“Of course you are. You lead from the front, you don’t hide at the back. You’ve led us here where we’re as safe and happy as it’s possible to be with those stinking things,” he replied. Bo admired Amy. From the moment he saved her from being assaulted, she showed strength.
“You see everything that goes on here. Food is depleting faster than we’re restocking it. Weapons are woefully basic, even the guns have little ammunition. Anyone has anything worse than a splinter or headache has to suffer.”
“We can’t exactly pop out to Boots, can we love?”
“That’s kind of my point. We’ve cleared out every house, shop, or veterinary practice within five miles and we weren’t the first. There’s nothing out there that’s easy to get. If we’ve not taken it, someone else already has.”
“We’re still getting the odd rabbit, the veggie patch is coming in and starting to produce.”
“I’m going back to Chipstead,” she bluntly announced.
“That’s that inexperience you were talking about showing through. There’s nothing there but the death. That’s all what was ever there.”
“They had medical facilities, guns, and thousands of ration packs. It’s going to be hard, and that’s why there might still be something left that’s worth taking the risk for.”
“Amy love, no. It’s not worth it.”
“You’re my number two, Bo. That means you can advise and guide, but ultimately I have to make the hard decisions. You’ll be in charge whilst I’m gone, I’ll take Jack and we’ll at least scout it out. If it’s impossible, we’ll come straight back here. I promise.”
“Sounds like a waste of diesel to me, but you’re the boss. If you take any stupid risks, I swear to God, Babs will be pissed with you,” Bo warned. He knew there was no point pushing her, stubborn as she was brave. Just more for him to admire.
Chapter 27
The ship’s brig was clean and bright; a modern prison for a modern warship. A stainless steel toilet and sink, a bed with clean linen, white-tiled floors and bright LED lights illuminating the space. It was basic, but luxurious compared to what some survivors on other ships called home. Mason had requested and been granted a few basic items. A change of clothes, a portable DVD player with a handful of films and some books. He’d lived as a monster for so long, he wanted to feel a little human, if only for a short while. He was relaxed as he laid on the bed and read through an autobiography of a TV reality star that he hadn’t been familiar with or cared about. The selection of films and books illustrated the disdain they had for him, but he didn’t care. He’d watch the shitty 70s Italian B-Movie with a smile. He read about that plastic celebrity as if she was the most important human to ever have graced the earth. He didn’t give a fuck or want to give them the satisfaction. As long as they didn’t kill him and fed him the precious meat, they could taunt him all they wanted.
A single soldier guarded Mason, sitting on the opposite side from Mason’s cell, sitting on a metal chair, a submachine gun in his hands. “You know you’re fucking dead, right? I don’t mean dead like those cunts out there. I mean, you’ll be proper fucking dead once you’re off this ship.”
“Didn’t you hear, I’m the star man on this tub. You best watch how you speak to me.”
The soldier rose to his feet and approached the cell. Mason rested his book on his chest and stared at the soldier. The soldier snorted, then spat in Mason’s face before resuming his seat and guard duties. “There you go, star man, fuck off and shut up.”
“And you call me a monster?” Mason said and wiped the spit from his face.
The prime minister entered with her usual group. The soldier stood up before he was relieved and invited to wait outside.
“Mason, we have an assignment for you,” the PM proudly announced.
“I can’t wait to start,” Mason said. He was intrigued by his new arrangement and was ready to have some fun.
“Good. General, do you want to tell our operative what he’s to do?” she asked. She looked at the general. His mouth stayed firmly shut, and he looked away from her. “I thought not. We’ll get you aboard The Hope 2 amongst another small group of survivors. You’ll be given a cover story, some belongings, and you’re to do what you do. Bite, fuck, whatever it takes. I want that ship to be infected within three days. Got it?”
“Two questions; the Hope 2? What happened to the first hope?” Mason questioned. He thought he was being clever. “And what happens to me when that ship is full of the mindless fuckers, are you going to nuke me too?”
