Edge of Chaos

by Jack Lewis

  Two sets of boots moved downstairs. Had both the soldiers responded to the name? Were all the Capita’s soldiers called Max? Did a Capita production line churn out soldier clones, all of them given the same name? She smiled with the humor of a death row inmate.

  Charles gave a long sigh. He leaned against the bannister. “Go outside into the garden,” he told the soldiers. “Pull out all the food and collect it in a bag. It belongs to the Capita now. Take them back to the stores, and don’t bother waiting for me.”

  “But sir,” said one of the soldiers.

  “Just go.”

  He faced Heather. It was amazing the mix of emotions Charles could convey with his eyes. The mask didn’t hamper him, because it was a part of him. She backed away, never breaking her stare from her predator, like a wounded animal caught by a hyena.

  “Kim?” he called over his shoulder. “Come upstairs. Your mother wants you.”

  Cold brewed in her stomach and spread across her body. With every inch it covered, her body locked. First her legs, freezing her in place, then her arms, which wouldn’t leave her sides. As the man in the plague doctor mask approached her, she wanted to shut her eyes, but at the same time didn’t dare.

  Kim bounded the steps and into the room. Charles spoke, but his eyes didn’t leave Heather’s for an instant. “Stand next to your mother, Kim.”

  Kim hugged her, but Heather felt nothing through her numbed senses.

  “I’m scared, Mum.”

  Heather strained to move her arm. She broke through the fog of fear enough to hug her daughter close to her.

  Boots crossed the hallway downstairs. They were leaving with all her food, but what could she do about it? You could dream as much as you wanted, but someone would take it away.

  The front door slammed, and silence settled over the house. Their Great Escape was over.

  Charles was standing still. He said nothing, just stared at them through the eyeholes cut into his mask. He moved his head a fraction of a centimetre as his gaze went from mother to daughter. Every time his eyes moved toward Kim, ice stung Heather’s skin. Time became endless. Maybe the last seconds of your life are the longest of all.

  “Have you got a cold, little girl?”

  Kim shook her head.

  “Why is there shredded newspaper all over the floor?” said Charles.

  Heather fought an urge to glance at the wardrobe panel, where Eric watched through the slats in the door.

  “She did have one,” said Heather. “But she’s better now.”

  The bounty hunter picked up a scrap of paper. He rubbed it in his fingers and let it fall back to the floor.

  “Either you don’t keep a tidy house, or someone’s not wearing their mask.”

  Heather fought to keep her voice firm. “She’s not going to sneeze into her mask, is she?”

  “Do you know how people act when they’re hiding something?” said Charles. “Your body can betray you. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? You’re trying to betray someone else, but your body is doing the same to you. You’ll tell me you haven’t seen the boy, but your head will nod ‘yes’. You’ll try to deceive me, but you’ll get out of breath.”

  He moved the chair over to wardrobe, scraping it along the floor. “You’ll repeat yourself. You’ll tell me more than I need to know, because you think that sounds more truthful. You’ll cover your mouth, and you won’t blink. Your eyes will point in directions your mind doesn’t want.”

  He made sure the chair rested against the wall and climbed onto it. “In short, Heather, your body will tell me what your brain is trying to hide. What do you think I’ll find if I look in here?”

  If he reached toward the top of the wardrobe, the game was finished. Kim pressed against her, and her blood rushed to Heather’s head so fast it pounded in her ears. Her own future screams shrieked from one of the Capita’s dungeons.

  No. I’m not going to let this son of a bitch do it.

  Her numbness thawed as she pushed Kim away from her. She grabbed the ceramic jug from the bookcase next to Kim’s bed.

  Her body warmed as she crossed the room. When she was in front of Charles, she burned red hot. All the restraint in the world couldn’t stop her now.

  She kicked the chair so hard that a wooden leg snapped. The chair tipped over and the bounty hunter fell to the floor and landed on his back.

  He shouted in surprise. He reacted with more agility than she believed possible. As he went to get onto his feet, Heather raised the jug and swung it at the bounty hunter’s forehead.

  It cracked against his skull so hard it made Heather wince.

  Charles grunted, spat blood, and put his hands on the floor to balance. His eyes grew large, and little red veins swam in the whites. He tried to stand.

  No going back now.

  She smashed the jug on his head again, cracking it into hundreds of porcelain pieces.

  “Mum? What have you done?”

  Heather stood over the bounty hunter and gasped for air. Above her, the wardrobe panel swung open and Eric poked his head out.

  The bounty hunter lay still on the floor.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ed

  A blue sky awaited them outside the town hall. The lack of a dismal sky annoyed him. The storm raged enough rain to flood the basement and ruin their plans. With the job complete, it dried up. It was big ‘fuck you’ from Lady Luck. The storm had also brought something else to the island. A dim light flickered in his memory.

