by Jack Lewis
He looked up at me, the whites of his eyes shot with veins. “I’m so close to the cure. You don’t even understand how near it is.”
Something banged outside the room. I looked back toward the door, but I couldn’t make anything beyond the frosted glass. My heartbeat sped. I had already known what I needed to do as soon as I had stepped into the room, and all of this talk was just delaying the inevitable.
Looking at Whittaker, with his Black Sabbath t-shirt and his DIY haircut, I could almost have thought he was human, but being human didn’t just mean being alive; the infected were alive in their own fashion. You had to do something more to give meaning to your existence. And sometimes, that meant doing things you didn’t want to do.
I stepped across the room until I was a few feet away from Whittaker. He stood up, and the chair shuffled behind him. He saw the look on my face and the knife in my hand, and he must have known what was coming.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing.”
I took a deep breath and fought to keep my pulse under control. “How many more were there?” I said.
He glanced to the side. “How many more wh-“
I raised my voice. “How many people died for your cure?”
He stepped back and almost tripped over his chair. He reached his hands back and scrambled for the desk.
“The number who lost their lives was nothing compared to the cause they gave it up for.”
My whole body quivered and my blood ran hot. The handle of the knife dug in to my skin.
“They didn’t give up anything, you bastard. You took it from them.”
I grabbed him by the collar and heaved him toward me. As his body fell into mine, I swung my left fist into his face and felt it sink into his cheek. Whittaker cried out and raised his arms to his head. I pushed him so hard that he fell to the floor.
I stood behind him and took hold of his hair. I pulled it back tight so that the strands pulled away from the follicles. Whittaker’s throat quivered.
“We all want to save the world,” he said, his Adam’s apple gulping against my knife. “I was just prepared to do the things that most people weren’t.”
I thought of Justin, his limp body, and the coma he might never leave. I thought about all the others Whittaker had taken. He had called Justin ‘Specimen thirty six’. How many of the other ‘specimens’ left behind husbands, wives, children? How many had died in fits of agony in Whittaker’s lab?
I remembered Whittaker’s voice on the radio and the hope it had given Justin. I realised that even I had felt that hope, but I’d hidden it from myself. The things Whittaker had done under the guise of finding a cure could never be forgiven.
I had killed twice before, but only in self-defence. The thought of doing it again made my stomach lurch. But if I didn’t, others could die. It didn’t matter how murdering him would affect me; I had to sacrifice my conscience so that others wouldn’t give up their lives.
Whittaker’s hands flopped to his sides. “I’m begging you, okay? I’m begging you not to do it.”
My arms shook. I let anger rush through me and heat my tensed muscles. I gripped the handle of the knife, stabbed the blade into Whittaker’s neck and sliced across it.
I clenched my teeth as the knife cut through his skin, his blood spraying out as I dug deeper. Whittaker screamed, but as his throat opened up his cries turned into a desperate gargle. He tried to clutch at me, but his hands quickly flopped away and fell to his sides.
I let go of his hair and stepped back. Whittaker’s body shook, and then he fell forward and smashed his face into the floor. For a few seconds he lay there, quivering. I held a breath in my chest and forced myself to watch him until he stopped moving completely.
My muscles felt soft. My face was flushed, and I felt like I was going to empty my stomach onto the floor. I swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat.
The door opened behind me. Lou saw me, and stopped. Blood seeped from Whittaker’s neck and formed a puddle of crimson around his lifeless body. Lou ran her hand through her hair. Neither of us said anything.
My stomach lurched. I span round, ran to the window at the side of the room.
“Kyle!” said Lou, concern etched in her voice.
I flipped the catch and pushed the window open. Cold air rushed against my skin, and the flush faded. When my head cleared, I realised I could hear a droning sound from outside. I looked up to see what it was, and I fell to the floor in shock.
Outside, miles into the distance, the landscape was completely covered in a sea of the infected, their rotted faces filling the horizon. It was a mountain of undead; half a million of them, the volume of their desperate cries loud enough that even here, so far away, it was enough for me to cover my ears.
Lou lifted me to my feet and supported me as I struggled to balance.
