by Mark Ayre
With a shrug, he crossed the room, plate out front. On the camper bed, at Sam’s side, he sat. It creaked and groaned as it received his weight. It sounded miserable. Benny put the plate on her lap. The smell was overpowering.
There she was again at the tiny kitchen table, too close to the fridge. Her father stood at the hob tending to a frying pan of bacon. In walked her mother. Her parents kissed. Mum gave Sam a quick squeeze. She went to call for Benny; still in bed.
“You must be hungry,” Benny said in the present. He tapped the plate with a finger. “Eat up.”
Still, she kept her hand over her mouth. The bile washed up and down her throat while her stomach churned. Blinking furiously, she fought back the tears, determined to pull herself under control.
“You need your strength.”
Benny put a gentle arm around Sam’s shoulder. With his other hand, he clasped her wrist, squeezed tight, and yanked. Sam gave an involuntary yell but did not cry, was not sick.
“I know this sucks,” said Benny. He gestured to the plate. “But it’s all they had. Come on, time to eat.”
All they had. Sam didn’t believe him. Whenever she displeased her brother, he brought her bacon for breakfast, served with a side of excuses as to why her usual porridge was unavailable. It never rang true. Sam never believed him; didn’t know if she was supposed to.
Because Sam was afraid, because she had let him down and hated herself for doing so, she would do as he said if she could.
“There’s no cutlery,” she said. Her voice was a hoarse whisper, as though she had been singing at a concert, or involved in a furious argument.
Neither were true.
Last night, when Benny had caught her trying to send Liam away, she had thought he would scream in her face. Even if he had, she wouldn’t have yelled back. She never yelled back because she was always in the wrong. She deserved his furious retribution.
He hadn’t shouted then. The cold, hard stare had been far worse.
Now, he gave a tut that almost concealed his true feelings. Releasing Sam’s wrist, he plucked the sausage from the plate, bit into it, then dropped it into the beans. A splatter of juice hit her top. She had slept in the dress she had worn the previous evening.
“Why would you need cutlery?”
His arm remained around her shoulder. As she cautiously went to pick up the same sausage as had he, he watched her, stared as she brought it to her lips and bit. As she chewed, she looked at him; a small child seeking approval from a parent. Nodding, he gave that approval.
“Keep going. Eat it all.”
She finished the sausage first, putting off the moment when she would have to touch the bacon.
She had loved bacon. On that morning, her father had slid onto her plate four rashers (“don’t tell your mother”) before leaving to find his shoes. It was the last food he would ever make for her.
For Benny, she collected a rasher. Bacon has a strong scent. To most, the aroma brings joy and longing. As Sam brought the rasher closer to her mouth, the smell strengthened. Her mouth didn’t water, but her eyes did. She had to fight the bile, swallow it. She brought the bacon to her lips, ever aware of Benny’s eyes on her face. It was a test. It was always a test.
When her parents had walked out the door, Sam had given a cursory wave but hadn’t looked up from her breakfast. Both mum and dad had told her they loved her.
Sam hadn’t said it back.
As though afraid it might be poisonous, Sam bit off the tiniest corner of bacon. Swallowing it whole should have been easy. Regardless, she chewed for almost thirty seconds before taking it down. She kept the remainder of the rasher clasped between two fingers, where sweat and grease began to mingle.
“Come on,” said Benny. “We’ll be here all day at this rate. Bigger bites, please.”
She remembered the police officer; pale face and wavering eyes. She remembered those words. Hearing that she would never again speak to her parents. Never again hug them or hear them say they loved her.
This time she took a bigger bite. She chewed. After only ten seconds, she forced herself to swallow.
From Benny and the police officer, she had run into the bathroom. Sobbing, she had brought up that morning’s breakfast. Amongst the vile smell of her vomit, she had detected traces of bacon.
On the camper bed, she felt it as soon as the bacon disappeared down her throat and knew she couldn’t fight it.
Benny had looked after her since her parents died, had protected her. No one knew her as he did. He knew what was coming. Without hesitation, he plucked the plate from her lap and put it on his other side. With the same hand, he collected the bucket and pressed it into her grasp. In the nick of time, he held back her hair. He neither flinched nor recoiled as she began to vomit, and felt no need to pinch his nose or turn away. For the next five minutes, he held her hair and soothed her, told her it was going to be okay, told her he loved her, would do anything for her. When she was finished, he took the bucket and slid it away. As she wiped her mouth, he pulled her head into his chest, held her close and soothed her again.
“I love you, Sammy. I love you with all of my heart. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded, then said, “I love you too.”
She always said it back. Always. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
Benny held her until she had got her crying under control. Once the tears had stopped, he lifted her from his chest and looked in her eyes.
“You hurt me yesterday,” he said. “I thought I could trust you. Thought you’d always choose me, but you proved that wasn’t true. No, don’t shake your head; there’s no need. All I need is to understand if that was a one-off, a moment of weakness. If it was, we can rebuild our trust, start again, still be brother and sister. I’ll continue to look after you. But if it was more than a moment of weakness—“
“It wasn’t. I promise it wasn’t.” She was on the verge of tears again. “I’m sorry, Benny. Sorry I was weak. Please, please forgive me.”
