by Lewis, Jack
"Through the high street and straight on out of town. That way, we make a detour that cuts out half the terrain that the motorway can't avoid."
"And what about them?" he said, nodding to the infected that were in front of us.
Two of them stood in our path, and when they saw us approaching them they turned and moaned. I tried to make out what they had once looked like, but fifteen years after infection it was tough to see any humanity in them. Their faces were full of sharp edges from where their bones pressed against their skin, and their scraggly hair tumbled to their shoulders. They stretched out their arms, and at the ends of their fingers long, dirty fingernails pointed at us. That was one of the more disgusting things about the infected; the fact that their hair and fingernails carried on growing after death.
"Is this one of the times we ignore them?" asked Justin.
I reached for my knife, took hold of the handle and pulled it out. I turned to the kid. "Think about it. Which direction do we need to go?"
"Straight on."
"And where are they?"
"Straight on."
I pointed my knife at them. "Then this isn't one of the times we ignore them. You take the smaller one on the left - he looks your height. "
I walked forward, poised and alert. Justin kept pace with me, and when we got closer he pulled out his knife. He held it at an awkward angle, almost at his waist, which meant that he had more work to do to stab the infected in the head. I held mine at head height and tensed my arm. Set on earning their meal, the infected let out guttural moans and stumbled toward us. They were only metres away now, and I could feel my pulse quicken in anticipation. I steadied my legs and got ready to stab.
My infected launched at me clumsily, hoping to grab onto some part of me with its outstretched arms. It was tall and its belly was bloated, and it wore a ragged football shirt. I stepped to the side and let it stumble past me. I reached forward and grabbed the back of its collar, but the material was so rotted that it tore clean out of my grasp.
To my left, Justin cried out. I snapped my eyes on him and saw that he had lodged his knife in the smaller infected's chest just below the collar bone, and he was trying to push the straining monster away. I took three strides toward him, raised my knife in the air and then planted it in the top of the infected's head, caving in its skull a meringue. I let it drop to the floor.
Justin sank to the ground, his eyes wide and his face a deathly white.
The infected to my right growled. I turned toward it but it was already in my face, so close to me that when it snapped its teeth I could hear the sound of them clacking together. I took hold of it by the neck with my left hand, raised my right and then brought my knife down into its skull. As the dead body fell to the floor, I let a long breath escape my lungs. After a few seconds, I got myself together.
"Did it bite you?" I asked him.
He shook his head. His face was pale and I could see that his hands were shaking. This was the first time that I had ever seen the kid scared - he hadn't even blinked when I'd strangled him back in the shack. I knew I should ask him if he was alright, show a little concern, but I didn’t have time for that.
"Pull yourself together," I said. "There will be more."
Sure enough, behind us at the bottom of the high street a couple of infected had gathered and were slowly picking up our trail. More would appear before long, I knew, and soon we'd have a crowd of them chasing us. The chase itself wasn't a problem, because they could never pick up enough speed to catch you. The problem was that they were relentless. Once they got on your trail - that was it. They wouldn't stop and rest, they wouldn’t sleep. They were driven by only one basic impulse, and they would stop at nothing to get it.
"Pick up your pace." I said.
We moved quicker down the high street. I looked behind me and saw that the two infected were now six. Ahead of us, the street twisted round a corner. I knew that round it there was another short walk and then we were out of Blackfoot. I couldn’t wait to leave.
I looked behind us again. Now there were ten of them. Where the hell were they coming from?
"Just round this corner then we're home free. Come on, speed it up. And don't look back."
As soon as he heard me say the words, Justin looked back. "Shit," he said.
We were moving just short of a jog now. We travelled through the high-street and turned the corner, after which we would be golden.
As soon as we turned the corner though, I froze.
"Oh, fuck," said Justin.
I would have scolded the kid for his language, but his sentiment was right, because in front of us was a giant makeshift barricade that completely blocked the exit to the village. It stretched twenty metres from either side and was made of various items of scrap metal - steel sheets, kitchen sinks, shopping trolleys - that were arranged like a madman's game of Tetris. There was no way through it, and there was sure as hell no way to move it.
Behind us, a couple of hundred metres and closing, fifteen or so infected chased us.
"Now what?" said Justin.
"Give me a minute," I said, and put my hand to my forehead.
Justin stared at the makeshift barricade that blocked us in. His eyes seemed to light up, and a little of the colour came back to his cheeks. "There's a way through," he said.
I looked at the barricade again. It might not have been air tight - there were gaps in it here and there - but there sure as hell wasn't enough room for a person to fit through.
"Don’t be stupid," I said.
He looked at me with a wounded look on his face. "I'm telling you, Kyle. There's a way. Stop being so stubborn and listen to me." He walked over to the barricade. "Lemme go first then, and prove it."
