by Jack Lewis
As the bus peeled away into the distance I wanted to run after it. It would have been so easy to jump on the back and ride it to safety, away from the infected and the stalkers.
The last of the survivors sprinted behind the fences. The stalkers leapt across the ground, yards behind, and one of them slammed into the metal as Billy pulled it shut. It slid back onto its haunches and stared at the metal as if sizing up its integrity. I wondered how long the fences could hold them for.
39
We backed away from the fences like a herd of scared cows. The stalkers crawled cautiously to the perimeter and stopped. They formed a line of twelve and stared, each of them sizing up their prey and deciding which man or woman would be their first. One of them swiped at the fence and made the metal shake, and the people around me took a collective step back.
A stalker leapt at the fence and latched onto it, claws gripping around the holes in the metal. The fence rattled as though a gust of wind had hit it. One by one the stalkers leapt at it and slithered up toward the top.
A man in front of us tripped over his own foot as he moved away. He fell to the floor and landed on his back. He cried out in pain, but he didn’t get up. He stared ahead of him, where the highest of the stalkers cleared the top of the fence and leapt over, landing on our side of it.
My ears still throbbed with pain, but sound slowly drifted back through them. I heard fallen men on the plain screaming in pain. Teenagers calling out for their parents, men crying. I wished I could turn the volume down again. I would have taken any amount of pain not to listen to it.
“So much for getting behind the fences,” said Billy.
“Better than being out in the open,” I said. “At least here we have places to go.”
“Places to hide, you mean.”
“We just need time to breathe.”
The furthermost stalker slid across the ground like a komodo dragon eyeing prey. Its arms and legs moved at odd angles, first sloping outwards and then tucking inwards. It tilted its head up, though I knew that it wasn’t trying to see us through its ink black eyes. Stalkers had the eyesight of a mole, which was strange for a creature which moved almost entirely in the dark. Their sense of smell made up for it. This stalker sniffed the air and turned its head toward the man who lay prone on the ground.
“Get up, you moron,” said Billy.
The man stared ahead with his mouth agape and head tilted back. The stalker rolled onto its back legs. Beside me, Billy twitched as if he was about to move. I put my hand on his chest and held him back. I knew what was about to happen, and we were too late to stop it.
The stalker’s calf muscles tensed until they bulged. It shrieked, pressed into the floor and then leapt through the air. Its claws were raised and its teeth were bared. The man looked up and his wide eyes registered the creature, but the only sound that left his mouth was a pathetic groan.
The stalker swiped its claws at the man’s neck at the same time its back legs touched the ground. The man’s skin slid away like turkey under a carving knife, and blood leaked over his exposed vocal chords. The stalker slurped at the blood, quenching its thirst until its face was dotted crimson. The upper set of its teeth jutted from its lips, and it bent toward the man and tore at his open neck wound like a lion.
A woman behind me screamed. It wasn’t a shout of panic or alarm, or even one of fear. There was a warped edge to it, something deeply inhuman that seemed to swim in desperation. It was the cry of a woman whose mind had snapped.
A river of panic broke through the levee of reason and flooded over the crowd. Men turned and ran, leaving thoughts of defending Bleakholt far behind them. Women ducked into doorways and rattled the handles, crying out in frustration at the ones they found locked. Others, those who had nothing to lose or weren’t scared to lose what they had, turned and faced the monsters.
The rest of the stalkers, seeing the first creature gorge itself on the man’s flesh, slithered forward. Their black shapes seemed to meld into the night. Their mouth opened wider and their second sets of teeth poked out, spit dripping over them and onto the floor. They sniffed the ground, hissed, and stepped forward. They began to fan out to the side as though spreading into a formation. One crouched and then leapt through the air. One by one the others followed, and within two leaps they caught the fleeing men and women who scampered wildly away.
Claws connected with skin. Teeth tore through flesh and crunched through bone. Blood spat through the air and drenched the floor. Screams welled in throats and then were cut short as claws snapped vocal chords. Some, seeing how impossible it was to run, stopped to fight. Others ran until either their burning lungs told them to stop or a set of teeth ripped a chunk out of them.
“Kyle!” I heard Billy shout.
I turned to my right in time to see a stalker diving through the air. I stepped to my right and watched it sail past of me. My nerves lit on fire, as if thousands of tiny pokers pressed into my skin. The stalker reared back, corrected its balance and then prepared to leap again.
I held my knife tight in my hand. The stalker pushed itself forward and cleared five feet in one leap. I waited as long as I dared as it sailed toward me, and at the last second I stuck my knife forward but tilted my body to the side. The blade of the knife snagged against the stalker’s skin and ripped along it as though it were tearing into a sheet of fabric. There was a pattering sound as black blood fell to the floor.
