by Jack Lewis
I looked at Lou. Her hand slipped from mine and fell by her side.
“I was wrong,” I said.
She looked at me, though the effort seemed to take every last shred of energy away from her. I became aware of a smell. Something unpleasant. Not quite rotting, but something dark and unnatural.
“Wow,” she said. “Three words I never thought I’d hear you say.”
“I thought I could be the big guy and tell people what to do and what’s good for them,” I said. “But I guess the thing is, I’m just no good at it. People have to decide their own paths, so I’m gonna let them. From now on I’ll only look after me and my own.”
“And does that include me?” said Lou.
I reached out and brushed her hair back over her forehead into her trademark sweep.
“I’m never getting rid of you, am I?”
Al dropped his rucksack to the ground. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his gun, and then he bent down to his rucksack and pulled out a combat knife.
“When you two have finished having your little moment,” he said, “You might want to help deal with these.”
The smell was stronger now. It was the stench of decay, so strong that it made me want to gag.
I stood up. At the bottom of the hill, fifteen feet away, dead bodies walked toward us. Some approached us head on, while others were at our sides, both left and right. There must have been over fifty infected.
Mel ran over to us. She held her cleaver tight in her hand.
“There’s way too many,” she said.
Charlie put his good arm around Ben’s shoulders and pulled the boy close to him.
“So where do were go? Back?”
Al shook his head.
“I’m not running. Don’t know if I mentioned it earlier, but there’s somewhere we need to be. We can’t go back. If we miss the ship, we’re stuck on this shithole of an island.”
“So what then?” said Mel.
Al looked at me.
“What do you think, Kyle?”
I felt weak. Maybe I had been fighting too much and for too long, and my body was giving up. I got to my feet and felt my right knee click. I took out my knife.
The infected walked toward us at a slow pace. I wondered how we hadn’t heard them approaching, but then I realised that it was because they weren’t making a sound. Every single infected I had ever seen came with a trademark groan, a pathetic cry borne of desire and hunger. These were different. They made a silent approach with steady footsteps.
I looked at one of them. She was an old woman, with straggly grey hair stuck to her waist by a gluey mixture of rain and blood. She opened her mouth as if to scream, but nothing came out. I realised that her tongue had been cut out. I looked at each of the infected and saw that they all tried to groan, but each of them had been made mute.
“Time’s ticking,” said Al.
“I don’t see what choice we have,” I replied.
Al nodded. Kendal got to her feet and shrugged her shoulders as if casting off the tiredness of the road. We stood and watched the infected march silently toward us, their mouths opening and closing but no sound meeting our ears.
Chapter 23
At the bottom of the sloping hill were almost fifty infected who wanted nothing more than to reach us. The grass was wet from the morning rain, and the grey clouds above us hung so low I felt like they were trying to suffocate us.
I looked at the people around me and I wondered about our chances. Charlie had one arm and wasn’t much of a fighter, but we had made him train back in camp. Mel was as good a person to have in a battle as any, especially with her cleaver clutched in her right hand. Al was ex-army and looked like he’d seen his share of trouble. Kendal was tough with her words, but I had no idea if that extended toward using the black metal poker that she carried. That left Lou and Ben. Normally I would have loved to have Lou by my side, but today she wasn’t much use. And Ben, well, he was a kid. It hit me that I needed to teach him how to fight.
The infected walked toward us at the bottom of the slope. They were spread so wide that there was no way we would have been able to get around them. I recognised some of them as the ones who had attacked us at the barn, but there hadn’t been that many back then. They must have pursued us here, and somewhere along the way their numbers had swelled. For an unknown reason, their tongues had been cut out.
There was no way around it. We needed to get back to camp, and from there we had to somehow travel the country and get south to meet Al’s people before they left. It was quickly becoming the only way out in my mind, a glimmer of a chance of leaving the hell behind.
“We better move Lou back,” I said. “If the infected get up here, I don’t want them getting anywhere near her.”
“What about Ben?” said Mel.
“He can stay by Lou.”
“I don’t want to,” said Ben. His eyes were wide.
Al grabbed one end of Lou’s stretcher and I took the other. We heaved her up and walked ten feet back, well away from the top of the slope. As we put her down I lost my grip and she hit the ground harder than I intended.
Lou winced.
“Steady,” she sighed, her voice barely a whisper.
I put my hand on Ben’s shoulder and gently pushed him to the ground.
“Stay here,” I said.
“But Kyle.”
“Come on, kid. We’ll be fine.”
Al and I joined Charlie and Mel at the top of the slope. The infected were starting to climb it now. One of them, a tall black man with shoulders that looked like they could have busted down doors, tried to walk up the dewy grass. His foot slipped, and he fell down.