I was going to tell him to shut up and let me think, but before I could say anything he moved a shopping trolley as much as he could to one side to work enough room to squeeze into. With that, he squirmed his way through the barricade. I looked at the hole that he had left, and there was no way I was going to fit my frame through it. I was considerably bigger than Justin, and I was nowhere near as agile. The kid was like a rat.
I bit my tongue and tried to fight back the rising anger that I could feel building. Why had he gone off like that? Way back when we started, hadn't I specifically told him that he had to do everything I said, that he mustn’t act on his own? Yet he had gone and done just that, leaving me stood on my own, trapped and with twenty of the infected closing in. Just wait until I got hold of him; the strangling was going to seem like a treat compared to what I would do this time.
The infected were close enough now that I could make out what passed for their faces. I could see their expressions - blank for the most part, yet there was something like desire in their eyes, something in their stares that glimmered. It was likely a hunger for my flesh, but it was proof enough to me that something about them was still alive, even though they weren’t people.
At their pace, I had five minutes until they reached me. I still had my knife, and with that I could probably take a few of them out, but with no space to fight and nowhere to run, this was a battle I was sure to lose.
Above me the sky had taken on a late-afternoon grey tint. It was getting dark, and we were supposed to be out of the village by now. I looked at the barricade. Where the hell was the kid?
"Justin?" I shouted, no longer caring about making a noise.
There was no answer.
I weighed up my options. As I saw it, I only had two; fight the twenty infected on my own, or try and get through the barricade.
I put my knife back in my belt and walked up to the wall of scrap metal. I found the part that Justin had squeezed through, and I pushed on the shopping trolley to try and make a little more room for myself. Blowing out as much air as I could to make my body smaller, I crawled forward. I worked my way slowly through the barricade, squeezing my body into a much smaller space than it had any right to fit. Through squirming carefully and sucking in my stomach, I cou
ld almost see an exit.
And then I got stuck.
I tried to move my body, but it was wedged right between two blocks of metal. I felt my chest tighten and adrenaline shot through me as the panic took over. No matter how much I tried I couldn't move. Outside the barricade and on the high street, the infected were so close that I could hear them moan. My legs poked out of the barricade and soon they would be an open target for the infected to chew on. I was going to be eaten alive.
Or half of me was, anyway.
I started breathing noisily heavily though my nostrils, and it was all I could do now to shout out madly. "Justin," I said in as calm a voice as I could. "If you're here, I need your help right fucking now."
When no reply came, I suspected the worst for him. For now though, his wellbeing was the furthest thing from my mind. This was it for me. The infected were getting closer to my outstretched legs, and I was completely stuck.
From outside the barricade, a gun popped off. There was the sound of bodies hitting the pavement as the gun exploded several times, and then it stopped. My heart hammered. I twisted and turned and slowly shifted the metal off me and backed my way out. I managed to move my body around so that the top half of me was out of the barricade, but my leg was still trapped. I looked up and saw what the sounds had been.
A man was there. A man with a gun and a grin.
Chapter 8
There were still five stray infected all within a feet of him, but the man didn’t seem to care. One of them stumbled close, but he sidestepped, got behind it and drove a hunting knife through its head with a crack, sending bloody skull fragments to the floor. He wiped the blade on his green khaki trousers.
As he walked over to me his steps were almost playful, and despite how heavy his boots looked, they didn’t make a sound on the ground. Justin could learn something about stealth from this guy. He had a thick brown moustache that curled over his top lip and into his mouth, which must have been irritating, and his eyes were small, squinty, and gave him an almost sneering look. I wondered if his army khakis meant he was in the military, or if he was one of those guys who just loved to pretend he was.
Before getting to me he stopped above the body of one of the infected. It was a little boy who wore a blue t-shirt. The man put his foot underneath the boy’s body and gave a kick, flipping him over. On the boys t-shirt, faded but just about there, was the outline of a train. The man looked at the boy’s face as though he was trying to recognise him, but attempting to see any facial features was made impossible through fifteen years of infection. He shook his head and turned his attention back on me.
I moved my foot and tried to pry it loose inch by inch, but it wouldn’t move. The weight of the metal on it was such that if I moved too much, the whole barricade was going to shift itself onto me and break my foot, and then I really would be screwed. I could still move my arms though, so I reached to my waist and pulled out my knife. I looked at the man and wondered if I’d get time to use it.
He lifted his gun up in the air and gave a sideways nod to it, with a mocking look in his eyes.
“Gun beats knife,” he said. His voice was gravelly, like a boot crunching on glass.
He was right, I knew. If things went bad I could swing my knife all I wanted, but all he had to do was take a step back out of my reach, pull the trigger and I’d be done. With the metal sheets trapping my leg, I was completely at his mercy. Behind him, the four infected were slowly making their way toward us. I felt sweat trickle down my forehead.
