Fear the Dead 2

by Jack Lewis

  1

  The crackle of the radio cut through the breeze. I sat back and let the words sink in.

  “There is a cure for the infection.”

  The transmission was sliced with interference as though the man, whoever he was, spoke through a dish cloth. The air was silent for a few seconds, and then the same message replayed. It left me with two questions that I didn’t think would be answered. Who was he? And what was the cure?

  It had been sixteen years since the outbreak began, and I couldn’t believe that there was a solution for the infection, that somewhere out there was a way to stop the dead from reanimating.

  “Can you get it any clearer?” I said.

  Justin scratched his chin. The radio transmitter sat on top of a wooden workbench, on which the varnish had long since faded. It was a taped-together mixture of equipment that we’d scavenged from the areas surrounding Vasey on our supply runs. Next to the transmitter and speakers was a pile of textbooks that Justin had used to teach himself how to operate it.

  He twisted a knob and then slid a lever. The interference fizzed. He shook his head. “Think that’s as good as it gets.”

  “That can’t be all he’s saying. We’re missing something.”

  “We could get a bigger antenna.”

  That meant a supply run, but the next one was a month away. Since becoming leader of Vasey, I’d done away with the random supply runs and replaced them with a set schedule. The scouts who made the trips didn’t just run into buildings and fill their bags with whatever they could, like an apocalyptic version of supermarket sweep. I gave them a list of the things we actually needed. That didn’t include cigarettes or alcohol, and a lot of people grumbled about that.

  That was the pressure that came with being leader. I hadn’t wanted the job, but when Justin and I got back to Vasey it was a mess. They consumed more resources than they found, and a lot of them wasted their days either sleeping or sucking down whatever still-drinkable alcohol they could find.

  I put forward the idea of electing a leader and having some direction, taking action to make Vasey a safe haven for the future. When nobody stepped up, I had to stand by my words and become leader myself. I still hadn’t gotten used to it.

  “Can you try talking back?” I said.

  Justin picked up the mike. He squeezed it and pressed it against his mouth. “Can you hear me? This is a survivor settlement in the North West called – “

  “Don’t say our name,” I said.

  I didn’t want whoever it was to know we were in Vasey. Until we got a better idea of who was sending the message, it was best that we played it safe. The idea of a cure – whether that meant a vaccine against infection, or even a way to reverse infection – excited me, but anyone who’d lasted this long in the apocalypse knew to keep their secrets to themselves.

  Nobody spoke back.

  “Try again.”

  Justin sucked in his cheeks. A trace of a beard lined his face, but it would be a while before he could boast one as thick as mine. That didn’t stop him trying though. His hair, once buzzed to the scalp, was thick and curly. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was trying to copy my look. Dishevelled survivor fashion.

  “I repeat, we have received your message. Who are you? What’s your twenty?” said Justin.

  “What’s your twenty?” I said.

  “It’s radio code. Means ‘where are you?’”

  I smiled. Since we’d gotten back to Vasey, after all the shit that had gone down at the farm, Justin had really come along. He’d always been clever, but now he had a direction in his life. We were making Vasey somewhere to build a future, but progress was slow and there were always people who resisted.

  The image of Moe popped into my mind, and I swiped away the glimmer of irritation. I had to try and get along with Moe, to put old feelings to one side for the good of Vasey. He had too many friends here.

  Justin dropped the receiver on the table. “We better switch it off. He only transmits once a day, so no point in wasting power.”

  I nodded. “Try again in an hour or so. You never know.”

  He tapped his fingers on the workbench. “I was kind of hoping I could leave early today.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He curled the tips of his feet inwards. “No reason.”

  I trusted Justin, and God knows that had taken me a while to do, but he’d been acting shifty. There was something he wasn’t telling me. I didn’t mind secrets; I’d kept some of my own for a long time. But if we were going to make Vasey work, I needed people to be open with me.

  “If there’s no reason, then you got no reason to go.”

  He stood up. He’d put a little weight on since we got back to Vasey, but he was still the wiry teenager I’d met a year ago.

  “You know I wouldn’t normally ask, but there’s something I need to do.”

  I walked over to the window. The high street below was empty. A year ago people would have been wasting their day away talking about the weather, oblivious to the dangers of the infected outside the walls as though the world had never gone to hell. I’d changed their attitude somewhat. Made them aware that there were things on our doorstep that would tear us apart like tissue paper. Most of the people here thought the infected were the worst of it. They’d never seen a stalker.

  A twenty-foot stone wall surrounded the town, a relic from Britain’s Norman ancestry. A team of three men and a woman were spot-checking it for weaknesses and cracks. On the far side of town there was a fifty-foot square garden of plant pots and troughs, each of them filled with mud and the sprouts of various vegetables.

