by Jack Lewis
“This is going to hurt,” he said.
***
Hours later, we still hadn’t seen the infected. Daylight no longer poured through the hole in the roof. Silver moonlight streaked in through the slats in the barn door and cast lines on the floor. Somewhere, maybe miles away, an owl shrieked.
We bundled our bags together and took out anything with an edge so that we could give Lou a makeshift bed. I covered her with my coat. I wished that we had brought our sleeping bags, but we had decided not to take them because we couldn’t afford the extra weight. This was to be a quick journey, and if we slept in our coats we would have been warm enough since the Scottish winter hadn’t quite taken hold yet.
Charlie leaned back against a wooden beam which reached up and supported the roof. Ben was stretched on the floor next to him. Mel sat next to Lou with her hand on her forehead. The two women had never been good friends, but Mel seemed to have taken Lou’s injury to heart. Reggie stood at the door of the barn and peered through the slats to the darkened fields outside.
“So what now?” said Mel? “Do we go back?”
“It’s clear we can’t go on. She needs medical attention,” said Charlie.
I stood with my arms crossed. Without my coat to shield me from it, the breeze smothered my skin. I walked around the barn to keep warm. In the corner I saw a rusted rake resting against the wall and next to it was a wheelbarrow filled with bricks.
“What about the helicopter? If someone’s alive, we need to get to them.”
Mel leaned forward. “And how about Lou? You know, your friend? She needs help.”
Reggie turned away from the door. His face was haggard.
“I hate to break this to you. But we don’t exactly have five star medical facilities back in camp. She won’t be much better off there.”
“And if we go back now,” I said, “there might not be a camp for much longer.”
Lou stirred on her bed. She hadn’t opened her eyes for hours, but her chest rose and fell as she slept. I hated seeing her like this. She had always been the strong one, and it didn’t seem right for her to be so weak. I knew she needed help but at the same time, Reggie was right. There was nothing at camp that could help her. Charlie was the only one with a slight amount of medical knowledge, and he was here with us.
I knew that we had to go on. If we went back empty handed, then the people would side with Darla. They would start to leave camp in groups, and most of them would find nothing on the road but death. There was more at stake than just one person, and going back now would have made a mockery of Lou’s injury. It would have meant that she had suffered it for nothing.
“What if we make her a crutch?” I said.
Mel shook her head.
“It’ll be a couple of days before she can walk . Even then, she’d still be going at a snail’s pace.”
“I could stay with her,” said Reggie. “You guys could press on, find the helicopter.”
I rubbed my head. There was no sweat this time, but my skin felt cold.
“I don’t know.”
Reggie walked up to me. When he stopped in front of me, I saw how bloodshot his eyes were. His hair was so greasy I could smell it.
“Just leave me some food. I have my knife, and if we’re quiet and keep the barn closed, we’ll be fine.”
I thought about what to do. More than anything I wanted Lou to be okay, but I knew that I had to find the helicopter. I felt like it was the most important thing any of us could do. As I considered the options, I heard the twang of guitar strings. Above us, Gregor picked at his guitar and played a maudlin tune.
I turned toward Lou.
“Wake her up,” I told Mel.
“But Kyle…”
“Just wake her up.”
Mel put her hand on Lou’s shoulder and softly shook her. After a few seconds Lou stirred, and then her eyelids flickered. When she opened her eyes there was a lost look in them, as though she didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. Then she looked down at her leg, and recollection flooded back.
“We need to ask you something,” I told her.
Lou moaned.
“We don’t know what to do, Lou. I mean, we have a plan. But it means you staying here with Reggie. And I wanted to know what you thought, because I won’t leave you unless you’re okay with it.”
Lou turned her head toward me, but her eyes were unfocussed. She opened her mouth to speak.
“Ugh. Kyle, I don’t-”
Her head dropped back onto the bag beneath her. Mel put the back of her hand on Lou’s head.
“She’s burning up.”
I turned my head toward Charlie.
“She must be infected,” he said.
On hearing the word infected, Reggie’s head snapped toward the scientist. His hand reached for his knife. The movement was slow and instinctive, and when he recognised he was doing it, he pulled his hand away.
“I don’t mean that kind of infection,” said Charlie. “Her leg. There’s a reason they don’t just pour whiskey over a wound and then call it a day. It isn’t exactly medicinal.” Then he looked at me. “We need to get her some antibiotics. There’s no two ways about it.”
“Where from?” said Reggie.
“You’re not going to like it,” said Charlie.
I nodded. I knew what he was going to say. “From town.”