“There are four ships named The Hope, our survivors lack originality, they should all die just for that. Can you swim?” The prime minister had noticed herself the repetition of ship names when the plebs were put in charge over the minor details.
“I lived on an island all my life, I can fucking swim,” he angrily replied. Even when he had been fat, he had been a decent swimmer.
“Good. When you get the signal, you’ll jump overboard and we’ll recover you,” she made it sound so easy. As if jumping off the side of a large cargo vessel, that was turning into hell, and into the English Channel was as easy as popping to the shops for a pint of milk.
“That sounds lovely, but am I supposed to take your word for it you won’t just leave me floating in the Channel?” Mason asked. He kind of wished they would. He was sure with a full belly he could swim for as long as he needed to and would find himself on land, eventually.
“You’ll have two minders with you, they’ll make sure you don’t get lost and that you stick to your objective. They will have your food and you are to do what they say. Is that clear?” the general stepped in. He hated the mission, but he respected the chain of command and wanted Mason to do the same.
“Yes, sir,” Mason joked. He stood and gave a mocking salute.
“You leave in three hours,” the general replied. He cared less about this moronic monster than he did the horrific job at hand.
The delegation left the brig, their job done. As they walked back to number 10, the general stopped the PM, grabbed her shoulders, and looked straight into her eyes. “You can’t do this, not again.”
“Let go of me. Now,” she ordered, calm, but authoritative. This politician was in control and the general complied.
“When does it stop? I’ve lost lord knows how many men, you’ve murdered one ship full of civilians and about to do the same again. You can’t get away with this, I won’t let you,” the general insisted. He had been in the British Army nearly all his adult life, he’d never wilfully been involved with such a murderous human being as this cow.
“Don’t threaten me general. You are complicit, so don’t you dare attempt to take the high ground. You will pay for any treachery, I’ll make sure of it,” she spat and meant every word, growing increasingly angry at his challenge. “You’re relieved of duty and confined to your quarters. Take him away,” she ordered. One soldier complied whilst the other soldier followed the PM in the opposite direction.
“You don’t have to do this,” the general screamed at her as she walked away, continuing to ignore him.
Chapter 28
They were perfectly happy together. In the month since William found Natasha and brought her to his home, they had at first become the ideal, self-sufficient couple. They had topped up their supply of victims in the basement, enjoying walks together and happening across poor desperate souls unaware of all the threats that existed. Natasha had made a full recovery and could see her future. William had treated her with love, and she had more than repaid him. Natasha lay naked in bed alone, William walked in with a bowl of flesh and a smile. “You must be hungry after last night. I know I was. Some Gillian?”
Natasha happily took the food and ate it carefully. Gillian had been one of William’s original captives, he didn’t learn their names anymore. They would rarely tell him and he just didn’t care.
“Unfortunately Gillian will need to be replaced, she had grown too weak. I’ve recovered what I ca
n from her, but we’ll need to drop her off later,” he spoke so matter-of-factly it as if they’d merely run out of milk.
“That’s a shame, she was sweet,” she said. Natasha carried on eating, taking care that no blood dripped onto the bedding.
William had let Natasha into his life, but he didn’t share everything. His bed, food, and home were one thing, but William had always been greedy and ambitious. He was a fool to have taken FatBGone when he himself was covering up results, but he had been overweight all his life and it had been the answer. He wasn’t sure if his new existence was a curse or a blessing. Had he not taken the drug, he’d surely have been dead. He wouldn’t have survived this world. Having taken it, he led a damned life but relatively safe life, preying on others but not bothered by the dead. Natasha had brought meaning to the new world, a partner in survival. It wasn’t about making it to the next day; he could now enjoy himself. However good life felt, he knew he still had work to do.
“I need to head out to my lab, I’ll be back in a few hours then we can go for a walk,” he told her. He was already planning the time he had available in his head, samples to test and results to analyse.
