Authors: Jack Lewis
Dan and I moved forward, heaving Faizel
along with us. Every so often he stuck a foot out and pressed it into the
floor, but he only managed one step before he switched back to dragging them.
With his added weight, I would never get to Alice in time. I took his arm,
wound it off my shoulder.
“Put him down,” I told Dan.
We lay Faizel on the floor. Behind
us, infected reached the glass service station doors and banged at them, their
primal senses telling them that they needed to break the glass to get at us.
Hopefully, with Dan’s hammer barring them in place, the doors would hold.
“Stay with him,” I said to Dan.
I expected him to refuse, but instead
he looked down at his friend, his face pallid and his shoulders tight, and then
nodded. On some level, Dan must have understood that this was his fault; if he
hadn’t decided to stock up on alcohol, Faizel wouldn’t have been bitten.
I ran toward Alice. Each step on the
concrete jarred my busted leg, but I winced through the pain and carried on.
Thirty metres lay between Alice and me; the stalker had only five feet.
The creature slid into a crouch,
ready to pounce. Sweat ran over the skin of its back, and muscles rippled
between the framework of bones that stuck out from its spine.
My heart exploded in my chest.
I’m
not going to make it. I can’t get there in time.
The hopelessness of it
nearly sank me to my knees.
Alice turned her back on the stalker.
She pushed Ben hard so that he stumbled back. I was close enough to hear her
now. “Run,” she told him.
Ben’s eyes were black discs. “But mum
-”
“Just run!”
She shoved him away from her, and
then turned to face the stalker. In the face of death her eyes turned to stone.
She gripped the crowbar tightly enough to drain the blood from her fingers.
I stumbled through the pain, closed the
metres. I ran as fast as my leg let me, but it wasn’t quick enough.
The stalker coiled its body and got
ready to spring. The seconds dragged, as though my brain were forcing me to
experience this moment in as much detail as possible, as though it wanted me to
watch Alice die. I would never get there in time.
A shadow stepped from behind the four
by four behind the stalker, a small figure with a black hood over their head.
They walked up to the stalker and raised their hand. A machete gleamed in the moonlight.
The stalker sensed the person, but before it could turn round they sank the
blade deep into its back.
The stalker opened its mouth and
wailed. Alice’s instincts fired, and she stepped forward and slammed her
crowbar into its face. The hooded figure pulled their machete out of the
stalker's back, steeled their grip and then plunged it back in.
The stalker twisted in pain. In a
fair fight, the stalker versus both people, the stalker would always win. The
element of surprise was the only thing that had let them beat it.
The hooded person put a boot on the
stalker’s back pushed the creature onto its belly. They stood over it, raised
their machete. The sleeves of their coat slid down and revealed a bony wrist
with veins pressing against the skin. They brought their machete down with a
grunt and sliced halfway through the stalker’s neck, spilling blood that was as
dark and thick as tar.
The hooded figure stepped back,
caught a breath. They lifted their hand to their hood and pulled it back.
16
It was a woman with a slim build and
thin face. The shadow of a tattoo covered her neck, but I couldn’t make out the
details in the dark. Her blonde hair was cut into a short bob, the roughness of
the strands marking it as a job she’d done herself. Her face was dirty, but
blue eyes shone from the grime. She scowled at me as I approached.
“Thank you,” said Alice, then she
turned to find Ben.
The woman stepped behind Alice,
grabbed her by the neck and held her machete to it. Alice struggled, but the woman’s
grip gave her no movement.
“Don’t move.” Her voice was hoarse,
as though she hadn’t used it in weeks, and her accent was Mancunian.
I walked forward, clutched my knife.
My lungs churned air and my blood pumped it through to the extremities that had
been numbed at the sight of the stalker.
The woman gripped Alice and pivoted
them both until she faced me.
I held my hand out. “Take it easy,” I
said.
The grip on her machete relaxed a
centimetre. Alice shoved her weight into her and slammed the woman into the
car. The woman span around, raised her arm and smashed the handle of the
machete into Alice’s head. Alice fell to the ground.
“Mum!” shouted Ben, and ran over to
her.
