by Ryan Casey
Kumal’s shouting.
Mike sat up. Looked all around, disoriented. The last thing he’d known, Kumal was here, sleeping beside the fire.
But now he was gone.
Now he was nowhere to be seen.
He stood up, grabbed his knife, ran in the direction of the screams, fully aware of just how dark it was; how suffocatingly jet black it was.
“Kumal!” he called.
But nobody responded. In fact, Kumal’s shouts seemed to have stopped, now. He’d lost sense of where he was. Lost sense of all direction, all time.
But he couldn’t leave Kumal out there.
He had to find him.
He kept on running in the direction he’d been heading in, eager to just get a sense of where Kumal was again; eager to just find some trace of him.
And then he heard it.
The struggling.
The struggling just ahead.
When he stepped forward, he realised exactly what was happening.
There were three people surrounding Kumal. One of them was holding a torch—a torch that must’ve been kept in working order via the means of a Faraday cage or something.
There were two men and one woman.
Kumal was on his knees in the middle. Hands tied behind his back with barbed wire. Eyes bloodshot, head bleeding.
The woman pulled back her fist, knuckle-dusters wrapped around her fingers.
“Frigging piece of shit,” she said.
Her fingers cracked against Kumal’s head. He bobbed to the side, eyes wandering, then spat out some blood and a fragment of tooth.
Mike stepped forward, knife raised. As much as this group looked well equipped, he’d fight them. He’d do everything he could for Kumal.
The woman pulled back her fist again.
“Please,” Kumal begged.
“It’s your kind’s fault that all this shit’s happening,” she said. “All your people coming in, using up all the power, draining society. If it wasn’t for people like you, we wouldn’t be in this mess. My Sophie would still be here.”
She pulled back her fist again.
“I don’t think you should do that,” Mike said.
She turned around, then, as did the rest of her people. They all looked at Mike, alarmed.
“You stay out of this,” she said. “Our problem’s with this rat, not with you. We’re all brothers and sisters, after all.”
“Actually,” Mike said, stepping forward, knife in hand. “If you’ve got a problem with him, you’ve got a problem with me, too.”
She looked disgustedly at the two men with her. “He’s one of those sympathisers,” she said. “One of those snowflakes. Well, shall we show him what snowflake blood looks like?”
“Not a snowflake, exactly,” Mike said. “Just somebody who doesn’t have a big appetite for scumbags.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed.
For a second, she went to launch herself at Mike.
But then something else happened.
Something Mike wasn’t expecting.
She grabbed Kumal by his long, dark hair and pressed a knife—a knife that Mike hadn’t seen before—right to his neck.
“I was hoping to hold off the slaughter for a while. But I guess we’ll rush it, just for you.”
Kumal’s eyes widened. “Please,” he said.
And then something else happened.
Something Mike hadn’t prepared himself for.
Something he didn’t even have the time to stop.
The woman pulled back the knife and jammed it into Kumal’s neck.
His eyes widened. He gargled, blood drooling down his neck as he struggled for air. He twitched from side to side, shook as more of that blood oozed out.
And all that Mike could do as Kumal bled out was stand there.
All he could do was watch.
The woman pulled the knife out.
The blood streamed out like a waterfall.
Kumal choked.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Holly didn’t sleep much that night, not with this stranger called David beside her.
Whenever she drifted off, it was as if her mind was reminding her that she was in unfamiliar territory, so shocked her back into wakefulness right away. But every time she did wake back up, she realised that she was okay. That David was still sitting there, right beside her, not even paying any attention to her.
And that had to count for something.
As reluctant as she was to trust anybody new in this world, David hadn’t shown any signs that he wasn’t to be trusted. So she had to honour him that.
They ate breakfast together. Holly had set up a simple snare trap and caught a squirrel in record time. David seemed impressed by how adept she was at surviving out here, especially all on her own.
He didn’t ask many questions. And Holly liked that about him. So many people seemed caught up in the past; obsessed with how people used to be or what they used to do when in fact the main thing was who they were in this world.
But eventually, he did ask one question. And it was a question that sparked a change between them completely.
“What’re you doing out here all on your own, anyway?”
Holly thought about David’s words. And it dawned on her that she wasn’t sure how long exactly she’d been separated from her dad, and from the wider group, anymore. The days were blurring together. Before they knew it, winter would be here, then summer, then winter again.
Unless the power came back online. Which it didn’t seem like it was going to do. It’d been too long already for sure. Holly would be stunned if anything radical changed anytime soon.
“I wasn’t alone,” she said. “I was with people. Good people. People I cared about.”
David smirked.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t sound like nothing.”
“It’s just… well, young Holly. I’ve come to learn that the people you think you care about can be the most problematic of all.”
