In all the time she’d been in Home, Vicky hadn’t witnessed Serj lose it often. She didn’t look back, but she couldn’t hear anything from the people he addressed.
“You, you, and you,” Serj said. “Clean up this mess.
Vicky stepped into her room and closed the door behind herself. It didn’t silence the sound of the people outside, but it shut them off enough. More importantly, it showed them she didn’t want to talk.
Chapter Forty-Four
When Vicky grabbed the door handle to leave her room, it felt cold to the touch and gooseflesh ran up her right arm. The corridor had been a mess the last time she’d been in it. Although a few hours had passed since then. A deep breath and she pulled the door wide as she exhaled. The hinges creaked, calling out into the hallway.
The white corridor shone as white as always, but the bleach smelled so strong Vicky ruffled her nose in response to it. There remained no trace of the blood she’d seen only a few hours previously, the blood she’d helped paint the walls with.
Voices mixed together as a hum of chatter and came down the corridor from the canteen area. What would the people say to her when they saw her? Would she be a hero for doing the job no one else wanted, or a monster for her actions? In the other direction Vicky heard the crash and bang of pans. The kitchen staff never spoke to her, not even when she tried to engage them in conversation, so she headed in that direction.
The second Vicky stepped into the vast area, the sounds stopped and the chefs looked up at her. “Well, this has never happened before,” she said from the side of her mouth as she froze under the collective gaze of the staff.
When none of them replied, Vicky looked at the floor. She walked toward the other corridor that ran parallel to the one she’d just stepped out of. It had the monitor room along it.
In the next corridor, a woman Vicky recognised but didn’t know the name of walked towards her. As Vicky had just done in the kitchen, the woman looked down. She also pressed herself against the wall at Vicky’s passing.
It made it easier than having to talk to her. Before Vicky could bump into anyone else, she came to the monitor room’s door, pulled it open, and entered.
To see Flynn in the room sent Vicky’s heart and stomach south. Instead of looking at the boy, she looked at the wall of monitors and shook her head. Diseased on every screen. Multiple diseased on every screen. They shuffled around, snapping at the air as a dog would when catching a fly. Fuck knew how they’d get through them should they need to.
A look at Flynn and she saw he focused on the monitors too. “We need to go outside and deal with this at some point.”
“Good luck persuading the people to do that.”
“Do you have any other suggestions?” Vicky asked.
“No, but we wouldn’t have needed them had you and Serj not filled a pen full of those monsters.”
As much as Vicky wanted to shout at the boy, she stared at him and clenched her jaw. She bit so hard it ran pains to her temples.
“I only stood by you in the canteen because I didn’t want everyone to turn on you,” Flynn said. “Even if you did deserve it.”
“You should try running this place.”
“Serj runs it, not you.”
“Yeah, right!”
As he threw his shoulders up in a shrug, Flynn said, “Whatever. Just know I’m still pissed about many things, including the monsters outside.” He turned to the monitors and looked from one to the next. “You and Serj are responsible for this. They wouldn’t be out there were it not for you two.”
Vicky couldn’t hold back. “Stop being such a self-righteous prick. You wouldn’t be here had I not saved your arse out there when you fell over.”
At times like this, Vicky remembered the little boy of ten years ago had grown to the size of a man as he towered over her, a faint whiff of body odour coming from him. “And I bet you loved that, didn’t you? Any chance to make me feel weak and vulnerable, eh?”
Vicky took a step back from Flynn’s imposing frame. Not that he’d do anything to her. “I saved you, Flynn. And I’d do it again. It’s why I wanted you to team up with Piotr so I didn’t have to make those decisions anymore. Your life is more important to me than my own. I will always put your safety first. Besides, the diseased only chased us because of the noise you made.”
“They wouldn’t have been there in the first place were it not for you! Okay, you saved me, well done.”
“And I’d do it again.”
“You’re not my mother, you know? How many times do I have to remind you?”
“As many times as you like. It won’t make any difference. Regardless of what you think, Flynn, Serj and I did what we thought was best for the community.”
“Well, that didn’t work, did it? Maybe you two morons shouldn’t be in charge if you thought that was best.”
The word moron hit a nerve and Vicky locked tight. She turned away from Flynn. “Just go back to your room. Get some rest, yeah? God knows you need it. You’ve always been cranky when you get tired.”
“Fuck you, Vicky.”
Before Vicky could reply, Flynn stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him as he left.
Chapter Forty-Five
A couple hours after Flynn left the control room, Vicky continued to watch the monitors. The black and white grainy images became harder to see as night settled in. Although they still had a good few hours before it got dark. Maybe tiredness played a role too. As she stared at the screens—her eyes stinging—more and more diseased appeared with every passing moment. What would they do if they kept coming? At what point would there be so many they couldn’t get out the front door?
The meadow in front of Home had diseased everywhere Vicky looked. They trudged through the long grass, aimless in their movement, but still not clearing out. Either side of Home looked the same.
More diseased wandered through the solar panels and Vicky squinted to watch them. They weren’t destructive against anything but people, but a shitload of the clumsy fuckers could cause a lot of unintentional damage, and Home relied on that power more than anything.
