by Ryan Casey
Tamara glanced between Ivan and Riley, gun by her side. The blood from the heads of the executed bikers touched the edges of her black shoes—shoes she’d retrieved from the pile of abandoned clothes in the warehouse. She waited. Looked at Riley. Looked at him with a blank expression. An expression that didn’t give him any clues or any support.
Just an expression that told him this was his call.
“I should’ve killed you,” Riley said.
He lowered his gun.
Looked down at the ground. At the dark blood that pooled around his feet.
“But you didn’t,” Ivan said. “And because of that, two young kids have someone to look out for them now. Pass on my regards to Pedro. And good luck with whatever it is you’re doing here. Good luck with Birmingham.”
Ivan picked up his rifle, turned around and walked out of Worthington’s Bike Emporium.
Riley waited until his footsteps stopped echoing around the docks—around his mind—before looking up from the bikers’ blood at his feet.
When he lifted his neck, Ivan was gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You okay?” Riley asked.
Jordanna leaned against the back of the bed in the back of the armoured vehicle. James was up top driving. Riley had told him about Gus. Told him about the explosion in the tunnel. He’d just nodded. Sighed and nodded. “He was a good man,” he said. “He died bringin’ those biker fucks down. He died for something.”
Jordanna pulled away her coat and revealed a white bandage Tamara applied to the top of her left shoulder. Blood had streamed down from it and dried on her upper arm. She tutted when she looked at it, like it was some kind of inconvenience, but Riley could tell she was in pain. “I’ve had worse,” she said.
“Worse gunshots?”
“Maybe not gunshots. But I’ve dealt with worse before. It’s him we should be worried about.”
Riley looked over at the other side of the armoured vehicle. On the bottom bunk bed, Pedro rested. Tamara sat by his side holding his hand. His head was bruised. Blood had crusted around the corners of his mouth. He’d slipped back into unconsciousness after his beating.
“We need to get him somewhere or get him to someone. Someone who can help him.”
Riley looked at Tamara. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she focused on Pedro. He knew she cared about him, but he’d never truly understood how much. They’d been through things together. Shared experiences. And that united them.
“I’m glad you made it, for what it’s worth,” Jordanna said.
Riley looked at her. “Did I mishear you?”
She smiled. Well, attempted a smile, clearly still hurting. “We’ve lost so much already. And I don’t just mean people. I mean humanity. I know what you did to the bikers back at Worthington’s. I can see it. See it in your eyes.”
Riley diverted his gaze away from Jordanna’s intense stare. “I did what I had to do to keep us safe—”
“You did what you did to make you feel better. And that’s okay. We live in a world where we can act out vengeance when we want to now. We don’t have to give people second chances if we don’t think they deserve them. And everyone still talks about that like it’s a bad thing. Like revenge is some kind of evil. But that’s just an idea from the old world. From a world that isn’t here anymore.”
Riley pondered her words. “Then why did you give me a second chance?”
He met her eyes again. She smiled. “Because I figured you weren’t such a bad guy. Bit of a dick, but not completely bad. You miss her, don’t you?”
Riley didn’t get what Jordanna was on about at first. But when he looked at where her eyes were pointed, he could see she was staring at his right hand.
He looked down. Opened his palm. Saw Anna’s silver necklace there. It still hurt him to look at it. “I still don’t feel like … like I’ve had the chance to let go. Not truly.”
Jordanna leaned to the edge of the bed. “Y’know, I had an ex. Well, I have a lot of fucking exes. But this one ex, Michael. No matter how much I thought I’d moved on, no matter how in love with someone else or … or something else I fell … it was always Michael I went back to.”
“Lucky guy,” Riley said.
“Don’t push your luck. Anyway, Michael. I still think about him now, sometimes. Wonder if he’s made it this far.” She laughed. “Probably way too nice to make it this far. Imagine he tried to talk the zombies out of eating him with his charm and wit on the first day.” Her eyes clouded up. She held her smile, stared across the room. “But I still think of him. And it makes me feel better. Is that such a bad thing?”
