Plague Of The Revenants

by Chilvers, Edward

  “But what do we do now?” Asked Thorpe. “Winter is here and we can hardly go trekking miles in a few vans in the hope of sanctuary whilst running the risk of meeting something even worse.”

  “Blake won’t leave it,” I said grimly. “I know him too well for that. He’ll be furious at what we have done, killing his men and stealing his truck and he’ll have the whole of the elite out looking for us as we speak.”

  “At least he’s got a lot of open countryside to be searching,” said Kit.

  “But a lot of men to search it,” put in Paul.

  “We can’t leave,” said Reverend Thorpe. “We can’t ask everyone to decamp, not after all we’ve worked for. The older people couldn’t stand it.”

  “Then we must find a way to fight,” I told him.

  Even though it was pitch black outside on a moonless night I climbed to the top of the tower and looked through the binoculars towards the camp. Now I knew it was there I could see the glow where the floodlights lit it up but I could not yet see the lights of any vehicles which might be searching for us.

  I went back to the clock house, ignoring Thorpe’s pleas to remain in the farmhouse. I had a feeling I was never to spend a single night in that building. The tunnel was looking solid once more but the interior of the church appeared more poignant and silent than usual. I sat down on my bedding and waited. Sure enough the door downstairs opened and footsteps climbed the stairs. It was Kit.

  “You want to talk,” I said with a wry smile as I accepted a cigarette from her. “About my nefarious past.”

  “Did they deserve to die?” Asked Kit, looking at me like I was some mort of dangerous animal.

  I shrugged. “Probably not,” I said. “I mean yes, they were the scum of the earth as drug dealers often are, but then I was a drug dealer as well, of sorts. But they weren’t beyond mercy. I daresay a few conversations with your dad and they might have turned into good little born again Christians.”

  “Don’t be flippant,” snapped Kit angrily.

  “Look, I spent eight years in that prison of a whole life sentence and even halfway though it I was a changed man,” I told her. “I know it sounds like a cliché and I don’t mean changed as in better; rather I was broken. The days all merged into one and I found myself wishing they still had the death penalty so I might end this misery once and for all. Then the outbreak happened and suddenly I was a free man. Suddenly I was worth something. Your father and the rest of the camp hailed me as a hero and I didn’t want to let them down. Maybe I tried too hard. Maybe I took charge when I should have stepped back and maybe my ideas weren’t worth shit and are now about to get us all killed. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what you were in the old world. In this world you’re either a killer or you’re dead.”

  “Strange but here in this new world your word starts to mean something,” said Kit as she lit up a cigarette. “You remember in the old world you used to run into acquaintances, and you used to say how you’d meet up for a drink with them sometime without ever having the slightest intention of doing so? Whereas now you say you’re going out on a raid, and the following day you go out on a raid. You say you’re going to plant some crops and you do it, scavenge when you say you’re going to. I suppose it’s because in this new world indecisiveness can cost you your life. You need to have your story and you need to stick to it. Nothing is safe in this world anymore, and nobody is safe either. I remember I always used to be wary of towns when I was younger, all the people and noise. I didn’t know how anybody could put up with it. Coming back here, to the rectory and the home which mum and dad had made, it seemed like a safe haven. The kids here and anyone else growing up in this new world aren’t going to know what that means. Nothing will ever be safe again. The revenants will always be here and we’ll always have to deal with them. Society is dead. We simply don’t have the technology to repel them permanently.”

  I simply shrugged at this.

  “Aren’t you worried I’m going to tell my dad?”

  “Tell him or don’t tell him,” I replied with a shrug. “I wouldn’t blame you either way. All I will say is that I haven’t killed any of you lot yet and nor will I. Like you’ve said, things have changed since the old world. But Blake and the rest of his cohorts, he will kill you. If he doesn’t enslave you first that is.”

  “I’m not going to say anything,” said Kit. “I’m not afraid of you. And you’re right. If you’ve killed before, whoever you might have killed, you’re still a better qualified leader than any one of us. So are we going to defend or will we go out and attack?”

  “Depends on what we can get,” I told her. “You want to free those slaves, don’t you?”

  “Well of course,” said Kit with emphasis. “Don’t you?”

  “You’re thinking ahead of yourself,” I said with a smile. “We’d be bound to lose people even if we did have enough to make an attack.”

  “But think of it rationally,” said Kit. “If we freed the slaves we’d cut off their lifeline and give ourselves a lot more manpower.”

  “I can see your logic,” I told her. “And you’re right. We have to do something.”

  The following morning I went upstairs to the top of the tower. Hammond was already there and handed me the binoculars straight away. I looked and saw that it was one of the green liveried, ex-army vehicles that we had seen the previous night at the camp and I estimated it to be around twelve miles as the crow flies.

  “What has it been doing?” I asked Hammond.

  “Driving down the road, finding a building, stopping to presumably search it out then carrying on again,” replied the policeman.

  “I imagine they’d notice the church,” I said warily. “The damned place sticks out a mile and if you think about it it’s an obvious place to go.”

  “Yes but this is not the only church in the area,” replied Hammond. “There are other places to be searched; stately homes, castles, those sorts of places.”

