by Lewis, Jack
I couldn’t leave him. I’d already done that once, and I knew that I was going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. I couldn’t change the past, but what happened in the present was still up to me. And I wasn’t abandoning him again.
I squeezed his arm and started to pull him up.
“Nobody’s leaving you. Get up and stop moaning,” I said.
Justin and I heaved David to his feet. For a second he was able to support himself on his own.
“Thanks, Kyle,” he said, and smiled at me. “Let’s go.”
A shadow leapt over the truck, and quicker than I could react it pounced on David, pinned him to the floor and tore a chunk out of his neck. Blood sprayed out like mist and covered the ground. I looked at the creature on top of him, and every nerve in my body screamed out. I felt my blood freeze, and for a second I couldn’t even move.
It was a stalker.
By the time I forced myself to move, David had stopped breathing. The stalker turned its head toward us, and despite its disfigurement I swore I could see something of a grin, some sort of human expression. It stared at me with hatred, and I saw its legs kneel up behind it, ready to propel it into a pounce.
I reached for my knife but then realised I didn’t have it with me. I gulped.
The stalker twitched and got ready to jump. Then, something next to me exploded, and half the stalker’s face tore away. It made a rasping sound and fell back to the floor with a thud. I looked to my left, and Justin stood with the revolver in his outstretched hand, smoke drifting from the chamber.
I looked at David’s lifeless body on the floor. A huge chunk of his neck was missing, and blood sprayed out from the torn veins like water seeping out of a broken pipe. I grabbed his hand and felt his wrist, but his pulse had stropped. I had failed him, I knew. I had brought him into this, and I had let him die.
“We need to leave,” said Justin.
I nodded and stood up. It was time for us to go. The farm was lost, but at least we could escape with our lives.
“Here,” he said, and passed me my revolver. The barrel was hot to the touch. I slipped the gun into my pocket.
We started to walk down the driveway and away from the farm, when I heard the stones crunch behind me.
“Where are you going?” said a voice.
I turned round and Torben was stood in front of me with his rifle raised. He pointed it at me and pulled the trigger, and I felt the bullet tear a hole in my leg.
Chapter 22
I clutched my leg. The hole burnt from where the bullet had pierced it, and I felt like shouting out with the pain. I looked up at Torben. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me like that.
Torben’s face looked weary, his hair was messed up and his jacket was smeared with blood. There was a dark look behind his eyes, the look of a man who had stared too long into the abyss and had finally been broken by it. His jacket sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and there were long red scratches across his arms.
Justin twitched, and I could see he wanted to do something. I looked at him. “Don’t get yourself killed,” I said.
Torben took a few steps closer. “That’s what we’re all doing though, isn’t it? Getting ourselves killed.” He lifted his hand to his face and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our differences,” he said, “And you know, I come up blank. My thinking is, me and you are pretty much the same.”
I clutched my leg and felt it throb. “I’m nothing like you,” I choked out.
H knelt down so that our heads were level. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and had lost some of its usual roughness. “I’ve always felt alone. Even when there were twenty people in my group, I still felt like it was just me and a bunch of shadows.”
He looked at the ground. I thought back to the warehouse and the conversation I had heard, about how Torben was looking for his wife and boy who I assumed had run away. I knew the pain of losing someone, but it wasn’t the pain that defined you. It was what you did after it.
What we had both done spoke volumes about us. I wasn’t proud of abandoning David and going my own way, but at least I’d never gone down as dark a path as Torben.
The hunter propped his gun next to him. “You were right to be alone. On your own, you’re safe. Where men gather, death hovers.”
Once I would have believed that too, but not anymore. I looked at Justin and saw how tense his body was. He was waiting for an opportunity to strike. I shook my head at him.
“There’s hope for the future, Torben. There’s something in it for all of us – just not you.”
I pulled the revolver out of my pocket, raised it at Torben’s face and before he could react, I pulled the trigger. The bullet blew a hole in his forehead. The lights in his eyes dimmed, and he fell back and thudded onto the stones.
I looked over at the farm. The field was full of infected now. There were so many of them crammed in that it was impossible to see the grass beneath their feet. I looked through all the dead faces searching for anything that was living, but it seemed that the hunters had all fallen in battle. Out across the field, where the farm met the road, even more infected were streaming in. Soon the whole place would be awash with them.
That was when I knew for sure that the farm was done. No matter how remote and out of the way the place was, this just proved that nowhere could ever be safe. I thought back to Vasey and it’s walls, and for the first time ever, I wished I was there.
I looked at the farmhouse and watched dozens of infected stumble inside. I’m sorry Clara, I thought. I got here, like I promised, but look at what I brought with me.
I turned to Justin. The boy was knelt on the floor. He had a knife in his hand and his arm was tensed. He couldn’t have been any more different from the kid I had first met back in Vasey, the one who was so unsure of them that he couldn’t even walk straight.
