by Jack Lewis
“Enough," I said.
Creases cut deep into Alice’s face as she screwed it in anger. “Don’t ever threaten my son again, bitch.”
She heaved her leg back and gave Lou another swift kick.
“Dan, stop her,” I said.
Dan put himself between Lou and Alice, gently pushed the older woman back.
“Get her to her feet,” I said.
Dan put his hand out and grabbed hold of Lou. He leaned his body back and took her weight as she got up. When Lou stood she blinked for a second, dazed. Then she pivoted her body back and swung her fist into Dan’s face.
There was a crack as his nose exploded. He grabbed Lou by the neck and slammed her hard enough into the car to shake her bones. He squeezed her throat, his face turning red as he applied pressure. Lou choked for air, sucked in raspy breaths through her closed throat. She curled her hands into fists, and sunk one into Dan’s ribs.
“That’s enough!” I said.
I put my hand on Dan’s shoulder and pulled him away from Lou.
The woman bent forward, made the sound of a thirty-a-day smoker as she sucked in deep breaths. She looked up at me. Hate sizzled in her eyes, and the grime smeared on her face made her look feral.
It was a look that I recognised. Once, after weeks of sleeping on the forest floor, I’d stumbled across an abandoned cottage. I remembered standing in the bathroom and looking at myself in the mirror, straining to recognise the pathetic creature that stared back. The Wilds stripped away your humanity layer by layer until it left nothing but a husk.
I understood this woman; I had an idea what she’d been through, but that didn’t make her any less dangerous. I didn’t know what to do with her. What did you do with a rat after you cornered it? If you let it go, there was always the chance it would go for the jugular.
Alice clutched her arms around Ben. A drip of blood trickled from cut made by Lou’s machete. Dan knelt by Faizel and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“He’s slipping,” he said.
I ran my hand through my hair. Blood pumped from Faizel’s arm, the torrent of it too thick for us to stop. Even if we could, he was infected now. No matter how long we stretched out his life, the disease was going to take him. And then he would be a danger to us all.
Seeing Faizel this way sent a deep ache through my gut. I thought about Faizel’s child, the boy who asked for reassurance that his dad was coming back. Faizel was leaving his family behind; a boy who would never see his father again, a wife whose last interaction with her husband was to refuse to speak to him. She would carry that guilt for the rest of her life, but it was nothing next to the guilt I would shoulder for bringing him with me.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
It was too much for me to process. I couldn’t think, couldn’t decide. Being leader was something that had been forced upon me, and it was more apparent than ever that I wasn’t the right person for it.
Dan rubbed his hand across his face, and a long sigh escaped between his fingers. When he pulled his hand away, a smear of blood trailed from his forehead to his chin.
“I don’t have a damn clue.”
Faizel twisted as pain pulsed through him.
Lou stepped away from the car. “What’s happened to him?”
Dan looked up.
“The hell is it to you?”
She took another step forward, stopped above Faizel’s body. She spoke again with measured force behind each syllable.
“Tell me what happened to him.”
I spoke through clenched teeth. “Same thing that happens to everyone, eventually.”
If my words shocked her, her face didn’t show it. She was from the Wilds, and she knew exactly what I meant. “He was bitten?”
I nodded.
Ben’s sniffling broke the weight of the silence, and Faizel gave a weak groan. Lou’s stony expression cracked. She knelt beside Faizel’s body, ran her hand across his sweat-covered head.
“You know what’s happening, don’t you? Inside your body?”
Faizel strained to look at her, and for a second the sight of the strange woman anesthetised the pain. He choked out a word.
“Yes.”
Lou gave a sad smile. “Then you’ll understand why I’m doing this.”
Before any of us could react, she slid a knife from a sheath above her boot. She raised it in the air and in one swift movement brought it down onto Faizel’s head, cutting into his temple and sinking it deep into his brain.
17
She twisted the knife and then yanked it back out. The lights in Faizel’s eyes faded until they were two glass balls that stared sadly at the ground. Blood seeped from his arm like an oil slick, the current thinning as the pumping of his blood slowed to a stop.
I wanted to sink to the ground and cover my face. All I could think about was Faizel’s boy; his tears, his need for reassurance about his father, and my refusal to give it. Sana was going to have to tell him the news. She was going to have to raise the boy without the father who was in many ways the perfect role model.
Alice knelt on the floor with Ben pressed against her, his head buried in her chest, sniffling sounds drifting out. My chest ached, and I wanted to look away. I knew I couldn’t do that. We had to face up to death, accept it as part of living. Alice needed to show Ben more of the bad side of the world, because he sure as hell would have to get used to it when he was older.
