Fear the Reaper

by Richard Murray

  “That works?”

  “We’ve had some success in the field tests,” I said. “But more to the point, we could mass produce them for the CDF from the limited resources we had.”

  “Just how limited are your resources?” he asked. There was genuine concern in his voice as his eyes drifted to the people milling around beyond the office.

  “The Fleet has managed to survive the initial attack, pirates, and rogue military units. All while rescuing as many people from the sea and coastal towns that they could. We have approximately twenty thousand civilians situated on the Isle of Lewis.”

  “Add to that, the crews of the destroyers and rest of the fleet, the marines and infantry that managed to get aboard before they headed back to British waters. We have a lot of mouths to feed and people to clothe and that’s not including the babies.”

  “Babies! People are giving birth still?” He seemed genuinely shocked by that and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Yes. My friend is one of them. We’ve had seven successful births so far and plenty more coming.”

  “This Admiral has done something special,” Lieutenant Macintosh said softly and it was clear to me that the hope he’d been struggling to contain was starting to grow in him. “He’s a good man?”

  “One of the best,” I said. “He’s holding the troops together and given us all a mission to accomplish. We will save humanity together and to do that, we need every man and woman who is willing to fight against the undead and the raiders.”

  “These CDF?” he asked and I nodded.

  “Around eight hundred so far with more volunteering than we can train or supply. The people out there, the survivors. They want to fight back, to take back their homes.”

  “What about government?”

  “What about it?”

  “If it’s just this Admiral then he’s a warlord. It’s too much to hope the royal family survived, but surely some of the government did?”

  “Not as far as we know,” I said and his face fell. “But we are currently holding elections.”

  The sudden look of hope was a joy to behold and I had to contain my smile.

  “Yes,” I said. “Local elections first to establish a leadership for the community we are building. Eventually, there will be a new government formed. It won’t be like before, but there will be some oversight for the military.”

  “That’s good to hear and tells me a great deal about your Admiral,” he said. “It would be easy for him to seize power and become de-facto ruler.”

  “That was proposed. I won’t lie. He shut that down straight away though.” I couldn’t help but remember just how pissed he’d been for days after that had been proposed. “You don’t know me, but I want to say, trust me. He is a great man who cares for the people we are saving.”

  His eyes glimmered as he lifted his chin. He straightened his shoulders and sat fully upright as though a little bit of hope had revitalized him. That, I realised, was what I lived for. Seeing the return of life to people who had been ready to give up. Giving hope to those who were clinging on by a thread.

  “Well then, ma’am,” he said. “I am at your disposal. How can this old soldier help you?”

  “A complete rundown of your supplies and situation that we can report back. We have transports arriving tomorrow with food and supplies though the selection will be a little limited.”

  “We’ve been living on very basic food for months, I’m sure it will be very welcome.”

  “We’ll also need any information you can give us on the city.”

  “Such as?”

  “Locations of any supply depots. Food mainly, but clothing and medical supplies too. You must have come through the city to reach this place so any info on the disposition of the undead would be useful too.”

  “We can maybe give some info, but not too much I’m afraid. Once we made it to the outer boroughs of the city we realised that we couldn’t walk the streets so we ended up making rafts.”

  “Rafts?”

  “Indeed. We had nearly a hundred people to transport and it wasn’t easy. We lost a few on the way to those damned Ferals, but we made it.” He tapped his lower lip with one long finger as he thought. “There are a couple of my group who worked in the city so they might have some info. Also, some of those the Deadmen brought in have been through the city.”

  “Yes, the Deadmen. I’m going to want any and all information you have on them. Numbers, where they make their home. How often they come to you, what they actually want…”

  Something he’d said had been tugging at the back of my mind and I paused as I tried to figure out what that was. Then it hit me.

  “Ferals!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said, you lost some people to Ferals.”

  “We did, yes.”

  “That’s what we’ve been calling them,” I said, my words almost tripping over themselves as I spoke. “My group. My friends. We started calling them that. How do you know to call them Feral?”

  “We met some people...”

  “A man? Tall, dark-haired with blue eyes? Slight scar on his check from just under his left eye all the way to his ear?”

  “Ryan?” the Lieutenant said I held my breath, barely daring to breathe as I nodded.

  “Yes. You’ve met him. When? Is he here?”

  “I’m so very sorry,” he said with a look of profound sorrow. “Your friend’s dead.”

  Chapter 4

  Gregg found me later that day, staring down at the slowly moving mass of undead on the open ground below the buildings. They didn’t seem to react to my presence on the roof and I soon realised that while they were generally aware that there was life in the building, fifteen storeys up we were beyond their ability to see. Not that the early evening shadows would make it any easier for them.

  “You okay?” he asked as he settled down onto the rough surface of the roof beside me. “I spoke to Lou.”

  “Lou?”

  “Lieutenant Macintosh. The people here have taken to calling him Lou and the name’s stuck.”

  I gave a half shrug of my shoulders in acknowledgement and continued staring down at the undead. No Ferals amongst them, just the same slow-moving Shamblers.

