by Jack Lewis
28
By the time Ewan let us out of the enclosure, word had already spread that Justin had to leave. I wanted to go to him and explain that I was just appeasing Ewan, but someone told him before I got there. Rather than stay and put up a fight, Justin resigned himself to leaving. There was no resistance in him, as though he was empty of energy.
By the time I got to him he had left the settlement and he was two miles across the plains. I wanted to run after him, but Ewan stood at my side. I knew that I had to keep up the act. I had to stay on Ewan’s good side until we could get rid of him.
It felt like I’d let a part of myself walk with Justin. I thought back to the day - god over a year ago now - that he’d first joined me. He was naïve kid eager to see the world, but he’d never been closer than twenty feet away from an infected let alone killed one himself. Back then he was a pain in the arse, a burden I wanted to drop the first chance I’d got.
Since then he’d grown. He toughened himself up and killed his share of infected. We’d been through a lot of shit together, certainly more than anyone else in Bleakholt. He’d become more distant since we’d saved him from Whitaker’s lab, but that wasn’t all his fault. He’d pushed us away, and maybe that was down to him. But however much blame he deserved, I was owed a thousand times more. I’d allowed Ewan to send Justin walking into the Wilds.
What the hell was I doing? Was staying in this place so important that I’d let Justin walk into the wilderness alone? Was the security of the fences that important?
Not to me. But it was to Alice and Ben. Melissa and Lou. Everyone who I was trying to protect.
I walked to the old bank and leant against the scaffolding. The rusty bars felt light, as though a shift in wind could collapse them like a Jenga tower. I wrapped my hand around one of the bars and felt the cold metal sting my skin. When I was little I used to open the freezer compartment below the fridge and press my hand against the icy sides. I’d hold it there and see how long I could last before it felt like my hand was a block of stinging ice. I wondered if one day I could hold it there until I was welded to the freezer and maybe my mum would have to call the fire brigade. Part of me wanted to try it just to get some attention. Maybe that’s all everyone wanted, really; another human being to notice them.
“Kyle,” someone shouted behind me.
I didn’t turn. I shook off the voice like it was an unwanted coat draped over my back. I unzipped my coat and let it drop to the floor. Cold fingers tugged at my shirt buttons, snuck in through every gap and ran their icy touch up and down my skin. My breath left my mouth as cold smoke, evaporating a second later.
When the cold felt like pin pricks testing my skin for weaknesses, I knew it wasn’t enough. It didn’t pierce the layer of guilt that had grown around me like a shell, but it was enough for me to feel something.
I lifted my leg and propped my foot on the scaffolding. Bar by bar I pulled myself up, and the further I went the more the cold wore down my senses like sandpaper. I wanted my nerves to fray away into nothing, leave me an unfeeling bundle of bones.
I got to the top of the scaffolding. There was a gap of two feet between it and the roof. I took a deep breath. I embraced my mild fear of heights and used it as fuel. Then I leapt. I landed on the roof with a thud and felt a jolt in my ankle. Great. A busted to ankle to go with a busted leg, to go with a worn down body.
I sat on the roof and watched Bleakholt. The streets seemed empty at first, endless lanes of grey cobblestone. The more I looked, the more people I spotted. It was like watching a mound of mud and seeing nothing at first, but you stare some more and start to see the ants crawling from tiny holes. Worker ants trek up and down the dirt, their life an endless stretch of back-breaking labour and then death. The endless nothing, the black that marks the end of existence.
“What’s the point?” I said to no one, expecting no response.
Something thudded behind me. It sounded near yet far away, like a fist pounding on a double-glazed window. I thought about turning round, but my body felt as rusty as the scaffolding. We weren’t so different. Both the scaffolding and I had been around since before the outbreak. We’d both been intended for one purpose back then, and that purpose had long since left us now. We’d weathered what the world had thrown at us and come out a little weaker. Flecks of rust covered the surface as the elements rotted us away. Neither of us would ever change.
Footsteps walked behind me, and then beside me. This time I turned my head. It was Alice. Talk about change, she was the embodiment of it. She was a true leader, someone who had already made a difference to the people of Bleakholt and would carry on doing so long after I’d gone. Alice was everything a leader should be.
“Quite a view up here,” she said, her tone enough to melt the ice.
She lowered herself to the ground, struggling a little with her weight, until she sat next to me. I could feel her body heat.
“How did you get up here?” I said, wondering how she’d navigated the scaffolds.
She gave me a look, like I’d said something ridiculous. “I used the stairs…and the door.”
I smirked, but felt the smile drop straight away.
“You must be bloody freezing,” said Alice.
A shudder ran through me but the feeling of it was blunted. It was as though my nerves had taken all the cold they could handle and had decided not to bother reporting any more of it. My teeth shook and my hairs stood on end.
