Authors: Jack Lewis
12
Ben screamed. Alice turned to the
door, then to the monitor. She saw the man in the room with her son. The whites
of her eyes pooled and she tightened her grip on the axe until her knuckles
were pale.
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt
you,” the man said.
There was no doubt as to who this
was. It was the man who Faizel and I had seen before, when he’d thrown a live
infected in the back of his van. It was almost certainly the man called
Whittaker who was mentioned in the diary.
I stuck my hand in the corpse’s
stomach, felt the cold juices run all over my fingers. My fingertips slid over
various textures. I had no idea what they were, but the sensation twisted my
stomach.
Every so often I glanced at the
monitor. Whittaker took a few steps toward Justin and Ben. Justin stood up in
front of Ben and shielded him from Whittaker.
“What are your names?” said Whittaker.
He smiled, but the expression hung awkwardly on his face as though he’d never
done it before.
He was tall, and despite the bulk the
two coats gave him, he looked like he needed a good meal. His hair had been
clipped short on top but the back of his hair was uneven, and long black
strands stuck out in places like patches on a badly-mowed lawn. His cheekbones
jutted out like a skeleton that had just been given flesh.
Justin looked around him, trying to
find a weapon to pick up. The man grinned.
“I’m Whittaker. It’s nice to meet
you.” He tried to make his words sound friendly, but they were
barbed.
Justin put his arm behind him and
pushed Ben back. He took a step forward, looked Whittaker in the eyes. The
smile on Whittaker’s face dropped and was replaced by cold steel.
“I’m glad you don’t want to play
games,” he said. “My work means too much to waste on that. It’s easier if you
just come with me.”
He slipped a metal pipe from his
pocket, raised it in the air and swung it onto Justin’s head. There was a
sickening crack as the metal connected with skull, and Justin flopped to the
ground.
Whittaker knelt in front of Ben.
“Don’t be scared,” he said.
He pulled a chord of rope out of his
pocket and began tying Justin’s legs together.
Alice’s face lit up with the fury
that only a mother can summon. She stuck both of her hands into the stomach of
the corpse and dug in it like a dog making a hole in the dirt.
My heart rate spiked. I had no idea
what Whittaker was doing, but I had to help Justin. I stuck another hand in the
corpse’s stomach, ignored the sensation of the juices washing over my fingers.
Alice stood up. She was covered in
blood up to her elbows, and some of it had splashed onto her chin. She looked
like an infected who had just finished a feast.
“It’s not in mine,” she said. “Hurry
up Kyle.”
She watched the monitor, gripping the
hem of her shirt and twisting the fabric in her fingers.
Whittaker had made short work of
tying up an unconscious Justin. He moved around his body until he stood at his
feet, then gave them a heave. Justin was a skinny guy, but even his light frame
seemed to give Whittaker trouble.
His face went red with strain. Inch
by inch, he dragged Justin out of the room. Soon we heard thumps as he moved down
the stairs, and finally the crash of the farmhouse door as he shut it behind
him.
I picked up my knife again and sliced
it against the dead man’s stomach, this time cutting a hole so big that it
opened up the stomach completely. I dug in the stomach until my hands were
coated in sticky crimson, the blood thick and clotted like raspberry sauce.
I touched something metal and grabbed it between my fingers.
“I’ve got it.”
My chest felt like it was going to
explode with pressure and my whole body felt like it had been injected with
caffeine. I needed to get out and stop Whittaker.
I put the key in the lock, twisted
it. The door didn’t budge. Seconds ran away from us. The only sound from
outside was Ben crying. Then footsteps thudding down the stairs, getting
fainter as time passed.
“What the hell is wrong with this?” I
said.
Finally there was a hiss as the lock
clicked and the door opened. We all stepped out. Dan took big gulps of air,
glad to breathe something that didn’t smell like death. Faizel went to the
window, drew back the curtain. Alice scooped up Ben and held him tight enough
to squeeze the air out of him.
The door of the panic room clicked
against the hinge and triggered the mechanism, shutting it behind us. The lock
clicked back into place. There was no way we would get it open again. Finding
it in the first place had been blind luck, and we didn’t have much of that
left.
“He’s got to the van,” said Faizel
behind me.
I ran down the staircase, almost
losing my footing at one point as my hand, wet with blood, slipped on the
bannister. I managed to straighten myself and get to the bottom without
breaking my legs.
The front door hung open. I got
outside just in time to see the white van turn a corner and drive out of the
village with Justin in the back.
13
Dan traced his fingers along the wall
where the door had been. It blended back into the décor with no visible sign
that it had ever existed. That was the point of it, I guessed. No use in a
panic room if potential intruders knew that it was there.
“Forget it,” I said. “You’ll never
get it open.”
Dan punched the wall. It made a
hollow knocking sound, but didn’t do much else. He turned and slumped against
it. “All those fucking guns and we can’t get at them. Wish I’d grabbed the
shotgun.”
I couldn’t think about the guns. I
imagined Justin tied up in the back of the van. The thought filled my body with
nervous energy.
“We need to leave, now. We need to go
after the van.”
Faizel stood at the window. “He could
have gone anywhere.”
I tightened my fist and curled my
fingers into my sweaty palm. “I don’t care. We should start looking. I say we
start in Bury – that’s the direction he headed in, right?”
It felt like all I ever did was chase
after Justin. I’d only known him a year, and this was the second time he’d been
kidnapped. Forget him watching Ben; maybe Ben should have been looking after
him.
