by Luke Kondor
It wasn’t until Patrick placed him in his chair and took a seat beside that Henry noticed that something was wrong.
There was no Anton.
There was no Veronica.
There were no Hill-folk.
~ 30 ~
Colin gently pushed the cage door shut behind him, the mug clenched tightly in one hand. It wasn’t much of a weapon but it would certainly be better than his bare fists. He was feeling fragile right now but knew that his moment had come to escape. Outside the open wooden door, he could still see the Miller guard that had arrived an hour or so before. He’d asked Colin why he had been left on his own, for which Colin had given no answer. The boy had shrugged and stepped outside, a hand resting on his pistol.
Now, the boy was hunched over the fire, attacking his food with a spoon, the metal knocking against the plastic with each aggressive swoop. Colin could smell the sweet scent of stewed vegetables and found his stomach already rumbling again.
Okay, Bolton. This is it…
Colin crawled forward, willing his body and the wooden floor beneath him to remain quiet. Hoping to God that the dogs wouldn’t give his position away and erupt into another round of barks. If he could just get close enough, he might get a clean shot at him with the mug and knock the lad out. Night, night, boy. We’ll see you in the morning.
He passed the end cage and saw the collies were now hidden deep in their corners, their eyes visible from the shadows. One of them let out a whine.
Colin closed his eyes and placed a finger on his lips, feeling stupid for even thinking sign language of a sort would work on the dog. A moment later and Drew (or Logan – he wished he knew the difference) stepped out into a thin thread of torchlight and sniffed at the floor of the cage nearest Colin before letting out one short, sharp bark.
Colin’s whole body tensed. He listened for movement from the Miller boy but found that outside had fallen silent. The clacking of the spoon had stopped. There were no footsteps or sounds of shuffling as though the boy were getting up to investigate. Not so much as a, ‘Hey, keep it down in there!’
Colin stood up and peeked around the door. There was a small fire some fifteen feet or so from the kennels with a little teepee construction and a pot bubbling over the top. In front of the fire, with his back to Colin, the Miller boy sat, cross-legged. Still as a statue.
Colin took a step towards him. Then stepped back into the safety of the kennels. He looked at the mug in his hand.
“Well, that won’t do the trick,” a voice said from behind him. Colin rubbed his eyes, not sure what he was seeing. In the corner of the cage once occupied by Whisper, he saw the shadow of Rachel. Fletcher was sat next to her on the floor, moving a train back and forth through the straw. “A thing like that isn’t from around these parts. You need fire or bleach, Colin. You know that.”
Colin swallowed hard, blinked, and they were gone. He turned back to the Miller boy, hoping to hell that he was an illusion, too. But Colin wasn’t so lucky. There the boy sat, the fire crackling. The dancing orange glow casting its light upon the edges of his form, where several myelin threads of rot had pushed through his skin. His mouth was wide open, forced apart by a thick thread that reached towards the light of the fire. A slit in his shoulder blades hosted several which waved and interlocked as they sniffed and sensed the air.
And yet it took Colin a moment to realise what he was seeing. The boy was infected, that much was clear. But in every case of rot that Colin had ever come across, the moment a person became infected, they would anger, they would lose all sense of self, they would get up and seek anything nearby that they could destroy and rip apart.
Yet this boy was just… sitting?
It didn’t make sense. But then, a lot of the world didn’t make sense nowadays. In the early days of the rot, Colin had seen the infection spread before his eyes. Leaping from one person to the next in a manner of seconds. But in the time since the rot had been assumed to be dead and buried, had it somehow changed? Had it somehow morphed and learned to evolve as so many creatures do? He thought back to Beckett, Susie’s father, the man that, to Colin’s knowledge, had been hiding for several days with Susie without a single encounter with the rot while he was on the run. Yet he had turned. Without warning. Without question. The rot somehow living within his system without detection. Even Dylan hadn’t sniffed it out.
Colin swallowed. Could the rot be… adapting?