Dan’s eyes were red, a contrast to the whiteness of his cheeks. He rubbed them and glared at Lou. When he spoke, his voice shook.
“He had a wife and son. Look what you’ve done.”
Lou wiped the blade of the knife on her cargo pants, which left the metal gleaming but smeared a red stain on her leg. She bent down and slipped it into her boot.
“Do you think I had any choice?”
Dan gripped Faizel’s limp arm. They had spent a long time together in the Wilds when they were scouting for Moe, and it was impossible not to feel some sort of connection with someone who shared life and death experiences with you. For Dan, it just took his friend’s death to show it.
He looked up at me, his face searching for something. “Maybe we could have found a cure. This Whittaker guy – “
Lou stepped forward, crouched down. Her eyes narrowed.
“Say that again.”
“We could have found a cure – “
She waived her hand in the air. “Not that. The name.”
Dan’s face slackened. “Whittaker?”
Lou straightened up. “How do you know Whittaker?”
“Do you know him?” I said.
Lou leant against the car bonnet. She nodded. “I’m going after him myself. I know where he is.”
I tilted my head to the side. I had every reason not to trust this woman. She had held a machete to Alice’s neck and she had killed Faizel in front of us. She had slipped a knife through his skull without even letting him say goodbye. By all rights, I should have killed her.
That was the old way of thinking, the old attitude to grief; sadness and retribution. In this hellish world, grief was a luxury. You had to compartmentalise things, weigh emotions against practicality. I knew that if I let myself think about Faizel my eyes would start to burn, my voice would choke. I pushed my feelings to the side.
Nothing would bring Faizel back. But if she knew where Whittaker was, maybe we could get to Justin. There was a chance that something could be salvaged from this mess.
“Where is he?” I said.
She shook her head. “Take me with you.”
Dan leapt to his feet, his pale cheeks flooding with blood. “No way!” He turned to me. “Kyle, we can’t take her with us. I don’t give a shit if she knows where Whittaker is.”
Alice pushed down on Ben’s shoulder so that he sat on the ground. “Wait here a minute.” Then she walked over to us. She glared at Lou, whose face didn’t register it in the slightest, then turned to me. “I don’t trust her, Kyle.”
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Lou crossed her feet. “Well trust this; I don’t know why you’re looking for Whittaker, but there’s no chance you’ll find him without me.”
I put my hand to my chin. Lou was right. Getting the car, driving to Bury, we were driving into a haystack looking for a needle. If Lou knew where to go, we could make it in time to stop Whittaker doing whatever it was he wanted to do. There was just the question of trusting this woman to guide us there.
I recognised something about Lou. She had a flinch in her eyes that only living in the Wilds would give you. None of the Vasey residents had it, save Faizel and Dan. It was something you got when you saw what the world was really like, when you’d done things to survive that most people couldn’t stomach. That was why no matter how much it sickened me to see Faizel’s lifeless body, I knew why Lou had done it.
Lou bent over, picked her machete up off the floor. Nobody moved to stop her. She slid it into her belt and then adjusted her coat. The inside was lined with thick fur, but the outside, reaching up to her hood, was waterproof. The dark blue material was splattered with mud.
“Take me with you, and I’ll take you to Whittaker.”
Alice and Dan turned to me, waited for me to act. Dan’s face was a grimace. I ran my fingers through my hair, felt the grease that was compacted between the thick strands.
“Why are you looking for him?” I said.
Lou gritted her teeth. The glow of the moon lit the blue of her neck tattoo.
“I’m going to slit his throat,” she said.
18
The silence that hung in the car said more than words could. I didn’t need telepathy to tell what everyone was thinking, and as I drove miles away from the service station, Faizel stayed with us every inch of the way. The only person unaffected was Lou. She sat in the passenger seat, pressed her elbow against the window and leant her cheek into her palm.
The light of dawn seeped into the sky, but the blue was hidden by dense clouds. I could see Lou’s neck tattoo better in the light; it depicted the inside of her neck – her neck bones, throat, trachea - as if someone had slit the skin and peeled it back to reveal the messy workings of the human body that were only separated from the outside world by a thin layer of skin.
On the back seat, Alice leant her head against the window, and the flickering of her eyelids told me that she was managing to sleep. Ben was spread out over her with his head buried in her lap and his legs stretching across the back seat. Dan pushed Ben’s feet away from him, then leant his head back and stared at the car roof. I held the steering wheel with one hand and rested the other against the window.
“You ever hear anything about a wave?” I said.
Lou blinked, and dark patches sagged under her eyes. “A wave of what?”
“Infected.”
She arched an eyebrow. “That’s a stupid thing to call them.”
