by Jack Lewis
“And?”
“And if you know where something begins, you can sometimes figure out where it ends.”
A thought pressed on Ed like a finger prodding a bladder. There was something wrong with this place, and it wasn’t just because the outbreak may have started here. He couldn’t help the feeling that somewhere in the woodland, something peered at him through the darkness.
“Bethelyn,” he said.
She turned around, but didn’t say anything.
“Can I talk to you for a sec? In private?” he said.
Bethelyn shook her head.
“There’s no point hiding things, Ed. With everything that’s happened, I don’t think we’ve got anything worth keeping secret. If you’ve got something to say, then say it in front of him.”
Ed left out a huff of air. “Fine. I don’t think we can trust him. All this talk about the outbreak starting here and him knowing where we are. I think he’s full of crap.”
Bethelyn shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t care either way. He might be lying to us. Maybe he’s picturing us turning on a spit and licking his lips. I don’t care. But I do know one thing; if we try and make it through here without him, we’ll die.”
“Your girlfriend is right, Edward,” said The Savage. “The only way you make it through Loch-Deep alive is with me. The only way you find your brother is with me. I’m taking on a risk myself by staying with a couple of turkeys like you.”
“Then why stay with us?” said Ed.
“I need something you can give me. But I think you know that, already.”
Ed knew what he meant, but it was a subject he was hoping they didn’t have to address. Like his driving licence and university forms, he wished he could just push it to the back of his mind until it went away. This was different, though. It wasn’t a matter of taking driving lessons and deciding which lectures he wanted to fall asleep in. The Savage needed blood and flesh, and he wanted it from Ed or Bethelyn.
“One thing I need to know,” said Ed, changing the subject. “Why wear the mask? You’re already infected, so it’s not as if you need it.”
“There are lots of reasons one might wear a mask, and a virus in the air isn’t the only one.”
“Ooh, how cryptic,” said Bethelyn.
They heard a crashing sound from deep within the forest. Ed couldn’t see anything moving, but it sounded like a rotten limb falling off a tree. It was as though the whole place was falling apart piece by piece; leaves fell to the ground and crumbled into dust, and trees shed their branches like useless skin.
“Do you do this on purpose?” he said. “The mysterious stuff?”
The Savage shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s why you wear a mask, isn’t it? To pretend you’re this enigmatic nob head.”
The Savage bent down and started to collect broken wood from the floor. Ed knew that he should help, but he didn’t want it to seem like he was following The Savage’s lead. Bethelyn straightened up and stepped away from the deer.
The Savage shifted a bundle of wood under his arm.
“We should talk about our needs,” he said.
There was another crash. This one was louder, but it seemed like it had come from a completely different direction. Ed slipped his hands into his pockets. He wanted to look behind him, but didn’t want to risk The Savage thinking he was scared. Damn, he thought. Why do I give a shit what this guy thinks of me?
“Talk about our needs?” said Bethelyn. “How much will this session cost, counsellor?”
“Well, Ed wants to find his brother.”
“I will find him.”
“And you need me to do that.”
Ed shook his head. “That’s debatable.”
“And I require something else,” continued The Savage.
Bethelyn gripped a thick stick in her hand. She wiped it on her coat and left a smear of mud on the fabric.
“Go on,” she said.
Ed had had enough. He realised that no matter how much he avoided it, the subject was going to come up again and again. As the hours went by, the urgency of it would become inescapable.
“You know what he needs, Bethelyn, as much as I do. We saw him from the window in Golgoth, when he fed flesh to the old man. He needs our flesh and blood to stop the infection taking him.”
“The infection is sat on a float, and it’s using my blood as a lazy river. You need me to get you through Loch-Deep, and I need you to avoid developing a taste for kidneys and livers. So what’s it going to be? Or, rather, who is it going to be? Given the choice, I’d pick Bethelyn. I think your blood would be too bitter, Ed.”
Ed thought about it. He needed to find James more than anything. With the rest of his family dead and his home lost to the infected, reaching his brother was the only thing that had meaning anymore. If making a deal with The Savage was what it took, then he was just going to have to live with it.
More sounds came from deep in the forest, and Ed heard a moaning noise carried by the breeze. It was something that his ears had become attuned to since Golgoth, and hearing it made his stomach quiver. There were infected nearby, he realised. Who knew, maybe the woodlands were infested with them.
“You can have my blood,” he told The Savage. “But not until you lead us out of here.”
“It’ll be too late by then. Can you hear them groaning, Ed? They’re closer than you think. There’s one of them standing right in front of you, too. Look at me. It’s a faint line that stops me becoming one of them.”
