There were times when my responsibility as the leader of Bastion meant that I wilfully keep things from the citizens in order to not worry them unnecessarily. On the other hand, there were times when things happened under such circumstances that, firstly, they had a right to know about what was happening because it involved everybody and, secondly, because even if they weren’t told about it there was no way to keep it a secret.
This time, though, I had no intention of keeping it a secret anyway – it involved everybody.
‘Leah, I need you…!’
‘What the fuck is going on? Tommy?... Tommy!’
‘Get a stretcher from Mae’s.’
‘What are we doing?’
‘Just do what I fucking say!’
Leah gave me a sceptical, worried look, as if she thought I might have finally gone insane, before running off through the streets.
I turned to the citizen on guard duty, remembering that Hayley was on a different post.
‘Keep your eyes on the field. If you see anything that isn’t part of Bastion, you sound the alarm. Signal to the others and make sure they know.’
We had a system for indicating between the four lookout posts at each corner of Bastion in the event that anything of some magnitude happened – the signal was given, and I could only presume that it had reached every post.
Leah finally returned with the stretcher under her arm. We took it in our hands and set off through the doorway, pacing quickly through the field towards the trees.
‘Tommy, what’s happening…? Is somebody hurt?’
‘There’s somebody in the forest. He came walking right up to me…’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know… I’ve never seen him before.’
‘Shit…’
We made our way through the trees, further into the forest, until we finally reached the spot. I no longer cared about the location of the treehouse being revealed – all I could think about was the man.
He was exactly as I had left him.
‘Holy fuck…’ Leah exclaimed.
‘I know.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t going to pose a threat to anyone in this condition. If he tries anything don’t hesitate to cut his throat.’
‘You got it.’
We approached him slowly, placing the stretcher down beside his body before rolling him onto it. He was almost completely limp.
‘You sure he isn’t dead, Tommy?’
I checked his pulse, feeling the odd warmth of his clammy skin.
‘His heart’s racing… Christ…’
‘A fever? You don’t think that he’s… That he’s got it, do you?’
A hundred questions raced through my mind, but the one thing I remained sure of was that he didn’t have the virus. There was no way he could have survived this long – just over fifteen years, now – without contracting it.
‘No. Let’s just get him back to town.’
We managed the weight between us, trotting back through the field – by the time we were halfway across I could already see people appearing in the doorway, some standing around it, some outside.
Around forty yards from it, Robbie came running out towards me.
‘Tommy! What is it?’
‘We found him in the forest…’ I grunted, trying to catch my breath as we hurried along. ‘He’s not in a great state.’
‘Let’s get him to Mae’s.’
‘Yep.’
We reached the door and pushed inside as Robbie led the way. Despite the fact that he was my younger brother, I still reckoned that in a fair fight with nothing but fists, he could probably take me.
Despite the fact that we were a community that remained strong together, the mounting number of people who were making their way towards us from town was growing and growing.
Fortunately I had Robbie.
‘Nobody panic!’ He shouted, leading the way and making sure nobody came to close, ‘We found him in the forest, and he’s injured. We’re going to get him straight to Mae’s house. Please, give him some room, people.’
Everybody obliged us, making some way for us to get towards Mae’s house, but the chatter and between everybody was in abundance.
‘Everybody just calm down,’ I shouted, just as Leah, Robbie and I reached Mae’s house. ‘We’re gonna get him inside and everything’s gonna be fine.’
‘Who is he?’ A voice shouted.
‘I don’t know, but he isn’t a threat to us. I’ll be right back, everyone.’
At that moment the door to Mae’s house came swinging open, and she emerged in the doorway looking agitated to say the least.
‘What the hell is all this?’
‘Mae, we need you.’
‘Oh, good God… Right, get him inside…’
***
As far as religion goes, it isn’t really my responsibility to talk about such things, if it’s anybody’s at all. I’d prefer not to go into it… But, if there is a God, then Mae was a godsend. A sassy, overtly honest godsend, but still a godsend.
‘The fuck did you find this fella?’
‘In the forest. He just came stumbling at me, mumbled some nonsense and collapsed-’
‘You two, out!’
‘Us?’ Leah and Robbie said in unison.
‘Yes.’
They both took off, Robbie winking at me and I returning it as they exited and the door shut behind them.
Mae’s surgery, if it could have been called that, was where the kitchen of the house would have been years ago. The centre island had been turned into a table big enough to place a body – or patient – upon, and then some. Right then that was where our visitor was placed, still unconscious.
‘Now that they’re gone, anything else I should know about this guy?’
‘Nope. I’ve told you everything. All I know is he looks like shit.’
‘You’re not wrong there. Give me a hand cutting off that jacket of his and we’ll shed some light on the situation.’
A few moments later I was pulling the overshirt taut while Mae ran the scissors through the material, cutting it open over both of his arms. The first was nothing but dirty, but the second was-
‘What’s he done to himself?’ Mae asked, echoing my thoughts.
