The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) (16 page)

              ‘It was chaos… We didn’t know what to do. We thought that that was the end of it, and we left those who had been bitten in the hospital for the night, but the next morning when somebody went to check on them… They were just like her. They attacked everyone, biting them, sinking their teeth into them, ripping them apart. Some managed to make it away, but eventually they turned into those
things
, too. I’m not quite sure how it works… Some people they kill, some they infect, some take a long time to change and others can turn in less than an hour. Perhaps it’s random, I don’t…

              ‘Anyway… When it was happening I was inside my home. Here. I have a crawlspace in the wardrobe in my bedroom. I don’t like large open spaces… I hid in there for more than a day until the screaming outside stopped. It went on for so long, then everything went quiet. When I came outside there were the bodies in the street, and a few in the houses, but everybody else was gone. I don’t know where they went. I’ve been meaning to clear them up, but I don’t know how to do it, so… I just stayed here. Until you four showed up.’

              I took in everything that he had said, running over it all in my mind. Every other citizen from Ashby, other than James, was either dead or infected. It didn’t bode well for whoever might have made it out of Bastion.

              It was just another piece of bad news that sent me running my hands over my face in a mix of frustration and sadness.

              ‘And… you don’t know where this woman came from? Sarah?’ I asked, looking across the table at him.

              ‘No. She came from the south gate, that’s all I know. Helena said that there were cities in the southern parts of the country, huge communities that made ours look tiny. She thinks that it might have originated there, but I’m not so sure.’

              ‘Why’s that?’ Hayley asked.

              ‘Something like this… It took out our community, and yours, in a matter of days. If it broke loose in a city, or somewhere with a massive population, it would spread like wildfire. All these people cramped together. It’s the best environment for an infection. So I don’t think it could have come from one of those… Unless they sent it here.’

              ‘Sent it?’ Robbie said quickly.

              ‘Like a biological weapon. There are no more armies anymore, no more bombs or warheads. If there are, they’re deep underground. Sending something like this in to wipe us out is the easiest way. Causes less of a mess.’

              ‘But how could somewhere have the kind of resources to come up with something like this?’ I said, asking myself the question as much as I was asking James.

              ‘There are far fewer people in this world than there used to be… When I was a teenager, I figured out that based on global GDP and the total value of worldly assets, by rough estimates, if the entire wealth of the planet was evenly divided up between everybody, each person on the planet would only have around $7000. Imagine how much that number would be now if it were divided up between the few people left on this planet? Funny thing is that money doesn’t matter anymore. Resources take a different form. But I’ll bet a lot of resources from before the apocalypse are still around, and in a world without TV, and where there are bound to be a few smart people, somebody, somewhere will have spent the time to figure out how these things work.

              ‘I’m good with numbers. I think that’s why Helena liked me so much. She always looked after me. She was always nice to me, even when so many of the other people in Ashby weren’t. She let me live here by myself as long as I looked after the books, the totals of all the resource the town had, stock levels, things like that. I like doing things like that… Now I don’t know what to do.’

              It occurred to me the kind of person James was pretty early on – cognitively intelligent to the point that it affected his ability to interact with people. I liked him pretty much immediately, because he was his own person, even when the world was working against him as much as it was now.

              I thought over everything he had said, the complexity, and at the same time, the legitimacy of it all. I didn’t know whether it was the surety with which James had said all of this – I didn’t consider myself to be someone who was easily swayed – but I agreed with his notions, these ideas he had put forward. He didn’t know where the infection had come from, that much I knew, but he had some damn good ideas about where it might have.

              Everybody was sat in silence, and after a while I realised that Leah, Robbie and Hayley were all looking back and forth between me and James. I was the negotiator here.

              Fortunately, I already had a plan.

              ‘James… I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know if anybody from Bastion is even still alive, but I’m pretty sure that the surrounding areas, and the town itself, will be swarming with the infected. I want to get back inside and put things back to the way they were. If I can’t do that, then I want to start the place again. That community is all I know, and I’ll do whatever I can to take it back.

              ‘If we manage that, I’d like to invite you in as our new bookkeeper. You can start afresh and operate just as you did before. We’ll set you up in your own house, and you can work in the same way that you did here. What do you think?’

              James looked at me, then between all of my companions, then back to myself. A steady smile rose on his face, and he nodded.

              ‘I think that I would like that.’

              ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ I continued. ‘My only problem is that we don’t have the means to get back into Bastion right now. I’ve no doubt the infected will outnumber us enormously, and we don’t have the means to fight them. Before, you mentioned that somebody shot Sarah before she turned. Do you happen to have any more weapons or…
Resources
, that we might be able to use to get rid of the infected back at Bastion?’

