The Dying & The Dead 2

by Jack Jewis

  “How many cabins have you checked?”

  The search light beamed across their window and illuminated the cobwebs on the glass. The glare caught Eric in the eyes, and it took a few seconds for his vision to clear.

  “Nearly all of them,” he answered. “I just know they’re here. Where else would they be? Any DCs that the Capita catch get brought here, by the looks of things. I just need to know where they’re keeping them. What about the brick buildings at the end of the camp?”

  “I’ve seen the guards go in there. And I think it’s where the man from the train works.”

  “Scarsgill?”

  Kim nodded. “I thought I saw him there earlier today.”

  Kim’s stomach made a whining sound. She put her hands against it.

  “You’re starving,” said Eric.

  “I know. I just can’t eat it.”

  “Can’t you try?”

  The girl pulled her blanket closer to her. The search beam ran across again, casting a light over Kim’s shaven scalp. Eric saw a dent just below her crown from a scar that had healed over.

  “It’s not a matter of trying. If I eat any of that stuff, I’ll be sitting on the bucket for days. And that’ll be worse than being hungry. How do you know your mum’s here? I mean really, how can you be sure? They might be in the Dome.”

  He remembered being back on the meadow. The worried look on his mum’s face as Charles Bull ordered his soldiers to take them all. The scream of pain she made when Charles hit her. At the time, Eric had been so scared that all he wanted to do was run. When he thought back on it, anger replaced the fear.

  He started to wonder if there was any point. Everywhere he went in camp, guards waited. When he did manage to speak to anyone about his mum, they couldn’t help him. It was locked door after locked door. He was just a boy, and he had the Capita and all their power and their soldiers against him. Some of the camp residents had been here for years. He could tell from their slumped shoulders and vacant looks that they’d given up. Would that happen to him, too?

  The window was illuminated again, but this time it wasn’t just the search light. Beams of yellow shot out from all across the yard. He heard men shouting, and from the far side of camp, near the shoe shed, came the sound of dogs barking.

  He climbed onto Kim’s bed and crawled over to the window. All the lights were aimed at one part of the camp. They shone at a fence on the east side. The array of yellow beams made it hard to see properly.

  “What is it?” said Kim.

  He just about made out two small figures at one of the fences. From so far away he couldn’t be positive, but he guessed it was the boys from earlier. One of them gripped the wire mesh and pulled himself up the fence. The other waited at the bottom, hands held in the air, unable to move as the searchlights and the torches shone in his eyes.

  “It’s them,” said Eric. “They’re trying to escape.”

  The boy almost reached the top of the fence. When he gripped it, a gunshot boomed out. The boy let go of the fence and fell to the floor. If it weren’t for the hole in the head, the fall might have killed him anyway.

  Kim joined him at the window, eyes wide. She gripped the window ledge, seeming to have forgotten the pain of her callouses for the meantime.

  “We need to help them,” she said.

  “Do you want to die?

  “We can’t just do nothing.”

  “That’s exactly what we’ll do,” said Eric. “If you want to live, we’ll do nothing.”

  The cabin started to stir. The girl on the end broke her crying and sat up. The man in the bunk above her put his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes.

  “What’s happening?” he said.

  The other boy was alone at the fence with his friend’s body at his feet. Guards with torches surrounded him, and the furious barking of the dogs grew louder. Soon the boy was surrounded. One of the guards stepped forward. He pointed at the boy. The dogs moved onto their haunches, heads held aggressively low.

  “We should do something,” said Kim.

  Eric wanted to help, but he knew that he couldn’t. It was no secret what would happen to him the minute he stepped out of the cabin. He shook his head.

  Kim tuned away. “I can’t watch.”

  The boy backed up against the fence. He seemed surprised when his back hit the metal. Behind him, the infected who walked the perimeter had gathered. One grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him, but the boy shook himself free.

  The pointing guard suddenly dropped his arm. On the command, the dogs leapt forward and tore at the boy, their teeth chewing on whatever part of his body they could grip. The boy collapsed to the ground and covered his face. The animals bit and scratched at him. Though the sound was faint, Eric heard the boy screaming. It was a sound so terrible that it almost wasn’t human, and he felt his bones chill to the marrow.

  The guards stood in a circle and watched as the dogs ripped the life away from the boy. Eventually, the searchlights dimmed and the torches moved away. The two escapees were left lifeless on the ground. Their bodies would wait in the night air until morning, when one of the other inmates would have to move them.

  Chapter Six

  Heather

  She remembered the decapitated heads as they stared at her from the top of the stakes, and after that everything faded to black. When she woke up, the first sight to greet her was a row of metal bars. She was stretched out on a thin bed joined to a wall. She sat up, and as she rose a pounding started in her temples. She rubbed her head. It was like she’d spent all night drinking whisky and had woken with a thumping headache and a hate for the world.

