Michael shrugged.
"Maybe none. I guess you'll never know."
Annie snorted.
"You think you have it in you to kill a defenceless old woman?"
Michael let out a mirthless chuckle.
"You'd be surprised," he said, and then he squeezed the trigger.
At close range the shotgun blew the top half of the old woman's body to pieces, and the blast ricocheted off the stone walls like a violent thunderstorm.
Chapter 25
When Michael returned to the room in which Jason slept, he found the man he had knocked unconscious coming to with a low, animal groan.
"You might be the last one left, pal."
"Gareth. My name is Gareth. You killed Annie?"
Michael nodded, and was surprised when Gareth let out a sigh of what appeared to be genuine relief.
"There might still be others hiding in the towers," Gareth said. "Not everybody was ready to come out. Too scared, even before…are you going to kill us all?"
He stared pointedly at the revolver that Michael had retrieved from the floor beside Annie Holloway's ruined corpse.
Michael felt an unexpected surge of anger welling up inside him.
"Of course I'm not," he snarled. "I take no pleasure in what I've done. I've had to do things I didn't want to in order to survive."
I sound just like Darren Oliver.
"Annie would have said the same," Gareth said morosely.
"Then Annie was fucking full of shit as well as insane," Michael snapped. “I told her I understood her killing John and I meant it. She thought he was a threat to her, and I get that, no matter how wrong I know she was. But that kid in the dungeon? Torture? Crucifixion? Threatening me with letting her sons rape my fucking daughter?"
Gareth's eyes widened, and he lifted his palms in surrender.
Michael fought to bring his anger under control.
"We live in a world where killing might be necessary now," Michael said eventually. "But for some people this is all just a license to act exactly how they always wanted to act. What about you, Gareth? Do I have to worry about you turning into a psychopath? Because if there's even a one per cent chance, I think I can do us both a favour right now."
He lifted the gun slightly.
Gareth shook his head firmly.
"I was about to run," he said. "I wanted no part of all this. Annie would have killed us all. I wanted to run."
Michael stared keenly at the man, and saw tears welling in his eyes.
After a long moment, he tucked the revolver into his waistband.
"Then I guess you'd better tell me what's going on with Jason. We need him awake. Or none of us are getting out of here."
*
Rachel had been watching through the bars set into the cell door for what felt like a couple of hours; maybe more. In that time she had heard a single gunshot, and she hadn't yet been able to tear her eyes away from the Infected that flocked around the courtyard.
Nor had she been able to tear her thoughts away from the certainty that everyone else was dead already. They had to be. She could see no reason why Michael hadn't yet appeared. And if the old woman was still alive, she surely would have sent Jason out to deal with the Infected that milled around the castle's grisly interior.
We're going to starve to death after all, she thought. It was almost funny. It felt like Rachel had been faced by a hundred different exotic ways to meet her maker, and in the end it would be an empty belly that claimed her. No different to billions of other humans that had died across the centuries. A mundane end.
Linda and Emma had given up trying to glimpse anything through the bars and were now slumped against the wall behind Rachel, locked behind invisible bars of despair.
When she saw a sudden flurry of movement outside, Rachel's heart leapt and sank simultaneously.
One of the tower doors opened and Jason charged out among the Infected like a bull, moving among the creatures that seemed unable to locate his presence and ending them. Jason had no weapon. There was no bloodlust on his battered face, and no sound escaped the lips that were no longer able to form words. The execution was almost serene; an act of nature.
One by one Rachel's brother snapped the necks of the Infected, and as she watched the slaughter Rachel knew that Annie Holloway had lived, and the nightmare would not end. Not until Rachel was dead.
She remembered telling Michael that she would throw herself over a cliff before she let the virus take her. It seemed now like the virus was humanity itself; it was Annie Holloway and her mania. It was Darren and Victor and who-knew how many other people who had responded to the loss of civilization with the destruction of their own kind.
Rachel wished fervently that there was a cliff available to her now. Even the single shell in the shotgun would be preferable to a slow, agonising death in a cage.
Just as she felt like she was falling into an endless abyss of despair, a miracle happened right in front of her eyes.
A miracle that wore a weary grin and carried a set of keys. A miracle that walked.
"Better step back if you want me to open this door, Rachel," Michael said.
And his grin widened.
*
"Since when can you fucking walk?"
Rachel's tone was half-accusation and half-joyous disbelief.
Michael smiled.
"I don't know when it started for sure. A few days ago, I think. I started to see movement...feeling came back yesterday."
He shrugged.
"Temporary paralysis?" He looked at Linda, who stood next to Rachel staring at Michael with an identical expression of disbelief. "That's a thing, right?"
Linda rolled her eyes.
"Not a doctor, remember?"
Michael laughed.
"Right. Sorry."
They stood in the courtyard, carefully avoiding stepping on the gore that was smeared across the stone, as if each chunk of torn flesh was a landmine with the potential to do terrible damage.
