by Casey, Ryan
But he crouched down at Clarice’s side and put a hand on her back, prayed to God she was okay, prayed to God she wouldn’t die, not now, not after how far they’d come.
“Sis, please,” Hayden said. He didn’t know what else to say. He had a hand on her wrist but his hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t tell if there was a pulse or not. He thought he could feel her breathing against his hand but maybe that was just his own breath. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know.
So he just kept a hand on Clarice’s back and let the warm tears roll down his cheeks as the voices and the engine got closer.
“I’d stay on the fucking ground if I were you, sunshine,” a gruff, almost Scottish sounding man said. “Unless you wanna end up like your girlfriend.”
Hayden felt a burning sensation cripple his chest. He pulled the gun out of Clarice’s pocket. Tensed his fingers around it. Stood up, held his breath, turned and pointed at the group coming his way, not caring what happened to him anymore, only caring about avenging his sister, making the fuckers pay for what they’d done to her.
But when he turned to face the group, he noticed something. Three things, in fact.
First off was the car. A black Range Rover incredibly similar to the one he’d stolen from the cottage that had broken down on the road to Warrington.
And then there was the woman. Sammy. The woman with the ginger hair who Hayden had held a gun to the head of. She was looking at Hayden with wide-eyed fear, with a distance and detachment that made it look like she almost regretted being here in her present company.
But most interesting of all was the third thing he saw.
The person he saw, a black guy standing behind her, a gun to her head.
Sarah.
“You’re gonna wanna drop that,” the gruff-voiced guy said again. He was narrow-faced, had shortish dark hair and was wearing a leather jacket that looked way too new and unmarked to have been his for long. “Unless you wanna get another innocent person’s blood on your hands, I’d lower that gun.”
Hayden looked into Sarah’s eyes. There were no tears there, just recognition. She had bruises on her cheeks and cuts on the top of her head. She looked like she’d been through a rough time.
But she was alive. She’d survived.
“Hey. You hear me? Drop that gun.”
Hayden blinked and looked away from Sarah. It didn’t seem like the group knew that Hayden and Sarah had anything to do with one another, and judging by how they were using her as leverage as it was, Hayden wanted to keep it that way.
He held the gun towards the gruff guy, who pointed a long black hunting rifle in his direction. Hayden’s finger shook on the trigger. He wanted to fire it. Fire it right into the guy’s neck and send a shower of blood spurting out of his jugular. He wanted to destroy him for what he’d done to Clarice.
But he held his breath. Let his pulse pound through his skull. Lowered his gun.
The gruff-voiced guy smiled. “Good. Good. Now drop onto your knees like your rag-head friend and slide that gun over here.”
Hayden didn’t know what the racist wanker was referring to at first, and then he looked and saw Manish on his knees with his hands on the back of his head. He was shivering, and Hayden could hear his anxious breathing from here. The smell of urine was filling the air.
“Get down. Or I’ll pop another cap into your girlfriend’s head to make sure she’s dead.”
“She’s my sister,” Hayden shouted. “She … she’s my little sister. And she did—she did nothing to hurt you.”
The gruff-voiced guy raised his eyebrows. “Oh. Is that so? See I’ve been hearing things differently. I’ve been hearing that you and that bird and some nigger who ain’t with you anymore all seemed awful happy to raid that cottage back north. Ain’t that right, Sam?”
Sammy swallowed heavily. She lowered her eyes so she wasn’t looking directly at Hayden and she nodded.
“And what if we did?” Hayden said. He kept his gun in his hand. Stayed on his feet. A clock ticked inside his head. A countdown of how long his sister had left. She had to get medical treatment. Some kind of professional help. She had to get to the safe haven—fast.
