by Casey, Ryan
He felt his knife digging into his thigh.
He wanted to reach into his pocket and grab it.
The man stopped. He stopped right above Hayden. Looked down at him. Hayden couldn’t see his face, not with himself being in the spotlight.
But he knew the man was weighing up what to do with him.
That he recognised him.
“It’s—it’s you,” he said.
Hayden smiled. Sighed. “You know, you really do need to check your back more often.”
The man kept still for a second. Like he was deliberating about what Hayden had said. “What—”
A grunt.
The sound of flesh being pierced.
The man’s chest stretched outwards. Blood trickled down his lips, now revealed in the torchlight, which had fallen on the road.
He fell down. Fell to his knees.
Miriam stood behind him.
“Good,” Hayden said. “Told you the alleyways can be useful to sneak around. Now let’s keep moving.”
He closed the eyelids of the man. Then he took his gun and his torchlight, and together, the three of them pushed further onwards.
The main gate got closer. They dodged more guards on the way. Took down another couple, their plan coming together. The closer they got, the more hope started to build. They didn’t have long. The longer they were in here, the more chance they were going to get caught.
But the main gate was just up ahead now.
They were so, so close.
Hayden saw the opening to the main gate. His heart must’ve skipped a beat when he saw there was nobody standing around it. That it was all clear. A tunnel leading out of this place, towards the extraction point, towards their safety.
“We’ve done it,” Miriam said.
“Not yet,” Hayden added.
“Hayden, we’ve—”
“Stop right there!”
Lights blasted into Hayden, Miriam and Amy. Filled the tunnel opening. It felt like they were on stage; like they were a part of some kind of play.
He turned around. Slowly. Looked back at where the lights were coming from.
Three men stood there, guns raised.
All of them pointing at Hayden, Miriam and Amy.
“Move a muscle and we’ll put a bullet through your skulls,” the man in the middle said. Hayden recognised him as Bilal.
Hayden felt deflation fill his body. He felt the ticking clock of extraction powering on.
And to think he’d thought this was going to be easy.
If only he knew how much harder it was going to get.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“I’m serious. You so much as twitch and we’ll end you, right here.”
Hayden didn’t twitch. He stood still in the glare of the torchlights. The tunnel opening was just inches behind them. They’d been so close to leaving this place. So close to getting the hell out of this place once and for all, towards the extraction point—whatever it held.
And those hopes had been shat on. Shat on, like everything got shat on.
“Now keep still,” Bilal called. He didn’t move an inch. Just kept his gun pointed at them. Which wasn’t ideal. Hayden wanted to draw them towards him so he could fight them. He had a gun in his back pocket that he’d taken from the guard on the way down here, which he knew he could use. Just it wasn’t in his hand right now. And the consequences of a single damned twitch had already been made perfectly clear.
“Go get Gary,” Hayden heard Bilal say.
“Gary said he hasn’t slept in days. He wouldn’t want—”
“Just get him, okay, Ravi? This is Hayden fucking McCall. You know how much he wants him. How important he is to him. To punish him. For what he did.”
Hayden sensed the antagonism in Bilal’s voice. But he heard uncertainty in the voice of the other man, too. Uncertainty he knew he could use to his advantage.
The second man, Ravi, turned around and started walking back towards New Britain.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Hayden called.
Ravi stopped.
“Shut your mouth,” Bilal said.
“We’re leaving this place. Leaving and going far, far away.”
“I told you to—”
“You can let us walk. We can pretend this never happened. That you never saw us. Nobody will ever know. Nobody ever has to know.”
Ravi shook his head. “People—people are turning. All because of you. All because of—”
“What’s done is done,” Hayden said. “Yes, people are turning. But we didn’t know that was how things were going to turn out.”
“My niece,” the third person, Adrian, who hadn’t said a word to this point, said. “She died. She died in my arms ’cause of you.”
“Because of me?” Hayden said. He’d been doing a decent job of holding his nerve so far. But he could feel himself cracking, piece by piece. “Or because everyone was so desperate for a cure, so desperate to believe that everything really was okay all over again, that they put their faith in something they didn’t really understand?”
Hayden’s words weren’t met with barks from Bilal this time. Instead, they were met with total silence. He wasn’t totally sure what he’d just said, only that he’d said it from the heart. He’d said what he thought had to be said.
“Please,” Bilal said. His voice had softened. “Just—just wait there. Please. We can sort this.”
“If you leave us here, we’ll die, all three of us. He’ll kill us. Gary will kill us because he fucking hates me for what happened to Amanda. Because of me leaving him for dead. And I understand that. I respect that. But you have to see why I did those stupid fucking things in the first place. I did it because I wanted to protect you. Not just these two people beside me, but you. I wanted to protect this place. I did the wrong thing. Went about it the wrong way. I can see that now. I can accept it. But I did what I thought was right. Messed up, sure, but at the time, it felt like the right thing to do to protect this place—to protect those I cared about. I accept I fucked up. I accept I did wrong. But please. Just understand that by leaving us here right now, you’re signing our death warrant. And I don’t really believe you want to do that.”