The woman pulled Alice upright,
making no work of heaving a much heavier woman to her feet. She held the
machete back to her neck and pressed it tight against the skin.
There were footsteps behind me, and
Dan stood at my side with Faizel leaning into his shoulders. Faizel’s face
looked like it was made of cold crystal, and his eyes were glazed. Dan looked
at the woman and his face twisted. He lowered Faizel to the ground and took the
fire axe from the dying man’s belt.
The woman pressed the blade of the
machete tighter against Alice’s neck. A millimetre more pressure and she would
puncture the skin.
“Drop your weapons, all of you.
Especially you, tubby.”
Dan’s eyes cooked. “Fuck you.”
The woman didn’t even blink. She
nodded at her machete that connected with Alice’s throat, only a thin layer of
skin stopping the blade from drawing blood. “I’ll slit her throat, and you can
watch her bleed.”
Blood pounded in my ears and my
throat dried. After all we’d been through to get the car keys, I wasn’t going
to let this ruin everything. For a second, fury gave me tunnel vision. It
blinded my thoughts and blurred the danger of the machete against Alice’s neck.
“Touch her and you’ll die before she
hits the ground,” I said.
“Maybe, but I’ll have still have time
to kill the boy,” she said.
Ben looked at her and took a step
back, his face a screen of fear.
I could tell she was serious. In the
Wilds I’d seen enough of the dark side of people to know the difference between
those who threatened violence, and those who were capable of it. The grime on
this woman’s face didn’t cover skin, it covered cold stone.
I let my knife clatter to the ground.
I looked at Dan and nodded. At first he tightened his grip around the handle of
the axe. Then he looked at the woman, and he came to the same conclusion as me.
He threw the axe on the floor.
The air was thick with tension.
Hearts hammered, and frayed nerves took on more strain. Someone was going to
snap, and it seemed to me that we were in the losing position. Faizel twisted
on the floor beside me, clutching his bitten arm close to his chest. We
couldn’t afford more bloodshed tonight.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“The fuck you care?” the woman spat.
I kept my voice level. “This will go
better if we all calm the hell down. Maybe we can help you.”
The woman gave a flicker of a
grin as sarcastic as it was fleeting. “Name’s Lena-Lou. Friends used to call me
Lou, but they’re all dead now.”
Alice twisted in Lou’s grip, then
gasped as the woman pressed her machete deeper. The blade broke skin, and a
sliver of blood trickled from her capillaries.
I held my hand up. “Easy, Alice.” I
looked Lou in the eye. “I’m Kyle. These guys are Dan and Faizel. The boy there
is Ben, and that’s his mother you’re holding.”
Lou nodded down at Faizel. “What’s
wrong with him?”
Faizel groaned. I’d never seen him
show pain before, never even seen him complain. To watch his face twist and
unnatural moans spit out of his mouth sent a shock of ice up my spine.
“He needs help,” I said. “Leave us be
and that'll be it. I don’t know what you want, but I promise you we don’t want
anything to do with you.”
Lou reached out her free right hand
and tapped the roof of the car. “This your ride?”
I nodded.
“Give me the keys.”
I took a step forward.
“No, idiot. Throw them to me.”
I dug the keys out of my pocket,
twisted the keyring in my fingers. I gave a weak underarm throw and they landed
a few feet short of Lou.
Lou stepped forward whilst keeping
her grip on Alice, but this time it seemed a struggle, as though the strain was
getting to her. She closed her eyes, gave a sigh.
“Okay, genius. You’re going to have
to pass them to me.”
I picked up the keys. Lou stretched
her arm out toward me. As I passed them, I slipped a key between my fingers and
clenched my hand into a fist. Too quick for Lou to react, I threw a punch at
her face, sinking the end of the key into her cheek.
Lou shouted in pain. She stumbled
back, clutched her hand to her cheek. Alice squirmed from her grip. Blood
rushed to her cheeks and left her bright red. She steadied herself, and then
shifted all her weight into Lou, slamming her into the side of the car.
