by Jack Lewis
Billy turned round and faced me. He took careful steps forward, away from the stalkers. He beckoned us to follow him. The quarry storage shed was less than a mile away, but we would have to abandon it. We couldn’t walk through a nest of sleeping stalkers. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t think my brain would allow me to take the steps. I felt like it would lock down on my motor movements like a vice and refuse to release the controls until I agreed to go home.
Before I turned around I took another look at the stalkers. Ice washed through my body and sent shivers across my skin. I scanned the black creatures on the forest floor from left to right and tried to count how many there actually were. And then I stopped.
My throat tightened and I made a choking sound as if something strangled me. I opened my mouth wide in disbelief at what I saw.
Further back, in the centre of the nest, there was a black form bigger than the rest. This one was the width of four stalkers. Its belly was swollen like a balloon ready to burst.
It reminded me of when I was a kid and I saw a pregnant woman on the bus. She was so far gone that I was worried she was going to pop before we got to our stop. I remembered her belly, the skin stretched around the oval shape. Swollen, like the slightest pin-prick could puncture it.
I knew know what this was. Now I knew how the stalkers bred. That is what waited for us in the forest. Not just a stalkers nest, not just twenty dozing stalkers. Here, sleeping in the darkness, was the source of them. This was a breeder.
23
As we ran through the forest it was a while before my brain caught up with my legs. My head swam with thoughts of the stalkers shifting in their sleep, their limbs straightening out. I imagined the breeder in the centre of them. A swollen beast, its belly swimming with the stalkers inside it.
We stopped a mile away from the stalkers nest. The forest was as thick as ever, but as far as I could see there were none of the black shapes were sleeping on the floor around us. Billy sunk to the mud and rested his back against a tree trunk. He ran his hand over his bald head and punched the ground.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Shit,” said Lou.
Alice leant against a tree. She gave a quick look behind her, as though she expected something to be waiting in the darkness.
“Are we just going to stand here and swear?”
I scratched my cheek, felt my beard rough against my fingers. My face was cold. “Is there a way around them?” I said.
Billy stretched out his legs, cracked his knees. “We could skirt around them. But it would add a few hours onto the journey.”
“Then let’s do that,” I said.
The sensible thing to do would be to go back, but I wasn’t going back to Bleakholt empty handed. Victoria had sent us out on one mission already, and that had ended in a spray of body parts. If we failed this time, there was no hope for Bleakholt. They needed the dynamite to blow the hillside passage. If we couldn’t do that, then the wave of infected would get a free pass into the settlement.
***
When we reached the storage shed the long fingers of night were closing the eyelids of the sky. The shed was the size of a house, a wood panelled building that look ready to fall apart. The wooden walls looked moist, as though they were sodden with rain and just couldn’t get dry. Beyond the shed was the quarry itself, a deep curve cut onto the earth, the sides of it covered in sandy limestone.
There was a disused quarry back in my hometown. Nobody had worked on it in thirty years, and at some point it had filled with water so dark and murky that I couldn’t see the depths. My friends had run to the side of the quarry and dived in. I stood on the edge and watched them lap in the brown sea. It was easy to imagine unseen creatures swimming around them, pulling at their legs and dragging them down. I didn't jump in.
This quarry was empty. A danger sign stood on the side of it with a warning drawn in faded red paint. ‘Demolition charge area. Keep out.’ On the other side, a stone’s throw away if you had a strong arm, a group of infected shambled along the sides of the slope. They dragged their feet aimlessly and focussed on nothing in particular.
Billy put his shoulder to the storage shed door and forced it open. A musty smell hit me, a decade old collection of damp and dust. A film of stone powder covered the floor and crunched beneath my boots. There were various white bags that reached up to knee height, some full of stone chips and others wood. A row of shelves lined a back wall with the tools that once the quarry men would have used to collect their stone. Various sledgehammers, pneumatic drills, hard hats.
Billy walked over to the shelves and inspected them. He reached out and heaved away a box.
“Got it,” he said.
“That the dynamite?” I said.
“No, it’s the Xbox I’ve been dreaming about.”
“Fuck off.”
Alice stood at the window, leant against the frame. The glass was single-paned and encrusted with grime.
“We should have turned back,” she said.
I walked over to a table near the door and rested my weight against it. The wood bent a little underneath me. “We couldn’t go back empty handed,” I said.
“We let it get too dark,” she said. “There’s no way we can leave here tonight.”
“She’s right,” said Billy, and put the box of dynamite on the table next to me. “No fucking way I’m walking back through the woods at night. Not with them waiting for us.”
