by Jack Lewis
“So what do you think?” I said, nodding at the teenager on the table.
Charlie put his knife on the surface of the table. Coagulated blood stained his fingertips red.
“Reggie’s lad, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t been by yet,” said Charlie.
“Reggie and Kendal are grieving. They’ve got a lot of hurt and it’s going to be a long time before it stops stinging.”
Charlie’s curly black hair flopped over his fringe and then stayed there, stuck in place by the sweat. I was always surprised that Charlie was as clever as he was. I don’t know why, but I found it difficult to picture him as a scientist. I imagined him more suited to an office job, stuck far back in the corner where nobody else went.
That impression couldn’t be more wrong. Charlie was devoted to science in a way that I have never seen with any person in any vocation. Truth was, Charlie was starting to worry me a little lately. He had missed council meetings despite knowing how much I needed him, and he had spent more time in his make-shift lab with the corpses that we had found in camp.
Still, Charlie’s knowledge was indispensable to me. He wasn’t a qualified medical doctor, but he had spent a year training as a clinical scientist with a pathology specialty. He only dropped out because his mum had gotten ill. Charlie’s input was vital if we were ever going to find out what was happening to these people.
“So what do you think did it?” I said. “Stalkers?”
Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose as though he were squeezing answers from it. “Perhaps. They’re getting more sophisticated in the way that they hunt, and that scares me.”
I thought about the stalkers. I pictured them crawling through the grass, their black bodies blending into the shadows. They were agile and they made even less noise than the whisper of the wind. In the Wilds, if a stalker had chosen you, then you rarely found out about it until it leapt on you and tore strips away from your neck. Even now they sent a shudder through me.
“I’ve doubled the watch. I’ve allocated everyone a time to take watch, and that includes you, Charlie.”
Charlie went to speak, but I put my hand up to stop him.
“I can’t play favourites,” I said. “And at the minute, I owe you nothing. Your chair’s been empty at every meeting this week, and that makes me look bad. But until we find out what the hell is going on, everyone takes a watch. I’m going to send a work party out to cut all the grass in the fields around us. It’s too high, and we’re leaving too many places for stalkers to hide.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Charlie.
“I’m no military leader, but I’m doing my best. It’s hard enough looking after myself sometimes, let alone everyone else. If there’s anyone I owe it to, it’s Ben. It’s my fault he’s alone.”
“Really Kyle? So I suppose you were the one who ate his mother?”
I shot a look at Ben.
“Damn Charlie, keep it down. You think he needs to hear that?”
“He’s asleep.”
Sure enough, Ben slumped in the chair with his head tucked forward and resting on his chest. His right hand was in a fist in his lap, with the bead necklace wrapped around it.
I lowered my voice. “Does he blame me? For what happened to her?”
“This going to be hard for you to hear.”
“Just tell me.”
Charlie put his hand on the table. “Yeah. He does blame you.”
“I thought as much.”
Charlie looked up at me. “Nobody else does, Kyle. It was the infected, for Christ sakes. We’ve all lost someone to them. We all know what they’re like, what they can do.”
I turned by back on Charlie and tried to collect my thoughts. I wondered if I should sit down with Ben and talk about it with him. Maybe if I told him exactly what happened that night, it might make a difference. Or maybe it would be better to just let him blame me, rather than give him graphic images of how his mum died.
As I tried to let my mind settle I looked around the room. The tiles had once been white but were discoloured now. Some had cracked and others had fallen away to reveal the wall behind them, with red brickwork that seemed covered in mold. In a corner of the room there was another table, a smaller one, and a chair. Stacks of paper littered the table top. I walked over and glanced at them, and I had an idea what the papers were.
After we had met the unhinged scientist Whittaker and I had killed him, we had taken his research notes with us. I’m not sure why I saved them, other than the fact that I knew that it wouldn’t have done any good if he was right and I had destroyed his notes.
“Are those what I think they are?” I said, pointing at the notes.
Charlie followed my finger with his gaze. I couldn’t say for sure, but I thought I saw his eyes widen for a split second.
“They are the notes of Barry Whittaker, yes,” he said.
“Barry, huh? Never had him down as a Barry. It doesn’t really seem like the right name, for a mad scientist.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Mad scientist. That’s an offensive stereotype.”
“A true one, in this case.”
Charlie crossed the room and stood over the table in the corner. He picked up a file and began to leaf through it. Casually at first, but I noticed that the pages seemed to suck him in, and within a few seconds they had enraptured him. I felt like waving my arms to remind him that I was in the room. Eventually, he looked up.
