thought that we’d found people we could trust.”
