Fear the Dead (Book 4)

by Jack Lewis

  I remember one time Lou and I had argued over which chemical element was the rarest, and we asked Charlie to settle it for us. I have no idea why this was the subject for our debate, but Charlie seized his chance at proving his knowledge. He put his fingers to his temple and rubbed them as if he had a headache.

  The longer he went without an answer the harder he rubbed, until finally he pulled his hand away and there were red finger marks on his skin. He walked away with a mean-looking g scowl on his face. Later, when the sky was black and every right-minded person was sleeping, I heard him banging on my tent.

  “Astatine” he said, when I unzipped the door. “It’s astatine.”

  I made a sound that I hoped conveyed annoyance, and went back to my sleeping bag. Charlie let out a huff of air in relief, as if he’d been holding something in for hours and had finally gotten his release. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Lou and I had settled the argument hours earlier by deciding that neither of us cared.

  We reached the top of the hill. Lou was to my right. Her eyes were open now, but it seemed like she didn’t really see me. Her forehead was drenched in sweat. Her skin was like a doll’s; neutral in colour, plastic-looking. There was no life to her.

  “Are you sure one of them didn’t bite him while you were fighting?” persisted Al.

  Charlie stared down at the corpses that littered the grass at the bottom of the hill. Most were nameless to us, just bodies that had come back from the dead and then had met their end a second time at our hands. I felt nothing when I looked at most of them, but then there was Reggie. His tall frame was stretched out on the overgrowth, his socks and ankles showing below trousers that were too short.

  “Something nipped him in the tunnels,” said Charlie.

  Al closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “So he was bitten then. Mystery solved.”

  “You don’t get it,” I said. “It was a rat bite.”

  I tried to think back. Reggie had been with me almost every second since we had left camp. The only time he hadn’t been was when Mel and I went to Larkton. When we came back, there were no infected in sight. There was never a point when an infected could have gotten near the group and bitten Reggie without anyone else seeing it happen.

  “Kyle,” said Mel.

  I had almost forgotten about her. She was on the ground now, sat next to the figure that was limp in the grass. Mel must have had a hell of a punch.

  I walked across to her. I reached them, stopped and looked down at the body on the ground. It wasn’t Shawn after all, but it was a familiar face all the same. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Kendal?” I said.

  Reggie’s wife lay on her back on the floor. Her eyelids flickered, and then her eyes started to open. She blinked, as if she was just waking up from a night’s sleep and getting hit full in the face by a ray of sun. She was a terrible sight. She had lost weight in the short time since I had escorted her away from camp. Her jacket was torn on the right sleeve and covered in dark stains. Her knuckles were swollen and scratched. I looked at her waist and I saw that she had cut a hole in her belt and looped the metal through it, holding her jeans tight against her skinny frame. She belonged in a hospital bed with an IV pumping her full of vitamins.

  She squinted at me, and there was a desperate look on her face. It was as if weight wasn’t the only thing that she had lost; there was much more missing than that. The woman that I had escorted out of camp used to have something behind her gaze. It was a primal energy that made the whites of her eyes brighter than most. Since I had last seen her something had put a crack in her, and her energy had leaked out of it and left her body shrivelled.

  Mel got to her feet and stepped back. She gave Kendal a look so full of disgust that it chilled me.

  “You,” she said, making the single syllable sound as venomous as possible.

  Kendal put her hands down on the ground. She tried to push herself up, but she was too weak.

  Al walked over.

  “Have you lot lost your manners?” he said.

  He put a hand out toward Kendal. She took hold of it.

  “You’re freezing, love.”

  He pulled her to her feet. For a second it looked like she was going to fall to the floor, but she kept her balance. She ignored Al, and instead looked at me. The skin around her eyes had the darkness of an insomniac forty hours into a spell of sleeplessness. Tiredness had cut cracks in her face and they seemed to run to the corner of her eyes and down her cheeks.

  I braced myself for an outburst of scorn, but Kendal kept me waiting. It was as if the rage left her, sucked out of her by the desolation of the Wilds. In the absence of anger she would need to find something else to fill her, but it seemed like she was still trying to work out what that was.

  “Look, Kyle,” she said. Her voice was softer than I had ever heard it, barely a whisper above the wind.

  “Don’t listen to the bitch,” said Mel.

  Kendal gave a solemn nod.

  “I don’t deserve much from you. Lord, I’m not gonna ask much. Just don’t leave me. I can’t face it again. Before I saw you, I stopped walking. I sat down on the grass and thought that was it for me.”

  Mel’s gaze was full of fire. “Think about what she did.”

  Kendal’s expression was the opposite; the flames of anger gone, and replaced instead by pleading.

