H
ayden tried not
to think about what he was actually doing as he stuffed his hands inside the bludgeoned torso of an infected and covered his hands with cold blood.
The sky was dark. The night felt endless. And it would be unless they got to the Dunstable Downs Golf Club for 2 a.m.
“When I said we needed a plan, this wasn’t exactly what I was thinking,” Miriam said.
Hayden looked at her. She was covered from head to toe in the rotting flesh and cold blood of a fallen infected. If he didn’t know it was her, he’d be convinced she was infected. Just another infected roaming around, harmless as long as they were a decent enough distance away.
Which was exactly what they were going for.
Hayden walked over to Amy. Helped scoop some scattered brains over her face. She spat some of it from her lips. Couldn’t blame the kid. The smell was horrible, and the taste was just as bad. Shit, he swore this looked easier on a TV show he once watched than it actually was in reality.
Just had to hope it was quite as successful.
“It’ll be over soon,” Hayden said. “All of this. You won’t have anything to worry about anymore very soon.”
Amy nodded. She didn’t really look convinced. Again, Hayden couldn’t exactly blame her.
“Now go on,” Miriam said. “How do I look?”
Hayden stepped closer to her. The smell of rot intensified. “Dead.”
“That’s exactly the kind of compliment I was looking for. You don’t look too good yourself.”
“Perfect.”
“If only it was this easy to pretty up in the first place. The world would be a much smarter place.”
Hayden turned from Miriam and Amy. He faced the road ahead. It wasn’t a main road, but he’d seen a few people wandering past every now and then. He knew they had to be careful. While they were safer under the cover of darkness and the cover of infected—Gary’s people didn’t seem to be wasting their bullets on the slower ones, which would make for a nice surprise when they stepped up to kill them only to meet a knife in their neck—there was still a risk that all this might go wrong.
“Hey,” Miriam said.
Hayden felt her hand, crusty with blood, brush the back of his.
“We’re going to do this,” she said. “We’re going to make it. We’re going to be okay.”
Hayden nodded. He wasn’t sure he totally believed Miriam. He wished he shared her optimism.
But the stakes were just too high to get complacent.
“We move towards the main gate,” Hayden said. “Slowly. We will bump into people. People who try to kill us. That’s what the knives are for.”
Hayden saw Amy lift the long knife, almost as long and wide as her little forearm. She looked at it, like it was out of place, like she wasn’t comfortable holding it.
“As horrible as it sounds… if in doubt, use it. Doesn’t matter whether you think you know the person you’re stabbing. Doesn’t matter if they were your friend, or your friend’s friend, or someone you even considered family. If in doubt, you stab them. You understand?”
Hayden tried to keep his words open as if he was addressing both Miriam and Amy. But really, his focus was on Amy. She was young. He was worried about her ability to go through with the plan.
She was tough, sure. But she was still just a child. A child lost in a dangerous world.
“Amy?” Hayden asked.
She looked up from the knife. Looked right into his eyes, her face illuminating in the moonlight. “Yeah. I’m ready.”
Hayden nodded. “Good. Then let’s get out of here.”
They walked down the road. Kept close together. Hayden made sure his movements were slow and distorted so they didn’t have the fluidity of a human. But he moved his eyes in every direction and at every opportunity. He couldn’t risk being seen for too long. The second someone saw them, raised their guns, he had to be onto them. One of them had to be stabbing a knife in their neck just seconds later. They’d brought Miriam’s pistol along, which Hayden carried as his rifle was out of ammo, so he’d left it behind. But guns would be too loud. Besides, they had knives, sharp objects. That would do for the job ahead.
It was grim. It was harsh.
But it was the reality they were living in.
They walked further down the road. In the distance, Hayden saw the main gate getting closer. It was too quiet, though. Everything was too quiet, too in order. This was supposed to be an impossible task. A challenge like no other.
It was all going too easily.
It was all…
His thoughts stopped and his stomach sank when he saw someone walk out of an alleyway and turn in their direction just up ahead.
First instinct was to freeze. Was to stand completely still. Then the next instinct was to turn around or drift down another of the alleyways, but that’d just look too suspicious.
His heart started to race. As he sweated, the smell of the undead flesh coating him got more pungent.
He had to do something.
He had to act.
The person ahead lifted their gun.
“Hey!” Hayden called.
The person up ahead kept their gun raised. Just for a few moments. Hayden could see it wavering, like they were growing less certain, less sure of themselves.
“Who—who is that?” the voice said. A torch flickered on, shone in Hayden’s direction.
