‘How come?’ Hayley asked.
‘There are a lot of flammable substances down there. It seemed best to keep them out of the way of anything that was valuable, person or object, in the event that something happened to explode. Accidents do happen.’
James produced a set of keys from his pocket and used one to unlock the front door. We were stood outside of a small house on the edge of Ashby, right where the wall cornered off. It was the most remote of all of them – their thinking made sense.
He led us through the house, down by the staircase. For the first time since we arrived I felt a sense of calm come over me, as if I was briefly letting my guard down. James seemed to be a genuine person, though. Trust was the most important thing for me, and I felt like it was something I could invest in here, with him.
He used another key to unlock the door by the stairs – I say the lock, but there were several, and it was clear that this wasn’t your traditional homely wooden door; it was thick and set, and it took him a good heave to finally open it.
I heard a flick in the darkness, and the descending corridor lit up via a single light bulb above.
‘Holy fuck,’ Robbie muttered, chuckling and shaking his head.
‘Pardon me?’ James said.
‘He’s just never seen a house with lights before,’ I said. ‘I don’t think any of us have, actually.’
‘Helena set the place up with a small generator. It’ll probably run for a day or more before it shuts down. Nobody around here to power it.’
We continued on down the stairs, reaching another door at the bottom that James had to unlock, before we stepped on through and another light up the basement, giving us a view that would have made us ooh and ahh were our circumstances not so dire.
The room was filled with racks and racks of guns and melee weapons, some old and rusted, some newer and in much better condition. I had never seen anything like it in my life, not even in the few gun stores that we had found with stock still remaining after the initial outbreak when they had been raided.
‘Item 36, was it?’ I said, turning to James. ‘Are those down here?’
‘Yes. All of them. Why?’
‘I want to use them, if you’d like complete honesty.’
James looked me up and down, looked at the file in his hands again, then looked back at me.
‘I do appreciate the honesty. And if it will get back your home, and give me a new one… Then yes, you may use it. You can use as much as you’d like, just as long as you run this plan of yours by me first.’
‘That won’t be a problem. There’s something else I meant to ask you, to.’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you have a car, or some form of transport we can use?’
‘I’d like to say yes, but they were all destroyed in the outbreak. What we do have, though, is oil. Enough to keep a car running for several hours.’
‘I only need enough to run one for fifteen minutes.’
‘I’m sure we can arrange that.’
‘Wait, wait,’ Hayley said, turning me around after placing her hand on my shoulder. ‘What is this plan of yours? We have a right to know.’
‘I want to tell you, but you’re going to call me crazy the moment I do.’
‘Come on, Tommy,’ Robbie said. ‘We already said it. We’ve trusted you this far, what makes you think we won’t trust you now?’
‘All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here’s what we’re gonna do.’
Chapter Eighteen
Before
‘No, I’m sorry. I take it back. This is the worst fucking idea you’ve ever had.’
We were halfway back to the outpost when Robbie finally said it. He and I were pulling a small wagon that had been kept onsite at Ashby, filled to the nines with explosives and a vat of oil. Eat your heart out, Rudy.
‘It’s gonna work,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about the fact that you and I are a few away from enough flammable liquid to send us to the moon.’
‘James said it’s safe.’
‘And you definitely trust this guy we’ve only known for a few hours?’
‘Yes. I can tell the type of person he is. You forget that it used to be my job to tell what kind of a person somebody is. You need to know that kind of thing when you lead so many people.’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘if you say so.’
Leah and Hayley were a little way behind us, carrying a bag each filled with automatic weapons and ammunition, and James was up in front, keeping a lookout. True, I trusted him, but not enough for him to be out of sight with so many weapons lying around.
After an hour of walking we reached the outpost and the empty Ranger. All was quiet.
We set everything down by the ranger and everybody took a minute, stretching their backs and arms.
‘I don’t remember what sleep feels like,’ Leah said, yawning.
‘Just a few hours and we can rest,’ I said.
‘No,’ Hayley broke in, shaking her head. ‘If we’re actually planning on launching this half-assed offensive of yours then we need to do it properly, with no hitches. If we’re all exhausted, no amount of adrenaline is going to stop us from making small mistakes that could cost us our heads. Let’s rest up tonight. There’s no harm in it.’
‘We don’t have anybody on lookout,’ I said. ‘I’m all for it but what if something happens?’
‘We can take two hour shifts,’ Robbie said. ‘Honestly, Tommy, I’m completely exhausted.’
I looked between the four faces before me. Even James looked tired, and he had only been outside the walls of Ashby for a few hours.
The sun was already beginning to set.
‘Okay,’ I reluctantly agreed.
***
I was last on shift, covering the early morning. Despite the tragedy that had happened in the basement of the house, everybody slept soundly that night. We had been up for too long, and we had been put through too much.
