by Jack Lewis
Charlie let out a groan behind me. His cheeks dripped with sweat and trickles of blood ran from the stump that jutted out from his shoulder.
"We need to move him," said Billy.
"Let's get him to the mayor’s office. Lou and Melissa can look after him."
"Won't that scare the kids?"
"They've got a hell of a lot more to be scared of."
Ewan tapped his cane against his shoulder. If the chaos around us affected him, he didn't show it.
"He needs to get help," he agreed, "but you two are best on the battlefield. Let the boy take him on the quad."
He gestured over to Reece, who stared wide eyed at the battlefield. All emotion had left his face, as if hearing the news of his father had emptied his brain.
"Think you can handle it?" I said to Reece.
Charlie cried out in pain. This shook the teenager out of his stupor.
"What?"
"Can you take Charlie to the mayor’s office?" I said.
"My dad..."
"Reece," I said, not bothering to hide the urgency in my voice. "There's a time for that. Believe me. But it isn't now. We've got a hell of a lot of work to do."
An explosion blasted across the plains. At first it was a rumble that blew along the grass but as it got closer the sounds of the detonation screamed at us.
Half of the battlefield stopped and stared. For some the second-long of lapse in concentration cost them dearly, because the infection didn't take heed. One woman shrieked as an infected bit her neck and tore away a strip of flesh. This shocked the rest into action, and they heaved their weapons at anything that came of them. Now, they were outnumbered six to one.
A film of dust in front of the hills hovered in the air and then started to settle. Rocks tumbled from the sides of the hills and blocked the passageway like a dam. The stem of infected had been stopped, and it looked like no more of them would be able to pour onto the plains.
I tried to see Justin, but it was impossible to make him out under the falling sheet of dust. As the crumbling rocks settled and the air started to clear, I realised that I couldn’t see him. Where was he? Realisation hit me like a bullet. Justin was trapped on the wrong side of the explosion.
The plan had worked, but I couldn’t celebrate. Justin was a hero, and he wasn’t here for me to tell him. But I couldn’t dwell on it. There were still hundreds of the infected to kill and a rapidly depleting number of people left to do it, but we had a chance. We’d turned the tap off and now we just had to pull the plug and let the water drain out.
Adrenaline exploded inside me. I turned to the battlefield, ready to burst into it and smash as many infected skulls as I could. I would stab them until I couldn’t move my arms. I wouldn't stop until I was drenched in sweat, my body drained.
I turned and looked at Billy. "Are you ready?" I said.
Billy stared at the plains. He held up his mallet and tensed his muscles.
"It's about time."
As we walked toward the battlefield, a dozen shrieks pierced the air. Louder than the groans of the infected, more terrible than the cries of the men and woman who were torn apart. The shrieks rose above us and seemed to suck the rest of the noise out of the sky.
"Kyle," said Billy, his voice shaking. He stretched his arm out and pointed to the woods.
I stopped walking. My stomach turned to liquid, and I felt like my organs were going to slide out of me. I looked over to the trees, where an army of stalkers crawled out of the shadows.
38
Nothing has ever spiked my adrenaline more than the sight of a dozen stalkers slinking across the open plain. My feet melded to the ground, trapped in place as though roots had twisted from the mud and wrapped around them. Billy put his hands behind his head and watched, his eyes wide in desperation.
A man twenty feet ahead dug the end of his crowbar into the head of an infected. He pulled it back, wiped it on his jeans and then looked to his left, ready to meet the next oncoming threat. He realised it wasn’t another infected coming at him but an army of stalkers with teeth shining like daggers. His face became a mask of screams.
The lead stalker, smaller than the others but with bigger muscles, opened its mouth wide and shrieked. It was a cry that cut through the air and rained down in shards that stabbed at the eardrums of anyone unfortunate enough to hear it.
It shook me out of my daze, unlocked my feet as if the roots had unwrapped and dissolved into the dirt. I looked at Billy. His clenched jaw stuck out, but his marble-sized pupils were as black as a winter night sky.
“The plains are too open. Think the fences could hold them back?” I said.
Billy turned his head and stared toward the hill passage, which was now a dam of rubble. Fifty men and women fought on, raising their weapons and smashing them down on the infected in automatic movements. Some strained their faces in anguish as they smashed through bone and were splashed by blood. Others lifted their arms in weaker and weaker arcs like wind-up toys that needed another twist.
Billy turned to me. He had a look in his eyes as though he stared at me and behind me at the same time. His body was here, but his mind was somewhere else. It was like the sight of the stalkers stretched the elastic of his brain to snapping point. We all had this point inside us, the time when the horrors just became too much to handle. Maybe Billy’s brain was reaching his. How much pressure would it take to break it?
“Does getting behind the fences mean giving up?” he said.
“The only way we’re giving up is if we stay in the open. It’ll be a slaughter.”
