by Jack Lewis
“Any news on Lou and Alice?” I asked.
Justin shook his head.
“I’ll give you the grand tour,” I said. “Better get used to it, looks like we’ll be here a while.”
***
Later that day the chain link fence opened again. This time it was Lou and Alice. As the guards march them in, my heart leapt. I couldn’t help the trace of a grin spread on my face. I didn’t know how they’d survived, but I didn’t care. They were here.
The guards shoved them in and closed the fence behind them. Lou kicked it, made the metal sing.
“I’ll remember your face buddy,” she said.
The guards turned and left.
Alice limped towards me. Bruises covered her face and dirt stained her white blouse. Her eyes had the bloodshot look of an alcoholic.
“Where’s Ben?” she said. Her eyes darted around the fenced area and inspected every inch.
“They took him away when we got here. Haven’t seen him in a few days,” I said.
Alice scrunched up her face, and her shoulders shook. “Is he alright?” she asked.
I couldn’t lie to her after everything I had put her through. I’d put everyone in danger, and her son had taken the worst of it. The least she deserved was the truth.
“He was unconscious when we got here,” I said.
Alice ran her hands through her hair and then put her arms over her face. She held the back of her head as if trying to stop something getting out. Maybe it was a scream. Anger. Blame. Whatever it was, I just wished she’d let it go. Give me everything I deserved.
“I swear to god if something has happened to my boy,” she said.
There was a clink. The chain link fence opened. Guards stepped aside, and a woman walked into the yard.
“Your boy is right as rain,” she said, in a thick Scottish accent. “He’ll live.”
She looked to be in her fifties. Dark rings were sunk under her eyes, and her skin sagged like it was trying to separate itself from her bones. She wore gold earrings so heavy they weighed her ears down, and her hair was a mess of brown tangles. Despite the haggard look of her face she held her body straight, her shoulders firm. Her arms poked out from a sleeveless leather jacket, and her muscles were toned. It was like she had a thirty-year old body and a fifty-year old face.
She walked into the enclosure. Two guards stepped behind, one with a baseball bat in his hand. She gave them a dismissive wave.
“Wait outside,” she said.
Alice clenched her fists at her sides. Her body looked tight with tension, like a rubber band stretched to snapping point. Lou sat on the floor, cross legged, and looked at the approaching woman with a grin. Justin and Melissa stood with their arms interlinked around each other’s backs.
The woman stopped a few feet short of us. Up close, I could see the thin muscles on her arms. She wasn’t well-built, but she was in shape. Her stance was statesman-like, as though she were a president about to address a nation.
“I’m Victoria,” she said. “And I’d like to welcome you all to Bleakholt. Let’s go somewhere we can chat.”
8
Victoria led us through cobblestone streets that looked ancient. Bleakholt seemed like it had stood silent through several centuries. It was a town that had seen generations of people be born and then die, leaving nothing behind them but their gravestones. I looked down at the cobbles and wondered how long ago they were laid. How many people had walked over the bumps of stone in the last hundred years? Would this generation be the last after the infected finally broke through the defences?
People walked past us, stared for a second, and then went on their way. A sense of purpose cut into their faces, as though they were London commuters hurrying to work. The smell in the air was ripe, the stench of a compost mound nearby. We walked through twisting streets toward the centre of the settlement. It was a circular open space with a statue raised in the middle, a fountain to the left of it, the water long-since dried up. Benches littered the stone and decorative flowers filled stone plant beds.
We walked across the square and into a building. The architecture dated it at a couple of hundred years old. Patterns were chipped into the stonework on the front of men on horseback, spears raised, anger cut into their faces. A marble plaque on the wall marked it as the Mayor’s office.
“So you’re the mayor?” I said to Victoria, who walked in front.
“No such thing as a mayor anymore. Mayors are voted democratically, and this isn’t a democracy.”
The stale air of the office smelt chalky. A staircase jutted up at the end of the lobby, a framework of steps carved from grey stone. Our footsteps echoed. There was the thud of my limp, the patter of Melissa’s feet, the scuffling of Justin’s.
I remembered visiting the town hall in Manchester once. It was ten times the size of this, a busy hubbub of council workers whisking up and down the corridors. It was a school trip, and I remember the teacher telling us to take a good look around. He stood in the entrance and took a deep breath.
“Think about your future, kids. You can be anything you want to be. Even mayor.”
Things hadn’t fallen that way for me. I didn’t grow up and have a budding political career, but I did follow in my teacher’s footsteps. I got an English degree and teaching qualifications. After that I spent my time discussing the merits of the Tempest with a bunch of disinterested teenagers. I never enjoyed it, and all the time I thought there must be something more to life. There had to be something waiting round the corner that one day I’d finally see. Well, the outbreak put paid to that.
