by Jack Lewis
If it were me painting, I’d have needed just black and white paint. The streets would be a shade of grey, the buildings greyer. Dark faces, glum and angled at the ground. Maybe a trace of red to blotch the pavements. Red was the only colour I saw these days; blood seeping out of a wound, spraying from a torn throat, dribbling out of a bite mark-ridden arm. I was never any good at symbolism.
She put the easel on her desk and took off her apron. Underneath she wore her sleeveless jacket, and her muscles bulged from her well-toned arms.
“Kyle,” she said. “Didn’t expect to see you. Decided to move on?” she said.
I shook my head. “My guys aren’t ready just yet.”
She walked behind her desk, sat down. She took out her tobacco pouch. I wondered where she got it from. With the rate she smoked, she couldn’t have much of a supply left.
“Want one?” she said.
“I quit.”
She grinned. “Doesn’t seem to be any sense in denying oneself the small pleasures these days. None of us are going to be collecting our pension.”
She gestured to a chair in front of the desk. I sat down, sank my weight into it. Despite all the sleep I’d been getting, I felt exhausted. My mind wouldn’t stop turning, wouldn’t stop thinking about what was coming for us.
She lit the cigarette and let the smoke rise. My nose twinged. I couldn’t tell which smell was worse, the sickly compost that hung ever-present in the air, or the sweet tobacco that made me want to reach out and grab the cigarette.
“You can only stay a few more days, you know,“ she said.
I shifted in the chair. “That’s what I came to speak to you about.”
She looked down and the desk. She thought about something, then sighed. “Look, Kyle. I’ll be blunt. I made a mistake letting the strangers camp outside Bleakholt. I’m going to deal with them, but it will be tough. There will likely be violence, and I can’t bring myself to give the go ahead just yet. You on the other hand, will be easier to get rid of. There’s only a few of you.”
“I don’t want to stay,” I said. “That’s what I came to talk to you about.”
Something rumbled outside. I looked out of the window. Billy drove a quad bike down the cobbled roads, his arms tense on the handles, smoke trailing from the exhaust.
“Spill it,” said Victoria.
I sighed. I felt like a broken record, I’d had this conversation so many times with so many people. Most didn’t want to hear it. But I had to try.
“Me and my group are leaving in a few days. And not because you’re kicking us out. We were going to leave anyway once we’d gotten our shit together. It’s not safe here.”
A grin spread on her lips. “If you know somewhere safer, I’d love to hear about it.”
“It’s not the place. It’s what’s headed toward it. Nowhere is safe.”
I told her about the half a million infected who were headed north. An unstoppable march of the undead that eviscerated any living thing they came across. I told her what happened to Vasey. How we’d travelled for weeks and how we’d keep on travelling still. The wave of infected would just keep walking, because they had nothing stopping them. They were driven by the instinct to feed, and they didn’t have the human trappings of needing to rest. If anything was inevitable in this world, it was the fact that they would eventually reach us.
Victoria breathed out a trail of smoke. She ground the cigarette into the ashtray. She wiped her ash-covered fingers on the wooden desk. If what I had said worried her, she sure as hell didn’t show it.
“What do you suggest?” she said.
“That you gather up what provisions you can. Get all your people together. Leave Bleakholt, and go north.”
I said the words, but I knew they wouldn’t have any effect. I had to try, for the sake of my conscience.
“And then what?”
“Then nothing.”
“We just keep walking north with no aim and no place to go like alcoholic tramps after a litre of cider?”
I nodded. “It’s the only way to stay ahead of them.”
“Seems like we’d be on borrowed time.”
I leant forward. “That’s all the time we’ve got these days,” I said.
A silenced hung. Victoria stared out of the window, tapped her chewed fingernails on the desk. Outside, the litter-man walked down the street with his bin liner. Figures moved on the fields in the distance. Grey clouds hung overhead, ready to splatter the crops with rain.
“We’re never going to leave,” said Victoria. “This is the only place that will ever be a home. I was like you, you know. Before I got here, I wandered place to place, foraging for food, living one day to the next. Every morning I’d look down at my ribs and measure how much they stuck out. I joined groups, watched them get torn apart. An endless cycle of death. There’s no life out there, Kyle. Only running and survival. The only way to live is to take a stand.”
With that, she stood up. She walked to the window, stood next to her canvas.
“Join me here a sec,” she said.
I got up, stood next to her. I looked at the bright, happy scene on the canvas and compared it to the grey reality outside, a colourless landscape almost metallic in its coldness. This was real life, and the canvas was just a dream world. Victoria pointed at the west side of the town.
“See that building with the grey playground? Hopscotch painted on it? Children running? It was a school before the outbreak, and it’s still a school now.”
I nodded.
