by Lewis, Jack
I tapped Justin on the shoulder, but he didn’t stir. A bubble of spit blew from the corner of his mouth and popped. I gave him a hove, and this time his eyelids flickered and then opened.
He looked at me, blinked, and then went to say something. I reached across and put my hand over his mouth.
“Don’t move, don’t speak. Trust me.”
When he nodded, I slid my hand slowly away from him. I moved back down my seat and beckoned Justin to do the same in his. He moved his body down the seat, finding a lot easier than I did. Now we just had to hope that David didn’t decide to wake up.
The truck got closer and soon it was driving next to us. Through some instinct I breathed in and held my breath as it passed, as though breathing might somehow give away our position. The truck rumbled past and stopped outside the Babe and Sickle. Torben got out followed by his friend who, last time we saw him in the pick-up, was the driver. Now I could see why he wasn’t anymore; he had a make-shift sling around his right arm, and part of it was smeared red.
The pub was only twenty feet away and it was a calm day, so we could hear the hunters talk. I reached for the handle and slowly wound down the window.
“Pass me the tracker,” said Torben. His voice sounded rougher than normal, his tone more clipped.
The driver reached over to the truck, picked something up and passed it to Torben. “What’d ya think they’re doing out here?” he asked.
Torben twisted the device in his hands, pressed something and then stared at it.
When I got a good look it at, I felt something sharp twist through my chest. That was my GPRS! Torben Tusk was holding my GPRS, and it seemed like it was working. I snapped my head to Justin to see if he was watching this. His wide eyes and furrowed brow confirmed that he was. I was dying to saying something, but now wasn’t the time.
I felt my forehead begin to sweat. My hands shook, and my face felt like it was heating up. There was no way this was a coincidence, no way that Torben had got his hands on another GPRS and just happened to be going in the same direction as us. There was only one explanation for this.
He’d gotten my GPRS to work, and he knew where the farm was.
I took a second to calculate our odds. From what I had seen there were a minimum of four hunters – minus the one I saw get eaten in the warehouse – with the probability of there being at least a few more that I hadn’t see yet. I knew they had at least two guns, double what we had, and they actually knew how to use them. That put us at a pretty big disadvantage.
There was nothing I could do right now other than listen and hope to get some idea of their plan.
“This fucking thing,” said Torben. “Never works properly. Thought you fixed it?”
The driver screwed up his face. “Got us here, didn’t it?”
Torben held the GPRS in one hand and picked at his teeth with the other. “Should have just snatched the kid,” he said. He tossed the GPRS back to the driver. “Anyway, get in there and see what they got. If you see any bottles of stout, grab me a couple,” he said, and pointed at the Babe and Sickle.
While the driver searched the pub Torben rested on the bonnet of the pick-up. From time to time he’d glance back in our direction, making me sink lower in my seat, but mostly he stared at the road ahead in contemplation.
After ten minutes the driver came back out. They got in the pick-up truck, revved the engine and then left.
As soon as they were out of sight, I turned to Justin. I poked him in the chest, jabbing my finger so hard it made him wince. I could feel my head get tight, and most lips curled.
“I thought you said it was broken? Huh? That nobody would be able to use it? That’s the only reason I didn’t beat the crap out of you when Torben took our stuff – because you promised me he wouldn’t be able to work it.”
Justin chewed his lip and furrowed his brow. “I’m sorry Kyle, I didn’t know. Really – I thought it was trashed.”
“Damn it” I said. I pounded the steering wheel, and the horn went off.
Behind me David jumped awake. He rubbed his head. “What’s going on?”
“We’re fucked, that’s what’s going on,” I spat.
I opened the car door and got out, slamming it behind me. I didn’t care who heard us now. I walked to the boot, opened our bag of supplies. I tipped most of it back into the boot and left a fifth still in the bottom of the rucksack, which I slung over my shoulder. Next to all the food was the shotgun. I thought about taking it, but then I put my hand on my belt and rested on the handle of my knife.
That would be enough. They needed to gun more than me, and I wasn’t a total monster.
The passenger door and opened and Justin got out. He walked over to me and looked at the food scattered across the boot of the car.
“What are you doing?”
I could feel my blood running red hot through my veins. Right now Justin’s face annoyed me too much. Did he realise what he’d done? Did he understand that ever since he stuck his nose into my business, things had turned to shit?
I reached forward and shoved him in the chest, sending him down onto the floor.
“They know where the farm is, and they’re headed there right now. It’s all fucked Justin, and that’s on you.”