I let out a deep breath. “It’s time to go,” I said.
He nodded. “We’re both going together?” he said.
I arched my eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember? ‘When we get to the farm, you’re on your own’. That’s what you said to me.”
The words stung. I had said them on a number of occasions, and I had meant them every time. But now things were different. A man couldn’t live on his own, I knew that now. I was ready to stop being alone.
I got to my feet.
“What about the farm?” said Justin.
I looked over at the farmhouse. It was swarmed with infected now. I imagined them walking through the rooms, imagined them passing the photo of Clara as a child. I pictured them walking upstairs and going into her childhood bedroom. I felt my chest burn. I screwed my face up.
I wasn’t going to have the farm. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to let them take it.
I stretched out my arm and pointed my gun over at the field. I guided it across until I had the petrol tank, the one with ‘petrol’ painted in red across it, in my sights. I took a deep breath and held it in. I remembered being back in the tree with the stalker coming at me, about how I wasted three bullets trying to hit it.
Now, I only had one. This time I wasn’t going to miss.
I squinted and pulled the trigger.
Three hundred metres away the tank exploded, and an orange fireball spread into the sky. The bodies of the infected were flung in every direction. Flames engulfed the field and started to spread to the farmhouse, the heat licking at the old timber and setting it alight.
I sat back. Even so far away, I could feel the heat on my face as the farm burnt to the ground.
Chapter 23
Five miles in the distance the smoke billowed into the air in thick grey columns that diluted the blue of the afternoon sky. At the farm, the night before, the air had been so heavy that I felt myself choke on it. Now, with a little distance between us, the air was cleaner.
I sat back on the grass as Justin l
ifted the shovel and piled the last of the earth back onto the mound. The milky brown soil cut a contrast to the green of the lawn, but I doubted the owners would care. I looked behind me at the house. The windows stared back at me, dark and empty, and nothing moved inside. We had already checked every inch of the place, of course, but it didn’t hurt to be wary.
I looked at David’s grave. He was buried in a garden that belonged to someone who we had never even met, but I don’t think he would have felt hard done by. To have any sort of burial at all was a rarity these days, and David had never been a sucker for attention.
“Think anyone will see the smoke?” asked Justin.
He rested on the shovel. He wore a blue shirt that he had taken from one of the bedrooms, and he had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. Tucked into his belt was a long hunting knife, but the blade was dull.
“Who told you that you could take my knife?” I said.
“Someone had to take care of the owners,” he said, and jerked his thumb back at the house.
I felt a jolt of pain in my leg. Last night I’d cleaned out the wound and wrapped a bandage around it, which I hoped to god would be enough to stave off infection. In the meantime, though, until it healed, walking was going to be tough.
“What now?” said Justin.
I stretched out my leg and felt a scream of pain. “We’re not going anywhere in the near future.”
“And after that?”
“I can’t see that far.”
Justin sat down next to me. In the oak tree opposite me, at the end of the garden, I saw something move in one of the branches. I couldn’t tell what it was.
I cleared my throat. “I’m thinking we go back to Vasey.”
He turned and looked at me. His right eyebrow arched. “Really?”
I nodded. “They’re not bad people, “ I said, “They just need someone to set them straight.”
I thought about the journey back to Vasey, about the hundreds of miles we’d have to travel, and my leg ached in anticipation. It would be a hell of a tough trip, but we’d do it. The town wasn’t the greatest place in the world, but right now it was all we had.
A breeze blew on my collar and the sun began to disappear behind a cloud.
“C’mon, let’s go inside,” I said.
Justin got to his feet. He stood in front of me and held out his hand.
“What do you think I am, a cripple?”
He laughed. “That’s exactly what you are.”
I took his hand, got to my feet and let him support me inside the house.
The sun set and the darkness trickled into the sky until soon everything above us was black. Outside, in the oak tree, an owl hooted. Something about the sound reassured me; that owls were still a thing, that the stalkers and infected hadn’t gotten all of them. I wondered if there were a parliament of them out there somewhere.
I stretched my leg out on the couch. My eyelids were heavy and my eyeballs felt itchy.
“One of us needs to stand watch,” I said.
Justin drew his knife in one hand and then dragged a wooden chair over to the window. Outside there was a clear view of the garden. He turned to me. “You can hardly stand, so guess it’s going to have to be me.”
I tried to sit up. I wanted to argue with him, tell him that I was going to do it, but my weary body dragged me back. As soon as I hit the couch I felt every last scrap of energy seep out of me as though all the cells in my body had given up trying to pretend.
I thought about the night’s sleep I was going to have. I thought about the next day, and the day after that. About how my leg would heal, and soon we’d set off back to Vasey. We would make something of the town, I decided. We’d make a real go of it.
I glanced at Justin. He gripped the knife tightly in his hand and he looked out into the night, the depth of his stare making him seem much older than he was.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift into sleep, for a brief moment not caring about the darkness that waited for me outside.