“What is it?” I asked, a feeling of dread growing in my stomach.
“Landmine.”
Just one word and it was enough to drain all the colour from my face. A landmine of all things! I had grown up hearing horror stories of war torn countries and the poor people who stepped on them. Of the decade's long attempts to locate and disarm those left behind after wars.
And Ryan was carrying one in his hand. His eyes met mine and I licked dry lips.
“Where did you find it?”
“Buried under the snow near one of the food distribution centres.”
His voice was so nonchalant that it took me a moment to register his words. When I did, I slumped back against the wall, legs going weak. One of the bodyguards steadied me and I looked helplessly at the mine in Ryan’s hand.
It had been buried in a place where hundreds of people would gather to collect their day's food. A place where just one person would need to step on it and dozens would be killed in a blast that would have zombies in a crowded place.
“Go,” I said. “Do what you must.”
There was no argument from the Admiral who merely stood to one side, turning his face away from the room. He too understood that there were things that might be unpalatable but necessary in order to save lives.
Ryan casually tossed the mine over his shoulder where a wide-eyed Isaac caught it before cursing loudly.
“You two, get out.”
The officers questioning the prisoner looked first at Ryan, then back at the Admiral who nodded. Their faces dark, they rose to their feet and marched past the man I loved, the man who I suspected was about to do something horrendous, something I had allowed.
I swallowed back my nausea and turned to watch. I wouldn’t allow myself to look away, to pretend I wasn’t complicit.
“Name?” Ryan asked.
The prisoner, a man almost as tall and well built as the over-muscled Isaac, just smirked and shook his head. Ryan nodded slowly and smiled in a way that I had seen make grown men cower in fear.
“Do you know me?”
A blank look was all the response and again, Ryan nodded.
“Ryan Sawyer,” my beloved said, quite casually, and then smiled as he noted a reaction. “Yes, my beard is new, and I didn’t have it in the photo that Smythe had in his file.”
He pulled a piece of paper out of one pocket. It had been folded several times and was quite grubby and wrinkled as though it had been screwed up and thrown away at one point. He carefully unfolded it and all the while, the prisoner stared at him like one would a viper.
“I’m not surprised that you know my name. Smythe was a little upset with me when last we parted ways. I had just killed everyone in his bunker.”
The prisoner couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of Ryan and his adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed nervously. Any cockiness had vanished from him.
“Smythe, if I were to guess, would have ensured that anyone coming to this island would know my name and my face so that they could kill me. Am I right?”
The prisoner didn’t respond but Ryan nodded anyway.
“He would have told you just enough so that you wouldn’t underestimate how dangerous I was. He would have even told you of my history, of all the information he was so pleased to show me.”
Still, no response from the prisoner but, once again, Ryan nodded his head. He reached down and tapped one finger on the piece of paper and the prisoner’s eyes seemed to be drawn there, to where he pointed. They widened and snapped back up to Ryan’s face.
“You know who I am. You know what I have done and what I am capable of. You now know that I am aware of the location of your bunker, the one where your family are being held to ensure your compliance with Genpact.”
“I am not going to torture you today. I will not use my knife to flay your skin, nor gouge out your eyes. I will not harm you. But know this.”
His voice dropped, a coldness entering it that I had heard before and I shivered as I knew that the prisoner was staring into the eyes of a killer, someone with no guilt, no remorse, no humanity.
“I will be going to this base, I will make my way inside and I will kill each and every person there. I will ensure that your family receives particular attention. Every dark and terrible thing you were thinking that I was about to do to you, I shall do to your family. And, I will record it.”
“When I am done, I shall return to you and if you are still alive, I will make sure that it is the only thing you will see for the rest of your miserable existence.” He paused and stared down at the prisoner. “Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Then answer every question truthfully and instead of doing that, I shall bring your family here, to you.”
The prisoner licked his lips before tearing his eyes from Ryan and looking over at me. No, not to me, I realised, but to Isaac. The burly mercenary nodded, a slight movement of his head, but enough apparently.
“What do you want to know?”
Chapter 16
The urge to kill him was almost overwhelming, as he sat there, spewing every little bit of information that he thought I wanted to hear. I didn’t respond at all, just stood there and stared down at him as I fought the murderous impulse.
Someone was barking orders from near the door and I tuned out his voice, focusing on not reaching for my knife from where it hung, sheathed, on my belt.
With each minute that passed, the prisoner grew a little paler, and began to speak just that bit faster, as though afraid that he wouldn’t tell me what I had wanted quickly enough. I could practically smell his fear and it was intoxicating.
I turned abruptly and stalked from the room, leaving the fool calling out behind me, asking if I had heard enough, if his family were safe. I ignored him and brushed past the guards out in the corridor, stopping only when a gentle hand was placed against my arm.
“Ryan.”