Everybody except for me. I didn’t sleep as well as I would have liked. Something was always on my mind, and this time it was what awaited us in the morning. I knew so little about the nature of our attackers, other than the fact they were rabid animals. I hoped that they would act as such, that they would act on animal instinct and succumb to this nature that they possessed. It was all a part of the plan.
Then again, they were anything but natural.
I watched Hayley for a little while when I woke early. I didn’t want to put her in harm’s way, just as I was reluctant to put any of my friends’ lives at risk, but I treated all of them equally, and that meant she could help us. Another person was another set of arms and another gun.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel a love for her that I had never felt for anyone else before.
I dressed and picked up my gun, heading out of the living room where we had all been sleeping and through the unlocked front door.
James was sat atop the roof of the Ranger, just as I had been the day before. I whistled to alert him to my presence, just to make sure that he didn’t freak out and turn around shooting. On the contrary, he turned his head calmly to look at me and smiled. Behind him the first light of the sun was rising beyond the horizon.
‘Your shift isn’t for a few hours, Tommy.’
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said, heading over to him. I jumped up onto the bonnet of the car and sat myself down, looking up at him. ‘Didn’t you want to grab a gun?’
‘I… I never learnt how to use one.’
I stared back at him, more baffled than I had been in a long time.
‘Are you serious?’
‘I’ve always lived at Ashby, ever since I was twenty. Around your age, I suppose. Helena let me live on my own terms as long as I did all of the accounting work for her, like I said. I prefer being by myself, if I’m totally honest. I like the quiet. No offence, of course.’
‘None taken,’ I laughed. ‘I know what it’s like to spend a lot of time around other p
eople to the point that you really start to wish for some peace and quiet. Of course, now…’
‘I know. It used to be that I always hated having to be around the people in town. Maybe not hate, but it was always a chore for me. Now, though, what I wouldn’t give to have every single one of them back. Even the ones who were nasty to me…’
‘It’s an independence thing, believe me. When you learn how to defend yourself, what it means to look after your own, you begin to know yourself a little better. You realise what you’re capable of.’
‘You think?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, standing up and pulling the rifle off my shoulder. ‘Here, I’ll show you how to use it. This is a rifle so it’s not like the other ones, but there’s a lot more control with it than there is with an automatic or a semi-automatic.’
‘I don’t know, Tommy. I’m not really sure I’ll be able to…’
‘Anybody can, you just gotta practice it.’
Chapter Nineteen
Massacre
‘That’s the plan.’
We all stood around in a rough circle by the Ranger, looking between each other.
‘You realise how many things in that could go wrong?’ Robbie said. ‘But… I know I’ll never have a better suggestion or alternative as long as I live.’
I managed to muster a smile as I looked over at my younger brother. For the first time I realised how much he had grown up, seeing the shadows of stubble above his lips and around his cheeks.
‘You really think this is going to work?’ Hayley asked.
‘Presuming we stick to the plan,’ Leah said. ‘That doesn’t always work, though, does it?’
***
I’d like to tell you that it was like one of the movies we watched back when Bastion was thriving, that it was cinematic and heroic and that we fought bravely… But that wasn’t how it went down.
I didn’t know whether or not the infected could perceive anything in some self-aware way, that they could see what was coming towards them beyond some primitive, primal interpretation of the events around them, but when the Ranger came smashing through the front gates and roaring through down the street, they truly did come running.
They seemed to have been standing or wandering dormant for some time – Morgan had led them there, but with nothing to feast on they simply stood and waited.
When the Ranger arrived they stormed towards it, but the infected just came on running. By my calculations, in the straight line it was headed, it would crash straight into the back end of the house on the corner, which stood at a little angle.
They surrounded it, throwing themselves against the windows, beginning to crack the glass.
My heart raced, watching it all happen, but then Rudy’s plan seemed to have worked pretty well, so why wouldn’t this?
After a few seconds of revving against the cracked wall, ten or fifteen of the infected surrounding the vehicle, the charge blew.
James knew how to stock and keep track of things, but none of us had had any experience with explosives before. I didn’t know quite how much to put in the Ranger, but when the explosion went off, it was big enough and loud enough to rival the one that Rudy had set off.
We, of course, weren’t inside the Ranger. We were a decent distance from Bastion, a few hundred yards on one of the roads that led up on an incline.
‘Holy shit,’ Hayley muttered from over my shoulder. I remained gazing through the rifle scope, watching the smoke swoop upwards and clear from the ground level.
The sight might have made me feel some relief, until I realised that it was likely that half of the infected that were on fire were people whom I had once known.
A smile rose to my lips before it quickly dissipated and I lowered the scope, looking at the cloud of smoke.
I looked around at my companions – not to my surprise, nobody else said a word. They were all too captivated by the sight before us.
‘If some of them weren’t there to begin with then they’ll be headed there now,’ I said. ‘Presuming that sound is one of the things that draws them.’
