34
As we
crossed over the plains time seemed to stretch out like a ribbon of twine
slowly unravelling. It was like we were on a conveyor belt and it didn’t matter
how fast we went, we never seemed to move forward. With every step on the
frosted-encrusted grass dread built up in my stomach and then spread into my
chest. If someone stabbed me now the dread would seep out of me, thick and
black like oil.
Charlie
stared at the hills. I could tell he was scared from the way his fingers
twitched, but he kept his focus on what lay ahead and where we were going to
set the dynamite. Reece took clumsy steps and gripped his wrench so tight that
his finger bones stuck against the skin.
The pathway
cut into the centre of the hulking hills. It was a crevice the width of a bus,
and it looked like it had been carved by the gods. I tried to look all the way
along it and see the other side, but the sides of the hills cast a shadow over
the pathway and hid what lay beyond.
Despite the
gloom it seemed so calm, and it was hard to believe that thousands of infected
would soon groan their way along it. I put my hand to my forehead as if to
guard my sight from rays of sunlight that weren’t there.
“What’s
wrong?” said Charlie.
“I can’t see
them.”
Reece folded
him arms and shivered. His nose twitched, and he screwed up his face. A second
later, I realised why. The wind had changed, and with it came the smell of rot.
It was light at first, like a blocked drain, but then it thickened. The putrid
smell crawled up my nostrils, down my throat, and made my stomach tumble.
Then came
the groans. The gust carried an orchestra of twisted wails, becoming louder and
more terrible as the seconds passed. It was the tormented cries of half a
million infected. The passage was too shadowy for me to see them, but they
were there.
Reece looked
like he was about to be sick. I stepped forward and put both my hands on his
shoulders. They shook beneath my grip.
“You know
what we have to do?” I said.
He looked
past me and over my shoulder, as if he wanted to be back with his dad at the
safety of Bleakholt.
That’s not a good idea
, I thought.
Bleakholt
won’t be safe for much longer.
“Charlie’s
going to set the dynamite,” I said. “We need to keep him safe while he works. If
any infected reach us before he’s done, we hold them off. Understand?”
He gave a
weak nod. I tightened my grip on his shoulders and felt his skin squeeze
between my fingers. I shook him.
“Reece, I
need to know that you understand me. This is the most important thing you will
ever do. No matter what happens, we hold them off.”
Finally he
gave a stronger nod.
“Good,” I
said. I turned to Charlie. “Better get to work.”
Charlie
walked to the left side of the path and started to feel the rocky sides of it,
testing for a place to put the dynamite. Reece and I stepped into the passage
way and walked into the darkness. Despite being the middle of the afternoon,
the sides of the hills stood so tall that they blocked out almost all the
light. It made it seem like we were walking through the thick of night. After
five minutes of following it, we stopped.
“This is far
enough,” I said. “We wait here until Charlie shouts that he’s done.”
If any
infected came before Charlie finished, we were the first in line. I hoped it
wouldn’t come to that. I wanted us to get this done, blow the path and then get
to Bleakholt without even seeing any infected. I just wanted some good luck for
a change.
The wind
gushed past and with it brought the odour of rotting flesh. This time it was
stronger. I clamped my mouth shut and tried not to breathe, but the smell was
so strong it worked its way through my closed lips. I gagged as I tasted the
rot in the air. Reece put his sleeve to his mouth and coughed.
I strained
my eyes into the shade of the path but it was like looking into a tunnel. I
turned round and saw Charlie behind me at the other end of the pathway. He was
stood against the side and pressed something into the rocks.
Hurry up
, I
thought.
A sense of
dread crept up my arms and made my hairs stand on end as if unseen hands
stroked me. I shivered. The dark of the pathway gave it the feeling of a crypt
with the lid pried off. It felt like any second we could be plunged into total
darkness.
The wind
whooshed past me again. The sick smell invaded me. The groan of an infected
wheezed into my ears and made it seem like they were much closer than they
actually were. I didn’t know how long we had before they arrived, but I wasn’t
sure I could cope with the smell and the noises.