Holly pondered what David was saying as he tucked into some more of that squirrel. “Sounds like you must’ve been through some weird stuff yourself to have views like that.”
David stopped chewing his squirrel. He smiled. “You’re an inquisitive girl, you know that?”
She looked away, blushing slightly. “My dad always said I was too nosy for my own good.”
“Well, hey. You’re still alive. Looks like you were right to be nosy all along, hmm?”
Holly looked back at David and smiled.
“I used to be in a group where people looked out for one another,” David said. “Where… where people had each other’s backs. Or at least that’s what I thought.”
“What happened?”
“They stabbed me in the back. Some real egos in the group. Egos who wanted to run the show. I mean, I wouldn’t have minded if it was just me. But then my kids, too.”
He stalled, then. Looked away. And Holly felt her sympathy growing for this man.
“What did they do to them?” Holly asked.
David looked back at her, tears building in his eyes. “You don’t want to know,” he said. “Seriously.”
Holly found herself at a crossroads, then. A crossroads of wanting to help this man, but also of not wanting to get dragged into any unnecessary conflict.
“What’s your plan?” she asked.
“My plan? I haven’t thought that far ahead. I guess I’d like to think I’ll run into a new group somewhere. Except… well, I don’t know. The thought of living on while my children’s—my children’s killers keep on going as normal and keep on hurting other people… that’s not something I want to even entertain.”
Again, a bitterness to Holly’s mouth. Because she wanted to find a new place to live too. But this man, David. She felt bad for him. She wanted him to get his closure. She wanted him to get the vengeance that he deserved.
“Maybe I can help,” she said.
David l
ooked at her, frowning. “With what?”
“These people. Are they the kind that’d chase a sixteen-year-old away?”
“Quite the opposite,” David said. “They’d probably welcome you with open arms.”
“Then maybe I can… maybe I can bring you some kind of justice,” Holly said. “Maybe I can help with your closure.”
David shook his head. But Holly could see something. Just for a second. A smile at the corners of his mouth.
She wasn’t sure what to read into it.
“You can’t,” he said, breaking the tension right away. “It’s too dangerous.”
“You said I’d be safe.”
“I can’t guarantee—”
“Let me help you,” she said.
David sighed. He shook his head. “There’s been so much loss already. Besides, I’m only just getting to know you. You can’t go corrupting yourself with things like you’re proposing.”
“Don’t worry about me corrupting myself,” Holly said. “I know how it is in this world.”
David looked away. He scratched the back of his neck.
Then he looked back at Holly. “I don’t want you to think you have to do this.”
“I don’t. It’s my decision.”
“Holly, I—”
“You’ve been screwed over. I don’t like to see people get screwed over. I don’t like to see people get torn from their families.”
“But it could get you in trouble.”
“I’ve been getting into trouble since long before this EMP hit. I’m still here.”
There was a pause, then. A silence, as the pair of them waited for the other to say something; waited for the next step.
And it was David who spoke in the end.
“If you’d do that for me, I’d be forever in your debt.”
Holly took a deep breath. She stepped forward, took David’s hand.
“Tell me where I need to go, and I’ll do it.”
David couldn’t help feeling joy when he heard the girl say those words.
He’d barely even had to manipulate her. He’d barely even had to say anything to her.
She’d wanted to do what she was proposing doing.
He smiled when he watched her turn around, watched her look over towards the village of Woodbridgeton.
She was going to be special.
She was going to be an ally.
She was going to be his.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Alison held her breath as the armed group raised their rifles.
There was nowhere she could run.
Nowhere they could hide.
They were trapped. Totally out of options.
But something happened.
Something Alison wasn’t expecting.
The group lowered their rifles.
They started walking down the alleyway towards her, towards Gina, towards Arya.
And she wasn’t sure whether she felt better or worse about that. After all, she’d braced herself. She’d stared death in the face, and in a morbid kind of way, she’d accepted it.
But now that inevitability of death had been delayed, and she wasn’t sure who or what was heading her way.
Just that they were armed. And they didn’t have good intentions.
“What do we do?” Gina asked.
Alison’s heart raced. She could hear Arya growling by her side. She didn’t know what to say. Didn’t even know what to think. If she could disappear into a hole in the ground right now, she would.
But she couldn’t.
She was here, and she was cornered.
“Get on your knees.”
Something struck Alison about the way these people spoke. Right from the off, there was something different about them. Something about their voices.
And then it clicked.
“Their accents,” Alison said.
Gina frowned as she got to her knees. “Their what?”
“Their accents,” Alison said, lowering down by Gina’s side. “They’re—they’re not the foreign group. They’re someone else—”
“Hands above your heads!”
She heard it then, loud and clear. The way these people spoke to her. And she knew that Gina had heard it too. She had to have done. There was no mistaking it.
