by Jack Lewis
It wasn’t Eric’s fault, but everything had collapsed when she met him. For so long she’d been frustrated at her own cowardice. DC’s went through hell. She wanted to help them, but she didn’t dare. Look what had happened when she found the courage.
It wouldn’t be long until Kim woke. A voice in her mind called to her. You know what you have to do.
The bottle felt too large in her hand. Can I use it to…She shuddered, and almost dropped it. Don’t think like that. She’s gonna be fine.
Noises drifted through the open window. Heather got up to check.
Infected walked down the street outside. There were dozens of them, and they had bracelets around their necks.
“The hell?”
Twenty feet behind them, Capita soldiers held lengths of chains. The chains looped across the ground and connected to the monsters’ neck bracelets. Further back, was a sight that chilled her.
Charles Bull rode his horse behind them, a conquering general sitting high on his horse. He was here for one thing; her.
“What’s going on?” said Wes.
“Charles Bull’s here. They’ve got a bunch of infected chained up.”
Eric got to his feet. “Is he looking for us?”
“He’s not here to party, kid,” said Wes.
People left their houses and were standing on the edge of the pavement. Infected walked toward them, their chains rattling along the tarmac road.
One man, his jeans unbuttoned as if he had dressed hastily, rushed to his front door and waved his arms. Across from him, a teenager settled onto a wall and watched with his hand across his forehead.
Charles shouted something. The Capita soldiers approached their infected with careful steps and released their chains. Let loose, the infected lurched in all directions toward the district residents.
Adrenaline shocked through her, making her tense. “They’re letting the infected loose. We’ve gotta help.”
“Help? It’s a clear out, Heather. They’re already dead. And so are we.”
The men and women transformed from spectators to victims. The monsters pounced on those who didn’t retreat into their homes. Growls met with shrieks. Chains scratched on stone.
Heather heard a groan behind her.
“She’s waking up!” said Eric.
Kim stirred. Heather choked back a breath, and she tightened her fists and dug her nails into her skin. She didn’t care about the pain.
She watched her daughter’s slow movements and she stared at her grey skin.
No. She’s infected. She’s one of them.
Kim let out a sound between a cry and a growl. She opened her mouth and coughed a spray of blood onto the laminate floor. Her eyes flickered, but her pupils still hid away.
Wes raised a pistol to shoulder height and cocked it. He must have got it from his hiding place in the wall.
“Don’t you fucking dare point that at her,” said Heather.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what we have to do.”
If she vomited everything in her stomach out onto the floor, it still wouldn’t be enough to get rid of the nausea inside her.
“Look at her, Heather,” Wes said. “She’s turned.”
“Put the damn gun down.”
Eric stayed against the wall. His eyes darted from Wes to Kim. He looked torn between rushing to Kim’s side, and getting away from her. Heather’s hands shook. She gripped the bottle tighter.
Kim gave another weak cough and a sprinkling of red hit the floor. She raised her head. Her eyelids flickered, and her fingers curled into her palm.
Put me out of my misery. Just show me what she is, and at least I’ll know.
Kim opened her mouth. Heather expected to hear her groan. She expected her world to crash down around her.
“Mum?” said Kim.
Wes lowered his pistol. Heather fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her daughter. She was squeezing too hard, but there was nothing else she could do. She pressed Kim’s head into her chest and ran her fingers through her hair.
“Mum?” she said with the weak voice. “You look scared.”
Damn right she was. She’d had the greatest scare in her life. Not even seeing an infected for the first time came close.
Now that Kim was okay, what next? No matter where they went, the Capita would hunt them. Eric - and now Kim since she was immune - would be taken to the farms, where the Capita would drain their bodies. Wait. Am I immune too?
Someone screamed. On the street, two infected pounced on a little girl. Her mother was standing at the side, legs paralysed in terror.
Heather’s legs wobbled. She backed away from the window, dizzy. “Why aren’t they doing something?”
Once the girl was dead, the soldiers steered the flock of infected down the streets. They went from door to door and barged their way in.
Charles didn’t care about the residents of the trader estate; it wasn’t about them. He was looking for her.
Chapter Eighteen
Ed
A figure sprinted down the street outside the window, galloping at a speed that could rival a racehorse.
“No way,” said Ed. “Gary?”
As he went to open the window, the bedsprings groaned behind him. “Ugh. My head,” said Bethelyn. “Ed? What’s going on?”
“Come look at this.”
Gary reached the road outside Ed’s house. He fell face-first into the ground without putting his arms out to stop himself. He opened his mouth wide, as if in mid-scream.
