by Jack Lewis
“Reggie, help me,” I said.
Gregor put two big hands around the top of the shutter door. His shoulders tensed up as he tried to move the metal, but the doors held firm. The infected were feet away from him now. They were close to getting out of the warehouse, where they would begin a pursuit that would see us fleeing back into the Wilds.
Gregor looked up. He seemed to notice something inside the warehouse.
“Kyle,” said Reggie.
He held a corner of the stretcher. I gripped my corner and we lifted it up. Although adrenaline flooded my body, my limbs felt sluggish and ill-equipped for the weight.
“I’m sorry Kyle,” Mel began.
“Not now,” I said.
The wails of the desperate dead shattered the night. They had almost reached Gregor now. Some wore the overalls of factory workers, the fabric torn and stained with what looked like oil but could have been blood. I saw the infected with blonde hair who had been at the window. He looked nothing like Justin.
As the infected almost reached the door, Gregor stepped inside the warehouse. What the hell are you doing? I thought.
He reached up and grabbed a link of chain that was on the corner of the door. He started to pull on it. There was a screeching sound as the shutters began to fall, the metal moving down inch by inch.
We watched as the shutter door closed, leaving Gregory on the wrong side of it. The noise of the metal couldn’t drown out the infected, and their moans and wails increased until soon it was all I could hear.
I could only see Gregor’s legs now. Gradually they were covered with metal until I could only see his boots, and then finally a dozen more feet joined his at the door.
Chapter 16
I couldn’t shake the image of Gregor’s feet at the bottom of the door. The shutter covered the rest of him from view, and the groans of the undead became a haunting song that my ears couldn’t shut out. When we saw shuffling feet join Gregor’s in the doorway, we didn’t need to see him to know what happened next. Gregor cried out once, but after that he didn’t scream in pain or beg for help.
We spent the next day searching for Ben. The birds chirped songs as morning rose, and they carried them on through the day as we combed the countryside fields and roads. We split up into two groups.
Charlie and Mel walked a half mile to our left, a hundred yards away from a reservoir which sat murky blue under a placid sky. Reggie and I supported Lou on her stretcher. In the early morning she tried to walk with her crutch nestled under her armpit, but within an hour her forehead and cheeks burned red.
There wasn’t exactly a hum of conversation. Lou was otherwise occupied with the infection her body was trying to fight. Reggie didn’t have much to say, and I was glad of it. I ran the events of the last few days through in my head and I tried to think of another way they could have turned out.
So many questions demanded answers. What if we hadn’t gone into the tunnels? The wall wouldn’t have collapsed, and Lou’s leg would be fine. She wouldn’t have sweat pooling on her head, with her leg losing the battle to the infection. Maybe if we hadn’t gone into the tunnels, we wouldn’t have ended up in the barn. There would have been no need to go into Larkton, and Ben would still be here. If the kid hadn’t run away, we wouldn’t have gone to Grey Fume, and Gregor wouldn’t have had to shut himself in with a factory full of infected.
Or perhaps none of it mattered. Maybe our decisions were just dust blown around by the wind, and whichever way the breeze blew, we could do nothing but follow it. We’d set out with seven healthy people, and now there were five of us.
No. There are still six, I told myself. I wasn’t giving up on Ben.
As the day wound on we all met on the field and settled next to a tangled bush. The trail had gone as dead as the darkening sky above us, and everyone wore grim expressions. When Charlie joined us, he walked over to Lou and knelt by her side. He put the back of his hand on her head.
“If we had a thermometer she’d be melting the mercury,” he said.
Lou groaned. Her lips looked cracked and raw, like tectonic plates rubbing against each other.
“Give her some water,” I said.
“How are we doing for supplies?” said Reggie.
He paced in front of us. His shoulders looked strong now, as if every passing minute lifted the weight of Kendal from him. I knew that part of it was an act. Sometimes, when he thought nobody was looking, he would stare out into the distance with an empty look. His eyes peeled back the landscape and found nothing in it.
“Can you hand me the bags, Mel?” I said.
Mel sat with her back to us and stared in the direction of Grey Fume. Losing Gregor had hit her in the gut. He had been a strange guy but he was one of us, and he had given his life for the group. Mel had been close to him in camp, I knew. She and the butcher had spent a lot of time together while he trained her. Maybe he had filled a role that had been empty since she lost her dad.
“Mel?” I said.
She turned around. She lifted a rucksack and threw it over to me. The ease in which she tossed it worried me, because it meant that the bag had lost a lot of weight. We should still have had enough supplies to get to the helicopter and back, but the journey was going on a lot longer than I expected it to.
