by Jack Lewis
The concrete flags of the path to the front door wobbled under our steps. I led the way, my knife clutched in my hand, with Reggie and Mel walking behind in single file.
“Something just moved,” said Reggie.
I stopped cold. I didn’t see anything.
“The room on the top floor. Far left. The curtain twitched.”
The window frame seemed too small, as if it was three quarters the size of normal dimensions. A pale yellow curtain covered the glass and didn’t give even an inch of a view of inside the house. I kept staring, but nothing moved or twitched.
“You’re seeing things. Try and keep it together,” I said. I paused, then added: “But tell me if it twitches again.”
We crowded around the front door. So far nothing had happened. No infected had burst from the undergrowth, no suspicious homeowners had ran at us with kitchen knives. Yet my heart kept a rapid tempo and I had a feeling on the back of my neck as if unseen eyes stared at it.
“Guess this is it,” said Mel. “Who wants to do the honours?”
She nodded at the door handle. It was metal, and at some point it had started out gold but the paint had worn away to reveal silver. It looked as cold as the rest of the house.
“I’ll go,” I said.
I gripped the handle and sure enough, the metal was freezing against my skin. I started to turn it, expecting the door to be yanked forward and for someone, or something, to be waiting on the other side. The lock let out a whine as the handle turned.
“Should have brought some oil,” said Reggie.
I turned it again. I realised that I was starting to breathe quicker, so I took a lungful of air and held it in and tried to settle the drumbeat thumping in my chest. As the handle screeched, I felt the latch opening.
I stepped back and readied my knife. I don’t know what I expected; infected? Stalkers? A crazy farmer with a shotgun? Instead there was nothing but a carpeted hallway that smelled of damp. The door opened onto a lobby which turned into a hallway filled with four other doors. At the end of the lobby was a staircase.
“Ladies first,” said Mel, and pushed passed me.
When she stepped over the door, her foot snagged on something and she fell over. She didn’t have time to put her hands out and she landed awkwardly, hitting the yellow carpet forehead first. Reggie stepped forward and put his hand on her back.
“Okay Mel?” he said.
She turned around. The skin on her forehead was grazed and her cheeks were red, but otherwise she was okay.
“I’ll make it. Guess that’s karma,” she said.
I looked down at the door step. At the bottom of the doorframe, just an inch above ground, a silver wire was tied from one side to the other. It was so thin that it was easy to miss at first glance, yet it looked sturdy.
“Not karma. Just a trip wire,” I said. I pointed down at the doorframe. “Look.”
“There’s something wrong here,” said Reggie.
“Let’s not go rushing in.”
Mel got to her feet. She licked her fingers and then rubbed her head, wincing as she touched the graze.
“Wait until I catch the bastard who’s playing games,” she said.
The air was musty, like fabric that had gotten wet with rainwater. There was an atmosphere inside, something heavy, and it felt like we had disturbed it. Paintings lined the walls, oil depictions of a desolate landscape. In one of them, a lonely man pushed a wheelbarrow down a deserted road while the sky darkened around him. I wondered if the paintings were of the local area.
“Four doors, three people. Better get exploring,” I said. “I would say we should split up to save time, but I’ve seen my share of horror flicks. Given how many times I’ve called people idiots for splitting up, it’d be pretty ironic for me to tell us to do the same thing.”
Reggie nodded. He seemed pleased that we would be searching the house together.
“Let’s start here then.”
We opened the first door on the landing. The room was dark save the daylight that snuck in through the gaps in a net curtain. It made for a dim illumination, but my eyes soon adjusted. When they did, I felt my breath catch in my chest.
Reggie must have seen it too, but he lost his footing and nearly tripped over the edge of a couch.
“What the hell?” he said, straightening up. He stared at the walls around him.
Handwriting covered the walls. The size of the words changed from sentence to sentence. Some were written in giant block capitals, and others were so small that I had to press my nose against the wall to read them.
“Is that what I think it is?” said Mel.
She pointed at one wall, where all the writing was in a deep red colour. Looking around, I saw that only two colours had been used for the scrawlings; crimson red and dirty brown. It made it pretty obvious which natural resources the writer had used for his ink.
The writing didn’t mean much. Most of it was a variance of a single sentence.
Shawn keeps them fed.
Keep them fed, Shawn.
Feed us Shawn. Feed us. Feed us feed us feed us.
“Interesting design choice,” said Mel. “Not exactly welcoming.”