Ed recoiled. A spear stuck out from Gary’s back.
Figures emerged at the top of the street and made their way toward Gary. There were eight of them. They wore masks on their faces, and thick animal-pelt coats reaching to their boots.
One man led in front. He was a foot taller than the rest and wore a thicker coat. He strolled like he was in a park on a sunny afternoon.
They walked in uniform steps that reminded Ed of a military march. As they went by Gordon Rigby’s house, an infected sprang from behind a bush. The leader of the strangers and grabbed the monster by the hair and pushed it away. Another stranger killed it with his knife.
The leader stopped outside Ed’s house. He stood over Gary’s and gripped the spear that stuck out of his back. He put his boot on Gary’s calf and wrenched it free with a spurt of blood.
Ed moved to the side of the window to look outside without being seen. Bethelyn lifted herself off the bed, but Ed raised a hand in the air. With the window open, Ed could hear the conversation outside.
“Do you think this will work, Savage?” said one of them, looking at the leader.
The Savage wiped his spear on his trousers. “We’ve seen it plenty of times before.”
“I know, but it’s been so long since he got bit.”
“Gotta try.”
“We might not have got to him in time.”
The Savage put his spear behind his neck and rested the crook of his elbows on it. “We’ll know soon enough.” He nodded at Gary’s lifeless body. “Was he immune?”
“You saw him, Savage. He was running like a girl. He hadn’t turned.”
The Savage made a beckoning gesture to his people. Two of them carried another man forward and laid him at their leader’s feet.
He dressed like the others, but his long grey hair marked him as much older. He had the wrinkled skin of a fisherman who had spent years at sea. His pupils were so diluted it looked like the whites were going to swallow them.
The Savage kneeled beside Gary’s body and gazed into his dead eyes. He sawed off Gary’s right arm using a knife.
Ed looked away to spare himself the sight, wishing he’d had enough warning to miss the knife slicing into skin. His stomach bubbled.
The Savage cradled a piece of flesh in his hands. Blood trickled over his fingers and ran down his arm, where it disappeared under the sleeve of his coat He bent next to the grey-haired man. He put one hand on the man’s leg and offered the meat to him
.
“Open your mouth.”
The man chewed Gary’s flesh, his face turning into a grimace. As he ate Gary’s arm, the strangers hummed a tune that sound like an old sailing song. The Savage watched in silence. When he was finished, the old man sobbed.
“You know it was the only way,” said The Savage.
“Shut the window,” Bethelyn said. “Please.”
Ed had been so mesmerised he forgot Bethelyn was watching. He gasped at how white her skin was.
“What the fuck did we just see?” said Ed.
Bethelyn interlocked her fingers behind her head. She didn’t answer.
“I mean,” said Ed. “He ate part of Gary. Sliced off some of his arm and fed it to his friend.”
“He was sick,” said Bethelyn.
“What?”
“The old man was sick. Don’t you get it, Ed? They were talking about people being immune. We’re all immune here. The man out there was sick, but Gary was immune. They made the man eat part of Gary to cure him.”
When the clues came together, they knocked the breath out of him. The strangers weren’t cannibals. If they were, they would all have eaten Gary. Instead, only the sick old man had eaten flesh.
“They made him eat the immune to stop his own infection,” said Ed.
Bethelyn nodded. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense, screwed up as it is.”
Ed was so stuck in his thoughts he didn’t realise he had moved in front of the window. Down on the street the strangers stared back at him.
When he met their gazes, ice shocked his chest.
“Time to go.”
It was a short run to the harbour, but it meant a descending a hill made slippery by rain. Ed skidded near the bottom, righting himself at the last step.
His breath left his chest as he looked at the boats tethered to the dock. All of them floated for now, but they were sinking inch by inch. The nearest one, a yacht called the Claret Princess, had a hole in the hull. The rest had suffered the same fate.
“Someone did this on purpose,” said Bethelyn.
“No prizes for guessing who.”
The strangers appeared at the top of the hill, like natives seeing off a raiding party. Ed reminded himself they were the strangers on the island, not him. Yet it was him being chased away.
“What now?” said Bethelyn.
The Savage shouted into the air. Maybe he meant it to be a war cry, but his delivery was too high-pitched. The sound didn’t scare Ed. It was only when the strangers rushed down the hill that adrenaline shot through him.
Great. The boats were ruined, and the strangers were running toward them. Their already limited options had narrowed to a single choice.
He grabbed Bethelyn’s hand. She seemed surprised at first, as if not expecting the contact. “Let’s go.”
