The Dying & The Dead 1: Post Apocalyptic Survival (4 page)

Bethelyn
turned to her daughter. “I don’t know why I let you read that stuff.”

Gunshots
of rain sprayed the window so hard that the frame wobbled.

“It’s
going to be the worst storm we’ve ever seen,” said Ed.

“And
to think I moved here for the weather”.

“We
haven’t had anything more than a gust of wind for years,” said Ed. “So we’re
due a big one.”

He
walked across the living room and into the hallway, leaving the glow of the
candles behind him. For a glimmer of a second he regretted leaving the warmth.
He reached up to a coat stand by the front door and grabbed his coat.
Thankfully Bethelyn had put it by the fire for a while and gotten most of it
dry.

He
turned and saw her stood right behind him.

“Thanks
for the soup.”

“You
hardly ate any.”

“Well
thanks. I mean it.”

“Don’t
be a stranger, Ed.”

“You
wouldn’t let me.”

He
grabbed the handle of the front door and twisted. As soon as he opened it, a
gust of wind blew into the house. Something smashed behind him. Ed turned and
saw that pieces of porcelain were scattered across the floor.

“Dad’s
plate,” said April. She jumped off the couch and ran to the hallway.

Bethelyn
looked down. “Oh shit. She made this for her father.”

“Shit,”
said April. She carefully scooped the pieces of plate in her hands.

Bethelyn
ran her fingers through her hair.

“You
sure you don’t want to stay a little? See if it dies down? You can finish your
soup.”

He
didn’t want to leave the warmth and the light and step out into the darkness,
but at the same time he felt uncomfortable. It was as if he didn’t belong
there, or that he didn’t deserve to be there. Since his dad had gone, and then
James, Ed felt that he should just sit in the dark all the time.

He
turned up the collar of his coat. “This isn’t going to stop anytime soon. I
better get back. Tape up the rest of your windows.”

Bethelyn
lunged forward and grabbed his arm.

“Don’t
be a stranger. I know it wasn’t easy about your brother…”

Ed
shook her arm away and stepped out into the cold. The darkness of the night
swam around him as he walked into it.

2

Heather Castle

Not far from the Dome.

Most
of the time Heather had a heavy sense of dread settling in her head. It was
something that weighed down on her the majority of her waking hours. It was
there from the second she woke up, held back for a few precious hours by sleep,
but always watching, always waiting. There was no good reason for it. The world
had ended and the land was filled with infected, cannibalistic humans, but that
was the same for everyone and nobody else seemed to walk around with this kind
of fog in their minds.

As she
stared out of the classroom window she realised that the view didn’t help
things. A few miles away was the Dome, a crystal structure that rose a hundred
and eighty feet into the sky. Parts of it glittered when the light hit it, but
most of the transparent glass and plastic was covered in mud or mold. She
remembered a time when it wasn’t a place where the powerful lived. Years ago it
had been a tourist attraction, a tropical garden in a non-tropical climate. A
place for things to grow in a way that was unnatural to their environment and
for things given life that should never have been. Now, of course, it was the
symbol of the Capita. The largest settlement in the land. Heather would never
live there if she could help it.

“Miss?”

She
snapped out of her thoughts and turned to face the room. Twelve wooden desks
were arranged in four rows, and children with masks covering their mouths and
noses sat behind all but one. She walked to the front of the room, turned her
back to them and started to write on the black board. As the white chalk
scratched across it she grimaced, but it wasn’t at the sensation of the chalk
on the board. It was the words that it had made, the ones she had written. She
took a deep breath and then turned to see the children.

“Hands
on your heart, kids.”

The
children placed their palms on their chests in unison and spread their fingers.
A girl in the corner, her desk just that little bit separate from the others,
caught her attention.

“No,
Jenny. The other side.”

The
girl crossed her hand to the other side of her chest.

“Now
read the words back to me,” Heather said.

She
turned away from the kids and closed her eyes. She felt her old friend dread
creep up to her and settle a cold hand on her shoulder. The children chanted
the words back as one, their young voices managing to fill the room.

“The
Government lived.

The
Government died.

The
Capita will live forever.”

“That’s
right,” she said. The words burnt in her throat.

She
knew she should technically chant with them, but she never did. She couldn’t
even look at their faces as they read the slogan aloud, because she was scared
that one of the kids, one of the perceptive ones, would see how much she hated
the words.

There
was nothing keeping her in Capita territory, of course. There were no bars
around her house and no warders guarding the borders of the land. The problem
was that you didn’t have to travel too far away from the Dome until you hit the
wasteland. Miles and miles of broken towns and cities filled with life that had
long since lost the right to be called human.

Safety
was the one thing the Capita could offer that few other places could. Somehow,
the Capita’s land around the Dome didn’t attract infected. Nobody, save perhaps
the inner circle, knew how this worked. Heather certainly didn’t have a damn
clue, but there it was. The only bond tying her here.

She
realised that the class was staring at her. She tried to remember where she was
in the lesson.

“When
was the Capita born?” she said.

“Eight
hundred years ago,” chanted the class.

She
felt a lump form in her throat. It was seven years ago, she thought. Not eight
hundred.

“And
why does the Capita exist?”

“To
keep us safe.

To
keep us fed.

Keep
us from dying in our bed.”

She
nodded. “Well done kids.”

The
children and their masks stared back at her expectantly. Most of them took
pride answering her questions. They loved to be right, loved getting the prize
of approval. At the back of the class sat Jenny. She always picked the same
seat. She never talked to the other kids, and she always stared out of the
window or down at the floor. Making friends didn’t seem to come easy to the
poor kid.