She walked to the end of the room, gripped the net curtains and pulled them. With the curtains gone, daylight filled the room. If Mel had done it to make the room seem less cold, then she had failed.
I wished the room was dark again. I looked around me. I put my hand to my mouth and coughed, and felt my stomach start to bubble. Reggie turned around and walked straight out of the door.
On the table in the centre of the room was an array of body parts. The wooden surface was covered in dismembered arms and legs that someone had lined up in a perfect row. I started to get a dizzy feeling. I tried to keep it together. Why was it that years after the outbreak, after everything I had seen, certain things still brought up a feeling of revulsion in me?
“Why don’t they smell?” I said.
Mel stood over the table. She picked up a severed leg. The wound had been cauterised and the skin was a dull pink. It looked like it should have been hanging from a hook in a butchers shop. Mel twisted the limb in her hands.
“It’s been salted,” she said. “Someone preserved it. Did a pretty good job, too.”
There was a crashing sound in the hallway. I turned my head and saw that Reggie was struggling with someone outside the door. A figure had latched onto him and they wrestled in the hallway, slamming each other into the walls of the house. A painting slid off its hook and fell to the floor, the glass frame shattering into hundreds of pieces. Reggie grunted with pain as his back thudded into the wall.
I ran out into the hallway. The figure wrestling Reggie was dressed in black, with a hood over his head. I grabbed the hood and yanked him away, putting my shoulders behind the effort. The man was surprisingly light. When I threw him into the wall behind me, his head slammed back and his hood fell down.
He was just a teenager. He looked to be Justin’s age, and he had a similar flop of blonde hair. His eyes were green and almost feral, and inch-long fine hairs grew from his chin. His eyes looked dazed but they soon cleared, and when they did he stared at me with a look of hate. I saw him reach for his pocket.
Before he could do anything else, I stepped forward and threw my full weight into a punch. My fist connected with his right cheek, and the strength knocked his head back into the wall. His eyes glazed over once again and he slid down to the floor.
***
We propped him up on a wooden chair that we found in the kitchen. Mel was at his side with the blade of her cleaver resting in her hand. She studied the teenager with a grimace on her face. It was strange to think that she was a similar age to him; over the last year, Mel had grown a hell of a lot older.
“I’m going to go look upstairs,” she said.
I shook my head. “Remember what I said about splitting up?”
“This isn’t a horror film, Kyle. I know it might seem like it some
times, but unfortunately for us this is real life.”
“Yeah. That’s what makes it worse.”
Mel walked across the room. The teenager turned his head and his gaze followed her every step. When she stopped in the doorway, she tapped her cleaver against her palm.
“I’ll be careful, honestly” she said, and left the room.
The stranger turned his gaze toward me. His cheek was swollen red from my punch.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
He was no more than a boy; sparse sprouts on his chin from a puberty not long gone. His arms and legs were sprightly, having no muscle mass but no fat either. Back in Larkton we had seen him sprint down the street, so I knew that he was fast. His body shape wasn’t exactly strange given his sparse diet and regular exercise.
There was an animal cunning in his eyes, a glimmer in his gaze that held experience long beyond his age. If the world hadn’t changed all those years ago, this boy would have just been at college with his friends. Instead, he had managed to survive alone in the Wilds. I knew what that took, and I knew that some of the things you learned, and some of the things you had to do, aged you beyond the normal run of time.
“If you kill me,” he said, “Salt me. Don’t let me go to waste.”
Reggie perched on the end of the couch. He couldn’t take his eyes off the boy, and he gripped his hammer in his hand and twisted the handle in his palm. The teenager seemed oblivious to Reggie’s stare.
“Is there anyone else here?” I said.
He shook his head.
“I’m not a fan of surprises,” I said. “So if you’ve got any, you better tell me. Are there any other survivors here?”
The teenager shook his head from side to side in exaggerated slow movements.
“Noooooooooo,” he said, drawing the word out so that it sounded like a whale song.
I showed him my knife.
“Are you sure?”
“That won’t be sharp enough to butcher me. There’s a whetstone out back, go and freshen up the blade.”
“Just answer the question.”
He shook his head, quicker this time. “I told you. No survivors here.”
He was twenty-odd years younger than me and half my weight, but something about him chilled me. He was part of a generation of people born in this new world; boys and girls who had to grow up fast. I got the sense that he was capable of anything.
“Reggie, stand in the doorway and keep listening for Mel.”
I turned to face the teenager.
“What’s your name?”
“They never named me.”
“Who are they?”
