It's clear to me from what's happened here, that they want that. They want to see who reacts, because anyone that kicks up a stink about this isn't not a happy bunny. Gordon only wants happy mindless people in his walls. Me and Warren did not fit that profile so he's using us as bait. Anyone that shouts and stamps is liable to follow us outside the walls, and I think you all know that. Go back to your duties. Tell everyone you know that they should do the same. Play happy families. Lull those pricks back into a false sense of security. Make sure they feel like they've won. Buy us the time to build our weapon, if you like."
"You sure this isn't all bravado talk? Warren was really good at that. I think he's been coaching you." Carla said with a laugh and a croak.
"Surprisingly, no. This is all natural, because it's true. For the first time since those gates closed, everything is slotting into place. We know what we have to do. Step one is stay alive, and to do that we need to go."
I think I was as captivated by Rich's speech as the women. I dropped my hand from Karen's forehead and was holding on to her shoulder. Looking at her then, I felt desperately sad to have to leave her. I needed to hold her, to let her know that I'd be back to defend her from Gordon and whatever he had planned. The way she now had both of her hands clamped on my upper arms showed she felt the same way. I was angry that she had been caught in the crossfire of Gordon's vendetta with me.
"Karen, listen, I'm sorry this has happened to you. I..."
"I don't expect a sob story from you Warren Fielding. If you expect me to be annoyed with you, you can let me kick you in the bollocks when there's no gate in the way of a run-up. If you are going to be the man I admire, then I expect you to stay safe and sort this shitpit out. Okay?"
"Um... okay?"
She grinned in response, and whilst some of it seemed forced a little sparkle of joy lit up the angst in her eyes.
"Stay safe. Come home."
There was one last squeeze and she retreated from the gates. Carla waved out to me, flopping her hand down uselessly. The tears returned, but she turned her back so that she could deal with them privately.
I was in mental limbo. I had been furious and now I felt depressed. I was angry and now my limbs were heavy with unwept sadness. I was hungry and exhausted. I didn't know when we were next going to eat or where we were going to rest. Rich pulled me away from the road, back to the wall, then pushed me into the cover of the trees when he sensed the coast was clear. I stumbled and nearly fell. Suddenly it was all I could do to keep my eyes open.
"We just need to get to the car. You can rest then. Come on."
I was in a coma on my feet. I let him push me all the way back and into the passenger seat. He pushed the door closed. Didn't bother with the seat belt. I was asleep before he had even rounded the car and slid into the other side.
* * *
I felt my head snap up as I was rocked awake. My neck felt loose, as if my spine were missing some parts. I twisted my neck from side to side, then did one full rotation and felt a very relishing crack as joints succumbed to the extended motion. I started talking and looked across to the driver’s seat to speak to Rich, then jammed my mouth shut when I saw he wasn’t there. My brow creased and I looked around the car, confused. Twilight was pulling down now and it wouldn’t be long before we were in full dark. There were no street lamps around. There were a couple of houses in questionable states of entropy. The neighbourhood was a mess.
I felt the suspension of the car move, and froze. My car door opened and I jumped. It was just Rich. Of course it was just Rich. I was about to speak, when he brought his finger to his lips. Finally, the international sign language for keep bloody quiet, rather than the Marine signals he was dishing out earlier. I complied, and shrugged my shoulders to let him know I did not know what the fuck was going on. He pointed at the first house. I looked at it, back to Rich, back to the house, and back again. I shrugged. Rich rolled his eyes. We would have made a great mime sketch. I noted this down as a future post-war career.
Instead of exchanging more futile gestures, Rich yanked me out of the car. He pushed me to the ground, and army-crawled to hide behind the front wheel. I followed him, mimicking his caution. He was trying to avoid something, and I didn’t want to spoil his fun if we were playing at soldiers. Apparently now confident enough to talk, he whispered in my ear close enough for it to tickle.
"Look at the house."
