The End of Everything | Book 9 | The End of Everything

by Artinian, Christopher

  “What the hell are you doing?” Robyn asked, snatching it out of his hand and fixing the older woman with an angry glare.

  “I thought—”

  “After he’s answered our questions, then we can treat him,” Robyn snapped, placing the bottle down on a bench.

  Wren walked up to Ruby who was cradling Tommy. His screaming had stopped, but his tics were in full flow. “You might want to get Tommy back to your tent for a little while.” Ruby looked towards the injured soldier then back at Wren.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s probably a good idea.”

  Wren headed across to where Robyn was standing, and they both loomed over Hatfield. The arrow was still sticking out of his crotch, but he’d lost less blood than either of them thought possible for such a wound.

  “Please, you’ve got to help me,” he cried out again with tears in his eyes.

  Robyn and Wren looked around at the assembled faces. Uncertainty and fear flickered in their eyes as the campfire flames licked higher. “Listen to me,” Wren said calmly as she knelt down beside him. “We’re going to help you, but you need to help us. If you answer our questions, we’re going to take care of you. Do you understand me?”

  The young man looked towards her and nodded as another jolt of pain shot through him. “Anything. Please just help me. Please.”

  “Where’s your base?”

  “What?”

  “Your base. Where’s your base?”

  “Wick.”

  Wren laid a hand on his arm. “No, I mean where did you drive from tonight?”

  “Please, I need help.”

  “I told you, answer my questions and we’ll help you. You didn’t drive here from Wick tonight, so where are you camped?”

  “T-Turroon. A place called Turroon.”

  “I’ve never heard of it. Are you making this up?” she asked, placing her hand on the end of the arrow and tapping it.

  “Aaaggghhh! Please! No, I’m not. Please.”

  Wren could hear gasps go up from some of the assembled crowd. “I know Turroon,” Chuck said. “I know where it is.”

  “Look, we’re not animals,” Emmy said. “Let me help him.”

  Wren shot her another angry look. “When he’s answered my questions.”

  “Wren, I know you’re angry, but—”

  “We’re doing this our way,” Robyn interrupted.

  Wren brought her hand away from the arrow. “How big’s your army there?”

  “I … I don’t know.” She moved her hand towards the shaft once more. “Please, I don’t know. Maybe three or four hundred, I don’t know.”

  “Three of four hundred?”

  “I thought there were thousands of you.”

  Hatfield winced again. “There are. There are thousands, but we’re spread out up and down the coast. Now, please, please help me.”

  A cold and menacing look swept over Wren’s face. “How many were sent to Safe Haven?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Wren’s mouth curled up into a vengeful snarl, and she batted the arrow with the back of her hand, causing the young soldier to shriek once more. “I can help you or I can inflict a level of pain you wouldn’t believe. How many did they send to Safe Haven?”

  “Please! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please.”

  “The town they attacked. My town. How many did they send?” She reached towards the arrow again.

  “Nooo. Please. They haven’t. They haven’t sent anyone.”

  Wren’s hand froze, and her mouth dropped open a little. “What do you mean?” she asked urgently, glancing towards her sister then looking back down at their prisoner.

  “God, the pain’s so bad. Please help me.”

  The tears running down his face were real. The agony and the fear were all real. For a young woman of sixteen, Wren had lived more of a life than most octogenarians, and she could tell the difference. She had dealt out a lot of pain since leaving Edinburgh. There was a time when the thought of what she was doing would have been abhorrent to her, but that young, naive girl had disappeared a long time ago. There was only one thing in life that mattered, and that was family—Robyn, Wolf, Grandad, the rest of the people back in Safe Haven. They were her family. “What do you mean they haven’t sent anyone?”

  Hatfield exhaled a quivering breath. “They’re waiting for reinforcements. They’ll be arriving in the morning.”

  They’re not dead yet. They’re not dead yet. “Reinforcements? How many?”