To their right, Jason stood, swaying slightly and staring around in confusion. With the Infected dead, Jason seemed to have no idea what to do next. He looked to Michael like a man trying to remember where he had left his keys. Or a machine awaiting the input of its next directive.
Michael caught the dark look in Rachel's eyes as she glanced at her brother, and knew exactly what she was thinking.
He's looking for Annie.
Michael could almost see Rachel's heart breaking; could see the devastating emotion that tried to crack her stoic face.
He was glad of the distraction when Gareth Hughes appeared in the courtyard. Glad that it took Rachel's mind off her brother, too. He saw her face darken with hostility.
"He's one of them," she spat.
"Not anymore," Michael said. "I think there might be a few of Annie's people left here, hiding out in the towers, but I'm not willing to punish them all for what she did. I think it's about time we stopped thinking in terms of us and them. We need to get the hell out of here, and the more people we have, the more chance there is that we might actually make it."
Rachel and Linda both seemed startled at Michael's tone, and he almost laughed. At one time or another, both of them had pleaded with him that he should cease the gloomy introspection that came to him so naturally and lead the people who were looking to him. Judging by the expression on their faces, neither of them had truly believed it would actually happen.
"How do we know we can trust him?" Rachel said finally.
"Can't trust anybody, remember?" Michael said with a sad smile. "We'll keep an eye on him. On all of them. And while we're on that subject..."
Michael strode away without finishing the sentence, and felt Linda and Rachel's eyes burning into him. He picked his way through the obscene mess on the floor until he found the rifle among the collection of parts that used to be Rhys Holloway. He bent down, feeling a twinge of protest in his damaged back, and scooped the weapon up.
Clutching the we
apon once more felt like hugging an old friend.
When he returned to the two women, he pulled the revolver out of his waistband and passed it to Rachel.
"For me?" she said sardonically. "You shouldn't have."
"I shouldn't have done a lot of things," Michael said glumly. "But there's one thing I regret more than anything now, and that's lying to you."
Rachel froze, and her eyes narrowed.
"Full disclosure," Michael said. "I figure if we're going to get anywhere in this world, it might just be because we're honest with each other. I killed Gwyneth."
"What?" Rachel said. "I already know—"
"No. I killed her. Not an accident. The gun didn't just go off. I pointed it at her and I killed her, and she saw it coming."
Rachel's mouth dropped open.
"I did it because she was infected, Rachel. Not in the same way as these poor bastards were, but infected nonetheless. As long as she lived, and as long as she was in this castle with us, there was a danger that all this,"—he waved a hand at the once-human mess on the ground—"could have happened at any time."
Rachel stared at him, and Michael felt the bristling anger radiating from her.
"So John was right," she said. "He thought there was something off about Gwyneth dying."
Michael nodded.
"I guessed as much. He didn't exactly try to hide it."
"So why tell me now?"
Michael stared at her thoughtfully. There was, he realised, no point in trying to dress up the point he had to make.
"John thought Australia was clear of the virus. He told me to get there if I could. And I will," Michael said.
"And when I do, I won't be taking the virus with me."
Rachel stared at Michael blankly for a moment, and then he saw terrible understanding dawning in her eyes.
"Jason," she said softly.
"He's infected," Michael said. "I don't plan to do anything about that. That's down to you. But he can't come, Rachel. You can. Your choice. Or if you're furious about Gwyneth you can point that gun at me right now and make all this go away. I won't try to stop you."
Michael saw tears seething in Rachel's eyes. The proud, strong eyes that had dazzled him in St. Davids, and which had remained steely throughout everything. Through every terrible ordeal the world had thrown at the poor woman.
It was the closest he had seen Rachel come to genuinely breaking, and he hated himself for putting her through it.
Rachel stared at her brother. He was a barren island amid the growing sea of activity in the courtyard. As people emerged from the cells and the towers, gathering together to find out what was going to happen next, Jason seemed unaware of their presence. Seemed unaware of anything.
For reasons she could not explain, John's final words came back to her.
You can do this, Rach.
As she stared at her little brother, damaged beyond all repair, destroyed and poisoned by a world that he had struggled with long before it turned savage, Rachel found she could hold back the tears no longer.
"I need time," she sobbed.
"You don't have much. I'm burying John, he deserves that, but then we have to move. As fast as possible."
He pointed at the clouds that gathered over the battlements to the west.
At the column of smoke that rose in the distance. A column that had been faint — almost invisible — days earlier, but which was unmistakable now, like the tentacle of some great monster reaching up to attack the heavens.
Wylfa Power Station was burning.
"Our time is running out," he said.
Chapter 26
In his clearer moments, Ed Cartwright thought about how quickly civilization had been stripped away. Not just the civilization you could actually see; not the buses and the takeaway pizzas and the endless television channels. All of that was gone too, of course, but it wasn't the sudden lack of life's little conveniences that dominated his mind. It was the things that weren't visible.
