by Ryan Casey
EPISODE FIFTY-THREE
HOW IT USED TO BE
(THIRD EPISODE OF SEASON TEN)
She listened to the rotors of the helicopter as she descended closer and closer towards the ground, and she wondered whether she’d made the right decision coming back here after all.
The sun was bright. It sent warmth inside the helicopter; warmth that she knew might just be illusory. Because it was the middle of winter here, after all. The frost was settling on the ground. The air would soon be filled with her clouded breaths. This was home, after all, and she knew exactly what home was like. One of the things she certainly hadn’t missed about it in all her time away.
But she knew that the illusory weather was like a wider metaphor for Britain itself. Because it might look nice. It might seem inviting, the whole idea of returning here at all.
But she knew also that something was waiting inside the depths of Britain for her.
Something that she wasn’t sure she was ready to face.
She looked out the window of the helicopter. Saw the rooftops of buildings. She saw a park, the trees bare of leaves. She saw streets lined with shops, trollies still in place.
And as she descended, if she squinted enough, she could convince herself there were people still there. People just going about their lives and their business as normal. People still getting on with things. Because sure, she’d heard the reports about Britain on the news. Sure, she’d seen just how much so many parts of the world had descended into chaos. But actually being here, there was a small part of her hoping that maybe the reports were wrong. That maybe this really was all some big misunderstanding, and that she’d find something entirely different now she was back in Britain; something bordering on… well, normality.
But then she saw it.
She saw the blood smeared across one of the rooftops of the buildings.
Then she saw the staggering thing just inches away.
It wasn’t looking up at the helicopter. Wasn’t even acknowledging any kind of presence. And it was right then, at that moment, that she knew that the reports were true. She knew this was one of the things she’d read about—one of the things that’d caused so much chaos and destruction, so much fear.
And as the helicopter descended to a point that this “creature” was out of view, she started to wonder whether she’d made the right decision even coming back here at all.
But no. She couldn’t think that way. She had to believe she’d made the right decision.
Because this was about more than just her.
This was about…
When she thought of him, she found herself swallowing a lump in her throat right away. Because she knew she shouldn’t let herself think about him in this way. Besides, she had a new life now. She had new people to look out for, new people to care for. And she knew deep down at her core that she should be back there with them, where it was safe.
But still…
She was here now. And she was going to help people while she was here.
That was her duty.
That was what she’d signed up for.
Trained for.
It was her life now. Like it or lump it.
A voice over the headphones. “We should be landing in approximately twenty seconds. Hold on to your seats. You’re about to spend your final moments in safe territory.”
She held her breath and counted down the seconds. She wondered whether it was too late to opt out. Too late to say she wanted to turn back. Because she had a child. She had a child, and she had a husband, and she had a happy life back home, and she shouldn’t be here. This was a big mistake. This was a mistake, and it was—
Slam.
She felt herself lift off her seat as the helicopter hit the ground.
She snapped out of her nervous stupor. She looked around at the rest of the people in the helicopter—the volunteers, just like her. Saw the apprehension on all of their faces.
Then she saw the helicopter pilot spin around, smile on his face
“What is it they say? We’re not in Kansas anymore?”
She looked out of the helicopter window and saw the emaciated, bleeding figures staggering in her direction.
She knew damn well she wasn’t in Kansas.
Chapter One
Melissa saw Britain in the distance and couldn’t get over how much she hadn’t fucking missed this place.
The morning sun glared down. The journey across the Irish Sea had taken longer than she’d been expecting, in all truth. Maybe it was the fear. The fear of returning here. The dread of what she was going to find. Because sure, it’d only been a year since she was last here. But thinking about how much things changed—how much things collapsed—in that relatively short space of time when she had been on mainland Britain… yeah, just the memory of it made her uneasy.
She didn’t know how many more things had changed in the time she’d been away. Only they would have done. And it was very, very unlikely that they’d changed for the better, that was for sure.
“It’s shitty coming back here, huh?”
She looked across from where she was sat. A man called Wilson smiled at her. He had tough, leathery skin, wore a few long chains around his neck. He looked remarkably calm about this whole “return to mainland Britain” thing, especially considering he’d just said how shitty it was coming back here.
But then again, he was the chief scout on this mission. The leader of whatever tasks were at hand.
Melissa thought about saying she was fine with it. She thought about saying that there was nothing interesting for her back on Island 47. That there was nothing keeping her there.
But that wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t true.
There was so much for her back there.
There was everything for her back there.
Ricky was her everything.
So instead of putting on a front—a front like she’d been putting on her entire life—she just smiled and sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is. But hey. What’s got to be done has to be done.”
“What takes you back, anyway?”