She carried on. Her finger drifted east, wavered over the field. “We’ve got enough food growing to see us through the next few years.” Her hand moved even further east. “And the buildings with solar panels on the roof? They’re going to keep the lights running. We’ve got power. Education. Food.”
She looked at me. There was life in her eyes, a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “We’ve got a life here, Kyle. You won’t find that anywhere else.”
It all sounded too good to be true. Ever since the outbreak, that’s all we had ever wanted. I remembered the first few years after the outbreak when Clara and I lived in the Wilds, avoiding the infected by day and stalkers by night. Closing my eyes for sleep and wondering if it would be the last time. Waking up with my forehead mottled in sweat, a cold chill in my body. Clara with her head on my chest, her eyes flickering from a dream or a nightmare. Nowhere was safe, back then. A place like Bleakholt would have been paradise.
I looked at Victoria’s canvas again and I saw it for what it really was. The happy scene, children playing, people living their lives. It wasn’t a painting of some golden past. She was planning Bleakholt’s future. I could tell that she was the kind of woman who would stop at nothing to get it. She’d let her own body burn out in the effort to make a future for everyone.
I couldn’t ask Alice to leave here. She had Ben to think about, and the kid needed some stability. Justin and Melissa would eventually want to settle down, and this seemed like the kind of place to do it. And Lou, well I didn’t know what the hell she wanted or what was going on with her.
Victoria said we could only stay a few days. There was no way the wave of infected would make her abandon Bleakholt. So now I had to convince her to let us stay. I owed it to Alice and the others, because until now, I’d let them down. A part of me ached for Victoria’s vision to be true.
“Listen, Victoria,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I know you don’t want us to stay. I get that you need to look after your own people. I don’t want to stay here either, because I’m still not convinced this place is still going to be standing when the wave hits. But if you let the rest of my group stay, I’ll help you prepare for it. Build defences, try and make sure the infected can’t destroy you.”
Victoria put her hand to her chin, then turned and looked outside. The wind kicked up a gust of dust, sent a tin can clanging down the street. She opened her mouth to say something, but there was a knock at the
door.
“Come in,” she said.
A man entered. He looked to be in his forties. Wide-rimmed train-spotter glasses that looked like they were cut from the bottom of milk bottles. He wore a smart shirt and trousers, and shoes that had somehow seen a polish recently. There was a knife in the loop of his belt which made him seem like a business man on a camping trip. His knuckles were misshapen, his shoulders stocky. The mark of a fighter.
“Ewan,” said Victoria. “How nice to see you.” She didn’t do a good job of hiding the scorn from her voice.
“Victoria,” he grunted. His voice sounded like it was filtered through a hundred cigarettes. He walked to the desk and ignored the chairs in front of it. Instead he walked behind it and sat in Victoria’s chair. He put his feet up on the desk and leant back, as if he was challenging her.
“Your shoes might be polished but they better stay on the floor,” said Victoria.
He slid his feet off the desk and let them thud on the floor.
“Spotters have found something,” he said. “Fifty miles east, near Ardroath. Looks like a Grouse factory.”
Victoria rolled her eyes. “So?”
“Think we better check it out. Would be good for morale, get a bit of decent whisky flowing.”
I looked out of the window, tried to see what he was talking about. Beyond Bleakholt, all I could see were the giant hills. From here they seemed to stretch to the sky. Folds cut across them like wrinkles in skin, and the rocks jutted out from the grassy knolls. Through the centre, I could just about make out the passage way that cut through the middle. It was wide enough for a car, but not much else would be able to get through. It was the only direct route to Bleakholt, and it seemed that the only other way to get here was to take a detour at least a couple of dozen miles long.
Victoria leant against the window and put her hand to her chin. Liver-spots dotted her hands.
“Not worth it. It’d take too much fuel, and we haven’t scouted that area properly. God knows what’s waiting there.”
Ewan shook his head. Gave a slimy grin. “You know best, Victoria.”
He stood up. He was six feet tall, but the heels on his shoes gave him at least an inch of that height.
“Guess I’ll tell the fellas that they can’t have their whisky because you don’t think it’s worth it. Shame, a bit of morale would have gone a long way. Guess that doesn’t matter to you.”
Victoria straightened up, took a step forward. Her face was a sea of calm, but her fingers were curled into her palms, and I could see the nail of her index finger digging into her skin.
“How about you leave morale concerns to me, and get on with your job? Or is it too much for you to handle?”
“I can handle the fences just fine. You’ll never see a crack in them.” He nodded at me. “Hope you don’t have a taste for a tipple of the golden nectar, stranger. Because you won’t get it here.”
He walked to the door. Before he left, he turned round. This time his face was a sneer, one that he didn’t make any effort to hide.
“Keep up the excellent work Victoria,” he said, contempt dripping over his words. He walked out of the door and let it slam shut behind him.
