by Jack Lewis
A girl lay across from him on a couch that had cushions so old that they would have sagged under the slightest weight. She ignored Ed, instead moving her head slightly as she scanned down the pages of a book. Ed leaned forward and caught sight of the cover; a giant rat with blood-stained fangs. He looked over at the bookcase and saw that the books so carefully messed up were all horror novels. The girl looked too young for that kind of reading. She turned her head and saw Ed staring at her. She put the book down next to her and sat up, tucking her legs against her chest and her hands over her knees.
“That was dad’s chair you know,” she said.
Ed stood up. “Sorry, should I move?”
“No, it’s okay.”
The door opened and Bethelyn stepped in from the darkness of the hallway. She carried a tray with a bowl in the centre, plumes of steam circling up from it.
“Thanks for the roof,” she said, and sniffed as steam hit her nose. “Glad to have a neighbour like you.”
Ed shuddered. Fixing the roof slates had been a cold, water-drenched job, and he’d nearly slipped off twice. The slates were slippery and the rain had clattered down onto them, but not many had dislodged. By the time he was done, Ed’s coat was heavy with water.
He took another look at the living room. The walls were cream and in places bore the signs of holes that had been filled in. A step ladder rested against a wall, and under the table, nearly tucked out of sight, was a toolbox. Something was wrong here.
“You could have fixed the roof yourself, couldn’t you?” he said.
Bethelyn bent to put the tray down. A few centimetres from the table she stumbled and the tray nearly tipped, but she caught it at the last second. She stood up straight and wiped her hand on her jumper.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You could have gone up there yourself and sorted the slates.” He looked at the toolbox again. “I see what’s going on here. You wanted to give me something to do.”
“Nope.”
“Come on, Bethelyn.”
She took a deep breath and let it out with a huff.
“Fine. Course I could have got up there, it’s not exactly difficult. And I wouldn’t have taken so long pissing around as you did, either. I was just worried about you. I know we haven’t spoken much, but times like these you need to look out for your neighbours. You’ve haven’t had a hot meal in weeks I bet, and I know you’ve been alone since your brother went.”
Ed looked at the girl who sat on the couch quietly watching them. Her face was dotted with freckles, and she had an expression that made her seem permanently on the verge of mischief.
“What’s your name?”
She smiled. “April,” she said.
“Like the month?”
“No, like the animal,” the girl said, rolling her eyes.
“She’s a cheeky one,” said Ed.
Bethelyn pushed the wooden table toward Ed, and the closer it got the stronger the smell of the stew became. His stomach ached for it. Lately he’d been eating raw carrots and leeks from the patch at the back of his house. He wasn’t much of a gardener; that had been dad’s thing. With James and dad gone Ed had developed green fingers out of necessity, because he didn’t want to starve.
“Don’t change the subject,” Bethelyn said, straining as she pushed the table toward him.
Ed picked up the spoon and dipped it into the bowl. As he turned it through the yellow-brown liquid he saw vegetables swimming in it. There were carrots, cauliflower, onions and mushrooms. Bethelyn’s gardens must have been doing well. Maybe she knew something the rest of the village didn’t. He scooped up a spoonful and lifted it to his lips. He was about to drink when he saw April’s brown eyes staring at him.
“Help you?” he said.
“She’s just curious,” said Bethelyn. “She’s always asking about you.”
“What are you reading?” said Ed.
Bethelyn stepped around the table and sat next to her daughter.
“Changing the subject again,” she said.
April tucked her legs closer to her chest. Sat next to her mother, she looked a miniature version of her. Both had hair that curled so much it was almost unkempt, but something told Ed that it was a look carefully cultivated. April’s eyes were a darker shade than her mother’s.
“How come you’re always on your own?” said April.
Ed put the spoon down into the bowl. He waited for Bethelyn to say something to her daughter, but she didn’t. The question felt a little too personal, maybe even rude. Bethelyn should have told her daughter that the question was too cutting to ask a guy who was basically a stranger.
“Don’t you get lonely?” asked April.
Ed got to his feet. Outside the rain hammered on the window and tried to get in. A hurricane swirled outside, ready to sweep away all the people and houses of Golgoth. If the sea didn’t claim them, the weather would. He’d never seen it this bad before.
“You got any tape?” he said.
Bethelyn smiled. “Do you need to wrap me a present?”
“I mean masking tape. Duct tape.”
She leant forward and pulled her toolbox from under the table. Metal screwdrivers and wrenches clanged as she rummaged through them, and black oil stained her fingers. Finally she pulled away a half-used roll of tape. She tossed it over to Ed.
