by Ryan Casey
She ran, then. She didn’t like running away from things. She had never liked running away from things. The only thing she’d run away from was the knowledge that her mother wasn’t always straight with her. When she was growing up, Melissa got the sense that her mum was keeping something from her. Like she wasn’t telling Melissa the full truth about her past. Melissa would find torn, burned out photographs. Ones with faces etched out. Whenever she confronted her mum about her past, her mum would simply smile and tell her she used to be a “wild one,” whatever that was supposed to imply.
She knew there was something missing in her life. Part of that was what led her to hurt herself, she supposed.
But for the first time, recently, Melissa felt like that dark cloud of self-harm really had lifted. It was only when caught in the act of the harming that she actually realised what she was doing to herself.
Like now.
Her argument for being out here was irrational. To find Kane? What hope did she have of finding Kane?
And sure, she was doing a decent job of drawing plenty of those zombies away from their original destination. But what did that mean for her?
She kept on jogging further.
Then she felt her right ankle pop beneath her.
She wanted to keep on running, defying the reality and the inevitability of what’d just happened. But it was just too painful to run on. She slowed down, right down.
She’d sprained her damned ankle, dammit.
She hopped along through the trees. The zombies weren’t runners, but fuck, they were power-walkers. They were gaining ground on her. Soon, they’d have her. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
The more ground the zombies gained on her, the more certain Melissa grew that this really was it. There’d been times where she’d nearly died in the past. There’d been times where she’d come so close to death. There’d been times when she’d closed her eyes and convinced herself she wasn’t going to wake up again.
But those moments were on her terms. This wasn’t.
And having your life hunted down when you weren’t ready to go yet was devastating to say the least.
She kept on hopping onwards but it wasn’t getting easier. She just had to hope she could get far enough to lose the zombies.
And then her ankle hurt even more.
She fell then, down onto the ground. As she lay there, she realised she’d dropped the bag carrying her arrows, and a load of them had spilt out all around her.
“Shit,” she muttered, as she gathered as many arrows as she could. They weren’t going to be enough to save her. They weren’t going to be enough to keep her alive for long.
But what else could she do?
What other option did she have?
She pulled back the bowstring and it snapped between her fingers.
She looked at it in shock. She felt sickness creeping up her throat.
She was down.
She was without her bow.
And the zombies were getting closer to her.
She sat there, heart racing, and she saw her life flash before her eyes.
She saw the first of the zombies, all contorted, bones poking out of its flesh, eyes waggling everywhere but at her as it powered in her direction.
She saw her mum.
What secrets had she hidden from her?
How different would her life be if she’d just known the truth?
She felt a tear roll down her face then, as she held on to her knife. Shit. She might be going down, but she was going down fighting.
“Come on,” she muttered, the zombie getting closer to her, a crowd following behind. “Come the fuck on, you piece of shit.”
She pulled back her knife and went to stab the zombie as it crouched down towards her.
Then she felt the hand on her shoulder.
“Not a good place to take a rest, my dear.”
She recognised the voice. She recognised it, but she couldn’t place it. Like it wasn’t supposed to be heard out here. Like reality was glitching.
But as she looked around, she realised her suspicions—her fears—were true.
Kane was standing over her, hand on her shoulder.
He was pale. Well, he was always paler, but right now, he was much paler than usual.
But he was smiling.
“Come on,” he said. “We’d better get moving. I made a promise that I’d kill you someday, and I’m not ready to abandon that just yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Riley didn’t think about anything anymore. The time for thinking was gone.
He just ran.
The rain had stopped, and the air felt thick. Really, it wasn’t because of the weather that it felt so thick. It’s because of how many bodies had walked this ground so recently.
Of course, those bodies were dead, so they were cold. But they added thickness to the air. A thickness that made damn sure you knew they’d been here.
Not to mention the layers of dead blood coating Riley’s body.
But anyway, the dead weren’t here now. That was the main thing.
Riley had an opportunity to get back to camp.
He had to take it.
He looked around at the trees. He wasn’t sure whether he was heading in exactly the right direction. But he’d seen which way the creatures were drifting when he’d come face to face with them. He was making assumptions about where they were heading, sure. But those assumptions felt grounded in possibility and reality.
The creatures were heading towards the camp.
And with that many of them… shit. He couldn’t just allow that place to fall. He had to be there. He had to help defend it.
A niggling twinge tugged at his stomach, a voice in the back of his head. It was telling him not to go in this direction. That instead, he should be going after Mattius and Kesha. He knew where they were, now. Where they were staying. The thought of Kesha being with Mattius any longer made his insides turn.
But he’d seen the mass of creatures in front of Mattius’ place, too. He’d seen how besieged Mattius and his people were.
Some of those creatures might’ve waded off after Riley, but he couldn’t go heading back into the eye of a storm.