Like safety.
It hadn't taken generations of hardship for humanity to revert to savagery. It had taken days. Civilization, it turned out, had been a collective fairytale that humans blithely told each other and chose to believe. An overwrought story of a world that didn't really exist; just a way to make people feel grateful for the dull light of reality.
Now the need to tell fairytales had crumbled away and all that was left was monsters and darkness.
It had happened so fast. One moment he had been sitting in his bedroom, thinking about the fact that he was running out of weed and cursing the certainty that his dealer was ripping him off; selling him under weight, just a little, every single time.
The next moment, he was running and there was death everywhere, and somehow he had ended up locked in a fucking dungeon waiting for people to cut parts of his body away like they were trimming the fat from a side of beef.
Those were his clearer moments, and they were brief, as fleeting as summer rain. The rest of the time—the majority of the time—he spent screaming.
He felt another scream building in his throat when he heard the dungeon door opening above him; heard it through the one ear he had left after Linda had sliced away the other, while the taller of Annie Holloway’s sons had cackled deliriously.
Linda hadn't wanted to do it, he could tell. The expression on her face spoke of remorse and pity, but that mattered little to Ed.
She'd cut him anyway. Just as Michael had.
As would they all.
Their reluctance and their pity meant nothing when you were the one watching pieces of your body being taken. All the prisoners would be given the same choice the man in the wheelchair had been given—torture or be tortured—and all would eventually pick up the knife.
Ed ran through the number of prisoners in his mind constantly like repeating a prayer, doing the terrible arithmetic again and again, and wondering which piece of his body the tenth of them would take. The fourteenth. The eighteenth. His fingers would be long gone by then, and probably his toes and his genitals, too. By the time the old bitch brought the tenth lucky contestant down the steps into the dark room, he imagined that even his limbs might be gone. After that where was there to go? Eyes? Organs?
Would number nineteen finally scoop out his brain and end it?
Ed wished fervently that he could just die; that he could persuade his heart that it would be in both of their interests if it just agreed to stop beating.
Faint light lanced apart the darkness, and Ed lifted his head as footsteps descended the stairs to the dungeon. The figure stood for a moment, silhouetted by the light from above and difficult to distinguish.
When Ed finally did recognise the person standing in front of him he felt his blood run cold. The young woman with the frightening, intense eyes stood in front of him. Rachel. She had scared the shit out of Ed long before he had been offered up to her like a blood sacrifice.
She has a gun.
Maybe this is the end.
Please, make it quick. Please.
Ed struggled to speak, but could not. Thirst raged in his mouth. No water for days. He found his cracked lips glued together; his dry, swollen tongue unwilling to comply with his request that it help him to start begging for her to end him quickly and mercifully.
It won't matter.
Begging hasn't helped so far.
Ed let his head drop, and tried to distance himself from the horror he knew was about to be done to him.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Rachel pick up a knife from a table that held a range of edged weapons, all of which Ed suspected he would get to experience.
He tried to sob, but it seemed there were no tears left.
And then suddenly his hands were free, and he was falling to the floor, and she was catching him.
"Come on, Ed. It's time for us to go," Rachel said softly.
The tears came then.
*
Ed stumbled out into the courtyard, squinting as the bright dayli
ght lanced painfully into his eyes.
It looked like someone had set off a bomb in a butcher's shop. Blood and bodies everywhere. Ripped and torn, broken and twisted and smashed.
His feet slid on something slippery and he fought to control his balance, desperate not to end up on the ground among the dead things.
He felt Rachel's steadying arm on his shoulder, and he let her lead him to the stockpile of supplies he had helped to gather from Caernarfon. It felt like a lifetime ago. When she passed him a bottle of mineral water, Ed slurped it down greedily. It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
"Hope you don't hold a grudge, mate," Rachel said. Ed looked at her, puzzled. She nodded over his shoulder, and he turned to see Linda walking toward him.
"So do I," Linda said as she approached. "I'm sorry. About your ear."
Ed stared at the woman. He wanted to come up with a retort, but no part of his life had prepared him for how best to respond to a heartfelt apology from somebody that had recently mutilated him.
He stared at her dumbly, and nodded.
"Got to patch you up," Linda said. "Is that okay with you? Despite what you might have heard, I'm no doctor, but I guess I'm all you've got."
Ed nodded again, and let Linda take his left hand. All his fingers were gone, and the stumps oozed yellow liquid that he knew meant infection. A gift from Annie Holloway’s son Rhys, who had defecated into his own hand and wiped the horrific result across Ed’s weeping stumps, smearing it into the wounds like a dreadful ointment.
The man had laughed like he had just heard the greatest joke ever told. The memory of the humiliation made Ed’s cheeks burn.
"This will sting," Linda said, searching through the supplies and producing a bottle of antiseptic.
"Trust me," Ed said. "I've had worse."
Linda smiled.
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