  This was another one of my initiatives. If we were going to be self-sufficient then we needed to stop relying on scouting raids. Tinned foods were rare and edible ones even rarer, and the more time you spent outside the walls the more chance there was you’d die.

  I opened the window. Cold, stale air blew in, the smell enough to wrinkle my nose. Most of us could only get the water to wash once a week, and the plumbing systems had long since packed up. You got used to the foul smell most of the time, but every so often it hit you in the nostrils like a smelling salt.

  Shouts drifted through the window. They sounded like they came from the town square.

  Justin perked his head up. “What’s that?”

  Whatever it was, it was loud. A voice shouted out in anger, but I couldn’t tell what it was saying or who said it.

  I stood up. “We better go check it out.”

  ***

  My busted leg slowed me down, and by the time we got outside the commotion had spilled over into the town square. It was a stone-paved area that used to be a shopping centre but the council, back when there was such a thing, had torn it down. After that it had been used for farmer’s markets and town fetes. Now it was just an open space with a few wooden benches. Weeds strained through the stone paving and dirt mottled the concrete.

  A ring of people stood in the middle of the square. Most of them were honest folks getting by in whatever way they could, but none of them had the foresight to try and make something more of their lives. Before I had come, they had wasted away their days drinking, chatting, and smoking.

  I’d changed that. I gave them work and direction. Some of them liked it, but some resisted. There were people who didn’t like to have a path set out for them, just preferred wandering in the wilderness.

  A man knelt on his knees in the centre of the crowd. The left side of his face was red as though he had been hit. His hair was a mess of curls. Moe stood behind him and held a hunting knife against his Adam’s apple.

  He smiled when he saw me. “Good, our leader’s here.”

  Moe was short and had plenty of meat on his old bones. His physique skirted betw
een muscly and flabby so that you could never tell which way it swung. His grey hair fell to his shoulders like a curtain, though the top of his scalp was nothing but shining skin. Lines of age cut trenches in his face and gave him a mean look that I knew was warranted.

  The man on his knees looked to be in his forties, though his face was so caked in grime that it was hard to tell. I didn’t recognise him. There was a couple of hundred people in Vasey, and over the last year I’d made a point of getting to know all their faces, even if I didn’t know all their names.

  “What’s the story?” I said.

  The men and women in the crowd wore different expressions; some curious, but most of them angry.

  Moe grabbed the man by the back of his collar. “Caught him trying to steal a car.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Moe grinned like he was enjoying himself. “Think I’d have a knife to his throat if I wasn’t?”

  I crouched in front of the man. He stared at me, his eyes wide. Underneath the mud caked on his face like war-paint were the marks of a man who’d spent more than his fair share in the Wilds. He had that scared look about him, cautious and distrustful by instinct.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” he said in heavy Northern bass.

  “Who actually caught him?” I asked.

  Two men stepped forward out of the crowd. One was tall with a bald head and a gut, the other thin and with the cockiness of youth on his smile.

  “I did,” said the bald one. “He was sat in the driver’s seat of the Nissan looking for the keys.”

  “Where you from, stranger?” I said.

  His ragged coat was lined with dirt. His face was gaunt and his eyes were hollow. It was a look you saw a lot these days, perhaps not in Vasey where we had enough food, but it was common in the Wilds. Until a year ago, I’d worn the exact same bone-thin look. The bones stuck out less when you got enough to eat, but the hollowness never left you.

  He moved his head a little, and Moe tightened his grip on his collar.

  “Been travelling around some,” said the man.

  My left leg ached from kneeling too long, so I shifted my weight. “What’s your name?”

  “Harlowe.”

  Moe pulled him back, almost knocking him off balance. “And you got sick of travelling and thought you’d steal one of our cars?”

  Harlowe hung his head. “I’m sorry. Wouldn’t have done it unless I had to.”

  I stood up and rubbed my temple. The crowd looked to me, waiting for me to do something. There was no court of law in Vasey, no jury. I knew what had to happen here; the law was brutal and it was final.

  I pitied him; he was worn-out from travelling in the Wilds, spending his life ducking between the infected and the stalkers. Desperate people did desperate things to stay alive.

  “You know the law,” Moe said to me.

  The man looked up, alarmed. In the ring of people, feet shifted. Some of them tightened their hands into fists. At the back a couple of kids tried to crane over the shoulders of the adults in front of them.

  Moe coughed. “Come on Kyle – you know what we do to thieves.”

  “Give me a goddamn minute.”