I looked back through the scope at the street, watching the myriad of infected swarming around the car, stumbling into each other. Some of them were on fire, but that didn’t deter them in the slightest. It seemed that it was only those that had been blown to pieces that didn’t pose a threat anymore.
A warzone.
‘How do we know if that’s all of them?’ James asked. ‘We have no way of establishing exact numbers considering we don’t know how many are already dead. What if some haven’t arrived yet?’
‘We’re just going to have to risk it,’ I said, looking about at the surrounding area that was in view. I could see no others beyond those that were clustered in by the flaming wreck of the car. ‘We need to go now,’ I said. ‘Make sure you’ve got everything, and that your safety is off.’
I expected looks of scepticism or fear, and while the latter was ever present over us there seemed to be no reluctance amongst my friends. Everybody knew what had to be done, and what we were going to do, even if all of that was a terrifying prospect that shook us all to the bone with fear.
We set off, each of carrying one of the automatic rifles from Ashby that we had brought with us. All of them were fully loaded, and we each carried with us a plethora of extra clips in the event that we needed them, which I had little doubt that we would.
We sprinted on, finally reaching the stretch of road up to the gates. Leah covered us from behind, in the entirely possible event that a straggler approached us from another angle that hadn’t yet reached the source of the catastrophic noise that had bellowed out over the area surrounding Bastion.
My heart pounded in my chest, a pang of dread and fear and adrenaline rushing through me as we headed through the slightly open gates.
They stood less than fifty yards from us, where the house on the edge of the street hung at an angle to the sidewalk.
The scene before us looked far more daunting than it had done upon the hill. Now that they were on a level with my eyeline, and everybody else’s, I suddenly felt a lot more vulnerable.
It didn’t take long in the slightest for them to realise we were there – they were a hive mind. Once one saw us, all of them had seen us. The virus was some collectivist unit, like a colony of ants, ready to act for the benefit of the thing as a whole.
Then they were all running at us.
I’d like to tell you that it was some epic fight.
I’d like to.
But the reality of war and violence is that it isn’t attractive. Something had invaded us, had run our community into the ground, and when it came to neutralising an enemy, the safest way was often the quickest.
‘Now.’
I didn’t really need to tell my companions what to do at all – I think it was innate. When you see something coming towards you that you know without a doubt will rip you apart without a moment’s notice, even if that thing takes the form of somebody who you had once seen every day for more than a decade, something kicks in within your mind that tells you to pull the trigger.
My ears began whistling the moment the clattering began, bullet casings falling to the ground as we unleashed hell on our infected assailants. In the haze of smoke and sparks I could easily make out the bodies dropping to the ground like limp bags of sand. We were all aiming at the same level, trying to strike them in their heads. Even if we were a little low, separating body from head via the neck would suffice.
The rows of them were so thick that few of our bullets missed.
The most terrifying moment, above all, was the sound of our guns clicking when one of us had to reload. We hurriedly scrambled for more clips, hands shaking and breathing uneven as we raised the guns again and continued to shoot.
How do I describe these things coming towards us? There was no humanity left in their eyes, no semblance of any of the people I had known. A few I recognised, though, and the fact that they were rabid didn’t account for the
fact that I felt a pain and sadness welling up within me with every round that left the gun.
The final few moments of our barrage of bullets were hazed and awkward, as we took out the final few who were coming towards us. They had strayed off, and we fired quickly and precisely in order to take them out.
Even when they had all fallen, we continued firing into the rows upon rows of them. We weren’t unfamiliar with the ghastly realities of this world that we lived in, but nobody ever got used to seeing sights like this.
This was by far like nothing I had ever seen.
Finally we came to a stop, the gunshots halting and our breathing heavy. I looked at the horrendous sight before me, and remembered another book my mother had shown me – a war that had happened a long time ago, and the things that one side had done to the other just because they had been told they were the enemy.
Was this who we were?
They were stacked about haphazardly, some on top of each other, occasionally three.
I looked about at my companions and saw the looks on their faces, the disoriented stares as they looked out ahead of them. I don’t think they were able to register anything other than the horror they had just experienced, and the aftermath of our actions.
‘That’s it… It’s over.’
The five of us looked about the streets at the mess that had come about as a result of our actions.
I had never felt more conflicted in my life. On the one hand we had managed to take Bastion back – the fact that bodies littered the streets wouldn’t have mattered so much if they didn’t belong to the people that I had once shared these streets with, who I had called my friends and my neighbours, my community.
The guns were all empty – we had continued firing even when they were all dead, firing into the pile.
We all looked about at each other, panting heavily as we took in the scene.
‘Oh, shit…’ I heard Hayley mutter from over my shoulder. I turned to look in her direction and saw the lone figure standing at the end of the street. ‘One more.’
We knew that it was one of the infected from where we stood. They seemed to be analysing us from the fifty or so yards away that they stood.
Fall of Earth (Book 1): The Survivors of Bastion Page 15