The question from Wilson caught her off guard. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been expecting to be asked it at some point. It was just, weirdly, she hadn’t thought about what was bringing her back when she truly did have everything she wanted back home—or rather, back on Island 47.
What was bringing her back?
“You don’t have to answer that,” Wilson said, smirk still on his face, his voice tinny and slightly delayed over the headphone system in the helicopter. “None of us know how to answer it, really. But deep down… deep down I guess it’s kind of like we feel we have a responsibility. A responsibility to the people out there to make sure they don’t suffer the kind of fate as the rest of the damned poor wandering fools out there.”
Melissa nodded. And she thought about the people she’d lost since the beginning of the end. She thought about Amy, her sister that she’d never known about, not until right at the very end. She thought about her friends like Annabelle, who she’d been a part of a group with—the woman with the bow and arrows—and all the other people, all the awful ways they’d fallen… but such a large portion of those people had fallen at the hands of other people, and not at the dead.
But there was another reason why Melissa was out here. And it was that same reason that had sent her out into the woods after Kane that time so long ago. It was the same reason that had made her throw herself into dangerous situations all her life.
She thought that voice had been silenced. She thought that urge to throw herself into danger had been neutered.
But she saw now what she was doing, and she realised that this was exactly the same. This was her putting herself in jeopardy. This was her walking the tightrope of self-destruction.
And the worst part about it?
The part about it that made her feel uneasy—that made her feel unclean?
She felt more comfortable walking along this tightro
pe than she did settling into any kind of normal life back home on the island.
“We’re a mad breed, anyway,” Wilson said. “I mean we all have some level of madness inside of us. Every single one of us. Only difference is, we’re more in touch with it. We’ve got issues, and we come out here ’cause we want to find ways to deal with them away from the people we care about. Or maybe we lost something out here, and we feel like… I dunno. Like we still haven’t faced up to that, somehow. But we’re here. That’s the main thing. We’re here. And somebody has to be. Madman or not, somebody has to do the dirty work. Looks like we just happen to draw the short straws of the fucked-up psyche.”
Wilson laughed, and Melissa found herself smiling along with him as she looked back out of the window. She liked Wilson. He made her feel a lot more at ease about this whole task, this whole mission—this whole… well, whatever the hell it was. He made her realise it wasn’t just her struggling with her demons. Everyone was struggling in their own way.
But they were doing something pro-active.
They were out here not just to help themselves, but to help other people.
And she was going to get back home.
No matter what happened, she was going to find her way back home.
“Eyup,” a voice said over the headphones. “Looks like the fuckers are still having a party down there.”
Melissa looked out of the window, down onto the ground.
She couldn’t make it out at first. Not properly from above, anyway.
But then it clicked.
The ground was filled with the dead.
A mass of dead, all of them moving so fluidly like water through a crack in a glass.
She felt that twinge of uncertainty in her stomach. That flick of nausea, a reminder of all the times she’d fought them, all the times she’d got away from them, all the times she’d lost at the hands of them…
She felt the helicopter thump down onto the ground. And when it did, as she stood by that door with her fellow scouts and looked out onto the empty, barren streets; as she looked at the blood that had been spilled; saw the crows swooping in; smelled that unmistakable stench of death that always poisoned the air—a stench she’d forgotten about, in fact—it all came back to her. It all returned.
She took a deep breath of the putrid air.
Wilson looked at her. “Sure you’re ready for this, scout?”
She looked back at him and smiled. “More than you’ll ever know.”
Then she stepped out of the helicopter.
Back home again.
Back to how it used to be.
Chapter Two
The first mission on their agenda was simple.
Get to a nearby barracks.
Get inside.
Establish whether rumours of human activity were true.
And then progress with the evacuation mission from there.
She didn’t know why this barracks was such a point of interest for her group. And she didn’t really know what “intel” entailed on the mission she was on. Wilson told her about how there were various scout groups dotted around the company, many of whom heard whispers from others about significant points of activity.
And to Melissa, it seemed pretty clear upon thinking about it why a barracks might be of such interest. Military presence.
Or outlaw presence.
One could be keeping the peace. One could be disturbing it.
The two concepts weren’t mutually exclusive.
She walked down the long street. The leaves had fallen off the trees. The houses were big. She saw a mosque on her right, which had been totally destroyed. She felt sad when she saw that. It was a spectacular looking building. And it pained her to think of all those worshippers in their place of sanctuary only to fall at the hands of pure evil.
She hoped, wherever they were, that they were okay.
She kept on going, the rest of the group beside her. There were eight of them in total. Wilson was just in front of the rest of the group, leading the way, rifle in hand.
There was something else weird about all this, and that was the clear mask that Melissa had been told to wear. She knew the shit about the airborne virus was a scam to strike fear into people. And maybe this was just a way of staying consistent, of keeping that illusion up.