His best chance of getting Kesha back—and of getting the revenge he so desperately wanted to take out on Mattius—was to head back to camp and make sure he could gather as many people as possible.
Then, when the time was right, with people by his side, he was going to take those people to war.
He looked back over his shoulder as he kept on running. He wasn’t so sure how exactly to feel about turning his back on Kane. He should be mostly delighted; he knew that. Kane was vermin. He was everything bad about this world.
But even as he’d pushed him back into that crowd of undead, Riley still felt like Kane was an unknown entity. Something he didn’t trust to be outside of his sights or attention.
He preferred Kane as his prisoner because, weirdly, he still felt like he owed something to Kane for not killing him yet.
He was a fuck. But there was something about him.
And that morbid curiosity as to whether he could truly turn Kane to his side—make him one of his warriors—was something he couldn’t shift from his mind for anything.
Riley was about to keep on running when he saw movement up ahead.
At first, he thought it was Jordanna, Chloë, and Anna. The visions had been bothering him more frequently lately. He felt like they were everywhere, like their ghosts were surrounding him and closing in on him, making that lust for revenge even more prominent.
But it wasn’t Jordanna, Chloë, or Anna.
It was a small group of creatures.
Riley slowed down and stepped behind a tree. There were quite a few of those creatures. But they looked like the back end of another group. A larger group.
He could see buildings up ahead. Little cabins, many of which had collapsed. He could see tents, and benches, all of them covered in blood.
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nbsp; And in a lot of these creatures, he could see arrows. Tons of arrows.
A sickening punch hit him right in the stomach at that point. Because that was the moment when Riley realised where this was, and when he realised exactly what he was standing on top of.
He looked on the ground and he saw the remains of the camp’s walls right beneath him.
And under those walls, he saw fallen people.
He recognised Stef as one of them, and his heart sank. He walked past her, further inside the camp. A few of the creatures came at him, but he didn’t pay them too much attention, taking them out immediately.
The closer he got to the cabin up ahead, the more bodies and arrows he stepped over, and the more creatures he killed on his way, the more dread he felt about this whole situation. There were a lot of dead. A lot. Maybe this entire camp.
He thought about Amy, and Melissa, and Carly. Everyone here who’d stood by him. Everyone who’d given him a chance.
He should’ve been here.
He should’ve—
“Riley.”
Riley turned around.
Over to his right, he saw the ghost of Jordanna. Her arms were folded over one another. Chloë was standing by her side. Chloë was crying tears of blood.
In front of them, Riley saw a creature heading his way.
He lifted his blade to take it down.
Then he lowered it as the realisation sunk in.
The creature staggering towards him was familiar. She was called Sophia. She’d made him breakfast on his first day here, and Riley had been having an on-and-off thing with her ever since.
A massive chunk had been torn from her neck, and her eyes had glazed over, the infection clearly getting to her fast. The speed of infection varied. Just one of those unpredictabilities of this new world.
Riley swallowed down a sickly lump in his throat. He pulled back his blade, as much as he didn’t want to, and he stepped towards Sophia.
He could see her eyes connecting with his. And they were just the same. Just those same brown eyes he remembered looking into on the first day. The same brown eyes that looked down into his when she was on top of him.
Looking at him the exact same way, like she recognised him.
He held that thought for a second. In fact, that’s the way all the creatures looked. One thing they maintained. Their eyes. They were always so… human. Always so alive.
He sighed and grabbed the back of Sophia’s head, her eyes still locked with his.
He pressed the knife to her skull and thought of the way Grandma’s creature, when he’d had to put her down, had looked at him, also like she recognised him.
Then he rammed the knife into Sophia’s head and she went still, out of her misery at last.
He eased Sophia to the ground, closing her eyes and pulling the knife from her head.
When he stood up, he saw Amy standing opposite him.
Her hair had fallen greasily down onto her shoulders. She looked pale. Her arms were crossed, her bow and arrow draped over her back. By her side, Carly, and a few of the others.
“Where’s…” Riley started.
But he didn’t finish.
He didn’t have to finish. Not to know the answer.
The camp had fallen.
They were dead.
Everyone else that made up this thriving community—this strong community—was dead.
CHAPTER NINE
Riley stood with Amy and looked at the fallen dead.
A few hours had passed and they were doing their best job of burning the bodies, salvaging whatever they could of this place. The afternoon sun was bright, but it couldn’t do much to cut through the sheer coldness around right now. The smell of burning filled the air, combined with the undeniable taste of cooking meat. Riley tried not to think about what that meaty taste was. The less he thought about it, the better.
He’d tasted the dead in the burning air so many times already since the world had fallen. He didn’t need another reminder of even more loss.
Amy was beside him. She hadn’t said a lot since Riley had come across her a few hours ago. He knew how she must feel. He’d lost enough as it was. He’d lost everything, in fact. He knew the power loss had to cast a long-lasting darkness and depression over someone.