  “Why didn’t we go there?” I asked with a wry smile.

  “I’ve always wondered how I’d fare in a medieval siege,” joked Hammond. “But seriously though, they’ve got a lot of places they need to search.”

  “And when they find us they hopefully won’t have a full force with them,” I said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to take them down before they’re able to summon their friends.”

  “Do that and we’d still be in a race against time. They’d soon come looking with a bigger force.”

  “This is true.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Information,” I said darkly. “We need more information.”

  I skipped breakfast that morning, instead driving out to the council house in order to interrogate Stout. The guard’s tone was humble and fearful and it was clear he had spent a wretched night in the cold, dark house. I was always struck by the contrast between the captive and the captor.

  “I was afraid, you have to know that. I never wanted to hurt you or your friends. I was an estate agent before all this started. I never wanted to fight. I had no choice.”

  “Shut up,” I told him harshly. “I don’t care about any of this right now. I want answers and I want them now. How many people?”

  “About three hundred.”

  “Three hundred?” I repeated, surprised despite myself. “And of that how many are slaves and how many the elite?”

  “Two hundred slaves, the rest soldiers or governors,” replies the frightened guard.

  “I see. And who decides who becomes a guard and who a slave?”

  “Blake,” replied the guard.

  “Why aren’t there more elite?” I demanded.

  “Blake only takes men he can trust,” replied the guard. “And he likes to make the slaves work. The harder they work the more chance they think they’re in with becoming one of the elite.”

  “Were you ever a slave?”

  “Of course,” replies the man. “But I was lucky. I came along at the start so I was
only there for a about a week. That was before Blake took over, before things started to get really harsh.”

  “Why are there so many military machines?” I demanded. “Where did you get the guns from?”

  “From an army base fifty miles west of the camp,” replied Stout (and I immediately realised this would be around fifteen miles away from us). “Or so they told me. I wasn’t part of the group then. Apparently there were originally fifty men, most of them from a biker gang that joined together early on in the outbreak. They smashed into the army base and seized a load of supplies and weapons, trucks too. Only they lost heavily because there were so many revenants. They managed to get ten trucks back driven by ten men. Forty men were killed outright, three more were bitten but managed to get the trucks back. Either way only eight survived.”

  “And what about the electric?”

  “Solar power,” replied Stout. “The place is self-sufficient, has been since before the outbreak. Needed a bit of work on something but we had an electrician sort it all out.”

  “And I suppose the other stuff is looted?”

  “Yeah,” replied Stout. “Once you’ve got a few well-armed men in a place where there aren’t too many revenants it isn’t too hard to take what you need. We’ve got people going about full time and the slaves do their bit as well.”

  “Tell me about Blake,” I ordered him. “What’s his part in all this?”

  “I had only just arrived when he came,” replied Stout. “Back then there wasn’t such a strict hierarchy. The remains of the biker gang were still in charge but they didn’t exactly keep people in prison. Rather they gave food to those who did what they told them to and denied it to those who didn’t. if you didn’t like it you were free to leave. Blake came along six weeks ago. He had this sort of digger-dumper truck thing which was useful to us and he also brought some guns. He muscled his way in straight away. A week later he made his move. It was a sort of revolution. He and a few others killed the remaining bikers and too charge. After that he really started pushing the master and slave thing. You’ve heard how it works. Everyone starts out a slave and has to prove themselves if they want to join the Elite.”

  “Why do they let him get away with it?” I asked.

  “Look at the alternative,” replied Stout with a shrug. “He’s right what he said to you yesterday. The slaves get food and shelter. It’s much better than what most of them have experienced, and most of them can join the Elite if they work hard enough.”

  “Everyone except the women,” I replied archly.

  “Blake has some idea about needing to repopulate,” said Stout. “There was this doctor we had at one point but he managed to escape. Blake went mad. He wants all the women to be having children, thinks he’s going to build a new world order in his image or something like that.”

  “How much firepower have you got?”

  “More than we have men,” replied Stout. “We’ve got jeeps, trucks and machine guns, a few grenades as well.”

  “Why did you keep the revenants in that pen?”

  “They used to be us,” replied Stout. “I mean they used to be members of the group when they were alive, before they were bitten. They’re Elite and slaves combined.”

  “Why keep them?”

  “You saw yesterday,” he replied. “To torture.”

  “Have you tortured many that way?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Stout. “A few I think.”

  “Thank you,” I said standing up. “I owe you one.”

  “You mean you’re going to let me go?” asked the guard hopefully.

  “No, I mean I’m not going to let you turn when I kill you.”

  I brought out the knife from my side and drove it hard into the back of the guard’s head before he’d had the chance to cry out. The man arched his back up, the whisper of fear on his lips then slumped forward, dead before he’d even hit the ground. The cleanest kill I’d yet managed during this whole sorry affair.

