Thunder rumbled across the sky and moments later, lightning flashed. A horse whinnied somewhere close by and I forced myself to roll over and push myself up. I wiped the water from my face with one blood-smeared sleeve and set off through the overgrown garden.
The two-storey house had white painted walls that had long since turned grey. Its roof sagged in the centre and many of the slate tiles were missing. The hedges to either side of the garden had overgrown to the point where I could barely see the conservatory for them.
My axe made short work of the thicker branches that had grown over the door and I hissed softly at the trail I was leaving. One so wide that even the raider I had blinded could have followed it.
Well, I thought with a chuckle, maybe not him.
The PVC door was unlocked and came open with a firm tug, allowing me into the house. I pulled the door shut behind me and moved cautiously from room to room, alert for any danger. A task made all the more difficult by the lack of light inside the house.
When satisfied that I was alone with just the mildew and decaying furniture, I pressed myself back against the wall beside the front window and looked out over the road.
Two of the raiders were riding slowly along the pavement on their horses. They both wore the now familiar raider armour, but their swords were sheathed and instead they each carried a crossbow.
With hard faces and eyes devoid of anything remotely human, I was sure that they were veterans and more than capable with those weapons of theirs. As they rode, their heads moved constantly, eyes shifting and seeing everything.
There was no excess fat on them, just heavy muscle and I began to realise that either I had badly misstepped or simply provided myself with a worthy challenge and some people I could kill without concern for my promise.
Water streamed down their faces, soaking into their clothes and likely not doing much for their crossbows. The waxed string of their weapons would eventually be ruined by the rain, soaking up the water, the wax unable to hold it fully at bay.
That gave me a chance, at least. They couldn’t rely on those weapons for long which meant they would have to switch to their swords. I couldn’t help my grin at the memory of the fool who had charged me with his horse, sword raised high.
His blood still coated the head of my axe and I almost ached with the need to kill those raiders outside.
Caution prevailed though and I waited as they passed on by the house. By my rough estimate, there were perhaps twenty raiders, each mounted and at least half were carrying crossbows. They were unshaven with soiled clothing that suggested they were fresh to the city.
I’d made it as far as I had by jumping garden fences and running down narrow alleyways between houses where their horses couldn’t easily go. While that tactic had been relatively effective, it had left me in the centre of a housing estate with a good number of raiders patrolling the streets as they searched for me.
I was, in short, surrounded. While that wouldn’t have tended to give me pause, their crossbows made it more dangerous and I had a distinct desire not to perish before I killed the leader of those raiders.
With a wince, I sheathed my knife and slipped the axe through the loop on my belt. Blood ran down my hand and splashed against the floor. A lucky swing had caught my arm, barely enough to cause any real damage but it was painful and bled profusely.
Since I was the kind of man who very often found himself in the midst of some chaotic violence or other, I had long since taken to carrying the very basics of a first aid kit in my coat pocket. It wouldn’t do much for a serious wound but might keep me alive long enough to get somewhere I could deal with it.
I pulled off my coat and rolled up the sleeve of my shirt, wincing once again as the material stuck to the drying blood around the wound, pulling at the edges of it. The cut was as shallow as I expected and might need a couple of stitches which is something I could do.
For the next few minutes, I tended to that wound, sewing together the flesh before wrapping it with a bandage. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would keep me from bleeding too much and Abigail would give it a once over when I made it back to the safehouse.
Dislike me as she might, she would still not abandon someone in need. A fact that I took advantage of mercilessly.
I quickly pulled on my coat and readied my weapons before heading towards the front door. I stopped before I reached the handle and turned towards the back of the house. For a moment I listened in silence before I heard it, the snapping of a branch as it was pulled away from the conservatory door.
They’d found my trail.
With a wicked grin, I pressed myself back against the wall before leaning in to look through the doorway into the living room. The conservatory was joined to the rear of it and on the other side of the filthy glass panels that made up the conservatory walls, there were the dark shapes of men.
The door handle turned and it was pulled open slowly, cautiously by men who knew they faced someone formidable. Two of them, with one giving orders to the other in a low, gruff voice. They moved well, eyes never stopping moving as they watched constantly for danger.
With the light behind them and the darkness inside the house, I was confident they couldn’t see me as I watched them step inside.
I pulled back my head and slowed my breathing, as my heartbeat pulsed in my ears. Adrenaline was rushing through me and the anticipation of the kill to come was almost enough to send me rushing out to meet them.
But I couldn’t do that, no matter how much I wanted to. I needed to exercise caution, to ensure that I killed them without alerting their friends who may be close enough to hear any shouts or screams.
“Check down here,” came the gruff command. “I’ll go upstairs.”
There were few options and I was pretty sure climbing wooden stairs that had been left to rot for almost a decade would be noisy as hell. Which left me with the dining room and kitchen. I moved quickly, feet barely making a sound, and I ducked into the dining room as the first raider stepped into the hallway.