A thought sent a cold shock up my
spine. Earlier, Whittaker had thrown an infected in the back of his van. Now,
he’d taken Justin. Was Justin lying next to the infected? We’d seen Whittaker
drive away earlier in the night, but we had no idea what he had done with
living corpse he’d tied up.
Alice wrapped her arm around Ben. The
boy clung to her torso. “He took the road toward Bury, but it splits off toward
Manchester not too far from here.”
Dan let out a huff of air. “Do we
really have to go to Manchester? I know I signed up for it, but I can’t think
of anywhere else I’d rather be.”
I paced to the end of the room, then
back again. “I doubt Whittaker will have gone there either. Even if there
aren’t half a million infected heading from there, it’s still the most
populated place in the North. And that means a hell of a lot of dead people.”
Alice put her hands over Ben’s ears.
“Don’t say that.”
I screwed up my face. “Didn’t have
you down as the scared type.”
“I don’t want him listening to
this,” she said, and nodded down at her son.
Dan gave a sarcastic laugh. “Stop
trying to protect the kid. Sooner he knows how fucked things are the better.”
As much as I hated Dan’s attitude, I
agreed with him. There was no use protecting kids from the truth. If you
shielded them from danger they grew up weak, and we lived in a world that
didn’t tolerate weakness.
Faizel held the crimson curtains
above his head so that he could see out of the window. He stepped back and let
them fall, cutting away the pale glint of the moon and covering the room in
shadow.
Dan stood up. “Moe’s not going to
wait around forever. Personally, I don’t give a shit, but if you’re bent on
keeping him in Vasey, we need to forget Justin and go check out this wave.”
I shook my head. “I’m not leaving
him.”
“The kid’s gone,” said Dan. “If you
take a detour for him, Vasey will be gone too.”
I bit down on a glob of anger that
rose up my throat. There was a mocking look behind the beady black balls of
Dan’s eyes. I wondered why Moe insisted on him coming along. The man was a
selfish as they came, and he was impossible to trust.
“Leaving him isn’t an option. We’ve
been through too much, and I’m not letting this guy take him. We don’t know
what the hell he’s going to do to him.”
Alice bent down to Ben, pushed him
gently to the bed. “Sit down,” she said. Then she turned to me. “I’m with you.
If it weren’t for Justin, he would have taken Ben.”
Faizel ran his hand through his long
hair. Black strands fell away from the tightness of his ponytail, and his
goatee was a couple of days shy of its usual immaculate grooming.
“Justin is one of us. I won’t leave
him either.”
Dan scoffed. “Left your wife and kid
behind though, didn’t you?”
Faizel rounded on him. Anger flashed
on his face, blood flushed his cheeks. He took a breath and it seeped
away. “You either come with us, Dan, or you walk back to Vasey alone.”
“Moe’s going to be pissed at you.”
“Then let him.”
Adrenaline shot through my veins. I
put my hand in my pocket, gripped my watch. Every minute we wasted was time we
could spend looking for Justin, and I could feel the seconds slipping away.
“I’m leaving now. Faizel, Alice, if
you come with me, I’m grateful. But don’t feel like you have to. You’ve both
got enough to lose, and I’ve got nothing.”
Faizel put his hand on my shoulder.
My back sagged underneath the weight, as though everything was catching up with
me and my body couldn’t bear the load.
“You’ve got Vasey, Kyle. You’re
trying to build something for us all, and it’s a higher calling than most.”
Dan scowled and shook his head.
“Decided what you’re doing?” I said.
He looked at the window, and then
spoke through gritted teeth. “Guess I don’t have a choice.”
“Everyone has a choice,” said Faizel.
“Time you made the right one.”
My left leg ached and energy seeped
out of me. Outside the black sky spat darkness onto the streets. I needed to
sleep, but there was no time for that. I wanted to sink into the bed so badly,
but I walked to the door instead.
“I’ll get our stuff together. We
leave in thirty minutes.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until morning?”
said Dan.
Soon, the stalkers would be leaving
their nests. They would slink through the streets, sniffing at the pavement
hoping to catch the scent of prey. It would be safer in the morning, but
Whittaker could be long gone by then. I didn’t know what he planned to do with
Justin, but unless we left right now, we would be abandoning him.
“We don’t have time to wait,” I said.
“If we’re going to find Justin, check out the wave and get back before Moe
leaves, we can’t waste any time.”
Faizel stretched his arms above his
head, let his joints crack. “We’ll need a car.”
I shook my head. “No chance. Do you
know how hard it is to find one that works?”
Alice nodded. “I used to check every
one we passed. Gave up after the hundredth.”
Faizel smiled. “It’s lucky you
brought a mechanic along with you, then.”
“You’re a scout,” I said.
“I’m a scout now. But scouting the
ruins of post-apocalyptic villages wasn’t a job before the outbreak, Kyle. I
used to own a garage with my brother.”
I’d known Faizel for a year, and I
never realised he worked with cars. It showed just how little I really knew
about the people of Vasey. Everything I did was for them, and I wasn’t even
sure that they wanted it.
“You’re full of surprises.”
Faizel nodded. “We all used to be
something else,” he said.
“Even so, working cars are thin on
the ground.”
“Finding a working one isn’t a
problem,” said Faizel. “It is getting the keys that is tricky.”
I realised I’d been here before. This
was the second time Justin had been taken by someone. The second time I’d found
myself needing a car. How did the same shit happen to the same guy twice?