by Lewis, Jack
“I never found a car that worked, “ I said. “That’s why we had to come to you. So I doubt we’ll have much luck here.”
David held his hand to his chin. I knew he was scared of the hunters and the potential of fighting but right now, stood in front of this machine, he was going into engineer mode.
“Hang on,” he said.
He walked to the side of the tractor. The vehicle was fifteen feet tall and the wheels were large enough to crush a man. David put his foot on a step on the side of it and reached up and grabbed the handle of the driver door. The door opened, and something large spilled out from the seat. David screamed.
He crashed to the floor and landed on his back with a thud, followed shortly after by an infected. David’s face went white and his usually-small eyes widened. The infected struggled on top of him, trying to get a grip on his limbs.
It all happened so quickly that I struggled to process it. My veins ran cold and my breath caught in my chest. I grabbed my knife and moved toward them as quick as I could, but I was already too late.
David pushed the infected off him. He turned his body round, held up the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The gun exploded with a booming sound that broke the stillness of the farm. To our left a bird flew from a tree, and even the wind died down, as though it were surprised to hear the noise.
The infected’s head sprayed across the floor in so many pieces that even if I had been a genius at jigsaws, I wouldn’t have been able to piece it back together. I wondered who the infected had been, and why it was sat in the tractor. I looked at David.
“Was that your – “
He shook his head. “Wasn’t dad.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “You okay?” I said.
David was quiet for a few seconds. Then, he stuck his arm out toward me. His cost was ripped down to the skin, and there were grooves in his flesh from where the infected’s teeth had punctured him. Blood started to ooze out of them and drip away.
He was bitten.
Before I even had time to process what this meant, I heard a voice next to me.
“Torben’s been looking for you,” said the hunter with the long fringe. Next to him were two other men, and one of them pointed a rifle at my chest.
“Drop the knife,” he said.
I weighed up my odds, and I came up short. I dropped my knife to the floor.
Chapter 20
The farmhouse was dirty and there was a mouldy smell that seemed to be coming from the walls. Cracked wooden beams ran along the ceiling to support it, though in some places the roof bulged slightly as though it would cave in any second. There was a dining table in the far side of the room, and a tattered couch that looked like it had been salvaged from a rubbish tip. On a dresser next to a wall, there was a solitary photo frame, and in it was a little girl with auburn hair and a wide grin. I knew that girl, or I knew the woman she had grown up to be. It was Clara.
I moved my arms and struggled at the rough ropes that tied me to the chair. They were wrapped so tight around my wrists that it felt like they were cutting off my circulation.
I looked up at the photo again. Clara had never shown me photos of her as a kid before, and it was almost like her childhood had never existed. Yet here was something; a memento her dad had saved and given a prominent place in his house, despite the fact he hadn’t seen his daughter in decades.
Torben followed my gaze to the photo. He walked over, picked it up and studied it. Seeing him with his hands on a photo of Clara made me clench my fists, but I said nothing. Instead, I looked to the door.
“Can’t we bring him in?” I said.
When they had escorted me into the farmhouse they had left David outside on the porch.
Torben put the photo face down on the dresser, walked over to the dining table and pulled out a chair. He sat in it and faced me. Despite how pale and tired his men looked, Torben’s face glowed red by contrast. There was no doubt that he was getting enough to eat.
“Your friend is bitten,” said Torben. “And soon he’s gonna turn. Or he would, if I wasn’t here.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked around him. “We’re on a farm. What do farmers do with sick animals?” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“They take them in the barn and shoot them.”
I looked out toward the porch, but I couldn’t see David. I knew he was hurt, and I knew he’d be scared. I didn’t want to admit it, but deep down I knew that Torben was right. David was infected now, and soon he was going to die. I pushed the thought down as far as I could.
Across from us and through a door, I could hear footsteps walking down the stairs. They got closer and then the door opened, and Justin walked into the room. His clothes were tattered and his nose looked bloody around the nostrils, but otherwise he seemed fine. He saw me, stopped, and his eyes grew large. Torben stood up, walked over to him and ruffled his hair.
“Here’s my lad.” He said, and give him a punch on his arm. Justin looked away. Torben smiled at me. “Kyle, I’d like you to meet our latest recruit.”
I shook my head. Did he mean that Justin had joined the hunters? The way I saw it, he had been kidnapped, and there was no way he’d ally himself with them.
“Looks more like a prisoner than a recruit,” I said.
Torben walked back to the chair and took a seat. He nodded at Justin and beckoned him to do the same. “I gave him a choice,” he said. “Join us, or die. It looks like his survival instinct kicked in.”