“My group. We never called each other by names. You don’t personalise something that’s about to die, it gets too hard.”
Reggie gave me a funny look and then shook his head.
“Call me Rhadamanthus,” said the teenager.
Reggie let out a sigh.
“What kind of name is that?”
“It means judge of the dead. He was an Egyptian god.”
“I’m not calling you that,” I said.
“Fine. Call me Shawn. I always liked that name.”
“What are you doing by yourself, Shawn?”
“Isn’t that how we all end up, eventually?”
It struck me how much his voice didn’t match his face. His skin was pale and soft, and it bore the aftermath of an acne flare up. His voice was rich and thick, and the words and their meanings carried more maturity than I expected. It was like talking to an old man in a teenager’s body.
Floorboards creaked above us, and then a door opened. I glanced over at Reggie.
“It’s Mel,” he said.
“You better go up there with her.”
“What about him?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“What about me?” said Shawn.
He leaned forward in his seat. He wore black jeans, black boots and a black hooded sweater. There was a dried stain on the cuff of his right arm, and he had tucked the bottoms of his jeans into his socks.
“What about you?”
“You’ll need to decide what to do with me.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that he could have been talking about the best way to cook a potato. He was right, though. We would have to decide what to do with him. Deep down I knew there was something dangerous about him, and I wouldn’t feel right letting him go. On the other hand, there was no way that I wanted him with us.
The floorboards whined. Reggie poked his head out of the doorframe. He ducked back in a few seconds later and stared at Shawn again. It was a deep stare, as though the boy fascinated him.
“I was just lonely, you know,” said Shawn. He leaned back and crossed one leg over the other. “Just lonely. There are worse people than me around.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“You’ll find out. Sooner rather than later, probably. But hey, what do I know? Not much except what I’ve seen.”
“Such as?”
“Guys racing around on quad bikes and hunting people down. Other things, too. You learn to keep your eyes open when you’re on your own.”
Reggie rubbed his hand over his face.
“I’ve had enough of this. Kyle, let’s ditch him, search the rest of the house and then get out of here. He’s a sick little bastard.”
“Sick?” said Shawn.
I nodded over to the table.
“The arms and the legs,” I said. The words felt strange to say. “Explain yourself.”
Shawn put his hand to his chin and sat, deep in thought. The air held a tension, a wire stretched out and ready to snap. I realised that I was gripping my knife so tight that my knuckles had turned chalky. Shawn seemed relaxed. He leaned his arms behind his head and supported his neck.
“Like I said. I’m not the worst thing out there. You’ve got more to worry about than me. You and your little camp.”
I snapped my head toward him. His eyes were slits, and a flicker of a grin played on the corner of his lips. How did he know about camp? I took a step closer. I was going to have to shake the truth out of him.
There were four sharp thuds upstairs, and then a loud banging as if a door had been flung open.
“Kyle,” shouted Mel. “Kyle!”
Reggie looked out of the doorway.
“What’s up?”
“Tell Kyle to get the hell up here.”
There was an edge of panic to her voice that cut through the tension of the room.
“You okay with him?” I said to Reggie.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look so good.”
“Good enough to keep this little bastard under control.”
I left the room and ran upstairs. Mel met me at the top and pointed at a doorway across the hall. The door was a brown mahogany with flowers carved into it. It seemed out of place in the cottage, as though it belonged in a much bigger and more expensive house.
“Got your knife?” she said.
I held it up. Mel lifted her cleaver.
“Just be careful, Kyle.”
“What’s in there?”
“You’ll see. Just stay away from the walls.”
A chill covered the skin on my back. I walked through the doorway, running the fingers of my right hand along the carved wooden trim. I clutched my blade in my left hand and tried to stay calm despite the anxiety leaking into my veins. I could feel Mel following just a step behind me.
“Watch out to your left,” she said.
It was an arresting sight. A blood stain covered the wooden floorboards. The walls had been stripped bare, and red handprints of different sizes decorated the plaster. Some of them were big enough to be a man’s hand prints, and others were from children. On one wall, written in messy red writing, were the words ‘Help me’.
Stainless steel rings were fastened in place along the walls. Lines of metal chain were looped through the rings, and on the end of the chains were some infected. When
they saw me they lurched in my direction, and the chain jangled as it was fed through the hoops. The infected were silent. Even as they tried to reach for me they made no sound, and I realised that their necks were torn open and their vocal chords had been ripped out. The chain around their waists allowed them movement in the room, but the line was just short enough that they couldn’t reach me.