  He remembered being a kid, and hearing James retching into a bucket beside his bed. Mum vomited in the bathroom, taking turns with Dad. The island of Golgoth stood still that week, with the entire population too ill to leave their homes.

  People dropped one by one. Farmers lost days of labour. The weekly council meeting was cancelled when Gordon Rigby, sickest of them all, covered his bathroom in vomit.

  After days of malnourishment and dehydration, the island recovered. People pointed fingers. Food producers took the most blame. Some said it was the milk, while others decided the recent lamb slaughter caused it.

  After months of town hall debates, Gordon and the council flew a scientist and a food hygienist to the island. The mainland experts spent weeks pouring over swabs. The dairy farmers waited. The cattle farmers paced their land. Nobody knew where the judgement would fall and whose livelihood would be ruined. It turned out to be an airborne virus that had nothing to do with the local produce.

  “We need to get to the harbour,” said Judith.

  She took an overstretched step over a crack in the street. She did this a lot. No matter how much it inconvenienced her, Judith would never place her foot within an inch of a crack in the cobbles.

  Bethelyn stared at the floor, her eyes dull. She tapped the poker against her shoulder.

  “Does anyone know how to sail?” said Ed.

  “Nope,” said Garry.

  “No,” said Judith, stepping to her right to avoid a split cobble.

  Bethelyn shook her head.

  “Damn,” said Ed. “That would have been incredibly fortunate.”

  Judith looked at the street ahead. Ed hadn’t seen any infected since they left the hall. If any lurked nearby, they were good at hiding. Was it too much to hope they’d given up searching for meat?

  “This bodes well, doesn’t it? Not much sense to take a boat when none of us can sail.”

  Gary stuffed his hands into his pockets. Flares of acne stained his cheeks, and his eyebrows met each other above his nose. “Don’t see much of a choice.”

  Judith rolled her eyes. “It’s not something you can learn off-the-cuff.”

  Ed knew what he had to do. He was trying to avoid it, hoping that someone else would be able to sail. In their present situation, it made no sense to pretend. If nobody else stepped up, he’d have to.

  “I can sort of sail,” he said.

  This time Bethelyn looked up. “Sort of? As in, you could paddle a dinghy?”

  Ed shook his head. “Ja
mes used to have a boat. He taught me the basics, but I never sailed without him.”

  “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” said Judith.

  Gary screwed his face. “But Ed has two eyes.”

  “It’s a saying, Gary.”

  “One eye or two, I’m the best you’ve got,” said Ed. “Let’s roll.”

  Judith gasped as she almost stepped on a crack. She skipped over it. The silence became oppressive. Houses stood lonely on each side of them.

  “Shit,” said Gary. “There!”

  Infected filed through gates, from behind walls, and emerged around corners, as though waiting for their cue. Bethelyn kept her stare on the ground. If they bothered her, she didn’t show it. Gary moved closer toward Judith.

  “Walk fast and they can’t catch us,” said Ed. “Watch out for anything that might hide them.”

  Before long, they reached a familiar house. Ed had dreaded seeing it, but they had to pass it if they were going to the harbour. It was a house where ivy clung to white walls, with a cavernous hole in the roof.

  When Bethelyn gazed at her house, something entered her expression. Ed couldn’t tell what emotion it was, but it was different to the grim acceptance she’d shown so far. As quick as it appeared, Bethelyn hid it.

  He had to do something. Maybe put his hand around her shoulders, like she’d tried to do for him the day before. People needed it. Human contact reassured them, but it made him uncomfortable.

  Maybe it wasn’t about what he felt. Sometimes, you had to play someone else’s game, to think the way they thought.

  He was about to put his hand across, when something wailed in the air above them. It was so deafening he had to put his hand to his ears.

  “What the fuck is that?” he shouted, straining against the blaring noise.

  Judith pointed at the road behind them, where a wooden pole stretched thirty feet high. It was a telegraph pole, one he had seen every day of his life. Until now, he had never paid attention to the speakers at the top. He hadn’t known they were capable such an ear-splitting sound.

  It blasted out like an air raid siren. Back in the Old Wars, it would have sent people running out of their house and spilling into shelters. Today, the sound brought something else.

  Infected emerged from behind hedges, trees, doorways and headed toward them. At first, they were drawn by sound, but something else interested them more.

  The dead, who once sat across from each other in the pub, who once chatted with one another in town meetings, locked eyes on the four of them. They opened their mouths and bared their teeth. They growled and groaned, cried and moaned.

  There were so many they blocked the road. Bethelyn held her poker in her tense hands. Ed raised his knife. Gary awkwardly held a thick stick.

  They couldn’t win this fight. They might as well have offered themselves as a buffet to the infected.

  “The harbour,” said Ed. “Let’s move it. Should be plain sailing when we get there.”