  “He tell you…”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t offer me any words of comfort or platitudes of false hope. He just sat beside me in silence and ignored the dampness on my cheeks. Jinx wagged her tail and watched him with her big brown eyes.

  “I don’t want to believe that he’s gone. Hell, unless I see his body I won’t believe it!” I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand and sniffed loudly. “I really don’t want to see him as one of them.”

  “God no! He was dangerous enough. Can you imagine what sort of zombie he’d be?” Gregg said with a low chuckle. “Might as well just abandon the country now.”

  There it was then. Gregg had already accepted Lou’s word that he was dead and I was hovering on the edge of belief myself. It was such a Ryan thing to do though and if he had to die, then I could only imagine he would die as he chose.

  The way Lou explained it, that was exactly the sort of way he’d choose too. A bunch of raiders and thousands of the undead, all in one great explosion. The only way he’d be willing to die would be to kill as many others as he could at the same time.

  “He saved all of Lou’s people,” I said. “He tell you that too?”

  “Yeah.” He was silent a moment and then added, “Whatever else happened, at the end he did the right thing. He did it for you.”

  “God!”

  I wiped at my eyes again and he pushed himself up to sit beside me on the ledge, putting his arm around me and pulling me close.

  “You know I’ve got bugger all depth perception now, so you sitting on the edge of this roof is scaring the shit out of me.”

  “Don’t worry, I have no intention of falling.”

  “Even so, come away from the edge.”

  I se
t my jaw and looked down once more at the undead below. He’d left me to break his promise and then, when a bunch of people he didn’t know and wouldn’t care about, had needed his help. He’d been there.

  He’d halted the advance of a horde of the undead that would have made our retaking of the city much harder and he’d ensured Lou and his people had survived at the same time. It was a noble end and one that no one would ever have expected from him. No one but me, anyway.

  “Did the Admiral contact us?” I asked in a far too obvious change of subject.

  “Yeah, we have our orders.”

  I paused and glanced at him. His gaze shifted away and I knew I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.

  “What?”

  “He wants us to make contact with these Deadmen.”

  “Crap.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many of us?” I asked.

  It made sense. They clearly moved around the city as they pleased and had been nothing but helpful to the survivors going by what they’d been willing to share. That was the problem though, I couldn’t shake the thought that they were leaving parts out.

  “He’s ordered another squad to join us. They’ll come in with the transports in the morning.”

  “Whose squad?”

  “Jennings,” he held up his hands in mock surrender as I spun on my heel to face him. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “Why the hell would he send that prick?”

  “Probably because he kept asking for you and I kept telling him you were unavailable. Jennings is a reminder that you need to be available.”

  “Dammit!”

  That was all I needed. Captain Jennings was career military and was firmly in the camp of those who wanted Admiral Stuart to take power and become a de-facto military nation. Admittedly, a military nation of fewer than thirty thousand people, but still, a bad precedent to set.

  The Admiral, being the good man that he was, had no intention of doing any such thing and I guessed that he was taking advantage of my not being able to object to getting rid of a thorn in his side for a little while.

  Which was fine except it meant that I would be stuck with him and since he was my ‘superior’ I would have to let him take charge.

  “We can’t have him hanging around here,” I said. “God knows what sort of mess he’ll create if he thinks he can influence these people to join his camp.”

  “Politics, man, I hate it,” Gregg said. “I don’t know what Cass is thinking by getting involved with all that.”

  “She needs something to occupy her,” I said gently. “She misses Pat.”

  “I know. We all do.” He shook his head and pulled me into a hug. “Sorry. That’s the last thing you need to think about right now. Not on top of everything else.”

  “Believe me, any distraction is a good one,” I said as I pushed him away with a smile tugging at my lips. “Better let go. I’m sure there’re regulations about hugging your superior officer.”

  He let go with a grin of his own, happy to see the return of my spirits. If it was fake, he wouldn’t pull too hard on that thread. He’d had his own share of misery over the last few months as he recovered from his injuries and was no stranger to faking it to ease the worries of his loved ones.

  “We better go see Lou. I’m sure he can give us a hint about where to start looking for these whackos.”

  “I’m not looking forward to going into the city with so few of us,” he admitted. “I thought it was a bad idea when we had a hundred other people.”

  “Judging by the mess the city will be in, the less of us there are, the better it will be.”

  We went down the stairs, past the kitchen slash dining area and into the first of the living quarters. Once again, the desks had been moved aside to make space for blankets and cushions. There was zero privacy to be had and the stench was horrendous.

  With the number of people crammed into the smallish space though, it wasn’t as cold as I’d expected. Even so, no one would be sleeping in anything other than their clothes with several blankets pulled over themselves too.

  A child of seven or perhaps eight, stared at Gregg as he passed and he stoically ignored her curious gaze. It was the same with several other people, though the majority had seen enough over the past few months to realise that such wounds weren’t uncommon and would likely be less so when the war against the dead began in earnest.