  “Think about Reggie,” she said. “What he’d want. He wouldn’t want you to leave me.”

  Al turned his head from Kendal, to Mel and then to me.

  “Am I missing something?” he said.

  Mel held her cleaver in her hand. Her hand wrapped around the handle as if it had a life of its own and could just fly off in any direction without her firm grip.

  “We evicted her from camp. Kyle ran her out and told her to never come back.”

  “Why?” said Al.

  “She was abusing her husband. And her son.”

  “So you just left her to die?”

  I nodded. “One of our rules. If you harm another person without cause, then you’re on your own.”

  Al put his hand to his forehead, rubbed it, and then turned his back on us.

  “Hellfire. You guys really have gone savage, haven’t you?”

  Kendal reached out and grabbed my hand. Her touch was icy, and it spread a chill up my arms. I pulled away.

  “Please, Kyle,” she said. Her voice was getting more desperate by the second.

  I knew that the decision would be down to me. The question was whether we let her come with us, or if we left her here. There was a biting wind in the air, and not much around us other than the grassy mounds and hills which loomed in every direction.

  I couldn’t face Kendal like this. She was half a person, the life-force drained out of her and replaced by emptiness. With her weight loss and the rings around her eyes, marks of endless nights without sleep, she looked almost dead already. I had condemned her to die in the Wilds once before, but I couldn’t do it again.

  “Fine,” said Al. “Far be it from me to mess with your rules. Bring her or leave her, but make your bloody mind up.”

  I had heard people say in the past that everyone deserved a second chance. I never subscribed to that; some things made forgiveness impossible. That was old world thinking, though. The landscape had changed, and morality had to adapt to it. I searched inside my heart and I found that I wasn’t cold enough to leave her to die a second time.

  I held Kendal’s gaze. I looked at her hollow eyes, unblinking, and spoke.

  “I’m ready to kill you, Kendal. If I have to. I’ve done worse. I don’t want to see your eyes on mine or hear you say my name. You stay at the back, and you keep your mouth shut.”

  “Thank you Kyle. Really.”

  “He said keep your mouth shut,” said Mel.

  Kendal looked down the hill at the corpses on the ground.

  “Reggie turned,” she said.

  She looked at her feet. Everyone was sil
ent for a few seconds, even Mel. It was as though, despite everything, basic human decency meant that we had to give her this. Her husband was dead, and we’d let her have a few seconds to think on it.

  Al adjusted the weight of the rucksack on his back. There was a badge sewn into the strap. He saw me looking, and he stretched the strap out toward me. It was a picture of a bonfire, with logs burning on it and smoke drifting up toward the sky.

  “The first badge I ever earned,” he said. “Got it about a month after joining scouts. Our leader said I was the quickest in our group’s history at getting it.”

  He nodded his head at Lou.

  “Better pick up your cripple, we need to leave.”

  “How long until your ship goes?” I said.

  “A few weeks. Is that enough time? I bloody hope so. But it isn’t just that. This place isn’t safe.”

  “Well, yeah. Don’t know if you noticed,” said Mel, “But nowhere’s really safe these days.”

  Al stretched his arms out, and I heard his joints crack.

  “I spent days here trying to fix the sparrow. Heard some things at night that I don’t care to hear again.”

  “Stalkers,” I said.

  “Sorry?” said Al.

  “You must have seen them. They hunt at night. Slimy looking things.”

  Charlie left Lou and walked back over to us. Ben clung to his hand.

  “They’re nocturnal creatures. Like the infected, but more agile. Have you seen them?”

  “I have,” said Kendal.

  Mel gave her a look that was best interpreted as ‘shut up’.

  Al shook his head.

  “The things I heard weren’t creatures. It was engines. Lots of them, buzzing around at night. I won’t lie to you, one night they sounded so close that I climbed in the cockpit and spent the night shitting myself.”

  “I heard them too,” said Kendal. “And other things. Makes me shiver when I think about it.”

  “What sort of things?” said Charlie.

  “Like people chanting,” said Kendal. “And screaming. When night’s at its darkest.”

  ***

  We started the walk back to camp. I lost track of how many miles we had walked to get to the helicopter originally, but I knew that we would soon come across the Quarryman’s Secret pub. Next to it would be the road back to camp. I wondered how it would feel to get back. Would it feel like going home?

  With each mile we covered the terrain became more familiar. Where once it looked like an endless sea of grass and hills, I began to recognise its features. The rock formation shaped like a giant head. A cobblestone wall with barbed wire running along the top and shreds of old carrier bags fluttering from the spikes.

  After a full day of travel, it seemed like there was still miles between us and camp. We didn’t have much chance of making it to the capital in time, I realised.

