by Jack Lewis
Her cheeks moved, as if she were trying to soften her features into a gesture that wouldn’t come. The cement had already set, and there was no room for smiles on her face.
“I do, Kyle. I need to tell you.”
“Okay.”
She stared deep into my eyes. "I need to tell you that Faizel and my son…”
I waited for the tumble of emotion, my heart leaping against my chest.
“I wanted to tell you that it was your fault.”
The words hit me cold in the chest. Sana raised her baseball bat and before I could react she swung it at my leg. Pain screamed through my thigh as a nail drove into it. The metal gouged through my skin and deep into my muscle, tearing at my nerves and sending a wracking agony through me. I stumbled forward onto my knees.
Sana lifted her bat above her head. I wanted to move, but the pain spread through my legs, my chest and up into my brain, where it filled my head like a fog. I felt blind, as though it was seeping through my eyes.
I sucked in a deep breath. I was dimly aware of the fighting around me, of knives sinking into rotten flesh, decaying teeth ripping through skin. Screams and shouts, blood trickling onto the floor. I couldn’t move for the pain twisting through me. I waited for the baseball to fall and crack my skull.
Sana’s mouth opened impossibly wide, as though it worked on a busted hinge. A raspy wail left her mouth. She coughed and a splatter of blood left her mouth and hit my face like ocean spray. A knife pierced her throat and broke through her neck until the blade winked at me.
A hose of adrenaline doused the pain that burned inside me. Sana gurgled, reached up to her throat and fell to the floor. Lou stood behind her, a bloody knife held tight in her hand. She held it at her side. She looked down at Sana and her eyes seemed drowned in darkness.
“What the hell are you doing here Lou? Where’s Melissa? Where are the kids?”
The lost look left Lou’s eyes, and she smiled as if she were putting on a mask.
“You’ve got a hell of a way of saying thanks,” she said.
41
Lou grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet. Stabs of pain coursed through my leg, and a trickle of blood ran down my thigh. Despite the chaos around me, the first thing I thought was what if the nails on the baseball bat were infected? I’m going to need a tetanus jab.
“Where’s Billy?” Lou said.
“He’s gone.”
“Motherfucker. As soon as things get tough.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that, Lou. “
Lou and I joined the fight, as if there was an unspoken agreement between us that any questions would have to wait. There was work to do before we could celebrate. Men and women swung weapons with tiring arms, crying out as they struck dead flesh. Slowly the groans of the infected faded away until they were just a drone in the background. Only a handful remained. Hundreds of their own had fallen to the floor, but still they lurched pathetically on until there was only one left.
This one carried on walking, oblivious to the bodies of its own kind that lay on the floor like sacks of meat. It moved its head from side to side as if struggling to choose a person to go for. Finally it settled on Moe, and it shifted its body in his direction and took stumbling steps toward him.
Moe lifted his meat cleaver and heaved it at the infected’s neck. As the blade connected with flesh the infected’s head hung to the side and clung on by a scrap of flesh. With one more swing Moe took its head clean off.
The fighters looked around them. Seeing no more infected left to kill, they sunk to the ground. Some closed their eyes as if collapsing in exhaustion. Others looked at the corpses around them with wide eyes as if they couldn’t believe what they saw. A man put his hands to his face and wept into them in huge uncontrollable sobs.
The adrenaline started to leave my body like air leaking from a sagging party balloon. I wanted to collapse onto the floor and let my emotions tear out of me, but I couldn’t afford to yet. The stalkers were gone and the infected were dead, but there was still something left to do.
Moe stood twenty yards in front of me. He held his cleaver in the air like a Viking warrior celebrating in front of his gods. His blade, once gleaming, was smeared with blood which dripped off the end and fell onto his face.
I took a step forward. Lou put her hand on my shoulder.
“Steady on” she said.
I swept her hand off me. My heart pounded and my whole body shook. I let long-buried feelings course through me. Images of Vasey, the stonework stained with blood. Alice dying outside the tent and screaming because she knew she was leaving Ben behind. I let the thoughts course through me and burn my veins like acid.
I strode ten feet along the grass until I stood in front of Moe. He turned round and looked at me, his face streak with blood like war paint.
“This is how it feels to be a god,” he said. “Breath it in, Kyle.”
Anger throbbed through my brain and put my teeth on edge.
“Where the hell were you when people were dying?”
Moe arched his eyebrows. “Surely you’ve figured it out by now, Kyle.”
I was in no mood to try and process Moe’s logic. I felt like the rational part of my brain had slid away and fury washed over it like a tsunami.
“What the fuck do you mean?”
“It’s simple enough,” said Moe. “We waited for the others to die so that Bleakholt could be ours. It belongs to us now, Kyle. I’s Vasey the Second.”
I gripped my knife tight in my hand.
“After all this, there’s still not a shred of humanity in you, is there?”
