by Ricky Fleet
“Yeah, and now he’s with us. You trust Mrs Blume, don’t you?”
Braiden gave it some thought before letting out a huff. “I guess so.”
“She was right about a certain young hell raiser.” Sam pointed both fingers and prodded them towards Braiden dramatically.
“Ok, ok! I’ll take her word for it but I’m still going to keep a close eye on him.”
Sam climbed out of bed and stretched. After weeks of slumming it and sleeping on whatever they could find, the soft mattress was difficult to adjust to. Knotted muscles protested with a vehemence Sam thought reserved only for the elderly.
Braiden groaned his own discomfort and their eyes met. “Floor tonight?”
“You read my mind,” Sam grumbled, “I don’t think I can sleep in that bed again, it’s way too soft.”
“We’ll put something together later.”
Sam wiped at the icy moisture on the window and paused. “It looks like you can keep an eye on him easier than you thought.”
“Huh?”
Sam nodded towards the glass so Braiden approached and squinted through the water streaks. The teenager was out in the main courtyard, breath fogging in the chill. He would jog for a few seconds before clutching his sides and bending over. Watching his brother from the corner of his eye, Sam was surprised when instead of mocking laughter, Braiden nodded.
***
Pain. Such unbearable pain. Winston was in a state of abject torment. Each intake of breath was like inhaling acid. Unseen creatures gnawed at his flank, desperate to tear free through the burning stitch in his side. A dull throb had turned into an incapacitating spasm in the small of his back.
Why are you doing this to yourself? He thought miserably. It wasn’t as if he would ever win any beauty contests with the stretch marks and sagging belly. Perhaps it was time to accept that he was just not cut out to be slim or fit. Running over short distances had kept him alive so far and maybe that was all he needed. Brute strength was also a boon and far less painful to maintain.
Stopping dead, he kneaded his sides, trying to massage some of the pain away, but it was deep and unheeding. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t even muster enough saliva to spit or swallow. Moving his tongue around, it felt like a gummy, alien slug. The unresponsive sublingual glands seemed to have dried up like a starved well and he finally called it a day. Or eight minutes of hell according to his watch.
Crunching gravel broke through his misery and he whirled around to see it was only Braiden and Sam. His survival mechanism was still on high alert even within the safe confines of the castle walls. He was grateful that the fierce burning in his cheeks from the exercise prevented a fresh bout of embarrassment from blazing to life. Lowering his head, he started to walk away, angling himself around them to avoid a confrontation with Braiden. They ignored the manoeuvre and intercepted him but he was too exhausted to even offer a witty remark.
“Here.” Braiden held out a bottle of water and Winston stared at him in disbelief.
“Take sips,” Sam added, “Don’t guzzle it or you’ll feel worse.”
Braiden pushed the bottle forcefully towards him with a nod. It was obvious from the narrowing of his eyes that it would be a while until he was accepted by the teenager. Mustering up his most disarming smile which appeared instead as a lopsided, gasping gurn, Winston accepted the gift.
“Come up to the top of the castle grounds with us. Gravel is too uneven and your ankles won’t be strong enough yet,” Sam explained.
Winston looked longingly at the arched doorway which then led to his sofa and the warm fires of the sleeping area. With a monumental battle of wills, he turned away from the promise of comfort and followed the younger boys.
“This is going to be awful for you,” Sam said, looking at the portly teen, “You know that, right?”
The water had softened his parched mouth enough to speak and Winston nodded. “I know. But I need to get fit.”
“We’ll ask Jonesy and DB for some better advice later, but for now we’ll just do circuits of the upper bailey. I guess it’s about half a mile give or take.”
“Half a mile?” Winston blurted, his face changing from flushed to pale at the thought.
“Don’t worry,” Sam said with a reassuring smile, “One of us will stay with you the whole time and we’ll take it slow and steady. Ok?”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, we do,” Braiden muttered, “It’s a good idea.”
