by Jack Jewis
He handed the bottle to Lilly. The girl cupped it in her hands.
“Drink it down,” Charles told her.
“You’re not wearing your mask,” said Heather.
She had seen him without a mask before. Back then it was the first time she’d seen him without his plague doctor costume, and looking at his normal face tricked her into thinking he was an actual person with feelings and emotions. She wouldn’t make the mistake of letting her guard down this time. Not when she knew what he was capable of.
Lilly made huffing sounds through her wounded nose as she drank down the liquid. Heather had already guessed that it was blood. From the bite marks across her legs and the damage on her face, it was clear that Lilly had been attacked by the infected.
“Tastes funny,” she said. She looked at her father. “Have you been eating well? It doesn’t taste like you have.”
“You’re infected, aren’t you?” asked Heather.
Lilly smiled. “I hope so. If not, then I’m just ugly.” She traced a finger around her wounded nose.
“Don’t say that,” Charles told his daughter. “They’re war scars. You should be proud of them.”
“Cut the crap, Dad.”
“What happened?” asked Heather.
Charles walked over to a couch and sat on it. His body sunk back into the fabric. He sighed.
“We used to live in Huddonold,” he said. “Back when the Capita was just a handful of people with a lust for power but not much to show for it. Lilly was in school when it was attacked by infected. By the time I got there, three teachers and fifteen boys and girls were dead. Lilly had climbed into the janitor’s closet to hide, but she didn’t realise that the janitor was in there, too. And he was infected.”
“I killed him with his gardening shears,” said Lilly, and smiled.
Charles looked over at his daughter, and a sad look spread across his face. “You did, Lilly. You did.”
There was a time when children had the luxury of being innocent. It was such a pure thing, thought Heather. Watching kids run around, oblivious to the dangers of the world. There always came a time when the spell had to break, though. It had happened to her daughter, Kim, and it sure as hell had happened to Lilly. She looked at the ginger-haired girl with her disfigured face, and she just wanted to give her a hug.
“I need to find Kim,” said Heather. She held the knife at her side. “Your dad is the only one who can take me there.”
“She’s in the camp, isn’t she?” said Lilly.
“How do you know?”
“I told dad to work there after I got bitten. It was the only way to get supplies.”
She couldn’t believe how old the girl sounded. It was as if someone had taken the brain of an adult and grafted it into her skull. Heather thought that Kim sometimes sounded clever beyond her years, but this girl was something else. There was something about her that nagged away at Heather. There was a look in her eyes; a sense of cunning, or even cruelty. It could have been a trick of the light, or maybe she took after her father.
She walked over to the window. The glass was covered by a white knitted curtain. When she pulled it back, she saw a unit of Capita soldiers advancing on the cottage. With them, shoulders slumped over a tired-looking horse, was the Capita soldier who she had left in the wastelands.
She turned around to face Charles and Lilly.
“How the hell did they find me?” she said.
Charles stood up.
“Don’t flatter yourself. They’re here for me. I’m assuming I’m going to be relieved of my duties, given my absence from the Dome.”
“I told you this would happen,” said Lilly. She pushed the wheels of her chair and positioned herself so that she could see out of the window.
“The Five aren’t patient and they don’t give second chances. They’re either assuming I’m dead given my lack of reports over the last week, or they think that I’ve joined the Resistance. Ishkur and his friends are more paranoid than you would ever believe.”
“So just explain to them,” said Heather. “Tell them you’ve been away. I’ll hide, and when they’re gone, we can go find Kim. I’ll go upstairs into one of the bedrooms. But I’m taking Lilly with me. If you say a word out of place, I’ll kill her.”
She tried to make it seem like she meant the threat, but even she knew there was no intention behind it.
“No, Heather,” said Charles. “They’re here to kill me.”
“And they’ll kill me too, in that case. So what the hell do we do now?”
Lilly spoke.
“We can leave.”
Charles looked at his daughter, and nodded.
“We can go to your mum’s old place on the coast.”
Lilly shook her head.
“We’ll go with Heather to the camp. You can’t keep me going on your blood forever. Come on Dad, you know that. I need flesh.”
It made Heather sick to hear a child talking this way. For this little girl, drinking blood and eating flesh had become a way of life. Her condition had twisted her mind until she had become a little monster. Despite that, Heather knew the girl wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t her fault she’d been bitten.
As the Capita soldiers walked toward the cottage, Heather knew that she had no choice. As much as Charles sickened her, she needed him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eric
She was getting worse by the day. When he looked at Kim on her bed, he couldn’t help but remember how bad his sister, Luna, had looked after she drank some water before mum boiled it. She spent the next week making constant trips outside to go to the toilet. So much so that they had to move on a day later because the smell was attracting foxes, and the foxes drew the infected.
