Flynn gasped and raised his baton. The woman stood on the other side of the rusty truck.
A grunt came back at her.
“Deer!” she called out.
Not that Flynn could see them, but because the group had stopped, the silence allowed him to hear the animals running through the meadow next to the old road. His pulse spiked. The woman would have to pass him to get to them. He lifted his baton a little bit higher.
No one in the group spoke, but as one they rushed off the road toward the sounds. The woman on the other side of the truck moved slightly slower.
Flynn clenched his jaw as he listened to her pass through the long grass and he got ready to swing for her. At least he’d take one down before they had to either fight or run from the rest of them, and one less cannibal in a world chock-full of the fuckers wouldn’t be a bad thing.
The swoosh of the woman’s movement stopped. Before Flynn could look up, he heard one of the men call from the meadow beyond. “Swan, what is it?”
When Flynn looked up to his right, he saw the wild, almost animal face of the woman staring down at him.
She had her head tilted to one side as if she listened to him rather than looked at him. Blonde hair clogged with dirt, filthy skin, and very few teeth left in her mouth.
Flynn stared back at the bright and wide blue eyes of the woman.
“Swan!” The call came again.
She looked in the direction of the man’s voice.
“What is it?”
At least that was what Flynn thought he’d said. Hard to tell.
She looked back at Flynn, her eyes narrowing as she snapped her head to the other side.
Chapter Two
Flynn and Swan continued to stare at one another. If she moved for him, he’d crack her skull. She might have animal reflexes from years of living like one, but he’d move quicker if he needed to.
The smell of the long grass ran up Flynn’s nostrils when he pulled in a deep breath. He definitely had the beating of one of them, but an entire pack would overwhelm him and Serj.
In the few years since the nomadic groups had sprung up, they’d earned quite a reputation. Two men from Home, Mark and Alan, had a run-in with them a few years back and never returned. Others from their community found two skeletons picked clean of flesh a few days later. They had scrape marks on the inside of their skulls from where someone had eaten their brains. The nomads moved through the world like a plague, consuming anyone they could get their hands on.
“Swan?” The call came again, the wind tossing the grass around Flynn and the tattered lady.
Despite her twitching movements—her snapping of her head from one side to the other, her slightly pulled-back arms—something in Swan still clung onto her humanity. Flynn saw it in the pinch of her blue eyes. Sadness stared out of them. Trauma from a hard life of atrocities. What had happened to her to land her with a bunch of savages? She stared regret down at Flynn. Empathy.
Flynn tensed in anticipation of yet another call from one of the gang before Swan snapped her head in the direction of the sound. “It’s fine,” she called back at them as an animalistic caw. “Thought I saw something. Nothing. Not a critter like I’d hoped. Nothing.”
She turned her back on Flynn as if he didn’t exist and headed in the direction of the others, picking her way through the long grass with stabbing steps.
Flynn let go of a breath that went on forever. As the air left his tense body, he turned limp, pressing into the rusty shell of the huge truck behind him.
Despite relaxing a little, Flynn still kept a tight grip on his baton. The nomads weren’t known for their generosity; to take her at her word would be foolish.
Chapter Three
About ten minutes passed before Flynn saw Serj appear.
After he’d looked down at Flynn, Serj turned and looked behind him in the direction the nomads had gone. “I think we’re okay now.”
Flynn stood up and was momentarily dazzled by the sun. He too scanned the meadow, the grass moving with the wind. “I think I preferred it when the diseased were here. At least we knew what they’d do.”
“And what’s with all the animal names?” Serj said.
“I’ve got a theory about that.”
“Go on.”
“If they give themselves animal names,” Flynn said, “behave more animalistic, and communicate in a series of short sentences and grunts, then they’re regressing from humanity, right?”
Serj shrugged. “Okay.”
“Well, it must be quite a thing to get your head around. Eating people, I mean. Anything to make it slightly easier …”
“Like pretending you’re not human, distancing yourself from the atrocity of it?”
“Exactly.”
Another shrug and Serj looked at the town on the horizon, the sun high in the sky above it. “This place always reminds me of her, you know.”
Flynn would be lying if he said he didn’t see it coming. He and Serj had been into town several times in the past few years and Vicky always came up. Instead of looking at Home’s leader, he looked at the broken office block that dominated the craggy skyline. What had once been a town now looked like jagged shards pointing at the sky.
“I can’t believe it’s been ten years,” Serj said.
Tension pulled Flynn’s back tight. Did Serj really need to go there with this?
“And I can’t believe it’s been eight years since the last of the diseased died off.”
“You think they’re all gone?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
“I keep thinking she’ll come back,” Flynn said, the words falling from his mouth before he could stop them. “I know it’s been years, and logic would tell me I’m a fool to have any kind of hope, but I’d give anything to see her again. To ask her why she left.”
Serj continued to stare at the town in front of them. “What do you think she’d make of things now?”
“Of Brian and his lot running Home?”
“Hey!” Serj turned to Flynn. “They don’t run Home.”