“I love you,” maybe she did.
“I love you too,” maybe he did too.
*
The house was isolated, it had been William’s parents’ home. When he was a child, the fields would have been full of crops, he’d always found rapeseed his favourite. The bright yellow flowers lit up the countryside. Now no such colours shone through, a few wild flowers peppered the overgrown grass in the unloved fields. In the years since his parents passed, William maintained the house and would visit it infrequently. The property enjoyed a good amount of land, even more before William had started selling it off as he needed to. The old barn had a brief life as a holiday property before William’s parents died. After years of lying vacant, it now found a new life. William’s laboratory.
The equipment wasn’t state-of-the art. It didn’t all work, but it’s what he had. He had looted hospitals, high schools, veterinarian surgeries, and local chemists. It didn’t look professional; he didn’t care, it just about suited his needs. Three large cages, courtesy of the vets, were covered in blankets. William pulled them off, one by one. Each cage housed a feeder. A young boy, a middle-aged man and a woman in her twenties. All appeared to have turned at roughly the same time, their clothes tattered, splashed with grey and red blood stains. Their hands and feet bound. They barely reacted to William. He wasn’t food, so he wasn’t worth bothering with.
William looked up at the clock, he couldn’t get lost in his work again. Natasha knew he was working on some kind of cure, so they would never face starvation again. Natasha’s arrival had delayed his work, but it had been worth it. He had an advantage the authorities didn’t; he knew the full development history of the drug. They would have spent weeks trying to find the cause. He already knew. They would have spent as much time finding out how it worked. He had been there as it was created, when it was tweaked.
Weeks before society fell, he knew what was happening to him and he started working, preparing. His parent’s house had been his priority. The cellar didn’t become a dungeon overnight; it took work. Only after the evacuations was William able to fill his lab. The food supplies for his cattle, he started collecting before the fall and then scavenged more from makeshift camps and boarded-up shops. All his preparation didn’t change the fact that he was racing against the clock. At some point, his food supply would dry up. Gillian wasn’t the first to be used up. His freezer had the last butchered remnants of several of his captives. Finding fresh guests was getting harder and harder. He didn’t want to cure himself. He liked his new form, his new place in the world. He wanted to cure the rest of the infected. They were a near infinite food supply. If he could turn them back to human, they would be edible. Their grey flesh was disgusting and he couldn’t keep it down. As humans, he speculated they would be severely mentally scarred. It would be unlikely that they would enjoy any ounce of humanity, they would truly be cattle.
William loved the idea of repurposing the farm with his own herd of humans roaming the fields, but that was more a joke in his head than a reality he expected. A potentially cured feeder likely could not walk, talk, or feed itself. He knew the best-case scenario would see him with a large collection of cured feeders in a vegetative state being fed through tubes. It wasn’t the dream he had, but it would be better than starving to death or going feral.
William approached the young boy feeder and opened its cage. Even with freedom in its sight, it didn’t move or acknowledge him. William produced a scalpel and used it to cut off a small strip of the grey flesh, only a centimetre wide and three centimetres long. He held it to the light. It would do for his test. William locked the cage and took the sample to the repurposed kitchen table and sliced it into three equal chunks. He placed each into a separate Petri dish and placed a different beaker behind each. Each beaker contained a small amount of liquid, all a various shade of pink. Carefully William used a pipette to place a single drop of the first liquid on to the first sample. It rested on the surface of the flesh, slowly absorbing into the grey meat. The colour turned from grey to brown, a change but not the one he was looking for. He sniffed the Petri dish and was disgusted by the odour. A swing and a miss. A fresh pipette placed a drop of the second liquid onto the second sample. It bubbled and fizzed, hissing quietly. After a minute it died down and the meat looked red. It was promising. A quick sniff and it didn’t turn his stomach. William was satisfied this had potential. The third sample had its turn. The flesh instantly turned black and dried out, an impressive if useless reaction. There was little need to examine this sample further.