Kim’s face was ghost white, and the bones in her cheeks stuck out like they were trying to get away from her skin. He’d persuaded her to try and eat more of the camp gruel, but it didn’t seem to do her much good.
Eric had spent the last day persuading some of the others to escape. He knew he couldn’t do it alone, and Kim wasn’t going to be a lot of help. He had to be careful who he asked, because some people loved to tell the guards what others were up to, because they thought it would get them special privileges.
Although he didn’t like him, he had chosen to tell Martin Wrench. After watching him in the race and seeing him trip up the other boy, Eric knew that Martin was devious, and that he was prepared to do anything. He made no secret of how much he hated camp, and although he had admitted he was scared, he seemed willing to risk danger.
“You’re cleverer than me,” Martin had said. “Work out what to do, and I’ll help.”
The plan was to convince Marta to use Goral’s keys and drive them out of there on the train. He would need to create a diversion somehow, because he needed to distract the guards and take as many DCs with him as possible.
“All well and good having a train,” said Martin. “but there are still the guards.”
“I’ve got a plan for that,” Eric told him.
Later that night Eric told Kim to cover for him while he sneaked out of the cabin. She sighed and nodded her head, and then she put her hand on her belly as if it was hurting her. Eric didn’t know if she’d really heard what he said, but he didn’t have a choice.
He crawled across camp. When a searchlight swooped nearby he stayed still – pretend it’s a wasp – and he took his time. He realised that people made mistakes when they tried to rush things. That’s how the other boys had been caught, he decided. They’d tried to escape without being patient and having a real plan.
He went all the way across the yard to the section where the red brick buildings were. He had never been this far before, and at first he thought there would have been lots of guards. The stars twinkled in the sky above him, and the moon was hidden behind a cloud so dark that it melted into the sky. All the guards were asleep. Either that or they were drinking and playing cards. Sometimes they took DC women from the cabins out fo
r a walk, but Eric didn’t know what they did with them or why these women got special privileges.
The train was beyond the kennels and Dr. Scarsgill’s building, fifty metres past the fence that ran around the perimeter of camp. To get there he was going to need to do something about the infected who wandered freely between the metal, and he was still going to have to persuade Marta to agree to drive the train.
Deciding that he’d learned enough for one night, he started back across the yard. His footsteps made little noise on the stone, although sometimes he stopped and stayed really still, sure that he heard something nearby. When he finally got to his own cabin, he froze in place. All of a sudden, his heart sped up.
The lights in his cabin were on, and through the window, he saw guards walking between the beds.
It’s an inspection, he thought. And they’re going to see that I’m not there.
His first emotion was panic so cold that it was as if a guard had gripped his neck and plunged him into an ice bath. He pictured them walking through the cabin and tearing it apart to find him. Finally they’d find the hatch that he used to sneak out from. They’d seal it up, punish Eric and probably do the same to the rest of the DCs just for being in the same cabin.
He knew that Kim was good at lying. Her mum, Heather, was forever scolding her for it, but for some reason Kim just couldn’t help herself. If something took an hour she’d say that it had taken five, and if the sky was blue she’d say it was grey. They were pointless and mostly harmless lies. Maybe she could put them to good use and make up a reason for Eric not being there.
All he had to do was get back into the cabin. The problem was that if he went back in through the hatch he’d make too much noise, and they’d wonder why he was at the back of the cabin rather than in bed. And he could hardly just walk back in through the front door, either. What would he say? ‘Sorry, I just went out for a walk. The yard is lovely at this time of night.’
Stood in the yard with a shivering wind hugging him, he was alone. This was the first time during any of his late-night wanderings that he’d really felt any danger. He knew what the guards would do to him if he was ever caught, but he’d pushed it to the back of his mind, to the same place where he kept the worry he felt about his mum and sister.
Eric had always been good at shutting things off. It was one of his talents; that when something bad happened he created some space in his mind, put the bad thing in there and then imagined a big metal door clanking shut and leaving it in darkness. The problem was that these days everything was bad, and he worried that soon there’d be so many bad things locked away in his head that there’d be no room for the good.
He looked around him to see what his options were. It only took him a split second, because Dam Marsh was dead end after dead end, closed door after closed door.
There were the cabins, but he couldn’t get in his own and it wouldn’t do any good to go into another one. ‘Sorry, forgot which cabin was mine. What was I doing outside? Err…’ There was the metal fence that surrounded the perimeter, and the infected shuffled back and forth beyond it, but it wasn’t time to use them yet. Finally, he saw the red brick buildings at the back of camp. One of them was Dr. Scarsgill’s lab. The guard barracks was somewhere out of view, and beyond that was the train.