Lou’s legs gave way and she fell to
the floor. Alice stood over her, swung her leg and sunk it deep into her ribs
with a blow so hard it made me wince. Lou groaned with pain and clutched her
elbows toward her ribs. Alice readied for another kick.
“Enough," I said.
Creases cut deep into Alice’s face as
she screwed it in anger. “Don’t ever threaten my son again, bitch.”
She heaved her leg back and gave Lou
another swift kick.
“Dan, stop her,” I said.
Dan put himself between Lou and
Alice, gently pushed the older woman back.
“Get her to her feet,” I said.
Dan put his hand out and grabbed hold
of Lou. He leaned his body back and took her weight as she got up. When Lou
stood she blinked for a second, dazed. Then she pivoted her body back and swung
her fist into Dan’s face.
There was a crack as his nose
exploded. He grabbed Lou by the neck and slammed her hard enough into the car
to shake her bones. He squeezed her throat, his face turning red as he applied
pressure. Lou choked for air, sucked in raspy breaths through her closed
throat. She curled her hands into fists, and sunk one into Dan’s ribs.
“That’s enough!” I said.
I put my hand on Dan’s shoulder and pulled
him away from Lou.
The woman bent forward, made the
sound of a thirty-a-day smoker as she sucked in deep breaths. She looked up at
me. Hate sizzled in her eyes, and the grime smeared on her face made her look
feral.
It was a look that I recognised.
Once, after weeks of sleeping on the forest floor, I’d stumbled across an
abandoned cottage. I remembered standing in the bathroom and looking at myself
in the mirror, straining to recognise the pathetic creature that stared back.
The Wilds stripped away your humanity layer by layer until it left nothing but
a husk.
I understood this woman; I had an
idea what she’d been through, but that didn’t make her any less dangerous. I
didn’t know what to do with her. What did you do with a rat after you cornered
it? If you let it go, there was always the chance it would go for the jugular.
Alice clutched her arms around Ben. A
drip of blood trickled from cut made by Lou’s machete. Dan knelt by
Faizel and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“He’s slipping,” he said.
I ran my hand through my hair. Blood
pumped from Faizel’s arm, the torrent of it too thick for us to stop. Even if
we could, he was infected now. No matter how long we stretched out his life,
the disease was going to take him. And then he would be a danger to us all.
Seeing Faizel this way sent a deep
ache through my gut. I thought about Faizel’s child, the boy who asked for
reassurance that his dad was coming back. Faizel was leaving his family behind;
a boy who would never see his father again, a wife whose last interaction with
her husband was to refuse to speak to him. She would carry that guilt for the
rest of her life, but it was nothing next to the guilt I would shoulder for
bringing him with me.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
It was too much for me to process. I
couldn’t think, couldn’t decide. Being leader was something that had been
forced upon me, and it was more apparent than ever that I wasn’t the right
person for it.
Dan rubbed his hand across his face,
and a long sigh escaped between his fingers. When he pulled his hand away, a
smear of blood trailed from his forehead to his chin.
“I don’t have a damn clue.”
Faizel twisted as pain pulsed through
him.
Lou stepped away from the car.
“What’s happened to him?”
Dan looked up.
“The hell is it to you?”
She took another step forward,
stopped above Faizel’s body. She spoke again with measured force behind each
syllable.
“Tell me what happened to him.”
I spoke through clenched teeth. “Same
thing that happens to everyone, eventually.”
If my words shocked her, her face
didn’t show it. She was from the Wilds, and she knew exactly what I meant. “He
was bitten?”
I nodded.
Ben’s sniffling broke the weight of
the silence, and Faizel gave a weak groan. Lou’s stony expression cracked. She
knelt beside Faizel’s body, ran her hand across his sweat-covered head.
“You know what’s happening, don’t
you? Inside your body?”
Faizel strained to look at her, and
for a second the sight of the strange woman anesthetised the pain. He choked
out a word.
“Yes.”
Lou gave a sad smile. “Then you’ll
understand why I’m doing this.”
Before any of us could react, she
slid a knife from a sheath above her boot. She raised it in the air and in one swift
movement brought it down onto Faizel’s head, cutting into his temple and
sinking it deep into his brain.