  There was one law in Vasey; if you steal, you die. It was the presence of this law that stopped the whole damn place descending into chaos. There were no police, no army. We didn’t imprison people, because that meant employing people to work as guards, and it meant allocating precious resources to keep an eye on those who weren’t contributing back toward society.

  Civilisation had crumbled, and the only thing that stopped Vasey from toppling further was one simple rule: you take something from the town, you pay for it with your life.

  “What’re you gonna do Kyle?” said Justin. He stood with his arms folded and stared at the man. There was no hate in Justin’s eyes, unlike the rest of the people here.

  Some of them, especially Moe, lived for moments like this. It was like they enjoyed getting permission to kill someone. As though there was a primal instinct inside them begging to be let out.

  The final decision was on me. I was trying to keep this place together, trying to make a life for us all in Vasey. To do that, we needed to have a safety lever that stopped us from descending into darkness. I knew I had to uphold the law, because if I didn’t, then the next guy who wanted to steal a car or rape a girl or kill a man might not think twice if he knew he’d get to keep his life afterwards.

  Harlowe cleared his throat, choked out words. “I know I did wrong. You gotta believe me, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need to. My wife and boy, they’re sick and I … well I just had to.”

  He was the man that I could easily have been. I had a wife once, and I knew how it felt when you weren’t able to protect her. He had spent his post-outbreak life surviving in the Wilds, where a good night’s sleep was scarce and food was hard to find. He’d been forced to live like an animal, and now we were treating him like one. I didn’t know if I could watch him die.

  “Let go of him,” I said to Moe.

  The old man blinked and tightened his grip. “Excuse me?”

  I pointed at two guys in the crowd, the bald one and the cocky one. “Take him to an empty shop. The hairdressers. Lock him up and watch him. I’ll decide what to do later.”

  Adrenaline had surged through the crowd as they waited for my decision. They waited for me to give the kill order. When I didn’t, and the tension couldn’t dissipate. Instead, fists tightened. Gazes hardened.

  I got to my feet. Justice unfolded his arms, his face serious. He was with me whatever happened.

  The crowd stared as though they were waiting for something.

  Moe looked at the men stood around Harlowe. He nodded.

  “Thank you,” said Harlow.

  The men took hold of him and dragged him away.

  “Don’t thank anyone,” Moe called after him, “You're still gonna die.”

  Harlowe’s arms and legs were slack, as though all his will had been sapped out of him. Around me, the crowd stared. I didn’t know what they were thinking.

  Maybe they thought I was weak. Maybe they were trying to decide what a man could get away with in Vasey while I was in charge. Any of them with a bit of sense should have realised I did the only thing a decent person could.

  ***

  “Don’t you all have jobs to do?” I said, puffing up my chest.

  The crowd lingered a little and then drifted away. A few went in the direction of the wall, where they’d check for weaknesses and work under the direction of our builder to get them plugged. Others went toward the fields. Most of them went home where they’d waste away the day.

  Moe fastened up his coat. “Walk with me a little,” he said.

  We walked away from the town square and onto the cobbled road of the high street. Businesses lined either side of us. Vintage clothing shops, cake stores, vegan cafes. None of them had done a day of trade in sixteen years and now most lay empty, their shelves lined with dust. A crusty poster on a gift store window advertised a sale for Mother’s day, the proprietor ignorant to the fact that the end of the world had been heading their way.

  Justin fell in step. He looked at me, his eyebrows drawn close. “Your leg hurting?”

  Since the incident at the farm where the Torben Tusk, the man-hunter, had put a bullet in my leg, extended walking shot me with pain. Back then Justin had helped me escape the inferno of the farm, and now he treated me like a wounded war hero.

  I gritted my teeth. “I’ve had worse. Listen, you better get back to the radios,” I told him.

  He shook his head. It was a tiny, nearly imperceptible movement, but I saw it.

  “There a problem?” I said.

  “I don’t see what good sitting there all day is going to do.”

  “You serious? You heard the broadcast. If we trust this guy – and for the record I don’t - there might be a cure. Probably bullshit, but we can’t afford to ignore it.”

  Justin kicked a stone
. “Just don’t see why I should be there all day.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “We’ve been through this Justin. You’re not finishing early. Now get back to the radio room.”

  Justin looked at Moe, his eyebrows arched.

  “Don’t look at me boy. Kyle’s the best friend you got here, and if he says no then I’m afraid you’re shit out of luck,” said Moe.

  Milky-red blotches spread through Justin’s cheeks, and his eyebrows twitched as he fought against the teenage tantrum that was tearing to get out. He turned away from us, gave another stone a kick and then walked off toward the radio room.