by Ryan Casey
She turned around and headed for the hatch.
“So what?” Ricky said, adrenaline coursing through his system. “I was supposed to just let him die?”
“He tried to kill you.”
“We didn’t know he was going to do that.”
“Everyone does that. It’s what people do now. They take their chances. Survival depends on it.”
There was a pause, then. A long, drawn-out silence, where Ricky wondered if the woman was having second thoughts about spending time with him after all.
Then she broke the silence: “Are you coming down here or what?”
Ricky swallowed a lump in his throat. Part of him wanted to say no. But what other option did he have?
He nodded and made his way towards the hatch.
HE SPENT a short while in the hatch, but it wasn’t long before the woman—whose name he still didn’t know—shot off again because she’d buried some extra supplies a couple of miles away.
And in that short while, Ricky didn’t see Mattius watching just metres away, Kesha in his arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Riley half-expected to break his legs when he dropped from the edge of the balcony.
He felt pain when he landed, for sure. He bit his tongue too, which gave him that not-so-pleasant taste of blood that just reminded him of how precarious the world he was living in really was.
He didn’t have time to stand around and mope, though. He knew that, while there was a gap where he stood right now, it wouldn’t be there for long. Not when the creatures filled in that space and tore him up in the process.
He had to get out of this place. He had to track down Mattius, wherever he had gone to.
Then he had to get Kesha back.
That was his sole purpose now.
He’d seen the good side to Mattius. For just a moment, he’d allowed himself to believe that Mattius would be capable of looking after Kesha and protecting her.
But then he’d seen the true Mattius, who made Riley throw Kesha through those flames and into his arms.
Mattius would rather see everyone die than see Kesha survive in someone else’s arms.
That was the turning point for Riley.
He was about to start running towards the ladders, which ran up the side of the wall, when he heard a splat to his left.
He looked. There was a creature beside him. One of its ankles had turned in, but it was still getting to its feet.
Then another creature appeared beside him, falling from above.
And another.
He looked up and saw that mass of creatures all tumbling over the edge like lemmings, and Riley knew right then that he only had one option.
Run.
He pushed aside the first creature to his left and battled his way onwards. The gap where he’d stood just moments ago had been filled with more dead mass, just as he’d expected.
Which meant that the blank space in front of him was surely going to be occupied in no time.
He pushed past more of the creatures. He swung at a few of them with his knife. But really, Riley’s only focus was on that wall, on scaling it, and on getting down it somehow.
Unless there was another way.
Unless there was…
He saw it, then. And in that gap in time, Riley understood.
There was a small opening in the wall right ahead of him. It looked like it’d been pushed apart by creatures. Blood and flesh dangled from the sharp metal edges, some of it dripping onto the ground below.
But the thing he noticed more than anything was the piece of fabric dangling from one of those serrated pieces of metal.
It was the blue fabric like the clothing Kesha wore.
Riley’s jaw tensed. At that instant, he heard the groans behind him intensifying.
When he looked around, he realised those groans weren’t just coming from behind him.
There were creatures coming from the left now, too. And creatures from the right as well. The scariest thing about all this, though? The thought and the knowledge that what he was seeing inside Mattius’ camp was only scratching the surface of the real number of creatures around them right now. There were more of them outside. They stretched onwards, further than the eye could see.
And sure, that had always been the case. There’d always been an unknown underbelly of creatures waiting for you wherever you went.
But this was different. Just knowing that a sheer mass of them was literally nipping at your heels upped the stakes.
Riley just had to hope that they broke up, or moved on, fast. Whatever it was—whatever reason they were congregating in this group—he was sure that it had to be something to do with the infection’s evolution. He’d been told back in the day about its different stages by Alan, God bless him. How the virus itself adapted like a strain of flu.
Riley had seen all kinds of different versions of the virus. Enough to last him a lifetime.
And he knew more incarnations were no doubt coming in the near future.
But for now, he just had to focus on what was in front of him.
That was running.
He sprinted towards the gap in the fence. He could hear the groans and the footsteps of the creatures either side of him closing in, their jaws snapping together ravenously like piranhas.
He didn’t turn his attention. He just kept on running. The gap in the fence got closer, closer until it was within touching distance.
And when it was within reach, Riley found himself stretching out his fingers as if it would get him there faster. He dared not look over his shoulder. He didn’t want to see the mass of undead right behind him.
He thought of Kesha. Jordanna. Chloë.
He thought of them, and he told himself repeatedly that he was doing this.
He was getting to Kesha.
He was strong enough.
He was—
He felt something pull him back.
He saw it vividly, then. Saw a horrifying sequence of events unfolding.
The teeth sinking into his back.
The sharp, bony fingertips sinking into his flesh, stabbing him like knives.
He felt his mouth filling up with blood as the creatures tore away his throat.
He saw it vividly, and he saw Mattius standing there too, Kesha in his arms, smiling.
When he saw it, he knew that’s what failure looked like.
