Authors: Jack Lewis
17
She twisted the knife and then yanked
it back out. The lights in Faizel’s eyes faded until they were two glass balls
that stared sadly at the ground. Blood seeped from his arm like an oil slick,
the current thinning as the pumping of his blood slowed to a stop.
I wanted to sink to the ground and
cover my face. All I could think about was Faizel’s boy; his tears, his need
for reassurance about his father, and my refusal to give it. Sana was going to
have to tell him the news. She was going to have to raise the boy without the
father who was in many ways the perfect role model.
Alice knelt on the floor with Ben
pressed against her, his head buried in her chest, sniffling sounds drifting
out. My chest ached, and I wanted to look away. I knew I couldn’t do that. We
had to face up to death, accept it as part of living. Alice needed to show Ben
more of the bad side of the world, because he sure as hell would have to get
used to it when he was older.
Dan’s eyes were red, a contrast to
the whiteness of his cheeks. He rubbed them and glared at Lou. When he spoke,
his voice shook.
“He had a wife and son. Look what
you’ve done.”
Lou wiped the blade of the knife on
her cargo pants, which left the metal gleaming but smeared a red stain on her
leg. She bent down and slipped it into her boot.
“Do you think I had any choice?”
Dan gripped Faizel’s limp arm. They
had spent a long time together in the Wilds when they were scouting for Moe,
and it was impossible not to feel some sort of connection with someone who
shared life and death experiences with you. For Dan, it just took his friend’s
death to show it.
He looked up at me, his face
searching for something. “Maybe we could have found a cure. This Whittaker guy
– “
Lou stepped forward, crouched down.
Her eyes narrowed.
“Say that again.”
“We could have found a cure – “
She waived her hand in the air. “Not
that. The name.”
Dan’s face slackened. “Whittaker?”
Lou straightened up. “How do you know
Whittaker?”
“Do
you
know him?” I said.
Lou leant against the car bonnet. She
nodded. “I’m going after him myself. I know where he is.”
I tilted my head to the side. I had
every reason not to trust this woman. She had held a machete to Alice’s neck
and she had killed Faizel in front of us. She had slipped a knife through his
skull without even letting him say goodbye. By all rights, I should have killed
her.
That was the old way of thinking, the
old attitude to grief; sadness and retribution. In this hellish world, grief
was a luxury. You had to compartmentalise things, weigh emotions against
practicality. I knew that if I let myself think about Faizel my eyes would
start to burn, my voice would choke. I pushed my feelings to the side.
Nothing would bring Faizel back. But
if she knew where Whittaker was, maybe we could get to Justin. There was a
chance that something could be salvaged from this mess.
“Where is he?” I said.
She shook her head. “Take me with
you.”
Dan leapt to his feet, his pale
cheeks flooding with blood. “No way!” He turned to me. “Kyle, we can’t take her
with us. I don’t give a shit if she knows where Whittaker is.”
Alice pushed down on Ben’s shoulder
so that he sat on the ground. “Wait here a minute.” Then she walked over to us.
She glared at Lou, whose face didn’t register it in the slightest, then turned
to me. “I don’t trust her, Kyle.”
Lou crossed her feet. “Well trust
this; I don’t know why you’re looking for Whittaker, but there’s no chance
you’ll find him without me.”
I put my hand to my chin. Lou was
right. Getting the car, driving to Bury, we were driving into a haystack
looking for a needle. If Lou knew where to go, we could make it in time to stop
Whittaker doing whatever it was he wanted to do. There was just the question of
trusting this woman to guide us there.
I recognised something about Lou. She
had a flinch in her eyes that only living in the Wilds would give you. None of
the Vasey residents had it, save Faizel and Dan. It was something you got when
you saw what the world was really like, when you’d done things to survive that
most people couldn’t stomach. That was why no matter how much it sickened me to
see Faizel’s lifeless body, I knew why Lou had done it.
Lou bent over, picked her machete up
off the floor. Nobody moved to stop her. She slid it into her belt and then
adjusted her coat. The inside was lined with thick fur, but the outside,
reaching up to her hood, was waterproof. The dark blue material was splattered
with mud.