A desperate
cry wormed into my ears. Another one sounded like it came from behind me.
Another one to my right. Then to my left. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and
finally I saw them. They weren’t at the end of the passage way. They weren’t
making their way towards us.
They were
already here.
Reece cried
out and stumbled back as an infected sprang at him from the shadows. Another
one reached at me and tried to grasp my coat with desperate fingers. I slid my
knife from my belt and gripped it. I slashed at the fingers and sliced through
the flesh. Clotted blood oozed from the skin, and the fingers hung from the
bone.
The smell
was overpowering. It was like being deep in an abattoir with rotting carcasses
piled knee high. No matter which way I turned the air was foul with the taint
of the dead.
An infected
stumbled toward Reece. He swung his wrench wildly and hit it on the collarbone.
The infected didn’t even register the blow. It kept reaching out to him, eyes
hungry, teeth bared behind its lips.
I strode over
to him.
“Move” I
shouted, and pushed him out of the way.
I raised my
knife, tensed my arm and sunk it into the infected’s brain. I tried to pull it
out but the blade snagged on bone. Another infected cried out and reached for
me. Panic bubbled inside me and turned my insides to water. I shook my arm
wildly and tried to wiggle free my knife. As the infected got within an inch I
knew I couldn’t get it loose. I tensed up and waited for the inevitable bite.
A wrench hit
the infected on the skull and cracked through the bone. The infected slid to
the floor. Reece held his wrench at his side, his chest heaving as he took
heavy breaths. I put my boot on the infected’s back and then pulled my knife
out of its skull.
I looked up.
An army of infected poured through the shadows in front of me. They appeared
from nowhere as if the darkness gave them form. They shuffled through the
pathway and filled every inch of it, struggling against each other as they
walked toward us. There were all ages, all genders. Their cries rose through
the air, hung above us and made desperation seep through me.
I grabbed
Reece.
“We can’t
hold them back,” I said.
We ran back
to the entrance of the passage way where Charlie arranged the dynamite. The
look on his face was so intense that it seemed like he hadn’t even registered
the infected who worked their way toward him.
“Let’s go
Charlie,” I said.
He didn’t
answer. Instead he scraped mud away from the side of the path and tried to dig
the dynamite into the hole.
“Charlie,” I
shouted, my heart pounding.
No response.
The front
line of the infected were a dozen feet away now, close enough that I could see
where their rotting skin flaked away.
“We’ve got
to go, Charlie,” I said. I reached out and grabbed him. He flinched and flung
my arm off him.
The nearest
infected was seven feet away. Its eyes were wide and bloodshot. Its yellow
teeth dripped with spit.
I grabbed
Charlie again.
“One more
minute!” he shouted, red faced.
The infected
was steps away. It looked at me, but then it swivelled and lurched toward
Charlie. I stepped forward and tried to grab it, but it was too close to him.
As Charlie crouched and worked on the dynamite, the infected took hold of him.
It lowered its head and sunk its teeth into his arm.
Charlie put his
head back and screamed. He pushed the infected away and got to his feet. He put
his hand on his bicep and then pulled it away. Blood was smeared over his palm.
His eyes widened and his skin turned into chalk.
The infected
lurched for him again. This time I grabbed Charlie and dragged him away. We
turned our backs to the path and ran toward Bleakholt. As we fled, it wasn’t
just the infected that we left behind us. It was hope.
35
As the sun
dimmed the infected poured out of the hill path like rats from a sewer. Every
man, woman and teenager strong enough to fight met them on the plains. Some ran
at the infected, weapons in the air, hellish war cries screaming from their
mouths. Others took careful steps back, hoping that something would intervene
and stop the battle.