He snapped back to his senses then, out of his imagined downfall, dragging himself out through the gap in the fence. He cut himself on the way, right across the stomach, but that didn’t matter. He could handle a cut.
He stepped out into the grassy surroundings and saw the woods up ahead. On the ground, which had been muddied by the rain, he saw footsteps. An area that had been surprisingly untouched by the undead.
He knew who those footsteps belonged to.
He started to walk when he felt the hand grab his arm from behind.
When he heard the ferocious growl, so hungry.
When he felt the teeth touch his skin and pierce his arm…
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carly never liked being trapped anywhere without the option to escape.
It was a fear that ran really deep and went way back to her youth. She’d got trapped in a car boot once when she was younger. She’d been playing with her friend, and her friend had told her to hop in there, promising that the light would stay on and that she’d be able to get out in no time.
She remembered climbing in there, reluctantly. Something deep within her whispered in her ear and told her that she was making a big mistake. That she wasn’t going to be able to get out. And that assuming the light would stay on in there was totally illogical because why would it?
But still, the desire to prove herself—a desire that every child has—reigned supreme, and she’d climbed into that boot. She held her breath as she lay there, and as the light faded away and her friend slammed the boot, she remembered thinking that this must be what it would be like to be buried, an
d how awful being buried must be, and how sorry she felt for Grandad who’d been buried just weeks before.
It got even worse when the light stayed out, and when she realised she couldn’t get out of the boot from inside.
Her heart had pounded. Her throat had closed up. She’d screamed at the top of her voice for what felt like hours but in reality must only have been seconds.
She’d felt fear at that moment. Total fear, for the first time in her life. Not the usual kind of fear you feel when you’re younger; the kind of fear that always comes with something of a filter. But real fear. The kind of fear adults must experience.
Carly wasn’t exactly old now. She was only seventeen.
But she’d felt that real, adult fear a few more times than she expected most people had at her age.
“So what’re we supposed to do?” Melissa said. “Just stand around and wait in here?”
Amy was quiet. They were in the shaft between the rooms in Mattius’ hotel. Outside, Carly could hear the scraping feet of the undead as they walked aimlessly around. Except, no. It wasn’t aimless. Not really. If it were aimless, then the undead wouldn’t even be here in the first place.
There was method to the way they walked. They knew exactly where they were going.
They were here because people were here. Food was here.
And Carly, Melissa, and Amy were trapped right in the middle of this place.
“He left us here,” Melissa said. “Why would he just leave us?”
“He thought he was keeping us safe,” Amy said.
Melissa turned around and frowned. “Keeping us safe?”
“Keep your voice down, please.”
Melissa ignored Amy. “Keeping us safe, how exactly? By making us jump down here with nowhere else to go? By leaving us here to rot? How is that keeping us safe?”
“I asked you to keep your voice down,” Amy said.
There was a glassiness to Amy’s eyes, Carly thought. She was so used to Amy acting the leader that she’d had so much faith in her for so long. And in a way, she’d never really stopped to think that Amy was just human, really. Human, like the rest of them.
“Maybe he didn’t lock us down here,” Carly said.
Both Amy and Melissa turned to her and frowned. She was used to being looked at in that way, somewhat patronisingly, in all truth.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Melissa asked. She hadn’t lowered her voice at all, surely to Amy’s despair.
Carly tried to put the words together in the right order. She struggled doing that, sometimes. It’d been an area she’d always had trouble with. She was good at thinking through problems. Beyond her years, apparently.
So right now she really had to make sure she got this right. She really had to work hard.
“I just—I just think maybe Riley wouldn’t leave us here knowing we’re going to die down here.”
Melissa lifted her arms. “Look around you, kid. The door’s locked. There isn’t anywhere else to go.”
“Maybe that’s not true.”
“Can you stop speaking so cryptically and just get on with—”
“Riley knows we’re strong. He knows we don’t need help. We’re us. And even though the… even though the rest of our people are gone, we’re still us. We’ll always be us. We can work together. We can figure things out.” Carly looked down, then. She saw more metal railings. More doors. “And we can get out of this place if we want to.”
She looked back and saw Amy was looking right at her, then. Tears were filling in her eyes. Again, that scared her. Amy seemed to have weakened so much over the last couple of weeks; the whole illusion of her leadership appeared to have collapsed. And in a way, it had. So many people had fallen. It was bound to break Amy right down.
“But we need to be in—in it together,” Carly said, walking over to Melissa, looking at her, then at Amy. “We need to decide what we’re going to do and we need to—to own that choice.”
Melissa lowered her head. She let out a sigh. But, for a change, it wasn’t a sigh of discontent. There wasn’t a whim of any patronising in it. It was a sigh of realisation of the truth of what Carly was saying.
“You’re right,” Melissa said.
Carly couldn’t help smiling.
She made eye contact with Amy again then. And this time, she thought Amy looked so strong. So warrior-like. She saw her spirit had returned, completely.