I inched forward and stopped as soon as I was far enough forward to see the whole house. There were three dwellings. The nearest to us looked to be in the best condition. The other two were pretty dilapidated, though I couldn’t tell in the poor light whether this was from natural decay or more recent damage—either violence or fire. For the longest time I couldn’t see anything. I was about to ask Rich what I was meant to be looking for, and if this was just a game, when I saw movement along the side of the building. There was a door, and someone had just left it. I squinted, trying to make them out. By the shape it was a male, but that was about as far as I could get. I watched as he performed some inexplicable tasks in the front garden. He could have been taking a shit for all I cared. Then he walked to the house next door. I saw there was another person, but this time they were too far away for me to spot gender; I couldn’t have spotted the Queen from a crowd at this distance. After a few minutes the anonymous male figure returned and re-entered the house. Through this whole scene, they hadn’t spotted us. They didn’t seem even vaguely aware there were people in the vicinity. I was about to stand when Rich pulled me back to the ground, flat this time.
"Wait," he whispered harshly in my ear.
I flattened myself to the ground as instructed, feeling the minute grit of loose gravel burrowing into the skin of my cheeks. I heard an engine start up. Then headlights flooded the area with light. I could see we were in a copse; the car was parked subtly. The wash of the lights only vaguely touched over our car, and with our car seeming both dead and empty, there was no reason for it to arouse suspicion. With a few revs, the car pulled away. Rich kept a warning hand on my back for minutes that I couldn’t properly count before he began to pull himself into a crouch and then back down into a seated position, legs crossed like a polite child at school. Following suit, I sat by him and gave him my best ‘what the fuck’ eyes.
"I think Austin is in that house," Rich said.
Eye Ability Skill Increase.
"What makes you think that?" I asked, attempting to keep my voice steady.
"Two reasons. I dropped him off not five miles from here."
"And?"
Rich looked down and flicked an imaginary piece of gravel out of his fingernails. "And I saw Austin go into the house."
I felt like jumping him and throttling him. The fact I probably couldn’t fit both of my hands around his neck did not dampen that desire. Rich looked embarrassed, and I personally wanted his head to spontaneously combust at that point.
"Did you know that Austin would be in this house?"
"I didn’t. Honest, I didn’t. Okay, I had a good idea. I didn’t drop him off nearby. I dropped him off here."
My jaw should have dropped then. I should have punched him. At least looked indignant. But what good would that do? Rich had followed orders—he had dropped an exile off at a pre-arranged point. He wasn’t to know that Austin would hang around. And with some prior knowledge of areas outside the community, this had been a logical place to bring us for the night.
"So you knew there was a place, and you brought us here for shelter?"
He nodded
"But instead we find a self-important shitstain that seems to be able to turn up in my life and cause me trouble no matter what I do?"
"That about sums it up."
I rolled my eyes and asked a God I didn’t particularly believe in to make a good show of changing my mind and give me some strength. I inwardly counted to ten, one of the few overused clichés that I’ve ever found to work in my life, and rubbed my hands over my face. For good measure, I
cracked my knuckles. The tension was building up well. Rich could snap my neck without much application of upper tensile strength, but displeasing me was upsetting him. In a backwards way, this upset me, too. I was getting to like Rich in a natural way I could never have got along with Rick, even though we too had been thrown together in an unexpected and unwanted situation.
"I think I should make the leaping guess that, seeing as we’re sitting outside like little children on a gravel path, that we’ve decided not to go in and take the house from Austin?"
"That guess would be correct."
I put my face in my palms and spoke through them. This was like trying to plait treacle. "And why would that be correct?"
"The other person he spoke to? I don’t know who they were, but they were acting like a guard. And they have a car. The information we wanted to get on Gordon? I would bet you a pound to a penny it’s here. But if they have one guard, they might have two. I don’t want to gamble on there being more than Austin in that house."