“As good as. Were it not for you, they’d take the place over in a heartbeat.”
“That’s why I stop them!” Serj said.
The sound of the wind carried over the vast meadow.
Flynn finally spoke. “Do you think she’ll ever come back?”
“I don’t know, mate.”
The tension that had coiled in Flynn’s back moved to his jaw and he bit down hard. His pulse quickened. He still had a hold of his baton and he squeezed it tighter than ever. “Why did she leave? Did I do something wrong? Was I too moody with her?”
“No!”
Flynn shook his head and heat rose up beneath his cheeks. “How do you know? No matter how many times I run through what happened in my head, I just can’t understand it. I was sixteen, for fuck’s sake.”
Flynn watched several birds flying over the ruined town in the distance. “All she wanted was to mother me, yet she left. What was wrong with her? I was a fucking child. I needed her and she didn’t give a fuck. She didn’t give a fuck about anyone but herself.”
Another few seconds passed where neither of them spoke. Serj broke the silence this time. “It’s like a hot coal, you know?”
“What is?”
“No matter who you throw it at, you’ll still get burned.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Anger, Flynn.”
“You think I don’t have a right to be angry?”
“I didn’t say that. But you’ve held it for a long time.”
Fire rushed through Flynn and he raised his voice. “That’s because she left me!”
“Maybe it was more complicated than that.”
Before Flynn could reply, Serj added, “And even if it wasn’t, you need to find a way to stop it burning you.”
“And how do I do that?”
“Forgive her. Whatever reasons she had, we both know how much she loved you. She m
ade a choice. Whether it was a good or a bad one, she loved you nonetheless. And if you can’t do it for her, do it for yourself. You need to find a way to let go of your hurt because it’ll consume you. It’ll mess with every relationship you have and keep on stinging you until you overcome it.”
Flynn refused to look at Serj, the wind stinging his already sore eyes. He ground his jaw and breathed through his nose.
When Serj nudged Flynn, he squeezed his baton harder.
Serj said, “What do you think she’d say if she could meet Angelica?”
“She knew Angelica,” Flynn said.
“Not when she was your girlfriend.”
Heat spread through Flynn’s cheeks and he didn’t reply.
“Come on,” Serj said, “you’ve been together for two years now. It’s okay to call her your girlfriend. I reckon she’d cry with happiness. You were her baby boy.”
A couple of heavy gulps and Flynn shook his head. When he looked at Serj, he saw the man’s intention and relaxed a little. Another gulp against the burning lump in his throat and he nodded. “I think she’d cry too.”
A broad smile spread across Serj’s face.
“Thank you,” Flynn said.
“For what?”
“I needed someone when Piotr died and Vicky went away. You didn’t have to do it, but you were there for me and I’ll never forget that.”
“Does that mean I have to cry about you and Angelica now?”
Flynn couldn’t suppress his smile when he looked at Serj.
“Come on,” Serj said and nudged Flynn again. “Let’s go and see if we can find some lead in that cursed town.”
Chapter Four
“So, what about you?” Flynn said to Serj with a smile, his voice echoing as they passed beneath the railway bridge leading into the town.
“Huh?” Serj said, his attention fixed firmly in front of them as they walked.
“Come on, you old dog, don’t hold out on me. I’ve seen the way Sally looks at you. You can’t tell me there’s nothing there.”
Unlike a lot of the town, the railway bridge remained standing. It probably wouldn’t hold up against a train going over it anymore, and bricks had fallen from it to the ground, but it hadn’t collapsed yet. Their footsteps were amplified from walking beneath it. Flynn looked at the structure above their heads. Hopefully it wouldn’t fall at that moment.
Once they’d stepped out of the other side, Serj looked up at the vast abandoned office building in front of them. “I’m not interested,” he said.
Flynn looked away from his friend and up at the structure too. What had once been a modern building made from steel and glass now stood as a skeleton of its former self. Much of the metal had been stripped from it—and anything else useful by the look of things.
The old office furniture remained on the sparse floors. Many of the cheap desks had buckled and folded down on themselves where years of damp had eaten away at their weak chipboard. The chairs lay scattered around, their covers ripped, exposing the foam inside them.
“After Jessica,” Serj continued, “I kind of lost interest in women, you know?”
A nod of his head and Flynn said, “That’s understandable.” Serj clearly didn’t want to talk about it, so he looked at the spray-painted words on the walls of the place. If they could even be called that. He couldn’t make out most of the writing, but he did see one phrase repeated over and over. KEEP OUT!
“People have been picking this town clean for twenty years now,” Flynn said. “You think there’ll be anything left for us? Especially with how useful lead is?”
“I hope so. We only need a small bit, so I’m sure we can find it. Just enough to line the barn’s chimney. We’re losing about ten percent of our supplies to that bloody leak, or about ten percent of storage space. We need to sort it out, especially before winter.”
Although Flynn listened to Serj, he couldn’t help but look at the red paint. The aggressive warning that told them to get the fuck away. “And you think the rats will let us in and out again without any problem?”
