“Hopefully?”
Vicky turned to look at the man. “You want guarantees from me?”
A flicker of something flashed across Serj’s mahogany gaze, but he didn’t say it. Maybe he did want guarantees but realised the absurdity of it. “When shall we do it, then?”
“I worry about Moira’s prisoners. The sooner we get them out, the better.” Two diseased scuffled for a second in front of them. They seemed unable to contain their fury, but the fight quickly died down after several slaps and a lot of growling. They both seemed to realise the futility of taking from one another what had already been taken. “I promised them we’d get them out two days ago.”
“Huh?”
“Oh fuck.”
“What do you mean you ‘promised them’.”
“Uh … I …”
“Just tell me, Vicky.”
A heavy sigh and Vicky kept her attention on the diseased. “After we fitted the new locks, I went to Moira’s community in the night.” She winced. “Twice.” Before Serj could speak, she added, “I wanted to make sure the prisoners were okay and to see how many guards we’re up against.”
“And?”
“I haven’t been able to work that out yet. Because it was night, I assume most of them were sleeping. But if the dorms are anything to go by, then I’d say there’s a lot of them there.”
Serj scratched his head and frowned at her. “Why did you go on your own?”
“Because you need to look after Home.”
“I’m not the only guard.”
“No, but Scoop has a little girl she needs to protect and Flynn is so pissed off with me at the moment he’s a fucking liability.”
A look out at the horizon and Serj chewed the inside of his mouth as he seemed to consider her words.
“You remember the people we saw in town. The family,” Vicky said.
“The army surplus guys?”
“Yep. Moira has them.”
At first Serj’s eyes widened. Then his head dropped and his shoulders sagged. “Damn.”
“I know, right? She has them in a cage with a man that seems to have nothing to do with them. She’s waiting until they get hungry enough to eat one another.”
“What?”
“She wants them to turn on one another for food. There’s a tense stand-off between them. At least, there was; that might have changed now.” More and more of the diseased turned away from where Serj had disappeared and wandered aimlessly.
“We need to get them out,” Serj said.
“Exactly. How about we attack in two days’ time? I know I told the people at Home five, but if they don’t have to fight, then we’ll save lives, right? Hopefully we can get it all sorted before they even have to think about it. Also, the longer we wait, the more likely it is the prisoners will be gone when we get there.”
A deep sigh and Serj continued to watch the diseased in the pen.
Before he could reply, Vicky gasped and her stomach flipped. “Oh my god.” She pointed down at the pack.
Only aware of him in her peripheral vision, Vicky noticed Serj turn to look where she indicated. “Oh fuck,” he said. “It’s …”
“Meisha,” Vicky finished for him.
The sound of the wind filled the silence between them before Serj said, “How the fuck are we going to tell Scoop?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
When they reached Home’s entrance, Vicky pulled her key out and cast a glance around her one last time. The area seemed clear, the grass moving as she would expect it to in the wind. She focused on the keyhole and unlocked the door.
The second Vicky stepped inside, she found Scoop waiting in the foyer. Heavy bags sat beneath her bloodshot eyes.
“Have you seen Meisha?” she said.
Vicky shook her head. “No. Sorry.” She and Serj looked at one another as he followed her into the foyer.
They’d discussed it on the way back and decided it would serve no purpose to tell Scoop about Meisha. The girl had gone, driven away by the disease. Sure, Scoop would need closure, and she could have that after they’d set the diseased loose on Moira’s community. It had taken them months to fill the pen, if Scoop knew about Meisha now, she’d want to get her back and bury her. Who wouldn’t, right? But that couldn’t happen. To try to get Meisha from the pen could jeopardise everything. Meisha couldn’t be saved, but Home still could.
The look in Scoop’s eyes took on a sound in Vicky’s mind. To watch her fellow guard—her irises shifting from side to side—made her think of a great structure cracking as it fell. A tower as tall as Pisa giving way at the bottom, creaking and groaning until the entire thing came crashing down.
Although Vicky reached out to hold Scoop’s hands, Scoop either didn’t notice or didn’t care because she completely disregarded the gesture. Maybe she sensed the betrayal.
Silence in the foyer save for the click of the lock as Serj closed the door. Vicky watched Scoop’s eyes glaze as if she’d retreated into her own mind. Scoop then turned around and walked away down the stairs, clearly in shock as she moved on autopilot.
A look across at Serj as she drew a deep breath and Vicky exhaled hard, her cheeks puffing out with the action. They’d done it for the right reasons. The uninfected needed to be the priority, regardless of how hard she’d just found it to lie to her friend.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The half-moon hung in the near cloudless sky. Brighter than the last time Vicky had visited, it ran white highlights along the wire of the chain-link fence. It showed the prisoners beyond, their eyes sunk so deep in their gaunt faces they appeared to have no eyes at all.
The moonlight made it easier for Vicky to navigate the rough ground but still gave her enough shadow to hide in. Although, she took no comfort from it and her stomach clamped tight with anxiety. Regardless of the cloaking darkness, it would only take a torch to reveal her in plain sight. But she had to keep going. They were finally going to move on Moira’s community and the prisoners needed to know.
