by Jack Lewis
He stood in the middle of the street and watched the fight rage around him. More Kiele men had emerged from the mouths of buildings, with weapons in their hands and adrenaline-filled expressions on their faces.
Nothing could have prepared Baz for the noises. The sickening sound of knives cutting through flesh. Men falling to the floor and screaming, giving cries so full of pain that they were scarcely human. Runts who, on the journey here, had seemed calm, bellowing and charging at the townsfolk in front of them. The screams and the moaning and the yells mixing with the gurgling of the infected.
Some of the Kiele fighters fell for Hanks’s ploy, and instead of focusing on the Capita soldiers, they tried to kill the infected. This was Hanks’s genius; his knowledge that where men and infected were concerned, a person’s first instinct was to go for the monsters.
A man ran at Baz with a pike. He held it horizontal at shoulder level, and charged forward with the spikes aimed at his chest. As the man got nearer Baz sidestepped. There was a millisecond where he had the opportunity to slice the man with his knife, but the weapon stayed in his sheath. Baz’s heart pounded so hard it felt like it was going to break through his chest. The man rounded, and he looked at Baz again and prepared for another charge. As he did, an officer galloped past and with one swipe of his sword cut halfway through his throat until his head hung off like loose skin.
Black dots danced in his vision and bounced over the carnage around him. Was he having a panic attack? The atmosphere of fear was so strong that he could smell it; the air was filled with an aroma of blood and sweat. He heard so many screams that his ears hurt.
This was his reality now, he realised. As he stood in the middle of the chaos, he finally understood that decisions didn’t end in the Grand Hall. He knew that acting as Tammuz, he had created this. The blood from every wound might as well have poured over his own hands, because although his skin wasn’t stained by crimson, he was responsible for every drop that hit the pavement.
This was what he didn’t see when he sat in the Grand Hall and wore his mask. Was it all worth it? Were the cries and screams of innocents a worthy goal? There was no doubt that Kiele was a home for the Resistance, but these people weren’t evil. It was clear that they were just folks trying to get by.
A crowd of men approached from the east of the town, walking in file past an abandoned fishmonger shop and a cobbler’s. One of them had a wide smile painted on the front of his mask, and for a second it looked as if he saw the carnage in front of him and grinned. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. With clipped words, he ordered the others into formation.
The Kiele fighters couldn’t have looked any more different from Baz’s unit. The Capita soldiers at least looked like an army, with the starched uniforms and stern expressions that seemed to be requisite if you were from the Dome. The Kiele men seemed to have something that the Hanks’s men lacked; they had fire in their eyes. Their clothes were mismatched and their weapons looked like they’d been scavenged from a DIY store, but they had passion and purpose.
Another man stood beside the one with the smile. He was tall, with shoulders that looked as if they would take the weight of a battering ram, and his ginger hair stuck up like the coarse fur of a dog. This man had a meaner look in his eyes than the rest, and he watched the battle in front of him like a drunk faced with a row of whiskey bottles.
At a signal from the ginger man, the Kiele fighters rushed into the battle. One Capita soldier was caught unaware, and he sank to the floor as a Kiele knife stabbed through his Adam’s apple. The smell of blood grew thicker, and Baz’s lungs gasped for air. Suddenly he prayed that he was back in the Grand Hall, and he had the stupid thought that even Marduk’s sneering face would be a welcome sight.
If he could go back now, he wondered if he would make a different decision. Maybe he would go down a path that didn’t lead to the slaughter of a town; of the clanging sound of blades meeting blades, and the sight of concrete paving stained with splattered crimson.
A little girl darted out of a doorway and ran toward the Kiele fighters. She dodged past a Capita soldier who, in the adrenaline-soaked heat of battle, swiped at her with his knife, but missed. An officer galloped on his horse from the opposite end of town, and it was clear that the horse’s hooves would cross with the girl’s small steps.
Baz’s breath caught in his throat. He wanted to reach out and scoop the girl up, but he was too far away. Men screamed around him, and people crawled on the floor to escape battle, some of them with deep wounds in their bodies.
The officer on his horse hadn’t seen the girl, and he was going to trample her. Baz wondered if seeing her would even make a difference to the man. A look of cruelty twisted in his face, and Baz sensed that this was the expression of a man drenched in bloodlust.
A Kiele fighter locked eyes with Baz. Baz realised that his hands were shaking, and that he hadn’t even loosened his knife from his sheath. He pulled it out and gripped the handle so hard that his knuckles ached.
The man ran at him. Baz readied himself and held the knife at waist level. As the man grew nearer, something fell on Baz and knocked him to the ground. He looked up to see an infected, newly-dispatched, slumped over him. Blood spurted from its neck and covered his hair and forehead. The man stood above Baz now, his face distorted by rage. He lifted a hatchet in the air.