Later, in my late twenties, Clara and I visited the town hall. We walked in, hands apart, neither of us speaking because we’d fought that morning and none of us wanted to make the first move. I stood in the exact spot my teacher had once stood, heard his words again.
“Think about your future, kids. You can be anything you want to be. Even major.”
Adults shouldn’t make promises like that to kids. They shouldn’t make them believe there’s more to life than there really is. The reality is that life is a dull grind. Even in the apocalypse nothing changes. Instead of working all day to get a pay check to get food, we spend all day walking. Foraging. Scraping by, keeping our bodies ticking. What was the point?
***
Victoria led us into her office. She dismissed her guards with a nod, and they took their places either side of the door. One of them held a baseball bat against his shoulder as if he were waiting to get subbed on to a game. His face was chubby and a faint smile hung on his lips as if he were always on the cusp of laughing at a joke. The other stared straight past us, as though he’d been forbidden to look at us.
“Victoria…,” the one with the baseball bat said. His tone was questioning.
Victoria gave him a sharp look. “I don’t think they’re about to ambush me, Steve. You can wait outside.”
Victoria walked behind a desk and sat in a green Winchester chair, the back of it enveloping her slim frame. She opened a drawer, took out a pouch of rolling tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.
The office was full of dark mahogany and oak furniture covered in varnish that had started to fade. The borders of the ceiling were decorated with spiralling patterns that spoke of excess. It amazed me that somebody took such care into the tiny details of a place where people rarely looked. On the right wall there was a hideous painting. It was a metre wide, big enough to hang in a gallery. On it, a cavalry soldier rode atop a horse. The horse was white once, but now it was covered in trails of blood that started at its hooves and spread up its legs and across its muscled body. The horse’s face was demented with anger, and it twisted its head toward the centre of the frame as if it was looking out at the viewer. The fury in its eyes seemed to come out of the painting and fill the room, and I could only stare at it for a couple of seconds before I had to look away.
“Park your arses,” Victoria said.
Justin, Melissa and Lou took the thre
e seats in front of the desk. Alice and I stood. Alice folded her arms, pressed them tight into her chest. Her face was set in a grimace. I could tell her leg was hurting her from whatever had happened when the stalkers separated us, but she refused to sit down.
“I want to see my son,” she said.
Victoria held the strip of paper to her lips, licked the adhesive and sealed the cigarette.
“Mind if I smoke?” she said.
“Rather you didn’t,” said Melissa.
“Well you’re in my office, so I guess I’ll do what I feckin’ please.”
She put the cigarette in her mouth, flicked a lighter, and ignited the end. The paper crackled, and she blew smoke into the air. I sucked in the smell, felt it reactivate the old cells in my brain that still clung onto addiction. I guess you never got over it. I took a step forward, put my hands on the desk and leant over it.
“First things first, she needs to see her son,” I said.
Victoria shuffled the chair away from the desk a little and crossed her legs. “The boy is fine. A damn sight better than the condition we found him in, anyway. He looked like the pictures you see of kids in the blitz.”
Alice took a step forward. Her face was turning red as though she were about to explode. Alice was capable of the most intense anger you ever saw when her son was in danger. The first time we met, she had knocked me out cold. If Alice was angry it was best to either let her simmer down or just step away.
“Better watch what you say about the boy. We’re feeling a little sensitive,” I said.
Victoria blew out a plume of smoke. It rose to the ceiling and dispersed. “Kid looked like he’d been through hell. Take it your his ma?” she said, looking at Alice, a hint of scorn in her expression.
I could feel the anger bubbling in Alice from where I stood, almost like the tremor of an earthquake. It seemed to me that levelling criticism at a mother over the treatment of her son was a pretty stupid idea. It wouldn’t do us any good to get mad though. The guards waited outside, ready to storm in at the slightest sign of trouble. And beyond these doors, there was a whole town full of people who didn’t have much time for strangers.
I gave Alice a glare that I hoped she took to mean ‘calm down.’ I stood back and crossed my arms.
“Listen,” I said, “We didn’t come here to take your shit. Tell us what the hell is going on. Why did you keep us fenced in?”
Victoria stretched her hand across the desk, let it rest. The bones jutted out of her wrist, and her veins were thick blue chords that pressed against the skin. She put the cigarette in an ashtray, ran her hand through her hair.
“I should apologise,” she said. “I’m feeling the pinch at the minute. Got a few things going on, and I shouldn’t take it out on you.” She looked at Alice. “I can’t imagine how far you’ve travelled, what you’ve had to do. I shouldn’t criticise. Your boy is fine, and I’ll make sure you see him soon as we’re done.”
Alice nodded.
Victoria carried on. “Guess I should tell you a little of Bleakholt. The last bastion of Scotland, as I call it. Nobody else calls it that, mind.”
“Start with why you kept us locked up,” I said.