Just my name, and nothing more, but enough to draw a little of my focus as I turned to her, to the woman I loved. Her eyes were full of warmth and concern, something I had learnt to recognise from her having seen it all too many times.
“A threat isn’t torture,” I said, perhaps a little defensively. “I did as you wanted.”
“I know.” She chewed on her lip, not releasing her hold on me and then jerked her head to one side. “Follow me.”
With little real choice as she refused to release her hold, I trailed after her, along the corridor to a plain brown door that led into a small supply closet. She practically dragged me inside and closed the door behind us, before reaching for the light switch.
It was cramped and smelt of the chemicals in the cleaning products that still lined the shelves fixed to three of the surrounding walls. She wrinkled her nose at the odour but stared up at me, eyes serious.
“What do you need?”
That question took me by surprise, and I blinked, taken aback, not quite knowing how to answer.
“Ryan, please. I need you to come back to me. What do you need to do that?”
“I don’t understand what you mean?”
My voice was cold, so very cold and unemotional and a small part of my brain, the part that had been growing for a mere two years, since I had met her, began to respond. Something must have changed as her lips drew up at the corners and her eyes shone brightly as she watched me.
She pulled me into an embrace and I stood there awkwardly for a long, drawn-out moment before patting her back gently with one hand. She seemed happy enough with that at least, though I was no less confused as she pulled back, all beaming smile and shining eyes.
“Thank you for making him talk… without hurting him.”
“Welcome.”
“Admiral Stuart is sending people out to keep a watch over those places that are likely targets.”
“I’ll go too.”
“No.” There was a hint of sorrow in her voice, but her face showed nothing. “I want you to do something else.”
She bit her lip and turned her head away, why, I wasn’t sure. So, I waited as patiently as I could for her to speak.
“Head to the mainland.”
Now, that took me by surprise. “Really?”
“Yah, I think it would be a good thing for you to burn off some energy. He’s just given us the location of where they are launching them from. You can take a small force and stop them.”
“You’re sure?”
“No, but I know you need this. You’ve been stuck here for too long and you need to be able to do… what you do.”
To kill people. She understood my need, but still, it was unsettling to see her reference it in such a manner. She was essentially saying that she was sending me out to kill people because I needed it. Which I so very badly did.
As soon as she had said it, I was itching to be away, to rush out there and kill a great many people. I almost shivered at the very thought of it. In some, small, part of my mind, I was aware that it was potentially becoming a problem. That need to kill.
I wouldn’t always have enemies I could face down. Somehow, I would need to find a way to deal with it before I found myself losing control. I couldn’t allow that to happen, not when around Lily or my children.
“Why haven’t the twins got names, yet?” I asked, thinking back to Gregg’s question.
She smiled wryly at the sudden change of subject. I didn’t have her adeptness when it came to conversation, so my segue was a little more obvious than hers would have been.
“That’s the first time you’ve asked, you know that, right?”
“It is?”
“Yes, and I’m not going to name them for you. We will do it together, when you are ready. But, until you were interested enough to ask, I wasn’t going to push. I wanted you to want to help choose names.”
It had never occurred to me. Just another way that I was different, I supposed. When the twins had been born, I had found myself able to love them in a way that differed from how I felt for Lily. It was yet another new and concerning emotion for me.
Dealing with that and my own issues, I had been a little self-absorbed and names had not even been a blip on my radar.
“I… apologise. I shall try harder.”
“You don’t need to apologise. I know who you are, remember? I’m not going to force or nag you to do something. You do notice things eventually.”
True enough, I supposed, but without Gregg’s prompting, I could well imagine that the twins would have been school age before I really noticed or cared.
I glanced at her suspiciously at that thought. Perhaps Gregg’s prompting wasn’t so random at all and while she wouldn’t nag or force the issue, I had little doubt that she would be willing to manipulate things to speed the process along.
“Should we do it now then?”
“No. Have a think about it and we can discuss it later. For now, focus on what you need. Get it out of your system and come home to us.”
I turned to reach for the door handle and stopped, looking back for a moment at the woman I loved. I had long since grown used to that idea and I acknowledged that I enjoyed spending my time with her. Waking in the morning beside her or holding her in my arms.
Something I would never have considered possible at one point in my life. She had changed me for the better, I knew that, as much as I knew it was a process and she was showing immense patience with me at times.
I couldn’t ever change my nature. I was a killer, a murderer. But I could be better. For her, for our children. I’d find a way to control it better, to avoid the chance of ever breaking that promise I had made to her, two years before.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I love you too.”
I stepped out into the corridor and stopped, sucking in a deep breath of air. She was my weakness. I knew that and when I was with her, the darkness I carried seemed to quieten, but not enough, and as soon as I was out of her presence, it came back full force and I felt a quiet rage, a need for death, that I couldn’t ever shake.
“Where to,” Gregg asked.
“Mainland.”
“Great.”