“There’s only a few hundred infected now. I could handle a dozen on my own.”
It must have been centuries since the British countryside had been strewn with so many bodies. The infected piled up in their hundreds, twisted heaps of rotting torsos and snapped limbs. A survivor, with a weapon and enough space to move, could kill tens of infected. The danger of the infected was not in the way they attacked; it was when they caught you in a tight space. It was when a crowd of them trapped you, nowhere to go but into their death embrace.
If we stayed to fight then Billy was right. Given enough time, we could deal with the infected that had gotten through the hills before the pathway was blown. A stalker was different. They moved with such speed and agility that open spaces meant nothing to them, because they could cover it with a single leap. Faced with a stalker, space was your enemy
“We need to get behind the fences and regroup. The infected can wait but the stalkers won’t,” I said.
“So what now?” said Billy.
I needed a way to get the attention of the people on the battlefield so that we could order them behind the fences. With the screams of the dying, groans of the infected and shrieks of the stalkers, there wasn’t room for anything else. We needed something loud.
“Get the spotter to blow the war horn,” I said.
Billy looked up to the roof top where the spotter sat. The spotter stared out to the east, toward the woods. Billy waved his hand in the air as if he were trying to hail a helicopter. The spotter continued to look away from the battlefield as though he was waiting for something.
“Dumb bastard,” Billy muttered under his breath, “Look over here.”
“Wait here,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“Just wait.”
I ran across the plain and back to Bleakholt. I opened the fence and let it slam shut behind me. My heart worked like a train engine, and my chest grew tight. By the time I got to the spotter’s building, my lungs felt like they were going to melt and flood up my throat.
I opened the front doors and sprinted up the stairs. It was an old furniture shop called Timber Furniture Land and along the walls were prints of old Dali paintings. As I ran up the stairs I watched clocks melt over tables and an elephant with impossibly large legs walk across a desert. I reached the top and burst through the fire doors that led to the roof. Outside the nip of the wind lashed my cheeks. I ben
t over and sucked in air.
The spotter span round, rifle raised. He stared through the sights with his finger held tense on the trigger. After a few seconds, he realised I wasn’t infected.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” he said.
“I’m Kyle,” I said, panting.
The spotter had long black hair swept over his forehead and a thick black beard that grew on him like moss. His eyes stared through narrow crevices, as though they never opened fully even when awake. He looked like he’d make a good policeman, with a stare that seemed to regard everything with a hint of suspicion.
“I know who you are,” he said. “But shouldn’t you be fighting?”
I couldn’t help the anger that started with a bubble in my chest and then rose like a poison air up my windpipe. He had the cheek to question me, when he hadn’t even been looking at the battlefield. I couldn’t believe the incompetence of him. What the hell had he been doing?
“Take a look that way,” I said, pointing at the plain. “Notice anything different?”
He followed my eyes toward the battlefield and shrugged his shoulders.
“I know.”
“Then what the fuck were you looking at?”
His eyes narrowed further until they looked like specs of coal.
“Ewan had me watch the side of town. Said he would give me a signal when it was time to go.”
“What do you mean, ‘time to go’?”
As I stared to the east side of town, a bus turned a corner and rumbled to a stop. Lumpy brown bags were secured to the top with rope. Across the side was a narrow strip of paper advertising a movie that had been released sixteen years ago. The top deck seemed to be full of tents, sleeping bags and assorted jars and containers. Twenty people sat on the bottom deck. Most of them looked down at their laps, pointedly ignoring what was happening on the plains.
“What’s going on?” I said.
The spotter blinked. “I think you know.”
My throat shrank so much that air struggled to get through. Ewan was running away, I realised. After all his bullshit about doing the best for Bleakholt, he was saving his own arse.
I took a step toward the spotter. He treaded back and raised his gun at me. The green sling slapped against his shoulder.
“Best you don’t move,” he said.
I knew that one squeeze of the trigger would send a shard of lead through me, but somehow I didn’t care. It was if a giant strip of sandpaper had scratched away at my insides and left my fear as a pile of dust on the floor. What threat did a gun have when death waited in every direction?
I stepped forward again. The spotter jerked his arms and pointed the gun at my head. I moved until I was only an inch away from him. I reached forward, took hold of the gun by the barrel and pulled it away from him. The spotter, faced with the prospect of actually having to kill a man, froze.
I turned the gun around. With the barrel now pointed at his own face, the spotter moved. He bared his teeth and made a grab for the gun. I swung the barrel and caught him on the mouth. There was a crack as the metal smashed his front teeth. He collapsed to the floor, blood gushing out of his gums.
I slung the rifle over my shoulder and walked to the edge of the roof to where he had stood. The horn was propped up against the roof ledge. It was an old war horn made of weathered ivory. Three iron bands were wrapped around it in intervals, with swirling patterns chipped into them. It belonged in a museum. It seemed that a previous mayor of Bleakholt had been something of a collector. The ivory felt frail enough to fall apart in my hands, and I was amazed that it could make such a booming sound.