The darkness of the forest crept up on him. He heard a rattle that sounded like it was made by rotting vocal cords. The noise moved closer, though he still couldn’t see anything but the decaying tree bark and winding ivy. He looked at the deer and the blood around its mouth, and he realised that he wasn’t much different. He was caught in a trap too, and like the animal, he was going to have to chew himself free.
“Like I told you, when we get out,” he told The Savage. “So maybe you better move quickly.”
Chapter Eight
Tammuz (Baz Worthington)
Underneath the Dome
They’d changed the incense in the Grand Hall. The smoky spices had been replaced by an aroma of cloves so overwhelming that Tammuz’s stomach lurched. He looked at the tray of grapes and half-cut apples in front of him, and he pushed them away.
Most people would have killed for a platter like that. For Tammuz, a bit of fruit was nothing new. His face grew hot behind his giant mask. He looked at the other members of the Capita Five who sat along the same table. The marble arches of the Grand Hall were above them, and a screen of bulletproof glass was in front. There was Grand Lord Ishkur, Marduk, Nabu, Sin and himself.
“So, we are all agreed then?” said Ishkur. His tone was octaves lower than anyone else in the room, though Tammuz suspected that he faked it.
Ishkur wore a white mask of death. It covered his face and went all the way to his jawline, and the edges had been melted into him so that skin and plastic were as one. The front was painted black in places, with a dark circle around his mouth to make it look bigger. Plastic teeth showed under thin lips. His eyes were drawn large and oval, and they gave the impression that you were staring into a dark and endless pit. He sometimes seemed to wear a smile, but it would change to a snarl with just two wrong words. That wasn’t possible, of course. Not really. It was just a mask. Nevertheless, its expression seemed to change.
“Let’s run over it again,” said Marduk. “I’m not satisfied that Tammuz has explained everything.”
Beside him, Nabu nodded like a dog. Sin sat on the edge of the table with his elbow leaning on the claret silk cover. He picked up a grape, put it in his mouth and sucked it. A few seconds later he spat the shrivelled fruit onto the tray in front of him.
Tammuz bit back on the irritation rising in him.
“Okay, Marduk. What do you need clarification on?”
Marduk flashed Ishkur a look before speaking, though the Grand Lord didn�
��t return it.
“Your numbers seem awfully vague, if you don’t mind me saying. You can’t give an accurate figure on how many soldiers we are to send, how long it will take and how many men we must station there afterwards.”
“There’s no science to war,” said Tammuz. “The town could see us and get on their knees, or they could fasten bayonets to their rifles and fight to the death. There’s no way of knowing.”
“Capita expansion is your job,” said Nabu, next to Marduk. The two sat close to each other. “So it’s something you should know.”
Tammuz sighed. He sensed the black eyes of Ishkur watching him. At the end of the table, Sin spat another grape onto the silver tray.
“It’s like this,” he said, “Kiele is one of the largest Resistance towns on the Mainland. I say one of, because the nature of the Resistance is that they are quite secretive, and we don’t know who else is out there. Are you with me so far, Marduk?”
Marduk nodded. His mask had squinting eyebrows that made him seem on the verge of a sneer. His cheeks were painted a rosy red, and wrinkles were melted into the plastic around his eyes. The mask was painted brown, and he wore a black shawl around his head.
The look on his mask was one of a schoolboy laughing at a peer, but not in a jovial way. It seemed malicious, and Tammuz had no trouble imagining Marduk as a school bully in his youth. It seemed fitting, then, that Capita Security and Policing were part of Marduk’s responsibilities. Not that all of the Capita police were bullies, but power seemed to draw those who craved both authority and the excuse to wield it.
“So,” carried on Tammuz, “I propose that Kiele is our next target. We’ve always known that the Resistance are there.”
“Then why not squash them now?” said Sin. In front of him was a tray that was now full of grapes with the juice sucked out of them.
It was Sin’s job to keep Capita bellies full, and he achieved this through effective use of the land surrounding the dome. In summer you could walk across Sin’s fields and see rows of corn and carrots and all manner of other vegetables. He wasn’t a man who lusted for power, and half of the time the meetings of the Five seemed to bore him.
In another life, Sin was probably a hardworking man whose only concern was that his crops yielded enough produce to support his family. Having to provide for the Capita had warped him. Tammuz heard stories of teenagers caught stealing from the fields and being executed by Sin. Some of them were stuffed and then used as scarecrows.
Tammuz straightened up. He knew he needed to keep his posture straight to seem more dignified, but sometimes he found himself slumping.
“We’ve kept them where we can see them,” he said, looking at Sin. The man seemed too big for his chair. His posture couldn’t have been more relaxed if he’d tried. “We even had a member of the Resistance close to us, for a while. He was one of Charles Bull’s men. He didn’t know that we knew that, of course.”
“And where is the bounty hunter?” said Ishkur.
Marduk picked up a fig from the tray in front of him and twisted it in his fingers.
