Twenty-Five Percent (Book 2): Downfall

by Nerys Wheatley

  Creedon hesitated, pushing her dark hair back from her face.

  Alex pulled the bike up behind the group. He had no doubt Janie was right. He’d only met Creedon once, but it was clear she was crazy. Not the jokey or cute kind of crazy, the real kind of crazy, where people got maimed or killed.

  The camouflaged group turned to look at him and Micah as they dismounted.

  “Aren’t you dead yet?” Creedon said to Alex.

  “Nice to see you too, Creedon,” he lied.

  “I see you’re still hanging around in questionable company, Micah.” A tall man with cropped salt and pepper hair stepped out from the centre of the group of around twenty people.

  “What’s going on, Bates?” Micah said.

  Janie stood up on the roof of one of the cars holding up the barrier, hands on her hips. “What’s going on is these militant idiots have an issue with us defending ourselves.”

  Bates pointed at her. “We have no idea what you are doing in there. For all we know, you’re using this crisis to prepare a white-eye army to take over the city.”

  Alex’s next door neighbour, Leon, climbed up beside Janie, his huge frame towering over her. “You’re the ones carrying guns and wearing camouflage. What’s up with that anyway? We’re in a city.”

  Creedon raised her rifle and aimed at him, her face filled with hatred. Alex darted forward and grabbed it from her hands before it accidentally, or not so accidentally, went off. She shrieked and took a swing at his face that he wasn’t quick enough to duck, his nose catching a glancing blow from her fist.

  Alex let out a roar of pain. He was still healing from being head butted by an insane woman who wanted him to impregnate her.

  Lunatic women were becoming the bane of his life.

  “Creedon!” Bates snapped.

  She halted halfway into the execution of her second punch and looked at him. “What?”

  When he did nothing but raise his eyebrows at her, she transformed into a petulant child, pointing at Alex. “He took Sylvester.”

  It was a couple of seconds before Alex realised she was talking about the rifle.

  Bates didn’t say anything. Creedon puffed out a breath, walked over to him, and lowered her voice. “But, Dad...”

  “You’ll get your baby back,” Bates said.

  Alex looked back at Micah. “Creedon is Bates’ daughter?”

  Micah nodded. “Chip off the old block.”

  “Her name...”

  “It’s her married name.”

  Alex gaped, trying to process this new piece of information. “Somebody married her?”

  “Yeah, it surprised me too. They’re divorced. I never met the man.”

  Alex shook his head. “He’s probably in a nursing home somewhere being fed through a tube.”

  Creedon looked at them sharply when Micah let out a bark of laughter.

  Alex went into police mode. He’d been trained in techniques for diffusing tense situations like this, although he hadn’t had to do it in over four years, since he became a Survivor.

  He handed the rifle to Micah and stepped forward. “Bates, you don’t have a problem with the residents of East Town protecting themselves, just with the fact that you don’t know what they’re doing?” He wanted to add, ‘and you’re a paranoid, bigoted, conspiracy theorist nut’. But he didn’t.

  Bates frowned and glanced at Janie and Leon. “I... suppose.”

  “So if you were able to satisfy yourself that we don’t pose a threat to you or the rest of Sarcester, you’d leave us alone?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I’d consider it.”

  Alex guessed it was probably the best he was going to get. “Alright, then you can come in with Micah and me and look around. But only you, and unarmed.”

  Creedon looked incredulous. “You must be...” She stopped when Bates held up his hand.

  He looked from Alex to Micah. “Did you find the secret laboratory you were looking for?”

  “We did,” Micah said. “We can fill you in during the tour.” He indicated the barrier.

  Bates considered for a few seconds then nodded once. He handed his pistol to Creedon and looked round at his people. “Stand down until I get back. The first person who shoots anything other than an eater will answer to me. Is that clear?”

  There were a few nods. Despite being fully aware that Bates was deranged, Alex was impressed at the loyalty the nut commanded from his equally deranged followers.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Creedon said.

