by Jack Lewis
I reached up past the stalker’s teeth, expecting its head to turn and its mouth to open. I took hold of the hook, grabbed its neck by the skin and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.
“You’ll need to hold its head and pull,” said Charlie.
I didn’t want to get any closer to it than I already was. It was like my body was hardwired to flinch at the sight of them. Despite the fact this one was dead, it still activated those survival instincts. They were the kind of creatures that inspired fear at first sight. Even at the beginning of the outbreak there had never been any doubt over the danger that stalkers posed. Hate oozed out of them, as though their slick black skin swarmed with evil.
I put my hand on the sides of its head. Its skin was clammy with moisture as if it was sweating. I tightened my grip and then pulled. There was a squelching noise, and blood fell to the floor and covered my boots. I turned my head away and looked at the other side of the kitchen as if this would spare me from the smell. I pulled the stalker away until it was off the hook and then I threw it onto the trolley. It clanged onto the metal, and its arms drooped over the sides. I felt bile rise up my throat.
Charlie took hold of the trolley and wheeled it across the kitchen to a metal surface next to the sink.
“That’s the reaction they provoke in most people,” he said. “I used to think it was because they are predators, and we’re programmed to fear the things that hunt us.”
Melissa’s face was white. She clung to Justin’s waist and looked over at the stalker. She took a deep breath, moved her arm away from Justin. She gritted her teeth and walked over to Charlie.
“Mel?” said Justin.
The closer Melissa got to Charlie and the stalker the more her steps faltered. She pushed herself through her fear until she stood an inch away from the trolley. Charlie turned, arched his eyebrows.
“You’re looking a little peaky,” he said.
Melissa turned her head toward the stalker’s cadaver slowly, as though looking at it would make it come back to life. Finally she forced herself to stare.
“They terrify me,” she said.
“Then come back over here,” said Justin. Her crossed his arms and then unfolded them again, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself when Melissa wasn’t by his side.
Melissa stretched out her right index finger. She moved it toward the stalker. The closer her finger got the more she shook, but she didn’t stop. She took a breath and pressed the tip of her finger into the stalker’s skin. She pressed her palm against its jet black arm and slid it down toward the elbow. It reminded me of a show I had seen once, where a hypnotist convinced a woman with a fear of snakes to pet a king cobra.
Charlie stared, unsure what to make of it. Melissa turned her glance toward him.
“I’m sick of being scared of them,” she said.
That took guts, and I was impressed. Put me in a room with an Australian funnel-web spider, and there’s nothing on earth that could have made me touch it. Melissa had forced herself to get over her fears in a way that most people couldn’t.
“What are they?” said Melissa. “Are they human?”
Charlie crossed his arms. “Maybe once, but not anymore. Their DNA has mutated and made them something else completely. Imagine a caterpillar suspended in a cocoon. Only instead of emerging a butterfly, this horrible thing crawls out.”
“So they have cocoons?” I said.
Charlie shook his head. “That was just a metaphor. Nobody knows how they breed. Nobody living, at least. You’d need to find a stalker’s nest and walk through it, and I doubt there are people willing to do that.”
I shuddered at the thought of wandering into a stalker’s nest by accident. Through all the years I had spent in the Wilds I had never seen one, and I had never met anyone who could claim to have done so.
“So why did Victoria send me to see you?”
Charlie reached behind him and picked up a scalpel from the counter. He took hold of the stalker’s leg and turned it so that the calf muscle bulged at him. He squeezed it, and the muscle bunched up against the skin.
“There’s a high concentration of them in the area, or ‘loads of the fuckers’ as Billy would put it. We don’t know where they come from or where they nest. They prowl the fences at night. They pick off anyone stupid enough to be alone when it gets dark.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Same wherever you go.”
“Perhaps Vicky thinks you can do something about them.”
If Victoria thought I would face a nest of stalkers for her, she was crazy. I got a sinking feeling that she was going to leverage our stay in Bleakholt against me helping her with the monsters. Why did she think I was the right guy for this? I’d spent my share of time in the Wilds, but that counted for shit. Put any person in the world one on one with a stalker, and the monster would come out on top.
Charlie pinched the scalpel between his thumb and index finger. He put it against the stalker’s calf muscle and pressed the knife into it. I expected it to pop like a balloon, but the knife tore through the muscle like it was a tough steak and left a line of blood behind it. Melissa held onto the trolley and watched Charlie work. Justin hung back and looked at the ground.
“I don’t feel well,” he said.
I nodded. He’d been through a lot lately. Back in Vasey he’d only been out of a coma for less than a day before we’d been forced to hit the road. He’d never had a respite from it all. Whatever Whittaker injected him with had changed him. He seemed normal but when you looked into his eyes, you saw red flecks that swam in the fluid like parasitic worms.