  She’d seen the inside of a police cell before. It was years ago, at a time of flaring acne, underage drinking and pointless rebellion at anything her parents ever told her to do. She’d been out at the shopping centre with her friend, and they were just leaving a pharmacy when the anti-theft barriers lit up. The store detective rushed over and demanded that her friend give back the condoms that she’d stuffed into her pockets. Heather was innocent, but she was still treated to a trip to the station.

  Her father came to collect her hours later. She heard heavy footsteps march down the corridor, and somehow she just knew that it was him.

  “I don’t need to tell you how disappointed I am,” he said.

  “Then don’t.”

  He sighed at her in his signature way, where the greys of his moustache bristled as he exhaled air.

  “You can be so much more than this, Heather.”

  She scoffed at him at the time. A month later, the advice sunk in, and from then on she left her old group of friends behind and she buried her nose in books. She didn’t see her father’s moustache bristle much after that.

  Like her first visit to a cell, she was innocent this time too. I don’t have time for this, she thought. Images of Kim crossed her mind. She pictured her on a train with the other DCs. She didn’t want to think about what was happening, she just needed to find her.

  She got up from the bed. She was in a cell that had barely enough room for her to turn around, and a row of steel bars hemmed her in. Beyond them was a cream wall, and on it was a poster with a young teenage girl dressed for a night on the town. ‘Think 18,’ it read. ‘Know your limits.’

  A whistling sound came from beyond her cell. Listening closely, she recognised the tune as one that Charles Bull made when they were travelling. She knew it from another context, too. From a different place and time, and whistled by a different person.

  It was a song that her dad used to whistle, usually after he’d had a fight with Heather’s mum. As a girl she sat on the bottom step of her staircase and listened to her parents’ raised voices. After a while her mum would storm out of the house, and her dad would compose himself for a few minutes, and then leave the room. He’d walk out with a troubled face, but when he saw his daughter waiting for him, he replaced the expression with a smile and a whistle. Thinking harder, Heather remembered the words
he sometimes added to it.

  Always look on the bright side of life.

  There was a window behind her. Trying it, she found that it was fastened shut. She walked across the cell and took hold of the bars and shook them. She hadn’t expected it to do anything; it wasn’t as if she had superhuman strength.

  “Have a nice sleep?” said Charles, from the cell next to her.

  “Where are we?”

  “In a prison cell in Kiele, I expect,” came his reply.

  A door opened. Footsteps echoed on the plastic flooring, and soon Max stood outside her cell. There was a red spot on his neck from where Rushden’s knife had pressed too hard into his skin.

  Heather touched the back of her head. A lump was already forming just above her crown.

  “Is this how your town welcomes people?” she said.

  Max scratched the back of his neck. She could tell by his stance that he was several hours into an unhealthy sleep deficit.

  “Things changed while I was gone,” he said. “Rushden called a vote, and they elected him leader.”

  “Why did he have the knife? I didn’t expect a cup of tea and a biscuit, but what the hell am I doing in here?”

  “Rushden’s just being cautious.”

  Heather shook the bars, but they stood firm. “If this is caution, I’d hate to see him when he’s really got something to worry about.”

  “While I was gone, Rushden got whispers that the Capita are planning a raid. We think it’s on a town nearby. I don’t need to tell you that it’s made everyone just a little bit anxious, even if it’s not us in the crosshairs.”

  “Are they part of the Resistance too?”

  “Doesn’t really matter. The Capita take what they want, Resistance or not. If you’re with the Resistance, it just means they’re a little rougher about things.”

  She started to feel dizzy. She backed away from the bars and sat on the bed. The lining of it was waterproof. She guessed it was to prevent accidents or dirty protests back when this was a police station. In the corner there was a steel toilet, and Heather didn’t blame someone for wanting to use the bed instead of it. She heard Charles making noise in the cell next to her, but she didn’t know what he was doing. It sounded like he was messing with something metal.

  “So who is Rushden, anyway?” she said.

  “If you think I’m dedicated to the cause,” said Max, “then wait until you meet Rushden. He’s something else. Some people go by the book. Rushden sleeps with it under his pillow. You can’t even begin to understand the lengths the guy will go to protect the Resistance. He’ll do anything, and that includes torturing friends if he’s had a sniff that they’ve lost their loyalty.”

  “Is that what he did to you?”

  Max nodded.

  “So how come he let you out?”

  “I gave him the blood promise.”

  “And that is…?”

  Max unbuttoned the first few buttons on his shirt. He pulled it back to show his chest. A rough-looking ‘R’ had been carved into his skin. The wound was still fresh, and blood formed where the knife had met his skin.