“I like it,” I said.
She gave a laugh. “Don’t act like Mr. Mysterious with me, Kyle. You’re not some anti-hero in a book. I know you, and I know that you are fucking freezing.”
I looked into her eyes and saw a heat in them. Most people thought that smile was just moving your lips into the familiar shape, but that wasn’t enough. A smile like that could be faked by the cruellest of people. Alice smiled with her eyes.
“Okay,” I agreed. “You got me. I’m freezing my bollocks off.”
Alice laughed, then leant across and draped a big arm across my shoulder.
“I’m sorry about Justin,” she said.
The name stabbed me in the gut, made me want to shake her arm off my shoulders. It reminded me of why I’d climbed up here in the first place.
“Just wanted to get one last look at the place,” I said.
The smile dropped from her face. “I don’t like the way you’re talking, Kyle.”
Alice looked below us, down at the ground. It took me a minute to realise what she thought I was going to do. I shook my head.
“Jesus, no. I didn’t mean that,” I said.
“Then what?”
“I’m leaving Bleakholt,” I said.
Alice sighed like a only a mother can. I half expected her to say something like ‘I’ve told you until I’m blue in the face, Kyle.’
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. I’ll catch up to Justin and then just keep moving, I guess.”
Alice let out a long stream of hot breath, as though she were exhaling all her annoyance.
“I’ve told you until I’m blue in the face Kyle,” she said. “There’s nothing out there that you can’t find in Bleakholt. You can’t keep running.”
“Doesn’t seem like me staying will do much good, either..”
Her arm fell across my shoulders again. I’d never admit it to anyone, but I enjoyed the comfort of it.
“What happened to Justin wasn’t your fault,” she said, her tone soft. “Ewan’s got too many people. You couldn’t have stopped him.”
I nodded. “See what I mean? Pointless staying here.”
“It is with that baby attitude. Answer me this. Do you really think there’s anything out there that’s better than Bleakholt? That there’s a place waiting somewhere that’s doing what Bleakholt does, and doing it better?”
I thought about it. I’d travelled a lot in the North of England, and I’d seen a bit of Scotland now, too. And in sixteen years, I’d never seen a
survivor settlement like this one. Deep down, tucked under the shadows of my pessimism, I knew that this was the only place left. It was the only place worth fighting for.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re fucked. Ewan’s going to screw the whole thing up, and we’ve got the wave coming any day now.”
“This place could be something special, with the right leader,” said Alice.
Flashes of Victoria flitted through my mind. Sat behind her desk, a cigarette burning in her hand and staining her fingers with tar. Her fingernails knobbly and bitten down to the skin. Her painting of Bleakholt resting against the easel. It made me realise how much I’d respected the women and how close I had been to buying into her dream.
And then Ewan came. He smashed that dream to pieces. I pictured his knife as he stuck it through Victoria's flesh and twisted until she couldn’t scream anymore. I imagined her eyes dimming like the sun in a thunderstorm.
I couldn’t let Ewan win. I couldn’t let the infected wipe us out. Maybe we could do this. Hell, we had to try. I owed it to Alice, Lou, Ben, Justin. I owed it to Victoria.
A rush of adrenaline blew away the cold in my veins like a leaf blower shooting through a cobweb. I backed off the ledge of the roof and got to my feet. A pain thudded through my ankle and then my leg, but I was glad of it. I looked at Alice.
“If we’re going to do this,” I said, “If we’re going to get rid of Ewan, then this place needs a leader.”
Alice nodded. She put her hand on the floor and pushed herself to her feet. “Yeah, it does. You.”
“I’m no leader, Alice. Bleakholt needs a true leader, someone born to do it. And that’s you.”
I looked down on the view of Bleakholt. This time it seemed calm. The cobblestones grew lighter, the glass of the shop windows reflected the yellow glow of the sun. People milled the streets, chatted with each other, walked to their homes or their jobs. The town buzzed.
“We’ll stay,” I said, “And we’ll fight. We’ll get rid of Ewan, and then we’ll smash the shit of this wave.”
Alice got to her feet and smiled. It felt like the kind of moment where we should high-five or something, but instead I looked beyond Bleakholt. I stared beyond it, all the way to the hillside pathway where soon, half a million infected would pour through.
29
We met in the living room of the house I had been staying in. Although treacly darkness covered the streets outside, we drew the curtains to stop anyone peering in. With a candle burring in the centre of the room, wax dripping down the side and an orange glow cast by the flicker of the flame, it looked like a secret meeting of a resistance group. When it was someone’s turn to speak they picked up the candle, as if they were a teenager telling a ghost story around a camp fire.
I held the candle to my face and felt the heat lap against my skin. Any closer, and it would have singed the weeks-worth of stubble on my chin. With the flame so close to me the rest of the room was bathed in shadow. I couldn’t see the people in the room, but I knew that Lou, Alice and Ben were there. Where the darkness hid the faces of those present, it also kept from view the empty spaces where Justin and Melissa should have been.