  “Jesus, you’re worse than your father,” said Judith.

  They headed by Bethelyn’s house and towards Ed’s, beyond which was the harbour. Five infected stumbled from behind a hedge, close enough for their stench to waft into his nostrils. They reached toward the survivors with twitching fingers.

  One grabbed Gary, but he sprang away to one side. He let out a scream, and his face grew as white as the chalky island cliffs.

  “Hit him, for fuck’s sake!” said Ed.

  As one of the infected grabbed for him, Gary yelped and dropped his stick to the floor. A startled expression smothered his face, like a rat trapped in a corner. Gary grabbed Judith and pushed her into the waiting arms of the monsters.

  “Wha…you bastard…what are you-”

  The infected pulled Judith to the ground. One of them gorged on her arm, while another tore sinewy flesh from her throat, silencing her mid-scream.

  Ed’s breath jammed in his chest. He moved toward Judith, but time ran at a quarter-speed. He couldn’t stop staring at Judith as she groaned. An infected kneeled next to her and chewed on her vocal chords. Ed wanted to save her, but all he could think was, why isn’t she dead yet?

  He stabbed the skull of the first infected. Judith grabbed his wrist in a grip so strong she was going to snap his bones. An infected leaned toward her ear, where it bit her fleshy skin and ripped it apart.

  Ed opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. Before he could tease out the words, Bethelyn pierced Judith’s throat with her poker, destroying what the infected hadn’t touched. The light left Judith’s eyes.

  He felt as if his own windpipe had been stabbed. What did you say to something like this? Did the right words even exist?

  Gary, screaming sounds too savage to come from a person, pushed away from Ed and ran. He disappeared behind a house and out of view, leaving Ed and Bethelyn alone.

  “Gary, wait, where the hell are you going?”

  “Leave the bastard,” said Bethelyn. “Coward. God damn coward.”

  The rest of the infected closed in on them in from all sides. Ed stepped next to Bethelyn.

  “There’s too many. We can’t get through.”

  Their orchestra of raspy cries made him shudder. He wanted to run like Gary had, but he wouldn’t. He’d die before he abandoned Bethelyn.

  This is it. This was the end, and it was right that he faced it feeling a connection with someone. It didn’t matter that Bethelyn was a stranger; she was as good a person as any to die next to.

  If this was it, then what would he leave behind? What had he missed in life after shutting himself away all this time? Would Dad and James have wanted him to become a hermit?

  The infected poured toward them. There were too many to fight. Bethelyn yanked her poker out of the brain of an infected. She was so close to Ed that their shoulders touched.

  Their eyes were white and empty, like fish eyes. It was a sea of them washing into shore, and it was time for Ed to plunge into it. Screaming in pain wasn’t the way he wanted to die, and the lack of choice made it worse.

  He tried to control his shaking, tried to convince his brain to accept a fate which the survival instinct of any person would reject.

  “We die fighting,” he said.

  “Wait…Ed. Look.”

  At the top of the street, more figures joined the infected. He didn’t believe it at first, but these figures didn’t have blank faces or dead eyes. They wore masks, attacking the infected as they passed.

  Was his brain tricking him in the last few seconds before his death? Wait – it makes sense. The boat in the storm.

  The strangers drew the attention of the infected away from Ed and Bethelyn, but that didn’t lessen the fear in his chest. He looked at these strangers with their fur coats and the masks covering their faces, and his blood froze.

  Unease grew in him, sitting heavy in his chest. It told him something wasn’t right, that the strangers on the island were worse than the infected ever could be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Heather

  She’d made mistakes before, but no words could describe her latest. Charles Bull, the Capita’s dog, was tied to her chair. The most feared bounty hunter in the land, a man who made the mercury drop when he walked into a room, was her prisoner.

  She had tied one rope around his arms and legs, and another around his waist. Charles was strong and bulky, and there was a lot of him to tie.

  To keep him secure, she used a knot her father taught her. She’d forgotten the name of the knot, but she remembered the stink of her father’s cologne as he showed her how to tie it. Trying it again years later, her muscle memory kicked in.

  She stared at the street outside her window. The room behind her reflected in the glass, and she made out the black outline of Charles. There was no escaping him. No way out.

  What the hell have I done?

  She wanted to slap herself. She’d been putting off the day of their Great Escape. She had fussed
over one detail after another until it had been too late. Charles’s soldiers had taken all their food, so they couldn’t travel for long without needing to find some.

  Yet, she couldn’t stay. If she let Charles go, he would come back for revenge. If she killed him, she’d have half the Capita looking for her. Fire on one side, and a volcano on the other.

  She heard a raspy breath. Charles moved his shoulders. It was a tremble at first, but then his head jerked. His body tensed, and he shook from side to side, his movements becoming quicker when he saw the ropes.