“He’s been dark for a few days. Nobody has seen him.”
“Most unlike him,” said Ishkur.
“You know the Bull,” said Nabu. “He always comes back when we wave the red flag.”
Ishkur turned to Tammuz.
“Tell me again about the plan.”
Tammuz took a breath and gathered the details together in his head.
“It’s a town fifty miles from the Dome. Not too far away from Mordeline. On the face of it, it looks like any other settlement. People scratching in the dirt to get by, and pretending that they’re a civilisation. Underneath that, men whisper conspiracies against the Capita and plot how best to strike against us.”
Ishkur laughed. “A noble pastime,” he said.
“With a single squadron, striking at the right time, we can ruin them. We can kill the men who don’t submit, and put the women and children to work. We would keep the town as it is, but flying under the Capita mask, rather than the Resistance.”
“And is the expansion worth the effort?”
Tammuz nodded. “Anything that gives the Capita more land and people is worth it.”
“So be it,” said Ishkur. “Are we all agreed?”
“This chair makes my arse ache,” said Sin. “So yes, whatever.”
Nabu shrugged. “I suppose so.”
Marduk stayed silent and stared at the fig in his hand.
“Then make preparations, Tammuz,” said Ishkur. “Put your cold mind to work. I want Kiele under Capita control within the week.”
Sin stood up. At six foot seven, he towered over everyone, even Ishkur. His clothes were so tight around him that the stitching frayed under his armpits.
“If we’re all done, I have a carrot haul that needs bringing in,” he said.
Marduk held a finger in the air.
“One final thing, if I may.”
Ishkur nodded. Sin sat down and sighed.
“I would like to take a trip to Camp Dam Marsh and see how things are progressing. We give Dr. Scarsgill and Goral a little too much thread at times, and I would like to visit and check the stitching.”
“Is there something wrong?” said Ishkur.
Marduk shook his head. “Nothing apparent. But a camp full of the Darwin’s Children is a precious thing. I would like to make sure the doctor and the old man are attending to it as they should.”
“You have my leave,” said Ishkur.
~
As he left the Grand Hall, Tammuz couldn’t help noticing an eerie feeling. It was like cold fingers gently stroking his skin. The candle in his hand lit the crumbling brickwork of the tunnel around him, and he watched spiders scurry away and disappear into cracks.
A breeze hit the candle and extinguished the flame. In the dark, with the walls constricting against him, he felt like he wasn’t alone. It was as if someone peered at him through the cracks in the stone, and any minute a hand could stretch out and unmask him.
It was something all of them were wary of, he knew. None of the Capita Five had ever seen each other’s faces. Furthermore, they all carried a vial of acid so that even if one of them died, the others could disfigure them beyond recognition.
Ishkur’s reasoning for this was that if a man’s true identity was known, he was constrained by it. He would feel his reputation weighing down on him as he made decisions. Having no identity was freeing, and it meant that your conscience could never hold you back as you decided the fate of the Capita.
Tammuz knew that this wasn’t the real reason. He’d figured out long ago that Ishkur didn’t want any of the other Five to have any ideas on his power. Ishkur was a big believer that no man could rule alone. He needed the opinions of others to help him make decisions, yet he didn’t want them conspiring against him. If not even the Five knew each other’s real faces and names, there was no way they could ever meet up in secret and make plans.
Tammuz struck a match. The flame lit the yellow stones but it didn’t reach too far into the darkness ahead of him. He brought the match to the candle wick and suddenly the light expanded.
The tunnels were part of the secrecy, of course. When their meetings ended, the Five all left the Grand Hall separately via their own individual tunnels. These stone mazes ran underneath the Hall, twisting and turning until finally they came out at random points in the Dome. None of the Five knew where the other’s exits were, so there was no danger of them ever meeting each other.
The only exemption to this was Grand Lord Ishkur. He didn’t need a tunnel. He left the Hall by the steel double doors. Since his mask was melted into his skin, nobody would ever see his true face.
Tammuz reached the end of the tunnel. In front of him was a ladder, and at the top of it, a hatch. Next to him, cut into the stonework, was a bench. He set the candle down and picked up a square box. He shook it and heard it rattle, and then reached inside and pulled out a cigarette. One of his few pleasures
in life was inhaling smoke and letting his thoughts run through his mind until they tired themselves out.
He thought of Kiele. He imagined the men and the women fleeing in panic as the Capita soldiers and their dogs stormed through the streets in bloodlust. It was sad to see blood flow so freely, but it couldn’t be helped. The Capita couldn’t coexist with those who conspired against them.
He took off his mask and set it down, and straight away he felt his skin breathe. So far underground, this was one of the few places where a mask wasn’t needed, and he could enjoy his cigarette without a weight pressing down on him.