Riley squeezed Anna’s necklace tighter. “I just … I know she didn’t feel the same way about me. Anna. She didn’t know how … how I felt about her. Sometimes I … I thought she knew. But I’m not sure. I just … the more I think of her, the cloudier it gets.”
Jordanna touched Riley’s arm. He felt a bolt of warmth shoot up his body.
He looked into her tearful, tired eyes. “It’s like revenge. Sometimes we don’t have to let things go, not if they mean a lot to us. Let her be your safe place. Let her fuel your decisions. Keep her by your side.”
She moved her hand down Riley’s arm so their fingers were touching.
His heart pounded.
He felt himself getting hard. Fuck. So long without contact with a woman. So long since anyone had shown any real damned interest in him.
He gulped down a lump in his throat, felt his cheeks burning and held Jordanna’s hand.
“Are you two together now?”
Tiffany’s voice made Riley jump out of the moment. He looked over at her as she sat on the floor with Chloë. Chloë was curled up in a ball, completely silent.
Riley pulled his hand away. His cheeks heated up some more. “No, we, er …”
“Him?” Jordanna said. She punched Riley in his arm, and he thought about knocking her back before remembering the bloody graze wound in her shoulder. “I think I can do better than him, don’t you?”
Tiffany smiled. Lowered her head. Looked at Chloë.
Chloë stayed curled into a ball.
“We should speak to her,” Riley said, feeling a little sick about the likely reason for Chloë’s silence. “About what happened.”
“She knows we’re here for her. The worst thing we can do is pry. She … she needs to come to us. Because there’s nothing we can say to her. She’s still just …”
Her voice gave way. She shook her head.
“She’s still just a kid,” Jordanna said, her voice quivery. “And it’s bad enough it happening when you’re an adult.”
Riley didn’t push anymore. He still hadn’t quite come to terms with the reality of what had happened in Worthington’s Bike Emporium. Just that bad things had happened to Chloë and Tamara. Bad, bad things that so many other women and children had suffered before them in that awful place.
“I don’t regret killing those bikers,” Riley said. He leaned back against the vehicle wall. “I don’t regret taking my revenge out on them. I could have given them a second chance, but I don’t think they deserved it. I made that call. I’ll live with it.”
Jordanna leaned back too. “Then you made the right call.”
They leaned back against the side of the vehicle, Jordanna’s body heat radiating over to Riley’s, in perfect silence.
A splutter from the other side of the room.
“He’s … Pedro? Pedro?”
Tamara’s voice. She sounded fearful.
Riley and Jordanna shot up. The spluttering continued. And it was coming from Pedro.
“Is he—”
“Pedro,” Tamara said. She leaned over him. Tried to keep his head still as he coughed and spluttered.
Riley walked over to him. “What’s—”
“He’s fitting,” Tamara said. She curled the sides of the pillow around his head. “He … he’s having a seizure.”
Riley watched as Pedro convoluted from side to side. Bl
ood trickled down his stubbly chin. His eyes were still shut, but his body looked like a million volts were blasting through it.
Riley felt a hand touch his. Looked down. Saw Jordanna’s fingers brushing against the back of his hand.
He opened his palm and held her hand and let the warmth inside.
Please, Pedro. Please.
Pedro fitted some more, coughed and spluttered and banged his head from side to side.
“The blood,” Riley said. “Is … That’s not good. Right?”
Tears rolled down Tamara’s cheeks. That gave him his answer, right there.
And then, just as suddenly as he’d started, Pedro stopped fitting.
The three of them waited a few seconds to see if the seizure really had stopped. Waited in stunned silence.
Tamara put her fingers on Pedro’s neck. Moved her ear right up to his mouth. “Heart’s still beating. Breathing very slowly. We need to turn him onto his side. Quick.”