“He was getting close,” said Charlie. His voice sounded strange. “So close that I bet he could almost taste it.”
“What do you mean?”
Charlie scanned the notes in front of him again. His eyes seemed to bounce from word to word.
“He could have had a cure if he’d gone about it slightly differently. I could figure it out myself, it’s just that there’s no way to test it. Except if…..”
The seconds drew out while I waited for Charlie to finish his sentence. I grew tired of the subject.
“Forget it,” I said.
Any topic that involved Whittaker was a dark one, and I don’t want to lead Charlie down a path filled with shadow. We needed him too much.
“Listen,” I said. “I suppose you’ve heard about the sickness going around camp?”
“People are shitting their arses off,” said Charlie.
I moved my head back in surprise. I had never heard Charlie swear before.
“It’s a phrase I heard Gregor Horlock use,” he explained.
I shook my head. “Anyway. Some people haven’t eaten in days, and a lot of them are struggling to make it out of their tents to actually go to the toilet. Only, some of us are okay. I was away from camp a couple of days, so I guess that explains why I’m still perky. How about you, Charlie? You seem fine to me. So how come you aren’t sick?”
“I did put a little thought into it. It comes down to this, to my mind. I boil my water before drinking it.”
“How come?”
He shrugged. “Just the way I am. An old boyfriend used to say that I wouldn’t even go for a pee without wearing gloves.”
“Is that true?”
“He was exaggerating.”
“Anyway, Darla thought it was the food,” I said
Charlie dropped the notes back onto the table and turned to face me.
“It’s the water. We don’t all eat exactly the same food, but we all drink from the same stream.”
“And you didn’t think to say anything to anyone else?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve been busy.”
“Okay then,” I said. “I guess I better go check the stream.”
Chapter 6
The stream which supplied our drinking water was to the east of camp, and it ran a twisting channel away and into the countryside. With Lou, Mel, Reggie and a guy named Samuel, we followed the stream out of camp without a clue as to what we were looking for. We just hoped that we would know when we saw it.
“I have to do something,” he said. “I’ll go out of my mind.”
I nodded.
“What happened to your eye?”
Reggie looked at the ground. “It doesn’t matter.”
All I had to do was ask Lou and Mel to come with me and they had said yes. Despite the occasional argument and how busy we all were, it seemed like I could always rely on them. I remembered my conversation with Lou a few nights before and I hoped that she hadn’t meant it. If Lou left camp, things could become difficult for me.
Samuel was the only surprise in our party. He was a man who kept himself to himself. If I gave him a job he did it without complaint, and at night he’d sit at the mouth of his tent and just stare out into the blackness of the night. He walked with his head tucked forward and his back bent. Not so much like a hunchback, but more that his whole body seemed to lean forward when he took a step. His centre of gravity was just an inch or two away from sending him falling to the floor every time he moved his legs.
Samuel reminded me of a supply teacher in my old school. He’d never covered any of my classes, but I had met him from time to time when the maths teacher, Glenn Mack, took one of his hangover days. This supply teacher had walked around the school in much the same way as Samuel. He had seemed quiet, but boy, did he get mean when he was angry. I wondered if Samuel also had a nasty temper.
It was a grey day that lent a bleak look to the Scottish countrywide, and in turn I felt a shadow cross my mood. I started to wonder if maybe Darla was right and Charlie was wrong, that it was possible that the food was the cause of the sickness.
With the camp a mile and a half behind us, we found the answer. In the stream, our only source of water, there was a dead cow.
Its body was thin and its skin was wrapped tightly around its bones, though a large part of it had been stripped away to reveal its ribcage. The skin on its head had been peeled away to show raw red flesh, and hundreds of flies lined it. As soon as I saw the cow I smelled the aroma of death, so thick that I could almost see it hang in the air and drift toward me.
Reggie turned away from the body. His skin turned as pale as the overcast sky, and I watched him put his hand to his mouth. He took deep breaths, but each intake of air looked like it was making him feel worse. He kept his hand against his mouth and battled against it, but eventually he had to bend over and retch. Mel put her hand on his back and rubbed it.
Lou walked over to the carcass. She swatted at a few flies which buzzed near her head, and she put her hand to her chin. From the look on her face she could have been in a gallery admiring a painting rather than staring at a rotting cow in the middle of a stream.
She turned to look at me.
“You know we’re going to have to move it, right?”
Samuel grimaced.
“The skin looks so slimy. It looks like it would just slip away from the bones if we tried to pick it up.”
Reggie gave another retch. Mel rubbed his back even harder.