I continued to speak through my palms, my words starting to come out in a muffled drawl. My head was starting to ache, and my throat was starting to constrict I was so parched. "We have guns."
"They might have guns."
"We have the element of surprise."
"They…."
I looked up. He didn’t have an answer to that one, so I cajoled the opening a little more. "Think about it. He’s obviously just waved goodnight to whatever drip was standing outside the door of that other house. Do you remember any cars—or people, for that matter—coming and going in the middle of the night? No? Well why would that have changed in the last twenty-four hours. I think he’s been alone here for a long time, and now you’re out of the way being the good conscience, and I’m out of the way asking all the awkward questions, they’re concocting some ridiculous plan to get Austin back into the community. I wouldn’t like to be Austin when Carla finds out, because she’ll try to castrate him. Still, would you put it past them, after what’s happened to us today?"
"I would not."
"And here’s a better question. Have we got any water? Food?"
"There’s some water in the boot that’s going to help us out for now. But in the main? No."
"Are you hungry?"
"Are you doing this for fun? Okay we have guns and we have surprise and it isn’t likely that Austin has anyone else in there giving him help. But think about it this way. If Gordon is hatching a plan to smuggle his best mate back in there, and if they’re having people come out here to guard him, don’t you think it would be a bit bloody suspicious that Austin goes missing or gets killed on the very day we leave the community? Of all the places around that I choose to come to, it’s the one place that Gordon will know that I know about. We’ll be signing off Karen and Carla’s death sentences, and I do not want to write that cheque."
My shoulders slumped. "Checkmate. Do you have a different plan, because I’m not too comfortable with sleeping under the stars if it means an infected is going to slump along and eat my toes?"
"There are other houses nearby. We could try to get to one of those."
"Is anyone else going to notice the car?"
"We’re going to walk."
"Fuck. That. Besides, what if someone comes by that recognises the car?"
"We’re practically in a car park. This place is right by a woodland walk or something like that. We can just push the car in with all the others so it doesn’t look so obvious. Then we can ditch it."
"Why don’t we just sleep in the car?"
"We’ve already established the car doesn’t have food."
"But it does have water, and excuse me for suggesting, but I’d rather not face the potential sprinting infected that may lay in wait for us out in the unknown darkness. I mean, I’ve had a whole five hours sleep or so to boast about in the last twenty-four hours and my muscles feel like someone has been trying to hang, draw and quarter me, but apart from that I can..."
"Okay okay you don’t half go on when you want something. You ever been called a diva?"
"I think that’s the nicest insult someone’s ever used on me."
"Help me roll the car back, then we’ll get some sleep."
We opened the doors, dropped the handbrake, and pushed the car backwards. As promised, our little copse was a little road to a wider car park. There were four vehicles there, all dark. Two had doors left wide open. We pulled on our car slightly to bring it to a stop and I waved to get Rich’s attention.
"Here, you think there’s any food in them things?"
He eyed both cars. We’d already made enough commotion to stir any creatures that might have been lurking inside the vehicles or stowing themselves nearby, so we could reasonably assume the cars were clear enough for us to check through. I wouldn’t usually expect there to be random food in cars past used chewing gum and french fries lost under seats. This was different though. This was a supposed beauty spot, and families that weren’t dysfunctional, or perhaps those that were and were attempting to seal over the cracks, would come to places like this to have picnics. And picnics meant food. I didn’t care how long ago those cars were abandoned so long as I could get something in my stomach. I laughed pitifully at myself. I hadn’t been starving for days; I just hadn’t eaten that day, and I was acting like I’d had some kind of major breakdown. Even still, we had big plans and hot action ahead of us. That wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to go into on an empty stomach.
"I’ll take the hatchback. You take the…whatever that car is meant to be."