“Go home,” I said. “Get some sleep.”
Charlie dropped the scalpel with a clang. Blood droplets splattered over the steel trolley.
“Im afraid that’s not an option,” he said.
I looked up. “What?”
Charlie screwed up his face. “Victoria wants him quarantined.”
Melissa shook the handles of the trolley, made the stalker’s leg flop over the side. “Why? What are you talking about?”
Charlie turned to the sink and twisted the knob. Water dripped out. He washed off some of the blood but then rubbed his hands over his lab coat, staining his palm with blood again. I wondered why he'd even bothered washing them.
“I’ve read Whittaker’s notes,” he said, “and I have examined Justin. There’s a cure in his papers, and that cure is in the boy. But we don’t have a clue what it has done to him. Is he dangerous? Is he contagious? If Justin were to bite you, would he infect you?”
He looked at Melissa, and his cheeks flushed crimson.
“If someone were to have…relations with Justin, would they get infected? If he were to impregnate them, would the baby be born as an infected? So many questions, and they will take time to answer. Until that point, I’m not happy to let him walk through the settlement. Vicky agrees with me.”
Melissa’s face burnt red. She twisted her hands around the trolley until her knuckles turned white. She shook it as though she was transferring the energy of her anger onto the metal. The stalker’s body flopped to the side, threatened to fall onto the floor. Melissa reached out and pushed it back, her hands covered in black blood. Her squeamishness around them was long gone.
“You can’t be bloody serious,” she said. “Look at him. He’s fine. Does he look infected?”
Charlie closed his eyes and sighed. “Frankly, yes. It’s not that he’s one of them. It’s the virus that he carries.”
“I don’t give a shit. He’s a human just like you and me. You can’t just lock him away like he’s got rabies,” said Melissa. Her voice was strained, the ends of her words sheared off by the tightness of her throat.
Justin stared at the ground. He didn’t care about anything anymore. It was a far cry from the lanky teenager I’d met a year ago. Back then he had wanted to see that world so much that he tricked me into taking him on my journey. After that, he’d fallen in love with Melissa and decided that she was more impo
rtant than seeing the world. Now, his face was a blank slate, his head empty of thoughts. No emotions or feelings, just a slab of contaminated meat.
I had to do something for him. I couldn’t let them quarantine him because that would make him worse. I couldn’t let them treat him like he was a lab animal to study, a threat that needed to be learned from. Putting him in quarantine wasn’t far away from treating him like the stalker that lay dead on the trolley. Maybe Charlie wanted to have Justin’s cadaver on the trolley instead. Maybe he wanted to cut through his skin and study his insides.
I knew what I could do. My brain cried out at the thought of it, and tried to gather back the words and lock them away before they left my mouth. I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice.
“Tell you what,” I said.
Charlie waited for me to speak.
I leant on the counter. “Leave the kid out of quarantine, and I’ll take care of your stalker problem.”
Melissa smiled at me. Justin looked up and flashed a look that said ‘what the hell are you doing?’ Charlie put his fingers to his chin and his eyes glazed in thought. Strips of grey hair ran though his eyebrows and made him seem much older than he was, but his smooth skin showed his true age. Either that or he had a killer skincare routine.
“I think Victoria will agree to that that. In fact, I know I can persuade her to accept. Leave that to me.”
Melissa smiled. “So he can leave now?”
Charlie nodded. “For now. But for god’s sake, try and stay away from people. There are some idiots in Bleakholt who won’t give Justin the benefit of the doubt.”
He pushed the trolley away and walked across the kitchen until he stood in front of me. At least three inches separated our heights, and I could see the strands of grey woven into his brown hair. On his right ear there were tiny pin pricks where the skin had been pierced and then healed. I wondered when Charlie had gotten his ears pierced. I imagined him being a punk as a teenager, acting out against authority before decided to settle down and become a scientist. Or maybe he had been carried away in the man-piercing craze of the eighties and hit the town dressed like Adam Ant.
“Where the stalkers are concerned, I can’t give you much to go on. But there is one thing,” he said.
“Go on.”
Charlie crossed his arms. “Stalker sightings have calmed since the campers came.”
“The people Victoria is pissed about?”
Charlie nodded. “They’re an aggressive lot, and their leader is the worst of them.”
I didn’t want to ask the question, but I had to know the truth. I had my suspicions over who these campers were.
“Is the leader an old guy, a little flabby? Long hair but bald on top?”
“That’s the one.”