A shrug of his shoulders and Serj said, “Who knows? They may write all that on the walls, but they’ve always seemed to avoid conflict before. This is the closest place to find any buildings, so we’ve got to try, right?”
Another look at the red writing and Flynn didn’t reply.
While craning his neck as if he could see around the large building in front of them, Serj said, “There’s got to be a small amount of lead left on one of the roofs. Come on, we can be in and out in no time.”
Serj took off at a jog around the left side of the large building and Flynn followed him, still clinging onto his baton. Not that it would do him any good. If the rats turned on them, they’d be fucked, outnumbered potentially in the hundreds.
The pair moved at a steady jog. They could find more speed if they needed it.
As they ran, Flynn looked into the old, abandoned shops. Impossible to tell what many of them had been, the signs had all fallen down and the insides picked clean of anything useful. It seemed wherever he looked he saw the rats’ indecipherable scrawl. He could only make out the two repeated words: KEEP OUT!
The wind played its symphony through the abandoned buildings, dragging Flynn’s attention to his left and right. He knew the noise to be the wind, but he still had to check, just in case.
Most of the buildings had collapsed in on themselves. Maybe from the effects of neglect, but more than likely human intervention. If you took enough from a building, it would inevitably fall. No wonder the rats were so pissed off about it.
As they jogged into what used to be a pedestrian area in the high street, Flynn caught movement in the shadows to his right. It shifted through the darkness and vanished before he’d seen it clearly. Another scuffle on his left and Flynn saw something, but not enough to get a clear picture of what. He and Serj shared a look with one another.
“Rats,” Serj said in a low voice. “They’ll leave us be if we leave them be.”
“I’m glad you’re confident,” Flynn said as he watched the shops for more of them.
Every shop Flynn looked into had the mark of the rats in it. The words KEEP OUT and red spray-painted lines of other words they’d tried to recreate. Maybe the rats understood what had been written. Maybe their language had evolved rather than devolved. Although hard to believe when he looked at the infantile scrawl.
Out of breath from the run, Flynn said, “Pretty fucking clear they don’t want us here.”
Although Serj frowned and looked into the shops—his heavy steps slapping down on the concrete ground—he didn’t reply. When he looked forward again, he pointed in the direction they were heading and said, “There.”
Flynn looked, but he couldn’t see what Serj had seen.
“The fire exit stairs,” Serj said. “That’ll give us access to the roof up there. It looks relatively untouched.”
Flynn looked at the large wall with the metal stairs zigzagging up the side of it. The roof on the top hadn’t folded in like most of the others had. “Those stairs don’t look very solid.”
Serj didn’t reply. Instead, he picked up his pace and headed for the wall.
Chapter Five
The tock of Serj’s feet called out through the near silent town as he climbed the metal stairs.
Flynn climbed up after him, checking behind frequently for signs of the rats. He and Serj were exposing themselves and leaving just one way down. Time to find out if the little fuckers were hostile or not.
The stairs rocked as they climbed them, but when Flynn looked at the points where they’d been anchored to the walls, they seemed stable. Although seemed could quite easily be proven wrong.
The scuff of more feet moved over the shop’s dusty floors below. Flynn looked back again. Shadows spilled out into the high street and betrayed the movement of the hidden rats, but he couldn’t see any of them yet. It served as a potent warning; they were in their space now and they operated only with
their permission.
When they reached the top of the stairs, they were five storeys up. Flynn turned around and looked out over the town. The unobstructed wind crashed into him and cooled his sweat-dampened skin.
“There’s some,” Serj said as he pointed over the roof, his hair being tousled by the strong breeze. He didn’t seem concerned with keeping his voice down.
Flynn looked down to see agitation twitch through the shadows below before he looked to where Serj pointed. Lead stretched up the side of the large chimney.
“That chimney’s bigger than ours, right?” Serj said.
Flynn nodded before he looked back down at the ground. The shadows had grown larger from where the rats had moved to the very edges of the buildings. Just out of sight, they seemed ready to reveal themselves.
“If we can get that lead free, that should be enough.” Serj stepped onto the roof.
A loud snap popped through the town and, before Flynn knew what had happened, Serj vanished from his sight.
Chapter Six
The shadows in the doorways pulled back as Flynn ran down the fire escape. Maybe they didn’t mean him any harm, but if they tried anything now, he’d kill the fucking lot of them.
The sound of Flynn’s feet hammered down the stairs, the entire staircase rocking with his movement. “Hang on, Serj,” he called out. Fuck knew if he heard him or not.
When he got to the last flight of stairs, Flynn vaulted over the handrail and hit the ground running. He ran alongside the wall and around to the front of the shop Serj had fallen into.
Like with every shop, a huge empty space sat where the window used to be. It left a large gap for him to run through.
The second he saw Serj, Flynn pulled up and clapped a hand to his mouth. “Oh God.”
Where Flynn would have expected anyone to scream in Serj’s situation, he found his old friend didn’t. Instead, he simply lay on the ground, a pool of blood spreading around him as he held the long metal bar that had pierced up through his stomach.
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