by Jack Lewis
A wrench hit the infected on the skull and cracked through the bone. The infected slid to the floor. Reece held his wrench at his side, his chest heaving as he took heavy breaths. I put my boot on the infected’s back and then pulled my knife out of its skull.
I looked up. An army of infected poured through the shadows in front of me. They appeared from nowhere as if the darkness gave them form. They shuffled through the pathway and filled every inch of it, struggling against each other as they walked toward us. There were all ages, all genders. Their cries rose through the air, hung above us and made desperation seep through me.
I grabbed Reece.
“We can’t hold them back,” I said.
We ran back to the entrance of the passage way where Charlie arranged the dynamite. The look on his face was so intense that it seemed like he hadn’t even registered the infected who worked their way toward him.
“Let’s go Charlie,” I said.
He didn’t answer. Instead he scraped mud away from the side of the path and tried to dig the dynamite into the hole.
“Charlie,” I shouted, my heart pounding.
No response.
The front line of the infected were a dozen feet away now, close enough that I could see where their rotting skin flaked away.
“We’ve got to go, Charlie,” I said. I reached out and grabbed him. He flinched and flung my arm off him.
The nearest infected was seven feet away. Its eyes were wide and bloodshot. Its yellow teeth dripped with spit.
I grabbed Charlie again.
“One more minute!” he shouted, red faced.
The infected was steps away. It looked at me, but then it swivelled and lurched toward Charlie. I stepped forward and tried to grab it, but it was too close to him. As Charlie crouched and worked on the dynamite, the infected took hold of him. It lowered its head and sunk its teeth into his arm.
Charlie put his head back and screamed. He pushed the infected away and got to his feet. He put his hand on his bicep and then pulled it away. Blood was smeared over his palm. His eyes widened and his skin turned into chalk.
The infected lurched for him again. This time I grabbed Charlie and dragged him away. We turned our backs to the path and ran toward Bleakholt. As we fled, it wasn’t just the infected that we left behind us. It was hope.
35
As the sun dimmed the infected poured out of the hill path like rats from a sewer. Every man, woman and teenager strong enough to fight met them on the plains. Some ran at the infected, weapons in the air, hellish war cries screaming from their mouths. Others took careful steps back, hoping that something would intervene and stop the battle.
Knives sank into brain tissue. Mallets cracked skulls and sent infected falling to the floor. Clotted blood rained on the frozen grass. Infected stumbled forward, arms twitching. Some took a hammer on the temple, others a baseball back across the chest. Dozens fell to the floor, never to rise again. Others were maimed, their bones broken and knee caps smashed beyond repair. The men and women raised their weapons and brought them crashing down again in and endless, tiring motion.
There were always more to take their place. They were like a virus, multiplying beyond all control. They gushed out of the hill paths and swarmed over the plains until hardly a blade of grass could be seen.
Arms started to tire. People slipped. They made mistakes and paid for it with the foul bite of decaying teeth. They screamed out and clutched their wounds. The desperate cries of men and women rose in the air, harsher than the groans of the infected and wracked with pain. Their squeals were inhuman, like horses dying in battle.
Reece and I carried Charlie through the battle and toward the fences. I tried to ignore the chaos around me and focussed on reaching the town, where we could lay Charlie down and let him rest. In the back of my mind I knew that he was done for. He had been bitten on the path, and right now the virus was working its way into his cells. Once that happened, there was only one end.
We set him down against the fence. The metal rattled as his back sank into it. Charlie held his hand tight against his bicep and tried to stem the flow of blood, but the thick crimson seeped between his fingers. Sweat covered his forehead.
I crouched in front of him. “We have to join the fight,” I said.
He gritted his teeth as if he was biting down on pain. It made him look like he was angry.
“Are you hearing me, Charlie?”
If his eyes or ears registered me, he didn’t show it. I turned round, saw Reece a few feet away. He peered into the raging battle in front of him and scanned the crowd.
“We’ll find your dad,” I said.
“His dad is dead,” said a voice to my left.
I turned round. Ewan stood in front of me and leant on his cane. He’d gotten rid of most of his office wear and changed into in army fatigues, but his open khaki jacket revealed a blue shirt underneath. His stood casually, like a commuter leaning on an umbrella and waiting for a bus. Seeing him made me think of Victoria, and hot anger burned in my stomach.
He looked over at Reece.
“Sorry lad. I saw him go. It was quicker than most, if that’s any consolation.”
Rage welled inside me. Ewan was responsible for a good number of the deaths today. Were it not for him killing Victoria and taking power for himself, we would never have gotten distracted. His insane lust for control had taken us away from the plan. If it wasn’t for Ewan, we would have blown up the path way sooner. We could have saved lives.
