by Ryan Casey
He didn’t answer. He just took a deep, elongated breath and then lowered his head.
“I think it’s about time ‘Cody’ here told you the truth about what his people have been doing to other people,” Melissa said. “To other survivors. And I think it’s about time he told you the truth about what he knows about the infection.”
Riley frowned some more. “Cody?”
Cody looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he desperately didn’t want to talk. Like he didn’t want to open up.
But then he cleared his throat and he looked Riley in the eye. “There’s something you should know. Something you should all know. I haven’t been entirely honest with you…”
“What about?” Riley asked.
A pause. A hesitation.
Then: “Everything.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Six months ago…
“SO YOU KNOW what you have to do?”
Cody was boiling hot. It was a strange thing to get used to, being stuck in a room with a luxury such as heating. But honestly, it didn’t feel like a luxury anymore. If anything, it felt like a hindrance. Like he’d adjusted himself to the elements of the world run by the infected so much that going back to a world of artificial heating just felt nigh on impossible.
He’d been in this new, new world for a month now. And already he was seeing signs that adapting and adjusting to it wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d perhaps first thought.
He was in an office high above the ground. To his left, a solid glass window looking out over the community. The more he thought about it, the more amazed Cody was by all this. The things he’d seen. The changes he’d witnessed. They blew his mind every single day.
But he also knew the truth.
The truth about the infection.
The truth about the new government’s plan for the infection.
And the truth about the very nature of the infection, something they were rapidly discovering; something which haunted him, kept him awake at night, memories of his daughter standing over his wife with that knife in her hand.
Memories of all the dead he’d killed.
Dead.
Except they weren’t dead, were they?
He leaned forward against the table, adjusting his tight collar. He looked Gareth, the leader of this entire operation, right in the eye. Gareth was dressed all in black. On his chest, an emblem, like a star. The symbol of the new world. The free world.
Only it was going to become a symbol of horror for so, so many.
“Cody? I asked you a question. Are you going to be okay with this?”
Cody stared Gareth in his steely grey eyes. He looked into them and tried to see some semblance of a person who actually gave a shit about other people, truly. He gave a shit about humanity, of course. As in, the concept of humanity.
But did he give a shit about humans, really?
How could he, with what he was calling for?
With what he was condoning?
Cody cleared his throat and looked back out the window. “If I agree to do this. If I do what you ask. What am I supposed to do if I come across someone I used to be friends with? Or family?”
Gareth smiled. “I’m not trying to stop you saving people. Sure, save people. But be aware that there is a quota. And we can only strictly bring a quota of people into this world. That quota is rapidly running thin.”
“I can’t believe you’d do this.”
“Do what?”
“Masquerade as someone who pretends to care. And then say things like, ‘we can only take a quota.’”
Gareth poured himself a glass of sparkling water. “But it’s true. The people of the world aren’t just going to let all these people come walking out of Britain and back into normality. That’s something we’re going to have to build towards, over generations. And Island 947. Well. You can see for yourself. It isn’t exactly going to house every single person from Britain, is it?”
Cody couldn’t argue with Gareth on that. The island was big, but it wasn’t big enough for everyone. He knew Gareth was right. And deep down, he suspected Gareth did truly want to find the best solution here.
It was just some of his other practices that disturbed him.
“The people who have been bitten. The ones who have… found ways to survive.”
“They stay in Britain. Absolutely without a question.”
Cody felt a lump in his throat. “I was one of those people, you know. One of the bitten people.”
“And you were fortunate enough to receive the antidote before the infection could take a grip. Of which you still receive boosters of now, remember?”
“Is that why you’re sending me back?”
Gareth frowned. “What?”
“You’re sending me back to Britain. Is it because you don’t want someone who has been bitten here on the island?”
Gareth didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. Cody knew the answer already.
“And what about the… the kids?”
“What about the kids?”
“You’ve seen it yourself. Don’t play dumb. The children. The newborns. They’re… some of them’re resistant, somehow. To the point that they can even cure the infection.”
Gareth tilted his head to one side and sighed. “We have all the preventative antidote we need banked up to resist any kind of threat or breakout in future. Like I say. You save whoever you can. But the newborns… you know just as well as I do that they are infected already. Don’t be sentimental about this.”
Cody felt numb when he heard those words. It was something he hadn’t believed at first: everyone born in the new world was born with the infection. And that was something to do with the way the infection latched itself onto people, asymptomatic to the carrier… but to the child inside them, a very different fate.
You could think you weren’t infected. You could think you’d been cured.
But that wasn’t true.
Sure, symptoms could be alleviated. The antidote radically slowed down the rate of infection.
But it didn’t cure the infection.
Because there was no cure.
If you were born in the new world, eventually you turned.
If you were bitten, no matter what you did about it, eventually you turned.
Cody would turn. Eventually.
