by Jack Lewis
“These windows couldn’t keep out a badger,” said Lou.
Billy put his hands around his head and covered his face with his arms. He let out a long sigh. “For god’s sake! This is pointless.”
Alice glared at him. “Hold it together, Bill.”
He moved his arms away from his face. “Don’t call me Bill. My dad was Bill, and I’m nothing like that bastard. I’m Billy.”
A shriek rose in the night sky and spread through the trees. It drowned out the other sounds of the forest. This one was much closer, though I didn’t know which direction it came from.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s think. How do they track us?”
“Smell,” said Alice.
“Hearing,” said Billy.
“GPRS,” said Lou.
I cut her a look that I hoped she interpreted as ‘shut up.’
“So they wake up and catch our scent in their nest. The track it, and it leads them to this shed. They smell us in here and then they get ready to eat. That about the size of things?”
Alice glanced toward the window. “Sounds right.”
“So it’s clear what we need to do,” I said. “We need to disguise our smell.”
Billy took an uncertain step into the middle of the room. He scratched his head, and I heard his nails scrape against the stubble straining through his scalp. “I’ve got something. You’re not gonna like it.”
“We don’t have time to mess about, Billy. Spit it out,” said Alice.
“We could piss on each other.”
There room was silent as all of us thought about Billy’s idea and how to best reject it without telling him how stupid it was. Billy scratched the back of his neck and looked down at the ground. After a few seconds, he coughed nervously.
Lou rolled her eyes. “How would smelling like pee help us, you dolt? Think about it. Our pee is human. We’d still smell like humans, with the added bonus of smelling like a bus station toilet.”
Lou’s derision made Billy scowl back at her, but it gave me an idea. Lou was right. The problem would come when the stalkers worked their way toward the shed and smelt live humans. If they didn’t smell us, then they’d ignore the shed.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
Alice smiled at me. “Go on.”
“We saw some infected walking near the quarry. We need to bring them in here.”
***
The infected were heavier than they looked. Billy, Alice and I killed them and dragged them to the shed while Lou stood on lookout, shivering and rubbing her arms. The infected were three men, two of them young and bulky, and an older one who was smaller and thinner.
We piled them in the middle of the room as though we were making an infected bonfire. Then we stood around them in a circle and stared. I couldn’t tell if it was just because I had gotten used to it, or I was just being critical of the plan, but they didn’t smell as bad as I thought.
“This gonna work?” said Billy.
I stuck a foot out and kicked the palm of an infected. “It doesn’t seem enough.”
Alice shook her head. “You’re right, it isn’t. The infected will be able to smell the difference. They’ll smell us in here as well as the infected.”
“So what do we do?” said Lou.
I knew what we needed to do. My throat felt thick, so I swallowed.
“We need to paint the walls,” I said.
We sliced through the skin that covered their bellies. As soon as my knife punctured the grey flesh, the smell hit me in full force. I choked back a glob of sick that hit my throat. This was the smell we needed. Pure death and rotten flesh. It reminded me of when I’d been in Iceland and tried their nation dish, putrefied shark. In the shed, the smell of death was so ripe I tasted it in the air.
Billy found a sheet of canvas stood in the corner of the room. He rolled it out on the floor, borrowed my knife and then cut it into pieces.
“Always loved decorating,” he said.
The choke of death seeped into every available inch of space. It crept up my nostrils, made my stomach lurch and bile rise up my throat. Lou’s face was the colour of tofu. She picked up a clean sheet of the canvas and held it to her nose. Her cheeks bulged like she was about to hurl. She walked to the door and opened it.
The fresh breeze of the wind swept in and started to clear the smell from the room. My nose thanked her for it, but no matter how much I liked the breeze we couldn’t keep it. This would be the only time in my life I would think this way, but right then we needed the stink of the infected.
“Close the door,” I said.
“I’m going to vom,” said Lou.
“Then do it and get it over with. But we can’t let the smell out. That’s the whole point of this.”
Billy stood up. “Okay guys, roll up your sleeves and get painting. Time to give this place a zombie makeover.”
Lou turned. She looked at the zombie guts on the floor and the pieces of torn canvas. “We’re going to spread it all over the walls? I can’t do it.”
I had never seen this from Lou before. I knew that deep down things scared her sometimes. It was hard not to be afraid when spending the night in the wrong place could draw a stalker to your scent. She usually hid her feelings behind a wall of sarcasm, but that was gone tonight. Lou was scared, and she was showing it.
A cry rose in the night and crept through the open door, and it sounded much closer than the others. Cold seeped through me. The open door felt like a gaping wound, like it was an open invitation to the stalkers.
“Close the door,” I said.