“Shhhhh.” He kissed her forehead, pulled her back into his chest. “I forgive you. I always forgive you, don’t I? I just… I got upset, because this is so important, this Liam thing. I’m working with some people and, well, if we’d lost Liam last night, that would have been bad for us. Really bad. That’s why I have to know I can trust you. Have to know you’re on my side.”
“I am. I’m on your side. Always.”
“You’ll make it up to me? Make up for what you tried to do?”
Unable to bring herself to speak, she nodded into his chest. His lips brushed her head again, and he lifted her once more from him. When their eyes met, he was smiling.
“I’m so glad to hear you say that. So glad.”
Turning from her, he saw the bacon to his right and jumped, as though he hadn’t known it was there. Shaking his head, he picked up the pate and dumped the rest of the breakfast in the bin.
“I’m an arsehole,” he said. “I know how it affects you. I shouldn’t—“
“You’re not an arsehole,” she said. “It was all they had.”
“That’s not good enough. You’re my sister. I’m supposed to look after you, and I bring you this. No. I’m going to get you something else. I’m going to insist we get you something else.”
“I don’t need—“
He held up a hand to silence her, then leaned down to pick up the bucket.
“I’ll get you something else,” he reiterated. “I told you, you’re going to need your strength.”
Smiling, he turned and walked to the open door. Sam told herself she wasn’t going to ask but, in the end, couldn’t help it.
“Need my strength for what?”
In the open doorway, he turned. Smiled.
“You said you were going to make it up to me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“One hour from now,” he said. “You’re going to get your chance.”
And he closed the door, locked it, and walked a
way.
Eighteen
Trey opened his mouth with no idea what he was about to say. Perhaps he intended to scream.
The SUV smashed the car’s back wheel and boot as Amira shot forward, then hit the verge and sailed into the air.
Amira’s car became a spinning top; her hands were wrenched from the wheel, Trey’s head smashed the window.
Everything went black.
He opened his eyes.
Around him, the world swam. In his ears, an incessant buzzing. Nothing hurt, everything felt fuzzy, strange, as though he was drunk or on drugs—not all there.
There was something on his face, clinging to his skin. The way it pressed, constricted, he thought of that common soap and TV trope. He was in hospital. Someone was trying to suffocate him with a pillow. A while back he’d read this was unrealistic. It was almost impossible to create an airtight seal with a pillow which made suffocating someone to death a real chore. Easier to bash their brains in with the heart monitoring machine.
In normal circumstances, such knowledge would not have diminished Trey’s terror at finding a pillow affixed to his face. Presently, his mind was too fuzzy; he was too out of it to feel so much as nervous.
The ringing in his ears increased in pitch, becoming a drill to the brain. Scrunching his eyes against the pain, he lifted a hand. It wasn’t easy, like he was trying to raise it through thickening cement rather than clean air.
Over the ringing, something else. A muffled shout, or something. Too tricky to discern. Trey couldn’t even be bothered to try.
His hand touched the pillow, at first could only stroke the material, which didn’t feel much like a pillowcase. After a few seconds, he managed to close his fingers, pull the pillow free.
It must have been true what they said, about how difficult it was to murder someone with a pillow. Whoever had placed the pillow to Trey’s face had given it up as a bad job, it slipped away.
The world remained blurred but crawled towards focus as a wounded soldier might crawl towards cover. It soon became apparent he was in, not a hospital bed, but a car. Amira’s car.
He remembered the SUV, cringed as he recalled the collision. Pain shot up his side, through his arms. His hand, which had suffered a baseball bat blow, was stiff, unmalleable. He couldn’t close his fingers into a fist.
Through the front windscreen, the landscape had a darkened quality. At first, this appeared to be as a result of the blurring, caused by the collision. As Trey’s head began to clear, he realised the landscape was instead being dimmed by smoke which rolled from somewhere to the right of where Trey sat.
Turning his head caused his neck to ache and moan. Ignoring the pain, he looked to the driver’s seat, found it empty. Amira’s door was open. She was nowhere to be seen.
If Amira had been thrown from the car as the vehicle span like a top, she was almost certainly at least unconscious and quite likely dead. If any of the enemies within the SUV had survived and were in decent nick, Trey didn’t stand a chance.
The pain was everywhere. He didn’t want to move. Knew that he had to. With his mobile hand, he found the buckle within which was held his seatbelt. When first he pressed the red release, nothing happened, and he feared the mechanism might have broken in the crash. A second press produced a click and some movement. With the third push, his safety harness released.
His door was closed. Across his window, numerous cracks painted lines like a map. Because the SUV had smashed the back of the car, the door had not bent or warped. It opened easily when he found the strength to pull the handle, and Trey fell rather than stepped into the grass and dirt.
More pain. As his head hit the ground, his vision once more swam. Fighting the urge to be sick, he rolled onto his front; used his one good hand to get to his knees, then grabbed the side of the car to climb to his feet.
Looking across the bonnet, he first traced the smoke back to source.