  Bates smiled at his daughter. “Penny, a good general does what needs to be done, regardless of his own safety. I can look after myself.”

  Ignoring the fact that Bates was no more a general than Alex, the discovery that Creedon’s first name was Penny came as something of a shock. Alex would have expected something more along the lines of Pit Bull or Viper.

  Alex retrieved the motorcycle and wheeled it up to the barrier, lifting it up so Leon and Janie could take it from him and lower it to the ground on the other side. He was well aware of the scrutiny of Bates’ underlings. It was one thing to be theoretically aware of the strength of a Survivor, it was entirely another to witness one lift a four hundred pound motorbike into the air as if it weighed nothing. Of course, it didn’t feel to Alex like it weighed nothing, he was in actuality straining quite a bit. But he thought he hid it well. He resisted the urge to beat his fists on his chest when he’d finished.

  Micah handed Sylvester back to Creedon, who stroked it as if it was a long lost lover, and walked up to Alex.

  “You totally did that on purpose,” he muttered. “Who’s showing off now?”

  Alex smiled and vaulted up onto the barrier. Micah climbed up after him and Bates came last. Leon and Janie followed them to the ground on the other side, leaving other Survivors to man the fortifications.

  “What happened?” Janie said. “Did you find Hannah?”

  Alex shook his head. “I’ll tell you all about it when we’ve done this.” He nodded at Bates.

  He, Micah, Janie and Leon spent the next half an hour giving Bates a guided tour of the area of East Town the residents had shut off when thousands of eaters began roaming the streets. The leader of the paranoid anti-Survivor group met some of the normals who had come for sanctuary and even spoke with a degree of civility to Alex’s friends and neighbours.

  Alex had to hide his annoyance at the whole thing. This was all a stupid waste of time, time he could be spending going after Hannah and the others. Instead, he was left babysitting the ignorant idiot. He could have handed him off to someone else, but since it had been his suggestion, and he was reluctant to let Bates out of his sight around his home, he stayed. On the way round, Micah filled Bates in on the underground lab he and Alex had found, the involvement of Omnav in the outbreak, and the real purpose of the new strain of Meir’s.

  Others Alex had told had been sceptical at first, not that he was lying, but that anyone would do something so heinous as making a terrible disease even more efficient, turning it into a terrifying weapon of death and its victims into nightmarish armies. Bates showed no such disbelief. This was the kind of thing he was waiting for, vindication that he wasn’t a paranoia-spreading extremist, but a herald of future manmade catastrophes that were now here. In his mind anyway. He appeared almost gleeful as he listened to the story. Alex didn’t bother to hide his disdain. Just because Bates had been right in a general kind of way didn’t mean he was any less of a lunatic.

  At the end of the tour they returned to the barrier where the Survivors on one side and Bates’ little demented army on the other were still glaring at each other.

  “So,” Alex said to Bates, “are you satisfied we aren’t here building a Survivor army to take over the world? Can we agree that we have a common enemy in Omnav and whoever created this new Meir’s strain?”

  Bates looked like a man in the grip of severe internal conflict. Alex silently cheered on the conspiracy theorist crackpot side of Bates’ brai
n to win out over the bigoted, death-to-all-Survivors crackpot side of Bates’ brain. He glanced at Micah who shrugged.

  “You know how I’ve felt about Survivors since Caroline died,” Micah said.

  Bates nodded.

  “But one thing this last couple of weeks has taught me is that normal people aren’t good and Survivors aren’t bad. We’re just people, all of us. And we can work together. I know it seems impossible, but if Alex and I can do it, so can you.”

  Alex nodded.

  “I admit,” Micah continued, “there were times when I’ve wanted to punch him, hard.”

  Alex frowned.

  “And even now, after all we’ve been through, he can be intensely annoying.”

  “Hold on...”

  “But that’s just because of his personality, not because he’s a Survivor.”