Hayden kept on moving forward. He lifted his hands. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. The specifics were something they should’ve planned.
Just as long as he got the timing right.
Just as long as she made it in time.
He kept his hands raised. And the closer he got to this person, the more certain he grew that they weren’t going to shoot him. They’d lost their nerve. They were too curious to know who he actually was.
“Just—just keep your hands up. Keep still.”
Hayden stood still. He kept his eyes on the alleyway by the side of this man. He bit his lip. This had to work. It was set up just like they’d planned an event like this. The exact reason they’d chosen this road in the first place.
“Get down,” the man shouted.
“What? Come on, man.”
“I said get down!”
Hayden tutted. He descended to the road. Got onto his knees.
She had to hurry.
She had to get on with it.
The man stepped closer to Hayden. He knew the second Gary’s people realised it was him, everything was over. He’d be dead. Or worse—he’d be taken alive for Gary.
He felt his knife digging into his thigh.
He wanted to reach into his pocket and grab it.
The man stopped. He stopped right above Hayden. Looked down at him. Hayden couldn’t see his face, not with himself being in the spotlight.
But he knew the man was weighing up what to do with him.
That he recognised him.
“It’s—it’s you,” he said.
Hayden smiled. Sighed. “You know, you really do need to check your back more often.”
The man kept still for a second. Like he was deliberating about what Hayden had said. “What—”
A grunt.
The sound of flesh being pierced.
The man’s chest stretched outwards. Blood trickled down his lips, now revealed in the torchlight, which had fallen on the road.
He fell down. Fell to his knees.
Miriam stood behind him.
“Good,” Hayden said. “Told you the alleyways can be useful to sneak around. Now let’s keep moving.”
He closed the eyelids of the man. Then he took his gun and his torchlight, and together, the three of them pushed further onwards.
The main gate got closer. They dodged more guards on the way. Took down another couple, their plan coming together. The closer they got, the more hope started to build. They didn’t have long. The longer they were in here, the more chance they were going to get caught.
But the main gate was just up ahead now.
They were so, so close.
Hayden saw the opening to the main gate. His heart must’ve skipped a beat when he saw there was nobody standing around it. That it was all clear. A tunnel leading out of this place, towards the extraction point, towards their safety.
“We’ve done it,” Miriam said.
“Not yet,” Hayden added.
“Hayden, we’ve—”
“Stop right there!”
Lights blasted into Hayden, Miriam and Amy. Filled the tunnel opening. It felt like they were on stage; like they were a part of some kind of play.
He turned around. Slowly. Looked back at where the lights were coming from.
Three men stood there, guns raised.
All of them pointing at Hayden, Miriam and Amy.
“Move a muscle and we’ll put a bullet through your skulls,” the man in the middle said. Hayden recognised him as Bilal.
Hayden felt deflation fill his body. He felt the ticking clock of extraction powering on.
And to think he’d thought this was going to be easy.
If only he knew how much harder it was going to get.
“
I
’m serious
. You so much as twitch and we’ll end you, right here.”
Hayden didn’t twitch. He stood still in the glare of the torchlights. The tunnel opening was just inches behind them. They’d been so close to leaving this place. So close to getting the hell out of this place once and for all, towards the extraction point—whatever it held.
And those hopes had been shat on. Shat on, like everything got shat on.
“Now keep still,” Bilal called. He didn’t move an inch. Just kept his gun pointed at them. Which wasn’t ideal. Hayden wanted to draw them towards him so he could fight them. He had a gun in his back pocket that he’d taken from the guard on the way down here, which he knew he could use. Just it wasn’t in his hand right now. And the consequences of a single damned twitch had already been made perfectly clear.
“Go get Gary,” Hayden heard Bilal say.
“Gary said he hasn’t slept in days. He wouldn’t want—”
“Just get him, okay, Ravi? This is Hayden fucking McCall. You know how much he wants him. How important he is to him. To punish him. For what he did.”
Hayden sensed the antagonism in Bilal’s voice. But he heard uncertainty in the voice of the other man, too. Uncertainty he knew he could use to his advantage.
The second man, Ravi, turned around and started walking back towards New Britain.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Hayden called.
Ravi stopped.
“Shut your mouth,” Bilal said.
“We’re leaving this place. Leaving and going far, far away.”
“I told you to—”
“You can let us walk. We can pretend this never happened. That you never saw us. Nobody will ever know. Nobody ever has to know.”
Ravi shook his head. “People—people are turning. All because of you. All because of—”
“What’s done is done,” Hayden said. “Yes, people are turning. But we didn’t know that was how things were going to turn out.”
