by Jack Lewis
Billy’s long strides matched my own, and his heavy boots left imprints in the mud. Closer to town the ground had thawed, the crisp mud turning to sludge. An old electric store displayed a yellow poster in the window that read ‘closing down sale’. Further up there was an estate agents with photographs of all the properties it had on sale. I looked at the houses with their tarmac driveways and their pristine lawns and imagined what they would be like now. Dirty windows, empty rooms, the lawn an overgrown knot of weeds.
“Thanks for your help back there,” I said.
“Surprised you didn’t kill him.”
“Believe me, I wanted to.”
“I know. I saw it in your eyes.”
I still didn’t know what to make of Billy, but there was no denying that he had helped me. First with the stalkers when he turned up in his quad bike, then again with my trip to the Vasey campers. He knew how to handle himself, and he didn’t say much. I liked that. Still, I couldn’t completely trust him until I knew what the hell was going on with him and Lou.
I decided that there was no point dancing round the issue. “How do you know Lou?” I said.
He cocked his eyebrow. “Which one is she? The one with the kid?”
“Come off it. You know exactly who I mean.”
“You’ll have to point her out to me sometime.”
If that was the way he wanted to play it, then fine. I knew that Lou sure as hell wasn’t going to clue me in, because she guarded her past like an oyster with a pearl. Until I knew what was going on, I was going to have to be wary of both of them.
A crowd of people stood near the fountain in the centre of town. The small frame of Ewan Judah was in the middle, pointing at something that I couldn’t see.
“What are they doing?” said Billy.
“Town meeting?” I asked.
“These people have jobs to do. Don’t know what they’re playing at.”
When we got to the edge of the square I saw through the gaps in the crowd, and I realised what Ewan was pointing at. Justin stood next to the dried-up fountain. Melissa was at his side, held back by a tall man with a bald head and thick beard. She struggled, but the man held firm. Ewan pointed at Justin, said something, and then turned to the crowd.
I sprinted toward them. A few metres away, I heard his voice.
“This boy’s an abomination. You can see it in his sick eyes. Who knows what parasites he carries? He's like a plague-carrying rat. At least during the plague, they tried to flush the rats out. Victoria lets this boy stay and treats him as a guest. Do you accept that?”
There were murmurs in the crowd. Screwed up faces, puzzled looks. A few of the men and women glanced at Justin and frowned as if they could see imaginary parasites crawling over his skin.
“What the hell’s going on?” I said.
“Kyle!” shouted Melissa, and struggled against the bald man’s grip.
“You better let her go,” I said.
The man looked at Ewan. He kept his grip firm.
“Let her go, Dean,” said Billy, arriving at my side.
The man relaxed his grip on Melissa and then shoved her toward Justin. The two of them stood next to the fountain with the eyes of the crowd on them. It made me think of the Salem witch trials. The town crowding against a stranger, singling them out as something evil.
“And right on queue comes another outsider,” said Ewan. “Been to see your friends at the campsite?”
I pushed my way through the crowd. Some sidestepped and let me through, but I had to force my way past others. I walked to the fountain and stood next to Justin. His face was calm, but his eyes were dazed. It didn’t seem like he really knew what was going on.
“You okay?” I said.
“I guess.”
Ewan took a few steps closer until he stood in front of us.
“Are we going to accept this?” he said, his face red, arms flailing like a preacher. “Are we going to let diseased outsiders wander our town? Eat our food? Taint the air?”
He was like a mad evangelist, and I half expected him to start talking in tongues. It was a far cry from the logical, though argumentative, guy I’d met in Victoria’s office. He was playing up to the crowd and getting them riled up. From the looks on their faces, it seemed like it was working. Ewan carried influence in the town.
He jabbed a finger in my face, stopped a few inches short of my nose. “You sir,” he said, “brought the foul air in with you. You dirtied our streets with the taint of the Wilds.”
More gesticulating. Arms wobbling like a kite in the wind, his voice screeching through me. This wasn’t going to end well for someone.
Ewan addressed the crowd. “So what are we going to do, fine folks of Bleakholt? Let them stay and infect us all? Or do we evict the boy? Cast him out into the Wilds where he belongs?”
“You have a choice to make,” he said to me. “Send the boy away, or we’ll make you all leave.”
He jabbed his finger into my face again, and this time my blood rushed hot through me. The veins in my temple twitched, and my head felt like it was tightening in a vice. I swung my fist, too quick for Ewan to react. It connected with his cheek and I heard a crack. Ewan’s head jerked back, then he sank to the floor like a performer in a poorly-acted death scene.
The crowd shouted and pointed their fingers. The bald man reached out and grabbed my shoulders. His grip pressed into me just below my shoulder blades, squeezing the nerves and sending a shock of pain through me. I struggled against his hold but he was too strong.
