Authors: Jack Lewis
I lowered my voice. “You leave as
soon as it gets dark. Once you’re outside of Vasey, you turn your back on it
and start walking. If I ever see you look in the direction of these walls
again, I’ll slit your throat myself.”
Harlow picked up his wallet and put
it in his pocket. “Thank you,” he said, “You won't regret it.”
I wished I could believe him.
3
I dropped the tip of the shovel and
worked it through the dirt. My busted leg ached, so I rested a few seconds and
let the throbbing subside. After days of working so hard that I went home
covered in sweat, the majority of the land was still untouched. We would never
be ready in time.
The fields were big enough to grow
the food we’d need to get through the winter, but there wasn’t enough people
working them. Across from me, two women worked on the carrot patch. I was
getting the potatoes ready, and a heavyset man did his best on the onions,
stopping every few minutes to wipe the sweat off his forehead. A handful of
people trying to grow enough food to sustain a population. It wasn’t enough.
I leant on my shovel and caught my
breath. This was my fault. I was the leader; I should have ordered people to
help. My mistake was giving people too much freedom. I’d allocated jobs to
those who wanted work, but I’d let those looking for an easy life get by
without having to work up a sweat.
A thick cloud loomed above us, as
though the sky was angry at our pathetic attempts at growing food and had
decided to punish us with rain. The smell of manure pinched at my nostrils.
Sometimes I wondered if it was better in the Wilds.
No. This has to work.
Vasey is our only chance.
There were footsteps behind me on the
paving. Faizel walked toward me. He was six foot three with a black goatee
beard that he somehow kept tidy despite the lack of grooming products. His skin
was tan and his bones were wrapped in muscle. He gave off a calm aura, as
though he kept himself in a peaceful place that the world couldn’t touch.
Faizel was one of Moe’s scouts, but I doubted his loyalty to him. He was the
opposite of Moe; he thought before he spoke, treated every word as if it was
precious.
“Kyle,” he said, nodding his head.
I stuck the shovel deeper into the
earth so that it stood on its own. I stepped out of the mud and tapped my boot
on the floor, letting the dirt spill out.
“Looking for work?” I said.
He shook his head. He pointed
behind me at the fields. “You should work in rotation. Four of you on the
carrots until they’re done. Then the potatoes. You need to plan for the season
– some things fare better than others in the winter.”
“Feels like it’s going to be a harsh
one this year.”
“Nature adapts.”
The cloud spat drips of rain. Lately
it seemed like that was all it ever did, and it made for messy field work. We
needed a couple of days of dry weather.
“What can I do for you?” I said.
“Moe needs you in town.”
I took my watch from my pocket. The
strap was broken, so I couldn’t wear it, but the mechanism still ticked. The
clock showed three pm. Still a few hours of day light left, and I needed them.
“Let me finish up here and then I’ll
head over.”
Faizel shook his head. Rain dotted
onto his face, but he didn’t seem to mind. His black hair was tied back into a
ponytail and a small star-shaped tattoo was cut into his neck.
“He needs you now,” he said.
“Is it urgent?”
“Yep.”
Faizel’s face didn’t convey urgency.
It didn’t crease or break, it was a slate devoid of emotion. I needed some of
the training he’d had to make himself a rock.
I heaved the shovel out of the field,
spraying mud everywhere. I looked at what I’d achieved with my day’s labour,
and my shoulders sagged. Only a quarter done. I shouted over to the others
working the fields.
“Gotta go guys. Emergency in town.
Keep up the hard work.”
The chubby man waved his hand in the
air, the round skin of his cheeks flushed red.
“Let’s go,” I said.
***
We got to the town square. This time
there was a larger crowd of people than before, and a ripple of anger ran
through their faces. In the middle of the crowd, the scene was the same as it
had been a few days ago.
Harlowe was on his knees. His
face was swollen, and a purple bump stuck out underneath his eyes.
I pushed past two people and got into
the centre of the ring. Moe stood behind Harlowe. His face was red, and his
hands were white from where he gripped the man’s collar.
“This is your fucking fault, Kyle,” said
Moe.
Harlowe looked at me, his eyes
vacant.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Moe shook Harlowe by the collar. His
body jerked, but he didn’t do anything to stop it.
“I told you not to let him go, but
you did it anyway. And look what’s happened. This is on you.”
He pushed Harlowe to the ground and
kicked him in the ribs. Harlowe flinched, but didn’t move to protect himself.
I put myself between him and Moe. I
pulled Harlowe to his knees, but Moe snatched his collar.
“What’s happened?” I said.
“He came back and tried it again,”
said Moe. He slapped Harlowe on the back of the head. “Only this time, he’s
killed someone.”
The words winded me. Harlowe’s face
looked like a swollen tomato, and his body sagged in Moe’s grip. His eyes were
half-closed, and he looked at the ground as though he were resigned to his
punishment. There was no fear in his face now. He didn’t look like the same man
who had shown me the picture of his wife and kid, the one who had convinced me
not to kill him. I had made a massive mistake.
Guilt started to flood my stomach,
but I could suffer that later. I needed to know what had happened. “Who did he
kill?” I said.
