by Jack Lewis
Moe stuffed his hands into his pockets and pulled something out. “Got something for you,” he said, and held his out his hand.
He held a gold bracelet in his palm, the chain links worn but still glinting. I recognised it straight away. A year ago I’d been attacked by a stalker out in the woods, and I woke up in a bed in Vasey. When I told them I wasn’t sticking around, Moe had insisted on taking something as payment for “my healthcare.” He gave me a choice between my gun and the bracelet; between survival and the sentimental.
“Thought you were going to trade it for some…leisure time?” I said.
“There are other things you can trade for ass around here. Day or two after you left, I got to thinking we’d see you around here again. Even a bastard like me has some sensibilities.”
I took the bracelet from him. The metal was warm.
“Thanks.”
The wind nipped at my cheeks and carried the smell of manure from the vegetable fields. It wasn’t alpine air freshener, but you got used to the sour odour. People complained that the town constantly stunk, but I reminded them that the smell of manure represented our future. It was a means of us being self-sufficient.
Moe ran his hands through his sheet of grey hair. “I’m leaving, Kyle.”
A steel gate loomed at the end of the road, the black bars thick enough to withstand artillery fire. It was operated by a system of cranks and pulleys controlled by levers in the turrets that stood either side of it. I’d walked through that gate once, but I never thought I’d be back on this side of it.
“Leaving where?”
“Just going. “
I stopped. “You mean for good?”
Moe sighed. “For good doesn’t mean much to an old man like me. Could be a year, could be five. But yeah, I’m going.”
“Why?”
“Look around you Kyle. The place is turning to shit. You can smell it in the air.”
I kicked a stone, sent it rolling across the cobbles. “We’re building something here. What’s out there for you, Moe? I’ve lived in the Wilds. There’s nothing but death.”
“Sure, around Vasey. There’s more to the world than this shithole.”
Outside Vasey’s walls there was only starvation and death. A year ago I wouldn’t have come near the town, but I’d come to realise that there was nothing else waiting for us, no shiny place where everyone was happy. Vasey was as good as it got, and I would do everything I could to keep it together.
The sky above of us was tinged with grey. A thick raincloud gathered, swollen and ready to drop. There was a chill to the air, and winter would be here soon. It was probably time to send people out chopping fire wood. We needed to build a stockpile to get us through the harsh months ahead.
“It’s the same everywhere,” I said, “Nothing but desolation. This is the world now, everything we have here. There’s no green grass on the other side Moe; just a fucking load of infected waiting to kill you.”
“We ain’t even got grass here, only a foul-smelling town full of people waiting to die,” said Moe. “Appreciate what you’re trying to do, but it’s misguided. We’re running out of booze, and I haven’t had a smoke in days.”
It was so stupid, I could have laughed. “So you gotta forego some things. Wouldn’t you rather stay alive than have a smoke?”
Moe looked at me. His eyes were squinty black balls. “You’re not living, Kyle; you’re surviving. The people here don’t wanna count down the minutes until doomsday, they want a little pleasure in their lives.”
I couldn’t understand him. Sure, we were out of alcohol, and I knew that sometimes you had to let off a little steam. But this was the safest place for miles, and I’d travelled enough to know that for certain.
In the Wilds you were lucky to find a place to sleep that wasn’t the hollowed out trunk of a tree, and even if you did find somewhere to rest, you did it with one eye open. The infected were bad enough, but at night the stalkers left their nests. They were more terrible than the infected could ever be.
I wasn’t a fan of Moe, but he had a lot of friends here. He’d been at Vasey since the beginning, and his word carried respect. If he left, others would join him. I could make something of Vasey, I was sure of it, but I needed people to do that. If they left with Moe, everything was over.
I changed my tact. “I’m the leader Moe. The people voted me in, and what I say goes. We’re not going anywhere.”
The corners of his wrinkled mouth turned up. “You’re not going anywhere, but I am.”
When the votes were taken and the people of Vasey elected their leader, lots of residents wondered why Moe had never put himself forward. There was a good reason that he didn’t; he was just too damn selfish to think of anyone but himself.
We walked on, nothing but the whisper of the wind playing in our ears. A shiver ran through me, and the sour smell of the air got stronger. There had to be something I could do to get him to stay. At least until I got more of the people on my side.
“What about the broadcast? Don’t you want to know more about that? There could be a cure out there.”
Moe sneered. “There’s no damn cure, and I don’t give a shit what the fella on the radio says.”