The second liquid was a clear winner but testing on a slice of flesh was one thing. He was eager to test it more thoroughly. One of the good things about the feeders was their pure abundance, so many he normally had to actively keep them away. The boy would continue his usefulness, success or failure of the second solution would still be progress. William produced a large syringe, normally for use on livestock, it would never be used on a human, but the feeder didn’t count as one, yet. The boy wouldn’t be scared by its size, squirm as the large needle passed through his skin. The syringe was filled to its 50ml capacity with the pink solution, and William approached the boy.
He was unsure where best to start. One injection might not be enough, so he overwhelmed the body with the solution, injecting each limb, the heart, the lower spine and base of the skull. Each site was treated to a full syringe, nearly the whole of this test batch, but William was confident he’d be able to replicate it quickly. The boy became increasingly agitated with every injection. The flesh gained a little colour. The last injection into the skull set the boy off into a frenzy. Pain or fear were not traits these creatures usually displayed, but it was easy to believe that this boy was hurting and scared. William quickly shut the cage with the boy inside writhing in pain, thrashing at the wire trapping him inside. William wasn’t sure if it was working or if he would need to pick up a new test subject and start again. The grey colour faded from its skin and the boy stopped moving, staying motionless on the floor of the cage as some colour returned to him. Blotches of pink and red spread across its body from the injection sites.
William smiled. In four weeks he had made tremendous progress, with the most basic of equipment and various old batches of FatBGone. If this worked, he and Natasha would never run out of food. They could enjoy a long and peaceful life avoiding the living, eating the cured dead. In a few hours, he would know how close he was to his dream.
Chapter 29
They had been at Wellworth for two days. Spencer and his men had checked, and double checked the perimeter. The double fence line had held up well, and the dead had done little to test it. The primary concern had been to build up the defences. The OP on the roof of the main building offered excellent views of the surrounding countryside, but little opportunities to engage anything that
made it inside the compound. The helicopter was their lifeline. If the monsters got inside, they’d need the helicopter to affect their evacuation. Sebastian had again suggested putting it on the roof, he was sure he could land it there but Spencer wasn’t sure the roof would take the load. He had more confidence in the fences holding under the weight of the feeders than the roof under the weight of a Lynx. The courtyard was their only option. To make up for this they had placed a line of Claymore mines at regular intervals from the main building and the barracks to the helicopter. If anything got it, it would wish it hadn’t.
Peter had assisted in digging a series of foxholes. It had been hard, back-breaking work of the kind he wasn’t used to. Spencer hadn’t shied away from getting his hands dirty. A foxhole had saved his life on many occasions. If a localised armed force fancied their chances and tried to take Wellworth, small defensive positions within the courtyard might be the only cover they had. The soldiers had warmed to Peter quickly. He was timid, but he didn’t want to disappoint. He may not have been particularly capable but set him a task and he’d give it his best shot.
Spencer had seen some action on the mainland after society fell. He had spent weeks extracting VIPs from infested areas. He’d lost more men rescuing former politicians than he had ever done in war. He resented that they’d died so that a man in his eighties might live a few more years, or a popular media darling or pop starlet might once again bring a smile to the nation. He didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, but some saving an old fart or young tart was hardly going to benefit humanity. Still, it had been better, more honest work than they had ordered him to undertake whilst at sea. He would rather be tasked with slotting as many of these things as possible. One less feeder was one less threat. At least now he felt like they might make a difference. A scientist who could find the cure to the creatures? It was too fantastical to believe that such a man existed and survived. The very idea that a geek in a lab had continued unmolested by these hungry bastards was preposterous. He’d seen experienced soldiers outmanoeuvred and overpowered by a handful of creatures, he couldn’t think how a man of science could survive in this world without help.
Deadweight | Book 2 | The Last Bite Page 11