by Perrin Briar
“But it’s more painful for those of us left to pick up the pieces,” a voice said.
Nathan stepped out from behind the camper van.
“What are you trying to do, Nathan?” George said. “Scare us to death?”
Nathan hadn’t taken his eyes off Chris.
“Did your other girl make it?” he said. “Did Sharon?”
“No,” Chris said. “They turned.”
A corner of Nathan’s mouth pointed up.
“They’re probably better off now than being with you,” he said.
Chris began to rise, his fist clenched tight, but George was up on his feet first and stepped between them.
“We don’t want no trouble,” George said.
Chris and Nathan glared at one another.
“So, you’re going to apologise,” George said.
Chris stood up and shook his head.
“I’ll never apologise to him,” he said.
“Not you,” George said.
He turned to his son, whose eyes boggled.
“You can’t be serious, Pa,” Nathan said.
“I am serious,” George said. “You had no right to say what you just did. What if somebody said the same thing to you?”
Nathan pressed his lips together.
“I’m not apologising to him,” he said.
“Then you’ll not be eating or sleeping with the rest of us until you do.”
“Pa!”
“Apologise now.”
The tendons in Nathan’s jaw stood out from his face.
“Sorry,” he said, before marching off.
George watched Nathan’s retreating back.
“Sorry for my boy,” he said. “He needs to learn to watch his tongue, otherwise someone’s likely to cut it out one of these days.”
“He had good reason,” Chris said. “And he might have been right.”
George shrugged.
“That’s no business of mine,” he said. “Or his. Revenge is a fool’s game. I’ll have no part in it. Have you heard anything about the other sites or travellers?”
“Nothing. I was hoping you might have news.”
A short figure appeared in the trailer doorway. Maisie beamed, her hands entwined in the folds of her dress.
“What do you think, Dad?” Maisie said, twirling around so the hem of her dress spiralled out. “It looks brand new, don’t you think?”
“Are you sure it’s the same dress?” Chris said.
“It is,” Maisie said. “I can’t believe it!”
“Thank you for that, Angie,” Chris said. “I don’t have any money-”
“Keep your money,” she said. “It’s not worth anything these days anyway. It was worth it just to see the smile on her face. Although, if you wanted to pay me back… I could murder for a pack of ciggies. You don’t have any on you, do you?”
“No, sorry. Non-smoker.”
“Never mind,” Angie said, shoulders slumping.
“But there are some fine cigars in that big farmhouse, in the main study on the ground floor. In a little engraved golden box.”
“You don’t say,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “I might just poke around up there later.”
“Where’s Danny?” George said. “He can play with Maisie.”
“He’s off wandering in the woods again,” Angie said. “You know how he is. Can’t sit still for five minutes.”
George shook his head.
“That boy’s going to get in trouble one of these days, wandering off like that,” he said. “Haven’t I told you to keep a close eye on him?”
“There isn’t enough eyes in the world to keep an eye on him.”
There was the sound of half a dozen footsteps slapping the hard earth as a group of kids skidded to a stop before the fire. A pair of twins with matching blonde shoulder-length hair and the boy who had been turning the deer meat earlier. They looked from Maisie to Chris and back again. The boy turned to George.
“I need a knife,” he said.
“What for?” George said.
“I found a yew tree to make a bow from!”
“Show me later, Shane, and I’ll go with you.”
George gestured to the boy.
“Chris, you remember Jack’s youngest?” he said.
“Last time I saw you, you were in a pram,” Chris said.
Shane made a face.
“And these are Patrick’s girls, Tiger and Lily,” George said.
“That’s a pretty dress,” one of the twins said to Maisie. “Do you mind if I touch it?”
“Go ahead,” Maisie said.
Both sisters ran it through their fingers.
“It feels nice,” the girls said as one.
“Go on, then,” Angie said. “Introduce yourselves.”
“I’m Tiger,” one said, curtsying.
“And I’m Lily,” the second one said, waving.
“I’m Maisie.”
“Shane?” George said.
“I’m Shane,” the boy said, extending his hand.
Maisie looked at the hand. It was dirty. She smiled and took it.
“Maisie.”
“Why don’t you kids go play?” George said.
“But I want to make a bow,” Shane said.
“Later.”
“Maisie,” Chris said. “Show them the animals.”
“All right,” Maisie said.
“Don’t wander too far.”
“I won’t.”
Maisie led the other kids toward the field.
“What are your plans?” Chris said to George.
“Same as everyone else. Find somewhere safe. Stay there until it’s not.”
George let out a breath. His shoulders sagged and he suddenly looked his age.
“You can stay,” Chris said. “But I want your word you nor any of the other Joneses will cause any trouble. It’s already dangerous enough these days.”
“Believe me,” George said, “trouble is the last thing on my mind.”