“Take me with you, and I’ll take you
to Whittaker.”
Alice and Dan turned to me, waited
for me to act. Dan’s face was a grimace. I ran my fingers through my hair, felt
the grease that was compacted between the thick strands.
“Why are you looking for him?” I
said.
Lou gritted her teeth. The glow of
the moon lit the blue of her neck tattoo.
“I’m going to slit his throat,” she
said.
18
The silence that hung in the car said
more than words could. I didn’t need telepathy to tell what everyone was
thinking, and as I drove miles away from the service station, Faizel stayed
with us every inch of the way. The only person unaffected was Lou. She sat in
the passenger seat, pressed her elbow against the window and leant her cheek
into her palm.
The light of dawn seeped into the
sky, but the blue was hidden by dense clouds. I could see Lou’s neck tattoo
better in the light; it depicted the inside of her neck – her neck bones,
throat, trachea - as if someone had slit the skin and peeled it back to reveal
the messy workings of the human body that were only separated from the outside
world by a thin layer of skin.
On the back seat, Alice leant her
head against the window, and the flickering of her eyelids told me that she was
managing to sleep. Ben was spread out over her with his head buried in her lap
and his legs stretching across the back seat. Dan pushed Ben’s feet away from
him, then leant his head back and stared at the car roof. I held the steering
wheel with one hand and rested the other against the window.
“You ever hear anything about a
wave?” I said.
Lou blinked, and dark patches sagged
under her eyes. “A wave of what?”
“Infected.”
She arched an eyebrow. “That’s a
stupid thing to call them.”
A car was parked diagonally across
the lane ahead of us. I turned the wheel, shifted us around it. A sign at the
side of the road told us we were ten miles away from Manchester.
The shadow of foreboding that hung
above us grew larger the closer we got to the city. I didn’t want to head that
way, but Lou had told us that there was no way Whittaker would go to Bury. She
knew where he was, and unluckily for us the destination was Manchester.
“A guy told me there’s half a million
of them in Manchester, and somehow they all joined together,” I said.
Lou bit her lip. “I’ve been in
Scotland.”
She glanced out of the window, and
stared deep into the trees that lined that side of the road, as though she were
looking at something that I couldn’t see.
“What were you doing up there?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “At first
I just wanted to see it. Then I met some people there, got tied down for a
while.”
Something about the way she said it
made the words sound hollow. Her answer was too vague, her tone too casual. She
had her reasons for going to Scotland but it was fine if she didn’t want to
share them.
The greens of the English country
fields blurred beside us. In summer the grass would be luscious, the branches
of the trees lined with leaves. Now, the branches had alopecia, and the grassy
fields were starved of sunlight.
My eyelids started to drop and the
car drifted an inch into the next lane. I decide it was time for us to stop,
because I’d learnt my lesson about trying to push through exhaustion,
especially when I was driving.
There was a field on our left, an
expanse of green that cut a contrast to the endless grey of the motorway. White
lines were painted on the grass, markings that drew the borders of a cricket
pitch. At the end of the pitch stood a beat-up wooden pavilion that looked like
it had been built by a ten year old. I pulled to the side of the motorway and
switched off the engine.
***
“I need the toilet,” said Ben.
“There’s a river down there,” said
Alice, pointing. “I’ll take him to the toilet.”
I shook my head. “Don’t let him do it
in the river. We might need to collect drinking water.”
“Sure, sorry. My brain isn’t
working.”
I pointed to the pavilion. “Lou and I
will check that out, see if we can find anything useful. What about you, Dan?”
Dan rubbed his eyes and grunted.
“I’ll get some sleep in the car.”
Lou and I set off toward the
pavilion. In truth I didn’t want her anywhere near me; the tips of her fingers
were stained red with Faizel’s blood, and I still had no reason to trust her.
I’d learned a harsh lesson from Harlowe back in Vasey; that survivors would do
anything to stay alive.