              James looked across at me, not blankly, but in an absolutely unreadable fashion. He glared at me, right up to the point that I was about to ask if he was all right, before speaking.

              ‘I have a full inventory in my records. Just a moment.’

              He got up from the table, heading off into the living room next door. Just out of sight I saw him carefully unlocking a large metal container and opening it, flicking through the meticulously arranged contents.

              ‘You sure we can trust this guy?’ Robbie said over my shoulder.

              ‘We don’t have a choice. We’re pretty much out of options right now. I’m only making it look like we have them.’

              In no time James returned with a filing folder in his hands. It was one of those odd items you saw scattered across the floors of stores from the old world, the kind of thing that pretty much everybody had zero use for in this day and age – except for James.

              He opened the folder and began flicking through the pages. They were all hand-written in a perfectly consistent style. Finally he came to a stop at a certain page and spun the folder around to face me, before sliding it across the table.

              I looked over the writings of the ledger, as my brain processed the long list before me, I felt my heart begin to race.

              Obviously my three companions peaked over my shoulder, looking over the list in front of them.

              ‘Holy fucking shit,’ Leah muttered quietly.

              ‘Indeed,’ James broke in flatly.

              ‘Do you have access to
all
of this stuff?’ I asked, looking up at James.

              ‘I’m the only one who does. Helena trusted me more than anyone.’

              ‘Could you take us to it?’

Chapter Seventeen

Lock and Key

‘We kept everything in the basement of an empty house.’

              ‘How come?’ Hayley asked.

              ‘There are a lot of flammable substances down there. It seemed best to keep them out of the way of anything that was valuable, person or object, in the event that something happened to explode. Accidents do happen.’

              James produced a set of keys from his pocket and used one to unlock the front door. We were stood outside of a small house on the edge of Ashby, right where the wall cornered off. It was the most remote of all of them – their thinking made sense.

              He led us through the house, down by the staircase. For the first time since we arrived I felt a sense of calm come over me, as if I was briefly letting my guard down. James seemed to be a genuine person, though. Trust was the most important thing for me, and I felt like it was something I could invest in here, with him.

              He used another key to unlock the door by the stairs – I say the lock, but there were several, and it was clear that this wasn’t your traditional homely wooden door; it was thick and set, and it took him a good heave to finally open it.

              I heard a flick in the darkness, and the descending corridor lit up via a single light bulb above.

              ‘Holy fuck,’ Robbie muttered, chuckling and shaking his head.

              ‘Pardon me?’ James said.

              ‘He’s just never seen a house with lights before,’ I said. ‘I don’t think any of us have, actually.’

              ‘Helena set the place up with a small generator. It’ll probably run for a day or more before it shuts down. Nobody around here to power it.’

              We continued on down the stairs, reaching another door at the bottom that James had to unlock, before we stepped on through and another light up the basement, giving us a view that would have made us
ooh
and
ahh
were our circumstances not so dire.

              The room was filled with racks and racks of guns and melee weapons, some old and rusted, some newer and in much better condition. I had never seen anything like it in my life, not even in the few gun stores that we had found with stock still remaining after the initial outbreak when they had been raided.

              ‘Item 36, was it?’ I said, turning to James. ‘Are those down here?’

              ‘Yes. All of them. Why?’

              ‘I want to use them, if you’d like complete honesty.’

              James looked me up and down, looked at the file in his hands again, then looked back at me.

              ‘I do appreciate the honesty. And if it will get back your home, and give me a new one… Then yes, you may use it. You can use as much as you’d like, just as long as you run this plan of yours by me first.’

              ‘That won’t be a problem. There’s something else I meant to ask you, to.’

              ‘Yes?’

              ‘Do you have a car, or some form of transport we can use?’

              ‘I’d like to say yes, but they were all destroyed in the outbreak. What we do have, though, is oil. Enough to keep a car running for several hours.’

              ‘I only need enough to run one for fifteen minutes.’

              ‘I’m sure we can arrange that.’

              ‘Wait, wait,’ Hayley said, turning me around after placing her hand on my shoulder. ‘What is this plan of yours? We have a right to know.’

              ‘I want to tell you, but you’re going to call me crazy the moment I do.’

              ‘Come on, Tommy,’ Robbie said. ‘We already said it. We’ve trusted you this far, what makes you think we won’t trust you now?’

              ‘All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here’s what we’re gonna do.’

Chapter Eighteen

Before

‘No, I’m sorry. I take it back. This is the worst fucking idea you’ve ever had.’