Hayden heard the total silence fill this section of New Britain. Further away, he could hear voices. Even further away, groans, footsteps.
If he listened close enough, he swore he could hear the brains of these three people ticking away, trying to figure out what to do.
“Nobody has to know about this,” Hayden said. He took a chance. Lowered his hands. Tensed his jaw and braced himself for the impact of bullets. “Nobody at all has to know about this—”
“He’ll kill us. If he finds out, he’ll kill us.”
“And that’s a man you really want to stand beside?”
Again, silence followed.
Hayden put his hands behind his back. He pushed himself to do something else that he knew was risky, that he knew was daring.
He walked closer towards the three men.
They watched him. Watched him, all of their guns pointed.
“We’ve all been through the ringer today,” Hayden said. “We’ve all been through hell. Let’s put our weapons down. All of us. Let’s put them down and end this madness right here.”
Hayden saw two of the men look at each other. Heard them mumble amongst themselves.
“Put the guns down and let us go. Turn around. Walk away. Pretend you didn’t see a thing.”
“You won’t come back?”
“None of us are coming back here,” Hayden said. “That’s a promise.”
“How do we know we can trust you?”
“You don’t. And you’d be stupid to trust me, just like you’d be stupid to trust anyone. I’m just… I’m just asking you to follow your gut.”
Another moment’s silence followed. And at that moment, Hayden knew he had them. He knew they were going to let him walk. Let all of them walk.
“Go,” Bil
al said.
“Are you with us?”
“We—we go back to Gary in fifteen minutes. Tell him we saw you leaving. If you aren’t far enough away from this place by then, well… what happens, happens.”
Hayden felt his stomach sink. He smiled. Nodded. “I appreciate that.”
“Now go. Clock’s ticking.”
The three men walked away. All of them with their back to Hayden, Miriam, Amy.
Hayden stood still. Stood still and stared at them as they disappeared further into the darkness.
Then he lifted his gun.
“Hayden?” Miriam said.
It was already too late.
Hayden fired a shot into the back of the neck of each of the men. Took him five bullets to take them down. To send them falling to the ground.
But when they fell, he lowered the pistol.
Turned around.
Started to walk, Miriam and Amy by his side.
“We need longer than fifteen minutes,” Hayden said.
Miriam’s eyes were wide, puzzled. “But they—they let us go—”
“They were with Gary.”
“It’s not about us or them—”
“That’s where you’re wrong. It is about us or them. I wish it wasn’t but it is. I didn’t want to shoot them, but I had to. Deep down, I just knew I had to. Because my duty isn’t to them anymore. They aren’t my people anymore. You are my people. And if I have to kill to buy us an extra thirty seconds, I’ll kill. That’s what this means to me. That’s what you mean to me.”
He looked ahead at the tunnel opening. Stared down it, towards the outside, towards the pitch black nothingness beyond.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
He waited. Waited a few seconds for Miriam and Amy to come to his side. Which they did, eventually. They always did.
They stood there. Looked down the tunnel. Prepared their final walk to safety. Their final fight towards extraction.
For the first time in a long time, Hayden felt hope.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Gary stood in the radio room.
He wasn’t sure why he’d been brought here. He’d been having a damned good nap. A long-awaited nap. He told his people that he only wanted to be woken if they had news on Hayden. If they confirmed they’d found that bastard’s body—something that they couldn’t confirm after hours of searching the makeshift tunnel. That slippery rat had found a way to sneak his way out of death once again. A snake, that’s what he was. A snake that needed its head biting off.
Gary would be the one to bite it off. He would be, soon enough.
“Is this worth me giving up my sleep or am I going to be fucking disappointed?”
Gary watched as Steffi played around with the radio. She looked like she wasn’t used to operating technology like this. The way Gary saw it, that’s how things should be. Women had their tasks. Men had their tasks. Nothing sexist about those beliefs. Nature was sexist in itself for creating different roles for different genders.
He just wished nature wasn’t sexist right now so he could get this done with. So he could hear whatever it was Steffi thought she’d found.
He tasted a sickly tang in his mouth every time he thought of Hayden. He’d fucked over so many people in this place. But more than that, he’d shot Amanda. He didn’t know what Amanda meant to Gary, sure. Not completely. Or at least, that’s what he claimed.
But Gary knew there was more to why Hayden shot Amanda than he pretended.
He did it ’cause he saw Gary as a threat. ’Cause he hadn’t fallen in line and taken that immunised cyanide like the rest of the sheep in this place.
He did it ’cause he was scared of what’d happen when the lion finally returned to the top of the food chain.
Well, now he was finding out.
Gary scratched the side of his bald head. “Seriously, Steffi. Is this worth any of my time?”
“It is,” she said, a little louder this time. “Just—just trust me. It’s something you’ll want to hear.”
“Well how about you get it working again, get it up and running, y’know, and then you come tell me when it’s working so I can—”
Gary’s voice was interrupted by a blast of radio static.