  “I don’t know that. They don’t tell me stuff like that. Lots … lots, I’d guess.”

  “How big is Olsen’s army in total?”

  Hatfield started sobbing once more. “I don’t know. I’m just a grunt. I do what I get told to do. I don’t ask questions. Please, I—”

  “You’re just a grunt? You capture, enslave and kill innocent people. You’re just as guilty as Olsen or whoever else gave you the order to come here.”

  “We don’t have a choice. If you’re not with them, you’re against them, and if you’re against them, you’re dead. Now please, I’ve told you everything I know.”

  Wren looked up towards Robyn. “Anything else?”

  Robyn’s face was set in stone. She looked down at the pleading guard with contempt. “Everybody has a choice. When that piece of shit put a gun to Tommy’s head, you could have stopped him, but you chose to watch with the others. We all have a choice.” Robyn reached down, grabbed the shaft of the arrow buried in Hatfield’s crotch and yanked it out.

  The tortured wail that erupted from the young soldier sent shivers through everyone who heard it apart from the two sisters and Mila. Hatfield writhed around on the ground. Robyn flicked the arrow, releasing the flesh that was stuck to the head. She carefully nocked it, drew back the bowstring, aimed, and fired.

  The screaming stopped instantly, and Robyn extended her hand, helping her sister back to her feet. Wolf immediately came up alongside Wren and rubbed against her. “They’re not dead,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  “I know, and now we’ve got a vehicle, we can warn them.”

  “No. That’s not enough.”

  “What do you mean?” Robyn asked as Mila joined them.

  “I mean warning them isn’t enough. There’s no way they’ll be able to evacuate everybody in time.”

  “But surely some warning is better than no warning, yes?” Mila said.

  “If I told you that you had ten hours to live and didn’t offer a solution, would you thank me?” Wren asked.

  “So, what is the answer? Just take the vehicle and run?”

  “No. We buy more time.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Ah good. While you work on it, I will go pick lollipops in the lollipop field and play with the fairies.”

  Wren took a step towards Mila. “I didn’t take you for a coward.”

  Mila took a step closer to Wren and Wolf began to growl. “I am not a coward, but you are talking nonsense. You say about delaying this army. How? Wishing it won’t make it happen.”

  “We could block the road,” Robyn whispered.

  “What?” Wren and Mila said in unison, turning towards her.

  “I said we could block the road.”

  “Yes. Yes, that would work. There are only two approaches. They’ll take the most direct one. It will take them hours to re-route, which will give us the time we need to block the other.”

  Mila looked from Wren to Robyn then back again. “And how do we do this exactly?”

  “Landslide,” Chuck said, who had been listening to every word of the conversation from a few feet away. “There are lots of stretches of road around here that have been carved through hills. You can’t drive five miles without seeing cliff safety netting.”

  “Okay. Say this is true. Do you honestly think we can do it in time?” Mila asked.

  “I’d be willing to help you.”
<
br />   “It might just work, but it will be hard for four people … in the dark … with no equipment,” Robyn replied.

  “There’s another way,” Wren said.

  “What way?” Mila asked.

  “When the Loch Uig men attacked Safe Haven they…” Wren couldn’t believe she was thinking like this. It went way beyond dangerous, it bordered on suicidal, but doing nothing would sentence her grandad and her friends to slavery or death.

  “We are waiting,” Mila said abruptly.

  “Grandad told me that when the Loch Uig men attacked Safe Haven, they took out the first vehicle and the last vehicle trapping all the others in between. Then they took care of them too.”

  “And how did they take out, as you say, these vehicles?”

  “Well, they had actually built some siege weapons, but that’s beside the point. What I’m saying is—”

  “Nein, nein, nein. That is not beside the point. That is the point.” Mila paused as she realised that all eyes were staring at them. Other than Tommy and Ruby, there was not a single person who was not listening intently. “They had weapons, big, big weapons to do the job. What do we have?” she asked, holding up her rolling pins.

