That was when James said it.
‘No… It’s Helena…’
We all stared at the figure, and even though I had only met her a couple of times over the years during our scheduled meetings, I could tell that it was her. She had been a very tall woman, and her hulking figure was now more intimidating than ever with the blood that stained her form, the wild hair and the contorted face.
She seemed to be waiting, and for a moment I held at some form of hope, that she would recognise James from afar, that some part of her mind would return to her.
That notion didn’t last long though – after a few moments of us all waiting, utterly on edge, she released the most spine-chilling, gut-wrenching howl, raising her head towards the sky, before setting off at a run towards us.
The automatic rifles were empty, but I had still had my father’s rifle slung over my shoulder. I raised the gun, steadying it, knowing that I could stop her within a second.
‘No,’ James said, ‘give me the gun.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve never done this before, and it’s only fitting that I put her to rest.’
In a split second I thought back to Marcus and Maria, and how suddenly she had killed herself in the basement of the outpost.
We didn’t have time to deliberate on these things, though – she would be here within seconds.
I hurriedly passed the gun over to James, and he took it in his hands, raising it before him.
‘Just-’
‘I know how to use it,’ he said quickly. ‘I remember what you told me.’
By my side I saw Robbie, Hayley and Leah shift uneasily, expecting James’s attempt to be botched.
He fired – the bullet whistled past Helena’s head but she paid it no mind, continuing her sprint towards us as she grew ever closer.
30 yards.
20 yards.
‘Do it now!’ Leah shouted, but her effort wasn’t needed. I watched as James calmly took a breath, reloaded another a round into the chamber and steadied himself.
She must have only been five yards away from the barrel of the gun when he pulled the trigger for a second time. From where I was stood I saw the bullet strike her square in the forehead. Her speed wasn’t enough to stop her as she moved towards us, no matter how fast she was going. The hard, smacking sound of the connection of the round with her skull signalled that terrible, powerful motion that sent her flying backwards, crumpling into a lifeless heap on the ground.
Then we were left with nothing but silence on the streets of Bastion, comfortable in the probably knowledge that we had stopped all the known infected that had overrun us.
I turned to James. He stood looking down at Helena’s remains, still holding the gun in the offensive position in his hands. I took a few steady steps towards him until I was by his side, and placed my hand on his shoulder.
‘You did good, James,’ I said, nodding at him. ‘Fancy giving me that back?’
James looked down at the gun as if he didn’t even know he was holding it, like some foreign object of death that had just so happened to finds its way into his hands. Hurriedly he passed it back to me, and I took it off him and slung it over my shoulder by the strap.
‘I can’t believe nobody made it,’ Robbie said, shaking his head.
I looked about at everybody. James would be all right, I thought, once he managed to move past his Ashby. His pain was the same as ours, but his people were ones that I had never known. My friends, though, had been friends with everybody else here.
‘Let’s go see the house, huh?’ I said. ‘There might be a little food left over there. If not we can head to the farm.’
‘That your plan?’ Robbie asked. I could see that he was struggling to hold himself together, and I didn’t blame him in the slightest.
‘Yeah. It is. I actually think it’s the best one I’ve ever had.’
***
In the aftermath of our second apocalypse, one that had impacted our own little world this time, the five remaining citizens of Bastion sat and drank cold water and slightly stale but still edible bread. James was now one of us – he had earned his keep in a short amount of time, and I admired that greatly.
We endured another long period of silence amongst our group before I finally said something I thought I would never say.
‘So what do we do now?’
‘So you’re the one asking that now, huh?’ Hayley said.
‘We have more options now.’
‘What do you mean?’ Leah asked.
‘Well there are fewer of us now. Fewer people to look after. Plus we’re more mobile. We could do whatever we want.’
‘I know… I know that we’re accustomed to people dying living in a world like this,’ Robbie said, ‘but even if they turned, even if… Mom was one of the one’s who turned, and we couldn’t find her… Even if she’s off somewhere in the wilderness right now, roaming around… I know that’s a horrible though, and I’m sorry… But don’t you think we should put everybody to rest first? They were good people before they came infected. Some virus shouldn’t be able to dictate what happens to them after they’ve gone.’
I thought about what he said for a while, before realising that I agreed with all of it.
‘Yeah. You’re right. I want to put something together for mom first, though, before we do anything. We can dig a little patch for a headstone in the spot next to where Dad is. We could do it now, actually.’
‘Yeah. I’ll do it. Do we have a shovel somewhere?’
‘Well, we- oh, shit, we left it back at Ashby, didn’t we.’
‘I’m pretty sure there’s one in the basement.’
‘Okay… Two minutes, I’ll just go grab it.’
This was another one of those moments, like the one that had happened the day before at Bastion. The kind of time when something’s coming up on you without you realising it, and beforehand you never knew it was approaching at all. They’re the times that have enormous effects on who you are and the course of your life, and they can creep up on you at any moment.