His arm was wrapped up in several pieces of towel and what looked to be ripped up t-shirts.
‘Has he cut himself?’ She continued.
‘Think we should take a look at it?’
‘No time like the present, m’boy.’
We both pulled on a plastic gloves from a box that she kept on the counter, along with the myriad of other pieces of equipment she had in her stores. While I made sure they were secure on both hands I couldn’t help but hear the sounds of the chattering and murmuring of everybody outside.
‘Okay,’ Mae said, ‘let’s take a look…’
I held his arm in place while Mae unwrapped the pieces of cloth bit by bit. Finally the last piece of soaked cloth fell away, and we saw what we were dealing with.
‘Oh, holy mother of God…’ Mae exclaimed, stepping back and inhaling deeply.
‘What the fuck…’ I couldn’t help but mutter.
I won’t go into exceptional detail about the sight that rested before me, but it was evident what we were looking at. The man’s forearm was dotted with incisions, overlapping in various points, with dots of blood seeping from several of the holes. For a second it hadn’t occurred to me, but then I realised what they had been caused by.
The man had been bitten.
‘You ever seen anything like this?’ I finally asked Mae, after several long, drawn moments of silence.
‘No, young man. No, I haven’t. It’s like somebody’s tried to eat him, or something….’
‘Cannibals? The folks at Ashby had heard rumours from far-off contacts, but you know the way these things are… I seriously doubt it.’
‘Me too… Plus I don’t know
why somebody would try to eat him while he was alive. Surely you’d kill him first…’
‘What should we do?’
‘I’ll give him a look… Get Laz to come and help me out with tying him down.’
‘Laz?’
‘Yeah, the Kitchen boy. He’s good with knots. Go on, get, before I kick your ass.’
I looked back down at the man once more, then about the room, before setting off back towards the front door. The moment I opened it and stepped out I was confronted with the vast majority of the citizens of Bastion, standing about.
‘Everybody just calm down,’ I shouted. I had to yell it out a couple more times with the help of Robbie and Leah before the sounds were reduced to a murmuring. ‘We have a visitor, as in, somebody who is not a member of our community. After farming duty I heard some noises in the forest and went in to investigate…’
That was a blatant lie, but I wasn’t going to tell them about the fact that Hayley and I were…
‘He’s in a bad way, but I want to emphasise that he does not pose a threat to any one of us. Now, he’s currently unconscious, and Mae is going to update me as soon as she’s done what she can to fix him up. However, considering the simple fact of his appearance, and the fact that we don’t often have intruders, I’d like to take the precaution of placing four extra people on guard duty for the next 24 hours. I know that we all hate guard duty, but this is for the benefit of every single member of our community. Would anybody like to volunteer?’
Chapter Ten
Morgan
About an hour later I was back at the house, putting together drinks and bread for Henrietta and Robbie, and our visitors – Hayley and Leah.
I took some extra time to prepare the food, sitting back against the worn kitchen counter. I hadn’t had a moment’s rest since I had found the man in the forest, a moment to clear my head. Now that I could, my mind began to race uncomfortably over everything that had happened since his arrival.
How important is it to doubt yourself? Keeping myself and my mind in check was an ideal that I held with the utmost importance, but how far should it have gone?
I was wondering this not because I doubted what I had heard in the forest, but because I was trying to convince myself that I hadn’t heard it.
I don’t know what happened. Everybody, they just… They’re coming for me…
I didn’t know what I was supposed to react to that, what I was supposed to think… Were they just the delirious ramblings of an injured man, or had he meant something by it?
Was something coming for us?
I ran my hands over my face, pushing my short hair back and looking about the room. In the living room I could hear the murmurings and the discussions of everybody. In the past the internet might have been a way for us to move information around at amazing speeds and to gossip on a massive scale, the art of gossip was now something reduced to literal small towns. There was no particular way around stopping gossip – speculation through endless discussion was innate in all of us, and when it came to a small community like ours it could be particularly destructive.
In all of this, of course, I faced a particularly difficult internal conflict. I could stop all of this gossip that I so loathed simply by getting everybody together and telling them the truth. The problem with that course of action, of course, was that it would send Bastion into a frenzy. If everybody knew what the man had told me, the terror would be far-reaching and profound, and people would be scared out of their wits.
I shook my head, casting it from my mind and taking up the food tray before heading into the living room, where everybody sat.
The moment I entered the room they all turned to look at me. Despite the featureless expressions, it was immediately evident that they were looking for information.
I set the tray down on the table in the middle of the room, but nobody went for the drinks with any haste. I could tell they were all looking at me, even before I sat down in the chair by the window and turned to see their piercing gazes.
‘What?’ I asked, knowing full well what was on their minds.
‘What happened?’ Henrietta immediately asked. ‘Who is that man? And what are you keeping to yourself?’