Two men walked out of the crowd and toward Justin, their faces smouldering with anger. Others followed. Billy pushed a man away.
“You all better calm the fuck down or you’ll have Victoria to deal with,” he said.
The crowd didn’t listen. Anger was the only thing on their minds now, and the sense of violence in the air blocked out any sensible impulses. I struggled against the bald man’s grip, but the more I moved, the tighter he gripped me.
A crowbar appeared above him and then crashed down onto his shoulder. The bald man jerked back and cried out in pain. When his grip relaxed, I stumbled to the floor.
Alice stood behind the man with the crowbar in her hand. Ben was at her side. It was the first time I’d seen him on his feet in over a week. Despite how happy I was to see him in such healthy condition, I had more things to worry about. Ewan was still working the crowd up and encouraging their violence.
A man separated from the crowd and moved toward Alice. She didn’t see him until it was too late, and his fist smashed into her cheek and sent her sprawling to the ground. Ben bent down to his mother, his face awash with panic.
The man swung his leg to kick Alice, but Ben stepped in the way and took the full force of it. The boot sank into his little waist and the boy cried out and then collapsed to the floor, wheezing. The man stood still for a minute. The anger left his face when he saw what he had done. It was as though realisation crept in, and he became aware that he had punched a woman and kicked a small boy. He looked down at his hands, as though he expected them to be covered in blood.
The sight of Alice and Ben on the floor made every muscle in my body tense up and boiled my blood until it bubbled in my veins. Fury blanked out everything out and made it all a blur, save for the man who stood above Alice and Ben.
I got to my feet and launched myself at him. My body worked on an autopilot of anger, and I didn’t realise what I was doing as my fist crashed into the man’s nose. He fell to the ground. I stood over him and swung my boot into his face. It connected with his mouth and there was a snap as some of his teeth dislodged from his gums. The man squealed. I knelt on top of him and saw his eyes staring back at me full of fear. Blood gushed from his nose.
I lifted my fist then brought it down onto his face and heard his nose crack. His blood splattered on my face. I lifted my fist up and brought it down again. More blood. Another punch, another sickly crack. I couldn’t stop myself and my thoughts faded away as I pun
ched him again and again.
Someone grabbed my shoulder and tried to pull me away. I turned at them and swung my fist, connecting with their face and sent them sprawling back.
The fog of anger lifted, and I realised who had grabbed me. It was Lou. She held her hand to her nose and looked at me in shock.
15
I was so dazed I didn’t even register Alice leading us away from the commotion at the town square and down Bleakholt’s streets. When I snapped out of it we were in the dusty remains of a Chinese restaurant that hadn’t served a chicken chow mein in years. A poster stuck to the wall named it as Blossom Garden. Behind the bar area a golden cat statue stared at us. Save for specks of dust smeared on the table clothes, the place was oddly clean.
We sat around a ten-seat table as if we were waiting for a buffet. Alice had her arm around Ben, who was in the seat next to her clutching his side. The dried up remains of tears were crusted around his eyes. Justin seemed to have snapped out of his own daze, and he rubbed the hair of Melissa who cried into his chest. Lou sat across from me, her right eye bright red. I thought about what I had done and I felt my throat close up.
“I’m so sorry Lou,” I said.
I expected her to shout at me and tell me what an asshole I was. I had punched her in the face for god’s sake. It was an accident, but I deserved everything I got. Instead she rubbed her eye and shrugged her shoulders.
“Had worse playing netball at school. And they were girls. You punch like a ten year old girl, Kyle.”
“Tell that to the man whose face looks like mincemeat,” said Alice.
I remembered being on top of the man. Raising my fist, then smashing it into his face over and over again, emptying my anger over him like I was clearing water from a leaking ship. It didn’t matter how many buckets I threw over the side, there was always more.
Lou leant back in her chair and lifted her feet on to the table. Mud lined the grids of her boots.
“I don’t know what the hell I walked into, but it was some intense shit,” she said.
My ribcage squeezed as though it were trying to crush me. It was the anger coming back, seeping into me like thick oil. Where the hell had Lou been all this time? I’d needed her help with the Vasey campers, but she’d let me down. If she’d been around when Ewan took Justin into the town square, she could have stopped this. Lou had let us all down. I held onto the sides of the table and gripped the edges as if it was going to tip. Applying the pressure lessened my anger, but I still felt it bubbling.
“Where the hell have you been, Lou? We needed you. I had to go and see Moe, for fuck’s sake.”
“You’ve been like a ghost,” Justin agreed.
“The monk breaks his vow of silence,” said Lou.
I glared at her. “Don’t start with the jokes.”
She crossed her arms. With her boots casually on the table and her body couched back, she could have been relaxing on a beach.
“You went to see Moe?” she said.
I nodded. “He’s worse than ever. And I had to take Billy with me.”
