Fear the Dead 2

by Jack Lewis

  I reached forward and put my hand on her shoulder. She shrugged me off.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  I sat back, felt my energy discharge from my body. “I didn’t think it would do any good. You were running away from him; I didn’t want to bring up old wounds.”

  She tightened her grip around her son. “You should have told me straight away.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  Dan groaned at the back of the room.

  “He doesn’t look good,” said Lou.

  Dan slumped against the floor. His face was pure white, and blood leaked from the bite in his neck and seeped through the fabric of his shirt. His body shook, and his breaths were raspy.

  I walked over and knelt beside him. I grabbed his wrist and felt the faint beat of his pulse. He looked at me, the whites of his eyes pale as though they were diluted. He spoke in a whisper.

  “I’m sorry, Kyle.”

  Anger burnt in my stomach, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good to let it out. Dan was dying, and at times like this, some things had to be put to one side.

  He grabbed my wrist and gave it a weak squeeze. I put my hand on his shoulder. The bad things he’d done wouldn’t be forgotten about in death, but the least I could do was not remind him of them while he was dying.

  As if reading my thoughts, he spoke in hoarse breaths. “I was just scared, Kyle. After all this time, they still terrify me.”

  “I know, Dan.”

  Silence hung in the air. The blood leaked from Dan’s bite wound as his body drained of colour and shut down. His pulse slowed to a sparse tap and his chest rose and fell with his struggled breaths.

  Lou leant against the door. “Kyle.”

  I walked over to her. Her blue eyes stared coldly into mine. “We need to do something about him.”

  I knew what would happen. The infection would reanimate him just minutes after he died. His eyes would turn grey, his skin would freeze. He would rise up again, dead except for one primal instinct.

  I took a deep breath, held it in my chest. “I know.”

  Lou shot a sideways glance at Alice and Ben. “You can’t wait for him to turn. You need to do it now. Better do it before the boy wakes up.”

  I looked around me. We had no weapons, and if Dan reanimated, we would have to deal with an infected with our bare hands. That was too dangerous.

  A tingling spread through my shoulders and then turned into a shock of adrenaline that flooded through my body. I looked at Dan as he lay limp on the floor and clung to life, and I knew what I had to do. I crouched in front of him, wrung my hands. My fingers felt tense, my biceps shook.

  “Dan,” I said.

  He turned his head toward me.

  “You know what I have to do,” I said.

  His pale eyes widened as realisation hit him. Instead of refusing or begging for his life, his features hardened. He sucked in his cheeks, and his shaking body tensed up.

  I put my hand on his shoulders. Sadness welled in his eyes, and his skin sagged. I couldn’t let him go like this; couldn’t let him die with a weight of guilt.

  “I forgive you,” I said. “I want you to know that. We all forgive you.”

  The faint trace of a smile curled on his lips, but it was lost as a shock of pain ran through him.

  My chest tightened and I felt my arms turn to stone, too heavy to move but too full of agitation to stay still. My stomach liquefied. I reached forward, put my hands around Dan’s throat and squeezed. His neck bones felt fragile against my hands. Dan struggled to suck in raspy breaths as I held them tighter.

  Dan’s pupils dilated until they looked like discs. The only sounds in the room were his hoarse gulps as he tried to breathe. My stomach flooded with bile and wetness welled in the corners of my eyes. I wanted to release my grip and stop the horrible sounds that left his throat.

  I held in my breath as though it was me being strangled. I tensed my hands around him, squeezed his neck tighter and felt the bones move. His pale face flooded with red. He tried to raise his hands up to mine, but even his survival instincts couldn’t match the weakness of his body. His raspy chokes rose and then died down as his body gave up the fight.

  I released my grip when his body went limp. I sank back. Adrenaline surged through me, and a shock of cold snapped across my chest. I looked to Alice and Ben. Her face was turned away, but the boy had watched the whole thing.

  Something smashed behind me. A glass beaker lay smashed on the floor, and Lou stepped forward and passed me a shard of glass. I wrapped my sleeve around the thick end.

  “One last thing to do,” said Lou.

  I nodded. I pressed the tip against Dan’s temple, held my breath and pierced through the skin, forcing myself to carry on until I felt it sink into his brain.

  The lights flickered above us, and then faded. A rush of panic hit me and I dropped the glass to the floor. Lou passed behind me, Alice and Ben got to their feet.

  “Generator must have gone,” said Lou.

  I looked behind me, toward the door. The red glow of the card reader had faded.

  “Check the door,” I said.

  Lou felt for the handle, and it gave a whine as she twisted it.

  “The lock’s open,” she said.