Riley reached down and helped Tamara shift Pedro onto his side. As he did, he noticed more blood dribble out of Pedro’s mouth. The gunshot and the beating … they’d taken their toll on Pedro. Riley didn’t know much about medical conditions besides from a hell of a lot about appendicitis—a personal hypochondria of his—but he knew that bleeding from the mouth after a bruising beating on Pedro’s head could not be a good thing.
Riley stepped away when he’d turned Pedro onto his side. Wiped his hands together. The vehicle rumbled gently from side to side. He had no sense of time, place, anything.
“What now?” he asked.
Tamara kept on looking back down at Pedro. Her eyes were filled with tears. Her bruised cheeks had come up all red and puffy. “We … we wait. We get to Birmingham and… and we hope. It’s all we can do.”
Riley nodded. He looked at Tiffany, who peeked over the edge of the bed. Chloë was still curled up in a ball at the back of the vehicle. She looked like she hadn’t even noticed Pedro’s seizure, like nothing could awaken her from her silence.
A splutter. Another splutter from Pedro.
Riley’s stomach sank. He looked down, readying himself to help Tamara out.
But then he saw that Pedro’s bloodshot eyes were open.
“Fu … fuggin ‘ell,” he said, with a surprising intensity.
He stuck his tongue out. Toothmarks had cratered their way right into the tip. Blood was pouring out of it.
“Bi-cken my fuggin’ tongue,” he said.
Riley couldn’t help but laugh.
Tamara couldn’t help but cry.
Jordanna grabbed Riley’s hand again and the pair of them watched Tamara and Pedro’s embrace.
Chloë kept her head tucked between her legs, oblivious to everything.
***
“Where did you go, Harrison?”
Ivan looked out of the window of his dock-side flat. He’d watched Riley and his group leave. Made sure they got safely out of sight.
And as he’d watched them leave, he’d felt a strange emotion inside. A longing to be with them. As impossible as it was, he wanted to be with a larger group. He wanted to give himself another chance to adapt to a wider society.
But Riley knew who he really was. Knew what he was capable of. Chloë, too—the tough little nut she’d become. Always had her down as a survivor.
She’d knocked him out with chloroform once. He wasn’t risking anything again.
Ivan turned around from the window and smiled at Nick. He was on his knees playing with a few of the silver figures from the musty old Monopoly game. Abigail was occupying herself over by the kitchen area. She sat on a tall stool and scribbled a picture onto a crumpled piece of lined paper with a worn-down pencil.
Ivan crouched down opposite Nick. Scuffed his hair. “Nowhere, soldier. Just … just helping some old friends out. Keeping us safe.”
“Can we meet your old friends?” Nick asked.
Ivan smiled. “I don’t know, Nick. I’m not sure we will just yet.”
Truth was, Ivan was experiencing mixed emotions over the Worthington’s Bike Emporium raid. He was feeling a lot safer from the bikers, sure. They were a problem that needed to be dealt with. But the ones Riley and that woman, Tamara, had shot. Some of them were just kids, barely into their twenties.
They’d shot them without even giving them a second chance, and that scared Ivan.
It scared him because it reminded him of himself. Of the decisions he used to make. The lengths he used to go to to keep things together.
Of playing God.
“We heard shooting,” Abigail said. She kept her head down, kept scribbling on the paper with the pencil. The sound of the lead scraping the paper went through Ivan. Always had. Couldn’t explain why. “Was that you?”
She looked up at Ivan with those innocent eyes of hers and Ivan couldn’t bare to look back into them. It felt like looking into them would transmit all the bad things he’d seen, all the things he’d done. And he couldn’t corrupt Abigail. Not after how hard he’d worked to keep her and her brother alive and out of danger.
Ivan ignored the question. He walked past Nick and stepped up to Abigail. “What’s that you’re drawing?”
Abigail looked up at him with a slight frown. She was sharp, that was for sure. Knew when Ivan was trying to divert the conversation, or when he wasn’t comfortable talking about something.