  “Is there a point to this?” Alex said, raising his eyebrows.

  Micah smirked. “My point is, we have made it work, so can you and the others.”

  Except for Creedon, Alex thought, but he kept it to himself.

  They waited while Bates stared at the ground.

  “Alright,” he said eventually. “It’s obvious things are very bad and I will concede you had nothing to do with it.”

  “How kind of you,” Janie said.

  “And since you are the only other group of people in the city who have organised themselves in the law and order vacuum where we find ourselves, I can see the benefits in working together.”

  Despite doing his best to make Bates see reason, Alex was shocked that he had.

  “Well, um, good,” he said, mentally reeling. “I’m glad we could work it out.”

  “I’d send someone to go with you two to Omnav,” Bates said, “but everyone has family that I couldn’t ask them to leave in these dangerous times. Except for my daughter. I could ask her...”

  “No,” Alex said immediately. “No. So nice of you to offer, but no. No.”

  . . .

  They left Bates working things out with Leon and Janie while Alex and Micah returned to Alex’s flat.

  He left Micah settling onto the sofa while he went to shower any remaining melted eater off himself and changed. He threw his jeans into the bin. No matter how much they were washed, he knew it would never, in his mind, get rid of the glutinous mess that had soaked him. It made his skin crawl just thinking about it.

  The smell of bacon and the sound of voices greeted his return to the living room and he walked into the kitchen to see Micah standing at the cooker, a spatula in one hand and a small child in the other, settled on his hip.

  An older child was sitting at the table, spreading butter onto slices of bread.

  “Good morning, Emma,” Alex said to the girl at the table, leaning down to kiss the top of her head. She giggled when his stomach rumbled loudly.

  “Are you hungry?” she said.

  He smiled. “A bit.”

  The little girl Micah was holding twisted around to look at him. “We’re making bacon sandwiches.”

  “My favourite.” He kissed Katie’s cheek and she smiled.

  “Mine too,” a deep voice said. Leon walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table next to Emma, taking one of the buttered slices of bread and stuffing it into his mouth.

  “Dad!”

  He looked down at her, speaking around the mouthful of bread. “What?”

  She slid the loaded plate across the table away from him. “Those are for the sandwiches.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll save room.”

  She rolled her eyes and kept on buttering, painstakingly covering each slice right up to the edges with a uniform layer of butter before moving on to the next.

  Alex sat on the other side of her and reached for the plate of bread.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said, without looking up from her work.

  He smiled and pulled his hand back. “How’d it go with Bates?” he said to Leon.

  “That man has a screw or three loose,” he said. “Sorry, Micah, I know he’s your friend.”

  “I think ‘friend’ would be stretching it,” Micah replied. “I’ve known him for a long time, but we were never really friends.”

  “Well, he has some lunatic ideas. But I think we’ve managed to hash out a plan. We’re going to start a schedule of patrols of the city, to try to keep order until this is all over. And so one of us can’t accuse the other of doing anything, each patrol will consist of a Survivor and one of Bates’ people.”

  “That wasn’t what I was expecting,” Alex said.

  “Actually, it was his idea,” Leon replied. “I think it will be an education, for both sides.”

  “That won’t be a bad thing for his lot,” Micah said. He glanced at Alex then back at the frying pan.

  Alex couldn’t help smiling. “As long as no-one is left alone with Creedon.”

  “We’ve already had a volunteer to partner with her,” Leon said, smirking.

  Alex’s eyebrows shot up. “Who?”

  “Scott.”

  Scott was new to East Town. At thirty-six a few years older than Alex, he’d only become a Survivor and moved into their building three months ago. He was still adjusting. Alex remembered what it was like after he was cured and subsequently had his whole life turned upside down. He felt for the man.

  “I think he wants to...” Leon glanced at his two young daughters, “...make friends with her.”

  “Brave man,” Micah muttered.