12:23pm
Maisie picked up a handful of dried leaves and wiped them across the algae-smeared window. She pressed her face against the glass and smiled at what she saw inside. She moved aside and gestured for the others to take a look.
“This is where we keep the pigs,” she said. “They used to live in the stables but they were attacked one night by zombies. Luckily most of them escaped but it took ages to catch them again. We clean them out every day, and let them run around in the garden out back.”
Shane yawned, an exaggerated movement that used his whole face.
“We have chickens and cows too,” Maisie said, scrabbling for something interesting to say. “We keep them in the farmhouse. Do you want to go see?”
“No,” Shane said.
“Sorry?”
“I said, ‘No’. I don’t want to see your stupid chickens and cows.”
“Shane,” one of the twins said, touching his arm.
“What?” Shane said, screwing up his face. “Do you honestly want to listen to her droning on about pigs and chickens and cows? I know I don’t. I want to go into the woods and make a bow and some arrows.”
Tiger and Lily exchanged scared, but excited, expressions.
“My dad said I should never go into the woods without him,” Maisie said.
Shane grinned, a horrible thing with the sunlight catching his chubby cheeks and casting shadows across his eyes.
“And you believed him?” he said. “Maisie, your dad is more dangerous than all the zombies put together.”
“What are you talking about?” Maisie said.
“Shane,” Tiger said, “don’t. Let’s just go look at the chickens.”
Shane pushed Tiger aside and stared down at Maisie.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he said. “This is rich! Your father is a bad man, ‘the worst kind of man,’ my dad said.”
“He’s not!” Maisie said. “He’s a good man.”
“He killed my
uncle.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They were having a fight and your dad cheated and killed him. ‘No Smith could ever beat a Jones in a fair fight,’ my dad said.”
Maisie raised her tiny fists and put her feet a shoulder-width apart. She scrunched up her face, a mixture of anger and confusion.
“What are you doing?” Shane said.
“Take that back.”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“I said take it back. Now! Dad showed me how to fight. I’ll fight you.”
“You’ll fight me?” Shane said, chuckling.
“Somebody needs to teach you a lesson not to tell lies. It might as well be me.”
A dark shadow fell across Shane’s face. His eyebrows drew down over his small piggy eyes and he converged on her.
“Hey,” a deep voice said. “Leave her alone.”
A tall lad, around the age of twelve or thirteen, with slight traces of puppy fat around his neck and cheeks, emerged from the foliage. He had dark brown eyes, almost black, even in the sunlight. He had dark shoulder-length hair shone with grease. The family resemblance between him and Shane was obvious.
“Danny…” Shane said, taking a step back. “What are you doing here?”
“What were you doing?”
“I was just messing.”
“If you’re going to mess with something, mess with those dead things wandering around out there. At least then you’d be doing something useful.”
“They’re out there?” Shane said, peering around at the woods around them. “For sure?”
“They’re always out there.”
A crow cawed. Shane jumped a foot in the air.
“Sorry, Danny,” Shane said, with such sadness and affection that it took Maisie aback.
“We’re in this together,” Danny said. “We have to learn to rely on each other, otherwise we’ll never get through this apocalypse.”
Tiger and Lily twirled their blonde hair around their fingers and said as one: “Hi Danny.”
“Hi Tiger,” Danny said without looking. “Lily.”
“Your grandfather was asking after you,” Tiger said.
“Oh yeah?” Danny said.
“He says you’re going to get yourself into trouble one of these days,” Lily said.
“That’s probably true,” Danny said.
“You wanted to go make your bow and arrow a minute ago,” Danny said, tossing Shane a switchblade, “why don’t you go now?”
Shane stared at the switchblade as if it were the Holy Grail.
“Yes. All right, Danny,” he said. “I’ ll go.”
He turned to the twins.
“Do you two want to come?” he said.
The girls looked Danny over.
“Sure,” they both said at once. “We’re brave. See you later, Danny.”
Shane, Tiger and Lily entered the woods, leaving Maisie and Danny alone.
12:37pm
“What’s it like out there now?” Chris said as he led George around the farmhouse and its grounds.
“It’s pretty much like the old days,” George said, leaning on his knee. “Travelling around, scratching a living to survive.”
“But with marauding undead wherever you go.”
“All right, so it’s not exactly like the old days. But I suspect it’s been less of a disturbance to our lives than it has been to a lot of people.”
George’s eyes were bloodshot and tired. The hair on his large head was thin, white and wispy, the scalp visible. He was still massive but his frame had lost a lot of weight in recent months.
“It’s hell out there,” he said. “It’s like the world has gone crazy and we’re the only sane ones left. I saw my daughter-in-law wake up one day, her child cradled to her breast. She hadn’t been well the past few hours, complaining of a bad headache, shaking, sickness, that kind of thing. She went to bed to rest. I went in to check on her, and she sat up, took one look at the babe in her arms, opened her jaws wide and savaged him. He screamed and hollered for help, but we were too late. She tore him to pieces.