I thought about the breeder we had seen in the forest, its belly swollen with what I could only assume were stalker eggs. I couldn’t shake the feeling that passing it by was a missed opportunity. That maybe we could have killed it and ended Bleakholt’s stalker problem.
Outside the light had been sucked away like water in a whirlpool, leaving the sky the colour of crow feathers. Alice was right, this had been a mistake. By taking the detour we’d gotten the dynamite, but we’d been out too long.
“We’re going to have to hole up here for the night,” I said.
Lou sank to the ground. She reached forward and tugged at one of her boots, straining as she pulled it off her foot. She threw it across the floor and then reached for the other one. Her blonde bob was greased back with sweat.
“Better get comfortable,” she said.
***
We settled into sleep. We hadn’t had the foresight to bring sleeping bags or covers, because we hadn’t planned on this being an overnight stay. Alice lay next to me, our bodies almost touching. I never liked having someone sleeping next to me, not even Clara. I had always been an independent sleeper. Tonight, though, I was glad of the warmth that she gave off.
Billy settled down near the shelves, his arm around the box of dynamite like a boy sleeping with his teddy bear. Lou sat against a wall and faced the door. She closed her eyes, but I could tell she wasn’t sleeping. I closed my own and let the haze of sleep slip over me.
A few hours later I woke to tapping sounds. Something pattered across the ground outside like a wolf walking on ice. I rose into a sitting position.
“Shh,” said Lou.
She stared at the door intently, as though she was trying to bore through the wood with her gaze. The way she looked at it reminded me of a guard dog keeping watch over a house.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
She broke her stare and looked at me. From the bags under eyes, I could tell she hadn’t even dozed.
“I think they’re outside,” she said.
A chill ran through me like someone was blowing up and down my skin. I pictured the stalkers outside, their sneering eyes refreshed from sleep, their noses honing in on our scent. We had been stupid to stay here. Stalkers could track anything. It was what they were built for.
I tried to make sense of the sounds outside. They could have been the delicate steps of the stalkers as they crawled across the ground. They also sounded like rain drops dripping from the gutter. It was easy for your senses to lie to you when you were already on edge. I had to be sure.
I got to my knees and crawled over to the window, my jeans shuffling against the stone floor. I reached the window and put my fingertips on the ledge above me.
“What are you doing?” said Lou.
Billy stirred at the other side of the room and his eyes flickered open. I held a hand out to signal quiet. I carefully raised my body so that my eyes were level with the bottom pane. I imagined a stalker waiting outside, staring at the window and watching my head slide into view. Its eyes snapping on mine, its body tensing up, a sneering smile snaking its way across its lips.
The woods outside were swollen with the black of night. I scanned the trees and the forest floor. There was no sign of the black silhouettes that had so often sent a shard of terror through me.
There was movement in my peripheral vision, something tracking along the forest floor. I almost didn’t want to look, as though my brain didn’t want my senses to confirm what was there. My heart pounded, and I gripped the window frame until my fingertips were white. I turned my head toward the movement and expected the worst. It was a rabbit.
“Jesus,” I said, sinking back away from the window and letting out a gush of breath.
“What is it?” said Alice, her voice groggy.
“Just a rabbit,” I said.
Billy sat up, stretched out his arms, and gave a groan. “I need some air,” he said.
He got to his feet, walked over to the door and opened it. The cold air of the night seeped in and washed over my face like water. Billy stood in the doorway and drank it in. My skin tingled with the chill, but it made me realise how dusty the air in the storage shed was. Maybe we should have worn masks while we slept. You always heard about quarry workers and miners getting lung diseases from the crap they breathed in.
The sounds of the forest floated in. Birds chirped bedtime cries and critters snapped across the bracken on the forest floor. The wind wheezed through the air and wrapped itself around the branches of the trees. It could almost have been peaceful, a night time lullaby to go to sleep by. Then a shriek pierced the stillness of the night.
It was a wail so full of hate and anger that it seemed to shake the trees. Other screams returned the call in answer, and soon the air was filled with dozens of them. It was like the howling of a wolf pack, but twisted and made more terrible by the desperation that the sounds carried with them.
Alice and Lou both looked to me, as if asking me for reassurance. I couldn’t give any. I knew what the cries were. Fear wrapped around my heart like a snake, slithered through my chest and then down my spine. My stomach twisted.
“They’re ready to hunt,” I said.
My words hung heavy in the air. It was night time, and the stalkers were coming.
24
As Billy took a step back inside the glow of the moon slipped from his body and left him covered in shadow. Alice got to her feet. She put a hand to the back of her neck and rubbed, easing her stiff muscles with her thumbs.
