Chapter
22
I clutched my leg. The hole burnt from where
the bullet had pierced it, and I felt like shouting out with the pain. I looked
up at Torben. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me like
that.
Torben’s face looked weary, his hair was
messed up and his jacket was smeared with blood. There was a dark look behind
his eyes, the look of a man who had stared too long into the abyss and had
finally been broken by it. His jacket sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and
there were long red scratches across his arms.
Justin twitched, and I could see he
wanted to do something. I looked at him. “Don’t get yourself killed,” I said.
Torben took a few steps closer. “That’s
what we’re all doing though, isn’t it? Getting ourselves killed.” He lifted his
hand to his face and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our
differences,” he said, “And you know, I come up blank. My thinking is, me and
you are pretty much the same.”
I clutched my leg and felt it throb.
“I’m nothing like you,” I choked out.
H knelt down so that our heads were
level. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and had lost some of its usual
roughness. “I’ve always felt alone. Even when there were twenty people in my
group, I still felt like it was just me and a bunch of shadows.”
He looked at the ground. I thought back
to the warehouse and the conversation I had heard, about how Torben was looking
for his wife and boy who I assumed had run away. I knew the pain of losing
someone, but it wasn’t the pain that defined you. It was what you did after it.
What we had both done spoke volumes
about us. I wasn’t proud of abandoning David and going my own way, but at least
I’d never gone down as dark a path as Torben.
The hunter propped his gun next to him.
“You were right to be alone. On your own, you’re safe. Where men gather, death
hovers.”
Once I would have believed that too, but
not anymore. I looked at Justin and saw how tense his body was. He was waiting
for an opportunity to strike. I shook my head at him.
“There’s hope for the future, Torben.
There’s something in it for all of us – just not you.”
I pulled the revolver out of my pocket,
raised it at Torben’s face and before he could react, I pulled the trigger. The
bullet blew a hole in his forehead. The lights in his eyes dimmed, and he fell
back and thudded onto the stones.
I looked over at the farm. The field was
full of infected now. There were so many of them crammed in that it was
impossible to see the grass beneath their feet. I looked through all the dead
faces searching for anything that was living, but it seemed that the hunters
had all fallen in battle. Out across the field, where the farm met the road,
even more infected were streaming in. Soon the whole place would be awash with
them.
That was when I knew for sure that the
farm was done. No matter how remote and out of the way the place was, this just
proved that nowhere could ever be safe. I thought back to Vasey and it’s walls,
and for the first time ever, I wished I was there.
I looked at the farmhouse and watched
dozens of infected stumble inside. I’m sorry Clara, I thought. I got here, like
I promised, but look at what I brought with me.
I turned to Justin. The boy was knelt on
the floor. He had a knife in his hand and his arm was tensed. He couldn’t have
been any more different from the kid I had first met back in Vasey, the one who
was so unsure of them that he couldn’t even walk straight.
I let out a deep breath. “It’s time to
go,” I said.
He nodded. “We’re both going together?”
he said.
I arched my eyebrows. “What do you
mean?”
“Don’t you remember? ‘When we get to the
farm, you’re on your own’. That’s what you said to me.”
The words stung. I had said them on a
number of occasions, and I had meant them every time. But now things were
different. A man couldn’t live on his own, I knew that now. I was ready to stop
being alone.
I got to my feet.
“What about the farm?” said Justin.
I looked over at the farmhouse. It was
swarmed with infected now. I imagined them walking through the rooms, imagined
them passing the photo of Clara as a child. I pictured them walking upstairs
and going into her childhood bedroom. I felt my chest burn. I screwed my face
up.
I wasn’t going to have the farm. But I
sure as hell wasn’t going to let them take it.
I stretched out my arm and pointed my
gun over at the field. I guided it across until I had the petrol tank, the one
with ‘petrol’ painted in red across it, in my sights. I took a deep breath and
held it in. I remembered being back in the tree with the stalker coming at me,
about how I wasted three bullets trying to hit it.
Now, I only had one. This time I wasn’t
going to miss.
I squinted and pulled the trigger.