Normally
Heather would have said it was just the natural order of things. For some
people, alienation was just their way. After all, not everyone can just fit in,
can they?  Heather was the same at school, and it wasn’t until she had become
captain of the football team – the boy’s team, to the horror of some of the
parents – that she’d made friends. Jenny’s loneliness wasn’t part of the normal
process, though. Jenny chose to alienate herself, and Heather knew why.

“Jenny,”
she said, “Why do we wear our masks?”

The
girl looked up. Her eyes looked sad as though she was always on the verge of
tears, like the centre of rosebuds with dew forming around them. Heather put
her hand to her own mask. She felt the clasp that was just below her ear, and
was thankful that hers was small and somewhat unobtrusive. Why did they make
the kids wear the big ones? It made them look as though they were suffering a
mustard gas attack in one of the old wars. Maybe it was to make them harder to
remove, so that the kids wouldn’t pull their masks off each other as a joke.

Jenny
cleared her throat. “We wear them so we don’t get infected.”

“And
what happens if you get infected?”

One
boy, a boy called Henry whose dad had a good job in the Dome, grinned to
himself.

“You
start eating people,” he said.

Heather
felt a rush of heat in her face.
Oh shit
, she thought.
It’s happening
again.
That familiar old feeling, the only one that could displace the
dread. She took a deep breath, held it in, tried to disperse some of the anger
that the boy’s comment built up inside her.

“Have
you ever seen anyone die?” she said. 

The
class went quiet. Henry shook his head.

“Then
don’t laugh.”

It
didn’t always happen, of course.  Some people got infected, fell into a coma
and woke up without no desire whatsoever for eating human flesh. Heather looked
to the back of the class, at Jenny alone in her corner.

It
wouldn’t happen to you,
she thought.  The little girl tried so hard to hide it
from everyone, but Heather knew that she was a DC. One lunchtime, when the kids
were outside playing, Heather stood at the window. She saw Jenny sat beside an
oak tree, the trunk of it hiding her from the rest of the class. As the leaves
rustled above her she unclasped her mask and took a deep breath of air, and
even so far away Heather saw the smile that spread across the girl’s face. It
was the first one she’d ever seen her wear.

This
was why she couldn’t stand the Capita. Jenny had a gift, and she shouldn’t have
to hide it. Everyone had heard the stories. Of children taken away from their
families. Scared parents exposed to infection-ridden air to see which one had
the immunity gene. She didn’t have a clue where the DC’s were taken, but she
knew they never came back.
I’m going to help you,
she thought.

One
day she was going to get Jenny alone and tell her to be careful. She would tell
her she knew her secret, take some of the burden away from her. She just needed
to work up the courage to have the conversation. Today wasn’t going to be that
day. If she were ever caught helping a DC the repercussions could ruin
everything, and she didn’t just have her own life to worry about. What about
Kim? What about their Great Escape?

She
caught Jenny’s eye and gave her a smile.
One day I’ll do it. I’ll help you
when I grow a spine.

“Miss,”
said a boy at the front of the class.

It was
Gary, a chubby kid who was great at memorising things but not so good an
analysing them.

 “Why
do we have to wear our masks in here? Isn’t the air clean? My face itches.”

Heather
paced at the font of the room. “How do we check if the air is free from
infection?”

“Our
AVS.”

“Get
yours out.”

The
boy reached to his pockets and fumbled, but his eyes widened and he pulled out
empty hands. Redness spread across his cheeks, and he stared at Heather as if
expecting her to shout.

Heather
walked to his desk. She stood over him, lifted her hand and brought it down
sharply on his desk. The boy jumped in his seat. Despite herself, Heather felt
pinpricks on the back of her neck, felt her chest tighten.

She
tried to stay calm in front of the kids. She hated losing her temper. But they
just didn’t understand. They didn’t have the slightest clue what a deadly world
they lived in. Kids couldn’t be kids anymore. They had to grow up. They had to
get used to danger, to live apprehensively beside it as if it was a pet snake
that they could never trust. If she had to be the bad guy to hammer some sense
into them, then that’s what she’d be.

She
felt her cheeks burn. “Stay behind after class. Five hundred lines. Can you
guess what they will say?”

Gary
swallowed. “I must remember my AVS?”

She
shook her head. “I must remember not to die.”

She
turned away from the boy, scared that she might start shouting at him again. He
didn’t deserve it. She knew that, but it didn’t give her any more self-control,
though. It was easy to come to realisations about yourself, but impossible to
do a damn thing about them. At the board she picked up the chalk and wrote a
date on the black slate.

AUGUST 2016

“Someone
tell me the significance of this date,” she said over her shoulder. “Jenny, at
the back.”

“That’s
when the infection got in the air,” replied the girl.

She
says it with such sorrow in her voice,
thought Heather.
Was it because she
knew she was different? She wasn’t a stupid girl, even if the location of her
heart sometimes confused her. Maybe she knew what the Capita would do to her if
they found out what she was. Heather felt the heat rise through her again. Her
muscles tensed up.

They
think they can tell people how to live just because they keep them safe, and
the consequence is kids who have to hide who they are.

There
was a snapping sound and Heather felt powder on her fingers. She looked at her
hand and saw that she had broken the chalk in her grip and white dust had
fallen to the floor. Some of the kids stared at her strangely, and Heather
tried to remember what she was talking about. She looked back at date written
on the board.

“Correct,
Jenny” she said. “And after it became airborne the Capita tried to help us by
dropping masks and air sensors out of the sky.”

“Like
Christmas presents, Miss?” said one irritatingly optimistic child.

“Yes,
Declan. Exactly like Christmas presents.”

It was
strange that she’d learned to identify the boys in the class by voice alone. When
they wore gas masks that covered their faces, most of them looked the same.
Strictly speaking they didn’t need the masks in here. The school was sealed,
and the air was checked hourly by a caretaker called Kevin with hands as big as
spades. It was just good practice to get the children used to wearing them.