“Shut the door,” she said.
It took a second for the words to register with Billy, like he'd tuned out everything apart from the shriek of the stalkers.
“Billy.”
He jerked his head back like he was waking from a trance. He stepped forward and took hold of the door then pushed it shut, careful not to let it bang.
I ran my fingers through my hair and felt the knots strain against my fingers. Adrenaline spiked my blood, and I felt like I could run all the way to Bleakholt without stopping. The idea of the stalkers sniffing us out made my skin itch, like microscopic bugs were eating it.
Lou stood by the window. She looked calm, but the hairs on her arms were on edge like static had ruffled them. She moved her head as close to the pane of glass as she dared, hesitating as if a stalker might suddenly appear in the window frame.
“I thought we’d be okay here?” she said, and looked at Billy.
Billy screwed his face up. Despite a penchant for violence when it came to the infected and stalkers, he seemed like a good natured guy when it came to people. But when he looked at Lou, there was genuine dislike on his face.
“I don’t control the stalkers,” he said. “And we don’t know they’re getting closer.”
Every so often something cracked on the forest floor. A cry rang out and floated through the trees, carried to the shed by the wind. The shrieks got louder, the snapping sounds were closer.
“They’re on their way,” I said, trying to put a touch of finality to the discussion. “So we need to decide what we’re going to do.”
Lou curled her fist and hit the wall with the bottom of her palm. The window frame shook.
“How the hell can they smell us? We’re miles away.”
“I didn’t have a clue,” said Billy.
“There’s a fucking surprise.”
Billy kicked out at the air like a drunk striking an annoying dog. “I’m not David Attenborough. I don’t know how they found us. Stop being such a bitch.”
The stalkers were hunters. They were fast and agile, with tough skin and senses keener than a wolf’s. They were experts at hiding in the night and sneaking through the dark. They hunted in packs and they killed without mercy.
Despite that, I felt that Lou was right. We were miles away. How had they found us? Then it hit me. Frustration rushed through me and made me huff at my own stupidity.
“We were in their nest,” I said. “So we were the first thing they smelt when they woke up. Imagine how they felt when they woke up at night and got a whiff of us.”
“Angry?” said Billy.
I shook my head. “I don’t think they have emotions in that way. They felt hungry. They smelt us in the air and they knew they had an easy meal waiting for them. All they have to do now is follow the trail.”
“God dammit,” said Lou, and hit the wall again. The window frame shook harder, and it seemed like the glass panes could just pop out.
“Stop that Lou,” I said. “No point drawing their attention even more.”
“Like it matters now.”
Billy bent to the floor and picked up the dynamite. He held it to his chest like a baby, and then put it on the table.
“We should have just gone back to Bleakholt,” he said.
Lou shot him an angry look. She could give the meanest look I’d ever seen when she was in the mood.
“You were the one who said we’d be okay here,” she said.
“Again, I’m not David Attenborough.”
“No kidding, he’s got more balls.”
Billy arched his eyebrows. “Didn’t know you liked them shrivelled up.”
Lou sprang away from the wall, fists at her side. “He’s faced lions, tigers, snakes. You lose your shit when you see a mouse.”
Billy looked at the floor, scratched the back of his neck. “Can’t believe you’re bringing that up.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks and a prickly heat ran down the back of my neck.
“That’s enough,” I said. “You’re acting like kids, and we’ve got other shit to think about. Like what the hell we’re going to do.”
The sky was thick like a barrel of oil. The outlines of the trees seemed to blend into it until everything was a uniform black. The stalkers couldn’t have been less than a few miles away, and it wouldn’t take them long to cover the distance. We needed to make a decision. I walked to the centre of the room.
“We either stay here, or we move. The only question we need to answer is, which one makes it more likely we survive?”
I didn’t know where the sudden logic had come from. I was as scared as the rest of them. My spine felt like ice, and my stomach felt light and twisted. Maybe it was all the time I had spent in the Wilds over the years. The nights spent shivering in the forest with infected lurching by and stalkers screeching in the distance. I learnt that I had to keep my head or I would die.
Alice crossed her arms. Her face was the only one of the groups that wasn’t pale. Instead she had a healthy glow, and her breaths were even
.
“If we leave, they’ll catch us in minutes. You know that, Kyle.”
“We could outrun them on a quad,” I said. “Pity we had to leave them at the edge of the forest.”
Billy stepped away from the table. “Too much shit on the forest floor. Gets in the carriage and screws things up. We lost one that way once.”
“Leaving is out of the question, I guess. We’re going to have to stay here. At least it’s kind of defensible,” I said.