But she didn’t quiz him any further, probably for her brother’s sake more than anything. “It’s a picture,” she said.
Ivan squinted at the drawing. Just looked like one big grey scribble to him, but then again so did all art, especially all this modern crap. “I … Well I can see that. Great job.”
“You said you thought drawing was silly,” Abigail said.
“Well I didn’t mean all …”
She looked up at him again with that frown. Only there was a little smile on her face this time, too.
Ivan didn’t bite the bait. He just smiled back. Scuffled Abigail’s greasy hair. “Anyway, what did you kids do with the peanut butter?”
Abigail looked over at her brother. Nick looked back at her, cheeks going red.
“We thought you … we thought you said to eat it all,” Abigail said.
“It was mainly Abi,” Nick butted in, putting more false interest into his Monopoly figures. “I … I only had a little bit.”
“That’s not true,” Abigail said, slamming her pencil down. “You had loads of it. It’s why you’re so fat.”
Nick’s cheeks were on fire. He tossed a little steel Monopoly hat at Abigail. It floated over her head and clattered against the tiles of the kitchen area. “Did not!”
“Okay, okay,” Ivan said. He raised his hands. “Let’s turn the temperature down in here. No worries: I’ll have some delicious gourmet bottled water for tea, in that case.” Truth was, he wasn’t all that hungry anyway. The things he’d seen today—the bodies stacked up at Worthington’s Bike Emporium—brought back way too many bad memories.
Way too many reminders of that freezer room he’d escaped from.
The man he used to be.
“Can’t beat a bit of bottled water, anyway,” Ivan said, leaning down to the electricity-less fridge and reaching in for one of the seven remaining bottles of Evian he’d looted from Sainsbury’s a few weeks back. His back ached as he reached in for the bottle. “It’s the body’s preferred fuel, did you know that?”
“Of course we did,” Abigail said. “We might be kids, but we’re not dumb.”
“What’s that noise?”
Ivan pulled a bottle out of the fridge and took the lid off. He looked across the room at Nick and he swigged back some water. It was cold and it felt good against his dry throat. “What noise?” he asked.
Nick stood up. Walked over to the curtain and pulled them aside slightly. “That … that noise. That rumbling noise. Can you hear it?”
Ivan couldn’t hear it, but he didn’t like that Nick could hear something.
He put the bottle of wa
ter on the kitchen counter and walked over towards the window. “Come away from there, kid.”
But Nick didn’t budge.
He was looking outside at something. Looking to the left and into the distance. Transfixed. Hypnotised.
“Nick, what’s …”
Ivan stepped up beside him. Looked out of the window in the direction Nick was looking.
He didn’t understand what it was he saw at first.
Movement in the fields where some new housing developments were being built before the world went to shit.
But … not singular movement. Mass movement. Like ants swarming out of a nest, all headed in one direction.
“Are … are they the dead ones?” Nick asked.
Ivan felt even less hungry as he squinted at the oncoming horde.
He’d never seen anything like it in all the months of living in the apocalypse. He’d never seen anything this big, never before.
Hundreds of zombies.
No, thousands of zombies.
Maybe more.
He put a hand on Nick’s chest. Gently pushed him away from the window.
“Go sit with your sister,” he said. “Please.”
And this time, Nick obliged.
Nick obliging told Ivan just how serious the situation was.
Thousands of zombies headed in their direction.
Thousands of dead feet rumbling against the ground, like a drum roll of death getting closer and closer …
CHAPTER SIX
The armoured vehicle broke down after about fifteen minutes of driving.
“Fuckin’ piece of shit,” James said. He kicked at the tire. Winced and regretted it right away as he clutched his foot. Sweat dripped from his shoulder-length blond hair, and his tan coat was smeared with oil. “See what the hell this engine’s shat all over my coat? Collector’s item, this coat. Would never have been able to afford anythin’ like it before the fall. Thought this ride was supposed to be foolproof, anyway?”