I looked over to the plains where the survivors fought. The infected dropped to the floor, their broken heads slamming against the dirt. A man edged backwards, away from two infected. He stumbled over something and fell onto his back. The infected followed, landed on his chest and ripped at his flesh as he screamed.
I put the horn to my mouth, filled my chest and then blew. The sound was louder than I could have imagined. It felt like it smashed through my eardrums and then swam in my brain, squeezing it until all I could do was drop the horn to the floor.
I put my hand to my ears. A pulsating wave ripped through my ear canal and twisted around my head. The sound around me faded as if driven out by some unseen forced. A stabbing pain poked at my head and twisted my stomach.
A hand grabbed my shoulders and hauled me back. My first thought was stalkers, but as I managed to spin round I saw that it was the spotter. He stood shakily on his feet, blood dripping from his mouth. He pointed to his ears.
“You should wear plugs when you blow that,” he said.
My vision lurched from side to side like a boat rocking in a raging sea. The world around me was drowned out, and sound seemed to travel slowly as though it waded through water. My eardrums throbbed in nauseous pulses that made me want to empty my stomach.
I glanced behind me for a second and looked at the plain. The fighters looked up at me. They’d heard the signal, and they knew that they had to retreat. Some of them started to run toward the fences.
The stalkers, seeing their pray fleeing, crouched back. Those within distance leapt on the retreating men and women. A stalker landed on the back of a blonde haired woman, and the weight of it sent her sprawling to the floor. Her mouth opened wide, but I couldn’t hear the scream that I imagined left it as the stalker tore a mouthful of flesh from the back of her neck. The woman thrashed against the ground, but another bite stilled her movements. Her blood sprayed across the ground like paint from the end of Jackson Pollock's brush.
The spotter took a step toward me. He tried to stare deep into my eyes, but for a second his glance darted toward the gun. I tried to bend down to get it but a well of agony dripped from my eardrums. I put my hand to my head and felt a sticky liquid running from my ears.
The spotter stuck his boot out and connected with my ankle. I cried out but I managed to stay balanced. A channel of pain ran from my ear and into my head. I took a deep breath and tried to ignore the lurching of my stomach.
A fist flew at my face. I tried to duck from it but with two busted eardrums my balance was gone, and my nose cracked under the force of his knuckles. Blood gushed down my lips and over my neck. Another fist connected, this time with my chin. Fuzzy spots covered my eyes and I tipped over onto my back like a felled tree.
As soon as I slammed onto the floor I acted on instinct. I reached to my right and felt the cool metal of the rifle against my fingers. I gripped it, swung it to the spotter and pointed it at his chest, ignoring the pain that ripped through me. My heart jarred as I pulled my finger tight against the trigger. It moved back slowly, as if it were reluctant to fire. As it slid further and further back time seemed to slide to a stop. I stared deep into the spotter’s face and expected fear. Instead, his narrow black eyes were calm. The trigger slid all the way back and the gun clicked.
The spotter smiled. He spoke to me, but the words drifted at such a low volume that my battered eardrums only picked out a few of them.
“Ran out of …weeks ago. Ewan told me….up here and keep pointing it at …. Make sure people saw me doing it. He said it … them feel safe.”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a long knife with a worn yellow handle. The silver of the blade was scratched and dull. He pointed it at me.
“He also told me to … … for you,” he said.
As the spotter moved cautiously toward me, his blade pointed at my stomach, I moved into a crouch. I sprang to my feet and drove the barrel of the gun at the spotter’s neck. I roared as the end of it drove into his throat and cracked through his windpipe.
The spotter clutched his throat tightly as if to stop the air from seeping out. His mouth opened wide and then clenched shut like a fish suffocating on dry land. Blood trickled from his neck, ran over his hands and dripped onto the floor. He fell onto his back. He held one hand on his neck and stretched the other toward me, as if there was something I could
do.
Below, on the plains, people started to reach the fences. Their faces were shot white with panic, their eyes glazed like trench soldiers with shell shock. Billy held the fences open and herded them in as though he were a shepherd guiding frightening sheep away from the wolves.
To the east the double-decker bus fired to life. The headlights flickered and cast yellow cones onto the dark mud. The wheels span forward and the bus lurched away. On the bottom deck men and women pressed their faces against the glass. These were Ewan’s men and women, the ones who had helped him get to power. And now they were abandoning Bleakholt in the middle of the fight.
If the stalkers hadn’t arrived, maybe Ewan would have stayed. I guessed he would have helped clear the infected and then proclaimed himself a hero. As soon as things looked bad, he had taken our only means of escape and he had fled on it. His speech about how we couldn’t leave, how we had to stay and fight, had been bullshit. His words were weightless and carried away by the wind.