Lou groaned again. She tried to sit up but strained at the effort, and Charlie gently pushed her back down. Seeing her like this made me feel sick. We needed to do something for her.
“What’s going to happen?” I said. “If we can’t treat the infection.”
Charlie stared at me with wide eyes as if he was trying to tell me to shut up.
“We need to talk about it,” I said.
“Kyle’s right,” said Lou, her voice weak.
Charlie squeezed her arm.
“You need to rest.”
She shook her head.
“I want to know what’s going to happen to Me. Don’t treat me like a kid, damn it. I won’t have you talking to me like that. Or talking about me as if I’m not here. Just tell me what the hell’s going to happen.”
Charlie’s face looked as grave as the grey countryside around him. He sat in the muddy field, his curls stuck to the sweat on his head. The scientist had adapted a lot better to the expedition that I had expected.
“You could lose the leg,” he said.
“That the worst case?” said Lou.
“That’s the only case. If we don’t treat the infection, you’ll lose it.”
“Love your bedside manner.”
“If you ask for the truth, I won’t mince my words.”
Lou’s head sagged back down onto the wooden stretcher, as if the effort of talking had been too much for her.
“I’m holding you back,” she said.
Reggie stopped pacing. He rubbed his temples with his index fingers.
“I feel sick,” he said.
His right hand was starting to swell, the skin between his thumb and index finger inflamed and red raw. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I had been stung on the thumb by wasp whilst climbing a tree. This was no wasp sting though; who knew what kind of diseases the tunnel rats carried?
I sat up straight and felt the thorns of the bush dig into my back. I thought about what we had seen over the last couple of days. First there had been the stranger in Larkton who had run away when he saw us. When we had followed him we had run into a crowd of infected. I replayed the scene in my head and I still couldn’t decide if it was an accident or if the man had led us to them. Then there was the infected in Grey Fume, the one tied up next to the fountain. The image of the ropes stretched over his newly infected skin disturbed me.
“One thing I’ve been wondering,” I said. “About the guy next to the fountain. He was tied up.”
“He’d been there a while,” said Charlie.
“The question is who put him there? And why? Someone fastened him to the fountain and left him for the infected. Who the hell would do something like that?”
&n
bsp; Reggie looked up.
“There are bad people in the world. No sense trying to see what makes them tick; they’re driven by something else.”
“Actually,” said Charlie, “there’s every sense in trying to see what makes them tick. We need to learn what drives people like that. Did you know that the FBI used to interview convicted serial killers to get an insight into their minds?”
“What the hell could you learn from those maniacs?” said Mel.
“You can learn what drives people to do despicable things.”
Reggie scoffed.
“Some people don’t have anything driving them except evil.”
Mel fixed her stare on Charlie.
“Don’t tell me the FBI used to give them reduced sentences?”
Charlie shook his head. “On the contrary. They promised the killers nothing except time to talk and an ear to listen. The murders loved to make themselves heard. They yearned to be understood.”
As the group talked around me, their voices started to fade. I stared at the overgrown fields and overcast sky. A flock of birds were so far in the distance that they looked like dots swooping across the clouds. Life went on, I realised. No matter what happened to the people on it, the world would carry on in ignorance. If we were to survive, we’d have to do it ourselves because we’d get no help from the world around us.
Guilt sloshed in my stomach like spoiled milk. I looked at Lou, her face pale but burning up at the same time and her broken leg starting to swell with infection. I had let her get injured. Not only that, but I had allowed Ben to run away. True, I hadn’t been there when it happened, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t my responsibility. Everything that had happened so far was down to me and my stupid need to be a leader. Back in camp when we’d argued, Lou had been right. This wasn’t about helping everyone else, it was all about me. I really did need to be needed.
I stood up. Charlie stopped mid-sentence and looked at me.
“I owe you all an apology,” I said. I rubbed the back of my head. “Shit. I’m no good at this. Guess the fact is that I’m not much of a leader after all. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time.”
Mel crossed her legs. “Kyle, you don’t have to – “
Before I could say anything, Reggie stopped and turned his head.
“What was that?” he said.
We all stopped talking. I listened, but I couldn’t hear anything. I looked at Reggie.
“I heard something,” he said.
I listened again. Sure enough, there was a sound. Something soft pattered across the grass. Whoever it was, they walked nearby but took care to hide their footsteps.
I got up off the ground. I pulled my knife from my belt. Deep in my heart I hoped that the sound was Ben coming back to join us, but I had learned not to hope for best case scenarios. The only saving grace was that I didn’t hear the groan of the infected.
The footsteps came from behind us, but the bush blocked my view. I stayed on my knees and moved to the side so that I could get a view of whatever was behind us. Daylight was draining down the plughole of the sky, but there was still enough light for me to make out a figure in the field behind us.