Charlie nodded. “A pharmacy in one of the towns will have them. They’re probably years out of date by now, but we don’t have much of a choice. It’s either the antibiotics or…”
“Or what?”
“She could lose the leg.”
I didn’t like the idea of going to town, but it was clear that I couldn’t just stay idle. I had already chopped off Charlie’s arm, so I didn’t like the idea of being responsible for Lou losing a leg. There was no other choice.
“Okay,” I said. “But only two of us will go. I don’t want to get there and attract the wrong attention. The rest of you will stay here.”
Chapter 14
Sometimes it took going near a town to remember what we used to have and how our lives used to be. Among the oak and willow trees, the swaying grass and cresting hills, it was easy to forget about the machine-driven smog and commercialisation of our old lives. It had been sixteen years since I’d held money in my hands, yet my palms didn’t feel empty for its absence. I never carried a wallet anymore and I never worried about bills.
I turned to Mel. We were the only ones going to town and we were comfortable, both with each other and with our silence.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure Kyle.”
“I was just thinking how long it’s been since we had to carry money. More than sixteen years. But even after all this time, for some damn reason I still remember the pin number for my bank card. Do you still remember yours?”
She arched her eyebrows. “I was, like, eight when the outbreak happened. I didn’t even get pocket money, let alone a debit card.”
A brown sign welcomed us to Larkton and informed us that its population was thirty thousand and that it was twinned with a town in France. Your population isn’t thirty thousand anymore, I thought.
“Eight. That’s rough. I forget what it’s like for people like you. At least I had something of a life. I was married, I had a career. You barely had time to learn long division.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how things go. I spent fifteen years of the outbreak terrified and one year getting stronger.”
“How so?” I said.
“That’s when I met you and Justin.”
“What about your parents? Back then, I mean.”
She put her hands in her pockets and looked at the floor as he spoke.
“You’re getting awfully talkative.”
“What can I say? I’m becoming a people person.”
“My mum lived in Tenerife, so I don’t know what the hell happened to her,” said Mel. “Dad was fifty five when it all st
arted. He was old as dad’s go, and not really in the best of health. He passed away a couple of years into the outbreak when we lived in the government camp just outside of Newcastle. Lucky it was nature that got him, and not the infected.”
We passed the ‘Welcome to Larkton’ sign. The air changed once we properly stepped into the town. It became heavier somehow, as if it was weighed down with things that you didn’t find in the wide open fields. It was the smell of crumbling buildings, of infected collapsed in doorways, and long-dried blood smeared on the pavement. The only sign of life was a dog as it scurried down the street in front of us. We walked the road which led into the centre of the town. The centre was usually the target of our scavenging trips, but I wanted to avoid it today. The whole point of only two of us coming to Larkton was that we would be able to sneak through.
In the distance, rising above the slanted roofs of the shops and houses, were the twin chimneys of the Larkton cheese factory. They were dirty and grey and stood fifty feet tall. There would once have been a constant stream of smoke drifting from the tops, but now they stood silent, like sentinels watching over the town.
We walked slowly down the right-hand side of the road. Mel looked across the road to our left and kept on watch for infected. I scanned the shops to our right. It was all too easy for an infected to be lurking in a doorway or on a street corner. Once they saw us, it would take just seconds for them to grow hungry.
“Hang on,” I said. “Check this out.”
We stopped in front of the window of a shop named Express Newsagents. The glass was covered in dust. There didn’t look to be anything useful in the shop itself, since chocolate biscuits and milk didn’t fare so well sixteen years into the apocalypse. I bent down to my knees and felt a faint pain in the scar on my leg.
Halfway down the window there were little index cards. Each of them was written in different handwriting, some printed, some ornate and slanted. The ink was black, red and blue.
For sale: Trampoline, 2 years old, 10ft. Collection only. Call Tom and Heather on XXXXX.
Wanted: Owners for four Schnauzer pups. Free to a good home.
There were cards advertising every aspect of people’s lives, from baby cots for sale to funerals with an open invite. Most of them had gone unfulfilled as the outbreak started and the world began to end. It just seemed so pointless. At one point, the focus of Tom and Heather’s life had been the sale of a used trampoline. It was probably in their back garden now, collecting rain and growing moss, while Tom and Heather were either dead or infected.
Mel stood above me and read out the headlines from pages of Larkton Evening News which were stuck onto the glass.
“Vigil held for missing girl,” she read. “Hundreds of residents attended a vigil outside Mount Hope church to pray for the healthy return of Gilly Moss, six.” She looked at me. “That’s all I can read, the rest is covered in crap.”
“We better go,” I said.