Victoria let out a sigh. Her shoulders sagged a little. A drop of blood trickled from her palm from where her nail had dug too hard and pierced the skin.
“Who was that?” I said.
Victoria took a deep breath and then straightened up again. The tension left her. “Ewan Judah. A contemptuous little shit who has ideas above his station. He wants my seat, and he doesn’t make much of a show to hide it.”
She walked to her desk and opened a drawer. She took out a roll of toilet paper, tore a piece off and then brushed her chair with it. She sat down, the leather creaking as she sunk into it.
“Do me a favour, Kyle. Go and see Charlie.”
“Charlie?”
“He’s the scientist I mentioned. He’ll tell you about our stalker problem.”
11
A stalker hung from a metal hook that pierced the skin just above its neck. Black blood dripped onto the floor from a cut that ran across its chest and over its belly and stopped at its groin. It looked like a pie that someone had sliced through the middle and allowed the sloppy insides to slide out.
Charlie Sturgeon’s laboratory was once a restaurant kitchen but he’d customised it to fit his needs. Formaldehyde-filled beakers lined the shelves. Next to them were jars containing pickled body parts that I guessed had come from stalkers. Blood stains covered a metallic counter that was once used to prepare food. It was more of a slaughter house than a kitchen. Stalker flesh was scattered around at random, and blood stains, both wet and dry, covered every surface. Even Whittaker's lab had been cleaner than this.
Charlie stood next to a fridge with a giant metal door. I didn’t even want to think what was in it. He wore a lab coat that was in the middle of a battle between the original white of the fabric and the blood stains that covered it. It was half and half now, but the white would soon lose the fight. It made him look like an abattoir worker.
“Lift your head up a little,” he said, and clicked on a torch.
Justin sat in front of him, his hair ruffled and his shoulders sagging. Melissa leant against a metal worktop and watched the two men intently.
Justin looked up at me. He nodded. “Kyle,” he said.
Charlie moved away from Justin and stood straight. He put the torch back in his pocket, and rubbed a smear of blood across his chest in the process, though I had no idea where it had come from. It was as though Charlie’s skin secreted it, and he constantly had to wipe it on his coat. His eyes poured over me as if scanning for data. He lifted his hand and ran it through his slick hair, spreading blood all over his forehead.
“Can I help you?” he said.
I was expecting him to sound like Whittaker, the deranged biology student who I had to kill. Whittaker had been kidnapping people in the Wilds and injecting them with his ‘cures’. Charlie's voice and tone couldn't have been more different. Despite his blood-soaked appearance, warmth backed his voice and his smile looked genuine.
‘How’s Justin?” I said.
“I’m fine,” said Justin. “You don’t need to talk about me like I’m not here.”
I nodded. “Sorry, kid.”
Charlie put his hand on Justin’s shoulder. “We’re pretty much done here.”
Justin got up and stood next to Melissa. She wrapped her arms around him immediately and squeezed him tight as if the few minutes separation had been too much. Charlie walked over to a sink and turned the tap on. Water dribbled out and pattered against the chrome surface. He spoke over his shoulder.
“Did Vicky send you?” he asked.
“Vicky?”
Charlie grinned. “She’d go mad if she knew I called her that. Let’s keep this between us.”
“Yeah she sent me,” I said. “She wanted me to talk to you about a stalker problem.”
He walked to a trolley that stood next to a wall. It was the kind that would have been used to wheel out a large meal or dessert to the dining area of the restaurant. He pulled it back and turned, the wheels squealing. He guided it underneath the stalker that hung from the hook. He moved onto his tiptoes, strained to reach the hook that sunk into the stalker’s skin, but he was an inch short of grabbing it.
“Get that for me?” he asked, his face turning red with the strain.
The stalker’s skin sagged from the loss of blood, and there was a hollow cavity in its chest from where Charlie had removed its organs. Its face hadn’t changed in death. Its teeth were still sharp enough to chew through bone, its incisors capable of tearing through flesh with ease. I wondered what it would feel like to get bitten by one, to feel two rows of teeth ripping my skin apart.
“Don’t worry, he’s quite dead,” said Charlie.
There was no trace of death in its eyes. They were completely black, though its pupils were a shade darker and seemed to swim in the ey
eball. They looked alert, as if they could snap on me at any minute. I expected the stalker to jerk alive and pull itself off the hook. Even without organs they made me shudder.
The stink of blood was thick in the air. It reminded me of visiting the butcher’s shop as a kid and breathing the sickly smell of minced beef while mum bought our week’s meat. Even worse, once, in the Wilds, I found a house. It seemed empty. I went upstairs and opened the bathroom door. The sour iron smell of coagulated blood hit me and made me stumble back, gagging. The homeowner had crawled into the bathtub, slit their wrists and let their blood drain out. For some goddamn reason they’d put the plug in the plug hole and let the bathtub fill.