I got to my feet and held my knife in my shaking hand.
Ewan held his palm in the air as if he read my intentions.
“Think about what you’re doing,” he said. “There’s a time for you to be angry, but this isn’t it. At least not at me. Save it for them.” He pointed to the plains which were awash with infected. They outnumbered us three to one.
I knew he was right. Whatever I wanted to do to him would have to wait. What was revenge worth if everyone died? The only thing we could focus on now was killing the infected. We had to stem the tide somehow, but the infected kept pouring out of the hills in raging waves.
“Time we put our heads together,” said Ewan.
I rubbed my hand over my face. My skin felt freezing, but when I pulled my hand away it was covered in sweat.
“We can’t blow the pass,” I said. “So we’ve got no way of stopping them. We could kill a thousand of them and we wouldn’t even scrape the sides.”
Ewan twisted his cane and pulled it from the dirt. “It’s like trying to scoop out the sea with a bucket. We need a bright spark with a plan,” he said.
“What you need,” said a voice to my left, “is to cut my arm off.”
Charlie leant forward away from the fence. He took his coat off, grunting as he moved his arm. His eyes were as white as milk, and dribbles of crimson covered his bony hands. He rolled up his sleeve and winced as the material brushed his bite wound. He bared his bleeding arm towards us.
“Kyle,” he said, nodding at my knife. “You have to do it.”
My stomach dropped. I had seen people do this before; hack away bitten flesh in the hope that the virus hadn’t spread in time. I had seen a mother cut off the leg of her infant child in desperate hope, crying to herself as she sawed at his skin. I had seen a man hack away at his own wrist to stem the infection. Lots of people had tried it, but I had never seen it work.
I shook my head. “I can’t, Charlie. It doesn’t work. You must know that.”
The words stung as they left my throat. I knew I was taking away his only consolation. With a bite on the arm it would take him hours to die, but the result was inevitable. Death wouldn’t be the end. Charlie must have known what he would become. His eyes narrowed.
“You need to cut off my arm,” he repeated, putting force behind every syllable.
Maybe the dangling promise of a cure gave him hope, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Once I started to cut through his arm and the agonising pain ripped through him
, he’d realise there was no consolation. Only pain.
“Charlie, listen to me.” I leant forward and put my hand on his shoulder. The scientist stared at the floor. “It won’t work. You know this.”
I tried to make my voice soft, but the words were too harsh.
Charlie raised his head slowly. When he looked at me, there was fire in his eyes. He lifted his good arm and pushed me away from him.
“Fuck you. This is my only chance, and you’re denying it me? Based on what, Kyle? Do you think you know everything, you son of a bitch?”
He fell back and slammed against the fence. “This is my only chance,” he repeated, his words becoming softer and trailing off.
Ewan rolled up his sleeves up to his elbows. He stood over me, he face stern-looking.
“Give me your knife,” he said.
***
I tried to look away as Ewan got to work. Charlie shrieked in pain, his nerve endings screaming out as Ewan cut through his arm without any anaesthetic. I turned my head away from Charlie's screams only to have them replaced by the din of battle. Women cried out as infected bit into their arms, men shouted in anguish as they fell to the floor. It was like poking my head into two rooms, each of them filled with screams and pain.
I scanned the bodies fighting on the plains. It was hard to tell the people from the infected, because even those still living were covered in blood. They fought for their survival like caged animals, lashing out at anything that walked within reach.
I looked to the faces of the humans and the infected, and I fell back to the floor when the enormity of the task hit me. We were outnumbered five to one now, and still the infected poured out of the hills.
I thought of the bus, packed up and ready to leave. There had to be nearly a hundred people still fighting, and they couldn’t all get on the bus. But that number would shrink within minutes. We could get on the bus and leave. We’d survive for now but Bleakholt would be done, and there would be nowhere else to go. We would be buying time for the present by giving up on our future, but at least we’d live another day.
Ewan put his knife on the ground. He stood up and straightened out. The front of his shirt, once sky blue, was soaked in blood. Charlie lay against the fence, his eyes half shut, his forehead covered in a feverish sweat. His severed arm was on the ground next to him.
“Ewan,” I said.
Ewan looked up at me, but he wasn’t the same man as before. There was a change in his face. Not on his features, but behind his eyes. A look shone out from them that spoke of the horrors twisting around in his mind. Suddenly, I felt ashamed that he had been the one to do it. That I had denied Charlie his slight hope out of a feeling that I knew it all.
Ewan rubbed his hands down his shirt, adding another smear of blood to what looked more like a butcher’s apron.
“He’ll need antibiotics,” he said.