But something told her there was more to this than she’d perhaps thought. And that thought unsettled her. It unsettled her greatly.
They hadn’t run into any undead yet. Which was disconcerting in itself. Melissa kept hold of her rifle, her finger near to the trigger. She just wanted to put one of them down, get it done with. Break the tension that had been building for so long. Because sure, she’d had training as a scout. Sure, she’d had to be a part of re-enactments; of hypothetical training situations.
And she’d done good in them, that she was sure of.
She just knew deep down that it was nothing like the real thing.
“Here we go,” Wilson said.
Melissa stopped, then. She stopped because she could see the armoured vehicle on the street ahead of her. On her right, she saw a building with bloodied writing scrawled onto a banner on the roof. It looked like it’d been that way for a while.
And on her left, she saw the barracks.
It was an impressive building. Large gates between two tall brick pillars. And beyond, a nice looking grounds area, with various different chambers and dorms.
She smiled when she saw it. Because it looked like the kind of place where people could find salvation. Where they could find safety.
But the smile soon dropped when she saw the mass of dead bodies lining the ground in front of it.
“Well,” Stephen—one of the scouts—said. “Doesn’t look like there’s much fucking human activity here to me.”
Wilson ignored him. “We keep going. We stay close. And we keep our wits about us. We don’t receive intel without good reason. So be alert at all times. Okay?”
A few nods from the group, although most of them looked half-hearted and disinterested.
“I asked you a question,” Wilson shouted. “Are we okay?”
“Yes sir,” everyone said in unison.
He looked Melissa in her eyes. Nodded at her. And she nodded back at him.
She didn’t know what that nod was. Not completely.
But he got the sense he valued her above the rest of the scouts. And she had to take that as a compliment.
She followed him inside the grounds of the barracks. The gates had been broken down. There’d been no attempt to fix them, which struck her as odd if anyone was here after all. The grass had grown scarily long, a sit-on mower perched in the middle of it. To her left, she saw a burned out building. She wondered what’d happened in here. How it’d gone down. She thought if she listened close enough, she could hear the screams of the people who’d been trapped inside there.
She looked to her left. Looked to her right. Listened to the total silence. Because it felt off. It felt like… like there were eyes on her even though this place was so dead. Like a ghost was watching over her, analysing her every move.
“He’s fucking batty.”
A voice to her right. Stephen again.
“Who is?” Melissa asked.
Stephen shrugged. “Who do you think? Wilson. I mean, look at this place. It’s dead as fuck. We’d be better off just turning around and getting the hell away from here while we can. It gives me the creeps.”
Melissa took an immediate dislike to the vibes Stephen was giving off. That air of mutiny about him; that sense of distrust that it spawned.
So Melissa took a deep breath and stood her ground. “I trust Wilson’s judgement. We’re here for a reason. We’ve got a job to do.”
She walked off ahead of Stephen, not wanting to stick around with him too long that he could come up with any kind of reply.
“Yeah, well,” Stephen said as she walked on. “Your funeral. Just don’t drag me down with you, okay?”
She
didn’t give him the liberty of a reply.
She reached the main door of the barracks. She stepped inside. Held her breath, staying aware of sounds of all times; of movement all around her. She kept her gun raised. Kept her trigger finger ready. She had to be ready to fire. She had to be on guard at all times.
The first place she found herself looked like a rec room crossed with a canteen area. Chairs had been toppled over. There was blood on the floor, bodies stretched out all over the place. A man in a chef’s apron lying dead right in front of her, his body rotted to the bone like so many others.
She thought again about what might’ve gone down here. Looked like some kind of internal conflict. Something that had happened a long time ago.
She kept on going through this dining area, ended up on a long corridor with doors on both sides.
She peeked through the open door on her left.
She saw an office area. On the desk in there, a photograph of a well-built man with dark hair, wife beside him.
A bloodied knife on the floor.
She stepped out of that room and kept on going. Because there was something on her right, up ahead. A door. A door that it looked like water had poured from.
She crept towards it, closer, closer, trying to see what it was.
When she reached it, she realised right away.
It was a freezer room. Only the freezer room had been left open.
But there was something in that freezer room.
Well, multiple things.
The first thing she noticed was the chair, toppled over in the middle of the room.
The next thing she saw made her turn around and puke in her mouth a little.
There were bodies.
Loads of corpses.
It didn’t look like they’d been bitten. It looked like they’d been shot in the head. Some of them still wearing military gear.
Melissa’s heart pounded as she thought about all the reasons why people would be trapped in here. And no matter where she let her mind go, all she could think of were bad outcomes. All she could think of were—