Three hundred metres away the tank
exploded, and an orange fireball spread into the sky. The bodies of the
infected were flung in every direction. Flames engulfed the field and started
to spread to the farmhouse, the heat licking at the old timber and setting it
alight.
I sat back. Even so far away, I could
feel the heat on my face as the farm burnt to the ground.
Chapter 23
Five miles in the distance the smoke
billowed into the air in thick grey columns that diluted the blue of the
afternoon sky. At the farm, the night before, the air had been so heavy that I
felt myself choke on it. Now, with a little distance between us, the air was
cleaner.
I sat back on the grass as Justin lifted
the shovel and piled the last of the earth back onto the mound. The milky brown
soil cut a contrast to the green of the lawn, but I doubted the owners would
care. I looked behind me at the house. The windows stared back at me, dark and
empty, and nothing moved inside. We had already checked every inch of the
place, of course, but it didn’t hurt to be wary.
I looked at David’s grave. He was buried
in a garden that belonged to someone who we had never even met, but I don’t
think he would have felt hard done by. To have any sort of burial at all was a
rarity these days, and David had never been a sucker for attention.
“Think anyone will see the smoke?” asked
Justin.
He rested on the shovel. He wore a blue
shirt that he had taken from one of the bedrooms, and he had rolled the sleeves
up to his elbows. Tucked into his belt was a long hunting knife, but the blade
was dull.
“Who told you that you could take my
knife?” I said.
“Someone had to take care of the
owners,” he said, and jerked his thumb back at the house.
I felt a jolt of pain in my leg. Last
night I’d cleaned out the wound and wrapped a bandage around it, which I hoped
to god would be enough to stave off infection. In the meantime, though, until
it healed, walking was going to be tough.
“What now?” said Justin.
I stretched out my leg and felt a scream
of pain. “We’re not going anywhere in the near future.”
“And after that?”
“I can’t see that far.”
Justin sat down next to me. In the oak
tree opposite me, at the end of the garden, I saw something move in one of the
branches. I couldn’t tell what it was.
I cleared my throat. “I’m thinking we go
back to Vasey.”
He turned and looked at me. His right
eyebrow arched. “Really?”
I nodded. “They’re not bad people, “ I
said, “They just need someone to set them straight.”
I thought about the journey back to
Vasey, about the hundreds of miles we’d have to travel, and my leg ached in
anticipation. It would be a hell of a tough trip, but we’d do it. The town
wasn’t the greatest place in the world, but right now it was all we had.
A breeze blew on my collar and the sun
began to disappear behind a cloud.
“C’mon, let’s go inside,” I said.
Justin got to his feet. He stood in
front of me and held out his hand.
“What do you think I am, a cripple?”
He laughed. “That’s exactly what you
are.”
I took his hand, got to my feet and let
him support me inside the house.
The sun set and the darkness trickled
into the sky until soon everything above us was black. Outside, in the oak
tree, an owl hooted. Something about the sound reassured me; that owls were
still a thing, that the stalkers and infected hadn’t gotten all of them. I
wondered if there were a parliament of them out there somewhere.
I stretched my leg out on the couch. My
eyelids were heavy and my eyeballs felt itchy.
“One of us needs to stand watch,” I
said.
Justin drew his knife in one hand and
then dragged a wooden chair over to the window. Outside there was a clear view
of the garden. He turned to me. “You can hardly stand, so guess it’s going to
have to be me.”
I tried to sit up. I wanted to argue
with him, tell him that I was going to do it, but my weary body dragged me
back. As soon as I hit the couch I felt every last scrap of energy seep out of
me as though all the cells in my body had given up trying to pretend.
I thought about the night’s sleep I was
going to have. I thought about the next day, and the day after that. About how
my leg would heal, and soon we’d set off back to Vasey. We would make something
of the town, I decided. We’d make a real go of it.
I glanced at Justin. He gripped the
knife tightly in his hand and he looked out into the night, the depth of his
stare making him seem much older than he was.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift
into sleep, for a brief moment not caring about the darkness that waited for me
outside.