  24

  The ends of the tubes punctured Justin’s skin and fed liquids into him through an intravenous drip. I had no idea what the murky liquid was, and the idea of messing with the setup made me uneasy. Perhaps the liquid was to help bring him out of the coma, or maybe it was to keep him in it. Maybe if I unplugged the tubes I would make things worse, but we needed to go, and there was no way I could leave him there.

  I pulled the tubes from his arm and lifted Justin from the worktop. Despite how thin his body was, my arms ached with exhaustion. I followed Lou out of the room with Justin’s body limp in my arms. Alice and Ben followed behind.

  The darkness of the corridor felt like a spider’s web that would break if we walked through it. It smelled faintly of bleach, which meant that Whittaker took the time to clean it once in a while. The rooms with blind-covered windows were spread on each side of us. Lou led the way, the echo of her footsteps bouncing from the walls.

  “Down the stairs at the end of the hall,” she said. “We’re on the first floor, so it should just be one flight of stairs.”

  “You okay Alice?” I asked.

  “Don’t know about okay but I’m here,” said a voice behind me.

  “What if we see Whittaker?” said Lou.

  There was only one answer to that. “We kill him.”

  The darkness pressed in as we walked. Something felt wrong when we passed the first room on our right. In the doorframe, instead of the hard wood of a closed door, there was an emptiness that stretched back into the room. A dull groan drifted out of the depths and sent a shot of panic across my chest.

  “All the doors are open,” I said, fighting to keep my voice under control.

  These were the rooms where Whittaker kept the infected. Whether it was through the power cut or an intentional move on Whittaker’s part, the doors were open, and the infected were free.

  A body stepped out of the doorway, arms outstretched. In the darkness I couldn’t see its rotted face or crater-filled skin, but I knew it had sensed me. A wail twisted from its throat, thick with a sick desire. Another infected shuffled behind it.

  “Oh shit,” said Lou.

  More infected fell out of the doorway in front of her. Phlegm-filled moans escaped from their throats. The darkness weighed in on us, as though it were trying to shrink the corridor and trap us with them.

  I thought about my knife. I’d never wished more for the feeling of the handle in my hand. But even if I wasn’t carrying Justin, Whittaker had taken our weapons while we slept. We were stuck in the corridor with the infected with nothing to defend ourselves.

  Ben whimpered, and his feet shuffled on the floor.

  “Hold my hand,” said Alice.

  An infected l
urched at me. I stepped back, kicked my foot out. I connected with its waist and pushed it back, but Justin’s weight knocked me off balance. I sprawled back and fought to stay on my feet. Ahead of me, the dim outline of Lou’s shape smashed something against the wall. There was a crack, and a body hit the floor.

  “Get to the stairs and get them out of here,” she said.

  I tensed my biceps and shifted Justin’s weight in my arms.

  I shook my head even though the darkness would hide the gesture. “You’re coming with us.”

  “Of course I am, I’m not suicidal. Get to the end and I’ll follow you.”

  I looked behind me. “Alice, stay close.”

  More infected streamed from their rooms. I darted down the corridor as fast as I could with Justin’s weight straining against my arms. The clomp of Alice’s feet followed me. Lou lagged behind, stopping every so often to push an infected away or smash one into the wall. The corridor filled with their desperate groans, the bile rising from their throats and making rasping sounds that bounced across the tiny space. We reached the door ahead. I braced Justin’s weight and then kicked it open.

  “Hurry up,” I said, my voice strained.

  She ran past me and dragged Ben behind her. Lou was still in the corridor.

  “Lou?”

  “Coming.”

  She pushed an infected away from her and sent it off balance. Her footsteps thudded from the floor and came toward me. A metre away she stopped dead.

  My eyes still couldn’t puncture the thick sheet of darkness. “Okay Lou?”

  “Shh.”

  I couldn’t see what had stopped her, but I heard it. The patter of claws scraping on the stone like nails scratching a chalk board. It came from the door that was between me and Lou. Something slunk from the bottom of the doorframe, a shape that groped against the ground and sniffed.

  My body flooded with ice. My arms weakened, the muscles in my legs turned soft, and it was a fight to keep hold of Justin. I knew what this was. I had heard the snarl before; a sound that seemed to strike deep in your stomach and flood your body with panic.

  The stalker crawled out of the doorway, its thin arms scuttling across the floor, the black outline of its body hugging the ground and slinking toward Lou. I turned to Alice.

  “Can you carry him?” I said, struggling to keep the panic from my voice.

  “I’m a damn sight stronger than you.”

  “I can’t leave her,” I said.

  Alice let go of Ben’s hand. The boy cried out, but she ignored him. She stretched her arms out toward me.

  “Pass him here.”

  I shoved Justin toward her and let go when I felt her take the weight. My heart pumped, and my ears amplified the sound of the stalker’s claws dancing across the stone floor.