He just hoped it wouldn’t be today.
“So what do you say?”
Cody smiled and shook his head. “You say that like I’ve got a choice.”
“You always have a choice, Cody. Everyone always has a choice.”
Cody looked into Gareth’s eyes. And then he figured there was no other option. He was going to have to go back. He was going to have to rescue some more people—just enough clean, unbitten, unscathed people to fill the quota of populating this new world.
And then he was going to have to kill everyone else in his sight.
“What about the other thing?” Cody asked.
“The other thing?”
“The consciousness studies.”
Gareth smiled particularly widely when Cody said that. It excited him, Cody could tell. But how could anyone truly be excited anymore? How could their shared knowledge do anything but give the people who knew nightmares? “We’ve got people to investigate just how deep the infected’s consciousness goes. And just how conscious they actually are. Anything else?”
Cody wanted to disagree. He wanted to go on living in this world. Because it was okay. Sure, it was artificial. Sure, it was like living in a fairytale, while the real threat was just across the sea. But it was a refreshing change of pace, and one that Cody had drastically needed for so, so long.
But what choice did he have?
He took a deep breath.
And putting all his fears to one side, he took Gareth’s hand.
Gareth smirked. “Good,” he said. “Very good. But remember one thing, Cody. If they are bitten, you kill them. If they are a child of the new world, you
kill them. There can be no mistakes made where that is concerned. Do you understand what you are agreeing to?”
Cody thought of his daughter. He imagined lifting his gun to her head and blasting out her brains. And he pictured doing it all over again.
But this was different.
This was the new world.
This was restoring order.
He took a sharp deep breath and he nodded. “I understand.”
WHEN HE REMEMBERED the bite mark on Riley’s legs; and when he saw Kesha, the child of the new world, he felt a knot tightening around his stomach.
Cody knew exactly what he had to do.
EPISODE FORTY-NINE
THE ROAD AHEAD
(THIRD EPISODE OF SEASON NINE)
PROLOGUE
Siobhan felt a smile stretch across her face when she saw the walls ahead.
It was the middle of winter and it was the coldest day Siobhan could remember. The nights were drawing in, gradually getting darker. She could see her breath frosting in front of her as she walked, and could hear the grass crumbling under her feet, frozen with ice. It had been a tough trek. Perhaps the toughest stretch of her journey to date.
But the knowledge that they were reaching the end of it. The knowledge that something good was ahead; something that could offer them hope, salvation… that made the weather irrelevant, and made the long, impossible journey seem so worth it.
She felt her son’s hand tightening against hers. Bobby had been such a good kid throughout this whole ordeal. He’d seen some horrible things. He’d been through some horrible things.
The most horrible thing of all was the bite.
The bite that, theoretically, should’ve ended his life.
But it hadn’t. For some reason, Bobby hadn’t turned.
It’d been four weeks now, and still he hadn’t turned. And as the days went on, sometimes Siobhan wondered whether the infection had lost its effectiveness; whether it was no longer getting to people in the way it used to.
But she’d soon given up on that admittedly hopeful and optimistic viewpoint when she’d witnessed someone turning a few feet away from her.
She felt her stomach lurch as she walked and recalled that memory. She should’ve gone over and helped that man. And when he had been bitten, she should’ve at least done the decent thing and put him out of his misery.
But she’d been intrigued. Intrigued to know whether her son was just a one off, or whether there were others like him, too.
So she’d watched him suffer.
She’d watched him bleed out.
She’d watched and she hadn’t done a thing.
And as she’d watched, she’d wondered if she’d completely gone over the edge. If her humanity was gone completely.
When she saw the man turn, she wasn’t sure how to feel. Relieved? Disappointed?
No. None of that. Nothing mattered. Nothing was relevant.
Nothing but the walls right ahead of them.
“Is this it, Mummy?”
Siobhan looked at her son and she smiled. She didn’t want to excite him for no reason. After all, they’d encountered places like this in the past. Places that offered hope, that offered promise. But places that had ultimately failed to deliver on that hope for whatever reason.
They could’ve given up their hope after that. They could’ve cast all their optimism that there was something better out there away.
But they hadn’t.
They’d found the strength and the determination within themselves to keep on going.
And now they were here.
“Will there be nice people here?” Bobby asked.
Siobhan swallowed a lump in her throat. She was torn between being honest and between being optimistic. Because she couldn’t offer any promises. Of course she couldn’t.
But she wasn’t in a mood to play this discovery down either.
“I hope so,” she said.
Bobby smirked at that. His little curly locks had grown right down the side of his face now. Siobhan had offered to cut it so many times, but he’d refused. He’d said it looked cool. So she’d let him keep it. If there was ever a world to break conventions and live a little in, it was a world where they were no outside rules enforced upon anybody.
“And do you think you’ll find someone there?” Bobby asked.