Moe rubbed his face with his free
hand. “Does it matter who’s dead? Do you really need to know his name, or is
the fact that he murdered someone enough?”
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
A man shoved his way through the
crowd. He was short and squat. Beady pupils rolled in the whites of his eyes,
and below them a swollen-looking nose flushed red. His chest spread wide and
his gut stuck out.
It was Dan, one of Moe’s scouts. He
was one of the people who had never come to me for work, instead helping Moe
with whatever he wanted doing. Wherever Moe pointed, Dan jumped. When hard work
needed doing, Dan ran.
He looked down on Harlowe, his pink
face twisted in contempt. The contempt didn’t leave him when he looked at me.
“Sam’s dead,” he said, his words
slipping through gritted teeth. “His wife’s a fucking widow because you didn’t
follow the law. What’s gonna have to happen before you realise that we know
best? Things were working well before you showed up.”
That wasn’t true. Things had been
turning to crap before I got here. They were running out of food because hardly
any of the tinned stuff was remotely edible, and they hadn’t made any effort to
grow their own. They had no direction in life, surviving for the present
by borrowing from the future. Dan was wrong, but I couldn’t say shit because he
was on the mark about one thing; my mercy had gotten someone killed.
My throat thickened, and I got a
sinking feeling as self-loathing slid through my body like bad medicine. I was
going to have to go see Sam’s widow. I didn’t know what it was going to take,
but I would make this right.
Moe grabbed hold of Harlowe’s hair
and pulled his head back. He took out his knife and pressed it to his throat.
Harlowe’s Adam’s apple bulged out of place as he gulped.
“Who wants to see justice?” he said.
The crowd murmured and a few people
spoke in the affirmative. Their features were covered in shadows, twisted into
positons that only anger could make. They had seen one of their own killed by
an outsider, and now they wanted revenge. And there was nothing I was going to
be able to do to stop it. I didn’t know if I wanted to; Harlowe and his
quivering chin were a pathetic reflection of my mistake.
I crouched in front of Harlowe. I
took his chin, made him look at me.
“What about your wife and boy? “I
asked. “They’re not worth living for?”
I don’t know what I expected from
him. Did I want him to say sorry? Plead for his life? It wouldn’t have made a
difference at this point. I was looking at a dead man.
The edges of his lips curled and his
face tightened into a grin. “Can’t believe you bought that shit.”
I gritted my teeth. “What?”
He leant in as far as Moe’s grip
would allow him. His words were a whisper, his breath hot. “I took the wallet
off a guy I killed. There never was a wife and kid. You gullible fucking
moron.”
My body tensed up. I tightened my
hands into fists and tried to keep them at my side as they shook.
Harlowe leaned in further. He spoke
so quietly that nobody could hear him but me. “Think your friends would like to
know what I told you yesterday. About the wave of infected that’s going to kill
them all.”
After lying to me about his wife and
kid, why should I believe him about this? I’d trusted his word once, and I
wouldn’t do it again.
Even so, if he told everyone about
the wave, Moe wouldn’t think about it objectively. He’d use it as a reason to
leave Vasey straight away, and he’d take half the town with him. Vasey was on a
knife edge, and I had to stop it cutting itself.
I took a deep breath and held it in
my chest. My arms and legs felt tight, my stomach fluttery. Was I really going
to do this?
I slipped my knife into my hand. The
blade caught Harlowe’s eye, and his face sagged. I moved my arm back ready to
swing at his throat, but I stopped myself at the last second. I couldn’t do it.
Moe threw Harlowe to the ground. He
looked at my knife and grinned. “Glad you’re coming round to my way of
thinking, Kyle, but this one’s mine. And I’ve got a few questions before we let
him bleed.”
Harlowe stayed on the ground. A
trickle of blood ran from a graze on his forehead. He rubbed at it, leaving a
red smear across his skin.
Moe addressed the crowd. “Who wants
justice today?”
They answered in the affirmative.
Moe paced across the square as he
spoke, an orator in his element.
“Is it the will of the people that
this man dies?”
A chorus of yesses.
“Harlowe”, said Moe. “I’ve got one
last question before I bleed you dry.”
Harlowe looked up, a man resigned to
his fate. In death he wasn’t the coward I thought he’d be.
Moe held his knife in his hand, span
it by the blade. “Why were you stupid enough to try and steal the same car
twice? You’re no genius, but you must have a pretty good reason.”
Harlowe dragged himself into a
sitting position. The strain of it drained his face white. The angry faces of
the crowd stared down at him, a throng of furious men and women looking for
revenge.
All I could do was watch. This had
gone beyond me now, beyond what any leader could do. Harlowe was in the hands
of the crowd.
He cleared his throat. As he took his
last breaths, he looked the crowd in the eyes and spoke clearly. “They’re
coming for you,” he said. “And you’re all going to die.”
And then he told everyone about the
wave of infected.
Panic seeped into the faces of the
crowd. They believed him, and the thought of it terrified them. Soon their
panic would turn to anger and then there would be no reasoning, no examining of
the facts. They would take action, and Moe would guide them into it. Vasey was
done.