“What do you need it for?”
He walked over to the window and stared into the darkness outside. A hundred feet away was the cliff edge, and below it was the tide. The night sky was a tarmac swamp, and the wind whined as though it was in pain. He stretched the roll of tape across the window first vertically and then horizontally, dividing the larger glass into smaller sections.
“This will stop it smashing into pieces,” he said.
“Think it’ll be that bad?”
“Rat Lair 2 starts off with a big storm,” April informed them.
Bethelyn turned to her daughter. “I don’t know why I let you read that stuff.”
Gunshots of rain sprayed the window so hard that the frame wobbled.
“It’s going to be the worst storm we’ve ever seen,” said Ed.
“And to think I moved here for the weather”.
“We haven’t had anything more than a gust of wind for years,” said Ed. “So we’re due a big one.”
He walked across the living room and into the hallway, leaving the glow of the candles behind him. For a glimmer of a second he regretted leaving the warmth. He reached up to a coat stand by the front door and grabbed his coat. Thankfully Bethelyn had put it by the fire for a while and gotten most of it dry.
He turned and saw her stood right behind him.
“Thanks for the soup.”
“You hardly ate any.”
“Well thanks. I mean it.”
“Don’t be a stranger, Ed.”
“You wouldn’t let me.”
He grabbed the handle of the front door and twisted. As soon as he opened it, a gust of wind blew into the house. Something smashed behind him. Ed turned and saw that pieces of porcelain were scattered across the floor.
“Dad’s plate,” said April. She jumped off the couch and ran to the hallway.
Bethelyn looked down. “Oh shit. She made this for her father.”
“Shit,” said April. She carefully scooped the pieces of plate in her hands.
Bethelyn ran her fingers through her hair.
“You sure you don’t want to stay a little? See if it dies down? You can finish your soup.”
He didn’t want to leave the warmth and the light and step out into the darkness, but at the same time he felt uncomfortable. It was as if he didn’t belong there, or that he didn’t deserve to be there. Since his dad had gone, and then James, Ed felt that he should just sit in the dark all the time.
He turned up the collar of his coat. “This isn’t going to stop anytime soon. I better get back. Tape up the rest of your windows.”
Bethelyn lunged forwa
rd and grabbed his arm.
“Don’t be a stranger. I know it wasn’t easy about your brother…”
Ed shook her arm away and stepped out into the cold. The darkness of the night swam around him as he walked into it.
2
Heather Castle
Not far from the Dome.
Most of the time Heather had a heavy sense of dread settling in her head. It was something that weighed down on her the majority of her waking hours. It was there from the second she woke up, held back for a few precious hours by sleep, but always watching, always waiting. There was no good reason for it. The world had ended and the land was filled with infected, cannibalistic humans, but that was the same for everyone and nobody else seemed to walk around with this kind of fog in their minds.
As she stared out of the classroom window she realised that the view didn’t help things. A few miles away was the Dome, a crystal structure that rose a hundred and eighty feet into the sky. Parts of it glittered when the light hit it, but most of the transparent glass and plastic was covered in mud or mold. She remembered a time when it wasn’t a place where the powerful lived. Years ago it had been a tourist attraction, a tropical garden in a non-tropical climate. A place for things to grow in a way that was unnatural to their environment and for things given life that should never have been. Now, of course, it was the symbol of the Capita. The largest settlement in the land. Heather would never live there if she could help it.
“Miss?”
She snapped out of her thoughts and turned to face the room. Twelve wooden desks were arranged in four rows, and children with masks covering their mouths and noses sat behind all but one. She walked to the front of the room, turned her back to them and started to write on the black board. As the white chalk scratched across it she grimaced, but it wasn’t at the sensation of the chalk on the board. It was the words that it had made, the ones she had written. She took a deep breath and then turned to see the children.
“Hands on your heart, kids.”
The children placed their palms on their chests in unison and spread their fingers. A girl in the corner, her desk just that little bit separate from the others, caught her attention.
“No, Jenny. The other side.”
The girl crossed her hand to the other side of her chest.
“Now read the words back to me,” Heather said.
She turned away from the kids and closed her eyes. She felt her old friend dread creep up to her and settle a cold hand on her shoulder. The children chanted the words back as one, their young voices managing to fill the room.
“The Government lived.
The Government died.
The Capita will live forever.”
“That’s right,” she said. The words burnt in her throat.
She knew she should technically chant with them, but she never did. She couldn’t even look at their faces as they read the slogan aloud, because she was scared that one of the kids, one of the perceptive ones, would see how much she hated the words.