The gruff-voiced guy smiled even wider and shook his head. “Look, I’m gonna make this extra clear to you cause you don’t seem to be all too wise about it right now. Your cute wee sis is dying on the road there. And she’s gonna bleed out if you keep on being a stubborn fucker. And we ain’t got no problem with that. You killed one of ours; we kill one of yours. Sounds even. But we ain’t nasty fuckers. We reason. We understand why people do what they do. But there’s gonna be no understandin’ if you don’t put your gun on the ground and get onto your fucking knees, pal.”
Hayden kept hold of the gun but his grip was loosening. The words, the reality, hit him hard. Clarice was on the road. She was dying. She needed help.
Clarice. His little sister.
He couldn’t lose her. No matter what that meant, he just couldn’t lose her.
He took a deep breath of the cool air and threw the pistol a few feet ahead of him. It was only then that he saw his axe was already on the road. Must’ve dropped it when Clarice got shot.
He got down onto his knees and he felt a warmth seep through his legs.
He looked down and realised it was Clarice’s blood.
He felt tears filling up in his eyes as he crouched in her blood. She hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t moved a muscle. It didn’t bode well. He didn’t know where exactly she’d been shot, what it meant. But he couldn’t bear to look at her. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his baby sister on the road like that.
“I’m here, Clarice. Your big brother’s here. I promise.”
The black guy threw Sarah into the back of the Range Rover. Sammy climbed into the back seat. The two men—gruff voiced guy and silent black guy—marched in Hayden, Clarice and Manish’s direction looking awfully proud of themselves.
The gruff-voiced guy pressed the rifle right underneath Hayden’s chin, stuffed the barrel right into his Adam’s apple. He peered at Hayden with nasty eyes. Bully eyes. Eyes that Hayden imagined when he pictured what his older sister Annabelle went through when she was younger.
Cruel eyes.
“You care an awful lot about your sister,” the guy said, pulling Hayden’s head up even higher as the black guy lifted Clarice over his shoulder and walked her back to the car. Hayden had to use all the resistance he had to avoid following him, to avoid twitching.
Keep calm or your head’s coming off, keep calm, keep calm.
“Wouldn’t you?” Hayden said.
The gruff-voiced guy’s smile got wider; his eyes got even more bloodshot, nasty, excited. “Oh no, I wasn’t criticising you. It’s a good thing.”
He pulled the barrel of the gun to the side and held it back like a club.
“The more you care about her, the more fun we’re gonna have with you.”
And then he swung the gun against Hayden’s face and Hayden felt something crack.
Twenty-Four
Hayden crouched in complete darkness as the Range Rover sped down the road, getting closer and closer to the Riversford Industrial Estate, closer and closer to the supposed safe place.
The left side of his face stung. Every time he squinted at the light peeking through the trees outside, he felt a sharp pain spread right around his head. He swore the gruff-voiced guy—who’s name he’d now overhead as Ally—had broken something. He swore he’d done some serious damage.
But that was the least of his concerns right now. His major concern was Clarice. How long she had left—if she had any time left at all.
And what he’d do to Ally if she died.
The things he’d die himself to do to Ally given the opportunity.
He was stuffed in the back of the Range Rover in a cage that was barely big enough to fit a dog, let alone three people. Sarah was in there with him, dirty white gag wrapped around her mouth. Manish was in there too, but he cou
ldn’t stop whimpering, couldn’t stop crying. Hayden wondered how the hell a guy as soft as him had made it this far, but then again he remembered himself just a week ago. Scared. Terrified, even. Convinced death was imminent—which it still was.
But he’d just grown more confident. He’d adapted to the new world. And yes, it took it out of him. Yes, he had to change every day, every minute, every hour to keep up with the rules of this new place. But he was doing okay. He was alive.
Until now, anyway. Because his sister was all that he was living for.
“We’re gonna get out of this,” Hayden said, as the Range Rover bounced over potholes in the road, sending his tender head slamming against the top of the cage. “We … we’re going to find a way out somehow. And we’re—”
“But what’s the point of—of even getting out if your sister needs help?” Manish muttered through his sobs and tears.