He looked across the wooden planks of the harbour to where the wood met the lapping sea. The boats were gone, but the sea remained their only escape. It was too cold to stay in it too long, but there was no other way.
they sprinted across the pier. When they approached the end of the small boardwalk, they jumped into the freezing sea. As his legs crashed into the icy waters and the cold slid over his skin, he gripped Bethelyn’s hand.
Chapter Nineteen
Heather
Desperate voices drowned the sounds of their escape; men and women screaming in fear, soldiers barking commands, the groans of the infected travelling on the wind.
“Stop!” shouted a Capita soldier.
Heather froze, but she didn’t see anyone nearby. She put her arm around Kim and supported her onto the street. Eric looked around, on edge like a fly buzzing in the breeze. Wes followed them with one hand tucked in his pocket, gripping his gun.
“We can slip through the streets if we’re quiet,” said Heather.
“Where are we going?” said Eric.
“We need to get off the estate, that’s all I can think about. Where is a big question, and I don’t have the stomach for it.”
They moved east away from Wes’s house, along a street of semi-detached houses with abandoned cars parked out front. Heather held her daughter close to her. Kim could about walk by herself, but she was frailer than an Autumn leaf.
It wouldn’t take them long. If they walked close to the buildings, they should have been able to slip by the soldiers and their chained infected. Charles was around somewhere, but he couldn’t see though walls.
They carried on along the street. Next to one stretch of pavement, a metre away from a drain by the roadside, lay the rusted remains of a pram. The black mesh was torn. Twisted wires stuck out like a ribcage smashed open from the inside.
Kim slumped against Heather. Eric lifted her arm and hooked it around his neck. He and Heather carried Kim together, but the differences in their heights meant Kim was off balance.
“Not far now,” said Heather.
They became accustomed to the groans and shouts, as if they were part of the background noise. The rushing of her pulse slowed into a smooth flow, but it was short-lived.
Dogs barked nearby. They’re too close. Her heart pounded so hard she could hear it.
Wes turned his head. “Sounds like a pack of ‘em.”.
“I saw a stray in Cresstone,” said Heather. “They’re getting angrier every day. Thought it might attack me.”
“These aren’t strays. They’re Capita dogs.”
Wes took his gun out of his pocket and gripped it as a good luck charm. A piece of duct tape around the handle was the only thing stopping it falling apart.
“Oh shit. Oh fuck,” he said.
He looked close to tearing his hair out. The person she used to know, so calm and collected behind his desk, was gone, replaced by a beaten excuse of a man.
“What are you so worried about? You sell to them, don’t you? They’re not searching for you.”
He scoffed. “Think how it looks, helping a woman sneak away two DC kids.”
“Call this helping?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“I think you owe it to the DC’s after what you’ve done.”
“I’m not a monster, Heather.”
“Maybe not, but you’re feeding the monsters.”
An infected turned the corner in front of them. A metal bracelet cut into the skin on its neck, and a loose chain link flapped with each jerk of its head. When it saw Heather, it bared its teeth and rasped.
A pack of dogs growled nearby. A Capita solder shouted, but Heather couldn’t tell what he said. It wouldn’t be long until they were found, either by the nose of a hound or eyes of a soldier. The groans of the now-loose infected drifted toward them.
They needed to lose their human stink. If the dogs couldn’t smell them, then they only had to worry about keeping quiet.
“Check your masks and your skin,” said Heather. “Have any of you got cuts?”
“Nope,” said Eric.
Kim wheezed out an answer. “No”.
Wes shook his head.
The infected inched closer to Heather. She grabbed it by the shoulder, surprised by how much its bones stuck out. It tried to bite her, but Heather was too quick. She lodged her broken bottle in its brain.
“Here,” someone shouted.
Heather snapped toward the sound.
“It’s not for us,” said Wes.
“We better hurry.”
The barks grew louder and more frenzied, as if the pack of dogs spoke to each other as they hunted across the estate.
Focus. She lay the infected out on the pavement, arms and legs spread-eagled.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Wes.
She twisted the bottle in her hand. The infected’s skin was weak, so she knew it would tear under slightest cut. She rolled the sleeve on its right arm to the elbow. Holding her breath, she stabbed the glass into the infected’s flesh.
When she was finished, it didn’t resemble an arm anymore. She’d peeled the skin to reveal the gory ins
ides, and blood dribbled over the edges and stained the concrete.
“Rub this on yourselves,” said Heather.
“Have you lost your mind?” said Wes.
More barking. More groaning. The shouts of the soldiers.