“You really think that…” said Charlie.
I looked at him.
“…That we’ll be okay?”
“Just have to keep the higher ground,” said Al. “As soon as any of them reach the top, jam that knife through their skull.”
I watched as the infected tried to climb the hill. I held my knife in my hand and felt the gouges of the handle dig into my skin. Undead eyes locked on mine, and the infected opened their mouths and gave cries that made no sound. A shudder ran through me. I felt my stomach wrap into a knot.
“There’s a famous quote I used to like to say before a fight,” said Al. “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. But I realised that it’s bullshit. Let’s go and cave their heads in.”
The first of the infected managed to reach the top of the hill. Al heaved his machete at its head, tearing off half of its scalp. He pulled his weapon back and sliced at the infected again, this time stabbing through its brain. It went limp and flopped down on the grass, and then slid down a few inches until it was motionless.
They tried to climb up toward us but the hill was so slippy that most fell back to the bottom and had to start again. The ones that did make it to the top met with a cleaver or a knife or a machete.
Their bodies started to pile up on the hill. One of them climbed up near Mel. She swung her cleaver and sliced away its nose, and there was a sickening crack as the blade whipped through its forehead.
She pulled her weapon back, but she hadn’t seen the second infected that had managed to reach her. It grabbed hold of the sleeve of her jacket. Mel gave a shout and pushed it back, but she lost her footing and slipped on the grass. I felt my heart pump to near exhaustion as I watched her slip down the hill toward the infected.
She hit the middle of the hill on her back. Some of the infected at the bottom took note and split away from the crowd, ignoring Al, Charlie and I and moving toward Mel.
Al ran over to her. He got to his knees at the top of the hill and stretched out to her, careful not to reach out so far that he ended up falling down the hill too. Even with his arm filly outstretched and Mel straining to grab him, there was still two feet between them.
“Come on lass,” he said. “Stretch.”
Kendal waited at
the top for an old infected man to reach her. When he finally did, she didn’t panic. She took hold of him by his hair, tilted his head back and then jammed her poker straight through the skin underneath his chin. There was a popping sound, and dark blood gushed out.
An infected reached Charlie. He was a tall man in an office shirt, with a black leather belt making his trousers cling to his skinny waist. Charlie stabbed his knife through the infected’s head. He was going to pull it away again, but the infected fell backwards and took his knife with it, leaving Charlie defenceless.
The hillside was filling with the bodies of dispatched infected. The ones who remained standing began to climb over the bodies of the fallen, finding better grip on the corpses than they did on the grass.
“Come on Mel! Put your shoulders into it,” said Al, panic in his voice. His eyes bulged with the strain of trying to reach her.
An infected climbed halfway up the hill. He reached out for Mel’s shoe, and managed to grab it. Mel kicked her leg out but the infected, set on its prize, wouldn’t be shaken off.
I was going to run over to help, when two infected reached my part of the hill. One was a woman, her earlobe torn and flapping loose from where an earring had been ripped off. The other was a man with a football shirt covering what looked like an athletic body.
The woman clambered over the bodies of other infected on the hill until she was a foot away from me. I took hold of her head. I tried to keep it steady so that I could jam my knife through her temple, but the other infected reached the top of the hill. It grabbed my right arm.
I let go other the woman and turned to meet the athletic infected. His grip was strong, and his body was too bulky for me to shove him away. Charlie walked behind him, grabbed his hair and pulled him away just enough for me to free my knife arm. I stabbed the blade through the man’s eyes and then let him fall down the hill.
“Thanks,” I said.
Charlie nodded.
The woman grabbed my leg. I kicked her with my other leg, destroying her nose as my boot met bone.
The infected near Mel grabbed hold of her thighs now. It pulled itself up, desperately trying to reach her with its teeth. Al stood up. Seeing that he would never reach her, he gave up trying. Instead he took a deep breath, and then started to run down the hill, launching himself down the grass.
He slipped on the dew and fell on his back, smashing straight into the infected above Mel. They both fell down to the bottom. Al was the first to his feet, slicing at the infected with his machete until it went limp. Al’s face, jacket and arms were covered in a dark treacle of infected blood.
Kendal ran over to Mel. She sat down on the grass and then slid down the hill until she was next to her. She reached out, grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet.
“Fancy helping me? said Al.
At the bottom of the hill, the remaining infected turned to him. There were only eight left now. Kendal and Mel slid their way down. Charlie and I walked down the hill to join them. Charlie stepped over the bodies of the infected, moving away from their heads in case any of them were still alive. It was a known fact that ankle bites were one of the most common means of infection.