  She was getting too caught up in things. The Resistance’s fight wasn’t hers. She had her own priorities and her own family to look after, and she needed to leave the cell. She wanted to get on a horse and ride through the gates of Kiele. For all she cared, the decapitated heads could stare at her as she went, just as long as she left them behind her.

  “I need to find Kim,” she said. “Can you spare me a horse? And some food and stuff?”

  “You’re not leaving yet.”

  “What?”

  Max took a breath. “Like I said; Rushden’s cautious.”

  “I can’t stay here, Max,” she said. She got to her feet. Bright spots jumped in her vision, and for a second she felt so faint that she might fall to the floor. It reminded her of the dizzy spells she used to get when she was pregnant with Kim.

  “What about my family?” said Max. “Kiela won’t talk to me, she just sulks. I’ve been to see her, and she wouldn’t even look at me. And my wife is…with someone else.”

  “It’s been three years, Max,” said Charles, from the cell next door. His booming voice bounced against the walls. “You don’t have enough of a sparkly personality to make her wait.”

  Heather decided that a gentler tone was needed. As much as she wanted to reach through the bars and slap Max in the face, it wouldn’t work here.

  “Who’s she with? Your wife?”

  “Rushden,” said Max. “She’s got a thing for power-hungry gingers.” The smile painted on his mask looked sadder than ever, but his stance was relaxed. He leaned against the wall behind him.

  “You don’t seem too cut up about it,” said Heather.

  “I told you before. Some things are more important than my personal problems. Mum used to call me and my dad stoic; she said we might as well have been made of stone. Besides, Charles is right. I can hardly blame her.”

  He seemed blasé about it, but Heather could tell from Max’s eyes that anger was smoldering in him. Sometimes it was easier to put on a front than admit that something bothered you. Having to wear a mask all the time made it easier than ever to keep truths hidden away.

  A high-pitched scream came from the end of the room. Heather walked to the bars and strained to see beyond them. At the end of the corridor was a closed door, and a pain-filled cry came out from behind it. It was enough for her to want to cover her ears.

  “It’s the trader, Wes,” said Max. “He got here a few days before us. Rushden put him straight in the interrogation room and set his best men to work on him.”

  Wes was a trader who used to operate from a district just outside the Capita border. Heather would sometimes go to him and barter for supplies that she couldn’t get anywhere else. The two had developed something that wasn’t friendship, but was more than just being acquaintances. That changed when Wes had given Heather, Kim and Eric up to the Capita in exchange for his own safety. When she heard Wes screaming in the Kiele police station, she didn’t exactly feel tears welling up inside her.

  “That doesn’t explain why he’s screaming so much,” said Heather.

  “That’s the sound a man makes when his fingernails are being peeled away,” said Charles. “I should know. I’ve done enough of it myself.”

  “Poor bastard,” said Heather, picturing it. Then she remembered how the trader had given her away to the Capita to save himself, and the pity she felt dissolved away.

  Max let out a long sigh. He moved closer to the bars. He spoke in a gentler tone this time.

  “You’ll get the same. Both of you. I’m sorry, Heather, but Rushden doesn’t take any chances.”

  Heather heard Charles get up from his bed. His boots thumped on the floor and bounced off the walls.

  “I bet this Rushden fella was the health and safety officer wherever he used to work. I met enough of those people in my time. Never happier than when they’re following guidelines and punishing people who stray.”

  Screams filtered through to them from the door at the end of the room. As the seconds went by they became louder and more high-pitched, and Heather just wished that it would stop. It wasn’t through pity that she wanted it, though. The trader was getting what he deserved. It was with the knowledge that she would be next.

  ~

  Max left them alone. Hearth stared at the ‘Think 18’ poster across from her. It showed a girl in a short dress, her face covered in enough makeup to deplete the cosmetic shelf at a department store. Behind her there was a bar with spirits lined up in bottles on it, and the room was lit neon. Despite her attempt at glamour, there was something naïve about the girl’s expression. There was a youth in her stare that gave away the lie she had tried to make about her age.

  Her daughter would never have a life like that, Heather knew. Kim’s fate was to live in a world where the infected roamed the streets and attacked anything that looked vaguely made of meat. For years to come th
e Capita would continue their march across the Mainland, taking what they wanted. Kim would never have a carefree life where her biggest worry was tricking a bouncer into letting her inside a club.

  “I admire them, you know,” said Charles. She heard him pace in the cell next to hers. “Complete control. They’ll do anything, and that’s what’s kept them alive. For now, at least. But life is fickle, and the Capita is too strong. The Resistance won’t amount to much when all’s said and done.”

  She had no desire to speak to the bounty hunter, but she needed something to take her mind off the screams that replayed in her head on a loop. They had stopped now, maybe because Wes had passed out during torture, but Heather was left with the ghost of his cries.