Even though he crouched low so that he could sneak through the fields, I knew that the figure was too tall to be Ben. He wore a hood over his head. His entire outfit was black and seemed to meld into the shadows around him, but the crunching of his boots on the ground gave him away.
I turned around. Everyone looked at me.
“It’s him,” I said, in a low voice.
“Who?” said Charlie?
“The guy we saw in Larkton.”
“I’m going to kill that bastard,” said Mel.
I held my hand up to stop her.
“Quiet. I don’t want him to run again.”
Back in Larkton, the man had sprinted away as soon as he saw us. He was fast, and right now he had a fifty yard head start on us. We needed to be careful about this if we were going to catch him.
I got to my feet. I would watch him and wait for him to turn his back to us, and then I would creep up on him.
Lou stirred behind me. She tried to sit up but failed, and she slumped onto her back. She let out a moaning sound as if she was trying to speak but her brain filtered the words and made them unintelligible.
The figure in the field looked up. He turned his head in our direction. I knew that I had to make my move. As I rose to full height and started running, the figure bolted into a run and trampled the fields with the speed of a sprinter. I gave chase but my leg started to ache, and I watched as his black frame disappeared into the horizon.
Chapter 17
“Think they’ll be okay?” said Mel.
A stone path was buried somewhere under the wild grass and bracken, but sixteen years without maintenance had allowed nature to reclaim its patch. It must have been the early hours of the morning now, and the nocturnal insects and birds of prey buzzed and shrieked into the night.
To our right there was a wall made of stone of various shapes and sizes all jammed together. Next to it, looking out of place in the remoteness of the landscape, was a wooden bench. The oak seat was sodden and scratched. A plaque was fastened onto the backrest, black and made from metal that had resisted the rusting of nature. It read ‘Dedicated to the memory of John Arthur. He would sit here sometimes. Other times he’d sit somewhere else’.
I looked at Mel. She and Reggie were the only ones walking the rough path with me.
“There wasn’t much choice,” I said. “In any case, Charlie has a knife. If they stay quiet, they’ll be fine.”
The man we had seen near camp had fled in this direction, but the countryside spread wide and it made no effort to help our search. Instead we relied on instinct, with our tired legs fuelled only by a desire to find the stranger.
Chance encounters with strangers were rare, and most started with a wary nod and ended with polite tidings. This one had been different from the beginning; the man had run away from us, and now we had caught him spying on our conversation.
“I used to beg my dad to take me to Loch Ness,” said Mel. “But he always said we were skint. I remember seeing that grainy photo. You know, the black and white one with the monster sticking out of the water. Man, I was obsessed with it.”
“You know the photo was a hoax?” said Reggie.
“Yeah, I do now obviously. But I was a kid.”
“Guess I know what you mean,” said Reggie. “I used to think Jurassic Park was a documentary.”
Mel looked at me.
“We’re confusing Kyle. He was never a kid. He was born a forty year old man with a frown on his face.”
I tried to smile, but the expression felt wrong. I glanced from left to right and took in the details of the landscape. Green grass, some patches overgrown, others yellowing and lolling in the breeze. Purple flowers buried under tangled weeds. I had never been a plant person, so I couldn’t even begin to remember what they were called.
I tried to look deeper. Small shrubs formed natural dividing lines across the open fields. A thread of barbed wire was above the wall and ran along it into the distance. Somewhere north the shimmer of a loch glinted in the sun. In front of us, close enough to a cresting hill that it looked like it was being devoured, was a cottage.
The changing of our direction served as our wordless pact to follow the path toward the house. Hills rose on either side of us, curved blocks of rock and stone that were covered in parts by grass. It felt like we were walking through a valley that tolerated our presence now, but could easily have closed in on us and crushed our bones.
The cottage had a thatched roof that seemed to droop over the edge of the building. The brickwork was beaten by age and wore patches of moss. Drawn curtains covered the windows. The garden had sprouted into a jungle of weeds, dandelions and grass. The plants had spread over the bonnet of an abandoned hatchback, and looked like they were trying to swallow it whole.
Mel stopped walking. She put
her hand out to lean on the stone wall of the garden, but then pulled her hand away.
“Okay. Now I’m uneasy.” She turned her head toward me. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
I saw what she meant. The house looked corrupted, and it felt unwelcoming. Everything about it seemed designed to repel people; from the hungry garden to the ivy slithering over the walls. There was something waiting for us in this house, I decided. But then, there was something waiting in every house, in every town, in every city. We lived in a world where danger was a constant, and the chance that Ben was here meant that we had to go inside.