We walked on to Moe’s house. It was a three bedroom terrace that pre-dated the Second World War, like most of the houses in Vasey. Unlike some parts of England, Vasey had escaped the bombing of the Germans though sheer obscurity.
He turned to the door. “You’re not persuading me, Kyle.”
I nodded. For now at least, he was right.
Moe unzipped his coat. “You’re so damn naïve.”
I bit my tongue, stopped the angry words coming out.
Moe carried on. “What you did today was stupid.”
The wall of patience I’d stacked up so I could deal with Moe without wanting to punch him started to crumble. I’d carried a lot of anger in me since Clara had died, during all those nights travelling on my own. I couldn’t afford to go back there.
“You mean Harlowe?” I said.
Moe nodded. “He should have died, Kyle. You know that. If people steal from us, they have to die. We can’t do half a job. That’s why your Vasey will never work. You can’t do what needs to be done.”
Moe opened his front door, and a musty smell drifted out. He stepped inside and shut it behind him.
I stood on the doorstep and felt the wind blow against my bones. The cold seeped through my layers and made my hair stand on end. I wondered if Moe was right.
2
The sun hung onto a precarious position in the sky. Soon it would start to lose the battle, on this hemisphere at least, and the black of the night would drop like a shroud. People would leave their assigned roles on the wall and the fields and trundle back to their beds, hopefully with their bodies aching from the day’s work.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out to do the hard things that Moe was talking about. To him, survival boiled down to selfishness. Do whatever you need to, take what you want. As long as it gets you through the nights, don’t let it keep you awake.
Despite how many people liked Moe, surely not all of them agreed with his philosophy? They couldn’t all believe in a world where the grey shades of morality were replaced with the black and white of violence. That committing any crime meant death.
I needed to talk this out. I had to figure what to do with Harlowe, because although he wasn’t dead yet, people were going to start to put pressure on me to do it.
Maybe killing him would get Moe to stay and help us hold on to Vasey for a little while longer, just enough to get people to start believing in it.
When I got to the radio room I expected to hear the crackle of the static or the washed-out transmission of the man with the cure. Instead there was silence, and Justin’s chair was empty. The radio system was powered down completely.
I ran my hand along the control box. It usually emitted a faint warm glow after we left it running for a while, but now the metal was cold.
This set-up was all too familiar. It was a position he’d put me in plenty of times back when we were on the road together; I’d tell him not to do something, and he’d do it anyway. The kid had grown up a lot over the last year, but his impulsiveness was never going to leave him.
I locked the radio room door. The sun was losing its fight against the night, a sure sign that the days were getting shorter. A chill ran up my arms, but the layers I wore meant that it wasn’t because of the cold. It was more to do with the image that longer nights brought.
More darkness meant more stalkers. Human-esque faces. Two rows of teeth lining mouths that smiled too wide. Slinking bodies. Patchy hair sprouting from decaying follicles, skin receding.
I walked down the road and tried to keep my feet level on the cobbles. The smell of a stew blew from a nearby window. It was earthy and full of vegetables, but was there also a trace of meat? The door number was thirty-two, which I was sure was Dan’s house. He’d already eaten his monthly meat ration, so where had he gotten more? I was going to have to talk to him.
When I got to Justin’s house I lifted the metal door knocker and let it thud back into place. Three bangs echoed. The living room was dark and empty. I knocked a few more times, but Justin didn’t come to the door.
He was up to something. He usually didn’t have much of a latch on his tongue, but lately he’d been watching what he said. He still put in a good shift at the radio room, but rather than staying for hours after his shift ended, he’d been leaving right on time. And today he’d asked me if he could even leave early.
What was going on?
***
The drug awareness centre had been stripped of furniture except for a plastic-coated desk with two chairs either side of it. The walls were lined with colourful posters boasting catchy sayings like ‘Thinking about drugs? Think again.’ None of it was needed anymore. The war on drugs had been won, and it had only taken the end of the world to do it.
Harlow was handcuffed to the table in the middle of the room. He rested his head on his hands and stared at the floor. His shoulders sloped down and his back bent with the slouch of his posture. His hair was tangled and curly, and his red beard was thick through months on the road.
Something about him reminded me of David, my brother in law who had died back on the farm. I pushed back the memories that threatened to surface. Stopped images of David softening my attitude to the thief who sat in front of me.
I shut the door behind me. Harlow turned his head slowly, saw me, and then turned back.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
He lifted his hand a few feet off the table, the most his handcuffs would allow. “Reminds me of when I stayed at the Hilton.”
I took a seat in the chair opposite Harlowe. The back legs were uneven, and every time I shifted my weight it rocked.