“We tied her to her bed. She growled and hissed and we thought she’d gone feral. And then we started seeing and hearing it on the news. People the same as her. All crazy and half-cocked. We tried to feed her, but she wouldn’t let us. She kept snapping at us, so we tied her head down and poured soup into her mouth, but she brought it up the moment it went down her throat. There’s nothing so close to a living nightmare as seeing your own children die before you. And to die like that…”
George shook his head.
“It’s the same all over, people say,” he said. “At the beginning we stuck to the main roads, figuring we’d hear all the news there, know where to go, where the safest place to stay was. For a while things were all right. We avoided the worst of the troubles. But then we got attacked by a huge wave of them. They washed over us like a river. We lost half our number that day, and then another quarter the next. Friends and family we’d known all our lives. Gone. It was luck that any of us managed to get away.
“We stuck to the smaller roads then, the ones leading to the small towns and villages, but within a few days those too were overrun. Then we used the country roads. That’s why it took us so long to get here. We commandeered these trailers and trucks and eventually found our way. We moved from one old stopping place to another, trying to find somewhere safe. Then Nathan remembered Usher’s farm here and we thought it was as good an idea as any, so we came.”
“It’s quiet, all right,” Chris said, “although there are more zombies every day.”
“Everywhere has its shelf life. But it’s nice to be somewhere that isn’t under constant attack. There were bright lights on the horizon at every city we passed, yellow and orange like the world was on fire, and flashes of white gunfire like God was clapping his hands, deep rumbles that shook the earth.”
George looked at his hands. He was a large man, but right then he looked like a ten-year-old confessing his nightmares to his parents. He wiped a hairy arm across his snotty nose.
“Thank you,” he said, “for listening. There’s no one here I can talk to. I have to be the leader. I can’t be seen to have weaknesses.”
Chris felt he should show an act of solidarity, put a hand on the big man’s shoulder, slap him on the back or something, but he didn’t.
“Somebody has to lead them,” Chris said.
“They’re what keep me going. If it wasn’t for them I would be in the ground now. I’m tired, Chris. I’m tired of leading them, tired of living in this new world. I’m an old man. I wasn’t meant to survive in this world. But for some reason I’m still here.”
“You have a job to do.”
“With any luck that job is about to end. This place, it could be just what we’re looking for, just what everyone these days is looking for: somewhere safe, somewhere to hang up our hat and sleep and know you won’t wake up dead the next day. This place could be it. We could put up defences all around us. The river runs along the top there and around to one side. There’s the woods on the other side. We could build traps. We could make this somewhere for future generations to live in safety.”
“I’ve already begun the process,” Chris said. “But it’ll take all of us to make them good enough for us to be safe.”
George smiled.
“Then it’s a good thing we came,” he said. “I understand that us appearing like this might not be what you were hoping for. In fact, we’re probably the last people you were hoping would come here, but we’re hard workers and we’ll pull our weight and get things organised the way they need to be. But living this way ain’t going to end this thing.”
“We might get lucky. Someone might come up with a cure.”
“We heard some scientists at Saint Bart’s Hospital found it.”
Chris thought back two months to when he’d met a tank commander on his way to London, leading his troops to protect the efforts of the scientists at
Saint Bart’s. Was it just coincidence?
“A cure already?” Chris said. “That was fast.”
“They don’t want to hang around,” George said. “Not these days. There’s too much at stake.”
“I’m sure there’s always someone somewhere claiming they have a cure.”
“Two months ago I was in town and ran into someone who said they had a cure.”
“Maybe they did.”
“Maybe. They were charging two tins of beans for it.”
Chris smiled and shook his head.
“At some point this all has to end,” he said. “Why not now?”
“It does have to end,” George said, nodding, “but it doesn’t have to end in our favour. Either way, we’re not going to have anything to do with it. So why worry?”
George yawned and blinked his dry old eyes.
“I haven’t slept well since this whole thing kicked off,” he said. “How can you with those things out there? I feel like I just need to lay my head down and relax.”
With how heavy George’s eyelids looked, Chris wondered if he’d ever manage to open them up again.
“Listen,” Chris said, “why don’t you all come sleep with us in the barn tonight? It’s high up off the ground and no one can get to us. We’ll get extra mattresses from the farmhouse and we don’t even need anyone to keep watch. One good night’s rest before we start the hard work.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I’m not sure-”
“Look,” Chris said, “I know how important a night’s sleep is, especially these days. You can sleep with us until we build somewhere else, some kind of house on stilts with multiple exit points. We can stock it full of gear to kill zombies from above.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?” George said with a smile.
“Providing a safe place for Maisie is the only thing I’ve been thinking about since I got here. Maybe now, with you here, it might be possible.”
George smiled. It was sad and distant.
“It’s a shame we had to get off on the wrong foot the way we did,” he said. “We might have been good friends.”