  “Well, for a start, we’ve got rifles now.”

  “Gut, gut, excellent. We can cause a roadblock and fight a huge army with rifles that we don’t know how to use. Then we’ll climb back into our car and drive back to La-la-la Land.”

  “It’s La-la Land,” Wren replied.

  “Danke. I am grateful you told me; I wouldn’t want to end up in the wrong place.”

  “Wren’s right,” Robyn said.

  “What? You cannot be serious.”

  “Listen to me.” Robyn raised her voice and stepped forward to address the assembled crowd. “These people aren’t going to stop coming at us whether we’re here or somewhere else. You’ve got two choices. You either spend the rest of your lives on the run or you come with us. We’re going to try to hit them where it hurts. We’re going to try to take out a lot of their vehicles and a lot of their men, and we’re going to buy some time to get back to Safe Haven. When we get there, I can’t promise you that things will be any better, but what I do know is there are over five hundred people there, and we stand a better chance against Olsen’s army with them than we do by ourselves.”

  “We should put this to a vote,” Larry said.

  “Agreed,” Emmy replied.

  “Okay. Everybody in favour of going with Wren and Robyn.”

  Chuck immediately raised his hand, as did Emmy. Larry was a little more reluctant, but he would never leave his daughter’s side. The rest of them all kept their arms folded.

  “Look,” Wren said, stepping up to join her sister. “I know you’re scared. We’re all scared, but think about what happened tonight. If we hadn’t been here, you’d have been captured. You’d be zeefs. You’d be chained together and used as bait for the infected. If you think you’re scared now, can you imagine how you’d feel with fifty hungry zombies charging towards you while you're bound to a lamppost?”

  Mila let out a long sigh. “Wren is correct. Right now, we have a choice. The second we are captured we have no choice, only a very short lifespan.”

  “If you hadn’t shown up here in the first place, we’d all be fine. It was you who brought that bloke to our camp. It was you who caused all this,” one of the men at the back called out.

  “You know what? You’re right,” Robyn replied. “But you’ve heard what we’ve heard. This huge army is slowly taking over, town by town, village by village. How long do you think it would be before a few of you were caught on a supply run?”

  Wren continued. “By us coming here, all we’ve done is speeded up the timetable. By all means, you can stay here, eating through your supplies, staying hidden. But winter in the Highlands is no picnic. You don’t know what cold is. When the snows come, how much protection are your tents going to be? How are you going to find fuel for the fire? What happens when you run out of food? These are the Highlands. We’re not talking about a light covering. We’re talking about three or four feet of snow, and guess what; the council won’t be coming out with the ploughs and the grit trucks.”

  “If you stay here, you might make it, you might die, or you might get captured,” Robyn said, looking around at all the faces. “If you come with us, there are no guarantees, but there is a chance. A chance for a future.”

  “My home town is in trouble right now. It barely got out of its last battle, and it’s about to face even worse. But it’s a place worth fighting for and an idea worth fighting for. Everybody has a say. Nobody goes hungry. If people need help, then we all band together and give them help. The decisions are made not by one person but a council, and let me tell you, every member of that council works harder than everyone else. They’re the first to wake; they’re the last to bed because they know that it’s an idea worth fighting for too. If you chose to come, I know they’d welcome you with open arms. If you come, I can’t promise you that you’ll never be scared again, but I can promise that you’ll be with people who’ll do their best to make things a little less scary.” A single tear trickled down Wren’s face.

  “It’s okay, Sis. If they don’t want to come, we’ll do it ourselves,” Robyn said, placing a hand on Wren’s back.