This was, indeed, one of those times.
I headed to the basement door in the next room, by the stairs. My guard was pretty much down at this point, but when I went to turn the handle-
It was locked.
The basement door was never locked.
I dashed upstairs, finding my room untouched, just as I had left it. I grabbed the keys from my desk and headed back to the door, turning it in the lock and pushing the handle open. It budged about an inch before I realised that something was blocking it from the other side. It made a heaving, crunching sound, but I ascertained pretty quickly that whatever it was, it wasn’t alive.
It was more like something had been stacked against it, as if to bar it.
In my frustration, and after much pushing and heaving, I finally mustered the strength to push through.
Looking down the stairs in the dim light, I heard a crashing sound as I witnessed stacks of boxes falling down each step. Their contents spilled everywhere, and it was loud enough to bring my four companions running into the hallway.
‘Everything all right, Tommy?’ Leah said, peaking over Robbie’s shoulder.
‘I’m not sure…’ I muttered, setting off down the stairs and into the dark.
Not a thought was running through my head as I took each step – for some reason I honestly didn’t know what I expected to find.
But as one of the dozen or so people who had been hiding in the basement turned on a torch and I took in the view before me, finally laying my eyes on my mother’s shocked face at the front of the group, who were all huddled into a corner, I felt the kind of promise and elation that I thought I would never feel again in my life.
She ran towards me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, I embracing her and feeling the frailty of her form after having been down here for two days.
I couldn’t think of anything to say – not a thought of anything came into my mind. I was onl
y overtaken by a rush of raw, thankful love as I held on tight to Henrietta, the tears filling up in my eyes.
Chapter Twenty
Reunion
‘I had a bad feeling that morning. I know you always say that my bad feelings are stupid, Tommy, but this one was awful. I haven’t felt that way since… Anyway, I woke up early and headed outside just before I heard the gunshots down the street. Everybody from the nearby houses had trickled outside, too, one by one, and I advised everybody to head into the basement until things were all right. I was about to head back outside when I heard the screaming, and that’s when I locked myself down there.
‘Then we heard the explosion-’
‘Rudy. I think he had some home-detonation system set up in the event that we ever ended up in a fight we couldn’t win. You know what he was like.’
‘Goodness… Well, when I heard the explosion I realised that I would have to get inside and barricade the door. You’ve always said that if happening just to save myself. I knew you boys could look after yourselves, but when things got bad with the screams and all of those horrendous noises… I didn’t know what to think. They went on for so long before things went quiet, but then they would start up again every so often. We were going to come out and make a run for it right around the time you showed up. When we heard those explosions I didn’t know what to think.
‘I must say, it’s a very creative approach… Who gave you all of those things?’
‘This is James,’ I said, waving a hand over to him as he sat in the couch on the far side of the room. ‘He’s from Ashby. They were overrun by the virus before us. They were the ones who attacked us. It wasn’t them, of course. They were being controlled by the infection, just like everybody from Bastion.’
After everybody else had come into the basement, the moments following had been overwhelming. I can’t even begin to describe the joy I felt at seeing my mother and the rest of the survivors of Bastion that she had managed to group together in the aftermath of the attack, how many she had been able to save.
It was only now, probably an hour later, that all of us had managed to calm down sufficiently enough to have a normal conversation. We were sat back in the living room, every one of us malnourished and exhausted.
‘How many of us are left?’ She asked, looking about the room.
Everybody else had gone outside to get some fresh air – I had warned them about the bodies, and it had been overwhelming for some of them. Breakdowns had been in abundance, and it was just something that we would have to get past. Every one of them had returned into the daylight though – they had been down there for longer than they could even figure out.
‘Four of us, plus James. Then there’s you, and the twelve that you saved. That’s eighteen.’
‘Less than half of our original numbers,’ she said, lowering her head. ‘I just can’t believe it. It’s all happened so quickly. What is this… Thing, you’ve been referring to? This infection, did you say?’
I explained everything that I knew to her, every scrap of information that I had managed to gather since the attack – the infection, Ashby, the mysterious woman from the south.
Henrietta sat in silence for a long time before finally speaking.
‘It makes you wonder where such a thing begins, doesn’t it? Where your patient zero comes from?’
‘Patient zero?’ I asked.
‘The first,’ James said. ‘Patient zero is the first person to contract the virus, to test positive for it. They’re the one who starts it, but how they become infected is another question all on its own. These things have to start somewhere.’
‘Yes,’ Henrietta said. ‘What did you say name was, again?’
‘James.’
‘Smart boy, James,’ she smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re with us.
‘I’m glad to be here.’