“He’d never join you,” I said, feeling a lump in the back of my throat.
Torben closed his eyes and shook his head. “You make it sound like we’re monsters. All we’re doing is surviving, just like you. We’re a pack. We trust each other with our lives.”
I scrunched up my face. I couldn’t shake the feeling of disgust. “There’s something rotten at the core of your ‘pack’. “
Torben stood up and perched against the dining table. Through his open jacket I could see a revolver in a holster. I recognised the gun – it was mine, the one I’d kept in the rucksack that Torben had stolen.
“It’s not man versus man anymore, Kyle. There are no cliques, no armies. Its man versus infected.”
“So why hunt people?”
“Some men just don’t belong in a pack” he said, and stared at me. Then he turned to Justin. “But others fit right in.”
I struggled against the ropes on my wrist, but I barely had a centimetre to move. My skin burnt from rubbing against the rough material.
Torben reached into the holster and took out the revolver. He opened the chamber and checked the bullets, and from my chair I could see gold circles filling two of the holes. The other four were empty. Torben span the chamber round to line up the bullets and then closed it with a snap.
My breath caught in my lungs now, and my chest felt tight. The bullets had only one purpose; I knew it, and Torben knew it. I was tied to the chair so tight that there was no way I was going to move. I looked over at Justin and tried to get a sense of what he was thinking. Had he really joined them, or was he just playing along? Maybe he had weighed up his options and come to the conclusion that sticking with the hunters was the only way to stay alive.
Torben walked over to me and stopped just inches away. He reached forward with the revolver and pressed it into my forehead. I felt the cold metal dig into my head, and Torben pressed it harder so that it broke the skin. It was like he was trying to push it all the way through my skull and into my brain. The metal pressing against my head stung, but I wasn’t going to show him that. I took a deep breath and held it in.
“The farm’s ours, and so are you. You lost.”
I opened my mouth and spat at him. Torben took a step back and wiped his khakis with his hand. He turned, put the gun on the table and slid it over to Justin. The boy looked up in surprise.
“Pick it up,” said Torben.
Justin looked at the gun and then at Torben. I
could tell what he was thinking; he was wondering if he should pick it up and fire it in Torben’s face. At least, that’s what I hoped he was thinking. Then again, there were six hunters outside who would come running in the minute they heard a shot. Whether Justin was on my side or not, we were still outnumbered.
Torben nodded at Justin. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can do it.” His voice was soft. He pointed over at me. “This guy doesn’t give a crap about you, but you’re one of us now.”
Justin’s picked up the gun, but his hands were shaking.
Torben stood up and put an arm around his shoulder. “Every man has to die, Justin. At least you won’t have to do it alone.”
Justin raised the gun at me. His pupils were so big that it seemed like his eyes were completely black. His arms were trembling, and his cheeks were white. He pointed the gun at my head. I looked deep into his eyes and tried to guess what he was thinking. Despite him aiming the gun at me, I knew that there was no way he would do it. There was no chance that Justin could shoot me.
There was a yell outside, and the farmhouse door burst open. A worried-looking hunter ran in.
“They’re here, Torben. There’s hundreds of them!”
Chapter 21
Torben walked over to the door slowly, as though he were in no hurry. He opened it and went outside. The hunter trailed after him. As soon as Torben left the room, Justin walked over to me. He pulled a knife from his belt and sawed at the ropes around my wrists, and as he cut them away I felt my skin loosen.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He nodded. “They’re a bunch of idiots.”
Torben and the hunter walked back into the room. Justin straightened up and backed away from me, hiding the knife behind him.
I grabbed the ropes and held them so that it looked like I was still tied up.
Torben looked at me. “He wasn’t kidding,” he said, his voice controlled. “Never seen so many before.”
I twisted my head to get a look. I could only see through the square doorway, but across the farm and over the fields I spotted them; there was a sea of infected headed in our direction. Was it the same ones we had seen in Edness? If it was, then there were thousands of them, and none of us stood a chance.
Torben turned and looked at me. His face was void of emotion, a stark contrast to the hunter next to him who looked terrified.
“This is what happens when you fire a shotgun out in the open,” he said.
I thought about David outside. I wondered how he was doing, how hurt he was. The bite hadn’t been bad, but I knew enough about the infection to realise that eventually, whether it be in hours or days, the bite was going to kill him. And when it did, he wouldn’t stay dead for long. I felt something welling up inside me, but now wasn’t the time for that. I couldn’t afford to feel anything now.
Torben looked over at Justin. “Come on, boy, time to earn your place.”
“What?” said Justin.
Torben pointed at the door. “We didn’t drive all the way here just to give it up. Come out and fight.”