Knives sank
into brain tissue. Mallets cracked skulls and sent infected falling to the
floor. Clotted blood rained on the frozen grass. Infected stumbled forward, arms
twitching. Some took a hammer on the temple, others a baseball back across the
chest. Dozens fell to the floor, never to rise again. Others were maimed, their
bones broken and knee caps smashed beyond repair. The men and women raised
their weapons and brought them crashing down again in and endless, tiring
motion.
There were
always more to take their place. They were like a virus, multiplying beyond all
control. They gushed out of the hill paths and swarmed over the plains until
hardly a blade of grass could be seen.
Arms started
to tire. People slipped. They made mistakes and paid for it with the foul bite
of decaying teeth. They screamed out and clutched their wounds. The desperate
cries of men and women rose in the air, harsher than the groans of the infected
and wracked with pain. Their squeals were inhuman, like horses dying in battle.
Reece and I
carried Charlie through the battle and toward the fences. I tried to ignore the
chaos around me and focussed on reaching the town, where we could lay Charlie
down and let him rest. In the back of my mind I knew that he was done for. He
had been bitten on the path, and right now the virus was working its way into
his cells. Once that happened, there was only one end.
We set him
down against the fence. The metal rattled as his back sank into it. Charlie
held his hand tight against his bicep and tried to stem the flow of blood, but
the thick crimson seeped between his fingers. Sweat covered his forehead.
I crouched
in front of him. “We have to join the fight,” I said.
He gritted
his teeth as if he was biting down on pain. It made him look like he was angry.
“Are you
hearing me, Charlie?”
If his eyes
or ears registered me, he didn’t show it. I turned round, saw Reece a few feet
away. He peered into the raging battle in front of him and scanned the crowd.
“We’ll find
your dad,” I said.
“His dad is
dead,” said a voice to my left.
I turned
round. Ewan stood in front of me and leant on his cane. He’d gotten rid of most
of his office wear and changed into in army fatigues, but his open khaki jacket
revealed a blue shirt underneath. His stood casually, like a commuter leaning
on an umbrella and waiting for a bus. Seeing him made me think of Victoria, and
hot anger burned in my stomach.
He looked
over at Reece.
“Sorry lad.
I saw him go. It was quicker than most, if that’s any consolation.”
Rage welled
inside me. Ewan was responsible for a good number of the deaths today. Were it
not for him killing Victoria and taking power for himself, we would never have
gotten distracted. His insane lust for control had taken us away from the plan.
If it wasn’t for Ewan, we would have blown up the path way sooner. We could
have saved lives.
I got to my
feet and held my knife in my shaking hand.
Ewan held
his palm in the air as if he read my intentions.
“Think about
what you’re doing,” he said. “There’s a time for you to be angry, but this
isn’t it. At least not at me. Save it for them.” He pointed to the plains which
were awash with infected. They outnumbered us three to one.
I knew he
was right. Whatever I wanted to do to him would have to wait. What was revenge
worth if everyone died? The only thing we could focus on now was killing the
infected. We had to stem the tide somehow, but the infected kept pouring out of
the hills in raging waves.
“Time we put
our heads together,” said Ewan.
I rubbed my
hand over my face. My skin felt freezing, but when I pulled my hand away it was
covered in sweat.
“We can’t
blow the pass,” I said. “So we’ve got no way of stopping them. We could kill a
thousand of them and we wouldn’t even scrape the sides.”
Ewan twisted
his cane and pulled it from the dirt. “It’s like trying to scoop out the sea
with a bucket. We need a bright spark with a plan,” he said.
“What you
need,” said a voice to my left, “is to cut my arm off.”
Charlie
leant forward away from the fence. He took his coat off, grunting as he moved
his arm. His eyes were as white as milk, and dribbles of crimson covered his
bony hands. He rolled up his sleeve and winced as the material brushed his bite
wound. He bared his bleeding arm towards us.
“Kyle,” he
said, nodding at my knife. “You have to do it.”
My stomach
dropped. I had seen people do this before; hack away bitten flesh in the hope
that the virus hadn’t spread in time. I had seen a mother cut off the leg of
her infant child in desperate hope, crying to herself as she sawed at his skin.