The only building he could see properly was the kennels. He supposed this was so that the DCs had plain view of the guards’ snarling hounds, so that they knew what would be let loose on them if they ever had the stupid notion of defiance or escape.
Torch lights flickered in his cabin. A burly man in a Capita uniform stood in the window, blocking the inside of the cabin from view. They weren’t quite at Eric’s bed yet, but it wouldn’t be long now. If Kim tried to lie for him and got caught, she’d be in as much trouble as him.
He walked across the yard. Stopping thirty feet away from the kennels, he reached down to the ground and picked up a stone. He twisted it in his fingers, and yellow dust crumbled away and covered his skin.
The dogs were sleeping in their kennels. Some held their paws out and stretched their heads across them, while others curled up into the tightest ball they could. One was on its back, limbs stretched wide into the most uncomfortable sleeping position imaginable. Like this, they were almost cute, but Eric had seen them in the day. Black eyes staring out of angry-looking faces, mouths wide open to show teeth sharp enough to snap bone. Spit spraying out with every bark. Sometimes, even the guards gave a wary glance as they walked past them.
He squinted at the dog directly in front of him. He tensed his arm, took his aim, and then threw the stone. It clanged against the bars in front of the dog and then bounced off to the side. The dog wiped a paw against its sleepy face.
He picked up another stone. He breathed like he’d seen the guards in the watchtowers do before they fired their guns. He imagined the stone hitting the dog’s head.
He threw it. It lopped in an arc, staying on a true course toward the dog as it fell. It hit the dog on the nose, and the hound was on its feet in a second. The dog started giving a bark that sounded throaty at first, like a man waking up in the morning and coughing his throat clear. The bark grew louder, and soon the other dogs stirred. On waking, the first thing they did was return the gruff sound, and soon enough the entire section of camp was drowned out by the wild shouting of the canines.
Eric sneaked away and hid behind the corner of a cabin. Sure enough, his own cabin door opened, and the guards filed out. Their torch beams bounced over the ground as they ran toward the kennels. As they ran past him he held his breath, but the men and women were too distracted by the dogs to even glance around them.
When he got into his cabin, he walked over to Kim’s bed. She saw him, and she reached out and grabbed him, and pulled him into a hug. It seemed as if the act drained the last scrap of energy from her body, because afterwards she pushed him away and slumped back onto the pillow.
“You were this close,” she said. “I swear to God, they were almost going to check your bed. And I don’t think my handiwork would have fooled them.”
He glanced at his bed. Kim had put his pillow under the bedsheets so that it looked like he was sleeping in it, but there was a problem with the disguise; he didn’t appear to have a head.
Back in his cabin, with the stale sweaty air and water buckets, he missed the breeze of the yard. At the same time, there was something about being out there that made him feel vulnerable, as if things crept up on him from all sides. The odds were against them both, he realised. Between the guards and the dogs and the infected, the Capita was sure to catch them if they escaped. It wouldn’t stop there, either. With their resources, the Capita would pursue them across the Mainland, hunting them down until they were too tired to run anymore.
“I’m worried, Kim,” he told her. “Even if we get out, they’ll hunt us all our lives. We’re just too valuable to them, aren’t we? Do you ever get the idea that it’s just our fate to be victims?”
Kim shook her head.
“Snap out of it. Mum told me ‘everything you want is on the other side of fear.’ I never understood what she meant, but I see the infected on the other side of the fences, and I know everything we want is somewhere beyond them.”
~
Later that night his body jerked awake. It took his mind a few seconds to catch up, but once it did, he saw a cabin covered in darkness, with the other DCs snoring around him. His blanket covered his legs but his bare chest was exposed to the cold air, and goose pimples welled on his skin.
The door of the cabin whined as someone opened it. Eric stayed still. He watched as a figure walked inside. He wondered what the guards were doing here at this time. Maybe one of them had already seen that Eric hadn’t been here earlier, and they’d come to take him away. There was nothing he could do now. He would just have to act dumb. Tell them he’d been here all along and didn’t know what they were talking about.
He didn’t hear the heavy thuds of Capita boots, and didn�
�t see the green, over-starched uniforms. Instead there was a tall man in a plastic coat, a beaky nose protruding against the fabric of his mask, his cold skin matching the air around him.
What the hell was Scarsgill doing here?
Scarsgill walked into the cabin. He was so tall that it wouldn’t have taken much more for him to hit his head on the ceiling. He looked around him from bed to bed, until finally his gaze settled just beyond Eric. Eric couldn’t turn to see what Scarsgill was looking at, because he didn’t want the doctor to think he was awake.
A guard followed the doctor into the cabin. Scarsgill’s shoes made pattering sounds as he crossed the floor. When he walked past Eric’s bed, he caught the scent of something that seemed like cigarettes but was stronger, as if the doctor had smoked five of them at once.