She nodded. “Simple. We’ve got to take precautions here.”
There was a knock at the door. Victoria looked up.
“Come in.”
Another knock.
“Come in, god dammit, are you deaf?”
A man opened the door and walked into the room, and I recognised him as the guy who had driven the quad. Grease stained his jacket, and black stalker blood covered his t-shirt like a watermark. Up close the pock-marks on his face were more pronounced. I couldn’t tell if it was from a childhood disease or just a severe spell of acne that had gone but had left behind a grim reminder. He had shaved his head so sharply that thinking about him doing it made me wince. There was something glum about him, like something was going on in his mind that he tried not to show.
“I’ve been to see the geek and dropped off the body,” he said.
Victoria nodded. “Did Charlie say was it good enough?”
“He said it was a ‘good specimen’. Guy’s a weirdo.”
Victoria smiled. She looked up at Lou, Justin and Melissa. “I’d like you all to meet Billy Hardy, the self-proclaimed toughest guy in Bleakholt.”
Lou swivelled on her seat to face Billy. When she saw him, she shrank back in her seat. Her eyes widened, and though she tried to hide it, there was a trace of shock in her face. Billy stared back at her. His face grew pale. He looked away and tried to dismiss the sight of her, pretended like the strange look between them had never happened.
“Good to meet ya,” he said. He drummed his fingers on his leg and looked at the door. “Need anything else?” he said to Victoria.
She nodded. “You might as well stay. I was just going to tell them about our fine town.”
Billy folded his arms. He kept his glance anywhere but in Lou’s direction. “Here we go,” he said. “Story time.”
Victoria smiled. “Guess I like to brag a little too much. But it’s with good reason.” She looked at me. “How long do you suppose we’re going to last?” she asked.
I scratched my chin. My throat felt tight, I needed water. My back ached, my limbs felt tired, and the cut on my knuckles stung.
“I don’t know anything about this place,” I said.
“No, not Bleakholt. I mean us. Our species.”
Lou crossed her legs and leant back in her chair so far that it threatened to tip over. “It’s been sixteen years and we’re not dead yet.”
Victoria shook her head. “We’re not dead. But we’re dying. Here in Bleakholt, we have more funerals than births each year. Food supplies are shrinking across the country. Fuel is depleting. And excuse me for being blunt, but people are getting dumber. Education has been put to the wayside in place of survival, and knowledge is dying. There’s no progress. To summarise, we’re starving, dying and getting stupid.”
The words rang chords of belief inside me. I’d thought this way once. Back in Vasey, I’d seen people scraping by, doing nothing to ensure their long-term survival. Instead they let their lives drag from one minute to the next. I’d tried to change that by planting crops and building defences, but it was futile. When they were threatened with their own survival, people didn’t give a shit about the long term. Every selfish second was precious to those who counted them.
“Tried that once,” I said. “Didn’t work.”
Victoria drummed her fingers on the desk, her nails tapping on the wood. They were rough and jagged, and she'd bitten most of them down. “What happened?” she asked.
I put my hand to my chin. My beard felt scratchy on my fingers. “People are too damn selfish to think about the future.”
Alice leaned in. “I never saw Vasey before it collapsed, but surely some people were willing to help?”
I nodded. “A few. But their voices were drowned out by the selfish ones.”
Victoria closed her eyes, nodded. “That’s what I found too. But when I got to Bleakholt, I saw something here. Not much, just a thread of survival at first, but I knew that if someone could unravel it, there was something great underneath. That was seven years ago. Now, everything is different. This really is salvation.”
Lou arched her eyebrows. “Seen a lot of places promising that.”
“Oh?” said Victoria. “How many places have you seen with a hundred acres of flourishing crops? Renewable wind energy? Solar power too, or as much as our shitty weather permits. Fuel generators, a school, engineers, carpenters. A science programme. Even children.”
It sounded too good to be true. It was everything I had planned, and failed, to do in Vasey. Yet if she were to be believed, Victoria had managed it. I hadn’t seen much of Bleakholt since arriving here, but it seemed like a place where the people had purpose. Maybe all it took was a strong leader to follow everything through. Perhaps I had been too weak in Vasey.
; “I’m impressed,” said Melissa.
“Don’t stoke her ego,” said Billy.
Lou gave him a glance, and then shot her eyes straight at the floor.
“It sounds good,” I agreed.
I meant it. I wanted more than anything for this to be true. I wanted the promise of Bleakholt to be real so much that my chest hurt. But I knew what waited out in the Wilds; the infected desperate to feast on flesh, stalkers creeping under the twilight. It made any kind of hope hard to cling to, like trying to stay in a dream when your body wants to wake you up.
Victoria leaned forward and straightened her bony shoulders. She probably weighed less than eight stone, but her posture made her seem bigger than she really was.