“It’s true,” I muttered to myself. “Harlowe told the truth.”
I stepped away from her and stood on my own. Neither of us spoke. Instead, we watched the army of infected as they put one foot in front of the other, specks on the horizon that headed in our direction.
26
We left Manchester behind us and walked back to Vasey. Exhaustion slowed our pace, but even at our slow speed we still outwalked the wave of infected. We could stay ahead of them for now, but it didn’t matter. Their march toward Vasey was inevitable. When we got to the town, the black gates were already open.
“Is this really your safe haven?” asked Lou.
I shook my head. I ran my hand along one of the black bars and followed it down to the latch. The chain and pulleys seemed okay, and I couldn’t see any damage to the steel.
“We never leave this open,” I said.
Ben craned his neck up at the gate, his eyes wide. The kid had proved to be the toughest of the group during the trip back to Vasey. We’d walked for two days with barely any sleep to stay ahead of the infected, and Ben had moaned the least out of all of us, save for Justin. It was hard to complain about anything when you were in a coma.
We’d found a rectangle shaped sheet of metal by the side of a skip just outside of Manchester. It was perfect to carry Justin on. One person held one end and someone else held the other, and there was even room on the stretcher to put the IV bags that we kept hooked up to him. When Alice had found Lou and me staring with our mouths open at the wave of infected, she’d had the foresight to grab the IV bags and take them with us.
I wiped my hand across my forehead and brought it away covered in sweat. My arms ached and my leg throbbed. Despite finding a river to wash in on the way back, my hands felt sticky as though they were still covered in Whittaker’s blood.
During the quiet times on the journey home, I had thought back to that moment. I still heard Whittaker’s skin peel back as my knife cut through it, the patter of his blood as it sprayed onto the floor. It was something I wanted to forget, but I knew that I needed to keep the images fresh. If I was going to lead Vasey into the future, I needed to remember how it felt to do the right thing even when it made me sick.
We walked past the gates and into town. On the high street, one of the busiest parts of town, we were met with silence. It was a silence that followed us as we moved through the rest of the streets. Every so often, trails of blood were splattered across the stone pavement, the smears getting thicker as our route wound toward the centre.
“Poor bastards,” said Lou, and pointed.
We stopped at the edge of the town centre. A couple of weeks ago, Moe had stood here and held a knife to Harlowe’s throat, and the stranger had told everyone about the wave.
Now, it was covered in blood. Sticky patches of crimson stuck to the paving, different sized splashes that looked like a tin of paint had exploded. Despite the excess of blood, there was no sign of the people.
A shiver built up in my arms then worked through my body until it stuck in my chest. No matter where I looked the scene was the same; empty streets, silence, blood-splattered stone.
Ben
covered his eyes. Alice took his fingers and moved them away from his face.
“What are you doing?” said Lou.
A wet film glinted in Alice’s eyes. “I’m not going to hide things from him anymore. He needs to see the world he’s growing up in.”
I walked onto the square and knelt against the ground. I traced my finger along a smear of blood. When I turned it over, my skin was stained red.
“It’s fresh,” I said.
Lou paced a few feet, then stomped her boots. “Someone tell me what the fuck is going on.”
A door slammed open across the square. Lou slipped the machete from her belt and held it in her hand. Alice pulled Ben closer to her and held the boy in one arm and a crowbar in the other. I straightened up.
It was the door of the theatre where we’d had the town meeting a couple of weeks earlier. Three people took tentative steps out of the doorway. I recognised two of them, but my brain couldn’t find their names, and the other was Melissa, Justin’s girlfriend. When they got closer, I looked at Lou. She tapped her machete against her chest.
“Relax,” I said.
Her forehead creased. “That’s the last thing I’m gonna do.”
When Melissa got closer she ran to me, her eyes wide. She looked at me, Lou Ben and Alice in turn. Her eyes narrowed.
“Where’s Justin?”
I stepped to my side, showed her Justin behind me on the stretcher. The blood left Melissa’s face. She got to her knees beside him and grabbed his hand. Her body shook.
“What happened to him?” she asked, her voice breaking.