Aaron looked like shit. Worse than before. His skin clung to his face as thin as a layer of film. To look at him reminded Vicky of the Gothic paintings she’d seen of skulls on writing desks. The source of light always came from a melting candle off to one side and cast appropriately eerie shadows. Fuck knew which museum she’d seen them in; the Tate, the National Gallery … a lot of years had passed since then and it hardly mattered now anyway.
Exhaustion clearly gripped Aaron, who slowly turned his head to Vicky when she stepped forward. Before he spoke, he heaved a weary sigh, the inhale lifting his entire body. “How long?”
“Two days.” Vicky dumped her heavy bag and went through the routine of passing water and food to Aaron first and then the other prisoners.
“Two days! What the fuck, Vicky? You said that three days ago!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, that’s okay then.” Laboured breaths ran through him as he lay against the fence and stared at her through listless eyes.
“I can see how it looks, but we have problems to deal with at Home.” Vicky gave some carrots to the people who lined up for them and already took some of the empty water bottles back.
“One of the guards’ kids has gone missing. It’s causing a lot of disruption. I promise I’ll be back in two days. I won’t let anything stand in the way of it.” Vicky checked behind her for the diseased and touched the knife at the back of her trousers. Up until now she’d worn the blade on her hip and taken it off inside Home. But with the amount of animosity around her at the moment, she’d decided to conceal the weapon on her at all times.
“For what good your promise is!” Aaron said. “Two more people went in the pit today, you know?”
Vicky didn’t reply.
“And they brought back three heads from the hunt! Moira’s punishing people for fun now. I’ve managed to meet the quota for heads every day, which apparently means fuck all. And I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up for.” Several
hungry gulps of air and he added, “I’ll be in the pit soon.”
“Just be prepared, okay? Be ready to bust out. We have enough diseased penned up to tear through this place. It’ll be your best chance to run. Just before it happens, I’ll bring some hammers down. When there’s chaos outside, you’ll be able to smash up the concrete ground and lift the fence up.”
“Why don’t you bring us the hammers now?”
“Because Moira will find them. It’ll ruin your chances of escape and our chance to surprise her.”
Before either of them could say anything else, Moira’s shriek cut through the night. At first Vicky thought it came from a diseased and spun around, drawing her knife. What she’d give for her crossbow right now. She’d left it behind because she needed to carry supplies on her back. Not ideal, but she probably wouldn’t hit much in the dark anyway.
Then it came again. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
After sharing a look with Aaron, Vicky threw frantic gestures at the people in the cage—hurry the fuck up with the water bottles and pass them back. A shake took a hold of her in her haste to pack her bag, the empty bottles crunching as she threw them in. Fortunately Moira seemed too occupied at that moment to notice anything else.
The zip on Vicky’s bag creaked through the night air and she turned to Aaron again. “Hang on in there. I promise I’ll get you free.” She then darted into what shadow she could use and moved alongside the prison until she came to the guards’ section of Moira’s complex.
Like the last time she’d visited the community, the door to the guards’ communal area hung wide open. Firelight rippled across the forecourt. It lit up the cage, twisting and bending the shadows on the bars as if manipulating the metal itself.
Vicky found a bush on an elevated mound. It gave her both something to hide behind and a view into the forecourt beyond.
The mum of the family shouted at the man in the cage. “I said stop looking at my girls. I don’t know what you want from them, but it won’t happen.”
Moira stood close to the bars, her eyes wild in her craggy face, her crazy black hair bouncing as she hopped on the spot.
No more than a defensive ball, the man recoiled in the cage from the mother’s wrath. He raised his shaking hands above his head and looked at the ground in total subservience. “Please, I don’t plan on doing anything. I don’t mean you any harm. Please.”
“He’s lying, Simon,” the mum said to the man in the cage with her, and she pointed down at the cowering wreck again. “I can see it in his face.”
If anyone had insanity in their face at that moment, it didn’t come from the older man. Moira maybe, the mum for sure, and even Simon seemed to be catching the crazy bug, his wide eyes bulging in his gaunt face.
Simon moved next to his wife and grew more animated, the situation clearly pumping him up. “Are you calling my wife a liar?”
Vicky jumped to see the mum of the family dart forward and drive a hard kick into the man’s face. It connected with a loud clop before the dad piled in after her. They went to work on the older man, a flurry of punches and kicks moving in the dancing light.
When the dad raised his fist, Vicky noticed the glisten of blood on it. His or the man’s, she couldn’t tell, but only one side fought the battle. While being attacked, the older man curled up and covered his face.
Spittle flew from the mother’s mouth when she leaned over him, her teeth bared. “You won’t win this. This is the fucking end for you.”
Until that point, Vicky had focused on the mum and dad. Although when she looked at the two girls behind them, her heart sank. They hadn’t been taken over with the rage infecting their parents. Instead, they stood at the back of the cage—seemingly pressing themselves as hard against the bars as they could—and they hugged one another. Both of them cried freely.
But Vicky didn’t watch them for long.