Justin sat up and drew his knees closer to his chest. There was a scared look to his eyes, as though he didn’t know what I was going to do next. I knew that for a second he was thinking about arguing with me, but then he decided better of it. “Look, Kyle, what can I say? I’m sorry.”
The back door of the car opened and David stretched a long leg out. “What’s happening?”
I slammed the boot of the car shut and looked at him. “I’m leaving,” I said. “You two can go to hell.”
Chapter 18
I walked away from the car. My face was burning and my blood was boiling in my veins. My mind was so clouded by a fog of anger that I didn’t even look where I was going; as long as I got away, that was all that mattered.
I put my foot on a stone wall and hopped over into the field. The earth was sodden and my foot was covered in mud before I’d even walked five steps. Behind me, I heard the car door open. I took a deep breath and picked up my pace. I wasn’t turning back this time. I wasn’t forgiving another one of Justin's mistakes. He’d screwed me over from the start, and now the only thing I had to cling on to was gone. The farm belonged to the hunters now.
“Kyle”
I heard David’s voice behind me, and I heard him grunt as he climbed over the wall.
“Shit!”
I turned round. David had slipped in the mud and he was flat on his back in the field, his coat covered in the brown mess. He seemed to be waiting for me to come and help him up, but instead I turned and carried on walking.
A few minutes later he caught up with me. He put a muddy hand on my shoulder. I stopped and turned to him.
“Fuck off, David,” I said.
David scratched the back of his neck. There was something weighing on his mind, but as usual he was struggling to get the words out.
I put my hands in my pockets. “Just save it. There’s nothing you can say. The farm is theirs now. It’s all pointless.”
Finally the words came to him. “It’s not pointless. Not at all. You were right. The farm’s the answer; dad knew it, Clara knew it – I know it.”
His words were coming fast. He stared at me with narrowed eyes that were like brown marbles.
I looked across the field in front of me. It seemed to stretch for miles and connected into other fields in an endless bed of green and brown. I tried to see what was beyond it, whether there was anything worth looking for, but there was nothing in the distance to cling on to.
I looked at the floor. “Even if you’re right, the farm’s out of the question now. Torben has it, and there’s no way I can take on him and his guys alone.”
David sighed. “You’re not alone. You never were. You’ve always had people with you Kyle, you’ve always been
a leader. But for some pig-headed reason you choose not to act like it.”
I looked at him and saw the sincerity on his face. “A leader wouldn’t watch as many people die as I have,” I said.
“You can’t do this alone,” said David.
The wind blew through the grass, sending the long stalks dancing in different directions. For miles on the horizon the fields all blew in unison. They were all overgrown and muddy, same as the farm would be, but with enough time and hard work something could be made out of them.
With the farm in the hands of the hunters, I felt empty inside, like someone had opened my chest and scooped everything out. I’d clung onto the idea of getting there for so long, that it was all I had.
Maybe David was right. Maybe we shouldn’t give it up. Perhaps it was time to fight.
I looked at him again. This time I felt something welling up in me, some kind of resolve. But there were something I had to say, things I had to get out of the way.
“I can’t watch someone else die,” I said.
“Everyone’s got to.”
I nodded. “But you and Justin – I don’t want to see that happen on my account.”
David screwed up his nose. He wiped his boot along the grass and let the mud slide of it.
“Sometimes you have to throw the dice,” he said.
He was right. For all this time, all these years of travelling alone, it wasn’t other people that I’d avoided. I had been running away from fear. I was scared that if I let my guard down and allowed people inside it, then sooner or later I was going to have to watch them die. I’d thought that being alone was better than risking losing someone, but I was wrong.
A man couldn’t live alone, especially not in a world like this. Man was on the ropes and the world was delivering the knockout blows. Unless someone did something, unless we stuck together, we were going to hit the floor.
I took my hands out of my pockets and turned back toward the car.
I noticed that the passenger door was open, but there was no sign of Justin. I looked around, but couldn’t see anything, and he certainly hadn’t followed us onto the field. So where was he?
***
When we got to the car it was empty. The passenger door was open, and on the floor beside it there were blobs of blood. I looked around us but I couldn't see Justin anywhere, nor could I see any infected. Besides, if an infected had got him, they would have started eating him there and then. They didn’t drag away their kill to eat it later.
David walked round to the boot and popped it open.
“It’s gone.”
I shut the passenger door and walked around. I saw what he meant; the boot, where I’d left all the supplies, was now empty. Who had done it, and why hadn’t we seen them?
How did things get screwed up for us at every turn?
I slammed the boot shut so quickly that David had to yank back his hand so that it didn’t get caught. He turned round and lent on the car.
“Who could have –“
“The hunters,” I said.