His feet thudded on the wooden steps that creaked beneath his weight and I grinned, mirthlessly, knowing that I had made the right choice. I set down my bloodied axe on the dining room table, leaving it in full view of the door before I pushed myself back against the wall and waited.
The raider stopped, attention going immediately to the axe that lay in plain view and he sucked in a breath ready to call out. He never made a sound as my hand rose, driving my blade up through his chin and then through the soft palate into his brain.
I caught him before he fell and gently lowered him to the ground, then pulled him into the dining room and out of sight. There was nothing I could do for the blood that pooled there and I let out a soft giggle as I pulled free my knife.
Since there was no hiding it, I lifted the corpse and lay it on the dining room table. Footsteps sounded from above as the other raider moved to the next room to check and I had to move fast. I crossed the dead raiders arms over his chest and smiled. He looked almost peaceful there, staring up at the ceiling with eyes that couldn’t see.
My knife plunged, deep into the side of his eye as I reached in with my other hand and pulled out the eyeball. I deposited it on his chest and then removed the other, placing it beside the first. There was no reason to do such a thing, but I was sure that they would find hidden meaning anyway and if it brought fear into their hearts, then it would do its job.
“Nothing up here, how about down there?” Heavy footsteps moved towards the stairs. “Hey! Fuck-face, I asked you a bloody question.”
He descended the stairs, sword in hand and stopped as I stepped out into the hallway. He looked me up and down as he raised his sword.
“That my mate’s blood?”
“Some of it.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Is that all your kind ever ask?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He rolled his shoulders and grunted as he kept his eyes fixed on me. “Boss-man will fuck
you up for what you done.”
My only reply was my axe as I leapt forward, swinging it high. He knocked it aside with a flick of his wrist, the sword catching against the carbon haft just above my hand. I was prepared for that and my knife was already moving towards his ribs.
He grunted as I caught the edge of his breastplate as he swung away, before thrusting at me with his sword. We exchanged blows, each gaining the measure of the other and I gave a short nod of something close to respect as I noted his skill.
His only response was to move fast, blade flashing so swiftly that I was very nearly run through. I edged back, towards the kitchen, smile firmly in place as I batted aside another quick thrust.
We both were breathing hard as we danced along the hall, striking at one another with our instruments of death and neither able to pierce the other's defence. Another step back, and I was almost at the kitchen, then one more as I barely deflected a wicked slash.
I darted in as his foot hit the puddle of blood and he jerked back, foot sliding out from beneath him as he cartwheeled back. It was only a bare moment before he regained his balance but it was enough time for me to reach him, knife sliding up beneath his ribs towards his heart.
“Fuck!” was all he said as I twisted the blade.
There was little reason to, but I took his eyes as well, leaving them in his open hand. A tasty treat for when he returned as a zombie I was sure. With a final snicker, I headed back to the living room and looked out through the window once more.
Empty streets soaked in rain. Cars with flat tires and shattered windows filled the road and leaves covered everything. The trees that lined the road had formed a thick canopy that couldn’t do much to stop the rain falling through.
No raiders though, so it was unlikely the fight had been heard. Even so, it was time to leave.
I slipped out through the front door and made my cautious way through the front garden to the gate. There, at the end of the road were the two raiders on horseback. They turned left which meant that in a very short time they would be able to see the horses that had been left behind as the raiders followed my path over the garden wall.
With any luck, they would follow and find what I had left them. As fun as it would be to hang around and wait for their reaction, I had places to be and plans to make.
Things were progressing and I had stirred up the hornet's nest somewhat. The patrols would double, searching for me in earnest and allowing me the chance to pick them off one group at a time until their leader finally made an appearance.
When that happened, I would kill him and tear down the empire he was building. I would leave a monument of death that would tell all who saw it that there was only one monster allowed in this world of ours, and that was me.
Chapter 13
Thunder rumbled in the distance and I turned away from the window to where my children sat beside the open fireplace. A pleasant, warm, glow filled the room along with the crackle of the logs as they burned merrily.
Angelina sat cross-legged with her head down, chin resting on one little clenched fist as she sulked. Her brother, Gabriel, played with his wooden animals on the rug beside her. I couldn’t help but smile, even if I was still annoyed at my daughter.
The wilful child had a fascination with the frogs that lived around the pond and that very morning, I had found her using a small kitchen knife to cut open the belly of one of them. She had insisted, and Gabriel had confirmed, that the frog had already been dead but her interest in it alarmed me.
She was way too much like her father, and that scared me more than anything.
“Wet out there.”
I accepted the steaming cup of tea that Cass offered me as she joined me beside the window and inclined my head towards the garden beyond and the rain that seemed set to drown us all.
“As much as I like the rain, this is a bit much.”