‘Mom…’
‘You have to tell us, Tommy,’ Leah said. ‘He’s inside of our town. This is our territory, and he’s here.’
‘Any of you would have done the same,’ I said. ‘Just because I’m in charge doesn’t make me the bad guy here. Sometimes I have to make the tough decisions. Just because he’s an outsider that doesn’t mean that he’s an enemy. Almost everybody in the town was an outsider at one time or another. I know he’s hurt, but it’s not a difficult task to get injured in a world like this.’
‘That depends,’ Robbie said.
‘On what?’
‘I just feel like there’s something that you’re not telling us. I know you don’t want people to start worrying-’
‘How would you know that?’
‘Because you’re my brother. I know you don’t share a lot with the people around you when it comes to anything. Is there something that happened out in the forest that you didn’t tell everybody outside of Mae’s?’
I looked about everybody in the room before silently looking to the floor and taking a long, drawn breath.
‘That’s a yes,’ Robbie said.
‘So… What happened?’ Hayley finally said something, brushing her hair back behind her ear and staring over at me.
Even if there wasn’t anything left to tell, they still wouldn’t have believed me.
‘Firstly,’ I started, ‘what I’m about to say does not leave this room. You wanna discuss it with me, and I don’t know why you would want to, but if you do, you come back here. I find out that anybody in town knows this information, I’ll presume it was one of you, because that’ll be the truth. Secondly, don’t take any of this as gospel. They were the ramblings of a deranged, delusional guy who came stumbling through the forest. I trust it as much as I’d trust Carl for shooting advice.’
After a few more moments I finally managed to say the words for the first time – to reiterate them as they had been said to me.
‘Well, what the hell does that mean?’ Leah asked. ‘ ‘They’re coming for me?’’
‘I don’t know. I thought he was just crazy, but when Mae and I checked his wounds, he had bite marks all over his arm.’
‘Bites?’ My mother exclaimed.
‘Yep.’
‘So, what is this?’ Hayley asked. ‘Cannibals?’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘For people we’re pretty remote out here. I don’t know how many people would descend into those depths, but I’m guessing it’s small.’
‘But you don’t know for sure?’ Robbie asked.
‘No. I don’t.’
Everybody went silent, before my younger brother turned to look at me.
‘What should we do?’
I was a second away from answering with the most logical, straightforward proposition – wait until he wakes up, if he woke up at all, and ask him what it was that had happened and what he was talking about.
Sometimes, though, these opportunities come knocking – quite literally.
It was a rapid hammering on the front door, a knock of knuckles that told me that something important was happening. I looked about everybody’s faces and dashed into the corridor, hearing a shout of ‘Tommy?’ as I unlocked the door. I had a feeling about what it was going to be before I even opened it – despite living in the aftermath of the apocalypse, in our little town flustered calls like this rarely showed up.
Rarely, but not never.
Larry, Mae’s partner that I mentioned a little while back, pretty much started speaking before I’d even fully opened the door.
‘-need to come now, Tommy. Your boy’s woken up. Now.’
A shiver ran through me as I felt my face dropping, not knowing whether to be terrified or thankful.
I signalled to Henrietta who u
shered with her hand – go, go. I nodded back at her and took off out the door, slamming it shut and running through the streets with Larry until we reached the house where Leah and I had brought the man earlier.
I followed him inside, not knowing what to expect seeing as Larry hadn’t said a word. We dashed upstairs, my heart racing until we reached the bedroom. I looked about the dark room, expecting to see some horrendous scene of conflict before me.
But that wasn’t what confronted me at all.
The room was quiet. Mae stood over the bed, several candles lit about the room causing every shadow to flicker in a fashion I had gotten used to over the years. She looked over at me, just before I glanced at the man.
He was splayed out in the bed, sat up a little against some pillows. Now that he had had the dirt and blood cleaned from him, I found that I was looking at a man perhaps in his mid-thirties, with dark hair and deep, hollow eyes. Even in the dim light of the candles it was easy to tell that he wasn’t in the best of ways by a long-shot; his brow was furrowed with sweat, and his face was drawn out and pale. He was breathing heavily, and seemed to be barely hanging on, never mind awake.
Mae stepped over to my side and look at me, the light only reaching one half of her face, while the other remained shrouded in darkness. She had been around death and illness long enough not to have to look away from it when it did appear, so when she lowered her voice I knew it was because what she was saying was only for my ears.
‘He’s not in a great way. I’ve patched him up but there’s something badly wrong with his arm. He’s burning up, too. I’ve given him something from the medication stores, but he hasn’t improved.’
‘Has he said anything?’
‘Just keeps asking if he’s going to die. I said hopefully not. After a while he stopped asking altogether. All he’s said is he wants to speak to my boss. Told him nobody bosses me around, but he could speak to you if he wanted.’
‘All right,’ I nodded, ‘let me have a word with him. I’ll call you if anything happens.’
Fall of Earth (Book 1): The Survivors of Bastion Page 7
