I moved back over to see what was happening and found Dale perched on the edge of the camp bed. My brothers had been quiet, but there was something to be said for vibration and intuition. A third sense for things like bodies moving under the ground beneath you, boots on steps, a change of air.
“Did it just get colder?” asked the grey-haired woman.
“Aye, Adeline.” He stood and approached the window, parting the curtains.
My brothers would have heard them speak. For a moment I wondered if they’d wait it out, cramped into the small lav, or if they’d retreat back to the tunnel. I didn’t have to wait long for answer, with their impetuous nature turning the handle in the door and pushing through. It was just a crack, but the movement was enough to catch Dale’s eye.
“Mm,” he grunted. “I don’t think so.” He said this loud enough to stir our guests from their sleep.
“What is this?” asked the one called Adeline, stepping up beside Dale.
Jack stepped into the room first, long blade held out before him. “Just business.” He stepped aside for Dylan and Aled, similarly armed.
“Cowards,” said Dale. “To slit our throats as we slept.”
Jack glanced up towards my hidden position. “You’re hardly sleeping.” The three of them began to take slow steps into the room, while those in their beds suddenly realised what was happening and bolted to the far side.
Dale put up a protective arm across Adeline and took a step back. “We have nothing of interest.”
“I think you have one or two things of interest to us,” said Aled.
“You think we’d take refuge without leaving a stash out there? And risk giving you something worth taking?” Dale stood ready to act, fingers flexing, no doubt feeling naked.
“We can take you to it,” said Adeline. “Just don’t harm us.”
Bess stood forward. “You don’t need to do this.”
“Quiet, Bessie,” Dale hushed. “They don’t care about that.” He turned momentarily to glance at his friends, perhaps wondering why no-one else was by his side. It was a sign. The other two men stepped up, followed by the two remaining women. “Six against three. How do you like those odds?”
A smile crept over Jack’s face as he cocked his blade, frowning as though giving the question some serious thought. He opened his empty palm, beckoning it my way.
“If I get that knife from you, I will use it,” warned Dale.
“You’ll never get a chance,” replied Jack. He looked directly towards me, then; a clear signal to join the party. I stayed where I was, though. I preferred to watch stories play out than get involved.
Dale’s palm had been open. Now it closed, and he and the rest of our guests lunged forward, hoping to catch my brothers off guard. Dale went straight for Jack whose immediate reaction was to rise the blade up over his head to slash it back down, a movement slow enough for Dale to duck under. My brothers had done surprisingly little fighting considering the notches on their bed-heads, and it showed. Dale’s shoulder clobbered into Jack and sent him flying, with Dale landing on top of him. Somehow, Jack held on to the knife, but Dale’s hand was on his wrist in an instant, pinning it down.
Dylan had to jump out of the way to avoid getting knocked over himself, and was about to stab Dale in the back after rebalancing, but the guests charged at them. He turned and aimed his knife out in front instead, arm acting as a pike. How often had I seen him play-fighting in the yard with sticks for swords and sticks too for guns, and now here he was, knees like jelly. They big guys, my brothers, from years of farm work and years and years of Father’s genetic line, but they were still boys. Dylan swung that knife back and forth with no idea what to do with it, glancing back over his shoulder to Jack still pinned to the ground, looking like he wanted to do nothing more than scarper. Aled was at his side like a twin, knife out ahead too. Those blades were the only things stopping the charge.
Jack sounded like a cornered pig as he wrestled with Dale’s weight. A few knee attempts failed, so he tried to roll from side to side, and he failed there too. “Get him!” he shouted desperately, eyes pleading at Dylan.
Dylan was close enough he could probably cause some damage to Dale before becoming overrun, but still he was edgy, feet twitching. Then he remembered me and looked up. “Ffion!”
“Get down here for fuck’s sake, Fi!” added Aled, taking a step back towards the lav.