I had seen a man hack away at his own wrist to stem the infection. Lots of
people had tried it, but I had never seen it work.
I shook my head.
“I can’t, Charlie. It doesn’t work. You must know that.”
The words
stung as they left my throat. I knew I was taking away his only consolation.
With a bite on the arm it would take him hours to die, but the result was
inevitable. Death wouldn’t be the end. Charlie must have known what he would
become. His eyes narrowed.
“You need to
cut off my arm,” he repeated, putting force behind every syllable.
Maybe the
dangling promise of a cure gave him hope, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Once I
started to cut through his arm and the agonising pain ripped through him, he’d
realise there was no consolation. Only pain.
“Charlie,
listen to me.” I leant forward and put my hand on his shoulder. The scientist
stared at the floor. “It won’t work. You know this.”
I tried to
make my voice soft, but the words were too harsh.
Charlie
raised his head slowly. When he looked at me, there was fire in his eyes. He
lifted his good arm and pushed me away from him.
“Fuck you.
This is my only chance, and you’re denying it me? Based on what, Kyle? Do you
think you know everything, you son of a bitch?”
He fell back
and slammed against the fence. “This is my only chance,” he repeated, his words
becoming softer and trailing off.
Ewan rolled
up his sleeves up to his elbows. He stood over me, he face stern-looking.
“Give me
your knife,” he said.
***
I tried to
look away as Ewan got to work. Charlie shrieked in pain, his nerve endings
screaming out as Ewan cut through his arm without any anaesthetic. I turned my
head away from Charlie's screams only to have them replaced by the din of
battle. Women cried out as infected bit into their arms, men shouted in anguish
as they fell to the floor. It was like poking my head into two rooms, each of
them filled with screams and pain.
I scanned
the bodies fighting on the plains. It was hard to tell the people from the
infected, because even those still living were covered in blood. They fought
for their survival like caged animals, lashing out at anything that walked
within reach.
I looked to
the faces of the humans and the infected, and I fell back to the floor when the
enormity of the task hit me. We were outnumbered five to one now, and still the
infected poured out of the hills.
I thought of
the bus, packed up and ready to leave. There had to be nearly a hundred people
still fighting, and they couldn’t all get on the bus. But that number would
shrink within minutes. We could get on the bus and leave. We’d survive for now
but Bleakholt would be done, and there would be nowhere else to go. We would be
buying time for the present by giving up on our future, but at least we’d live
another day.
Ewan put his
knife on the ground. He stood up and straightened out. The front of his shirt,
once sky blue, was soaked in blood. Charlie lay against the fence, his eyes
half shut, his forehead covered in a feverish sweat. His severed arm was on the
ground next to him.
“Ewan,” I
said.
Ewan looked
up at me, but he wasn’t the same man as before. There was a change in his face.
Not on his features, but behind his eyes. A look shone out from them that spoke
of the horrors twisting around in his mind. Suddenly, I felt ashamed that he
had been the one to do it. That I had denied Charlie his slight hope out of a
feeling that I knew it all.
Ewan rubbed
his hands down his shirt, adding another smear of blood to what looked more
like a butcher’s apron.
“He’ll need
antibiotics,” he said.
“We’ve got
to make a decision,” I said. “There’s the bus –“
An engine
roared behind me. It got closer, the engine firing as it sped along. I turned
round, and saw a quad bike speeding along the plains and heading toward us.
Billy rode it, his head bent over the handle bars. The sound increased, the
engine droning like a beehive.
Billy
steered the quad bike away to the right, revealing another bike driving behind
him. The rider of this one was planted firmly in his seat. He gripped the
handlebars tightly, as though easing off would result in him plunging over
them.
I squinted
and tried to see who drove it. My eyes register familiar facial features. My
heart almost exploded. I took a step back, my pulse hammering. Behind Billy, on
another quad bike, Justin sped toward us.