by Lewis, Jack
Justin sat by the smouldering fire. The smoke drifted up into the sky in patches, and the embers glowed red. He had his right legged crossed over his left and he was tying a sock around his ankle.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He looked up at me and blinked. “It’s for support.”
I had to take a deep breath. For the last two days since leaving the wholesalers it had been tough to keep a handle on the burning feeling that rose in my chest. My fists were constantly clenched and my whole body was so tense I felt like I was going to snap in half.
Back at the warehouse Justin had done what he swear he wouldn’t; he’d gone against my instructions and done his own thing. I told him to stick with me and we’d escape, but instead he climbed to the top of a twenty foot shelf to get food and tried to be a hero. Now he’d screwed up his ankle and he was walking like a damn cripple, and the journey to the reservoir had taken us two days when it should have taken six hours.
I should have just left him. Why should I support him and set myself back days because hop along can’t match my pace anymore? He did this to himself.
But I couldn’t leave. He knew where the farm was, and I wasn’t giving up.
My face was starting to get red again. I walked over to the fire and stomped on it. The embers hissed under my boot and sparks shot out from the side. I ground my teeth and then spoke, trying my best to keep my tone level.
“What did I tell you, Justin? What did I make you promise to me?” I said, losing the fight to keep the contempt out of my voice.
He lifted his head a little. He looked ashamed. “To listen.”
“So why didn’t you do that, damn it?”
I took a deep breath. I curled my hands into a fisted and pressed the middle of my palm with the tip of my fingers. It was a technique Clara had shown me to calm me down, but this time it didn’t work. I looked at the kid in front of me and all I could think was how he’d broken my GPRS and forced me to take him along, about how he’d ignored my instructions at every turn and got us in such a mess that we weren’t getting to the farm this side of Christmas. I looked at the boy and all I saw was someone who was ruining everything for me. A stupid little kid who didn’t know what he was messing with.
Everything I did was for my promise to Clara, and he was fucking it up.
Who the hell did he think he was?
My veins pulsed, and my skin felt hot. I started to feel my head go fuzzy and knew I wasn’t going to be able to think properly because the anger was taking over. I raised my right boot in the air.
“God damn it!” I screamed.
I kicked what was left of the fire and sent red embers flying in all directions. Justin twisted his body away and moved back to avoid being hit. His eyes were wide and his face started to drain white. As the last of the red embers turned black and fell to the earth, I picked up my bag.
“We’re moving.”
Justin didn’t move. He had his knees drawn up to his chest and rested his head on them.
“Get up. You’ve wasted enough of our time.”
He still didn’t move. I took a deep breath and walked over to him. Was he crying? I couldn’t tell. I felt a pang in my chest, and the hot feeling that was burning through me started to fade. This wasn’t me. It was just the situation making me feel like this. It was like everything turned to shit at the slightest opportunity, and my options were narrowly dwindling away.
We had no supplies, no energy and we had a group of hunters close on our tracks. Now the only thing we could do was get a car, and to do that I had to go see my brother-in-law, David.
***
We crossed the road and walked by the side of the reservoir. Something about the pool of water and the way the hills were positioned around it collected the wind and made it snap around our heads. My ears started to hurt, and I could see Justin’s turning red.
“Put your hood up,” I said.
He reached behind him and lifted his hood over his head, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t spoken since I had gone mad and kicked the fire. For me, there was nothing wrong with the silence. But I couldn’t have him in a mood. I needed him to listen to me and do what I said, so I needed to snap him out of it.
We reached the merchant’s pathway that turned away from the reservoir. If we followed it for ten minutes, we would reach the old building that David had taken as his home sometime after Clara died and we went our separate ways.
“Sit down a minute,” I said.
I sat down on a bench next to the reservoir, and Justin did the same. Behind us the waves gently lapped. Today would have been a perfect day for wind surfing.
I looked at the kid. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his face was drained of colour. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked up at me and arched his eyebrows quizzically.
“It’s important to me,” I said, “Getting to the farm. And when you do something to fuck it up, I can’t help but get a little upset.”
He cleared his throat. His voice was the quietest I’d ever heard it. “What’s so special about it? You obviously can’t stand having me around, so what’s so good about the farm you put up with me to get there?”
His voice sounded hurt, and I knew everything he said was true. If I could have had my way, the GPRS would be working and Justin would have been back in Vasey. But things hadn’t worked out like that, and you had to work with what you had. Besides, there were some things he could do that came in useful, I guess. He wasn’t a total pain in the arse.