Our guests all looked up to the mezzanine and the empty air under which I hunkered, quiet, unseen. Dylan remembered he had boots, so kicked out at Dale while keeping his knife pointed ahead. Dale grunted with each heelkick until he’d had enough, grabbing Dylan by the ankle and pulling him down by rolling off of Jack. He kept a firm grip on Jack’s wrist and twisted away from Dylan’s incoming knife attack. With the guard dropped, the man who had complained about being hungry – and to be fair, he looked pretty gaunt – dove at Dylan and wrestled him to the ground, following that up with punches to the face. A blade skittered across the floor.
This was an invitation for the rest of our guests to charge, so Aled turned and fled, the coward. He slammed the lav door behind him and quickly deadbolted it, and I watched him drop the eight feet into the tunnel. He’d be back though.
I returned my attention to the fight to find both Jack and Dylan disarmed with bloodied noses, lying on the ground. Dale took the head of the wall formed in front of them, standing over them. Jack wiped at blood on his chin and tested his jaw, while Dylan wept. Jack looked my way again, eyelids slit.
“I said I’d use this on you,” Dale reminded Jack.
“Kill him,” said the coughing man. “Kill them both.”
“Where’s your brother gone? Trapdoor? And who’s up there?” He pointed the knife to the mezzanine.
“Nobody,” said Jack. “Kill us, and you won’t escape unhurt.”
Dylan’s sobs grew louder, and with wet sniffles he said; “Don’t hurt us, just go. Please.”
“How could you do it?” asked Adeline. She held out both palms, speaking with her hands as much as her mouth. “As if times aren’t hard enough already, you have to harm your fellow human beings? Never before have we needed to stick together.”
“This why I don’t like dealing with people,” said Bessie. She clutched her open jacket around her body. “All the animals wanna do is eat ya. They don’t try an’ trick ya.”
“Can’t move for animals,” said Dale. There was anger in his face, but it seemed like a permanent kind of anger, etched by the world and whatever had come before. There was wearisome too. “You chose your move. Time for us to make ours.”
“Checkmate,” said the coughing man.
The lav door unbolted, the sound of the metal bar in the slot moving over just enough of a warning for me to get myself into position. I dropped down just as the door opened outwards and Aled’s shotgun was rising to fire. Bringing a gun to a knife-fight, now that was just uncalled for. It breached my guidelines for making this a fair fight, so I kicked at it on my way down and he ended up blowing his own foot off. The boom reverberated in the tiny space and both men and women yelled. Aled screamed with a look of incredulity on his face as he stared straight at mine. He had a look in his eyes I’d only seen once before, when I pounced at a mutate that was bearing down on us. It was a look he’d given me as I tore its jugular out. He brought up his knee and looked down at his missing foot and the pattern of blood and bone and passed out, falling backwards. His backside fell through the trapdoor and his head smacked against the side with a crack, and if he wasn’t dead by the time he hit the tunnel floor, he’d surely be paralysed from landing on his back.
I turned to face the crowd.
“So you’re Ffion I take it,” Dale stated.
Jack and Dylan looked at me with perplexed expressions. On the one hand, here I was to save the day! On the other hand, I’d just probably got Aled killed. Did she do that on purpose? they'd be asking themselves. When has she ever done anything accidentally?
&
nbsp; “You’ll answer to Father for that,” said Jack. “Now end this.”
John trained his knife on me. His eyes were bloodshot and his face pale and clammy. His cough came with etchings of the flu too, it seemed. I breathed deeply of his scent – no corruption to be found, just the sour green of illness. “How exactly are you meant to end this, miss? Don’t do anything stupid.” He was two metres from me, a distance I crossed almost instantly. I smashed a hand against his inner wrist and disarmed him as easily as snapping a chicken’s neck. He jumped backwards and raised his arms, saying; “Easy… easy.”
Everyone but Dale retreated. “Nice moves you got there, honey. Element of surprise gone, though.” He switched his knife to a backwards grip.
“I want you to do whatever you were going to do before Aled returned with the shotgun,” I said, handing him my knife.