***
Robbie and I both took huge bags with us to the farm and filled them to the brim with food, enough to feed all of our survivors. Blood was still on the streets, and so were the bodies – we ate back at the Kitchen with everybody, out of sight of it all, well into the confines of the house, a few people in the patch of garden out the back. Our people were happier, but the meal was just a shade of the one we had had a couple of days ago, when everybody had lined the picnic tables in the streets and eaten meat and drank and laughed and talked and just been with each other.
I felt it would be a long time before we experienced another day like that, but in my mind I had little doubt that we would get there again, one day.
When we had all eaten I gathered everybody into the garden and stood before them, searching for the words to comfort them, to reassure them, to let them know what our plan was from here.
That wasn’t what came out of my mouth, though. It was my job to look after Bastion and everybody in it, and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done that by a damn long shot.
My mother had saved a quarter of the populous, taking care of them in the basement of our home for hours on end while it seemed the world was coming to an end for a second time right above their heads. It was her face that I looked to at the back of the group, the one I looked to for the words and the strength, to find what it was that I wanted to say.
So I told them. I told them everything. I wasn’t going to lie to them a second longer, or keep things under wraps just to keep their minds at ease. We had lost so many people – friends, family, neighbours, and now was the time to be honest about what had happened.
That wasn’t all, though. I told them that we wouldn’t let this thing defeat us, just like we wouldn’t let anything defeat us. If we could come back from this, then we could come back from anything.
We would.
They weren’t just my people.
They were the survivors of Bastion.
Chapter Twenty One
One Month Later
I awoke peacefully for the first time in a while and laid there in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. In the long-run it felt like this room was one of the only things that hadn’t changed in my life, that I was safe here within these four walls. That wasn’t true, of course. None of us would ever be truly safe, and everything had changed.
Still, that didn’t mean our old routines had to disappear completely, although there were a few changes that had to be made.
The footlocker beneath the cabinet now contained a new rifle – something a little more high powered than the one I had been using before the attack. My father’s rifle was back beneath my bed, where I felt it could stay safe. I had put it to plenty of use over those few days, and now it could take a rest.
James had moved in to the house next door, and I had kept true to my word; I allowed him to go about his business and stay indoors as long as he liked, on the condition that he kept track of our accounts and stock levels. He had been kept more than busy with all of the supplies we had transferred and brought in from Ashby over the last month. All of the guns were now kept in the basement of his house, and we were in the process of training everybody in town to use them in the event that another attack occurred.
What about the rest of the explosives, you might ask? Well, we decided to put them to better use – we had set up booby traps around Bastion with them, in the event that anything like the previous attack happened again. We still knew so little about the virus and the infection, and for all the information we had on the matter we had no idea how bad the outbreak was. Maybe we were the only ones left.
We hadn’t had a passer-by, travelling salesman or anybody else stop by in a month.
I headed through the clean streets of Bastion towards the gate, the very same that the infected had come through before. Rudy’s house still lay in a crumpled heap, but we had kept the mess contained to the property and were in the process of giving it a full clean-up. Everybody had grouped together to return Bastion to its former state, and we had done a damn good job of it.
I said hi to our guard on the door and headed out beyond the wall, an em
pty rucksack in one hand and my rifle slung over my other shoulder.
I crossed the fields in the early morning sun. The days were growing colder and autumn was approaching us faster than I could comprehend. With fewer people around to carry out the work I was beginning to wonder whether we had the manpower to get through the cold of the upcoming months, never mind the food shortages. We had fewer people, true, but that also meant fewer people to tend to the food.
Wheat kept for years, so it looked like any variation of that would be on the menu for the next season.
Things were quiet as I crossed through the fields towards the farm. I thought back to the day not too long ago when I had shot the deer, back when Carl had been by my side through all of this. He had survived the ambush by the intruder and the farm that morning… I think that truly was what had given him the bravery to go and talk to Maria. It had put things into perspective for him in the best of ways.
I wondered how he would have behaved if he knew the fate that awaited him just a few days later.
I arrived at the gate to the farm, finding it intact and that none of the traps surrounding it had gone off. Still, it didn’t stop me from keeping my gun close and ready as I unlocked the gate and headed inside, keeping my eyes wide open as I searched for any movement.
Comfortable with the conclusion that I was alone, I packed up all of the supplies I needed, making sure I had the correct number so that I could report them back to James. There was something therapeutic about being around things that grew. Here, I no longer felt the lingering feeling that something was awaiting me, something that wanted to end my life, as so many other things in this world did.
In the quiet of the farm I sat down for a moment on the dry ground, breathing in the clean air before lying back against the ground and looking up at the sky. It would be another clear day, and for that I was more than grateful.
So many questions still remained unanswered; the woman from the south, the source of the infection, the theories that James had posed to me – cities in the south? Could such a thing be true? Our information wasn’t exactly extensive, but surely if there were they would have had the means to contact us by now.
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