  One thing I would give him, Lou had a firm control on the people under his care. Food was portioned out from a central supply, as was water. He had selected a number of deputies to patrol each floor during both the day and the night.

  Those men and women were armed with short wooden clubs and he had told me that only once had they needed to use them. A recent addition to the group had followed one of the women down to the latrine floor during the night.

  Fortunately, Lou had planned ahead and ensured that the latrine floor was guarded by a man and a woman. Each of them taking one half of the room and making sure that any visitors used the appropriate section to allow some privacy for both men and women.

  He’d been more than a little cagey when I asked what he’d done to the would-be rapist. He’d muttered something about the Deadmen dealing with it and hadn’t said much else when pressed.

  That told me a little more about this strange group and I was curious to know if that man had become part of their group or if they had dealt with him in another way. I didn’t know which would be worse. A group of supposed helpers made up of rapists and killers or a group of people who took the law into their own hands.

  “This is us,” Gregg said as we arrived at an office set off towards the far side of the building near the now pointless elevators and on the opposite side of the building from the stairs. “Was a storeroom but Lou figured we’d prefer our privacy.”

  “He’s also canny enough to know we won’t be that trusting just yet,” I muttered. A sudden thought occurred to me and I was annoyed that I hadn’t considered it sooner. “Has anyone spoken with Ray?”

  He’d stayed down in the boat and I had forgotten all about him as I absorbed the news about Ryan. God knows what he was thinking of me. Great leadership, Lily.

  “Yeah, he’s fine,” Gregg said reassuringly. “I went down to confer with him and grab our gear earlier. He’s in here with the others.”

  I breathed a heavy sigh of relief as I opened the door and stepped inside. I was more than a little grateful to have Gregg with me and suddenly sure that I shouldn’t let him go with me into the city. I couldn’t bear the loss of another friend.

  “How-do boss,” Ray said cheerily.

  He was seated across from Lars and Mark, a hand full of cards with more spread on the desk between them. The two soldiers rose to their feet and I waved them back down, not quite in the mood for the endless saluting the military seemed to do.

  “Where’s Suraya?”

  “Treating some kids one floor down, ma’am,” Mark said.

  “Alone?”

  “She’s fine,” Gregg assured me. “Lou has a couple of his fellows with her and I seriously doubt they would try anything with the one person who is dealing with their ailments.”

  “Even so… Lars?”

  “Ma’am,” he said dropping his hand of cards to the table and rising to his feet.

  I nodded polite thanks as he brushed past me and left the office in search of the squad’s medic. I looked at each of the others in the room.

  “We’re headed out tomorrow, early,” I said. “Even so, I want someone on watch tonight. I’ll take the first shift.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yah,” I said to Gregg. “I’m not going to sleep just yet anyway.”

  “Okay then. I’ll take second.”

  “Sure. Rest of you, get some sleep. We’ve a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  With just a little grumbling, the squad settled in. It was cramped and close, but that would help with keeping it warm for us. With no lights to work
with, the early autumn evenings would make things harder.

  In summer, we’d been able to train till late. Once winter came in fully, it would be dark till almost nine in the morning and as early as five in the evening. That would limit our days to a ridiculously short amount of time.

  Which just made it all the more imperative that we locate the warehouses full of food and supplies that would keep us alive through the winter. And if that were my only problem, I would be a happy woman.

  No matter how often I replayed Lou’s words in my head, I couldn’t shake the thought that he was wrong. Ryan couldn’t be dead. I wasn’t ready to believe that and I doubted I ever would unless I had his body before me. And if that day ever came, I couldn’t say what I’d do.

  Jinx settled down at my feet and I smiled down at her. She missed him too. I knew that she’d adopted me mainly because of my relationship with him and when he’d left me, he’d left her too. She seemed to stay with me only in the hopes that it would bring her back to him.

  I let my head thump back against the wall. It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 5

  I was awoken to the sounds of a voice speaking rapidly through the radio Mark held. I wiped bleary eyes and pushed aside the blankets, aware of a pressing need to relieve the pressure in my bladder and a growing realisation that something was wrong.

  “What is it?”

  “Alpha-one-three is not responding, status NYK,” Mark said as he listened intently to the radio chatter. “Gunshots were heard.”

  NYK? I mentally translated that as ‘Not yet known.’ The marines had been getting better at using less of the military jargon to help the rest of us fit in, but occasionally some would slip out. Which was fine, but since it meant I had to pause for a moment to figure out what they meant, it could be a problem out in the city.

  “Okay, crap. Get everyone up and topside,” I said with a glance at the watch the Admiral had given me. “Breakfast will have to wait, transports will be here in an hour. Let me know if you hear anything.”

  “Will do, ma’am,” he said as he kicked at Lar’s sleeping form. “Get yer arse up.”

  I left the office to the sounds of a less than polite retort from the taciturn Lars and went in search of the latrine. Two floors down, I found it and my stomach heaved at the stench that filled the former office space.