He strode outside. Justin looked over at me, and I nodded. He walked after Torben and out of the door.
When the room was empty I let the ropes fall off me and stood up. My legs ached and my skin around my wrists was raw. I had a pain in my lower back, and my neck was stiff. I looked around me for my belt and knife, but I couldn’t see what Torben had done with them.
I walked over to the dining table, pulled out a chair and tipped it on its side. I need some sort of weapon if I was going outside. I didn’t know what my plan was yet, but going out there unarmed would be crazy. Any weapon would do, any blunt instrument; it just had to be solid enough to smash through bone. I lifted my foot and brought it down on the chair leg, snapping it from the base. I picked up the block of wood and twisted it in my hands.
Outside the sky was black. The first wave of the infected had reached the farm and their faces were illuminated by the dim glow of the lamps on the porch and the flashes of the hunter's guns as they fired at them. The sound of the gunshots made me flinch, but it didn’t matter about the volume now. There were already enough infected coming our way, and drawing in a few more wouldn’t make a difference.
The hunters and the infected engaged in battle. The driver held a machete in his hand and swung it at the head of an infected, splitting into down the middle. Across from him the hunter with the long fringe held the neck of an infected woman as she struggled to bite him. With his right hand he lined up a screwdriver and drove it into her eye socket, splitting her eyeball like an onion.
A man to my right cried out, and I span around and saw him fall to the floor. Two infected fell on top of him and didn’t waste a second in tearing pieces out of his neck and chest, their teeth clacking as they tore through his skin. One took a big bite of his chest, chewed and pulled away a long strip of flesh. The man’s screams of agony rose above the collective cry of the infected, but were quickly silenced as the infected ate his vocal chords.
“Kyle!”
I turned round and saw David with his back against the porch. His face was drained of colour and he held his bitten arm tight against his chest. When he saw me look at him, he pointed to my left. I turned and saw an infected man inches away and lunging right at me.
I grabbed hold of the man’s hair, held it tight and then smashed the end of the chair leg against its face. The leg was so square and blunt that all it accomplished was breaking the skin and making putrid blood ooze from the infected’s face. I pushed the infected to the ground. When it was on the floor, I lined my boot with its face and brought it down as hard as I could. Its head didn’t smash straight away, and it took three tries before I heard it crack. When I looked down, my boot was covered in dark red blood and bits of grey flesh.
I turned, ran over to David and knelt beside him. He looked at me, and his voice was so quiet that it was hard to hear him over the battle cries of the hunters and the groans of the infected.
“You need to go,” he said.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “We need to go,” I agreed, and give him a squeeze.
I heard footsteps run over to us, and then Justin was next to me. He bent over and took a few shallow breaths. His hands were covered in blood.
“You okay?” I said, looking for the tell-tale marks of a bite.
“It’s not mine,” he said. He held his hands up.
Behind us there was a scream, and I knew another hunter had been taken by the infected. How many more were left? I glanced over, but I couldn’t see them all. It didn’t matter; the hunters were outnumbered twelve to one.
Justin leaned in to David. Panic spread across his face. “Shit, David,” he said.
David nodded. Shit. No other words needed to be said.
I looked at Justin. “We need to go, right now. I don’t care where, we just need to get out of here.”
Justin swallowed. “Their truck,” he said, and pointed past the farmhouse. The hunter’s pick-up truck was parked on the stone driveway that led to the farm.
I nodded at him. This was as good a plan as any. Right now we just needed to get as far away from the farm as possible. What happened after, whatever we were going to do later didn’t matter, now we just had to escape.
“What about the keys?” I said.
“They keep them in the ignition for quick getaways.”
I grinned. “Smart.”
We picked up David and between us we supported him over to the truck. Behind us the sounds of the gunshots faded as the hunters ran out of ammo, and I knew that most of them would now be reaching for their knives. If they had any sense, they would slit their own throats. There were too many infected swarming in for the hunters to have any chance of winning.
We set David down next to the wheel of the truck. I opened the door, jumped in and reached for the keys. The ignition was empty.
My heart began to pound and my chest flooded with panic. The keys had to be here somewhere. Our luck just
couldn’t be this bad, surely. I looked all around the dashboard and found plenty of chocolate wrappers, but no car keys.
I got out. Justin and David looked up at me, but I shook my head.
“Shit,” said Justin.
I knelt down next to David. His face was so grey that he looked like he should be in a morgue. I put my hand on his arm. “Listen, pal. We need to leave, we can’t stay here. Think you can make it just a little bit further?”
He looked up at me. His lips were dry and his eyes were dark. “Just leave me. I’m dying anyway.”