But Riley had never lost in the way Amy had lost right now. So many of her people, all of them taken out in a matter of minutes.
Barely any left.
Riley heard footsteps. He looked up and saw Carly walking towards them. Behind Carly, he could see a few of the remaining group members cleaning out the remaining undead.
“That the last of them?” Riley muttered.
Amy didn’t answer. She just shrugged. Making small—or large—talk with her wasn’t going to be easy. But he knew from his own experiences that he was going to have to drag her out of this dark cloud eventually.
“We need to talk about the next step,” Riley said.
“There’s no next step,” Amy said.
Riley turned to her and frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The walls have collapsed. We’ve lost people. Lost more people than we’ve got left. Everything we built. Everything we worked for. It’s gone.”
Riley shook his head. “You know, you’re wrong.”
“Tell me why I’m wrong. I dare you to tell me why I’m wrong.”
Riley looked around at the devastation, the destruction. He saw the collapsed sections of the wall. He saw how the gate had been torn apart. He saw the cabins, overrun by the dead, the tents ripped to shreds, and the shooting ranges and stoves completely toppled. “Because I’ve thought the same before.”
In the smoky mist, he saw the silhouettes of Jordanna, Chloë, and Anna. All of them were looking at him. All of them were staring. But they weren’t right in the forefront of his consciousness anymore. They weren’t a source of obsession. Riley couldn’t let them be.
“When the world first fell, we found a place. A Chinese restaurant. It seemed safe. Like there was a sense of, I dunno, permanence about it. Like we could really make it our home. Perhaps we were living in a fantasy. It was still early days, and I guess we were all scared and clinging on to that hope that things were going to be fixed in no time. But anyway, it didn’t take long for it to get overrun, and we lost people, and it felt to me right then like everything was falling apart.
“But that wasn’t even the worst one. There were other homes after there. Places we stayed for longer. And there was a place… a Living Zone. A place that was built solely for people like us to survive the end of the world. It was perfect. Honestly, it was the only place where you could go into an actual pub and then go to the doctor or dentist or whatever and worry about trivial problems. It was the place where you could forget about the outside world.”
“Must’ve been hard re-adjusting to reality when that fell,” Amy said.
“It was,” Riley said. “It wasn’t an easy transition to make. I did things. Bad things. I killed people. And part of me knows that killing those people led to the situation we’re in right now.”
Amy frowned. “How?”
“I killed some of Mattius’ people. He took out his revenge.”
“On Chloë and Jordanna?”
“Yeah,” Riley said, nodding.
They were quiet for a few seconds. Riley wanted to speak, but at the same time, he wanted Amy to really take in what he’d said.
“I thought I’d lost my home,” Riley said. “So many times, I thought I’d lost everything. But I haven’t. Because I’m still here. And that’s what we all fought for. Not for me, but for each other. As long as one of us… two of us… however many of us are alive, we’re still winning. We’re still home.”
Amy glanced at Riley, then. There were tears in her eyes. For the first time since meeting her, Riley thought she looked on the verge of breaking down. Like the pressures of leadership were getting to her.
“Melissa,” she said.
Riley swal
lowed a lump in his throat. He’d seen how much Melissa meant to Amy. She was close to her. Closer than she was to the others. “I’m sorry—”
“She’s still out there,” Amy said.
Riley hesitated. “What?”
“She left. To try and draw some of the dead away from this place. And to go after Kane.”
“Kane?”
“What happened with him?” Amy asked.
Riley thought back to the moment he was bitten. The moment he’d pushed Kane into the creatures. “Something tells me Kane’s not coming back from his current state anytime soon.”
Amy nodded. “And Melissa?”
“What about her?”
“You were out there. Is there any… is there any chance for her?”
Riley didn’t want to say what he thought. He didn’t think there was much hope for Melissa, in truth. He’d been lucky to get back. It’d taken all his strength and a whole lot of luck. But he wasn’t in a mood to let Amy down anymore, to damage her resolve. “I made it back here. If I can, I’m sure Melissa can.”
A twinge of a smile flashed across Amy’s face. The first look of hope for a long time. “Good,” she said.
Amy stood then and walked over to Carly. She hugged her, as Carly let her emotions out. All around, Riley saw the rest of Amy’s people cleaning up the last of the dead, burning the bodies. The crowd of undead had attacked here and then it had moved right on. It could come back at any time. But at least they had a moment of respite. Just a moment.
He thought about Kane. Then he thought about Mattius. He thought about Kesha.
He might’ve softened after what had happened.
But there was something still burning inside his system.
A fire, still raging away.
When they’d regrouped and recovered, they were going to go after Mattius’ place.
If they didn’t back him, then Riley would go there himself.
Like he said: he might’ve softened, but one thing still drove him. One lust still carried him.
He was going to rescue Kesha and he was going to kill Mattius.
Nothing was getting in his way.
At least, that’s what he thought.