Besides the mug, there were no other weapons of any type in the drawers. Colin quickly looked over the maps, searched through the coils of leads and harnesses, but could find nothing. He was so ready to leave, yet also wary that he might be dealing with something far more dangerous than the rot he had encountered before. The last thing he wanted to do was disturb its slumber and force its anger.
There came a whistle, followed by the movement of something outside. Colin poked his head around the door and could just make out the shape of two figures hiding in the brush up ahead. If it hadn’t been for the pale face of the boy amongst the shadows, struggling against the woman’s grip, Colin might have missed them altogether.
*
Joanna couldn’t believe what she was seeing in front of the fire. So much so that for a moment she almost forgot about Colin until he appeared back in the doorway. She and Sunny had been crouching in the bushes, studying the patterns of the Millers that came and went, waiting for the right moment. But now she was at a loss of what to do.
Turn back and get reinforcements? Probably not. Everyone would be in the dinner hall by now.
She was beginning to think they’d missed their chance. There had been a fair chunk of time after the Miller without the tattoos had simply walked away without tagging in the next guard. But by the time Joanna had puffed her chest enough to even think about using that opportunity, the young Miller boy had come. And, shortly after that, she had seen him silently double over as the strands of rot took over. She’d since been watching in horrified fascination. She’d seen a few things in her days but nothing quite like this.
Sunny tugged on his wrist.
“Sorry,” she said, barely a whisper. She hadn’t realised that she’d been squeezing his wrist so tightly. She loosened her grip without letting go.
Had they been bleached on the way in? Joanna highly doubted it. They hardly seemed the cautious type. She watched the boy, still as death, and couldn’t draw her eyes away. A lump rose in her throat. As haunting as it was, she couldn’t help but see beauty in its movements.
Sunny pulled against Joanna’s wrist again, moaning and trying his hardest to shake her free.
“Sunny, calm down. What’s—?”
His wrist slipped out of her grasp. He took a clumsy step forward and she caught it again.
“No.”
But still Sunny squirmed, pulling his arm like a fox caught in a trap.
How much longer ’til he gnawed the thing off?
“Sunny. Stop. It.”
It was louder than she’d meant it to be. She clapped her free hand to her mouth and looked up, seeing the rotter’s eyes now fixed on Sunny’s. Her grip loosened. Sunny was free. Colin watched in awe from the entrance of the kennels.
“Run,” she said, the panic rising in her throat. “Run, Sunny!”
And he did.
The wrong way.
Sunny ran straight towards the rotter.
*
Colin heard Joanna’s cry. He heard her telling the boy to run. He watched as Sunny sprinted towards the rotter, an unmatched determination on his face.
Panic threw icy water over his spine. He was hardly the kid’s biggest fan, but he couldn’t bear to see him just throw himself into the beast’s open mouth. A martyr nailing himself to the cross. In that moment, Colin put aside all his angst, forgetting for the first time since Sunny had woken him up in the night with his son’s name with the look of an innocent child. Which is what Sunny was. A child. A child that needed protection.
Colin grabbed the first thing he cou
ld find on the kennel walls. He fumbled with the lead, manoeuvred it off the hook, and snuck as fast as he could towards the rotter, eyes fixed on Sunny.
They were both just a couple feet away from the rotter when Sunny stopped running and began walking, as though strolling along to greet an old friend. His eyes locked unblinkingly on the rotter who remained sat on the floor, the contents of the mug of food spilled on the floor. The threads of rot across his body stretching and growing and reaching towards Sunny as a plant might reach towards the sun. The rotter brought a hand forward, the fingers split at the ends to reveal threads which reached towards Sunny, aiming for the boy’s bare arms as he came ever closer.
Colin felt his heart stop. He looked past the rotter and the boy and saw Joanna with her hand clapped over her mouth, eyes wide. They both knew they had to do something. They had to do it now. One touch of the rot on bare skin and Sunny would be infected. They’d both seen it before. That was all it took to erase all semblance of self and to allow the rotter to control you.