“You’ll have to forgive my garrulous brother for rabbiting on too much,” Sam quipped, playfully pushing the scowling youth to try and banish some of the tension.
“It’s ok,” Winston replied. He would take it slowly, proving himself and earning the trust of the survivors.
“Ok, this will do,” Sam pointed to an empty flowerbed with a low stone wall enclosing the barren soil.
“Did you stretch?” Braiden asked.
“Umm…”
“I thought not. Touch your toes,” Braiden continued.
“Funny,” Winston muttered. It had been a favourite taunt of his father to ask how long it had been since he had seen the wiggling digits.
“It wasn’t meant as a joke,” Braiden declared, “It doesn’t matter if you can’t touch them yet, it’s more about the movement to stretch out the hamstrings.”
“Oh,” Winston sighed. The shape of his body was an inescapable impediment to the task, but even halfway down he could feel the twinge of muscles pulling.
“Now your thighs,” Braiden said and the three boys went through a complete warm up routine.
Sam was keeping out of the discussion, content to let Braiden take charge as it meant he was finally talking properly to the newcomer without a knife in hand. Moment by moment, some of the mistrust ebbed away as the tearaway offered pointers and support.
“Most of the cramps have gone now. Thanks,” Winston grinned.
“Let’s get going,” Braiden mumbled in reply, re-erecting some of the barriers.
“We’ll walk the first circuit and see if there are any holes or obstacles to avoid,” said Sam.
“After that I’ll run around while Sam paces with you. Once I’ve lapped you, I’ll stay with you until he does the same. How does that sound?” Braiden asked and the two boys agreed.
Winston was dreading the coming ordeal but also, deep down, knew it was for the best. Beneath the understandable hostility shown towards him, there was an undercurrent of kindness. They hoped against all hope that he would prove to be as genuine as he claimed. It was not an opportunity he was prepared to waste. The blood started to flow with each pace and the well-tended grounds were as perfect as Sam and Braiden had assumed.
Reaching the starting point, Braiden had a few final words of encouragement for Winston, “This isn’t going to be much easier for us, we haven’t run properly in months. See you later, bitches!” With a raised middle finger, he started to jog away, pumping his arms and increasing his stride as he gained confidence.
Winston looked at Sam with nervous anticipation. “Ready?”
“Yup, you?”
“No,” Winston groaned and started to run.
Winston tried to match the long paces of Braiden until Sam eased him back. “Slow it down a bit, he used to be on the athletics team. Neither of us could keep up with him.”
Unable to answer through the rapid constriction of his chest, Winston nodded.
“Try and take deeper breaths and time them to your feet. I take one breath over two steps and let it out over the next two steps,” Sam said, watching the boy as he struggled to fill his strained lungs.
Slowing down a little, Winston focused on each footfall. Left, right, breathe in, left, right, exhale. He managed about a quarter of the distance before it became too much. Raising a hand in surrender he started to slow, but Sam grabbed him by the arm and pulled.
“Not yet, give me another twenty feet!”
Winston felt the familiar self-doubt, but before it could g
rind him down and win, he took another step. Then another, and another. Nearly forty feet had been covered in a sweaty blur before he slowed to a walk.
“Brilliant, mate. Well done,” Sam praised, “Now, don’t stop walking, even if you think you can’t go another step and take long, deep breaths. We’ll give it thirty seconds and then we do a little more.”
“Kill… me… now!” Winston croaked.
“That’s the spirit!” Sam laughed, his own breathing nearly back to normal.
“Slackers!” Braiden shouted from their rear as he approached. Stretching out an arm to mimic a relay pass, he reached them and Sam took the invisible baton and jogged away.
“It’s like being back in training,” Braiden exclaimed, taking deep breaths of his own in time with Winston.
“How are… you not… dead?”
“In a month, you’ll be keeping up with me,” Braiden grinned without a hint of sarcasm. The combination of exercise and subsequent endorphins had put him in a great mood.