“Where’s Melissa?” I said.
Lou shifted in the darkness. “She hasn’t left her room since Justin went.”
“Is she okay?”
“You might say she’s a tad unhappy.”
I hung my head back in annoyance, though Lou couldn’t see the gesture. “You know what I mean, Lou.”
“She’s fine. I keep checking in on her.”
I held the candle out toward Alice and Ben and let the orange light splash on their faces. Ben looked better than when he had arrived in Bleakholt. Alice made him sit as close to her as possible without spilling onto her lap, but the boy didn’t seem scared. With everything he had been though I expected him to be a wreck, but he was made of strong stuff like his mother.
I brought the candle back to my face. “We need to make a decision,” I said. “Ewan killed Victoria. Let’s be clear on that. He might say that he wants what’s best for Bleakholt and that he is protecting the people who live here, but he murdered her. He took her by surprise, stabbed her and then he burnt her body. This is a violent, manipulative man.”
“I’ve known worse,” said Alice.
I knew exactly who she meant.
“Torben is nothing compared to Ewan,” I said. “I honestly believe that he would kill anyone to keep control. He says he loves Bleakholt, but that’s bullshit. He loves power. And he’ll destroy anyone to keep it. I’ve seen it in his eyes; the look of a man who craves what others have.”
“So let’s kill him,” said Lou.
I had killed people before. Those were evil men who were a danger to others and had deserved to die. I had shot Torben and I had stabbed Whittaker, and although I knew it was for the best, it left me with a rotten feeling in my stomach. But if I had to do it again, I would.
“That wouldn’t work,” I said. “Ewan has too many people with him. Half of Bleakholt were in support of his coup, and the other half are shit-scared. We’d be torn apart the second we touched him.”
“How about we leave?” said Lou.
A few weeks ago, all I wanted to do was leave. Staying in Bleakholt had never been on the agenda for me, because I knew what was coming. Now though ,I knew the potential Bleakholt had. It really could be a salvation given time, and I couldn’t abandon it. The wave of infected were coming, and if we could just do enough to stop them breaching Bleakholt’s defences, then maybe there was hope.
“We’ve come too far to run away,” said Alice. I heard her shift in her seat. “Kyle, give me the candle.”
The sour smell of the wax drifted up my nostrils. I bent forward and passed the candle to Alice and felt the darkness of the room slip over me. I missed the comforting heat of the flame on my face.
Alice’s face was half lit by the candle and half in shadow. “I have an idea. You’re going to absolutely hate it, Kyle, but it’s the only way.”
“Right now I’ll consider anything,” I said.
“No. You’re going to despise this plan.”
“Just spill it,” I said.
Alice held the candle closer to her face. Her breath made the flame dance as she spoke. “I was thinking about what you said about Ewan and the amount of people on his side. That means that if we want to get rid of him we need bodies. And there just so happens to be a bunch of people camped outside Bleakholt who would love the chance to shake things up.”
Lou made a scoffing sound with her throat. “You don’t mean Moe?”
Alice’s eyes were set in stone. “That’s exactly who I mean. There’s enough of the Vasey group to at least put up a fight. We know that they want to move into Bleakholt and get a share of the resources, so we could promise them that. And Moe is a conniving son of a bitch. I can’t think of anyone better placed to help us.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this again. I had already swallowed my feelings down a couple of times. I had tried to ignore the anger that burned in me when I thought about Moe and what he had done. I wanted to kill him, it was that simple. But I also knew that some things were more important than my own feelings.
“If we kill Ewan,” I said, “We’ll need someone to take his place straight away. If we chose someone strong and do it quick enough, the rest of Bleakholt will follow them. Maybe some of Ewan’s people would, too. These people just want an easy life, and they’ll follow the person with the loudest voice.”
“Congratulations Kyle, you got the job,” said Lou.
I shook my head. I had thought of myself as a leader once. I had ideals and I wanted what was best for everyone. I wasn’t the best leader in this room though. I had let my own thoughts and worries cloud my thoughts and force me into bad decisions.
“Not me. I’m not the leader. Alice, I think it should be you.”
Alice laughed. “Me?”
“I’m serious. You’re a better leader
than I ever will be. If we’re going to do this, I want you to step in. The people will listen to you. They respect you. If you promise to take the job, I’ll agree with us speaking to Moe.”
Alice sat in silence for a few seconds. Ben looked up at her and waited to see what his mother would say. Thoughts of Moe flashed through my mind but I pushed them back. They would never go away, and someday I would have to deal with them. For now, they had to stay hidden in the shadows.
Alice looked up through the shimmer of the candle light and gave a solemn nod.