“We’ve got to make a decision,” I said. “There’s the bus –“
An engine roared behind me. It got closer, the engine firing as it sped along. I turned round, and saw a quad bike speeding along the plains and heading toward us. Billy rode it, his head bent over the handle bars. The sound increased, the engine droning like a beehive.
Billy steered the quad bike away to the right, revealing another bike driving behind him. The rider of this one was planted firmly in his seat. He gripped the handlebars tightly, as though easing off would result in him plunging over them.
I squinted and tried to see who drove it. My eyes register familiar facial features. My heart almost exploded. I took a step back, my pulse hammering. Behind Billy, on another quad bike, Justin sped toward us.
36
The drones of the engines faded to a stop and the sound of the battle carried through the air. For a second I almost asked Billy to switch the quad bikes back on. At least the firing of the engines had covered the screams of the men and women as the infected tore them apart.
Justin lifted his leg over the side of the quad and planted it on the ground. I walked over to him, calmly at first, but when I was a few feet away I nearly ran. I stood in front of him and then gave him a hug, squeezing him until he wheezed.
I dropped him and then stepped back. I wasn’t one for emotion, but the time felt right. People were dying all around us, and here was my friend, back after I thought I would never see him again.
Justin flicked his fringe away from his eyes.
“Where’s Melissa?” he said.
“She’s safe.”
Justin looked concerned. “Where is she?”
“With the kids. They’re far enough away.”
Billy stood at the end of his quad. He fiddled with something on the back of it, reached down and then pulled out his mallet. He gripped it tightly with one hand and beat the end against his palm. His face was set in a grimace.
“Where did you find him?” I said, still trying to take in the fact that Justin stood here in front of me.
Billy pointed over towards the woods that hid the quarry.
“I went back to the nest,” he said. “I wanted to burn it, figured I could get rid of the breeder. But then I heard the horn, and I knew things had gone to shit here. On the way back, I bumped into this guy. I give him a lift into town and we picked up an extra quad.”
A woman screeched in the distance. I darted my eyes over to her just in time to see two infected drag her to the floor and tear chunks out of her shoulders as her body flopped. The image was a cold shower of reality.
“It’s all fucked,” I said. “There’s too many coming through. Maybe we better get the bus.”
“No way,” said Ewan.
My forehead started to heat up. “I don’t want to let the fuckers win, but there’s going to be a hell of a lot of corpses before long.”
“What happened with the dynamite?” said Billy.
Charlie groaned by the fence. He moved forward and tried to sit up but he winced and sat back. His face was a sheet of ice from the pints of blood that had drained from him and sprayed over the ground.
“My fault,” he said. “I messed up.”
I shook my head. “He didn’t mess up. We just didn’t have enough time.”
“We’re not leaving,” said Ewan.
I put my hand to my forehead. I felt it start to pound. “Haven’t you been watching? Look over there. See how many of them there are. Now look at the hills and see them pouring through. The tap’s been turned on and it’s going to overflow.”
“So we need to get to the dynamite,” said Billy.
I looked over to the hills. The passage way looked like a hole in an anthill, where dozens of the insects spilled through.
“Impossible.”
Justin looked at me. For the first time in god knows how long, there was a light in his eyes.
“I have an idea,” he said.
Ewan rested on his cane. “Go on, boy.”
Justin folded his arms across his chest. “The infected ignore me. I could walk up to one, spit in its face, and it wouldn’t blink.”
The idea hit me like a punch in the guts. There were too many infected in the hills for anyone to get through to the dynamite without being lost in the swarm. I knew where Justin was going with this.
“You’re going to set the dynamite to blow?” I said.
Justin nodded. “Being a freak’s gotta be useful for something.”
37
The darkness crept into the sky as if someone had suddenly dropped a black sheet over us. The screams of battle raged on, but people started to tire. One man, his face shocked red with blood, bent over and let out wheezy breaths. An infected crept behind him, grabbed his shoulders and sunk its teeth into his back. The man cried out and tried to swing a hammer, but another infected took hold of him and dragged him down to the floor. His face twisted in agony as the infected feasted on him, and his screams drifted over the plains.
I watched Justin as he sped on his quad across the plains. So far away, he was a speck on the horizon drowne
d in the shadow cast by the hills. His quad stopped, and he got off it and walked to the dynamite.
Dozens of infected shuffled ahead of him. My heart pounded as I watched him move closer to them and toward the path. I knew that they wouldn't touch him. I had seen them ignore him before with my own eyes. But a part of me still wondered if maybe it was all a cruel trick. Would the infected turn on him, grab him and tear him apart? My arms felt tense, and I couldn't imagine how Justin must have felt being enveloped by a crowd of the dead.