I looked at him and I suddenly saw him for what he was; just a lonely kid with no family. He wanted an escape route, and when he saw me, he took it. He knew he didn’t belong with the people in Vasey, that he was different from them all. Maybe Justin and I were similar after all.
I thought about his question and what to say to him. It was hard, the feeling of having to share something, but the hurt in the boy’s voice stung me. It wouldn’t kill me to tell him a little more about the farm.
“I promised someone very special to me that I’d get them there. It was a few years ago, after all everything kicked off.”
“Who was it?”
I took a deep breath. “My wife. The farm was her father’s. We didn’t live up North; we’d driven here to visit his farm when all of this kicked off. That’s why I still had it programmed into the GPRS.”
“You’ve got a Northern accent though.”
I smiled. “I was born here, but Clara and I left Lancashire and moved to London. My mates never forgave me.” I smiled to myself when I remembered the stick my friends would give me for becoming what they called a ‘London yuppie’.
Justin wiped his nose. “So you’ve been to the farm before then, if it was her dad’s?”
I shook my head. “All the time I knew her – Christ, a decade – Clara never spoke to him. No family meals, no birthday cards, nothing. They couldn’t stand each other, and it was over something so damn petty. And then one day, completely out of the blue, he picked up the phone. So we loaded up the car and drove up here.”
“How come you didn’t make it?”
I looked into the water of the reservoir and tried to see to the bottom, but it was too dense to make out anything but a dark brown tint. The wind nipped at my ears.
“Before we got there,” I said, “the world ended.”
There was a few seconds of silence as we both stared into the pool of water. Somewhere above, a bird squawked. I turned my head to Justin. The boy was leant forward with his elbow propped up on his leg and his chin resting in his palm. His eyes were deep and engrossed in thought.
I cleared my throat. “I made a promise; I told Clara I’d get us there; that whatever state the farm was in, we would fix it up and make it our own. It wasn’t the greatest plan in the world, but it was the best we had. Better than living day to day with a target on your back. We could get crops plants, fix the farm up. We’d never need anybody every again.”
“Sounds like
a great plan,” said Justin.
***
We walked through the merchant path. Years ago it had been a stone walkway that cut a clear trail through the grass, but after fifteen maintenance-free years it was covered in weeds and the stone was cracked. The hills to either side of us offered a little protection from the cutting wind.
As we got nearer to David’s house, my heart hammered. I hadn’t seen him in years, and the way we left it hadn’t exactly been friendly. I knew he’d be pissed off at me, especially when I came to him asking for his car. If I could have thought of any solution, no matter how difficult, I would have turned around in an instant.
Justin kept his head down and walked, which hopefully meant his curiosity about me was satisfied for the time being. I still felt anger faintly twisting in my chest over what he’d done, but I knew it wouldn’t do us any good to take it out on him.
“Your steps are getting quieter,” I said.
He nodded.
I tried to smile at him. “Well done.”
Ten minutes later we reached what passed for David’s house. It was a red-bricked building that had once stored pumps that helped in some way toward filtering water from the reservoir. The pumps had been removed years ago, and ever since then the building had been left to fall apart. There were four windows cracked with dust, and at one side of the building there was a power generator, though it wasn’t switched on. There was space at the back of the building for a yard, which is where his car would be.
Justin started to walk ahead, but I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Steady on, kid. Wait a minute.”
“Isn’t this where your brother lives?”
“Brother in law.”
“Whatever, what’s the problem?”
I scratched my chin. “You’ll see. David’s…not quite right.”
I stared at the building for a few minutes, trying to find a sign of life, but I couldn’t see anything. I looked at the generator again. Despite that it wasn’t humming right now, I knew it would be a working power supply. David was a genius at things like that, mechanical stuff. Electronics, cars, computers, power, you name it, he had a working knowledge of it. These days, that was a valuable skill to have. It was a pity his personality made people want to get a hundred miles away from him.
I opened my mouth and filled my lungs with air. “Let’s go.”
We walked down a path and toward the front door. I knocked on it, three taps that shattered the stillness of the air.
“David?” I said.
There was no answer. Maybe he had left.
I knocked again.
“David, you here?”
Nothing.
I turned the handle and opened the door. We stepped inside David’s home. It was a draughty one-floored building with a stone floor and walls that felt cold to the touch. In one corner of the room there was a pile of hay that was spread into a makeshift bed. There was a carpenter’s table with basin of water and a razor on one end, and some nuts scattered on the other. It seemed like this was his bathroom sink and his dining table all rolled into one. Scattered around all over the floor were bits and pieces David had scavenged; batteries, smoke alarms, jumper cables, screwdrivers, copper wire, rope.