“My niece,” the third person, Adrian, who hadn’t said a word to this point, said. “She died. She died in my arms ’cause of you.”
“Because of me?” Hayden said. He’d been doing a decent job of holding his nerve so far. But he could feel himself cracking, piece by piece. “Or because everyone was so desperate for a cure, so desperate to believe that everything really was okay all over again, that they put their faith in something they didn’t really understand?”
Hayden’s words weren’t met with barks from Bilal this time. Instead, they were met with total silence. He wasn’t totally sure what he’d just said, only that he’d said it from the heart. He’d said what he thought had to be said.
“Please,” Bilal said. His voice had softened. “Just—just wait there. Please. We can sort this.”
“If you leave us here, we’ll die, all three of us. He’ll kill us. Gary will kill us because he fucking hates me for what happened to Amanda. Because of me leaving him for dead. And I understand that. I respect that. But you have to see why I did those stupid fucking things in the first place. I did it because I wanted to protect you. Not just these two people beside me, but you. I wanted to protect this place. I did the wrong thing. Went about it the wrong way. I can see that now. I can accept it. But I did what I thought was right. Messed up, sure, but at the time, it felt like the right thing to do to protect this place—to protect those I cared about. I accept I fucked up. I accept I did wrong. But please. Just understand that by leaving us here right now, you’re signing our death warrant. And I don’t really believe you want to do that.”
Hayden heard the total silence fill this section of New Britain. Further away, he could hear voices. Even further away, groans, footsteps.
If he listened close enough, he swore he could hear the brains of these three people ticking away, trying to figure out what to do.
“Nobody has to know about this,” Hayden said. He took a chance. Lowered his hands. Tensed his jaw and braced himself for the impact of bullets. “Nobody at all has to know about this—”
“He’ll kill us. If he finds out, he’ll kill us.”
“And that’s a man you really want to stand beside?”
Again, silence followed.
Hayden put his hands behind his back. He pushed himself to do something else that he knew was risky, that he knew was daring.
He walked closer towards the three men.
They watched him. Watched him, all of their guns pointed.
“We’ve all been through the ringer today,” Hayden said. “We’ve all been through hell. Let’s put our weapons down. All of us. Let’s put them down and end this madness right here.”
Hayden saw two of the men look at each other. Heard them mumble amongst themselves.
“Put the guns down and let us go. Turn around. Walk away. Pretend you didn’t see a thing.”
“You won’t come back?”
“None of us are coming back here,” Hayden said. “That’s a promise.”
“How do we know we can trust you?”
“You don’t. And you’d be stupid to trust me, just like you’d be stupid to trust anyone. I’m just… I’m just asking you to follow your gut.”
Another moment’s silence followed. And at that moment, Hayden knew he had them. He knew they were going to let him walk. Let all of them walk.
“Go,” Bilal said.
“Are you with us?”
“We—we go back to Gary in fifteen minutes. Tell him we saw you leaving. If you aren’t far enough away from this place by then, well… what happens, happens.”
Hayden felt his stomach sink. He smiled. Nodded. “I appreciate that.”
“Now go. Clock’s ticking.”
The three men walked away. All of them with their back to Hayden, Miriam, Amy.
Hayden stood still. Stood still and stared at them as they disappeared further into the darkness.
Then he lifted his gun.
“Hayden?” Miriam said.
It was already too late.
Hayden fired a shot into the back of the neck of each of the men. Took him five bullets to take them down. To send them falling to the ground.
But when they fell, he lowered the pistol.
Turned around.
Started to walk, Miriam and Amy by his side.
“We need longer than fifteen minutes,” Hayden said.
Miriam’s eyes were wide, puzzled. “But they—they let us go—”
“They were with Gary.”
“It’s not about us or them—”
“That’s where you’re wrong. It is about us or them. I wish it wasn’t but it is. I didn’t want to shoot them, but I had to. Deep down, I just knew I had to. Because my duty isn’t to them anymore. They aren’t my people anymore. You are my people. And if I have to kill to buy us an extra thirty seconds, I’ll kill. That’s what this means to me. That’s what you mean to me.”
He looked ahead at the tunnel opening. Stared down it, towards the outside, towards the pitch black nothingness beyond.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
He waited. Waited a few seconds for Miriam and Amy to come to his side. Which they did, eventually. They always did.
They stood there. Looked down the tunnel. Prepared their final walk to safety. Their final fight towards extraction.
For the first time in a long time, Hayden felt hope.