He had a point, too. A point that was dwelling on Hayden’s exhausted mind. What was the point of escaping their current situation—for him, at least? Because his sister needed help. Serious medical help. And all running away was, was running away from her.
He couldn’t run away from her.
“You … you should find a way out,” Hayden said. “Both of you. You don’t need to be here.”
Sarah mumbled something under her gag. Something that Hayden couldn’t make out, but it sounded like a noise of disagreement.
“I … I should probably be honest,” Manish said. “I’m—I’m not good. On my own. I’ve—I’ve been with three groups. Since—since all this horrible stuff started. And I …” He stopped speaking, sniffed back some more tears. “The last group I was with. Nice people. But—but we were staying in a cabin just inside Warrington for a night. I was on watch. And—and I saw them coming. Saw the flesh eaters coming. And I wanted to let the others in the group know. Believe me, I wanted that. But I just … I saw an opportunity. An opportunity to get out and—and to use the others, the live ones, as a distraction. So I ran. I took a crowbar and some food and I ran.”
He descended into more guilty sobs.
“I … I’ll never forget their screams as I ran away. And—and the voice. A woman called Harriet. The last thing she said—‘Where the fuck’s Manish?’ And that just … that just broke me. Because she wasn’t saying it accusationally. She was genuinely worried. Worried about me. And I’d just left them. And—and by then it was too late to do anything. I was on my own.”
Another smack to the head as the Range Rover went over a bump in the road, then swung to the left.
Hayden understood what Manish was saying. And the strangest part about it all was how numb he felt about the words. It was like they were irrelevant somehow. Like the weight of what Manish had done—the guilt it was pressing down on his shoulders—was minimal.
“You did what you had to do to survive,” Hayden said. “Anyone in your shoes would’ve done the exact same.”
Although it was pitch black, Hayden got the sense that Manish was looking at him in the darkness, as his short, shaky breaths cut through the silence. “Do—do you mean that?”
Hayden went to reply and then the right side of his face flew into the grating on the cage.
The Range Rover stopped. The engine cut out.
He heard a door open at the side. Heard muffled voices outside—voices he didn’t recognise. He tensed his fists. Readied himself for whatever was coming. He had no idea whether he was going to have to fight or scrap or whether Ally and his friends were just going to pop a bullet in his head and ditch him on the side of the road for zombie-feed.
The boot opened up with a creak. Light filled the cage.
At the other side, Ally stood with a smile on his face.
He unclipped the cage then pointed his gun at the three of them in the back again. “Come on,” he said. “Time for you to meet the boss.”
Twenty-Five
When Ally dragged Hayden out of the back of the Range Rover, he knew right away that his bad feeling about Riversford might just be right.
The place looked empty. Void of life, not like his hopes and dreams had made it out to be—bustling, full of positivity, optimism, hope.
Just a wide, empty parking area, waterlogged grey stones. People stood on top of the large metal industrial hangars holding guns and looking down at them as Hayden, Manish and Sarah were pushed across the concrete by Ally, Sammy and a ginger guy that Hayden hadn’t seen before.
There were high fences all around the outskirts of Riversford. Decent for keeping zombies out. But the sheer lack of life in this place was haunting. There was no sign of men, women, children all surviving in here. Just men with guns, the glimmer of movement in some of the hangar windows.
“Get a fucking move on,” Ally said. He pushed the barrel of the gun right into the bottom of Hayden’s spine, knocked the wind out of him.
“My sister,” Hayden said, looking around the grounds and trying to find her. “Where’s—”
“Don’t worry yourself about your sister,” Ally said. “Bob’s taken her to get medical treatment. Told you we were the warm, loving type.”
He laughed, and Hayden couldn’t argue. They hardly came across as warm and fluffy, that was for sure.
They walked across the grounds, went past a huge stack of petrol canisters and to a blue-painted garage at the sides of one of the hangars. It had CityFast Parcel Depot on the side of it. Hayden figured any other visit here would be a good time to lambast CityFast for the shitty experience he’d had when having things delivered with them, but those times had passed. He had bigger problems on his plate right now.