Moe looked up at the sky as if pondering the question. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he opened them, and stared at me.
“I think there is, sometimes. I hate those moments.”
Fury crashed through me. It channelled through my veins like a rampaging river, overflowing the banks of reason and sending every part of my body awash it. My hands shook, my chest contracted, my whole body was electrified. But my mind was clear, and I knew what I had to do.
I stepped forward and put my hand gently on Moe’s shoulder. I looked deep into his dark eyes and lifted my hand. Moe gasped at the last second as if suddenly aware of what I was about to do. I jabbed my hand forward and buried my knife deep into his belly, twisting it until his eyes flickered in pain.
Moe wheezed as the blade drilled into his guts. I pulled my knife away and then stabbed him again, holding it in until his eyes dimmed and the last breath left his body.
42
Ewan's bus and Billy’s quad bike were smoke trails in the distance. The screams of hundreds of people, voices thick with pain, had died until they were replaced by the wails of a dozen. I couldn’t see all of them. One man lay on the floor with his hand on his bicep. He bit through the pain and squeezed against the muscle, but he couldn’t stem the ooze of blood. A woman shrieked as an infected crawled across the ground to her. It tried to bite through the top of her head, coming away with strands of knotted hair in its mouth.
I tried to rise, but my legs felt like they were pressed to the ground by unseen arms. The woman’s shriek sounded like a crow dying. It reminded me of the time when I was testing my dad’s pellet gun and I’d shot a magpie. I heard the flap of its wings as it fell from the tree, squawking as it hit the ground. I’d walked to the tree to try and find the magpie and put it out of its misery with a stamp to the head, but it had gone. Wherever it went, it went silently and full of pain.
The woman was too far away to put her out of her misery. If I started doing that now, where would I stop? Dozens of wounded people were strewn around the now-red ground. Some were bitten, some were hurt more than others, but all of them were dying. They would all become something else, in death, and then I’d have no choice but to deal with them. My body was empty, my resolve gone like oil leaked from a rusted engine. I couldn’t do it now. Not while they were still living.
I rested my head against th
e floor and tuned out the sounds of the dying. A few men stayed on their feet and dealt with the infected stragglers. The groans of the creatures grew quieter with each swing of a hammer or a knife. The battle was won. I knew that, but the knowledge didn’t fill me with joy. It left me feeling empty. I watched a grey cloud slide sombrely across the sky like a wispy funeral procession. I closed my eyes.
A boot crunched across the crusty grass. Was it one of them? Had a stray infected spotted me, sized me up as the easy prey I was in my depleted state? Did I have it in me to keep fighting? I opened my eyes.
“Guess you really are John McClane,” said a voice.
It was Lou. Blood was splattered over her t-shirt up to her collar bone, over her chin and almost up to her forehead. Her face was flustered and her eyes were hollow, all white and no pupil.
Charlie stood next to her, his stump wrapped in bandages. Blood seeped through at the end and spread through the fabric like an ink stain. His face was pale and covered with sweat. He shouldn’t have been on his feet.
“They’re all dead,” I said.
They were the only pathetic words I could churn out. We’d won. We’d beaten the wave. Or the part of it that had gotten through, anyway. There could only have been a thousand, maybe two, and that left the best part of half a million still out there. They could wait.
Lou swallowed deep breaths. When she looked at me, there was something in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in a while. Triumph, humanity. I didn’t know what it was exactly. But it was something. There was a sense that we had something to cling to.
“What now?” she said.
I thought about the decision that waited for us. Did we stay in Bleakholt and try to pick up the pieces? Did we hit the road again? Would the responsibility of it all fall on me? The weight of the decision pressed down on my chest. That was another thing that was going to have to wait.
“Fucked if I know,” I said, and flopped back to the floor.
Charlie coughed, then started to speak. “I read all of Whittaker’s research. Went through the bloody thing twenty times. I thought things through, and I think there is a cure. Something we can do to end this –“
His voice carried on but the words stopped reaching my ears. I looked around me at the bodies littered on the battlefield like upended bowling pins. Infected hacked into pieces, men and women cold on the ground. Blood trickling from bite-marks and melting the thin cracks of ice that covered the grass.
I thought of everyone we’d lost. Not just in the battle, but before. Faizel. Victoria. Justin. Alice. A ripple of panic poured across my chest, covered my lungs, and made each breath heavy. I had let Faizel and Alice down. Victoria had never been my responsibility, but maybe I owed her more than I gave. Justin wasn’t lost. There was still hope that he might be out there, somewhere, but the hope seemed like a frayed thread ready to snap if I tugged on it.
I knew I should get up, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I let my back melt into the ground, let the feeling of loss wash over me like the lapping of the current. A time would come where I had to do something, where I could make all the losses count by finally ending this. Surely that, if anything, was worth fighting for.
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Q&A With Author Jack Lewis
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