              We were halfway back to the outpost when Robbie finally said it. He and I were pulling a small wagon that had been kept onsite at Ashby, filled to the nines with explosives and a vat of oil. Eat your heart out, Rudy.

              ‘It’s gonna work,’ I said.

              ‘Oh, I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about the fact that you and I are a few away from enough flammable liquid to send us to the moon.’

              ‘James said it’s safe.’

              ‘And you definitely trust this guy we’ve only known for a few hours?’

              ‘Yes. I can tell the type of person he is. You forget that it used to be my job to tell what kind of a person somebody is. You need to know that kind of thing when you lead so many people.’

              ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘if you say so.’

              Leah and Hayley were a little way behind us, carrying a bag each filled with automatic weapons and ammunition, and James was up in front, keeping a lookout. True, I trusted him, but not enough for him to be out of sight with so many weapons lying around.

              After an hour of walking we reached the outpost and the empty Ranger. All was quiet.

              We set everything down by the ranger and everybody took a minute, stretching their backs and arms.

              ‘I don’t remember what sleep feels like,’ Leah said, yawning.

              ‘Just a few hours and we can rest,’ I said.

              ‘No,’ Hayley broke in, shaking her head. ‘If we’re actually planning on launching this half-assed offensive of yours then we need to do it properly, with no hitches. If we’re all exhausted, no amount of adrenaline is going to stop us from making small mistakes that could cost us our heads. Let’s rest up tonight. There’s no harm in it.’

              ‘We don’t have anybody on lookout,’ I said. ‘I’m all for it but what if something happens?’

              ‘We can take two hour shifts,’ Robbie said. ‘Honestly, Tommy, I’m completely exhausted.’

              I looked between the four faces before me. Even James looked tired, and he had only been outside the walls of Ashby for a few hours.

              The sun was already beginning to set.

‘Okay,’ I reluctantly agreed.

***

I was last on shift, covering the early morning. Despite the tragedy that had happened in the basement of the house, everybody slept soundly that night. We had been up for too long, and we had been put through too much.

              Everybody except for me. I didn’t sleep as well as I would have liked. Something was always on my mind, and this time it was what awaited us in the morning. I knew so little about the nature of our attackers, other than the fact they were rabid animals. I hoped that they would act as such, that they would act on animal instinct and succumb to this nature that they possessed. It was all a part of the plan.

              Then again, they were anything but natural.

              I watched Hayley for a little while when I woke early. I didn’t want to put her in harm’s way, just as I was reluctant to put any of my friends’ lives at risk, but I treated all of them equally, and that meant she could help us. Another person was another set of arms and another gun.

              Still, I couldn’t help but feel a love for her that I had never felt for anyone else before.

              I dressed and picked up my gun, heading out of the living room where we had all been sleeping and through the unlocked front door.

              James was sat atop the roof of the Ranger, just as I had been the day before. I whistled to alert him to my presence, just to make sure that he didn’t freak out and turn around shooting. On the contrary, he turned his head calmly to look at me and smiled. Behind him the first light of the sun was rising beyond the horizon.

              ‘Your shift isn’t for a few hours, Tommy.’

              ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said, heading over to him. I jumped up onto the bonnet of the car and sat myself down, looking up at him. ‘Didn’t you want to grab a gun?’

              ‘I… I never learnt how to use one.’

              I stared back at him, more baffled than I had been in a long time.

              ‘Are you serious?’

              ‘I’ve always lived at Ashby, ever since I was twenty. Around your age, I suppose. Helena let me live on my own terms as long as I did all of the accounting work for her, like I said. I prefer being by myself, if I’m totally honest. I like the quiet. No offence, of course.’

              ‘None taken,’ I laughed. ‘I know what it’s like to spend a lot of time around other people to the point that you really start to wish for some peace and quiet. Of course, now…’

              ‘I know. It used to be that I always hated having to be around the people in town. Maybe not hate, but it was always a chore for me. Now, though, what I wouldn’t give to have every single one of them back. Even the ones who were nasty to me…’

              ‘It’s an independence thing, believe me. When you learn how to defend yourself, what it means to look after your own, you begin to know yourself a little better. You realise what you’re capable of.’

              ‘You think?’

              ‘Yeah,’ I said, standing up and pulling the rifle off my shoulder. ‘Here, I’ll show you how to use it. This is a rifle so it’s not like the other ones, but there’s a lot more control with it than there is with an automatic or a semi-automatic.’

              ‘I don’t know, Tommy. I’m not really sure I’ll be able to…’

              ‘Anybody can, you just gotta practice it.’