He longed for the times when his biggest drama of the week was whether he was going to get his new video game through on a Monday or a Tuesday.
They walked through the hangar entrance. There was a chubby-faced guy stood there wearing a wooly green CityFast fleece and blue jeans, holding a gun. He nodded at Ally as he entered, and Ally nodded right back at him. It wasn’t the most comfortable exchange. There was something stilted about it. Much like the way Sammy didn’t seem comfortable in Ally’s presence, there was a forced nature to the exchanges between these people.
A secret.
“Now when we get upstairs, I expect you guys to be on your best behaviour. The boss has enough aggro to deal with without you three makin’ it worse.” He prodded the gun further into Hayden’s back. “And when he finds out what you did to Dave, well … Things ain’t gonna be pretty.”
He laughed, and it made the hairs on Hayden’s arms stand.
Ally, Sammy and the other guy pushed the trio through a reception area and towards a narrow flight of concrete steps. Hayden looked up them and held his breath. It smelled weird in here, like damp and sweat. There was a sourness to the air too. A sourness that made him feel queasy. A sourness he couldn’t quite comprehend, but which gave him an undeniable bad feeling.
“Come on,” Ally said.
He prodded the gun further into Hayden’s back, and Hayden was forced to climb.
Every step Hayden took, he felt like a prisoner walking to the gallows to be executed. And maybe because that was happening—maybe he was just a prisoner. Maybe they were going to strap a jumpsuit on him so this “boss” could find justice after Hayden killing Dave.
They climbed slowly. Hayden’s footsteps echoed against the dusty concrete steps. His mouth dried.
When they reached the top of the stairs, the place seemed to lighten up. Which was a pleasant surprise, since Hayden had it in his mind that he’d be heading to some pitch black gas chamber disguised as a shower room or something.
“Take a right,” Ally said.
Hayden turned right and he was surprised to see a man sitting at a desk jotting away on a pad of paper.
There was a huge glass window behind him. A window that looked right out over the surrounding houses and countryside. The structures of the town of Warrington were visible in the distance.
Hayden’s footsteps echoed on the soli
d floor as he was pushed towards the guy. And the more he was pushed, the more he started to suspect that this guy was the “boss.” But he wasn’t anything like Hayden expected. He had thinning white hair, with thick-rimmed glasses perched on the edge of his nose. He was wearing a loose-necked black cardigan, with light brown corduroy trousers—trousers that were too short, exposing his hobbly, bare ankles.
And he just kept focused on the notepad. Kept on scribbling away. Didn’t once look up.
When they were just a few feet from the desk, Ally grabbed Hayden’s back and told him to stop. Manish and Sarah stopped too, their feet squeaking against the tiles.
And still, this man didn’t lift his head.
It was a few seconds before Ally cleared his throat and broke the silence. “Boss. Got three for you. Taken one of ’em down to medical bay. A woman. She … she got shot in crossfire. But this one here, he killed Dave. Sammy here saw it with her own eyes. Didn’t you, Sam?”
Sammy nodded. Hayden could see that her cheeks were going red, her eyes were watering. She kept her wide eyes off the Boss. A far cry from the seemingly strong woman who Hayden had held a gun to the head of back at the cottage.
Boss stopped scribbling. He clicked the button on his pen, pulled his glasses onto the top of his head, and then he looked up at Hayden, Manish and Sarah. He half-smiled at them with his thin little mouth, then looked at them all in turn, intently. He didn’t speak. Nobody spoke. The only sound was of Hayden’s heart thumping, of Sammy’s feet shuffling against the dusty floor.
Finally, Boss broke the silence. He squeaked his chair back and stood up. He was shorter than Hayden expected. Definitely only clocked in at five nine. But there was something intimidating about him, clearly. Something that scared Sammy—something that scared all of them. Hayden could just see it in their expressions, hear it in their voices.