I told her as much as I could, but everything that happened was still a blur to me, and I had hardly processed it all myself.
I swallowed. “Look, I know how you’re feeling -”
“You don’t have a clue how I’m feeling.”
“He’s my friend,” I said.
She snarled at me. “If you cared about him, you wouldn’t have let him go with you.”
My heart thudded. I couldn't deal with everything on top of this. “Look, Melissa, I need to know what the hell happened here. Where is everyone? Whose blood is it?”
If my words even reached her ears, they were lost as she pressed her head to Justin’s chest. A man shifted next to me. I recognised him as the Irish guy who had spoken up at the town meeting. He hadn’t said much, but I remembered him arguing against me.
“You’re Martin, right?” I said.
“Michael.”
I was too tired and confused to care about getting his name wrong. “What happened, Michael?”
He coughed. “A few days after you went, Moe gathered everyone up. He told us he was leaving, that you were never going to make it back.”
“And people went?”
He nodded. “Most of them, yeah.”
I put my hand to my face and covered my eyes. Anger built in my stomach. “What about the blood?” I asked, through clenched teeth.
The man looked down at the ground. “Some of us stayed, but things turned to shit. We started drinking all day. We drank every drop of whatever booze we could find. Nobody was running things.”
I folded my arms. “And you started fighting?”
Lou scoffed. “Does this look like a pissed-up brawl to you?”
The man shook his head. “One night, someone left the gates open. The stalkers got in while we slept.”
I gritted my teeth. So this was all it took to destroy Vasey; an old man leaving and a drunken dickhead forgetting to shut the gates. A splitting pain throbbed through my skull. Everything came down to Moe, when I thought about it. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have left to find the wave. Justin wouldn’t be in a coma. Vasey wouldn’t have ben deserted, and those who stayed wouldn’t have drunk themselves into a stupor, left the gates open and gotten slaughtered.
I would make sure Moe died for this.
A shock of pain split through my head. I knelt to the ground and rubbed my head.
“You okay, Kyle?” said Alice. She walked over to me and put her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged her off.
“Leave me,” I said.
Something groaned behind us. I took a deep breath and stood up. The only thing I could focus on was taking out my anger on the infected that had picked today to stumble into Vasey.
I pulled my knife from my belt and span around. The infected I expected to see wasn’t there. Instead, the groan had come from Justin as he stirred on the stretcher. He moved his fingers.
Melissa grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Justin! Can you hear me?”
My pulse hammered. I crouched on the other side of Justin and took his other hand.
“Welcome back, buddy,” I said.
Justin coughed, and his body thrashed. I put my hand on his chest to stop him moving too much.
“It’s me, Justin,” said Melissa, her forehead creased. She stared at him with unblinking eyes.
Justin curled his fingers. His eyelids flickered, and the whites of his eyes began to show. Adrenaline washed through me as I watched my friend wake up. All the way home, my thoughts had alternated between hoping he would pull through, to trying to accept he never would. Seeing colour seep back into his skin filled my muscles with a nervous energy.
“He’s waking!” said Melissa.
Justin gave an unintelligible moan and opened his eyelids. When he turned his head and his eyes snapped on mine, I gasped and fell back. A shiver ran through my body and chilled my limbs.
“Kyle,” said Justin, and rubbed his head. “How long was I out?”
Melissa and I exchanged glances, neither of us able to speak. I looked again at Justin’s eyes. Red worm-like flecks swam in the centre of his oil-slick black pupils. I had seen those flecks before in the eyes of the infected.
It was too much to process. Between killing Whittaker, and getting back to find Vasey destroyed, I felt like my mind was falling apart. I’d done so much for this town. I’d slit a man’s throat and left a red stain on my conscience, but even that wasn’t enough.
I watched Melissa grip hold of Justin’s hand. Lou sat on the floor and rubbed her neck, her eyes staring blankly at the ground. Alice stood with her arms wrapped around her son, tight enough to squeeze the air out of him. I realised it didn’t matter how I felt; I had to carry on for them. We couldn’t let this be the end.
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Copyright 2015 by Jack Lewis. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away without the prior written consent of the author.