He heard the transmission kick in. Heard the words the man said. About the UN. About Dunstable Downs Golf Club. About extraction at 2 a.m. And as he listened to them, he felt his excitement settling in. He felt the euphoria of the discovery—the discovery of an extraction point—covering all the anger in his body and replacing it with joy.
But when the transmission ended, it was something else that filled Gary with even more joy.
He crouched down. Picked up a little white stone from the floor. A stone that he soon realised wasn’t a stone at all. It was a piece of tooth.
He looked at it, swirled it around in his hands. “Get the cars loaded up. Get everyone inside them. And get them armed. Heavily.”
“We’re leaving already?”
Gary stood. Smiled at Steffi. He felt like his mind was clearer than it’d been for a long time. “We’ve got an extraction deadline to make.”
“But that’s only at—”
“But before then, we’ve got a rendezvous to make.”
He looked down at the tooth.
Tossed it across the floor.
Then he loaded up his gun and felt the excitement tingling through his body.
Hayden McCall was a dead man.
And he was going to snatch his hope away from him at the very last moment.
Chapter Thirty-Six
After walking for an hour, the situation Hayden, Miriam and Amy found themselves in started to feel all the more real.
The sky was still dark. The air was bitter cold. It made Hayden shiver. He just wanted to wrap himself up in his bed covers and close his eyes, just like he’d been able to every day for the last three months. He’d been inside the safety of New Britain so long that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to live this way—to live normally. Because that’s what this was. This was normal living. The time at New Britain—that’d just been an exception. A momentary blip of hope amidst a landscape of chaos.
But no. That wasn’t true.
It wasn’t true because soon, they’d reach the extraction point.
Soon, Hayden, Miriam, Amy, the three of them would be off this island, away from the dangers of this awful world. For good.
“How you feeling?”
Hayden heard Miriam talk and he knew she was asking him how he felt, not Amy. Truth was, her voice made his ears ring. His teeth, one of which was broken now, chattered. It was cold, there was no doubting that. But Hayden worried there was something else at play. Another reason why he felt so grim. So shitty.
He wondered if he was turning. Turning, just like the others who’d been immunised turned.
“I’m okay,” he said.
He knew he didn’t sound all that convincing. He didn’t look Miriam in her eyes when he spoke those words. He couldn’t bring himself to, or she’d know something was wrong. She already knew that, of course. It didn’t take an idiot to realise that.
But they were less than an hour away from their extraction point. The clock was ticking.
He just had to get Miriam and Amy to safety. He just had to make sure he got them as far as he possibly could.
Then…
Well. What happened, happened.
At least he’d played his part.
The road ahead was dark and quiet. He looked out for a light. Listened for the sound of vehicles, or whatever was coming to extract them. He constantly stayed aware of the smells around him. Although he still reeked of rot after covering himself and his friends in the remains of the undead, he’d be able to pick out some fresh undead right away. It was just something you developed when the dead walked. A nose for different types of rot, different stages of decomposition.
Even if he did get back to a normal world, Hayden knew one thing was certain.
&n
bsp; He wasn’t normal. Nobody who’d lived in this current world was normal.
And they’d never be normal again.
He felt his knees weakening and stopped as a sharp pain seeped through them.
“Hey,” Miriam said. She put a hand on Hayden’s back. “If you want us to stop, just—”
“No,” Hayden said, panting. “Just—just keep going. No time to stop. No time.”
He waited for Miriam’s argument. Once again, it didn’t come.
Finally, she saw sense. Finally, she understood what she had to do.
“I just keep thinking of something,” Hayden muttered. He hadn’t been planning on speaking. The words had come from nowhere.
Miriam stopped, Amy by her side. She looked around at Hayden. “About what?”
Hayden swallowed down a thick batch of phlegm. “Back at Riversford. There was a kid. Tim.”
Amy lowered her head. Hayden knew she’d remember him.
“He just… Out of nowhere, he just turned.”
“Without being bitten?”
“Without being bitten. He wasn’t cured. Nothing like that. He turned, and then he passed on the virus to his mum without biting her, too.”
“But something has to have happened,” Miriam said, still not understanding. “Something has to have—”
“I keep thinking how wrong we’ve been all along. To assume we know how the infection works. To try and influence it. We’ve been wrong. I mean, you wouldn’t try to fight the flu. You alleviate the symptoms, sure. But it finds ways to adapt. It finds new ways to prey on the weak.”
“So you’re saying the immunisation was worthless? That it was all for nothing?”
Hayden forced himself back upright, no matter how much pain spread down his spine. “I’m saying we dealt with it the wrong way. Right from the start. We were fighting it like it was curable. When in fact we should’ve been alleviating it like flu.”
Miriam sighed. She shook her head. “You can’t think you’re responsible for this.”
“I can’t help but.”
“You did what you could. Not just that, but you did what you were told. And if… Well, if Daniel hadn’t found you, you wouldn’t be alive right now. So many people wouldn’t have had a chance of living. And that’s all because of you.”