The man took a step closer and knelt in front of me so that his head was only a little higher than mine. Up close he had the same unwashed smell that most of us travellers had, so it was obvious he wasn’t from Vasey. He also smelt faintly of Old Spice, and I didn’t know where he could have gotten that from, or why. What did it matter how we smelt these days? He had a dark leather belt around his waist. On one side of it was a sheath for his knife, and then wrapped around the rest of it were what seemed to be parts taken from various animals – a couple of rabbits paws, presumably for luck, and some teeth that looked like they were from an alligator, though he must have ordered these online before the infection. As I followed the trail of animal memorabilia hung around his belt my eyes snapped onto something, and I felt a cold shiver run through me.
There was a human ear on his belt. It was torn and mangled, but unmistakably human.
I remembered what Justin had said about the hunters, and suddenly it didn’t seem so stupid. The need to free my leg became more urgent, and the feeling of being trapped jabbed at me. It was a struggle to control my breathing, and my chest felt tight. Behind us, getting closer still, the infected moved toward us.
“Name’s Torben,” he said. His voice was as rough as sandpaper. “Torben Tusk.”
I looked down at my leg, but there was no way I could get myself free. It would take someone to hold up the metal while I dragged myself out, and Torben didn’t move to help. I still had my knife in my hand, but he was knelt in such a way that he could easily move himself back if I took a swing at him. The infected were moving slowly toward us right now, but they would speed up when they got closer, and at that point I would need Torben to take care of them or they would be on me.
Where the hell was Justin? I wanted to look at the other side of the barricade to where he had squirmed his way through, but I didn’t want to draw Torben’s attention to it. The longer he thought I was alone, the better.
My only option was to see what he wanted, and hope he didn’t want one of my ears for his belt. I was conscious of the fact that my bag was on the floor a few feet away from me, and in it were the bulk of our supplies as well as the broken GPRS. I prayed Torben didn’t notice it.
Torben wiped his knife on his khakis again. He brought the tip of it toward his mouth and stuck his tongue out so that it was millimetres away from the blade. I thought of the lingering infected atoms that would still be on the silver, just waiting to enter a new host.
“Peculiar, don’t you think? One little nick from this blade, and in a few days I’ll be one of them,” he said, gesturing behind him. He didn’t seem to care that the four infected were only fifty feet away and headed in his direction.
I stayed quiet and kept my eyes focussed on him, waiting for the slightest of movements in my direction. As silently as I could, I twisted my foot and tried to make room to pull it out.
He held the blade of the knife in front of him as if transfixed. “We’re all living like this – inches away from the knife edge. Makes you wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just give in and become one of them.”
The infected were forty feet away now. Where was Justin?
Torben leant in a little closer. “How’d you come to be in this fix?”
I feigned a smile. “I slipped.” I needed to play nice as much as I could, but I wasn’t telling him anything.
“Accidents happen easier than you think, ‘specially now. You from town?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
He turned his head away from me and looked at my rucksack on the floor. As he moved, I saw an infected closing in behind him less than ten metres away. My heart pounded. Should I warn him, or should I let it pounce on him? I didn’t trust the guy an inch, and he gave off a vibe that made me want to get far away. But once the infected was done with him, it would eventually turn its attention toward me. Justin was gone and I was stuck, and I’d be helpless as all four of the infected ripped me to pieces.
The infected was five steps away.
“Behind you,” I said.
Without even looking first, Torben readied his knife and span his body, connecting with the stomach of the infected and slashing a deep gash through its skin. Through the tear in its abdomen the infected’s rotten guts slipped out and slapped onto the floor. Torben sprang to his feet, hooked his right leg behind the infected and pushed it to the ground. He walked around to its head, lifted his boot in the air and brought it down with all his weight. The infected’s skull cav
ed like a watermelon and sprayed bits of blood and bone onto the road.
Somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of someone retching. I couldn’t move my head because that meant taking the effort to reposition my whole body, and this would draw Torben’s attention to what I was trying to look at. I knew who was being sick behind the barricade. It had to be Justin. I just hoped he had the sense to keep quiet.
In front of me, Torben lifted his leg, propped it awkwardly on his knee and tried to balance. He picked at the grills of his boots with his knife and dug out a piece of flesh that had lodged between them.
“These are great in the snow, but they’re a bitch to clean,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, what’ve we got here?” He walked toward my rucksack, unzipped it and began to look through it.
The sight of the stranger fishing through my things made my blood run hot. I tried to pull my leg toward me, but the metal wouldn’t budge. As Torben looked through my bag, I slowly moved my body so that I could get a view of the other side of the barricade. I managed to do it without him seeing, and on the other side of the barricade, there he was. Sure enough, it was Justin, and his face was pale.