Baz stabbed his knife into the side of the man’s knee, and digging it deep into the kneecap. The man screamed and fell to the floor. The blood drained from his face, and he dropped his hatchet and clutched his leg.
He got to his feet. The girl was stood still, paralysed with fear at the onset of the officer charging toward her. Just as the horse galloped head-on toward the girl, Baz ran across the paving. He scooped the girl up in his arms and dived to the side, just out of reach of the officer. The Capita man looked down on Baz in surprise, and he stopped for a second, wondering how to act on the mutiny of a Capita soldier.
“She’s just a girl,” said Baz.
The officer looked as if he was going to say something, when the man with the wide smile walked up to the horse and plunged a blade deep into its belly. The horse buckled, and both officer and beast crashed to the ground. Blood spilled from underneath the horse, and the rider struggled to get free of the dying animal. Without pause, the man with the smile walked across and slit the officer’s throat.
He walked over to Baz and stood over him. With the girl in his arms, Baz couldn’t use his knife. He gulped. He smelled the blood in the air, and his stomach turned to water.
“Dad,” said the girl.
Baz released her from his grip, and the man with the smile gathered her in his arms. He stared at Baz for what seemed like minutes, before finally nodding at him.
As he turned to walk away, Hanks galloped up on his horse, lifted his sword and smashed the handle down on the Resistance fighter’s head.
Hanks stopped his horse. The sounds of battle started to die, replaced by the pathetic cries of the wounded. One by one blades ceased meeting flesh and instead hung loose in tired hands. Some of the Capita soldiers sank to the floor and gulped air, relieved that the battle around them was simmering to a stop.
Hanks nodded down at the man with the smile. “Take this one alive,” he told one of the officers. “And the ginger-haired one. Let’s see what they know.”
Baz sank onto his back and stared up. Rather than the clear blue of an afternoon sky, he saw dark clouds above him. Raindrops fell onto his face and pattered onto the pavement around him. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he hoped he would be somewhere else. A place that was calm and clean. He knew it wasn’t to be; the rain would brew into a storm, and it still wouldn’t be enough to wash the blood off the streets of Kiele.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ed
Its voice sounded like a lullaby sung in the raspy tones of a forty-a-day smoker. There was something dark about it, but with the sense that there was something human there, no matter how deep
ly it was buried. It was at once both familiar and odd, a sound that scratched at the inside of Ed’s head and dug deep into his subconscious.
“I could lead them away, if I chose,” it said.
Ed had to look around him to see if the others had heard it too. Part of him worried that he was just imagining it. At the same time, he wished that was the case, because whatever was outside went beyond the monstrosity of the infected. This was a being that should never have been created. No matter how Ripeech had started out, what he had become was an abomination best scrubbed out of existence.
They had pushed what furniture that was in the room up against the four windows so that two were covered by arm chairs, one by a full-height antique mirror, and the other by a chest of drawers. It didn’t completely block the outside from view, and Ed saw the infected as they scratched on the window frames and tried to pull themselves over the ledge. The only mercy was that the windows were high enough to make it difficult. It still didn’t seem it would be long before they got in.
Polyester meditation mats were scattered on the floor around them. Spent incense sticks littered table tops, and in the corners of the room speakers were fastened to the wall. Ed could almost hear the calming music they probably played during relaxation sessions.
“Where is it?” said Bethelyn.
She walked over to a window and looked beyond the mirror propped up against it. She jerked back, and shuddered.
“Don’t look at me,” said the voice.
Its voice scratched its way into Ed’s ears, eating away at every good thought he ever had and turning them sour. Suddenly, he lost all hope. He knew they wouldn’t leave here alive, and that he’d never find James. He imagined Ripeech crawling up next to him and whispering into his ear, like it had with Cillian in his hut.
When Cillian had told them about it, the idea made Ed’s skin crawl so much that he wanted to shed it like a snake. Despite the darkest images his imagination could conjure, nothing prepared him for hearing the noise first-hand. It was the cold voice of something that was once human, but had deformed so much that every shred of humanity had leaked away into the darkness.
With the infected grouping around the windows, there was only one way out of the room, and that was the way they came in. Ed considered it for a second, but when he heard the screeching of infected echo through the corridor, he knew that way out was lost to them too. Not only were they surrounded on both sides, but the creatures were in the building as well.
Bethelyn stood opposite the window covered by the mirror. Ed knew why she had chosen that particular window, because he felt it too. Wherever Ripeech stood, he somehow sensed its presence. He felt his gaze being drawn by it.
“What do you want?” said Bethelyn.
“Don’t talk to it,” said The Savage.