Siobhan frowned as they made their way further down the hill. “What do you mean by that?”
Bobby tilted his head. “Well. Someone to make you happy. Someone like Dad.”
When Bobby mentioned Dad, it all came flying back to Siobhan. She remembered heading back to their makeshift home together. She remembered seeing the zombie edge towards Dave as he leaned down to fix something. She remembered wanting to tell him there was something behind him. She remembered wanting to help him.
But they were alone. They were isolated. There was nobody else around.
She wanted even more so to know whether Bobby was a one-off, or whether there were other people like him. Whether the infection not manifesting was more widespread than just her son.
She’d had hope when she’d watched Dave get bitten. There was no doubt about that.
But at the same time, the memory of his screams as he lay there bleeding out kept her awake at night. They haunted her nightmares. Because that was on her. That was her responsibility. That was her doing. And she’d never forget it.
Especially because her husband had come back as one of those monsters after all.
She hadn’t been particularly close to Dave. Not for the last couple of years. Not since Siobhan caught him in bed—their bed—with some young piece he taught at university.
They’d stayed together out of convenience. Even when the world had collapsed, that convenience had held them together.
It’d held them together until it hadn’t.
And there was a deep darkness inside Siobhan that had sparked up an unexpected emotion in her when she’d witnessed Dave getting bitten. A darkness that she had been trying to repress, but a darkness that she couldn’t deny.
Siobhan had felt happy.
Like Dave was going through just a smidgen of the pain she’d gone through when she’d found him fucking that slut.
Fuck you, Dave.
Fuck you.
She smiled at her son. “I don’t think Mummy’s ready to meet someone else just yet. You’re the only one I need, angel face.”
He smiled up at her. And then he squeezed her hand even tighter.
Then, together, they continued their walk down the hill, down towards the walls, down towards whatever future and whatever hope lay ahead.
CODY WATCHED FROM A DISTANCE.
He held his rifle in hand, the pair of them in his scopes.
A buzzing in his ears. “I can see the bite mark on the kid’s arm from here. You know what you have to do, Cody.”
He swallowed a lump in his throat. Wiped away the tears from his eyes.
And then he steadied his rifle, held his breath and put his finger on the trigger.
He knew what he had to do.
He knew how the new world worked now.
He took a deep breath and he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER ONE
“And I… I stood there with the rifle and I looked through the scope at that kid. And I knew he had a scar on his arm. I knew he had a bite mark. I tightened my finger on the trigger and tried to black everything out. But I couldn’t do it. I just… I just couldn’t pull that trigger.”
Riley listened to Cody speak as they sat at the dining room table in the total darkness. They hadn’t gone to bed. Only Carly, who had taken Kesha upstairs. But Riley, Anna, Cody, Melissa and Ricky were all still up, all still around the table. He figured none of them would be getting any sleep tonight. Not when there was a rotting Orion in the hallway.
“So what did you do?” Riley asked.
Cody leaned against the table, eyes glassy. “I did the only thing I could do. I did the right thing. I turned around a
nd I fled. I ran. I… I had no real direction. I just knew that I had to be away from that place. I knew I couldn’t associate with any place that endorsed the killing of children. I… I couldn’t be a part of what they were doing. So I ran.”
“And that’s how you ended up running into us?” Anna asked.
“Well,” Cody said. “I thought about going back. As set in his ways as Gareth is, I have to believe he does have people’s best interests at heart. But I started to realise he never actually intended for me to go back at all, especially as I was once bitten. He was using me as a soldier. A soldier that was once trying to recruit as many suitable people as could fill the quota in this island of his. But… but also someone who eliminated anyone who might be infected. I’m starting to wonder if maybe he really just sent me out to die after all. Because believe me, the infection isn’t what you thought it was.”
Riley heard what Cody said and he remembered what he’d told him about the infection. Firstly, that kids who were born in the new world were all infected. One way or another, they all had that infection running through their bloodstream.
Which meant Kesha was infected.
It also meant that no matter how optimistic they were about her having some kind of “cure” inside her, she wasn’t special. Not in the eyes of the people in power.
She was just another threat to be eliminated.
And there was the other argument, too. The one that the infection couldn’t be cured, not indefinitely. Riley wasn’t sure if he was still infected. After all, his “cure” had come from the government himself. Besides, he hadn’t shown any signs of regression in his condition, which made him question Gareth’s motives all along.
Maybe Cody’s suspicions were right. Maybe this man was just trying to clear out the trash, so to speak.
And then there was the other truth about the infection, too. The hardest thing to believe at all. Something Riley still struggled to get his head around. Something that just thinking about made the hairs on his arm stand on end, goose pimples creep up the back of his neck.
“What you told us,” Melissa said, interrupting Riley’s train of thought. “About… about them being alive inside.”