It all seemed so empty. It was easy to forget sometimes that life had stopped dead while we were in the middle of it. People were selling trampolines, finding homes for puppies, holding vigils for missing girls. Then everything had been uprooted.
I leaned forward and read more of the index cards. I knew that we had to leave, but it was addictive to scan over them and see what people wanted and what was happening in the world back then.
As I read, a face appeared against the window. Its skin was falling away from its cheeks. Its eyes were bloodshot. It stared at me and snarled, and its teeth were so brown that I could almost smell its foul breath through the glass.
The shock of it made me fall back onto the pavement. In a second I had straightened up again and grabbed my knife. I got to my feet, and from inside the shop the infected got to its feet too, following my movements like a decayed mirror image. It raised its hands and pounded on the glass, its fist making a dull thud on the double glazed windows.
“That’s our cue to leave,” I said.
We walked down the street away from the thudding. I hoped that nothing around us heard it. I couldn’t see any infected, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Far down the road, a brown speck against the grey concrete, the stray dog stopped. It looked at us for a second, and then went on its way.
We took the first right turning that we could find. It led to a back street, and the rear yards of the town shops looked onto it. There were wheelie bins lined up next to each gate, all of them waiting for a rubbish collection that would never come.
“Let’s cut down here,” said Mel. “Better we avoid the main street.”
I nodded, and we walked down the grime-covered backstreet. The air was unwholesome, and I felt like I was breathing in moss or mould. We followed the path and went by an old Chinese takeaway, a haberdashery and a solicitor’s office. I wondered if it was the solicitor’s office that Reggie had once been sent to buy, but then I remembered that the office he told us about had been in Grey Fume, not Larkton.
“Think they’re all okay at the barn?” I said.
“Sure. Everyone’s there,” said Mel.
“I’m worried about Lou.”
“I know, Kyle. But you’ve done everything you can. You’re here, aren’t you? Let’s get her the antibiotics and get the hell out of here. The smell is giving me a headache.”
Soon the only way to progress was to go back onto the main road, so we left the dingy rear street and re-joined it. The clouds had started to spit at us and the concrete flags of the pavement were dotted with little splatters of rain. The pharmacy was five minutes away on the opposite side of the road, on a left turning at the edge of the main street.
As were about to walk toward it, I saw movement in the corner of my eye. I felt on edge. I put my palm around the handle of my knife on my belt, and I stepped back against the wall of the building behind me. I crouched down. Next to me, Mel followed suit. Neither of us spoke, but I could hear her breaths coming quicker.
The movement came from behind us, on the opposite side of the street. A figure dressed in black stepped out of a side street. I could tell straight away that it was a person rather than an infected. His movements were deliberate and fluid. He paused for a second to zip up his black jacket to his chin. He wore a hood over his head, so the only thing I could tell about him was that his face was pasty white.
I wondered what to do. Should we approach him? My natural caution held me back, though I knew that anyone who could walk through a town on their own was someone who was gifted at survival. Maybe that was the kind of person we needed.
The figure turned in our direction. He seemed to look at us for a split second, and then his gaze passed over us.
“Did he see us?” whispered Mel.
I held a finger in the air. I waited, but the figure didn’t move. Then, without warning, he bolted into a run down the high street. As I wondered whether to call out or give chase, he had reached the end of the street and turned right and then disappeared from view.
I got to my feet.
“What are you doing?” said Mel.
“I need to know who this is.”
I started to walk down the street. I thought I saw movement from the doorways around me, but looking around there was nothing. There was a faint sound in the air. It could have been the breeze, or it could have been something more. For the moment, I had to ignore it. Something about the figure in black was disconcerting, and I felt that I had to know who they were and what they were doing.
When we reached the end of the street and turned the corner, we saw nothing but an empty road. I wondered where the figure had gone. Had he ducked into one of the houses? Was he watching us now from behind a twitching curtain?
The sound in the air was louder now. I pulled my knife from my belt.
“This is getting hairy, Kyle,” said Mel.
We needed to turn around. The pharmacy was behind us, and I was letting my curiosity get the better of me. Was it really curiosity though, or was it something else? Deep down, I knew
there was something wrong about the person in the street.
I walked forward, down the right turning. It was a short road, and I just needed to see what was around the corner. If he wasn’t there, I would turn around. If he was there…well, what was I going to do? What was my plan?
“Wrong way Kyle,” said Mel.
I ignored her and carried on down the street. I felt eyes watching me from the windows of the shops around us, but when I looked up, all I saw were dark rooms or drawn curtains. I reached the corner, and turned it. And then I stopped and felt my heart sink.