His quiet groan said that perhaps it wasn’t so great, but I ignored that for the moment. He didn’t have to come with me. I turned to Isaac.
“We need transport. Something big enough for twenty or so minions.”
“Minions?”
“His death culty followers,” Gregg whispered. “Just go with it.”
“I can do that, laddie. Where we headed to?”
“Liverpool.”
Without waiting for a response, I marched off. I had an urge to be away, the adrenaline rising in me at the thought of what was to come.
It wasn’t such a foolish place for them to be, not really. Back at the beginning, when all hell was breaking loose, it would have been disastrous to go near the cities. Two years later, a great many of the undead had died off.
The summers were harsh on them and when the food source had gone, there was little to sustain them and they had withered away. The parasites that infected them could only do so much. They weren’t magical creatures after all but worked on the same basic principles as the rest of us.
When they infected their host, they would grow and take over the body, animating it. With limited control and only the most basic, primal urges, they would devour the living to feed the parasite within.
Some of them would develop enough to see other dead flesh as a food source. Those feral creatures would still be around for a while yet. The Reapers, well, I suspected that they would be around for decades.
So, we could expect that a great many of the slower, stupider, most basic zombies, would have died out. In a city with almost half a million people, it would be a fair assumption that if most of them had become zombies, seventy per cent or so would have died by now.
That still left a hell of a lot, but not so many that they couldn’t be avoided if needed. A determined force could clear the dockyards and marinas. They could seize boats and sail them along the coast to where other groups had abducted survivors.
Those other groups could wait. They wouldn’t infect those prisoners until they were ready to board a boat anyway, so as long as we wiped out the source of the boats, the island would be safe long enough for us to head south to the Genpact base.
In theory anyway.
I ignored the salutes of the minions standing guard and walked straight past them and into the building. It had been some kind of spa or health centre before the fall. The gym was useful for training and the minions made use of the shower and bathroom facilities that were designed for a lot of people to be using them.
Most of them slept on blankets on the floor, or in sleeping bags. Comfort wasn’t necessarily a priority since their whole reason for existing was to die fighting the undead. Once you had accepted that, not much else really mattered.
There had been a café of sorts and that had been converted into a general mess area, which is where I found most of the minions, eating their morning meal.
As I stepped into the room, silence fell and almost a hundred black-garbed minions rose to their feet, fists hitting their breasts in unison with a sound like low thunder. I scanned their faces, searching for one in particular.
“My Lord Death,” Samuel said as I finally located him. “Your orders?”
There was something different and I wasn’t sure what it was. Something in the air, in the way the minions were watching me. It set the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end and some of that old paranoia reared its head.
“What’s the problem?” I asked, voice barely more than a growl as I scowled at the watching men and women, my hand twitching towards the knife on my hip. “Why are they staring?”
The older man moved lithely through the crowd towards me. He didn’t take his eyes from mine and his hands remained far from his weapons. He too remembered my paranoia back in Glasgow.
“My Lord Death,” Samuel said, voice bare
ly above a whisper yet still carrying easily in the taut silence. “They bear witness.”
“Bear witness to what?”
“To you.” Samuel smiled at my clear confusion and took a hesitant step closer. “Many have seen you fight, and it has inspired them. But, just a short time ago, two of your followers witnessed you bring death to the scourge in a manner they had never before seen.”
I wanted to sneer, to laugh at their idiotic beliefs but I didn’t. Lily would need them, the twins would need them too. While I was away, they would ensure my family were safe and for that, I would put up with any amount of foolishness.
“It was just some zombies. I killed them.”
“We saw death made flesh!” a voice called out.
My eyes narrowed and I tilted my head as I stared at the young woman who had spoken. She gazed at me with something close to worship on her face and my mood grew darker. What had begun as a way of ensuring my own safety, had moved way too far out of hand.
At some point soon, I would have to put a stop to it else it would become a bigger problem in the future. I needed no adoration, no worship of lesser men and women.
“They saw their beliefs made manifest,” Samuel said with some amount of glee, but low enough that only I heard. “They saw Death walking the world, as I have done.”
It was a problem and one I would need to discuss, but that would be for another time. For the moment, I needed willing followers for a dangerous task.
“Twenty of you,” I said loud enough that all could hear. “Will come with me to the mainland to stop these boats coming. Be at the docks in one hour.”
With that, I turned away, headed back out into the early morning light as it broke over the horizon. Behind me an argument began, everyone demanding their right to come and risk their lives with me.
Fools, all of them.
Chapter 17
I stopped at our apartment, just long enough to cuddle my babies and distract myself from the worry and the guilt I couldn’t shake. He was leaving the island and going into a city! With far too few people to keep him safe.
We’d watched the shamblers become slower, weaker, as they began to die off but there were millions still about. Our resident scientist and the researchers had worked up an equation that suggested that it would be another year for them all to have died out fully.
Killing The Dead (Book 17): Siege Page 10