  I was surprised at how easy it was, killing a man in cold blood after all this time. But I could not have afforded to let the man go, nor could I have brought him back to the camp. I tried to console myself with the fact of him trying to kill us yesterday but I knew he was only following orders. He wasn’t responsible for Blake, just as shit scared of him as everyone else was. He didn’t deserve to die. I released his limp body from the radiator and dragged it over to the window, hauled it outside where it landed in a heap in some bushes. Then I turned my mind back to the information he had disclosed.

  I returned to the farmhouse and gave Kit and Thorpe a summary of what Stout had told me.

  “What about the guard?” Asked Kit.

  “I let him go,” I replied. “Made sure he was good and disorientated. Maybe he’ll find his way back to his camp, maybe he won’t. But with all the revenants out there and he an unarmed man on his own I doubt he’ll spend much time looking for us. Besides, I get the feeling most of those so called soldiers are slaves as much as the rest of them.”

  Kit nodded. It was clear she had doubts as to the truth of what I had told her but she did not press me further. “We’ve got a clear idea of numbers, of both slaves and elite at least,” she said. “Even clearer than what Doctor Bashir told us.”

  “What it all points to is that we must go to the military base,” I said decisively. “There are no two ways about it.”

  “I’ve heard stories about that base,” said Hammond darkly. “Everybody headed there when the outbreak first got bad. The place will be overrun with revenants, more so than in the city.”

  “In that case it won’t have been touched,” I said. “With a bit of careful planning we might pull it off, and we’ll be taking the truck as well.”

  “You’ll be blocked in,” warned Hammond. “Remember what happened the other day when the swarm came by? How they surrounded the truck and you were almost torn apart? It’ll be ten times worse over there.”

  “Do we really need a war?” asked Reverend Hammond, his face etched with worry. “We are hardly fighters after all.”

  “If we want to stay here we need to be able to fight,” I said.

  “So when do we go?” Asked Paul. “Tomorrow?”

  “The day after,” I replied. “I want to take Dev and Stan with me but I want Stan to go on another mission first. Take him out with you tomorrow and go looting. Make sure you go in the opposite direction to the Elite camp.”

  This time Stan did not complain when told he would have to go out. Perhaps he was afraid of me, or perhaps he really had reformed. Leastways he had kept a low profile since our encounter in the council houses the other day. They went out shortly afterwards. They set off just after eight. Stan had his head down and did not say a word whilst Dev was quiet as usual. I dearly hoped Stan would be able to come into his own soon, for we would soon need to fight hard if we were going to defeat the Elite. I did not notice them go, for my mind was preoccupied with plans for the raid on the army base tomorrow. I reinforced the trucks as much as possible, considering that we would need to run the revenants down as much as possible, but I was no mechanic. I wished Frey was still here to help us. Kit checked the map and planned our route, tried to list possible escape routes which was difficult considering she had never visited the place and didn’t have a plan of the base to hand. We decided to take the van with the reinforced roof as well as the truck. We would also look for another vehicle at the base. From time to time I popped up to the roof to see Hammond. The trucks and vans were getting closer. One came to within three miles away and searched a village we had looted for wood for the fence before turning around and heading back off again. I could tell it would only be a couple of days before they found us. We needed to act fast.

  Dev, Paul and Stan returned in the early evening and I was pleased to see the back of the truck half filled with looted goods. “They did well,” said Paul. “Stan is a little quiet. He got surprised by one of them in the bedroom and only just got away. Think it was his first c
lose encounter.”

  I nodded and watched Stan walk straight into the farmhouse with his head down without saying a word to anyone. “Probably do him good in the long term,” I said. “He needs to get out there again so he doesn’t get a complex about it.”

  “Did he kill it?”

  “Yeah, bashed its head in completely,” said Paul approvingly. “Probably went a little over the top but considering it was his first time I suppose he thought it better to be safe than sorry.”

  “What about the Elite? Any sign of them?”

  “None at all,” replied Paul. “I checked with Hammond before I left and he told me they were searching methodically. Therefore I set off in the opposite direction. We didn’t have any problems.”

  “Will he be able to come with us tomorrow do you think?”

  “I don’t see why not,” replied Paul. “They’ll be swarms of them of course and he’ll be up close but provided he’s not right in the middle of it all I don’t see he’ll present a problem to us, although he’ll definitely be at risk himself.”

  “It’s a risk we have to take,” I muttered.

  I needed to be alone for a while to collect my thoughts. The past few days had drained me more than I cared to let on. I went back to the clock house and sat there thinking for a while. It concerned me on a deeper level that Blake had survived the epidemic, not because he was dangerous, although he was certainly that, but rather because of what he represented to my attempts to put the past behind me. People were still looking to me for leadership. I wanted to get the weapons from the base and have the Elite defeated so that I might be able to step back a bit. Once the farm had got going and we were able to obtain a degree of self-sufficiency I was hoping to be able to make a peaceful handover to the civilian leadership of Reverend Thorpe. Would I myself be happy as a civilian? Until now I had never considered the possibility that some form of normality was possible. And what about the slaves? Would we take them on as well? I realised so much was still to be left to chance. Tomorrow would be a big day. It would mean facing the revenants again, a bigger swarm than we had ever seen. It was an ominous prospect but it was also essential if we were to have any hope of resisting Blake and his men.