by Jack Lewis
She stared at the ground now, unable to meet any of our stares. Her shoulders shook, and she covered her face with her hands. Revulsion twisted in my stomach, and my belly burned as if it was trying to digest itself. Melissa’s eyes were wide, her disc-like pupils staring out in shock. Justin looked on with disinterest as though he’d been listening to a weather report.
“Finish the story,” I said, wanting to get it over with.
A few seconds of silence passed, and then Lou looked up.
Alice interrupted her. Her face was cut into stone. Rage twisted through it so that she snarled.
“Get out,” she said.
I held up my hands. “Hold on a sec, Alice.”
Alice moved Ben away from her. She stood up, her face stained red with anger. “Get the hell out. I never want to see you again.”
The anger in her tone seemed to bounce against the walls and fill the empty air of the room. I felt sick but in some way, a small part of me struck sympathy with Lou. In the Wilds, it was easy to get to the point where you’d do anything to survive. The old rules of the world had rotted away a decade ago, and now it was up to you to ensure your own survival. Nobody was going to come to your rescue.
I thought about everything that had happened since we got to Bleakholt. Victoria treating us like freeloaders, making us beg to stay. Moe tying people to trees and leaving them for the stalkers. Charlie experimenting on Justin like a lab monkey. Ewan treating Justin like a freak and trying to get him kicked out. On top of it all, the wave of infected were still on their unstoppable march towards us.
“This place is poison,” I said.
Lou looked up. Alice towered above us and crossed her big arms.
I carried on. “There’s something toxic here, guys. Everything has turned to shit. They’re treating Justin like he’s got some disease. There’s god knows how many stalkers prowling the woods. The Vasey crew are here, and the less said about them the better. You call this place safe, but I think it’s the worst place we could be. They might be trying to survive, but I don’t see a life here for us.”
Alice shook her head. “Don’t you see Kyle? There’s nowhere else to go. There isn’t some golden sanctuary waiting for us. The only safe place in the world is the one that we choose to make safe. Here they’ve got food, Power. Our choice is simple. Go out into the Wilds and keep running, or we stay here and fight. And I’m staying. I don’t care what you guys do, I’m not taking Ben outside of these fences.”
She pulled Ben to his feet and moved away from the table. Her chair slid back and tipped over. They walked past us and out of the restaurant. The door banged behind them and a breeze floated in.
Lou, Melissa, Justin and I sat in silence. Lou wouldn’t meet our gaze. Justin seemed lost in his thoughts, though what he thought about these days was anyone’s guess. Melissa held her hand to her chin, as if she were weighing up what Alice had said. I wondered what she’d do, if it came to it. She was a hell of a lot tougher than she let on, and I knew she wouldn’t follow me blindly.
Lou stood up. Her face was pale, her shoulders slumped. She walked out of the restaurant without a word.
The group was falling apart. I couldn’t see a way forward, and I didn’t know what we were going to do. So much for my leadership. They needed someone like Alice to guide them, not me. All I ever did was lead them from one pile of shit to the next.
The restaurant door opened and the bell above it tingled. Billy stood in the doorframe.
“Victoria says it’s time to earn your keep,” he said.
16
Billy marched us to the mayor’s office, where Victoria sat behind her desk. Pale light filtered through the windows and illuminated the crow’s feet around her eyes. Her skin looked tired and grey, and she drummed her bony fingers on the table. Charlie stood behind her. He’d shed his blood-stained lab coat in favour of a cotton brown jumper with black patches on the elbows. It made him look like a physics teacher who was bored with his life.
“Take a seat,” she said.
Alice and Lou took seats in front of her. I was surprised that Lou had joined us, but we’d seen her on the way to Victoria’s office and Billy had told Lou that the boss wanted to see her too. Lou complied and joined the group without a joke or a wisecrack, as if her usual sarcasm had been drained out of her.
Alice gave Victoria a smile. It was strange to see the difference in her attitude towards the woman. When they first met, Alice looked like she wanted to throttle her. Now, after seeing Ben on the mend and being given a job on the fences, Alice’s demeanour had changed. There was a look of understanding between the two women. Billy stood against the back room of the wall. He didn’t move or speak, but I could feel his bulky presence in the room all the same.
Despite the empty chair, I stayed standing. I knew what was coming. After the fracas in the town square, Victoria was going to throw us out into the Wilds. Alice would be devastated. Ben was only just getting better, and now he was going to have to go through it all again.
“Listen, Victoria. I know what happened outside, but you’ve got to understand-”
“This isn’t about that,” she said.
“Then what is it?”
She looked up at Charlie, who shifted uncomfortably. Then she addressed us.
“Charlie’s come up with a plan. Something we can do to stop this wave of infected before they even get here. Haven’t you Charlie?”