There was nothing keeping her in Capita territory, of course. There were no bars around her house and no warders guarding the borders of the land. The problem was that you didn’t have to travel too far away from the Dome until you hit the wasteland. Miles and miles of broken towns and cities filled with life that had long since lost the right to be called human.
Safety was the one thing the Capita could offer that few other places could. Somehow, the Capita’s land around the Dome didn’t attract infected. Nobody, save perhaps the inner circle, knew how this worked. Heather certainly didn’t have a damn clue, but there it was. The only bond tying her here.
She realised that the class was staring at her. She tried to remember where she was in the lesson.
“When was the Capita born?” she said.
“Eight hundred years ago,” chanted the class.
She felt a lump form in her throat. It was seven years ago, she thought. Not eight hundred.
“And why does the Capita exist?”
“To keep us safe.
To keep us fed.
Keep us from dying in our bed.”
She nodded. “Well done kids.”
The children and their masks stared back at her expectantly. Most of them took pride answering her questions. They loved to be right, loved getting the prize of approval. At the back of the class sat Jenny. She always picked the same seat. She never talked to the other kids, and she always stared out of the window or down at the floor. Making friends didn’t seem to come easy to the poor kid.
Normally Heather would have said it was just the natural order of things. For some people, alienation was just their way. After all, not everyone can just fit in, can they? Heather was the same at school, and it wasn’t until she had become captain of the football team – the boy’s team, to the horror of some of the parents – that she’d made friends. Jenny’s loneliness wasn’t part of the normal process, though. Jenny chose to alienate herself, and Heather knew why.
“Jenny,” she said, “Why do we wear our masks?”
The girl looked up. Her eyes looked sad as though she was always on the verge of tears, like the centre of rosebuds with dew forming around them. Heather put her hand to her own mask. She felt the clasp that was just below her ear, and was thankful that hers was small and somewhat unobtrusive. Why did they make the kids wear the big ones? It made them look as though they were suffering a mustard gas attack in one of the old wars. Maybe it was to make them harder to remove, so that the kids wouldn’t pull their masks off each other as a joke.
Jenny cleared her throat. “We wear them so we don’t get infected.”
“And what happens if you get infected?”
One boy, a boy called Henry whose dad had a good job in the Dome, grinned to himself.
“You start eating people,” he said.
Heather felt a rush of heat in her face. Oh shit, she thought. It’s happening again. That familiar old feeling, the only one that could displace the dread. She took a deep breath, held it in, tried to disperse some of the anger that the boy’s comment built up inside her.
“Have you ever seen anyone die?” she said.
The class went quiet. Henry shook his head.
“Then don’t laugh.”
It didn’t always happen, of course. Some people got infected, fell into a coma and woke up without no desire whatsoever for eating human flesh. Heather looked to the back of the class, at Jenny alone in her corner.
It wouldn’t happen to you, she thought. The little girl tried so hard to hide it from everyone, but Heather knew that she was a DC. One lunchtime, when the kids were outside playing, Heather stood at the window. She saw Jenny sat beside an oak tree, the trunk of it hiding her from the rest of the class. As the leaves rustled above her she unclasped her mask and took a deep breath of air, and even so far away Heather saw the smile that spread across the girl’s face. It was the first one she’d ever seen her wear.
This was why she couldn’t stand the Capita. Jenny had a gift, and she shouldn’t have to hide it. Everyone had heard the stories. Of children taken away from their families. Scared parents exposed to infection-ridden air to see which one had the immunity gene. She didn’t have a clue where the DC’s were taken, but she knew they never came back. I’m going to help you, she thought.
One day she was going to get Jenny alone and tell her to be careful. She would tell her she knew her secret, take some of the burden away from her. She just needed to work up the courage to have the conversation. Today wasn’t going to be that day. If she were ever caught helping a DC the repercussions could ruin everything, and she didn’t just have her own life to worry about. What about Kim? What about their Great Escape?
She caught Jenny’s eye and gave her a smile. One day I’ll do it. I’ll help you when I grow a spine.
“Miss,” said a boy at the front of the class.
It was Gary, a chubby kid who was great at memorising things but not so good an analysing them.
/> “Why do we have to wear our masks in here? Isn’t the air clean? My face itches.”
Heather paced at the font of the room. “How do we check if the air is free from infection?”
“Our AVS.”
“Get yours out.”
The boy reached to his pockets and fumbled, but his eyes widened and he pulled out empty hands. Redness spread across his cheeks, and he stared at Heather as if expecting her to shout.