The stalker writhed on its back, teeth gnashing and a snort coming from the back of its throat. A long fault line of a cut ran from its neck to its groin. Billy stood above it, raised his mallet and then brought it down, crushing the stalkers face into the ground.
Billy looked up.
“This is fucked,” he said with a tremor in his voice.
I had never seen him show fear. The infected didn’t bother him, and the stalkers were an annoyance. Hearing his voice wobble set my skin on edge. But as I listened to the sounds around me, I knew that he was right. Screams of pain rang into the night sky, a fresh one every second as the stalkers hunted, and caught, their prey.
Billy walked to the front of the gate where his quad bike was parked. He swung his leg over the side and slid into the seat. With a flick of a switch the headlamps glimmered, two narrow searchlights that punctured the dead darkness.
A few stalkers perked their head up ahead of us. Their eyesight was awful, but they couldn’t have missed the sudden beams of yellow that cut through the air.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
Billy turned the ignition and the engine coughed. Another turn and it roared to life. Fumes drifted from the exhausts and the wheels seemed tensed and ready to scream across the plain.
“I’ll draw them away,” he said.
“Draw them where?”
“I’ll just drive.”
I ran my hands through my hair and felt something wet on my forehead. I didn’t know if it was sweat or blood.
“Are you looking to die?”
“Things are screwed here, Kyle. I’m swapping one suicide for another. At least this way a few more of these poor bastards might live.”
“You don’t need to do this,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”
Billy twisted the handlebar and the engine screamed out. A few more stalkers perked up and stared at him.
“I’ll keep riding until its light. I’ll get them miles away from here and see how the fuckers cope with daylight.”
“There’s no way you have enough fuel for that.”
Billy looked at the ground and closed his eyes. When he looked up at me, they were dark and sad. “Just let me have this, Kyle. After all the things I’ve done, I need it. This isn’t just for everyone else. It’s for me.”
I swallowed and felt my dry throat contract. “Lou told me what happened.”
“Then shut the fuck up and let me do this.”
He twisted the handlebars again and made the engine shout out until it drowned out everything else. The
stalkers perked their heads up like dogs hearing the dinner bell. Slowly they turned into Billy’s direction and took tentative steps forward. Billy rolled the quad down the path and toward the fence.
“Get the gate for me,” he shouted.
I walked to the gate, slid the bolts and pulled it open. I turned behind me and saw a dozen stalkers crawl toward us, drawn by the hum of the engine.
Billy stuck out his hand toward me. He gripped mine and shook it. He had a strange look in his eyes.
“You think this makes up for what Lou and me did?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”
He breathed into, then clenched his teeth. “I do.”
He twisted the accelerator and sped out onto the plains. The stalkers, seeing him leave, picked up speed. As they got closer I realised that they were going to have to run through the gate. I shrank back against the metal and held my breath as they pounded past me, the sour smell of their skin strong enough to make me gag.
The headlights of Billy’s quad sped into the distance, the trail of stalkers following behind. They faded into the black of the night and eventually disappeared into it completely.
40
Limp bodies lay strewn around me. Before Billy led them away, the stalkers had managed to tear through us, leaving piles of corpses behind. One man pulled himself across the ground on his belly, blood trailing from his neck like a reel of claret ribbon.
Outside the gates, the infected walked towards us. I looked around me. Only fifteen or so men and women stood on their feet, and some had lost their weapons in the chaos. It wasn’t enough to fight the hundred infected who walked our way.
They dragged their feet across the grass, some of them stumbling over corpses of fellow-infected. If they registered that one of their own had fallen, they gave no response. That was the difference between us. There isn't a man alive who can look at a fresh corpse and fail to feel a shudder of revulsion. The infected don’t care though; they've only got one thing on their mind.
The iron stench of blood was thick in their air. Across from me a woman heaved herself onto her knees. She turned and saw the infected coming towards us. She looked at me with pleading eyes, as if begging me to take her out of the nightmare. She coughed, and a spray of blood hit her shirt. She fell forward and cried into the dirt.
I felt alone. Alice was dead. Victoria was gone. Justin was trapped behind the debris of the explosion in the hills, and Billy had sped off on his quad bike to die. I wished that I had someone with me. I wished that Lou was by my side but she was in the mayor’s office with the kids, and that was the safest place for her. For now.
What would happen to Lou, Melissa and the kids when the infected tore us apart? Ewan had taken the bus, so there was no question of escape. Would the infected finish off the fighters at the gates and then go looking for the children?
I felt sick rise in my stomach and burn my throat. I remembered when we first got to Bleakholt. I had warned everyone to leave, but Victoria had persuaded me that Bleakholt was the only hope for the future. I’d allowed myself to buy into it, and look at what had happened. I gripped my knife in my hand and squeezed the handle until my knuckles started to sting. I was going to give every last drop trying to protect the people who were left.