“Still,” I said. “It’s got to go. It’s either that or we find another drinking source, and I don’t think there are many of them around. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not going back to camp and explaining that we couldn’t fix the problem because we felt a little sick.”
Reggie’s skin had lost so much colour that I could almost see through his skin. Poor bastard, I thought. He came with us to take his mind off things, and this is what he gets.
“There’s no way I’m touching it,” he said.
“It could be full of parasites,” said Samuel.
Lou rolled her eyes.
“After everything we’ve seen. Infected eating people, stalkers with blood dripping from their lips. And you’re afraid of a dead cow. It isn’t coming back to life, you know. The virus hasn’t jumped species yet.”
“But it will jump a few species the day you get bitten,” said Mel.
I turned and looked at her. Mel had always been a bit scared of Lou, and I hadn’t expected such a bitchy remark to come from her.
“Just kidding,” she said.
I took my coat off and felt the chill of the breeze as it slivered through the sleeves of my shirt and teased its way up my arm. As well as the infected and the stalkers, the Scottish gusts were another thing that I didn’t think I would ever get used to.
“Okay,” I said, and started turning my coat inside out so that the inner layer of black fabric showed. “If you’re all going to be babies about it, here’s what we’ll do.”
I took my knife from my belt and cut around the inner layer of my coat until I pulled it free. From there I cut it into sections and then handed two of them to each person.
“We’ll use these to hold it. That way, you don’t actually have to touch the thing.”
Lou and I stood at the head of the cow, and Mel and Samuel stood by the legs. Reggie watched, his skin slowly regaining some of its colour.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
I bent down and put my hands on the cow’s head. Flies flew off its raw flesh and buzzed around me. I let go of the cow to swat them away. I took a deep breath and held it in, worried that if I stopped for air then the flies would seize the opportunity to enter my mouth. I wished I was back at camp.
Mel grabbed hold of one leg, Samuel the other.
“One, two, three,” I said.
As we all lifted, I felt the soft cow flesh on my fingertips, and realised that the coat lining around my hands wasn’t big enough. It felt cold and slimy, and I knew already that even if I washed my hands a hundred times, I still wouldn’t feel clean after this.
We held the cow four feet off the ground and moved it away from the stream. Samuel and Mel took careful steps backwards.
“You’re okay,” said Reggie. “That’s it. Careful Sam, there’s a rock near your right foot. Good. Nearly there.”
I listened to Reggie as he guided us out of the stream. I tried to focus on his voice, but all I could hear was the wind. It was starting to gather in power, and I thought that I heard it shriek at one point. A few seconds later, it sounded like it groaned. I felt a chill run up my arms, and I had the urge to just drop the cow head and step away from it.
Again I heard the wind moan at me. I looked over to Reggie, and this time I dropped the cow head. With Mel and Samuel still holding the legs, when the cow head fell to the floor it snapped off at the neck.
“What the hell Kyle?” said Samuel, dropping the legs and stepping away.
The smell of putrid flesh was in the air now, but it wasn’t just the cow creating the aroma. I looked over Reggie’s shoulder and saw that ten feet away, a crowd of infected stumbled their way across the grass towards us.
I felt a momentary flinch run through me, and cold panic began to flutter through my chest. I wished that I knew my kill count so far into the apocalypse. The total must have run into the thousands, yet the sight of the infected still made my fingers shake ever so slightly as I reached for my knife.
There were six of infected; three grown men, two women and a child. The child was missing his right hand, and two of his fingers on his left hand had been chewed down to the knuckle. The men were tall and strapping, their skin swollen and discoloured to look like bruised peaches. The women walked with their arms outstretched. One had nails that were an inch long and sharp at the end. The other infected’s chin hung loose from her face, probably due to a dislocated jaw.
I stepped forward, put my hand on Reggie’s shoulder and moved him away. He seemed surprised at first, but then he turned and saw the infected, and I heard him yelp. Within seconds Lou and Mel were by my side, Lou with a red crowbar raised at shoulder height, Mel with a cleaver.
I had thought about standardising weapons at one point. It seemed to me that rather than knives and cleavers, long, sharpened sticks and
poles would be the way to go. That way we could pierce the brains of the infected without getting close to them. In practice, it hadn’t worked. The fact was that people had gotten used to their individual weapons; to the feel of them in their hands, and the weight as they swung them.
One of the male infected cried out and stretched towards us with a step so large that it almost lost its balance. Lou was the first to move, by jamming her crowbar through its eye socket until the eyeball popped and juice ran down the rusted metal.