The Survivors of Bastion (Fall of Earth Book 1) (8 page)

              ‘Cannibals? The folks at Ashby had heard rumours from far-off contacts, but you know the way these things are… I seriously doubt it.’

              ‘Me too… Plus I don’t know why somebody would try to eat him while he was alive. Surely you’d kill him first…’

              ‘What should we do?’

              ‘I’ll give him a look… Get Laz to come and help me out with tying him down.’

              ‘Laz?’

              ‘Yeah, the Kitchen boy. He’s good with knots. Go on, get, before I kick your ass.’

              I looked back down at the man once more, then about the room, before setting off back towards the front door. The moment I opened it and stepped out I was confronted with the vast majority of the citizens of Bastion, standing about.

              ‘Everybody just calm down,’ I shouted. I had to yell it out a couple more times with the help of Robbie and Leah before the sounds were reduced to a murmuring. ‘We have a visitor, as in, somebody who is not a member of our community. After farming duty I heard some noises in the forest and went in to investigate…’

              That was a blatant lie, but I wasn’t going to tell them about the fact that Hayley and I were…

              ‘He’s in a bad way, but I want to emphasise that he does
not
pose a threat to any one of us. Now, he’s currently unconscious, and Mae is going to update me as soon as she’s done what she can to fix him up. However, considering the simple fact of his appearance, and the fact that we don’t often have intruders, I’d like to take the precaution of placing four extra people on guard duty for the next 24 hours. I know that we all hate guard duty, but this is for the benefit of every single member of our community. Would anybody like to volunteer?’

Chapter Ten

Morgan

About an hour later I was back at the house, putting together drinks and bread for Henrietta and Robbie, and our visitors – Hayley and Leah.

              I took some extra time to prepare the food, sitting back against the worn kitchen counter. I hadn’t had a moment’s rest since I had found the man in the forest, a moment to clear my head. Now that I could, my mind began to race uncomfortably over everything that had happened since his arrival.

              How important is it to doubt yourself? Keeping myself and my mind in check was an ideal that I held with the utmost importance, but how far should it have gone?

              I was wondering this not because I doubted what I had heard in the forest, but because I was trying to convince myself that I hadn’t heard it.

              I don’t know what happened. Everybody, they just… They’re coming for me…

             
I didn’t know what I was supposed to react to that, what I was supposed to think… Were they just the delirious ramblings of an injured man, or had he meant something by it?

              Was something coming for us?

              I ran my hands over my face, pushing my short hair back and looking about the room. In the living room I could hear the murmurings and the discussions of everybody. In the past the internet might have been a way for us to move information around at amazing speeds and to gossip on a massive scale, the art of gossip was now something reduced to literal small towns. There was no particular way around stopping gossip – speculation through endless discussion was innate in all of us, and when it came to a small community like ours it could be particularly destructive.

              In all of this, of course, I faced a particularly difficult internal conflict. I could stop all of this gossip that I so loathed simply by getting everybody together and telling them the truth. The problem with that course of action, of course, was that it would send Bastion into a frenzy. If everybody knew what the man had told me, the terror would be far-reaching and profound, and people would be scared out of their wits.

              I shook my head, casting it from my mind and taking up the food tray before heading into the living room, where everybody sat.

              The moment I entered the room they all turned to look at me. Despite the featureless expressions, it was immediately evident that they were looking for information.

              I set the tray down on the table in the middle of the room, but nobody went for the drinks with any haste. I could tell they were all looking at me, even before I sat down in the chair by the window and turned to see their piercing gazes.

              ‘What?’ I asked, knowing full well what was on their minds.

              ‘What happened?’ Henrietta immediately asked. ‘Who is that man? And what are you keeping to yourself?’

              ‘Mom…’

              ‘You have to tell us, Tommy,’ Leah said. ‘He’s inside of our town. This is our territory, and he’s here.’

              ‘Any of you would have done the same,’ I said. ‘Just because I’m in charge doesn’t make me the bad guy here. Sometimes I have to make the tough decisions. Just because he’s an outsider that doesn’t mean that he’s an enemy. Almost everybody in the town was an outsider at one time or another. I know he’s hurt, but it’s not a difficult task to get injured in a world like this.’

              ‘That depends,’ Robbie said.

              ‘On what?’

              ‘I just feel like there’s something that you’re not telling us. I know you don’t want people to start worrying-’

              ‘How would you know that?’