“Was that Pre or post outbreak? I bet the rooms are going pretty cheap now.” I said.
He arched his eyebrow. “You think I’m stupid enough to go into the middle of Manchester? It’s the second biggest city in the whole frigging country. “
“I know you’ve been there Harlowe. Or at least thereabouts.”
“What makes you say that?”
I was no interrogator. I didn’t know how to screw with someone’s psyche to get information out of them, but I figured I could throw him off balance. Truth was, I had no idea where he’d been, I was just taking a stab. From the look on his face, I had gotten him flustered.
“I was a traveller myself. Didn’t come to Vasey until a year ago. I know someone who’s done their time in the Wilds. Yeah, you’ve moved around some. And most people who move around, they want to see what’s happened to the city.”
He put his fingers to his chin, scratched his beard. Flecks of dry skin fell to the table. “Yeah I’ve seen it.”
“And?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
The light above us, a single bulb swinging from a cord, dimmed and then went out. They must have been swapping over generators, and that meant the power would be back on soon. Until then we only had the weak light that filtered through the window. Harlowe’s face was cast in shadow.
I put my hands out on the table. “Why take the car?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I think you owe us an explanation.”
He held his hands out in front of him, picked at his nails. He tried to hold his face firm, but his eyebrows twitched.
“Look,” I said. “They want to kill you, and it’s only my authority that stopped them cutting your throat. We make an example of thieves.”
“I don’t see how any man can lay claim to property these days.”
I leant back. The chair rocked. “Gotta have some sort of system. Otherwise nothing works.”
Harlow screwed his face. “You can’t kill me.”
“Why?”
He put his hand in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a wallet. He opened it and slid it across the table. There was a picture of a woman and a boy. She had brown hair tied into a pony tail, freckles dotting her pointed nose. The boy’s cheeks were chubby and he had two teeth missing.
Harlowe bit his top lip. “My wife and son.”
I thought about Clara. She’d been gone seven years now, but the image of her face still stung. Every time she entered my mind I got another lashing.
“Not my problem,” I said. “But if you tell me why you needed the car, then maybe we can talk.”
He turned his head to me. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Try me,” I said.
He pulled his chair closer to him and sat upright. He took a few seconds, as if picking his words carefully.
“What’s the biggest crowd of them you’ve ever seen?”
By them, he meant the infected. The biggest crowd I’d seen was a few thousand, and I’d watched them cut through a group of armed hunters like teeth chewing through bone. I remember the sounds they made, a chorus of desperate wails, and the smell of death. It still brought bile to my throat, even a year later.
“Couple of thousand,” I said.
He nodded. “And what was that like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, were they dangerous?”
I crossed my arms. “Of course they were. What do you think?”
He put his elbows on the table and rested his head on his hands. He leaned forward.
“If two thousand was bad, imagine five hundred thousand.”
The bulb above us flickered back on. I expected to see Harlow smiling, because this had to be a joke. Five hundred thousand infected, all of them in a wave? It wasn’t possible. Sure, they joined together sometimes, got tangled together like shoals of fish, but there was no way half a million of them could do that.
Outside, someone laughed. The drug centre door was closed, all the windows shut save one which was open an inch.
I lowered my voice. “You’ve actually seen them?”
He gave a slow nod.
“Where?”
He pointed toward the window. “Twenty miles north of here. Take a man four days to walk, eight if they got a gammy leg like yours. It’s a big place full of skyscrapers and infected. You can’t miss it.”
“Manchester.”
“That’s the one. And they’re walking in this direction, half a million of ‘em.”
“Bullshit. That’s not possible,” I said.
Harlowe shifted in his seat. “The population of Manchester was over two million before the outbreak.”
I stood up and the chair scraped behind me. My blood flowed faster in my veins and my heart pumped like it was an engine on the titanic. I didn’t trust Harlowe, but I’d be foolish to dismiss him. Half a million infected all walking in the same direction sounded ridiculous. But maybe I was wrong. If two thousand could do it, then why not more?
I walked over to the window. The streets were dark and empty.
“You seem tense. Something bothering you?” said Harlowe.
“Shut up.”
If Moe learned about this, there was no chance that he would stay. The situation was precarious enough, but this would seal the deal. Losing Moe wouldn’t be the end of the world, but his word carried weight, and Vasey couldn’t afford to be a hundred-people lighter. It wouldn’t work.
Harlowe leaned forward, hands clenched together. “Look, just let me go. I’m sorry I tried to take a car, but, well, you know why I did it now. If you could just – “.