Authors: Jack Lewis
“You mean Harlowe?” I said.
Moe nodded. “He should have died,
Kyle. You know that. If people steal from us, they have to die. We can’t do
half a job. That’s why
your
Vasey will never work. You can’t do what
needs to be done.”
Moe opened his front door, and a
musty smell drifted out. He stepped inside and shut it behind him.
I stood on the doorstep and felt the
wind blow against my bones. The cold seeped through my layers and made my hair
stand on end. I wondered if Moe was right.
2
The sun hung onto a precarious
position in the sky. Soon it would start to lose the battle, on this hemisphere
at least, and the black of the night would drop like a shroud. People would
leave their assigned roles on the wall and the fields and trundle back to their
beds, hopefully with their bodies aching from the day’s work.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out to do the hard
things that Moe was talking about. To him, survival boiled down to selfishness.
Do whatever you need to, take what you want. As long as it gets you through the
nights, don’t let it keep you awake.
Despite how many people liked Moe,
surely not all of them agreed with his philosophy? They couldn’t all believe in
a world where the grey shades of morality were replaced with the black and
white of violence. That committing any crime meant death.
I needed to talk this out. I had to
figure what to do with Harlowe, because although he wasn’t dead yet, people
were going to start to put pressure on me to do it.
Maybe killing him would get Moe to
stay and help us hold on to Vasey for a little while longer, just enough to get
people to start believing in it.
When I got to the radio room I
expected to hear the crackle of the static or the washed-out transmission of
the man with the cure. Instead there was silence, and Justin’s chair was empty.
The radio system was powered down completely.
I ran my hand along the control box.
It usually emitted a faint warm glow after we left it running for a while, but
now the metal was cold.
Where was Justin? And why had he not
come back here when I told him to?
This set-up was all too familiar. It
was a position he’d put me in plenty of times back when we were on the road
together; I’d tell him not to do something, and he’d do it anyway. The kid had
grown up a lot over the last year, but his impulsiveness was never going to
leave him.
I locked the radio room door. The sun
was losing its fight against the night, a sure sign that the days were getting
shorter. A chill ran up my arms, but the layers I wore meant that it wasn’t
because of the cold. It was more to do with the image that longer nights
brought.
More darkness meant more stalkers.
Human-esque faces. Two rows of teeth lining mouths that smiled too wide.
Slinking bodies. Patchy hair sprouting from decaying follicles, skin receding.
I walked down the road and tried to
keep my feet level on the cobbles. The smell of a stew blew from a nearby
window. It was earthy and full of vegetables, but was there also a trace of
meat? The door number was thirty-two, which I was sure was Dan’s house. He’d
already eaten his monthly meat ration, so where had he gotten more? I was going
to have to talk to him.
When I got to Justin’s house I lifted
the metal door knocker and let it thud back into place. Three bangs echoed. The
living room was dark and empty. I knocked a few more times, but Justin didn’t
come to the door.
He was up to something. He usually
didn’t have much of a latch on his tongue, but lately he’d been watching what
he said. He still put in a good shift at the radio room, but rather than
staying for hours after his shift ended, he’d been leaving right on time. And
today he’d asked me if he could even leave
early.
What was going on?
***
The drug awareness centre had been
stripped of furniture except for a plastic-coated desk with two chairs either
side of it. The walls were lined with colourful posters boasting catchy sayings
like ‘Thinking about drugs? Think again.’ None of it was needed anymore. The
war on drugs had been won, and it had only taken the end of the world to do it.
Harlow was handcuffed to the table in
the middle of the room. He rested his head on his hands and stared at the
floor. His shoulders sloped down and his back bent with the slouch of his
posture. His hair was tangled and curly, and his red beard was thick through
months on the road.
Something about him reminded me of
David, my brother in law who had died back on the farm. I pushed back the
memories that threatened to surface. Stopped images of David softening my
attitude to the thief who sat in front of me.
I shut the door behind me. Harlow
turned his head slowly, saw me, and then turned back.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
He lifted his hand a few feet off the
table, the most his handcuffs would allow. “Reminds me of when I stayed at the
Hilton.”
I took a seat in the chair opposite
Harlowe. The back legs were uneven, and every time I shifted my weight it
rocked.
“Was that Pre or post outbreak? I bet
the rooms are going pretty cheap now.” I said.
He arched his eyebrow. “You think I’m
stupid enough to go into the middle of Manchester? It’s the second biggest city
in the whole frigging country. “
“I know you’ve been there Harlowe. Or
at least thereabouts.”
“What makes you say that?”
I was no interrogator. I didn’t know
how to screw with someone’s psyche to get information out of them, but I
figured I could throw him off balance. Truth was, I had no idea where he’d
been, I was just taking a stab. From the look on his face, I had gotten him
flustered.
“I was a traveller myself. Didn’t
come to Vasey until a year ago. I know someone who’s done their time in the
Wilds. Yeah, you’ve moved around some. And most people who move around, they
want to see what’s happened to the city.”