  Wren swallowed hard and continued. “I was never popular at school,” she said, looking around at the faces as further tears pooled in her eyes. “I was in the athletics team, I was good academically, but I was never really liked. I was always an outsider. People used to make fun of me, and I thought that was just how it was always going to be. Some people never get the chance to have real friends. I tried, but it just didn’t happen. I never felt like that in Safe Haven.” Salty streams ran down her face and over her lips. They glistened and shimmered in the light projected by the fire. “From the day I moved there, I had a place and had a purpose. And I’m not the only one. Lots of people have said that to me. Lots of people have said the same. Some say that these are the end times … that this is the end of everything … that we won’t last much longer. I don’t believe that. I think there is a future; in fact, I know there’s a future, and it’s not that far away from here.”

  The man who had shouted out earlier slowly raised his hand. Then the woman next to him did the same. One by one, all the hands went up.

  “About bloody time,” Chuck said, and a small wave of laughter rippled around the crowd.

  “Right people,” Larry shouted, clapping his hands. “We’ve got a lot to do before the curtain goes up. I suggest everybody heads straight to their tents and gets their belongings together.” No sooner had he spoken than the crowd dispersed.

  “Okay, so what now?” Chuck asked, looking towards the two sisters.

  “Now we need a proper plan,” Robyn replied.

  CHAPTER 23

  Larry and Emmy went about the task of organising the packing of the tents and supplies. They selected a small team who they knew not to be squeamish about scavenging whatever they could from the dead soldiers while Chuck, Wren, Robyn and Mila all focussed on the open pages of the map book in front of them.

  “So, we’re agreed, that’s the place then?” Chuck said, pointing towards a narrow stretch of road.

  “Looks like our best option,” Wren said.

  “Trust me. We were touring schools in the Highlands, and the van broke down there once. It was peeing it down, and I had to head out on foot to get a mobile signal. The cliffs at either side are at least seventy feet tall. They eventually slope down into forest, and about half a mile along there’s a National Trust trail with a car park and a little map hut. Two bloody hours I waited in that place until the breakdown service finally got back to me to tell me it would be another two hours before anyone arrived. We cover all of Britain, my arse.”

  The others smiled, but even in the lantern light it was impossible to hide their nervous expressions. What they were planning was bordering on impossible. “What about the
second site?” Robyn asked.

  “I was thinking about that,” Wren began. “The easiest thing to do would be to head to Torridon and then carry on north, so we don’t have to worry about it right now. We just need to make this work then get back home, and we can speak to Shaw and Mike about our options from there.”

  “Okay, I suppose it’s not like we haven’t got enough to think about is it?”

  Mila looked down at the homemade maces in her hands. “I don’t think these are going to be of any use,” she said, slotting them into her rucksack. She picked up one of the rifles. “Will you show me how to use this?”

  “We’ve got ten rifles and two pistols. I may as well show everybody at once.”

  Wren placed the two broken halves of her spear into her own rucksack and picked up one of the pistols. “This is army issue. My friend taught me how to use one,” she said, grabbing two spare magazines and putting them in her pockets. “Granted I can’t aim for toffee, but better to have one than not.”

  “I’m okay with my bow,” Robyn said.

  “No, Bobbi. It makes sense for you to take a gun too. Arrows won’t penetrate car or van doors or roofs, will they?”

  “Err … you didn’t actually go into specifics about what we do to the vehicles caught in between the front and the back one. Are you saying we’re going to shoot at them? ’Cause I can tell you now, we don’t have enough bullets.”

  “No, I was thinking more in terms of… err…”

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

  “I do not understand what we are talking about,” Mila said.

  “My sister wants to start a fire,” Robyn replied.

  “Ah, yes, of course. The pyro sisters. I should have guessed this.”

  “And how do you propose we do this exactly?” Robyn asked, looking from the pistol and magazine that Wren had pushed into her hand back towards her sister.

  “Molotov cocktails.”

  “Of course. Silly me. Number one, we have no idea how big this convoy will be. Number two, where do we get the materials from to make Molotov cocktails? Number three… okay, I don’t have a number three, but those first two points are enough, aren’t they?”