When the mum dropped to her knees next to the man, Vicky shuddered to see her wild face. The firelight glistened on her teeth when she opened her mouth wide and dived in on the cowering man’s neck.
The man screamed, Moira cackled, the guards cheered, the girls cried, the dad continued to beat the shit out of the man, and the mum pulled away, blood dribbling down her chin and neck as she chewed on the liberated piece of flesh that had been a part of the man only moments before.
Knots clamped Vicky’s guts tight and a nauseating fire burned in her belly. Whatever else she did in this life, she would take Moira down.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maybe it would have been a good time for Vicky to leave. The guards and Moira all watched the barbaric attack in the cage and it gave her the perfect opportunity to move from shadow to shadow until she got out of there. But she didn’t. Instead, she stayed and watched events unfold in front of her, her stomach tense and her jaw slack.
The mum’s eyes rolled as if she were about to vomit, yet she continued to chew the man’s flesh. When she gulped it down, Vicky’s stomach flipped.
The mum looked at the others, a goatee of blood dribbling from her chin.
Even Moira’s laugh died down at that point. “You fucking sicko,” she said.
Some form of realisation sank through the mum’s features and her mouth fell half open. Only moments earlier she’d been lost in the frenzy of the kill, but in the face of Moira’s berating, she seemed to be coming back.
“How the fuck do you do that to another human being?” Moira said.
Despite being over twenty metres away and seeing everything in the poor light of the fire, Vicky noticed the shake running through the mum.
The mum looked from the dead man down to her blood-covered hands and then up to her family. Even her husband backed away from her, her daughters still pushing against the bars as if their applied pressure would get them out of there.
The frantic cycle repeated several times before the mum focused on Moira. “What have I done?”
The accusation of a few seconds ago left Moira’s frame and she spoke with a soft voice. “You’ve just killed a man, dear. And you’ve eaten some of him.” Her tone stiffened and she shouted, “Isn’t that fucking obvious?”
As the mum shook her head and rocked back and forth, Moira’s cackling laugh returned and rang out into the night. The shrill punch of glee startled a rabbit next to Vicky, which exploded to life and ran away from the bush. By the time it had vanished from sight, Vicky had only just drawn her knife. Were that a diseased, it would be eating her face off by now.
Moira continued to goad the mum. “You’ve just bitten into him like he’s a cooked ham.” She used her long and bony index finger on her right hand to jab at her temple as she laughed louder. “You’re fucking mental.”
When the mum looked at her partner and her girls, she shook more violently. As if a hypothermic seizure came over her, she jittered uncontrollably, the man’s blood still running from her face.
Not that her clear distress stopped Moira. “I can’t believe you thought you had to eat him. What the fuck’s wrong with you? I was planning on letting you out today too.”
The brief moment of lucidity seemed to pass for the mum, who repeatedly shook her head as she walked in small circles inside the cage. She spread the fingers on both of her hands out and stretched them back as if locked in a spasm. She clapped her palms together, seemingly trying to avoid the fingers connecting with one another.
The girls remained at the back of the cage and clung together as if they could keep each other afloat in the choppy sea of insanity. They stared at their mother, or what used to be their mother.
Moira sneered as she looked at the family and shook her head. She then turned to her guards. “Get them out.”
After one guard opened the cage, four of them moved in and grabbed a family member each. The family came without resistance, all of them looking down at the recently dead man as they passed him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
More guards joined the ones who’d dragged the family out until there were
thirteen in total surrounding them. They followed Moira around the side of the complex where the prisoners were. Vicky moved over with them, staying in the shadows to remain hidden.
“No,” the dad said, his call running out into the night. “Don’t lock us up again.”
Vicky hadn’t noticed the dad’s bare feet until one of the guards stamped on them and he screamed. Another guard punched him on the chin, rocking him to the point where the one leading him had to hold him up.
A quick check over both shoulders and Vicky couldn’t see any diseased. They might be there, but if they hadn’t been attracted to the sound, then maybe she’d be okay.
The dad had asked Moira not to lock him up again. Vicky had no doubt the crazy bitch would oblige him.
When Moira walked toward the two manhole covers, Vicky dropped her head and sighed.
At the cover over the pit of diseased, Moira stopped to look up at one of her guards. She then pointed down at it.
“No,” Vicky whispered. “Don’t do it.”
Backflips turned through Vicky’s stomach as she watched on and listened to the scratch of the metal manhole cover against the concrete surrounding it. When she looked at the cage of prisoners, she saw Aaron watching her. Maybe he couldn’t see her. Maybe he just guessed she was still there. Either way, she stepped back a few paces into a darker spot.
Something close to hope burned in Vicky’s chest as she watched Moira and her guards. Maybe the hideous matriarch just wanted to taunt the family. Hopefully, she’d change her mind and throw them in with the other prisoners.
The sharp tear of gaffer tape echoed in the open space as one of the guards pulled off a long strip and wrapped it around the mouth of the youngest of the two girls. He then used more to pin her arms to her body. When the guard had finished, the silver tape sheathed and gagged the girl. It left her standing pencil straight.
The Alpha Plague 6: A Fast-Paced Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Page 10