I walked out of the fence and onto the plains. The wind bristled against my cheeks and snuck down my coat, freezing the sheen of sweat on my back. The emptiness of the plains seemed to swallow me, as though it were a vacuum of darkness that sucked in everything in its path.
I heard a din of voices to my right. My adrenaline spiked. It sounded like the rest of the infected had somehow found a quicker way around the hills and now they were pouring in from the sides. Soon there would be hundreds of thousands of them, so many that they would cover the ground like spores.
Then I saw what the noise really was. My heart beat against my chest as though it were begging to be let out. To my right, walking across the plains, there were no infected. Instead, it was the people of Vasey.
When they got closer I saw that Moe and Sana led at the front. Moe held a meat cleaver in his hand, the silver blade square and shining. Sana carried a baseball bat with nails driven into the side. Her face seemed set in a cement grimace, as though she’d scowled once and then her features had hardened. The survivors from Vasey were behind them. Fifty men, women, and teenagers who carried makeshift weapons and wore faces of fear and anger.
When I saw Moe, revulsion twisted my stomach like a wrung dishcloth. My whole body shook as hate coursed through me. This bastard had killed Alice. He’d abandoned us in Vasey and left half the townsfolk to die, and as if that wasn’t bad enough he had found new depths to crawl to. I wanted to stick my knife in his belly. Images flashed through my head of blood pouring out of his mouth, his eyes wide as I buried the blade deep in his guts.
Ten feet away from me, Moe held his hand in the air. The Vasey campers stopped as though he were a general who had called a halt to a march. Sana looked at me, and I felt her stare burn through my skin. Moe turned and faced his people.
“You know what to do,” he said.
He swept his hand in the air like a conductor, flicking it across the plains where the infected shambled toward us.
“Clean up the mess, and Bleakholt is ours.”
The Vasey people shifted uncertainly. Some cast worried glances over at the infected. Moe’s face reddened, and he clapped his hands together.
“Come on! Stop shaking. Stop being babies. This is when you prove what you’re worth. And if you don’t, then you aren’t worth shit. They've kept us in the shadows for too long. Forced us to scrape and beg for the things any decent person deserves. This is your chance. Clean up the dead and take what you’re owed.”
The men and women seemed to drink in confidence from Moe’s words. They breathed it in and let it fill their chests. They held their weapons high, looked toward the plains and one by one they walked toward the infected.
As they reached the first of the infected, a man at the front of the group raised a hatchet in the air. He cried out and then brought it down on to the head of the creature, splitting its skull across the hairline. Others followed, and before long they were hacking and stabbing at every infected that came their way.
The air once more carries the groans of the infected. Men and women screamed as they raised their weapons and sunk them into every corpse that they saw. Every so often a wail punctured the air, and a man or woman would fall to the ground screaming. As blades cut through dead flesh and stabbed into brain tissue, more infected slammed into the ground never to get back up. I joined the fight and hacked at everything I saw, pushing my knife through infected skulls until the blade was red and my arm ached.
I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and saw the remaining people of Bleakholt had walked out of the fences and joined the fight. Their faces were grey and haggard, their arms tired from hours of fighting. But they saw their chance. The tide was starting to turn, and now they had to sail into the heart of it.
In the heart of the battle there was a heat in the air, as if the energy expended as each man and women sliced at the infected warmed the wind. The air stank of sweat, blood and rot. Shouts of anger were cut by shrieks of pain. Men fell, clutching wounds made by the teeth of the infected. For every person that hit the ground, never to get up, more infected met the same fate.
An infected lurched my way. It was taller than me and with a barrel-shaped chest that was bitten down by decay. It grabbed my shoulder in a burning grip and leaned its head toward me, teeth slimy and desperate for my flesh. I lifted my arm and drove my knife through its neck and up into its head, feeling a squelch as my blade pierced its brain.
A hand grabbed my shoulder. I span round, knife ready, but saw that it wasn’t an infected. Instead, Sana stood in front of me. Despite the mayhem around her, her face was pale and free from sweat, as if her pores were sealed shut. She held her baseball bat at her side, rusty nails
sticking out from the wood.
“I just want you to know Kyle,” she said. “About my son. About what happened. I thought you should know…”
Was she trying to make peace with me? She had hated me for so long, and I understood it. Grief twisted your thinking. It squeezed your brain until all reason dripped out and the only thing you could cling to was the idea that there had to be someone to blame. For Sana, that person was me. Hating me had helped her struggle through the tragedies in her life, and I was willing to take that.
“Look, Sana. I get it, okay? You don’t need to say anything.”