I had been stupid to think that the hunters would drive so close to us and not see anything. Torben was a hunter, so he certainly wasn’t oblivious to the clues and trails that people left behind. I guessed that their stop at the Babe and Sickle probably wasn’t about checking it for supplies. It was more likely that they stopped because they wanted me to know that they had the GPRS and were headed to the farm. Torben was laying a trap for me.
I snapped my head toward David. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “They’ve taken Justin, and they want us to come find him.” I said.
“So what do we do?” he asked.
The old me would have taken what supplies I could, turned round and walked in the opposite direction. But I knew what the hunters were and what they were capable of, and I couldn’t just abandon Justin to that. Whatever the risk, no matter the cost, I was going to have to try and do something.
I was going to be running into a death trap, but it was better to sprint into a quick death than walk into a lingering one.
“I can’t ask you to come,” I said.
David nodded solemnly.
I opened the car door and looked around for what supplies I could find. I looked under the passenger seat and let out a gasp. Tucked underneath, was our shotgun. Justin must have hidden it before the hunters had grabbed him. I took it out and showed David.
“Clever kid,” he said.
I nodded.
“I’m coming with you,” said David.
“You sure?”
He nodded his head. “You have to be able to depend on people.”
I slammed the car door, took a deep breath and looked to the east, where the farm was waiting. I could already feel the adrenaline flowing inside me. This was it.
I looked up. Above us, a mean-looking black cloud loomed.
Chapter 19
We ducked down into a ditch so that we had a wide view of the farm but couldn’t be seen by the hunters. I counted six hunters patrolling the farmland, and past the fields there was a farmhouse where there would probably be even more of them inside. Outside the house there was a large tank with ‘petrol’ written in red letters, no doubt used in better days to supply the tractors with fuel.
The farm wore the scars of fifteen years of neglect. The fields were choked with weeds, a lot of the fences had blown over and water poured into the farmhouse roof through the gaps left by missing slates. The place had gone to hell, but I still saw some potential in it. If you looked past the weeds and the mess, the heart of the farm was still there and it could be turned into something good.
Some of the hunters walked up and down the fields, stopping occasionally to stub a cigarette under their boots or talk with another hunter as they walked past. Across the fields and under two branching elm trees there were two tractors, their paintwork flecked with rust.
Next to me, David was quiet. “Wishing you hadn’t come?” I said.
He shook his head. “Wishing we had a lorry or something. We could just ram into them.”
“If we’re going to wish, then let’s go big. A tank would be pretty handy right now.”
David smiled for a second, but the gesture soon dropped from his face. “We’re going to have to fight, and I’m gonna hold you back,” he said.
I looked at him. His body was wiry and his pants were held up by the last rung on his belt. His eyes were small, his hair receding. His hands were curled into fists, bony and white at the knuckles. I tried to think of something to tell him, something I could say to reassure him, but the fact was that he was right. He wasn’t a fighter.
I picked up the shotgun and passed it to him.
He waved his hands. “No Kyle, you have it.”
I pulled out my knife from my belt. “I know how to use this,” I said. “You’re more use to both of us if you’re armed.”
He nodded, took the gun from me and then laid it down next to him. He pointed out across the field, toward the tractors, and whispered. “Suppose we steal a tractor. Smash into the farmhouse. They won’t know what’s happening.”
A distraction would be good, I knew, but it was risk. “You think they’ll still be working?”
David shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe, Maybe not. Probably not, really. But we won’t be worse off for checking.”
We snuck over to the tractors. Along the way, we got within a few feet of two hunters as they stopped for a chat. Their eyes looked dark and their skin was pale. I guessed that lately the world had been as harsh to them as it had been to us. Their voices were hushed.
“He’s got a thing for the lad,” said one of them, and took a long drag on his cigarette. The wind whipped at his coat and made the material flap.
The other hunter screwed up his face. His long fringe blew across his forehead. “Nah, he’s using him for bait. He’s obsessed with catching the other fella.”
“So he don’t really want the lad to join us?”
The other one shook his head
. “Once we catch the bloke, Torben’s gonna gut the boy.”
I shuddered at the idea of what Torben had in mind for us all. I knew they were hunters, and that Torben loved his trophies, but were they also cannibals? From their tired eyes and their sunken cheeks, I guessed the hunters weren’t getting their five fruit and veg a day. Hunters tended to eat what they killed, and there was no reason for these guys to be any different.
We moved slowly around the sides of the farm and to the tractors. One of them was so rusty that the body was practically orange, and it looked like if I tapped it the whole thing would fall apart. Next to it was a newer one that looked slightly more stable, though I didn’t know if it would start.