A car was parked diagonally across the lane ahead of us. I turned the wheel, shifted us around it. A sign at the side of the road told us we were ten miles away from Manchester.
The shadow of foreboding that hung above us grew larger the closer we got to the city. I didn’t want to head that way, but Lou had told us that there was no way Whittaker would go to Bury. She knew where he was, and unluckily for us the destination was Manchester.
“A guy told me there’s half a million of them in Manchester, and somehow they all joined together,” I said.
Lou bit her lip. “I’ve been in Scotland.”
She glanced out of the window, and stared deep into the trees that lined that side of the road, as though she were looking at something that I couldn’t see.
“What were you doing up there?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “At first I just wanted to see it. Then I met some people there, got tied down for a while.”
Something about the way she said it made the words sound hollow. Her answer was too vague, her tone too casual. She had her reasons for going to Scotland but it was fine if she didn’t want to share them.
The greens of the English country fields blurred beside us. In summer the grass would be luscious, the branches of the trees lined with leaves. Now, the branches had alopecia, and the grassy fields were starved of sunlight.
My eyelids started to drop and the car drifted an inch into the next lane. I decide it was time for us to stop, because I’d learnt my lesson about trying to push through exhaustion, especially when I was driving.
There was a field on our left, an expanse of green that cut a contrast to the endless grey of the motorway. White lines were painted on the grass, markings that drew the borders of a cricket pitch. At the end of the pitch stood a beat-up wooden pavilion that looked like it had been built by a ten year old. I pulled to the side of the motorway and switched off the engine.
***
“I need the toilet,” said Ben.
“There’s a river down there,” said Alice, pointing. “I’ll take him to the toilet.”
I shook my head. “Don’t let him do it in the river. We might need to collect drinking water.”
“Sure, sorry. My brain isn’t working.”
I pointed to the pavilion. “Lou and I will check that out, see if we can find anything useful. What about you, Dan?”
Dan rubbed his eyes and grunted. “I’ll get some sleep in the car.”
Lou and I set off toward the pavilion. In truth I didn’t want her anywhere near me; the tips of her fingers were stained red with Faizel’s blood, and I still had no reason to trust her. I’d learned a harsh lesson from Harlowe back in Vasey; that survivors would do anything to stay alive.
The pavilion was locked, but the door looked weak at the hinges. I braced myself and then sank my weight into it, and the weak wood shifted and the lock broke. A shower of dust fell from the ceiling, and I coughed as I took some in my lungs.
“This one’s a loser,” said Lou, stepping in to the room.
There wasn’t much to see. A few cupboards and shelves, a dirty couch. Cricket uniforms discarded on the floor, the once white material now grey with dust. In the corner a few cardboard boxes were stacked against the wall, and a framed photograph of a cricket team hung above them. The players all wore their whites and held their bats proudly in front of them. The captain clutched a trophy that crowned them Radcliffe Division C winners of 2013. Dust trailed across the glass of the frame, smearing out the smiles of their faces.
“You take the shelves, I’ll take the boxes,” I said.
I picked up the top box, braced my arms and took the weight. As I lifted it, my biceps stretched and tensed and blood rushed to my muscles. It was heavier than it looked. When I heaved it onto the floor and saw what was inside, I smiled.
“Got some cricket bats,” I said.
Lou slammed a cupboard door shut, and the handle twisted out of place and dropped onto the floor. “Good, because I haven’t found shit.”
I lifted another box from the stack, placed it on the floor. It was full of red-purple corky balls. I knew from experience that if one hit you in the face it hurt like hell, and I still had the tiny dent in my forehead that was the scar of a school cricket match gone wrong.
“Lou,” I said. “How do you know Whittaker?”
She picked up the handle and attached it back to the shelf as though she were fixing it for whoever might come in here after us, despite the fact that the dust in here hadn’t been disturbed for years.
“Don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I just knew him, from before.”
“Before the outbreak?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I lifted down another box, this one lighter. It was full of plastic crotch guards, which were your best friend when you had a cricket balls flying at you.
“So why were you in Scotland?”
She shrugged. “Just wanted to get as far away from it all as possible.”
I knew how she felt because after Clara died, I had done the same. My brother in law, David, was still alive then,
but I had abandoned him because in my selfishness, I couldn’t face people. I needed to be alone, to walk a lonely path in silence, one that was only cut by the moans of the infected. Somehow their pathetic guttural cries seemed better company than people.
Now I knew how wrong that was. All of us who were still alive had been given the gift of survival, and wasting it was an insult to the millions who had died. Traveling alone lessened your survival chances, and if you did that you spat in the faces of those the infected had taken.