“I doubt I’ll survive… the morning.”
“Bollocks! Can’t you hear? Your breathing is already slowing down.”
Winston was surprised to find that Braiden was right. His body’s resistance to the exercise was being replaced by the same energised feeling which flowed through his companion.
“The mistake you made was trying to run flat out straight away.” Braiden patted him on the back, “We need to build your stamina gradually. Let’s go.”
In place of the earlier groan was a determined nod and the two boys started to jog again.
“Mind if we join you?” yelled Holly from the flowerbed they had used to stretch.
Accompanying her were most of the fellow students as far as Braiden could tell. Three more came hurrying from the lower keep to make it the whole class. Winston was flagging again and was horrified at the thought of reaching them as a red, sweaty, gasping mess. Braiden refused to let him slow and urged him on.
“Nearly there!”
The rest of the youngsters could see the pain contorting his face and shouted their own encouragement. Winston stumbled to a halt and everyone congratulated him on pushing through. As one, the whole group started to walk in time while he regained his composure.
“You got this,” Braiden said confidently as Sam reached them, before sprinting away to show off to the girls.
“Why are you out here?” Sam asked everyone, taking a sip from the water bottle.
“What’s rule number one of the zombie apocalypse?” Holly inquired with a raised eyebrow. “Cardio.” Everyone burst out laughing at the joke. The movie from which she had stolen the phrase made light of the true horror, but it brought back fond memories of Columbus and Tallahassee’s zombie killing exploits.
What had started as a freezing, agonising, lonely endeavour had grown into something else entirely. Winston looked around the happy faces walking alongside and felt an inner glow which had eluded him for his whole life. It was belonging.
CHAPTER 4
Shifting his weight to account for a spreading cramp in his thigh, Pesci laid the scoped rifle down and decided to take the opportunity to relieve himself. Rising into a kneeling position within the concealment of the bushes, he uncapped the bottle and held his breath lest a waft of the stale urine assail his senses. The freezing temperatures were keeping the vile fermentation of his bodily fluids to a minimum and he was grateful for that. Placing the bottle out of reach, he nibbled sparingly on a dry cracker and sipped from his water bottle before fluffing the thick blankets on the ground.
The silence was only broken by the occasional moan of nearby zombies as they bumbled along, driven by whatever unfathomable instinct was animating them. Pesci hadn’t really given it any thought, much like his whole life up to this point. He avoided them because they were dangerous, but that was a peripheral concern to the main mission. Craig had asked him to survey the castle and any surviving occupants, and for the last two days he had lain in the thicket, oblivious to all else, even the cold. His ability to get a job done was legendary, or so he had been told by criminal acquaintances and fellow prisoners. Their praise had never filled him with any pride; he normally just nodded and ignored it.
All through his younger years, his parents had been filled with a growing hopelessness as they tried to unravel his bizarre behaviour. Thirteen years had been their limit and the day that the social workers arrived to remove him was forever etched in his memory. For eight months, he had sat in the room of his new home and analysed every aspect of the event. The anxious, tear streaked creases of his mother’s cheek as she sobbed. The stoic frown of his father which couldn’t hide the well of unshed sadness which threatened to spill from his dark lashes. The cruel grip of his collector on the flesh of his upper arm and the way the fingers dug painfully into his left triceps muscle as he was led to the waiting vehicle.
Attempts had been made to get him to go to school from the children’s home, but his mind simply wouldn’t allow it. Although they shepherded him to and from classes, he was unresponsive. Food had been consumed and perfunctory cleaning undertaken when they had urged him, but every time he would return to the scene in his mind. He harboured no animosity towards his birth parents, they were just two people he had lived with for a while. Love was an emotion he had never experienced, a concept as alien as the stars he could see in the night sky. Had he been fortunate enough to be born twenty years later, he would have been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. His personality would have been better understood as being victim to hyperfocus and obsession.