“Agreed.” She peered out, nose scrunching as she shook her head. “At least the water barrels will be full.”
One small piece of good news at least. Every house in the village had a water barrel connected to the downspout from the gutters. The rain should fill them nicely and provide us with ample water for our everyday needs, leaving the well water for drinking and cooking.
“I heard that some more communities have been found.”
“Yeah, to the south. Small but once we established that we were friendly they were happy to accept the radios.”
Which meant they could contact us and we could contact them. A win no matter how you looked at it and a chance for us to help build that network of communities across the whole country. Once we had that, we could actually have a chance of rebuilding civilisation.
“Where are they?”
“Nercwys, Penyffordd and Ffrith, so far.” She grinned then. “The people in Ffrith told us they had met with communities in Ellesmere, Newport and Stafford.”
While I didn’t know the Welsh places, I definitely knew the locations of those others and they were all in what had once been England. Stafford was just north-west from Birmingham and if they had survived with such a large city close by, then I had hope that many more had too.
“That’s really great news.”
“Isn’t it! As far as we know, these are all small groups. No more than twenty people in the largest, but it’s something! People survived and they are still surviving!”
I couldn’t quite share her enthusiasm as I made a rough calculation of the distance. If I knew my geography correctly, then Stafford would be around seventy miles away from where we were. It had taken us weeks of exploring with a hundred willing cultists to reach Ffrith which was around twenty miles from where we were.
For any real trade of goods and ideas, we needed to be able to travel that distance in a shorter time than we currently were. That would mean we needed vehicles that worked and while there were plenty left over from the fall of the world, finding any that might work would take some effort.
Added to that was the concern for just returning to the world as it had been with all the waste and destruction we, as a species, wrought on our world. No, we needed something sustainable and I wasn’t at all sure what that would look like.
“Penny for them?”
I blinked and looked over at my friend, before realising that I had been silent for several minutes as I stared out through the window at the rain and worked over the various problems that were plaguing us.
“There’s a lot to deal with at the moment.”
“Yeah, no doubt.”
Her smile faded at that reminder and I couldn’t help the pang of guilt I felt for ruining her happy moment. There were so few of them.
“The food supplies that Eunice needs will be ready soon, at least,” I said, trying to recover the good feeling. “Albert is working with Charlie on access to the monitoring software that will allow us to see the parasites in real-time, and the sawmill is producing a lot of wood at the moment.”
“Things are getting better,” Cass agreed, a smile returning as the corners of her eyes crinkled. “We will figure out the problems eventually. Think about it, we survived the end of the bloody world! Anything that comes after should be easy.”
Her laughter filled the room, and she patted my shoulder before turning and heading over to where her daughter was rousing sleepily from her nap on the couch. I went back to staring through the window, my thoughts troubled.
The parasites were the biggest problem, there was no denying that, but since we didn’t have any way to actually kill them, all we could do was monitor them until we did. Which is what we were doing.
Sebastian Cho and his fanatics were next and the preparation for dealing with them was underway. Isaac was training his security force that would become our main peacekeeping force. He would lead them out against any of the fanatics we found.
Which was another reason why we needed faster means of transport. His people needed to be able to get to those trouble spots quickly if we were to ferret out those culti
sts and finish them for good.
Of course, I wasn’t able to discuss ways that could be done because Isaac had become increasingly difficult to pin down. We had both been avoiding one another since our kiss but he had taken it to a whole new level, which was fast becoming an issue.
Added to that was the increasing chatter about raiders the further south we went. Each new group had stories to tell and from what we had managed to piece together, there were three raider groups to the south and east of us.
The smallest were over in Northwich, which placed them to the south-east from Liverpool and the growing parasite there. From what we could gather, they would attack small communities and take what they could grab before running for cover. They never attacked large groups and they tried to keep it as bloodless as possible though they were willing to fight if they needed to.
Next, somewhere between Shrewsbury and Swansea to the south were the Silures, a group who had named themselves after the ancient Celtic tribe that inhabited the south of Wales. They were aggressive, taking what they wanted and leaving little left for the survivors.
The only thing that had stopped their attacks on some of the larger communities to the south-east was an ongoing dispute with the largest group, the Riders. They inhabited a huge area with their central base somewhere near Birmingham.
Unlike the others, they were smart in how they subjugated the communities within their territory. They would take a percentage of what the community had and while they would often abuse the people of those communities, they wouldn’t kill without any real provocation.
They had very clearly decided that it was better to take a little now, to ensure there was more to take later. The only thing they offered in return was some protection from the other raiders, which likely included groups we hadn’t heard about.
To make any sort of impact, we would need to take them out but to do so would leave a power vacuum that would only allow the other groups to descend on the communities that were being protected by the Riders and result in more death and chaos.
Killing The Dead | Book 22 | Fury Page 8