Charlie nodded. “Sure have, Vicky.”
“Never call me Vicky.”
“So you believe me about the wave?” I said.
Victoria shifted her tongue in her mouth as though she were picking at something in her teeth.
“Frankly, I thought you were paranoid. That maybe there was some infected headed here, but I sure as hell didn’t believe it was half a million.”
“Then what changed your mind?”
“Pure facts,” said Charlie, cutting in. His voice was strained, as though he didn’t like talking in front of so many people. I saw a glimpse of a gold chain around his neck, but it was buried under the v-line of his jumper so I couldn’t tell what was at the end. I thought it might have been a cross, but that wouldn’t fit a scientist like him. Weren’t they all atheists?
Charlie looked at Victoria, as if asking for assurance that he could go on. She huffed. “Get on with it, Charles.”
“It’s pure theory on my part, but I worked out that what you said was possible. I looked at population levels in Manchester. Compared them with what we know of the infected’s behaviour. Their instincts, their drives. How they travel. And grouping together like that seems like a logical outcome.”
“It doesn’t stop there. If I’m right, I think this wave is only the start of it. I can see a time when every remaining infected is drawn together, from John O’Groats to Land’s end. I can see them swarming to each other like wasps. At some point, it won’t be half a million infected we’ll be facing. No. It’ll be the population of Britain.”
A chill ran through me. “Sixty million?” I said.
He nodded. “Give or take the few thousand people who have survived.”
“Don’t like those odds,” said Lou.
Victoria straightened up. “That's why we need to get off our arses. Charlie has a plan, but it’s dangerous. Frankly, it’s stupid. So I need you to go and do it. Show me how much you love me.”
“How dangerous?” I said.
Charlie scratched his ear. “It, err, involves some very volatile explosives and making a controlled explosion. You’d have to go out of the settlement.”
Alice crossed her arms, shook her head. “No way. I’ve got a kid who depends on me. I’m done endangering myself.” She turned to me. “Sorry Kyle, but you know that I can’t go.”
“We kinda need you to, Alice. If this is what it’s going to take to be able to stay here, then surely it’s worth it,” I said.
Victoria leant forward. Wrinkles cut into her forehead and made her skin sag. “You’ve got
leadership potential Alice, and this place could use some of that. So I would suggest that Kyle, the girl, - “
“Lou,” said Lou, a note of irritation in her voice.
“I suggest that Kyle, Lou,” Victoria continued, “Billy and Steve go.”
“Who the hell’s Steve?” I said, racking my brain to try and place the name.
Victoria pointed behind me. “The man guarding my door with a baseball bat.”
“People always forget his name,” said Billy. “He’s a very forgettable guy.”
“Fuck you, Bill,” said a muffled voice through the closed wooden door.
Victoria perked her head up, screwed her forehead. “Thought I told you not to eavesdrop?”
There was no reply.
“So what’s the plan?” I said.
Charlie took a step forward and leaned on the desk. Victoria gave him a glare, and he took his hands off the wood. He crossed his arms. “A while back, we scavenged some explosives. It’s pretty damn volatile, and I wouldn’t like to be holding it. I think it’s because the compounds have – “
“Focus, Charles,” said Victoria.
Charlie nodded. He closed his eyes as if he was looking for his train of thought. “So the plan is to take the explosives and blow out the passage between the hills. Create a barricade of stone and completely block it.”
Billy sprang off the wall as if he’d been zapped by a cattle prod. “Blow the pass? Are you fucking crazy? It’d completely block us off from the South. We’d be stuck here if things ever turned to shit.”
Charlie nodded. “It also means that anything coming from the South would have to either climb the hills or take a lengthy detour around them. Either way, they wouldn't get to Bleakholt any time soon.”
“It also means we can’t get south,” said Billy.
I thought about it. The infected were coming from the south, so it made sense to cut them off. But right now the hill passage was Bleakholt’s only means of getting into England. If something were to ever come from the North, they’d be trapped between a rock and a hard place. This was probably the most literal example of that phrase there had ever been.
“You’ll be cutting off your options,” I said.
“The nature of options is that sometimes you’ve got to use them,” said Victoria.
“We’ve sent scouts North,” said Charlie. “There’s not much going on a few hundred miles north of us. We’re safe.”
“Nowhere is safe,” said Lou. She stared in every direction but Billy’s.
Victoria ran her hand along her desk, her nails scratching against the grooves of the old oak. “The girl’s right, of course,” she said.
“My names Lou.”
Alice put her hand to her chin. “It would mean other survivors can’t find the settlement,” she said.