Anger flooded my chest. There was no doubt about it now. The people who had left Vasey with Moe, the ones who had abandoned everyone else, were camped outside of Bleakholt. Moe was with them, and now I had to go and talk to them.
My right arm felt heavy, as though it was drawn toward the knife on my belt. I had to go and talk to them about the stalkers and find out what they knew. I needed to do it for Justin’s sake. The question was whether I could talk to them without killing Moe.
12
I found Alice on the west side of town working the fence with a group of guys. Four of them stood at the fence where fibres of the chain link had twisted away to create a gap. It was barely big enough for a fox to fit through. Two of the men pushed against it and held it steady, and the others worked with pliers to straighten it out. Alice stood back and talked to Ewan Judah. I wondered why she was spending time with the man who Victoria had told me had a jealous eye on her power.
“Chain link doesn’t make sense,” said Alice.
Ewan screwed up his face. “You’ve been here ten minutes and you already know better.”
“I think a concrete wall would be much safer. More stable.”
“We don’t have the time.”
Alice laughed. “You’ve got nothing but time. It’s not like we have anything else to do around here.”
One of the men turned around. “She could have a point boss. We wouldn’t have to spend time doing this every day if we had a wall,” he said, and strained against the fence.
“Fuck” said one of the other men, and dropped his pliers. A trickle of blood dripped from where a loose link had punctured a hole in finger.
Ewan huffed. “Shut up,” he said to the man. He turned to Alice. “You don’t tell us what to do. You’re a newbie. You’re nothing but a body to do the hard work; the hard work that I order you to do.”
I took a step forward. “Morning,” I said.
Ewan turned to look at me. “Your boyfriend’s here,” he said to Alice.
“Got a sec?” I said.
Alice and I walked away from the men. We crossed the street and sat on a bench thirty metres away. The wood was cold, as though the plummeting temperatures had frozen it into a block of ice. Even three layers and a heavy jacket weren’t enough to keep away the sting. I’d lived in the North of England most of my life and I was used to the climate that prompted the saying ‘It’s grim up North’. Scotland was something else entirely. It felt like the cold was digging into my bones.
“What’s up Kyle?”
“It’s been a while,” I said.
Sweat dotted Alice’s forehead despite the cold air. She looked like she’d dropped a few pounds, though her frame seemed as strong as ever. We’d only been here a week, but I’d barely seen her in that time. When she wasn’t working, she was with Ben. I couldn’t blame her though. Losing yourself in work was the surest way to forget the grim reality of the world these days.
“Ah well, you know. I’ve been busy. If I wasn’t here, these idiots would let the fence fall into ruin.”
“Ewan seems like a delightful fella.”
“He’s a dick.”
I flicked my collar up and shielded my chin from the cold. A day earlier I had groomed my beard with a pair of kitchen scissors and now I looked halfway presentable. What I gained in appearance, I lost in insulation. I felt bare.
“I suppose you know the Vasey people are here?” I said.
Alice held her hand in front of her, inspected the blisters crested on her palms.
“How do you feel about that?”
I thought about what to say. If I told her how I really felt, it might scare her. The force of anger in my chest made it feel like I had an angry dragon in me. I thought about holding it back but if there was anyone I could be honest with, it was Alice.
“I want to kill Moe,” I said.
There was silence except for a gust of wind that that rushed past us. It groaned against the fence and made it wobble. To our left there was a children’s playground, but it had been a while since the rusted swings and dirty slide had seen any children on them. Not even children had time to play anymore.
“I can understand that, Kyle. But it wouldn’t do any good. There’s way too many of them. If you ever touched Moe, you’d have the rest of the Vasey crew chasing you with pitchforks. Best thing is to stay away.”
“I wish I could do that.”
Alice turned to me. The dark rings around her eyes made it look like she hadn’t slept in a week. “What do you mean?”
“I know how much you want to stay here,” I said. “You want somewhere safe for Ben.”
Alice nodded.
I took a deep breath. “Victoria is letting us stay. But I have to help deal with their stalker problem.”
“What problem?”
“There’s a nest of them, somewhere. They’ve been picking people off every night.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start with that,” said Alice.
A rush of wind kicked at the fence across from us. The fence jarred as though a tank had hit it. One of the men stepped back, his face red.
“I said hold the fucking thing!” he shouted.
“I need to get back,” said Alic
e.
“I need your help,” I said. “Apparently the stalker deaths calmed down since the Vasey people got here. Moe must have found a way to deal with them, and I need to find out what that is. If I do, Victoria’s gonna let us stay here. Only thing is, I can’t go and talk to them alone. If I’m left on my own with him, I know what I’ll do. And we can’t afford that. I need you there Alice.”