A few sweaty, adrenaline spiked minutes later, all the creatures were on the ground. Tiredness washed through me as the last of my energy seeped out. I became aware of a stinging in my lungs, and I opened my mouth and drank in the air. Everyone was silent, and the smell of rotten blood hung heavy around us.
***
The miles back to camp seemed endless. The weight of Lou on her stretcher made each step heavier. Every passing second, the deadline to meet the ships ticked away.
None of us spoke much in the day in took to get back. We each walked in the company of our own thoughts, speaking only to correct our route or to ask for a break.
I dreamed of getting back to my tent. I knew that we didn’t have time, but I wanted nothing more than to just lie back on my bed and close my eyes. Through lack of sleep and poor diet I had lost weight over the last week, but all the same my bones felt heavy.
“It’s too quiet,” said Mel.
It was the first she’d spoken in hours. We had stopped to sleep the night after fighting the infected, and I had taken watch. Under the silver moonlight and black sky, I had seen Mel toss and turn on the grass. Her sleep had been uneasy, and I was sure that at one point, I had heard her mutter “Justin”.
I stopped. I fought the urge to just sit down on the grass and let sleep take hold, and I looked around me. We could see camp now, a garden of mud splattered tents that flapped in the wind.
It was midday. This would usually have been the busiest time in camp. Foragers would be combing the field around us looking for edible berries, plants and mushrooms. Smoke would rise into the sky from bonfires. Men and women would walk back and forth to the stream to replenish our drinking water. Instead of all this, today there was only a deserted field and a heavy silence.
“What’s that smell?” said Ben, screwing up his nose.
I took a breath through my nose. A twinge of odour hit me. It was a smell of rot and blood.
I looked closer at the camp in front of us. I swept my gaze from tent to tent, praying for any sign of activity. Nothing moved save the fabric as the wind swept through camp.
“You have a problem,” said Al, and pointed.
I followed the line of his arm. In the middle of camp, just yards away from my own tent, dozens of bodies littered the ground. There were dark patches of blood covering the soil, and strings of intestines and other organs littered the ground. The bodies were covered in stab marks, cuts and gouges. Some of the people had their noses pressed into the mud, but I recognised the faces of the ones who didn’t.
Chapter 24
I remember when we had first found the camp. It was after the battle of Bleakholt, when the horror of the fighting was still fresh. We spent hours walking on the roads until our legs ached, but many of us still couldn’t sleep. Those who managed it suffered through nightmares of the hungry undead and ever-hunting stalkers.
We had trekked miles over the Scottish highlands after the battle. We were a fifty-something strong band of refuges. We were survivors just looking for a safe place to rest, with hunger closing on one side and the infected on the other.
I remember the morning when I saw the first tent. At first I thought it might have been a lone camper battling against the elements. When another tent appeared, and then another and another, I felt such a rush of relief that I almost fell to the floor.
Back then the tents were standing but were empty. The grass was green and free from trampling, and the only things staining it were the weeds as they pushed through the soil.
Looking around me now, things had changed.
“Is this your camp?” asked Al. “It’s not exactly Butlins.”
I shook away my thoughts. I nodded. It was our camp, alright, but it wasn’t how we had left it. Instead of the usual hustle of the day, of people chatting, hunting game, fetching water and firewood, there was silence. In the middle of the camp, left to get sodden by the autumn rain, were the bodies of the campers.
Mel strode forward. I took slow steps, looking around me to see if whatever had left the bodies was still waiting. Mel reached the first corpse. It was a man, and his face was squashed into the wet mud. Mel turned him over, and she sank to the floor in shock.
I joined her and looked at the man. The whole of his nose and right cheek were covered in mud. Brown soil smothered his lips and flecks of it had gone in his mouth. One of his eyes was wide open, but the other was closed as if he was winking at us.
“It’s Pete Jenkins,” said Mel.
I had seen plenty of dead bodies before, but I had never seen a slaughter like this. It was different than looking at the corpses of the infected. The last time I had seen these people they were getting on with their lives, carving a niche of survival in a world where hope was slim. Now they were just cold cadavers in the dirt.
Al hel
d his combat knife in his hand. He looked over the bodies.
“Steady on now,” he said. “We don’t know what happened here. If any of these buggers start to rise…”
Mel stood up and stepped away from Pete Jenkins.
“This wasn’t the infected. Look.”
She pointed at his chest, and straight away I understood. There were no bite marks on Pete’s body. Instead, his torso had been torn open by a cut that ran from his collar bone all the way to his groin. His insides were empty, as if they had been scooped out. I looked at all the other bodies and saw that the same had been done to the rest of them.