The motor he waved at was one of those hybrid SUV things—not a proper off-roader, but not a saloon or hatchback, either. I associated them with females and men subjected to domestic servitude. Both doors were open on mine. This suggested a rapid evacuation. The suspension was still when I scrutinised it. I left it for a good minute or so. If there was something shambling inside, it would have still moved the car around no matter how many limbs it was lacking.
Happy the coast was clear, I inched my way to the car. The smell as I got closer was starting to put me off the adventure, and it wasn’t the smell of rotting food. It was like what we had smelt in the house with the old couple—but somehow worse. Multiplied. The front two seats were empty. Instead of leaning my head in the car and succumbing to every jump-scene stereotype in cinematic history, I shuffled to the rear windows and glanced inside. There was still just enough light from the fading day for me to make out what was inside. A child was strapped in the backseat. It was thoroughly dead. I use the term ‘it’, because the child had already started the decay process, and with the slumped head and unclear light, I wasn’t going to get close enough to give it an identity. No matter what my stomach said to me, I didn’t want the food that was in the front of that car. The boot would be another matter entirely. I pulled this open to be met with the buzzing of bluebottle flies and a sickening rot that made the smell of the child seem like gentle vanilla. There was a corpse in the boot, and it smelled so thoroughly repulsive that it had probably started liquefying in its own putrescence. I threw a latent hand against my mouth and nose, but the retching had already started. I dropped to my knees and dry heaved on the floor. I heard Rich’s footsteps quicken and croaked out to him.
"Don’t. Don’t come near. I’m fine."
He didn’t stop. I pushed myself up to my hands and knees to get enough air into my diaphragm when I came almost face to face with a slow undead. A silent maw opened and black strings of thick saliva gooped between its jaws. One hand reached out for me. Where the other arm should have been there was a minced stump, chunks of bone sharp and stunted where the limb had seemingly been torn off. I gargled something between a scream and a shout, dribbling bile all of my very own and pushed the arm away. Rich arrived with me then, and it took a running kick to the temple. The zombie went down and didn’t move. Rich went over on his hands and knees to check it. A braver man than I. I resumed dry vomiting. When I stopped, he lifted me from the ground. I was
put into a fireman’s lift and felt only mildly humiliated. I heard a door open, and I was shoved across the rear seats. I rolled onto my back, my arms crossing my face, a continuous drone buzzing from my lips. Various doors were opened and closed before I felt two things land on my stomach. I lifted my head—which felt thunderous and heavy—to see the godly shape of a bottle of water. Rich put himself in the driver’s seat. I was lying so that I could look up and see him, but he didn’t make eye contact with me.
"You okay?" he thought about this for a second. "Hit the headrest once for yes, twice for no. You bitten?" I gave him a no. "Good. You okay, otherwise? Apart from the smell, the pain, the dehydration, the fatigue, and the fact that in general you’re a bit of a pansy?" I waited and gave him another yes, followed by the bird. He emitted a low chuckle. "Good still got some fire. That’s a sausage roll. I didn’t look for the date. It obviously hasn’t been refrigerated. Smell it. Use your common sense. No food might be better than some food, the state you’re in if you catch my drift."
I did. I did not want to spend days with food poisoning. We didn’t have enough supplies to cope with my being ill. Or being a pansy, as he put it.
"I’m going to put the seat down so we can’t be seen from outside, that goes for humans and zombies. If you need to piss, use your bottle. It’s sterile liquid. Let’s not have too much diva about it. If you hear noises outside, do not raise your head. That will just draw more attention, and it’s far more likely to be a zombie than it is a human. They have no need to come looking out here. I’m guessing they’ve already done the checks we’ve just tried and came up with nothing but nausea for their efforts. I don’t think any less of you, by the way. The smell was grim. Looks like they left the dog in the boot. They picked a bad day to bring Fido out for a walk. Anyway, I’m just as knackered as you and I’m done talking. Need anything else?"
I gave him a no and gratefully closed my eyes. I waited patiently for sleep to come and take me.
Great Bitten (Book 2): Survival Page 20