“You are right,” Amy said, her voice shaky. She stood up. “So we go. We—”
She might’ve finished what she was saying, but Carly didn’t hear it.
Melissa wouldn’t have heard it either.
The door behind them slammed open and a small group of undead flooded into the shaft.
They all backed up. Carly felt that fear again. That claustrophobic fear that was rooted in the boot incident of not being able to escape.
She tightened her grip on her knife and got ready to attack.
But something strange happened.
Amy was standing still.
She was staring at the oncoming undead.
“Amy!” Melissa shouted. “We have to fight—”
“Go,” Amy said.
Horror covered Melissa’s face. And Carly, although lost in the moment, backed up against the metal bar of the walkway behind her, guessed her face wouldn’t be all that different.
“We can’t go,” Melissa said. “We can’t leave you.”
Amy turned around then. And for the first time in a long time, she looked totally at peace.
“Go,” Amy said. She smiled. “I’ll always be with you.” She lifted a hand to her heart. “I’ll always be right here. Right here. Sister.”
There was a moment of confusion, then. A moment where Carly didn’t understand. And she figured Melissa didn’t understand either.
But there wasn’t much of a chance left to understand.
Amy looked at Melissa one final time, tears filling her eyes.
“No!” Melissa shouted, as if she was realising something; a secret that’d been buried for so, so long. “No!”
“You be strong,” Amy said, lips quivering despite her smile. “You be brave. It’s your turn to be brave now. For everyone.”
“Amy—”
As stunned and horrified as Carly was by all this, she found herself reaching out for Melissa.
She found herself pulling her back, away from Amy, because she knew that’s what Amy wanted, and that was their best chance right now.
“Amy,” Melissa spluttered. “Amy, please. Please.”
But it was too late.
Amy had closed her eyes.
A large, beaming smile had stretched across her face.
And then she’d walked into the mass of the undead.
THERE WERE NO SCREAMS. There were no yelps of pain. There was nothing.
Just Melissa’s sobs, as the horror of losing a sister she didn’t even know she’d been reunited with welled up inside her.
Reluctantly, she joined Carly at the edge of the barrier, and for a moment—just for a split second—she thought about just throwing herself down into the dark mass below.
But she remembered Amy’s words.
It’s your turn to be brave now.
For everyone.
She closed her eyes and forced a smile, just like Amy had.
And then she eased herself down, dropped into the unknown, down to where Carly had gone.
She could grieve later.
Right now, she had one thing on her mind.
Getting out of this place.
Getting her and Carly to safety.
Then doing what Amy would’ve wanted her to do all along.
Getting Kesha out of that prick’s hands.
She landed beside Carly. Carly grabbed the door and opened it, revealing a clear path, except for a few straggling undead.
“You ready?” Carly asked.
Melissa took a deep breath and focused on the moment. “Ready.”
She
lifted her knife as the undead noticed her and, with Carly by her side, she stepped out into the unknown, towards whatever horrors lay ahead.
CHAPTER NINE
“Why so damned bashful all of a sudden? We’ve known each other for months, Ricky. You don’t just get to wander away from our camp—from everything we built together—and go silent on me all of a sudden.”
Ricky stood with his back to the wall of the hatch where the woman had brought him. She was still out, clearing the immediate area of undead. Part of Ricky clung to the hope that she’d come back fast and help him out here, mostly because he didn’t want to be the one to have to deal with Mattius.
But mostly, Ricky hoped she didn’t, because he’d seen what kind of a monster Mattius really was. And he dreaded to think what he might put her through, too.
Mattius leaned back against the chair on the far side of the hatch. To be honest, the hatch was more like a cabin inside. It was hardly the high-tech kind of place you might expect from Lost. It did have that old war feel to it, though. It was some kind of bunker, but it had been long disused, evidently.
Mattius held Kesha in his arms. She was crying, like she could sense the tension in the air.
“So, what’ve you got down here?” Mattius asked. “Food? Water? We’re going to need plenty of it if we’re batting down the hatches.”
He walked past Ricky, who stayed totally still, other than his shaking fists, which he clenched together. Ricky knew this was a game. A game of chicken. He was waiting for Ricky to crack. And Ricky wanted to crack. He wanted so badly to crack for what he knew Mattius had done to his mother.
But he had to wait for the right moment.
The moment where Mattius wasn’t holding a pistol.
“See, there’s water here,” Mattius said, pointing at a load of bottles stacked on top of one another. “A whole lot of it. Good. That’s good. Glad to see you’ve been putting provisions in pl—”
“You aren’t welcome here,” Ricky said.
Mattius’ eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth, as if he was planning on responding, but then he closed it and wiped his lips, dangling Kesha in one arm. “What did you just say?”
Ricky felt the tension building up in his stomach and like a volcano, he knew it was finally erupting. “You killed my mum. You shot her through the head. You aren’t welcome here.”