He took hold of a small coffee table and turned it over. He wedged his boot against the bottom of one of the legs and wrenched it away until it snapped. The splinters cracked as he pulled it free. He took out his pocketknife and started shaving the end of the leg into a spike.
Bethelyn edged closer to the window.
“Do you want something from us?”
The gurgling clamour of the infected surrounded them, the din sneaking in through every gap in the window frames. Ed had closed the doors at the end of the room and slid a table leg through the door handles, but if the monsters wanted to get in, they eventually would.
The moans ceased for a second, as if in deference to something higher on the bestial scale.
“I want the man,” said the voice.
Ed’s shoulders shivered. He tried to see through the gap where the mirror didn’t cover the frame, but all he caught was the bobbing head of an infected as it sniffed the opening. Ripeech was there, somewhere, staying out of view.
“Why me?” said Ed.
“You’re not a man.”
“Charming,” said Ed, though the sensation of fear running through him didn’t match his forced jovial tone.
The Savage scraped a long wedge of wood away from the table leg and let it drop onto the floor. The carpet was littered with curled oak shavings, and the table leg was starting to look sharp.
“He means me,” he said.
“Yes,” gurgled the voice. “The infected one. I want him.”
“I already had a wife,” said The Savage. “And she was a damn sight prettier than you.”
“What do you want from him?” said Bethelyn.
“To make him like me.”
“And what are you?”
“I have seen him. I have seen the weak one giving him blood. He can learn to become like me. I can teach him.”
The Savage gripped his sharpened table leg. “I won’t be your boyfriend,” he said. “Find someone else.”
The Savage took hold of a wooden chair and dragged it to the centre of the room. He climbed onto it and reached up toward the ceiling, where one of the plastic covers looked loose.
Ed walked over to one of the windows. They had blocked this one with a felt-lined armchair, but it wasn’t big enough to block the view completely. He pressed his head close to it and looked outside.
Peering out, he caught a glimpse of the monster. He regretted it immediately. Ripeech stood next to a tree. He was on all fours, but it was clear that he was no animal. His body was bloated, and rags hung off his torso. His nails were long and yellow, and they curved at the ends. His face was marked by craters, and it looked disfigured, like a piece of wood infected with woodworm and decayed by rot.
Despite everything he had seen over the last two weeks, he couldn’t believe that something like this existed. It was as though part of Ripeech was still human, but the other half was tainted by infection. He didn’t carry himself like the other infected, but nor did he act as a man would. He seemed like a confused creature, unsure of what he really was.
The Savage lifted the ceiling pane above him. He strained on his tiptoes to get a look at the space above, and then lowered himself back down onto his heels. He huffed.
“Nothing up there but cobwebs. Only an inch or two of space at most.”
An infected stuck its arm through the window nearest Bethelyn and scrabbled to get hold of the frame. She kicked its hand, snapping it at the wrist until it hung limply over the edge. The bone pierced its skin, and blood dripped onto the floor.
It was no good, Ed realised. They were surrounded at each exit, and it was clear they wouldn’t be able to fight their way out. He couldn’t even believe he was contemplating it, but he wondered what would happen if they gave The Savage to Ripeech. What would the creature do to him? And would it be true to its word and call away the infected?
He knew he couldn’t do that. The Savage was a loathsome man, but Ed needed him to find James. The Mainland was a humongous place, and without The Savage there to guide them, Ed would never find his brother amidst the ruined towns and desolate villages.
There was a choice to make either way. They could try and fight their way out, and more than likely all three of them would die. Or he could give up The Savage, and weigh his conscience down with the idea that he had condemned him to a worse fate than the infected could ever bring.
He realised that this was the world they lived in now. Maybe there was beauty out there somewhere, but it was buried in a grave of blood and violence, of infected and rot. The old Ed would have backed away from this. He would have filed the decision in his drawer and left it in darkness until the choice was taken from him, and he’d hide from the consequences of his inaction.
He was strong enough to live in this world. He realised that now. If Bethelyn could make it through the death of her daughter, and The Savage could lose his wife and live with infection, then Ed could learn to adapt.
The infected clamoured to get in. Outside some of the windows, the row of creatures was three bodies wide. They gurgled and hissed, tormented by their hunger but held back by the grip that Ripeech somehow had on them.
Ed walked over to one of the wi
ndows and started to drag away the chair.
“What the hell are you doing, Ed?” said The Savage.
It was one of the first times he’d used his name without a hint of sarcasm behind it. No more Wetgills, no more mockery. The Savage’s soul was corrupted by darkness, but it was one Ed would share too, he knew. There was no way to survive on the Mainland without taking some of the taint upon you.
He pulled the chair away. There were three infected at the window. Ed stared into their soulless eyes, and he ignored their hungry grunts. He took hold of the window frame and prepared to climb out.