  “Oh, Dad,” Emma said, rolling her eyes, “I know what make friends means.”

  The three men exchanged glances.

  “You do?” Leon said carefully.

  “Of course. It means he wants to be her boyfriend.”

  Three relieved breaths were slowly exhaled.

  “That’s exactly what it means, sweetheart,” Leon said.

  Emma nodded and smiled.

  Micah turned towards them. “I need both hands. Who wants this little one?”

  Alex held out his arms, beckoning with his fingers. “Hand her over. I haven’t had my hug today.”

  Micah handed Katie to him and he settled her on his lap facing the table, wrapping his arms around her little body and kissing her cheek several times, making a ‘nom nom nom’ sound. Her giggle made his chest glow with warmth.

  “So when do you plan on leaving to go on your rescue mission?” Leon said.

  “As soon as possible,” Alex replied. “After breakfast.”

  Micah placed a plate heaped with slices of crispy bacon onto the table. Alex began to salivate as Emma started assembling the sandwiches.

  “Brown sauce?” Leon said.

  “Top cupboard,” Alex said when Micah looked at him. “On the right.”

  “How are you going to get there?” Leon said.

  “We thought we’d go back to Kenny’s dealership and get a couple more motorbikes,” Micah said.

  Leon nodded. “And you know where you’re going?”

  Alex and Micah glanced at each other.

  “More or less,” Alex said. “In general. We still have to iron out the specifics.”

  Leon nodded again. “And you have all your supplies in case it takes longer than you’re thinking? And weapons and ammunition and other stuff you might need?”

  There were a few seconds of silence.

  Micah looked at Alex. “You remember what I said earlier about thinking ahead? This is precisely what I meant.”

  . . .

  It took them the rest of the day, frustrating Alex no end at not being able to leave.

  He knew Leon was right about them needing to be prepared, but the thought of Hannah being held captive made him want to punch something. More than once he vowed to himself that if anyone hurt her, they would suffer.

  They started by walking to the motorcycle dealership where they’d found Kenny and picked up the bikes they’d used to get to the lab the first time, before Kerry took them from the warehouse car park in the middle of th
e night. Alex still wondered where she’d hidden them.

  He was worried other people would have come by now and taken everything, but it didn’t look like anyone had. It seemed the small remaining population of Sarcester, those who’d survived by using their brains, had better, more sensible things to do. The crowd of eaters they’d left in the building had gone, except for a couple that had somehow got themselves trapped behind a hydraulic lift. Alex put them out of their misery.

  He and Micah chose two more bikes to take with them. They spent a good two or three minutes gazing through a testosterone haze at the massive black and red Harley that took pride of place on a pedestal in the centre of the room, but good sense won out. They needed speed and manoeuvrability, not a tank on two wheels, so they reluctantly left it in the showroom and took two smaller, more practical bikes. Micah said he might go back for it when they returned, however, because it looked “too cool for words”.

  Next, they went to the Bates Mansion. They seemed to be expected.

  “Don’t even speak to me,” Creedon said as they walked through the gate at the side of the house.

  Alex smiled. “You know, if you got to know me...”

  “I’d be having some sort of psychotic break,” she said. She waved in the direction of the armoury. “Get whatever you came for and go, before I just shoot you anyway.”

  Alex shrugged and followed Micah down the garden. He hoped Scott made it.

  They left ten minutes later with three magazines worth of nine millimetre rounds each.

  Next stop was the middle of the city. The central shopping area looked like several bombs had hit it. Broken glass and other detritus littered the two main streets and Market Square. Not one shop had escaped the looting.

  Alex couldn’t help but feel saddened at the destruction as he carefully manoeuvred his bike around the glass. This hadn’t been caused by eaters. This was what happened when law broke down and normal people turned into mobs of thoughtless monsters out for anything they could get. So very similar to eaters, other than the hunger for human meat. Most of them were now probably either dead or roaming the countryside looking for their next meal of raw flesh.