The pavilion was locked, but the door
looked weak at the hinges. I braced myself and then sank my weight into it, and
the weak wood shifted and the lock broke. A shower of dust fell from the
ceiling, and I coughed as I took some in my lungs.
“This one’s a loser,” said Lou,
stepping in to the room.
There wasn’t much to see. A few
cupboards and shelves, a dirty couch. Cricket uniforms discarded on the floor,
the once white material now grey with dust. In the corner a few cardboard boxes
were stacked against the wall, and a framed photograph of a cricket team hung
above them. The players all wore their whites and held their bats proudly in
front of them. The captain clutched a trophy that crowned them Radcliffe
Division C winners of 2013. Dust trailed across the glass of the frame,
smearing out the smiles of their faces.
“You take the shelves, I’ll take the
boxes,” I said.
I picked up the top box, braced my
arms and took the weight. As I lifted it, my biceps stretched and tensed and
blood rushed to my muscles. It was heavier than it looked. When I heaved it
onto the floor and saw what was inside, I smiled.
“Got some cricket bats,” I said.
Lou slammed a cupboard door shut, and
the handle twisted out of place and dropped onto the floor. “Good,
because I haven’t found shit.”
I lifted another box from the stack,
placed it on the floor. It was full of red-purple corky balls. I knew from
experience that if one hit you in the face it hurt like hell, and I still had
the tiny dent in my forehead that was the scar of a school cricket match gone
wrong.
“Lou,” I said. “How do you know
Whittaker?”
She picked up the handle and attached
it back to the shelf as though she were fixing it for whoever might come in
here after us, despite the fact that the dust in here hadn’t been disturbed for
years.
“Don’t want to talk about it,” she
said. “I just knew him, from before.”
“Before the outbreak?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I lifted down another box, this one
lighter. It was full of plastic crotch guards, which were your best friend when
you had a cricket balls flying at you.
“So why were you in Scotland?”
She shrugged. “Just wanted to get as
far away from it all as possible.”
I knew how she felt because after
Clara died, I had done the same. My brother in law, David, was still alive
then, but I had abandoned him because in my selfishness, I couldn’t face
people. I needed to be alone, to walk a lonely path in silence, one that was
only cut by the moans of the infected. Somehow their pathetic guttural cries
seemed better company than people.
Now I knew how wrong that was. All of
us who were still alive had been given the gift of survival, and wasting it was
an insult to the millions who had died. Traveling alone lessened your survival
chances, and if you did that you spat in the faces of those the infected had
taken.
This was how I knew that Lou’s
actions were right. Faizel was going to turn, there was no stopping that. The
only thing wrong was the human brain’s inability to process violence, even if
it was necessary to survive. I decided to take a chance. I turned to Lou,
picked my words carefully.
“There’s a town. We’ve got
walls, gates. There’s a couple of hundred of us, and it’s the safest place you
can be these days.”
Lou shrugged her shoulders.
I picked up a corky ball, twisted it
in my hands, found the ridges which told the bowler where to place his fingers.
“I want you to come back with us. It
would be good for you. We could use someone like you.”
Lou crossed her arms, and the faint
bulges of her biceps pressed against the fabric of her coat. Living in the
Wilds had toned her physique to a level that, before the outbreak, people used
spend days working in the gym to achieve. If only we’d known back then that
running machines weren’t the secret to fitness; you just had to wait for the
world to end. She put her hand up to her chin and shook her head.
“No thanks.”
I was going to try and persuade her,
but the sound of an engine rumbled outside the pavilion. Lou and I exchanged
glances.
Had someone else driven into the field? Had someone been following
us?
I dropped the ball, pushed the
pavilion door open and stepped out onto the grass. Across the field, Alice and
Ben trudged out of the bushes just in front of the river.
The headlights of our car illuminated
the middle of the field. Dan sat in the driver’s seat. There was a lurch as he
change gears, and then he reversed the vehicle.
There was no need to ask what he was
doing because I knew that already. As he drove forward and left the field,
spilling the car back onto the motorway, I knew that he had abandoned us.