Billy dabbed a piece of canvas against an infected’s intestines and covered the material in crimson. Clots of flesh clung to the sides of it and made it look like jam. He moved to the wall and dabbed the canvas against the wood, spreading the thick paste of infected blood across the panels. The smell hit me afresh, twisting and stabbing at my nostrils, remind me that death was in the room.
“Shut the bloody door and pick up a cloth,” shouted Alice.
This jarred Lou from her thoughts. She pushed the door and let it slam against the wood. She took a deep breath as if she was readying herself, and then she picked up a cloth.
***
The walls of the shed were covered red with a soup of infected blood. Chunks of flesh stuck to it like raisins in fruit bread. Billy had taken the infected’s trails of intestines and lined them against the bottom of the door like a draught guard. We’d scattered their organs randomly around the room, distributing the sick smell of death as evenly as we could. Lou’s guts had given in while we worked and she’d thrown up on the floor, but we were finished now. The shed looked like the finished product of a home makeover show where the contestants had gone insane.
Something crunched on the forest floor. The stalkers were here now. They had tracked our scent all the way through the forest and to the shed. If the plan had worked, then our scent should have stopped suddenly.
The question was would they give in, or would they explore? Did they possess enough logic to realise that if the scent trail ended at the shed, then the humans must be inside? Maybe they’d smell the infected and assume that the humans had died.
Either way, hearing them sent a shock of panic though me. Just being near the stalkers was enough to make my skin itch. It was like looking at the lion enclosure in the zoo and wondering if the cages could really hold them. Were the bars strong enough? What if you fell in and got torn to pieces?
Branches snapped. Tremors of cold shot up my arms. Lou darted a look at me, her eyes wide. Billy looked at the ground and closed his eyes. Alice stared at the window. I looked up at it.
There was a face in the glass.
My heartbeat jarred and then seemed to stop. My brain screamed at me, told me that the plan had failed and that I had to run. But at the same time, I knew my legs were frozen solid.
The dark face pressed against the window frame. It had dark eyes and oil-black skin that shimmered in the moonlight. I looked awa
y, hoping that my not looking at it, it wouldn’t exist. My cold breath left my mouth as steam. I slowly turned my head back toward the window.
Sharp grey teeth flashed in front of a sneering smile. It stared in through the glass. I held my breath. I didn’t even dare risk the tiny movement of my chest.
There was a shriek outside, as though one of the stalkers was communicating with the others and telling the pack what it had found. Any second now they were going to smash through the window or crash through the door. We’d be torn to pieces in seconds if they got in.
I wondered if I should stand up. If I was going to die, I wanted to die fighting. I wouldn’t let the bastards take me that easily. I moved my foot, tested to see if my body would still respond to me. My leg twitched. Alice reached slowly across, put her hand on my shoulder and pushed me down.
The face left the window and its footsteps moved away from the shed. None of us moved. We hardly even breathed. Time dragged for hours like some unseen force was stretching it out and making the night last as long as it could. The cries of the stalkers drifted further into the night, like voices disappearing down a dark tunnel. When pale daylight flickered through the window panes, I knew that we had made it.
25
As I walked through the streets of Bleakholt I didn’t even look up to say morning to the people I passed. My body felt wilted. I knew I should go and see Victoria and tell her we had the dynamite. Tell her about the breeder. I couldn’t do that yet. I just needed sleep.
I got home and walked upstairs. I drew the curtains and sank into the bed like I was falling into water. Pale light filtered through the curtains, so I shut my eyes tighter. Every so often I’d open my eyes and see that the hands of the clock had moved and the light that strained through the curtains had changed. It got brighter as midday came and went, then faded as the winter afternoon and onset of night suffocated it. Soon it had extinguished completely, and the bedroom swam with shadows.
My eyelids flickered. I tossed and turned. A breeze floated in, crept underneath my bedcovers and made my hairs stand on end. I tried to blot everything out, but at three o’clock in the morning I realised I wasn’t going to get any more sleep. I threw the covers back, got out of bed and walked to the window. I drew back the curtains and let the moonlight spill into the room.
The streets were awash with darkness, a river of black that blotted out the features of the houses. The settlement was a curious mix of the old and the new. On the outskirts were homes that were built in the seventies. They were characterless blocks of stone that had the uniform two up, two down arrangement. In the heart of the town, beyond the streets that span like veins into the centre, were the older cottages. Some were a couple of hundred years old, the sodden timber having seen multiple generations live and die. They had sat silently through the end of the world without judgement.
I opened the window. I expected a breeze on my face but the night was still, and it would have been clammy were we not in the dead of winter. Instead the temperature chilled my skin but there was no gust of wind to blow it at my face. The night was silent. All the people would be in bed now, sleeping off their labour and letting their muscles recover in time for the next day.