A look back at the images out the front of Home again and Vicky paused. “What the—?”
To be certain of what she saw, she leaned closer to the monitor in front of her.
Two diseased, locked together almost as if embracing one another. More than likely they were fighting, but as Vicky studied them, her heart beat harder than before and a rock clamped tight in her stomach.
The only sound in the room came from the buzz of electrical devices surrounding her and the pounding of her own pulse. The image might have been poor quality, but that didn’t matter. Vicky recognised what she saw from the start and now she had to accept the truth of it. In front of her—locked in one last desperate hug—stood Meisha and Scoop. She gasped. “No way!”
A knock on the door sent Vicky’s pulse skyrocketing. Her heart beat like a hamster’s as she took deep breaths to try to settle herself down.
After a second knock, she walked over to the door.
When she opened it, the huge figure of Piotr blocked any extra light from coming in. Vicky looked up at him and her heart sank. Of all the people to turn up when she’d just seen that outside.
Piotr said nothing as he and Vicky stared at one another. He then looked over her shoulder at the monitors.
The image of the two diseased must have stood out among the rambling chaos because Piotr noticed it immediately. He walked over to it and stared for a few seconds before he said, “Is that …?”
Vicky nodded and cleared the lump in her throat. “Yep.”
“Damn.”
Another hot wave of sadness rose beneath Vicky’s skin, setting fire to her cheeks. “At least they still love each other, I suppose, even after they’ve turned. Maybe there is still something there. Although I’m not sure Flynn would want much to do with me were we in that state.”
Vicky squirmed under Piotr’s scrutiny. “The same
thing happened between my brother and his kid, you know?”
“Huh?”
“The way Flynn’s pushing you away. I saw my nephew do the same to my brother. I think most teenagers do it against their parents.”
To be called his parent set Vicky’s tears loose and her bottom lip bent out of shape. She wiped them away with the back of her hand and sniffed hard. “I’m sorry,” she said as she looked at the floor. “I’m in a bit of a state at the moment.”
Piotr waited for Vicky to look up at him. “You do an amazing job with him, you know? You make him feel secure, which allows him to get shitty with you.”
An ironic laugh and Vicky shook her head. “That’s what it is, is it?”
“Absolutely.” After he reached out and lifted her hands in his, his grip firm and warm, Piotr said, “Just keep going, keep loving him, and he’ll come round. He’ll see it for what it is in time.”
The kindness from what had been a cold man up until that point broke Vicky and she could do nothing to stop from crying. This time she didn’t try to fight it and let her tears run down her face and off her chin. She shook as she spoke. “I couldn’t do anything different even if I tried.”
Piotr gripped her in a hug so tight Vicky felt her skeleton shift. She made a gargling noise, more because she felt uncomfortable from the gesture than anything else.
“I know,” Piotr said. “And know just how wonderful that is.”
Another wave of grief threw Vicky off and she nodded. “Thank you. I needed to hear that.”
Before Piotr could reply, Vicky looked away from him. She glanced at the monitor that looked out over the field with the solar panels and her tears stopped instantly. “Oh, shit.”
“What?” Piotr said as he followed her line of sight to the monitor.
But she didn’t need to tell him.
A gang of about fifteen people, both men and women, had entered the solar panel field from the back. They were carrying weapons from bats to swords to axes. They smashed three panels as Vicky watched on and they looked like they were going for more.
Vicky shook her head. “Looks like I was wrong about them not attacking our electricity supply.”
“Fuck!” Piotr said. “What are we going to do?”
“We only have one choice, right?”
After a heavy sigh, Piotr straightened his considerable frame and lifted his chest. He nodded at Vicky. “Come on, then, let’s take this fight to them.”
Vicky nodded back, drew a deep breath and left the room. Piotr followed behind her.
Chapter Forty-Six
By the time Vicky arrived in the canteen, she’d already loaded up with weapons from the armoury.
Piotr walked by her side, and he too had equipped himself for the fight.
With a crossbow strapped to her back, a baseball bat in her tight grip, and a knife down the back of her trousers, Vicky looked at the people gathered there.
Most of the complex seemed to be in the room at that moment. Well over half of them turned to look at her and Piotr. The rest stood and watched the large monitors on the wall. Not only did they show the diseased waiting outside for them, but they also showed the group of humans smashing up their solar panels whenever they flicked to the view behind Home. Serj and Flynn stood among the crowd.
A dry pinch in her throat, Vicky swallowed and then coughed.
When Serj turned to look at her, Vicky shouted across at him, “We need to get out there and fight.”
At first Serj didn’t reply, the colour draining from his dark face.
“You’ve seen what they’re doing, right?” Vicky said as she pointed at the screens. “We stay here and do nothing and we’ll end up with no power. We have to fight them.”
Although Serj drew a breath to reply, a dissenting voice came at Vicky across the canteen. “That’s easy for you to say.” Brian—the tall New Age hippy—stood with Sharon, Dan, and a few others by his side. They should split them up. Too much time together and the paranoid fucks could start a revolution based on ill-informed conspiracy theories. The same hostility that Brian directed at her also came from the people around him. Disdain, revulsion, and open resentment, they looked like they still had a lot of things to say to her.