Colin weighed the dog lead in his hand and threaded the metal clasp end through the open loop of the handle. He took a step forward, bent his knees ready to leap, when—
A strange thing happened. Sunny took one final step towards the rotter. In a simple, lightning moment, the rotter’s threads darted out and latched onto Sunny’s arms, wrapping themselves around his wrists. But they did not puncture the skin. They did not break through the flesh. And, where Colin had seen the physical pain that people had experienced when they had succumbed to the rot, Sunny showed no signs whatsoever. In fact, he was smiling. Something Colin wasn’t sure he’d ever really seen from the kid. The rot threads shifted and snaked around Sunny’s arms without leaving a trace. Colin was reminded of the feelers of a moth, and how they used them to see and communicate.
Sunny took his other hand and stroked the threads around his wrist. “I know,” Sunny whispered. “I know. I know.”
Colin and Joanna watched in awed silence as the moment stretched between the two. It wasn’t until Colin caught Joanna’s eyes, a tear falling down one cheek, that he was reminded of the seriousness of the situation. Sure the rotter hadn’t attacked Sunny… yet. But how long until this meet-cute turned violent?
In one swift move, Colin launched himself forward. He threw the noose of the leash up and over the rotter’s neck and yanked back. The noose tightened and the rotter screeched. The threads retracted from Sunny’s wrist. Colin quickly booted the rotter in its lower back as he pulled tighter and tighter on the leash, feeling the material constricting the airways. Wet dirt slicked the rotter’s hands as it tried to right itself and stand up, but Colin pulled and heaved until he found the large hook at the side of the kennels and clasped the end of the lead to it.
Colin sidestepped and moved out of reach. The rotter continued to scream with panic as Colin ran to Sunny and scooped him in his arms. A second later and Joanna had her arms around the pair of them.
“Come on,” Colin urged. “That lead won’t hold him forever. Let’s get out of here.”
As they turned and ran down the road as fast as Colin’s tired legs could take them, the rotter pulled and tugged against the lead, the dogs now whipped into a frenzy inside. It clawed at the ground, still reaching for Sunny as though the man and woman were stealing its own child. The screech turned to a cry. Not a clicking, or a hiss, or a growl. Colin could just make it out as they rounded the corner and ran into the shadows. It wasn’t a noise he’d ever heard a rotter make. The last time he’d heard a cry like that was a year or so after he left the quarantine when a group of scavvies on motorbikes had stolen a mother’s baby and driven off into the woods.
“I know,” Sunny muttered, head resting now on Colin’s shoulder. “I know.”
~ 31 ~
The horde moved as one through the woods. Some running with bare feet. Their skin caught on thickets and brambles and sliced open allowing the thick pus and gore to spill. Some not bleeding at all. But all running. All moving as fast as their hosts would allow towards their singular goal. Organic robots programmed to move forward and sniff out the people.
At the borders of Hope, a lone sentry stepped out of his cabin, his Ruger 77 in hand, unfired for going on three years. The screeches seemed far off, but were growing louder fast. Sounds his tired mind could hardly fathom. The heavy darkness swallowed the road ahead, making anything approaching near impossible to see. The sentry squinted, raised his rifle and—
One moment the road was empty, the next they came. A swarm, led at the helm by a tall topless rotter with gnashing teeth and a bloody chest. The sentry cried to the darkness but soon quietened as the rotters surrounded him like piranhas around an elephant’s corpse, pulling him apart in seconds. They lingered for a second, two, three, and then they were off again.
They could still hear the signal, they could still feel the call of the antennae somewhere up ahead. Not far now. Not far at all…
Lights appeared in the distance. The horde moved on, sprinting, running until they hit the fence and piled up one behind the other. The mesh straining against their weight.
The rotter formerly known as Byron, a man so familiar with the camp that he could have walked you from one end to the other with his eyes closed, felt his face pressed against the metal wires. There was no semblance of memory left, only a bloodthirsty instinct that drove him. That forced him to place his fingers between the wires and pull himself up. Lifting himself above the angry horde towards the top of the fence. Soon enough, the rotters to his left and right were doing the same.