“What the hell?” said Justin from the other end of the room.
I walked over. There was a table and two chairs. On the table there was a mug with coffee stains on the sides, and across from it there was an ashtray with a single butt stubbed out. I saw what Justin was looking at, what had confused him.
In one of the chairs female mannequin sat. She had long dark hair so slick that it looked like it had been brushed every night. In her left hand was a book, and it had been arranged so that it was open in the middle, as though she were reading it.
I shook my head. Had David really fallen this far? Was he pretending to have company?
“What is this?” said Justin. He ran his hand down the arm of the mannequin.
“I told you, David is strange.”
“Guess I believe you now. But why do this?”
I looked at the mannequin again. She was wearing a t-shirt that I swore was one of Clara’s. It couldn’t be, could it?
“Loneliness,” I said. “He misses people.”
Justin sat down in the chair opposite the mannequin. “Then why not go to town? What comfort can he possibly get from a doll?”
I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed. “David is scared of being alone, but he doesn’t trust people any more.” I looked down at the floor and tried to blot out the memory that was coming back to me, unwanted. “Someone let him down,” I said.
Justin stood up. “But why the pretend people? What comfort does a block of plastic give you?”
I was about to answer, when I heard the door open behind me.
I span my body round toward it and reached down to my belt for my knife, but it was no use. David was stood in front of me, and he had a shotgun pointed at my head. His arms were shaking and his eyes were wild. I couldn’t even tell if he recognised me.
“Sit on the floor. Hands behind your heads. And get away from Leila.”
Chapter 14
He pointed the shotgun at us but he couldn’t seem to choose between me or Justin, and he adjusted his aim so that he was in the middle. Presumably this meant he’d be able to shoot either of us should he need to.
How long had it been since I last saw him? I must have been half a decade at least, and those five years hadn’t been kind to either of us. The hair above his temple had receded so that his fringe was reduced to just a small patch just above his forehead, and his once dark hair was flecked with grey. His cheeks were sunken and the bones protruded against them, and there was a lost look in his big brown eyes. He was six foot two inches tall, but his back looked slightly crooked, and his arms were definitely thinner. Although he was looking straight at us, there was something vacant in his eyes.
“C’mon, Dave, lower the piece,” I said. “If you fire that thing we’ll be covered in infected. You know that as well as I do.”
Instead of putting the gun down, he trained it on my face.
“Rather see an infected than you.”
He didn’t mean that, I knew. David was terrified of the infected, always leaving the killing to Clara and me.
“Where’d you even get it?” I said, trying to think of anything to say to calm him down.
He sucked in his cheeks. “Lots of farmers round here. Farm houses. Animals. Guns. You can get a lot of stuff, if you look for it. Found the generator outside a barn.”
His words spilled out of him in quick-fire succession, so fast that that it was like they were on a spinning conveyor belt that David couldn’t control. He’d always been like this; a little on edge, the wrong side of erratic. He’d gotten a lot worse since I last saw him.
He took a step forward. “Hands behind your head. Move away from there.” He jerked his gun to his left. He looked at Justin.
“You asked about Leila, about why I have her. Simple – I like people but I don’t trust the real thing. Leila doesn’t get angry, doesn’t talk back,” he said. He looked straight at me. “Leila wouldn’t just abandon me.”
The way he spoke worried me. David was the cleverest guy you could meet when it came to mechanics, science, and practical things like that. But, as Clara had explained to me before I met him for the first time, he had some problems growing up. There were some things about the world that he couldn’t comprehend and struggled to cope with, and things like emotion were always a foreign language to him. Clara always knew just how to handle him, but I was useless at first and it took me years to get on his level.
“Who are you?” asked David, looking at Justin.
“He’s with me,” I said.
David tutted. “Watch this one. Your sister will die and then he’ll just leave you to fend for yourself.”
Justin nodded. “Don’t worry, he’s already told me I’m on my own when we get to the -”
I
interrupted him before he said the word ‘farm’. The last thing I needed was David knowing where we were going. If he knew we were going to his dad’s house he’d want to come with us, and I didn’t need that.
There was a small part of me that knew that I actually owed it to him, letting him come along, but I tried to suffocate that side.
Justin didn’t seem to be scared by David, but I was worried. Deep down he had a kind heart, but the problem was it sometimes got clouded by poison. He used to have rages that he struggled to control, and you didn’t want to be around when he took the lid off.