It was these traits which made him such an efficient burglar and ‘psycho’ as people labelled him when he had reached adulthood. He would sit patiently for days on end to note the habits, and comings and goings of their marks. Where others would get restless and fidget, Pesci, or Harry as he had been christened, would be in his element. The same compulsion took him when he felt slighted. Instead of dealing rationally with the insult, he would not rest until the person was either laid in a coma or the grave. There was no satisfaction, just a mechanism in his mind that then closed that episode and moved on. It was thus a murder that got him sentenced to eighteen years in prison and under the protective wing of Craig.
Finishing his stretching routine, he lowered himself back to the blanket insulated ground. When he was settled, he re-covered himself with the thermal sleeping bags which Mike had arrived with. Luckily, they were black and blended in well with the dark shadows of the old fox run which he had found. He placed his cheek on the stock of the Remington Model 700 bolt action rifle and stared back through the scope. By his reckoning, the guard on the wall would be changing in about forty minutes. This gave the sentry a four-hour window to patrol their section of battlement or tower. Pesci found himself watching each new guard and wondering why they had to be so careless. Like clockwork, the first thirty minutes would be spent carefully scanning the horizon for movement. They would gradually lose interest and take out a hidden book or magazine, or disappear for ten minutes and fetch more firewood for their dying brazier. The last three hours would then be spent giving a cursory glance over the wall at random intervals. Anyone wanting to approach stealthily would be able to wear neon lights with a huge flashing arrow pointing down at them and still go undetected. Now and again a survivor would appear who wasn’t cut from the same cloth. They had the look of people who had seen too much, who knew what evil lay outside the high walls. And not just the rotting kind either.
Looking at the note pad on the dead leaves and twigs, scribbled notes had been written by one of the other inmates. It took Pesci a while to understand each word, but he wasn’t totally illiterate. He had already ticked off the two soldiers who were detailed on the paper. They had been easy to spot in their combat fatigues. Sam and Braiden had question marks by their names as he had seen several teenagers which could match the descriptions. One name had been underlined and circled to display its importance; Kurt. Craig had left him in no doubt that if he was to
bring confirmation of only one person, it was to be him. Reasons weren’t sought as they were moot; he had his mission and that filled his whole psyche.
If Pesci had arrived a day earlier, he would have witnessed the man leading the clean-up operation and subsequent incineration of the zombie corpses at the eastern wall. As it was, the only glimpse had been during the manic arrival of the crane and the fat kid. The belching, snorting machine had crashed through the undergrowth twenty feet from where he lay. He had watched with bemusement as the vehicle had been driven at the wall and the dripping, crumbling entourage had surrounded it. A protracted discussion ended with the driver being dragged up and over the stone parapet where he was then bound and removed. A period of extreme watchfulness slowly ebbed away over the following day until the slovenly observation had taken its place once again.
A shout came over the field and he could see his target gesticulating and berating the man who he was replacing. The argument was brief and with a bowed head, the individual stomped away in shame. Kurt turned the book over in his hands as if he hadn’t seen anything like it before. With an angry shake of his head, he tossed it into the fire which devoured it gratefully. Pesci was under strict instructions not to shoot anyone, especially Kurt, so he removed his finger from the trigger guard just in case. Better to be safe than sorry. The thin black crosshair centred on his face, and for a split second it appeared Kurt was looking directly at him. Slowly capping the lens with his hand, Pesci blinked a couple of times until his closed eye had adjusted and watched carefully. Fearing a stray flash of the reflected glass, he exhaled slowly when Kurt moved away from him onto other sights. Nothing about his body language spoke of tension or recognition and Pesci relaxed a little. His watch displayed 1.17PM and he had all the information required to fulfil Craig’s brief. Carefully folding the bedding, he placed it all inside his backpack. All evidence that he had been sheltered in the bushes was taken even though the chances of someone human coming to look were infinitesimally small.