  I turned toward it. My body screamed at me, and every instinct told me to turn around and leave. I’d only just met this woman. Why risk my life to save her? Would she have done the same for me?

  I clenched my teeth, swallowed the feelings down. I took a step back into the corridor. The stalker’s head snapped toward the echo of my boots. I tightened my hands into fists and felt my arm muscles tense tight enough to burst.

  “Lou, are you listening?” I said.

  She was frozen in place. The sight of the stalker had affected her the same way it did everyone unlucky enough to see one so close, no matter how tough they were.

  “Lou!”

  The black outline of the stalker shifted in the darkness.

  Finally she answered me in a cracked voice. “I’m here.”

  I swallowed and felt my throat tighten. “In a second, I want you to run.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I didn’t have time to answer. The stalker slid into a crouch. I ran forward until I was a foot away and heaved my boot into its skull as hard as I could until I felt my foot crack against the bone. Its head jerked to one side, and its body lurched. Lou ran forward. I dragged her back and pushed her past me.

  “Go!”

  The stalker took less than a second to recover. By then we were running toward the door. As it span round, crouched back and leapt, I shut the door behind us and heard it slam into the wood. I turned and ran down the stairs.

  Alice and Ben waited on the ground floor. Weak light filtered in through a window and cast a glow on Alice’s pale face. She held Justin’s body against her, his head hung over her arm. A corridor span off to our right, and there was a door with a frosted glass window at the end of it.

  My heart hammered like a steam engine chewing through coal. I thought I was going to pass out. The exit was in front of us, and the streets of Manchester waited outside. Alice walked to the door and pushed it open. A rush of air flushed the staleness of the hallway and blew cold on my skin. The streets had never looked so inviting.

  “What now?” said Lou. Her voice was strained but her stare was hard.

  “We go,” I said.

  “What about Whittaker?”

  I sighed. “Nothing we can do about that.”

  Upstairs something pounded against the door, and I wondered how long the wood could hold out against the infected and the stalkers. Whittaker was still in the building, somewhere, but I didn’t know where, and I didn’t have time to find him. We had Justin, and that was all that mattered.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I stepped forward, ready to feel the fresh air on my skin. I took one last look down the corridor, and then stopped. The outside air would have to wait. At the end of the ground floor corridor, a tall figure was blurred against the frosted glass window of the door.

  25

  “Wait here,” I said.

  Lou opened her mouth, but I lifted my hand.

  “I have to do this on my own.”

  I walked to the end of the corridor, opened the door and stepped into the room. There were weapons spread on a table at the right hand-side. I saw Lou’s machete, Alice’s crowbar, my knife. At the far wall there was a desk covered in paper, some sheets arranged in piles, others scattered. All of them were covered in the black scratches of Whittaker’s handwriting. Beside the desk was a box of liquid-filled plastic IV bags, with tubes hanging from the bottom.

  Whittaker stood at the end of the room and stared out of a window. He held his hand to his forehead and looked into the distance, engrossed in something I couldn’t see. It was only when my footsteps echoed from the floor that he turned.

  Black rings hung underneath his eyes and his sharp cheekbones pressed against his skin. His shoulders sagged as though something weighed down on them, and his thin body was swallowed by his long lab coat. When he saw me, a flicker of surprise registered on his face, but it was quickly swept aside. He put his hands to his face and sighed through his fingers.

  “A piece of me died you know,” he said, his voice cracked. “Every time a batch failed.”

  I didn’t hide the contempt in my tone. “And every failure was another person dead.”

  He shook his head. “Their lives meant nothing. What’s a man or a woman, in the grand scheme of things?”

  My muscles tensed. I glanced at my knife on the table and thought about how quickly I could walk over and pick it up. Whittaker saw me and frowned.

  “That would be ignorant of you.”

  What was stopping me from grabbing my knife? What could he possibly do? He wasn’t a fighter, and he didn’t seem to have any weapons on him. I stepped over to the table and picked up my blade. Whittaker didn’t move.

  I nodded at the plastic IV bags. They were the ones that had been dripping fluid into Justin on the worktop upstairs.

  “What are those?”

  Whittaker raised an eyebrow. “Those were keeping your friend alive.”

  I gripped my knife in my hand and stepped toward him. “What was in them?”

  Whittaker reached over to his desk and pulled the chair from underneath it. He turned it to face him and then sat down. His body sagged when his back hit the seat
. He picked up one of the plastic bags and squeezed it in his hand.

  “They keep him hydrated and full of nutrients.”

  My knuckles turned white around the grip of my knife. “What did you do to him?” I asked.

  Whittaker drummed his bony fingers on his knees. “You should be thanking me,” he said.

  A lump formed in my throat. I swallowed. “How’s that?”