Lou moved her boots off the table and jolted forward. The colour drained from her face.
“Why’d you take him?”
“Because if I didn’t have someone with me, I would have killed the bastard, and then everything would have gone tits up. As it stands though, I think we’ve reached that point already.”
“And whose fault is that?” said Lou.
I raised my fist and pounded it on the table. The sound jolted Melissa away from Justin’s chest. Her eyes were as red as Lou’s, but hers was due to the tears that had poured out of them rather than being punched.
“Enough,” I said. I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice. “You better tell us what the hell’s going on, Lou. I’m sick of this.”
“There’s nothing – “
“Cut the shit,” said Alice. Her voice carried the weight of authority. “We know there’s something between you and Billy. After all we’ve been through, you owe us an explanation.”
Lou looked down at the table. A silenced passed. I looked across the restaurant, over to a door that probably led to the kitchen. I half expected a waiter to walk out with a portion of spring rolls. Lou composed herself and then spoke.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Guess I better tell you. I’d ask you to promise not to hate me when you hear it, but that’s asking too much. Just listen and don’t punch me again is all I can hope for, I guess.”
“Just spill it,” I said.
“You know when we met? After I killed that stalker that was going pounce on Alice?”
She looked at Alice, who nodded. Lou carried on.
“Well I told you I’d spent some time in Scotland already. I was part of a group of survivors. And yeah, you guessed it; Billy was part of it too. It’s remote up here, and the infected were far apart enough for us to handle. But things were fucking bleak, man.”
“I’m a beanpole as it is, but food was so scarce that even I dropped a few pounds. Makes me wonder how gyms stayed in business, back in the day. Forget paying twenty quid a month, you’ve just gotta starve the shit out of yourself.”
“Stay on track,” I said.
“We ran out of food pretty sharp. We didn’t have any aim, there was nowhere to go. The group started to drop. An infected got one. Two starved. Three of them just up and walked away, I think they were crazy. They just walked into the wilderness with this weird look in their eyes. And that left me and Billy.”
Melissa coughed. She ran her fingers through her hair and flicked back the stray ends. “How long ago was this?”
“Hard to keep track of time,” said Lou. “A few months ago? Anyway, it was just me and Billy. We did things the honest way at first. We scavenged any food we could. We went into every house we passed and checked every inch for something to eat. Even tried boiling some leather shoes in a soup.”
The thought of it made my stomach knot. I’d been hungry in my time in the Wilds, but I’d never reached the level where eating shoes looked appealing. Guess I had never had things as bad as I thought. No matter how much crap was flung at you, there was always someone else covered in more of it.
“So eventually we thought ‘fuck it’. We kept passing travellers on the road. They always had food with them. We’d stop for a chat, and then go on our way. I weighed seven stone when Billy and I decided we wouldn’t just stop for a chat anymore. We were going to start taking their food from them. Hell, it was either them or us, and I think in a pinch any person’s gonna choose their own life over someone else’s.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Alice, and hugged Ben tighter to her chest.
“Yeah,” said Melissa. She moved her chair closer to Justin so that barely a centimetre separated them.
Lou grimaced. “Look, you’ve never been as hard up as we were, little girl. Come back to me when you’ve got blinding stomach cramps from eating paper.”
“Just because I’ve never starved doesn’t mean I haven’t had it bad,” said Melissa.
“Give me break.”
I pounded the table again. “Enough, guys. Get on with it Lou.”
“For a few weeks we had plenty to eat, so we eased off. Let a few people we met go on their merry way without roughing them up and stealing all their shit. But soon enough our supplies dropped and my stomach started to cramp again. So then we came across a bloke and his son.”
Her head sagged a little, and her eyes drooped. For the first time, I saw emotion written in her face. She gulped. “The boy was about Ben’s age, and the man looked a little like you, Kyle. They had tons of food. And they were nice people, offered us some of their stuff. But we didn’t just take what they offered us. We took it all from them.”
A loose tear dripped from her eye. It struggled through her tear ducts like a plant straining through the cracks in the desert. It was strange seeing someone like Lou cry, especially in front of us all. I didn’t think she was capable of it. Something
about it gave me a strange feeling in my stomach, and I wanted to look away.
Everyone else watched in silence. Melissa looked like she were holding in her breath. Alice looked at the walls with sad eyes. Nobody could meet Lou’s stare. Watching Lou cry reminded me of being a kid and watching my dad cry after grandad died. There was something jarring about seeing strong people look vulnerable.
“Then” she said, her voice cracking, “We ended up having to go back the way we came a few weeks later. And we found the guy and his son again. Only this time they weren’t friendly. They didn’t offer us any food. They couldn’t because they were laid down in the middle of the road. Their faces were cold and shrivelled and covered in maggots. The whole place reeked of death.”