These were British troops.
It wasn’t the foreign group.
It wasn’t the enemy.
Her heart started to race. Her mouth went dry. It felt like there were so many things she wanted to say but couldn’t quite manage. More than anything, she just wanted to prove to these people that she wasn’t the enemy; that she meant no trouble.
“We—we’re—”
“I don’t give a hoot who or what you are or aren’t,” the man at the front of the group said. “What matters is that you comply. You understand?”
Alison found herself nodding. Didn’t seem like she had much of a choice.
“I asked you a question!”
“Yes,” Alison said. “Okay. Okay. Just… just don’t hurt us. Please.”
She felt sick, kneeling here, begging. There was something that had awoken inside her these last few days in particular, and that was a sense of self-worth unlike she’d ever had.
She didn’t like that she was kneeling here, submitting to some man with a gun who was claiming authority all of a sudden. Especially when she didn’t know who the hell he was.
So she did something unexpected.
Something even she hadn’t been expecting.
“No,” she said.
She stood up. Lowered her hands.
Gina looked up at her, fear in her eyes. “Alison?”
The man in front of her—muscular, steroid-fuelled—looked similarly baffled. “I’m not going to ask you again. On your knees and—”
“Bullshit to sitting on my knees,” Alison said. “I’ve no idea who you are. I’ve been surviving this long. I’m not here to just get on my knees and be subservient to you. Who gave you the authority to tell me to sit on my knees? Who gave you the authority to think you’re superior to me?”
The man didn’t speak. Not for a moment. He just seemed surprised. Shocked that anyone would stand up to him.
And then he finally broke his silence.
“How dare you question my authority.”
“And how dare you question my independence. We’ve spent so long out here, making it alone. And you just expect to waltz into our lives and have us ‘complying’ because you point a gun in our face? That isn’t how it works.”
Another pause. More tension growing, building, making Alison question whether she’d made the right call after all.
And then something changed things.
The man stepped forward and pressed the gun to Alison’s head.
“You sure that’s not how it works, lady?”
Alison was afraid. She wanted to go back to begging; to submitting.
But she was done.
She found herself smiling, instead.
The man looked at her, even more puzzled. The other military people around her looked similarly confused.
“You can shoot me if you want. But that’ll be on you. And you’ll have to live with the knowledge that you killed a woman simply for asking who the hell her supposed masters are. Is that really the kind of shit you want on your conscience?”
“You’ve no idea what’s on our conscience already. But we know what’s on yours. Ten seconds, and we’ll fire you into oblivion if you don’t get back on your knees.”
Alison kept smiling as the man counted down.
“Nine. Eight. Seven.”
“Alison,” Gina said, fear in her voice.
Alison looked at her.
“Six. Five. Four.”
She smiled.
“Three.”
“He won’t shoot,” Alison said.
“I’m not kidding,” the man shouted. “Two!”
Alison looked back at him. Forced a smile. As confident as she was that this man was
n’t going to fire her into next week… she was still beginning to wonder. She was still beginning to doubt.
“One!”
“Alison!” Gina shouted.
There was a pause. A pause, right there, where it felt like everything was hanging on a thread. Reality was hanging on a thread. Time was hanging on a thread. Life itself was hanging on a thread.
“I won’t ask again,” the man said, voice breaking now.
“Then don’t,” Alison said.
He hesitated. His grip on the gun got progressively wobbly. And Alison started to feel him cracking. She started to feel like the game of roulette was being won, and that she was getting her rewards for standing her ground all along.
Then he lowered the rifle.
“You really should’ve just complied,” he said.
Then he nodded, and two of his companions dragged a sack over Alison’s head.
She tried to struggle.
She tried to fight free.
But she was screwed.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Mike watched the woman pull the blade out of Kumal’s neck.
Kumal’s blood darkened as the woman’s torch lowered. Everything went black. But Mike didn’t have to see anything to know what was happening. It was enough to hear it; it was enough to just know.
Kumal had been stabbed in the neck by these savages.
And they were going to pay for it.
He tightened his grip around his knife and made an immediate move towards the woman who’d stabbed Kumal.
He lifted the knife. Went to slam it into her body.
But before he could, somebody slammed into his right side.
He fell to the ground, hitting his head on the ground.
Someone was on top of him, pressing him down, punching and kicking him.
He tried to struggle free, tried to kick back. He still had hold of the knife. If he could just use it, he could take a swing. If he could just take a swing, then maybe he’d be able to get to Kumal. Maybe there’d still be a chance.
He went to slam his knife into the person holding him down.
But then they punched back at his knife and knocked it from his hand.
Dread filled his body. There were three of them. He was surrounded. Chaos was building up in this darkness. Time was running out.