Despite the layer of grimness the dark of the night bathed on the town, there was something bright about it all. There was a sense that everyone believed in Bleakholt and was willing to work together to make it somewhere worthwhile. If there was ever a place to spend the apocalypse, this was it. Bleakholt was all there was, and all there ever would be.
I was going to close the window and get back in bed, but a shriek broke the stillness of the night. My brain flicked to one thought; stalkers. Invisible icy fingers stroked the hairs on my arms, made them stand to attention. I thought back to the quarry shed and the stalker peering through the window.
There was another scream but this one stopped abruptly. It wasn’t a stalker, I was certain of that. This had been a woman. It had come from somewhere within Bleakholt, but the dark buildings and streets gave no clue where.
I pulled my trousers over my legs, ran downstairs and opened the front door. I stepped onto the dark streets, felt the night press down on me. The chill in the air was stronger now, made goosebumps cover my skin. My ears felt alert, attuned to the slightest noise. I ran to the end of the street, turned left, and ran a hundred yards down another street. I passed by houses that settled in stillness, no sign of life behind their drawn curtains.
I didn’t know where I was going or where the scream had come from. Something about it made my stomach heavy. I tried to rationalise it to myself. Maybe it had been an animal. Perhaps someone just had a nightmare and left their window open. As I walked back down the gloomy streets, something fluttered inside me and made my insides feel like water. The scream had meant something.
***
The next morning my head felt like it was full of fog. I had planned on getting up early, but the sun snuck up on me. I woke up to something pounding on the front door.
I opened the door and squinted into the light. Lou stood on my doorstep. Her cheeks were pale and puffy. I waited for a sarcastic greeting or jibe, but it didn’t come. She smiled at me and stepped into the house.
“You look like shit,” she said.
I rubbed my head. “Did you hear anything last night?”
Lou looked puzzled. “Like what?”
“Something on the streets.”
She shook her head.
“We need to see Victoria,” I said.
I got dressed and we left the house. The streets were light now. People walked down them on their way to their assigned jobs. The bulk of them would go to the fields where their manual labour would ensure the town had food for the winter months. Some would trundle toward the fences and others toward the wind farm. Everyone had skills and a purpose. I could almost picture this as a normal town.
There was a burning smell in the air but I couldn’t see the source of it. It was as though an invisible fire licked and spat on the winter ground nearby. I looked around me and tried to see the plume of smoke responsible for the smell that teased its way up my nose.
“What the hell is that?” I said.
Lou pointed over at the school, where a black smoky snake twisted into the air. For a second my heart jolted, and I tried to see which part of the school was on fire. My legs twitched, and I thought I was going to have to run toward it. Lou put her hand on my arm.
“It’s not the school. It’s in that direction, but it looks like it’s outside of town. They’re probably burning the stragglers.”
“Stragglers?”
Lou pointed at the fence. “Sometimes infected get to the fence, and Ewan and his crew do a daily clean up. They burn the dead bodies.”
The smoke scratched at my throat. “I’ve never noticed the smell before.”
“They usually do it further away from the town. Maybe Ewan’s getting lazy.”
I thought about Ewan and his sneering face. His not-so-subtle jibes at Victoria, his green bulbous eyes on her power.
“I hate the prick,” I said.
We met Alice on the way to Victoria’s office. She greeted me with a grunt, no trace of her usual warmth or smile. Her skin was grey, and she looked like she had lost weight. For a second her face looked strained as though the stress of the last few days pressed down her. Then she shook it away, and her face looked strong again.
“Going to the fence?” I asked.
“Yeah. You going to see Victoria?”
“We need to get the dynamite set up today. The wave are a few days away, and that’s being generous. We could see them spilling through the hill passage any day now.”
Lou’s boots scuffed on the ground as though lifting her legs to walk took more effort than she was willing to give. “You seem awful calm about it.”
The truth was that whenever I thought about the wave, a feeling of panic liquefied my guts. I pictured hundreds of their rotting faces walking toward the gates of Bleakholt. Th
en the hundreds swelled into thousands.
I imagined our spotters seeing them and raising the alarm. Men shrieking, women screaming. People running around in panic. Victoria standing up and bringing everyone to order. Alice standing beside her and helping to control the chaos. We look to the fences and see the dead, their mouths open, saliva pooling in rotted gums.
***
I opened the door to the mayor’s office. The lobby was oppressively silent. Watercolour portraits of past mayors lined the stairway, their serious faces imprisoned behind canvas. The step of my boots thudded on the stones. I stopped.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” I said.