  We rested next to a wall as the sun dipped from the sky. Next to us was a cattle grid installed over a narrow path at the boundary of a field. Once the field had belonged to a local farmer, but nature had reclaimed it now.

  Lou was on her stretcher, but she asked that we prop her in a sitting position with her back against the wall. Ben lifted a water bottle to her dry lips. She drank the bottle dry, then put out her hand and ran it through the boy’s hair.

  Kendal hovered on the outskirts of the group, sitting by herself and staring at the ground. Mel leaned against the wall and just stared at Reggie’s wife.

  Al stood up, arms folded, rucksack hanging from his back. He looked up at the sky and scowled.

  “Something wrong?” I said.

  “Wish I was up there,” he said. “It’d take an hour in the sparrow.”

  “Well we’ve got to work with what we have.”

  Al glanced at Lou. He sighed.

  “Isn’t going to work. Do you really think we’re going to make it down there in time? My boys won’t wait. That’s our rule. No matter who makes it back to the ship or not, we leave when we say we will.”

  “So what do you suggest?” I said.

  “We need to think about what’s slowing us down.”

  “Which is?”

  “He means me,” said Lou.

  Her voice was croaky, but I was glad to hear it. I wouldn’t have said that she looked better, but it reassured me a little to see that she was conscious, at least. I wondered how long it would last.

  “Kyle, have you got a second?” said Mel.

  I nodded. I turned my stare to Lou.

  “One sec,” I said.

  Lou gave a thin smile and put her hand up in a dismissive gesture.

  Mel and I walked a few paces away under the crunching grass. Al and the rest of them stayed back and watched us. When we were far enough away, we stopped. Mel spoke in a hushed voice.

  “We need to decide what to do with her,” she said.

  I glanced over at Lou. My friend looked weaker than I’d ever seen her.

  “We need to get her something for her leg.”

  “I looked at it earlier, Kyle. Have you seen it? It’s swollen as hell. And I don’t know if it’s just something in the air, but I’m sure it was starting to smell.”

  “We can do something.”

  Mel huffed. “What if she, you know, goes the same way Reggie did?”

  “This is different. She broke her leg, she wasn’t bitten. I’m worried, Mel. It’s become infected, and Charlie said she could lose it.”

  “And if we try to get to London carrying her with us, we’re going to lose a hell of a lot more.”

  Across from us, Kendal sat on the grass. Al stood with his rucksack on his bulky shoulders and shifted on his feet. He looked into the horizon as if he was worried it would disappear.

  “What are you saying, Mel?”

  “I think you know what I’m saying.”

  A dark cloud hung above us, heavy with rain, a deep, dark grey. So plump that it looked like it could fall out of the sky any second. A shadow was cast over Mel’s face. I tried to read her expression, and it worried me. There was something there, a look that she’d worn more and more lately but I had pretended not to see. She was developing a mean streak.

  “I don’t want to hear another damn word from you,” I said.

  Without giving her a second to reply, I walked away from Mel and joined the rest of the group. I knelt down next to Lou. The grass was wet with dew and it soaked through my trousers. I put my hand out. I went to move the makeshift bandage away from Lou’s leg, but she saw my hand and flinched. Instead I rested my palm on her forehead. It was hot and wet.

  “Kyle,” she said. Her voice was strained.

  “Shh. Just rest.”

  “I’m sorry about how I’ve been acting lately. I’ve been a real bitch to you. With Darla. And then I was an idiot and got myself into this state.”

  I smiled at my friend.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I just want you to know,” she said. “You’re one of….There’s plenty of bad people around, and I guess by their standards, you’re alright.”

  “Wow, Lou. Steady with the compliments,” I said.

  She gave a weak laugh. She reached up and grabbed my hand. Where her forehead was burning, the touch of her hand was ice. She tried to squeeze my palm but her grip was weak.

  I sat back on the grass. I felt the rain soak through to my knees and wet my skin. I closed my eyes and sat for a while with Lou’s hand in mine, aware that everyone around us was waiting for something.

  Al wanted to get to London to meet up with the rest of his crew. I didn’t have a clue what Kendal wanted, but I didn’t care. Mel just wanted to get somewhere safe, and Charlie was itching to be back in his lab at camp. What did Ben want? The boy stood next to the scientist and clung to his leg as if it was all that kept him upright. He probably wanted nothing more than to have his mum back. Did he miss his father? Who knew, but he was better off without him.

  All these people, some of them my closest friends,
all needed something. The people back at camp did, too. I thought I could decide for them what they wanted and needed, but the truth was that I didn’t have a clue. I thought I was some tough survivor and I knew better than them, but I was just as clueless as everyone else. My big conceit was thinking I could decide their futures for them. I was an idiot. An arrogant, selfish idiot.