“What are you doing?” exclaimed Jack, climbing to his feet. “Kill them!”
Dale’s gaze didn’t flicker from mine as he took the knife, staring down while I stared up. Up close, he smelled of must as well as a certain grassy sweetness. I switched from one eye to the other, noticing the asymmetrical flecks of black and orange within the brown irises. Counting the crow’s feet as well as the fatigue. He looked to his weapons and looked at his prey and came back to me, and I nodded.
“You want to sleep,” I said. “I know somewhere.”
“What are you doing, sis?” pleaded Dylan.
“Fucking traitorous bitch,” said Jack. He made a move for the trapdoor but I pounced at him, knocking him against the wall. I used my pinky nail to slice across his throat as he rocked on his feet; as I climbed his body and put a hand to his forehead and tugged back his head, opening his neck further. I didn’t mean to do that, I really didn’t – I’d meant to let it all play out naturally, but I wasn’t in the mood to chase him, or watch the chase ensue. I was hungry, and a little tired myself by then and the thought of a sleep was comforting.
Dylan screamed and our guests retreated even further, away from this mad girl and her bloodletting. Only Dale stood rooted, and even then not for long. He stepped into a temporary spurt of blood from Jack’s neck and plunged his knife into Dylan’s heart, ending the scream. He turned to Jack and I and ended Jack’s suffering.
The rubber bands of life fell away, as easily as that. Strong legs under strong will became pudding. Jack had been as much hamstring as brain, eardrum as lung, and now they were meat that had no lifeforce. I landed on my feet as Jack crumpled between my legs, and my first thought was to finish the job so there was no chance of him coming back. We didn’t know at that point if I infected others in the same way that mutates did, and the last thing I wanted was to face Jack for the second time.
However, try explaining that one. If he turned, it would be half an hour or an hour from now. I looked across at Dale and the rest all eyeing me closely. If I removed the knife from the heart only to move into the brain, they’d only ask questions and be even more wary of me then they would already be. “Grab your things. We need to go.”
“Where?” grunted Dale, exhaling, blood and sweat on his face.
“Home from home.”
“And your… parents?”
“Mother’ll be in bedroom. Father’ll be on his way down.”
Dale shook his head, repeating “Fuck.”
“Can’t get two minutes’ peace,” said the hungry man. They began rummaging around by their beds, collecting their gear back together.
“Get mine for me, someone,” said Dale, opening the entrance. The night sucked the air out and replaced it with a refreshing mist of cool, and then he ran across the yard through squelching mud. I looked back at the trapdoor and figured Dale was correct; Father wouldn’t come from that direction. That was the boys’ thing. Their doings.
I followed Dale out into the night, mud up to my ankles in some places, and slid in front of the porch door just as the outside light activated and Father stepped out. He saw me and his face visibly relaxed. It’s a strange thing; those things our minds choose to remember the most, with the clearest of clarity. Sometimes you can just have a moment and know, right then and there, that something about it just stuck, like a splinter, forever to needle your mind. Or if pleasant, the flash of a camera, the Polaroid pinned to a corkboard. This was one of those moments; Father’s eyes had had a frantic look to them, and his chest had been puffed out. Seeing me, he breathed out, and all worry seemed to drain away. I could almost read his mind; Ffion’s dealt with it. As she always does. My boys fucked up but she covered for them.
Then Dale, hiding to the side of the door, swung an arm and close-lined Father to the ground. Father landed with a thud and cracked the back of his head on the terracotta-tiled kitchen floor, smeared from boot mud, both dried and wet. Out cold. Dale stepped over him and grabbed his arms to pull him within. Blood trailed along with the mud.
“Will he be okay?” I asked.
“In a while,” Dale huffed, dropping the arms. He looked around and saw the stairs. “Your Mother – she’s upstairs?”
“Yes. But let me go,” I said, stepping by. “Meet me by the gate.”
“Food. Water.”