It was a damn good point, and the cynical side of me thought that this was Victoria’s plan all along. Cut off the only accessible way to Bleakholt so that other survivors couldn’t get here and drain their resources. By doing it under the guise of stopping the wave, it made Victoria look like she was doing a good thing.
It didn’t seem like we had much choice. After all I’d put them through, I owed it to Alice, Ben and the others to fight for their right to stay here. I was going to have to put myself in danger again, but that didn’t matter. Like Alice had said a long time ago, I didn’t have anybody. So it didn’t matter what happened to me.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Victoria smiled. “Thanks, Kyle. Charles is going to walk you through the details.”
As the scientist stepped forward and opened his mouth, I heard shouting coming from outside. Victoria got up from behind her desk and walked to the window. She stared out toward the town square for a moment and then turned around. Her eyes were wide with alarm.
17
A throng of people packed the square. When we got closer I saw that it was the Vasey campers. They looked terrible. Their bodies swayed in the wind like weeds and their faces were gaunt. They wouldn't have looked out of place marching with the infected.
Sana stood at the head of the Vasey group. Her hair looked like wild tree roots twisting into her skull and her eyebrows arched above angry eyes. She looked like some kind of witch who had spurned society and spent her time isolated in the forest. She held a hatchet in her left hand, and there was a pale patch from where the wedding ring was missing from her index finger. I realised that everyone else in the Vasey group had weapons too. Some of them had thick logs of wood, whereas others carried hammers, knives, axes. The look in their eyes said that they were ready to use them.
When we got to the edge of the square Billy charged ahead, his mallet clenched in his hand. He looked like a warlord running into battle. I knew that if he got there first, he was going to sink the mallet into the forehead of the first person he reached. If that happened, blood was going to flow.
I started running and in a few seconds I overtook him. The bullet scar on my leg ached with the effort. Sana looked up at me, and there was fire in her eyes.
“You,” she said, her words dripping with acid.
I held my hand in the air. “Let’s all just take a second and calm down,” I said.
“Fuck off, gimp,” she said. “We’ve been shut out of this place for too long. You’ve kept your food from us like the fat pigs you are, and now look. We’re starving.”
Across the square, behind the Vasey group, I saw Ewan. He stood in his shirt and trousers like a worker commuting to the office who had stopped to see what all the fuss was about. He had a wide grin on his face, as though he loved what he saw.
Sana waved her hatchet in the air. “It’s about time we took what we deserve. We want a share of the food. Enough to feed us all.”
Victoria joined me at my side. Despite how tired she had seemed in her office, she’d managed to shed that for now. Her posture was straight and her shoulders firm. She stared into the angry faces of the Vasey campers.
“How the hell did you get in here?” she said.
Sana screwed up her face. “It’s amazing how persuasive a bunch of pissed off people with weapons can be.”
“So you forced your way in?”
“We waited long enough for you to invite us, but you’re happy to let us die out there on your doorstep. It turns out that your fences don’t mean shit when your people don’t have the balls to guard them.”
“We should talk,” said Victoria.
“We’re done talking,” Sana spat.
It was the most life I’d seen from Sana in a long time, a far cry from the defeated woman who had travelled with us before Bleakholt. It was like she’d taken grief and turned it into bile and anger.
If Victoria was worried, she didn’t show it. She crossed her arms, straightened up a little more, added a couple of inches to her height. Her face was set in steel. When she looked like this she was scary, as though she could step forward and tear your head off.
“If you’re done talking, then I suggest you get the hell out of my settlement.”
“We’re not going until we have food,” said Sana.
The Vasey group murmured behind her. They waited for Sana to do something. It was if they were looking for a cue, like Sana would give a sign and then the riot would break out and they’d release their built-up anger. I wondered where Moe was. This seemed like the kind of thing he’d relish.
I stepped forward until I stood in front of Sana. From a couple of feet away, she smelt horrible. It was an unwashed, damp smell, like a dog coming in from the rain. Her shoulder bones stuck out against her blouse like a coat hanger.
I tried to force a smile. “We can talk about this,” I said.
Sana swung the blunt end of her hatchet at my leg and caught me on the bullet scar. Molten pain ripped through my leg and made it burn from calf to thigh. I stumbled back and held my leg tight as if gripping it would squeeze the pain out.
Sana raised her hatchet in the air again. “Let’s take what we’
re owed,” she shouted.
The Vasey campers lurched forward. Between sick bouts of pain I glanced at them, and the way they moved reminded me of the infected. They marched in step, their faces angry and eyes lifeless. They had only one thing on their mind; the drive for survival.
Billy, Steve and Lou stepped forward, their own weapons in their hands. A few more Bleakholt settlers joined them. They were like two opposing armies meeting for battle. Their nostrils flared, and adrenaline shot through their veins and made them grip their weapons.