Their screeches faded to concentrated grunts and communicative clicks. There was no security on the doors that evening. No one left to attend and keep watch as the bodies spilled over the fence, landing clumsily on the gravel floor of the car park and blinking at the lights.
Byron paused and sniffed the air, looking on Hope with virgin eyes. An excitement buzzed around his body. The smell of flesh was in the air.
~ 32 ~
“Sing, dammit! Sing!” Patrick roared, snapping his fingers at the musicians.
Arty and Susan were doing their best. Their fingers trembled as the sweat gathered on their foreheads and beneath their pits. They were stood just a few metres away from the Millers on the top table who had been heckling them for some time, commenting on Arty’s misshapen head and the frail skeletal frame of Susan. Their fingers trembled on their fretboards. Arty led the count, and soon they were playing their own little rendition of Blackbird.
“Yes! That’s it!” Patrick said. He scooped another mouthful of Chef’s broth and chewed loudly on the chunks of meat.
Henry looked down at his own bowl and idly swirled the spoon around the liquid. On any other night, he would’ve long finished his bowl, but not tonight. He looked out at the dining tables and watched the sullen expressions on the Hopefuls’ faces. Despite the music, there was little cheer or celebration. Just a quiet sense of unease and tension that dragged their chins to the floor. Even Iggy was over in his corner, sat next to some brute who kept glancing at him and wrapping his arm around his shoulder.
I’m sorry, Henry thought as he sipped from his moonshine. I’m so sorry, Iggy.
“Oh cheer up yer soppy ol’ bastard,” Patrick said as he swallowed his own mouthful of moonshine. “Yer look like a pig licked yer tit at Christmas. This is a celebration, eh? Where’s all this fine hospitality I’ve heard so much about?”
Henry forced a smile. “I’m just… tired is all.”
“Jesus, you’d think someone had died!”
Patrick exploded into a roar of laughter, as did several other Millers on the table. A woman with blonde hair who Henry had been introduced to as Diana, a man in an Iron Maiden hoody that showed a picture of an English soldier with flesh missing from its face, and a boy who looked like he was sat somewhere in his late teens – Jackie-Boy. Throughout the meal, Henry had found him the most disturbing. A couple times he had caught Jackie-Boy staring at the kids a couple tables over,
playing with his food knife in his hand and occasionally stabbing it into the table.
When the musicians reached the end of their piece, Patrick whooped and demanded another. His voice had grown thick and a little slurred at the copious amounts of moonshine he was pouring down his throat. Most of the noise was coming from the Millers on the top table, but they hardly seemed to notice.
Arty and Susan exchanged a nervous glance, then began.
There were three ravens sat on a tree,
down a down, hay down, hay down,
there were three ravens sat on a tree,
they were as black as they might be.
As the musicians sang Patrick pulled his chair closer to Henry, leaning towards him with a dark glint in his eye. His breath was putrid. The stink of meat and moonshine made Henry’s eyes water. Now that he was so close, Henry could see faint silver scratches across his face. Old scars from a life of survival on the road.
“Yer know,” Patrick said, leaning into Henry’s ear so only he could hear him. “If I were you I’d cheer the fuck up and slap on yer happy face. Yer people need to see you happy now, don’t they? Wouldn’t want anybody getting the wrong idea and thinkin’ we’ve got you held hostage, now. Who knows, somebody might even start a revolt…”
Henry felt a panic shoot up his spine. Did Paddy know…?
“Nobody knows exactly when their time is up, LeShard. Especially in this world we find ourselves in these days…”
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,
his hounds they lie down at his feet.
“I’ll be honest, Henry-lad. I’ve seen that same look yer giving me right now somewhere before. Where was it now… Ah, that’s right. It was the same look yer brother gave me right before I ran me knife across his throat.”