The SUV. Having collided with Amira’s car, it had hit the verge and soared into the air. Its inhabitants might have prayed for a safe landing on all four tires. However the car had landed, it had ended on its side; smoke poured from the engine.
Steam rose from the side of the car which pressed against the ground. The potential cause of this latter phenomenon at first alluded Trey before he remembered who had populated the vehicle.
Blood dirtied Trey’s cheek and forehead. He could have been cut up much worse. When the SUV had landed, had rolled, those within had likely been smashed against windows, against dashboards, against each other.
They were infected. It would have taken little—busted nose, cut arm—to cause severe damage. In the enclosed space, their poisoned blood would have eaten them alive. Now it was working on the car in which they had launched their attack.
Movement, to Trey’s left. Alarmed, he spun, preparing for an attack, a trick.
“Calm down, dear.”
Amira. She had been lying in the grass. The movement had been her rising. Now standing, she clutched her side. There was a fast forming bruise on one cheek, and one of her eyes was swollen
“You should have hopped out the car,” she said.
At first speechless, Trey’s frustration quickly turned into words.
“You said we couldn’t leave the car.”
“I did,” Amira agreed, “and we couldn’t. But I was driving. If you’d jumped ship, the car would have weighed less. I might have dodged the SUV. If our car doesn’t run when we’re done here, you’re in so much trouble.”
This time, Trey was speechless. Amira could have told him to abandon ship to better aid their escape when first he’d raised the idea. But she didn’t. Because she hadn’t considered how it might help. If it wouldn’t save their transport, she was happy for them to die together. To her, his life was meaningless.
Maybe he would have said some of this. Before he could speak, Amira had approached the car and found her gun in the footwell. Keeping one hand on her damaged side, the other on her weapon, she left Trey and made her way towards the SUV.
Trey watched her leave, then rushed to catch up, though it made his body cry to do so.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
Amira didn’t answer but pointed. Beyond the SUV, lying in the grass, was a broken, battered form. When the vehicle had crash-landed, at least one of their enemies had been tossed from within. There was blood. Steam rose from the ground. The man was missing half his legs. He was also moving. By the looks of it, he wasn’t dead.
“Good,” said Amira. “A survivor.”
Smoke continued to billow from the SUV’s engine. It seemed to be growing darker all of the time. Was that a sign that the engine was merely broken or was it on fire? Might it be on the verge of explosion? If it did go up, Amira and Trey would never survive the blast from this distance.
As ever, Amira showed little to no concern for her safety. Gun by her side, she continued towards the SUV at a brisk clip.
Keeping at her heel, Trey tried to be fearless. Amira wasn’t approaching the car for fun. She had a plan. He wished to be part of the solution, not another problem.
Arriving, Amira wasted no time. The passenger side window pointed towards the sky, Pressing her chest against the roof, she grabbed the top of the window, pulled herself up, and stared into the car. After a couple of seconds looking left and right, she dropped and turned to Trey.
“Think the rest are dead,” she said, moving from the car towards the dying man. “Double check.”
This was neither request nor plea. Amira wasn’t giving Trey a choice. Even if she had been, bravery was his mission. Besides, what was there to fear of an SUV full of dead monsters?
If they were dead.
Trey’s imagination was forever active and often prone to run away with him. If he tried to get near the car’s roof, images of hands bursting from the passenger side window would have him paralysed. This despite Amira’s check and belief that the vehicle contained only the dead infected.
Amira
was already beyond the SUV. Her quarry lay in the grass, groaning. All that remained of his legs were two tiny stumps and these fast disappearing. Blood surrounded him. The ground steamed, and the dirt began to sink. He was digging his own grave.
Trey could lie. Amira was paying him no attention. She would believe he had checked the car even if he didn’t. She would never know.
But he would.
Fighting his cowardice as though it were a rabid and hungry dog, he forced himself forward, ignoring thoughts of zombies, and peeked over the edge, into the open window. Somehow, he managed to look before the urge to scream overpowered him.
It was a repulsive sight. Almost enough to make Trey wish he had fled.
As the SUV had turned over and over, it’s inhabitants and been tossed around and had crushed into each other. Where they had smashed into the door, ceiling, chairs, dashboard; where the broken glass had attacked, they had bled. As the car continued to turn, the blood had coated them as water will coat clothing in a washing machine. By the time the SUV came to a halt, the car’s inhabitants were balls of melting flesh and bone. Within a minute of it stopping they must all have been dead. All that was left was a mulch of melting remains. Had the solo survivor not been thrown from the car, he, too, would have been mush.
Trey’s hands were resting on the side of the car. As it creaked, he yelped and jumped away. Stumbling back he watched as it began to sink, as the survivor was sinking, as though it had landed in quicksand.
“They’re finished,” he forced himself to say. Amira nodded and returned to the man on the ground.
“Heidi’s really upping her ante, huh?” she said to the mess of a man on the floor. “We frighten her, right? We should. We’re almost ready to go against her. When we do, she’s going to die.”
From the man, a horrible sound. At first, Trey thought he was croaking, then retching. It was Amira who worked it out.
“You think that’s funny?” She smiled. “You think we can’t kill your boss?”