He put his fingers to his chin,
scratched his beard. Flecks of dry skin fell to the table. “Yeah I’ve seen it.”
“And?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
The light above us, a single bulb
swinging from a cord, dimmed and then went out. They must have been swapping
over generators, and that meant the power would be back on soon. Until then we
only had the weak light that filtered through the window. Harlowe’s face was
cast in shadow.
I put my hands out on the table. “Why
take the car?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I think you owe us an explanation.”
He held his hands out in front of
him, picked at his nails. He tried to hold his face firm, but his eyebrows
twitched.
“Look,” I said. “They want to kill
you, and it’s only my authority that stopped them cutting your throat. We make
an example of thieves.”
“I don’t see how any man can lay
claim to property these days.”
I leant back. The chair rocked. “Gotta
have some sort of system. Otherwise nothing works.”
Harlow screwed his face. “You can’t
kill me.”
“Why?”
He put his hand in the back pocket of
his jeans and pulled out a wallet. He opened it and slid it across the table.
There was a picture of a woman and a boy. She had brown hair tied into a pony
tail, freckles dotting her pointed nose. The boy’s cheeks were chubby and he
had two teeth missing.
Harlowe bit his top lip. “My wife and
son.”
I thought about Clara. She’d been
gone seven years now, but the image of her face still stung. Every time she
entered my mind I got another lashing.
“Not my problem,” I said. “But if you
tell me why you needed the car, then maybe we can talk.”
He turned his head to me. “You
wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Try
me,” I said.
He pulled his chair closer to him and
sat upright. He took a few seconds, as if picking his words carefully.
“What’s the biggest crowd of them
you’ve ever seen?”
By them, he meant the infected. The
biggest crowd I’d seen was a few thousand, and I’d watched them cut through a
group of armed hunters like teeth chewing through bone. I remember the sounds
they made, a chorus of desperate wails, and the smell of death. It still
brought bile to my throat, even a year later.
“Couple of thousand,” I said.
He nodded. “And what was that like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, were they dangerous?”
I crossed my arms. “
Of course
they were. What do you think?”
He put his elbows on the table and
rested his head on his hands. He leaned forward.
“If two thousand was bad, imagine
five hundred thousand.”
The bulb above us flickered back on.
I expected to see Harlow smiling, because this had to be a joke. Five hundred
thousand infected, all of them in a wave? It wasn’t possible. Sure, they joined
together sometimes, got tangled together like shoals of fish, but there was no
way half a million of them could do that.
Outside, someone laughed. The drug
centre door was closed, all the windows shut save one which was open an inch.
I lowered my voice. “You’ve actually
seen them?”
He gave a slow nod.
“Where?”
He pointed toward the window. “Twenty
miles north of here. Take a man four days to walk, eight if they got a gammy
leg like yours. It’s a big place full of skyscrapers and infected. You can’t
miss it.”
“Manchester.”
“That’s the one. And they’re walking
in this direction, half a million of ‘em.”
“Bullshit. That’s not possible,” I
said.
Harlowe shifted in his seat. “The
population of Manchester was over two million before the outbreak.”
I stood up and the chair scraped
behind me. My blood flowed faster in my veins and my heart pumped like it was
an engine on the titanic. I didn’t trust Harlowe, but I’d be foolish to dismiss
him. Half a million infected all walking in the same direction sounded
ridiculous. But maybe I was wrong. If two thousand could do it, then why not
more?
I walked over to the window. The
streets were dark and empty.
“You seem tense. Something bothering
you?” said Harlowe.
“Shut up.”
If Moe learned about this, there was
no chance that he would stay. The situation was precarious enough, but this
would seal the deal. Losing Moe wouldn’t be the end of the world, but his word
carried weight, and Vasey couldn’t afford to be a hundred-people lighter. It
wouldn’t work.
Harlowe leaned forward, hands
clenched together. “Look, just let me go. I’m sorry I tried to take a car, but,
well, you know why I did it now. If you could just – “.
“Shut it.”
I walked to the table and stood
inches away from him. So many things were going through my head.
Was Harlowe
telling the truth? How would I prove it? If he was, what the hell were we going
to do?
I needed time.
I leant my face into his, so close I
smelt the grime. “You say nothing. You understand me? Nothing.”
Harlowe nodded. “Are you letting me
go?”
I knew that I shouldn’t. Letting him
go sent a message, and if people knew I’d done it, they’d think I was an easy
touch. He could have others out there waiting for him, and he’d seen enough of
Vasey that he could come back with them and cause real trouble. By all rights,
Harlowe had to die.
Harlowe reminded me of myself. The
thick beard, dirty skin. Clothes that had never seen a wash. A face that
had never been creased by a smile or a frown, instead left as a blank canvas.
In the Wilds, there was no point feeling anything. You just had to stay alive.