A furious pulse damn near rocked Vicky where she stood. Tension wound the muscles in her back so tight it hurt, and before she had control of herself, she shouted at them, “Why the fuck is it easy for me to say? You think I want to go out there in this mess? You think I enjoy this bullshit because I’m one of the only ones brave enough to actually do something about it?”
No less hostile, Brian pulled his shoulders back and Vicky picked up on all the people around the canteen watching them at that moment. “You created this mess.”
“What the fuck?” Some of Vicky’s anger left her. Did they know about the virus and the Alpha Tower?
Before Vicky could say anything, Dan stepped forward. “He has a point. We were fine until you came here.”
At least they didn’t know the truth. “Fine? You had a psycho running this place. He wanted to kick out everyone he deemed to be weak. It would have been easier than fixing the problems in the community like a lack of food from the farm. He simply wanted to reduce numbers. You miss that, do you?”
Dan opened his mouth to speak, but Vicky cut him off. “That was a rhetorical question. Not only did you have Hugh fucking shit up, but you also had Moira’s community not too far away. You’ve seen first-hand what she’s capable of in what she’s done to your children. Now, you may have felt you were fine, but you were ignorant to the dangers you lived with, nothing else. How many times do I have to say it?”
Not giving any of them a chance to reply, Vicky said, “Another rhetorical question. You have one fucking choice. Survive or don’t survive. That’s it. If you want power and fresh air down here, we need to fight for those solar panels.” She turned to look at the screens and saw the wreck of several more panels as Moira’s guards moved forward again.
A look at Brian’s narrowed eyes and Vicky said, “Those fuckers are attacking our lifeblood.” She looked at Sharon, Dan, and the other sheep that had joined their cause. “I, for one, will not stand around and wait to gas out like fish on a riverbank as our air supply runs out.”
Serj and Flynn had already moved toward the corridor with the armoury on it.
“You want revenge for what happened to your children?” Vicky said, this time addressing Sharon.
Sharon nodded.
Vicky pointed a strong finger at the screen again. “Well, there it fucking is.” Fuelled by her heavy pulse, she raised her voice. “We need to fuck them up. We need to show them they can’t do this to us. Otherwise, they’ll roll the fuck over us and take everything we have.
“You can stand here with your mouths open like dumb fish all day—” Vicky looked around the canteen and saw some of the people bristle as if they were energising for the fight “—but I’m going out there to make sure they don’t take this place.”
An itch burned Vicky’s throat as she continued to shout at the people from Home. “Serj and Flynn have just gone to get weapons. You have spears up here, but if there’s anything else you need to take, go and see them now.”
Stuart, the first of the spectators to move, walked in the same direction Serj and Flynn had just gone in. In that moment Vicky’s heart damn near stopped because he looked like the only one who’d go.
A few seconds later another person followed him—a young woman probably still in her twenties. From the look of it, nerves had turned her face pale and sweat beaded on her brow. But she did it, unlike the spineless fucks who seemed more hung up on complaining than anything else.
Within a few minutes, only the complainers remained. A facetious smile, and Vicky said, “It looks like you’re outnumbered. Now go and get your fucking weapons, you cowardly fucks.”
“And if we say no?” Brian asked.
“You get thrown outside without anything to defend yourself with. It’s yo
ur choice, but either way, you’re not snaking out of the fight we have in front of us. Especially when everyone else is stepping up.”
Silence met Vicky’s words, but it only lasted for a few seconds before some of the hangers-on to Brian, Sharon, and Dan’s group walked in the direction of the armoury.
A few more seconds and Brian shook his head as he walked past Vicky in the same direction. A low growl as he spoke from the side of his mouth. “You’d best win this fucking fight.”
Although Vicky balled her fists, she refrained from knocking the prick out. She could do that when they got back.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Much later and they’d be fighting in the dark. The sun sat low in the sky, but it still lit up the landscape, highlighting just how many diseased loitered outside of Home’s main entrance.
After Vicky had watched the monsters through the window for a few more seconds, she looked at the people around her. Most of Home’s residents seemed to have gathered there and none of them spoke. From a quick scan, she couldn’t tell who hadn’t turned up. To Brian, Sharon, and Dan’s credit, they all stood in the crowd. Their faces—like most of the others—were pale and locked tight.
Maybe the only people who hadn’t come were the old and the young. Vicky preferred to believe that, even if it weren’t true.
Vicky looked at the gathered crowd, then Serj, who stood by the front door, and then it came flooding back to her. The attention of the people was focused on her, but she had to ask him. “Serj, is the banner still up?”
Some confused faces looked on, but no one questioned it.
A shake of his head and Serj said, “Flynn and I sorted it out while you were resting.”
Vicky exhaled; if the group didn’t want to lynch her already, that fucking banner from Moira would have stirred things up.
Before Vicky could say anything else, Serj broke the silence by addressing the crowd. “You ready?”
The Alpha Plague 6: A Fast-Paced Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Page 15