“This isn’t yours.” I took another look at Father’s rising chest, hearing from his shallow whimpering breaths that he was probably okay, and made my way up. She smelled nice that night, breaking open her scarce perfume collection. Perhaps she had thought it was all a cause for celebration. Or perhaps she had wanted to take her mind of things. I found her sat upright in bed, resting against the headboard. A pink slip of a nighty casually loose across her shoulders, hair down. She had her eyes closed and she was shaking. I reached out to grab her clenched hand and she startled.
“Ffion.” Then she saw the blood on me. “Fi!” She shuffled over, as if to leave the bed, maybe even attend to me, if I had anything wrong with me, but instead I put my hand on her chest and said “Stay.” She looked down at the handprint of blood I left on her nighty.
“Who’s blood is that?”
“Could be Jack’s,” I said, putting my hand out again to warn her not to jump from her bed. She leaned forward into it, scrabbling with her legs, but I pushed back. “Stay.”
“What’s happened? Where’s Father? What’s happened to my boys?” Tears of hysteria welled in her eyes, and here came another Polaroid moment; she threw herself at me so I had to push my hand into her face, snapping her head back towards the stacked pillows. She hit the bed hard but was undamaged; a little red in the face from the blood.
“You knew this day was coming,” I said.
“What? Why won’t you tell me? What have you done you ungrateful brat!?” Her face twisted away from the one of innocence, beyond even the one that feigned ignorance that anything wrong or immoral was going on – this was a bad world full of bad people after all (and I was one of the worst, for sure). At least I didn’t hide from the truth.
“It’s time for your little bird to leave its nest.”
That face was full of spite, a hundred lines wrinkling her lips – she had never looked so old. Wiping at her face, she became frozen by the sight of the blood on the back of her hand. “All we did for you. You’re a demon. An ugly monster. Inhuman! You’re not even a real girl – I don’t know what you are!” She spat at me. “Tell me my boys are still alive.”
“Find out for yourself.”
“Please,” she pleaded, voice switching to a whine. “They are brothers to you! It is your job to protect them!”
“No. It’s not.”
“I should’ve listened to your Father. Your Father – you hear? He said not to take you in. But oh no, I couldn’t say no, could I? You’re an abomination, straight from the devil’s womb.”
“I’m going now.” I retreated, Mother looking increasingly small, all of a sudden too scared to leave the bed. “I just wanted to say thank you for the flowers.”
“What flowers?”
“All the flowers.” I shut the door and braced it for a few se
conds, in case she thought to follow me. No springs squeaked, only her sobs. Jack’s blood was drying on the door handle. I could smell it on my face, but it was the same as any other human blood; didn’t smell especially like Jack at all. I don’t know why I thought it would.
Staying still, I closed my eyes and fell into my other state; someplace time slowed to a crawl and I became acutely aware of my bodily functions, from my heart rate to my adrenaline. The boys had had an old biology textbook from their school days that I had read front to back a hundred times. (School was an odd concept to me – not only because of the thought of so many people in one space, but that they were all children. These anachronistic moments were so easily filed away in my mind-space reserved for fiction, like all stories, because it was fiction now. It was impossible to feel nostalgia or remorse for something I’d ever experienced.)
That book had shown me how I was different, especially when comparing to animal textbooks from the local vet and watching old documentaries about wildlife. Things like muscle fibre density; where a human may take a running jump to a metre high, a cheetah could jump three-and-a-half metres through higher density leg muscles. A greater stored potential. This was how I could look relatively normal when stood before a mirror, yet jump through a first floor window from the ground.
So yes, Mother was right when she called me all those names.
My blood had risen so I collected large gulps of air and slowed my breathing, slowing my heart and my blood; my lips were dry and licking them filled my mouth with a taint of metal and reminded me of Mother making black pudding. Eyes closed, I imagined my stress levels falling, feeling a coolness sweep through me from my kidney area as cortisol production ceased entirely. At least, that’s what the books said.
The Risen ( Part 2): The Risen, Part 2 Page 4