              ‘Because you’re my brother. I know you don’t share a lot with the people around you when it comes to anything. Is there something that happened out in the forest that you didn’t tell everybody outside of Mae’s?’

              I looked about everybody in the room before silently looking to the floor and taking a long, drawn breath.

              ‘That’s a yes,’ Robbie said.

              ‘So… What happened?’ Hayley finally said something, brushing her hair back behind her ear and staring over at me.

              Even if there wasn’t anything left to tell, they still wouldn’t have believed me.

              ‘Firstly,’ I started, ‘what I’m about to say does not leave this room. You wanna discuss it with me, and I don’t know why you would want to, but if you do, you come back here. I find out that anybody in town knows this information, I’ll presume it was one of you, because that’ll be the truth. Secondly, don’t take any of this as gospel. They were the ramblings of a deranged, delusional guy who came stumbling through the forest. I trust it as much as I’d trust Carl for shooting advice.’

              After a few more moments I finally managed to say the words for the first time – to reiterate them as they had been said to me.

              ‘Well, what the hell does that mean?’ Leah asked. ‘ ‘They’re coming for me?’’

              ‘I don’t know. I thought he was just crazy, but when Mae and I checked his wounds, he had bite marks all over his arm.’

              ‘Bites?’ My mother exclaimed.

              ‘Yep.’

              ‘So, what is this?’ Hayley asked. ‘Cannibals?’

              ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘For people we’re pretty remote out here. I don’t know how many people would descend into those depths, but I’m guessing it’s small.’

              ‘But you don’t know for sure?’ Robbie asked.

              ‘No. I don’t.’

              Everybody went silent, before my younger brother turned to look at me.

              ‘What should we do?’

              I was a second away from answering with the most logical, straightforward proposition – wait until he wakes up, if he woke up at all, and ask him what it was that had happened and what he was talking about.

              Sometimes, though, these opportunities come knocking – quite literally.

              It was a rapid hammering on the front door, a knock of knuckles that told me that something important was happening. I looked about everybody’s faces and dashed into the corridor, hearing a shout of ‘Tommy?’ as I unlocked the door. I had a feeling about what it was going to be before I even opened it – despite living in the aftermath of the apocalypse, in our little town flustered calls like this rarely showed up.

              Rarely, but not never.

              Larry, Mae’s partner that I mentioned a little while back, pretty much started speaking before I’d even fully opened the door.

              ‘-need to come now, Tommy. Your boy’s woken up.
Now
.’

              A shiver ran through me as I felt my face dropping, not knowing whether to be terrified or thankful.

              I signalled to Henrietta who ushered with her hand –
go, go
. I nodded back at her and took off out the door, slamming it shut and running through the streets with Larry until we reached the house where Leah and I had brought the man earlier.

              I followed him inside, not knowing what to expect seeing as Larry hadn’t said a word. We dashed upstairs, my heart racing until we reached the bedroom. I looked about the dark room, expecting to see some horrendous scene of conflict before me.

              But that wasn’t what confronted me at all.

              The room was quiet. Mae stood over the bed, several candles lit about the room causing every shadow to flicker in a fashion I had gotten used to over the years. She looked over at me, just before I glanced at the man.

              He was splayed out in the bed, sat up a little against some pillows. Now that he had had the dirt and blood cleaned from him, I found that I was looking at a man perhaps in his mid-thirties, with dark hair and deep, hollow eyes. Even in the dim light of the candles it was easy to tell that he wasn’t in the best of ways by a long-shot; his brow was furrowed with sweat, and his face was drawn out and pale. He was breathing heavily, and seemed to be barely hanging on, never mind awake.

              Mae stepped over to my side and look at me, the light only reaching one half of her face, while the other remained shrouded in darkness. She had been around death and illness long enough not to have to look away from it when it did appear, so when she lowered her voice I knew it was because what she was saying was only for my ears.

              ‘He’s not in a great way. I’ve patched him up but there’s something badly wrong with his arm. He’s burning up, too. I’ve given him something from the medication stores, but he hasn’t improved.’

              ‘Has he said anything?’

              ‘Just keeps asking if he’s going to die. I said hopefully not. After a while he stopped asking altogether. All he’s said is he wants to speak to my boss. Told him nobody bosses me around, but he could speak to you if he wanted.’

              ‘All right,’ I nodded, ‘let me have a word with him. I’ll call you if anything happens.’

              Mae nodded at me and headed out of the room with Larry, who shut the door behind them.

              Then I found myself alone with this man, this visitor who had made his way onto our lands.

              I looked over at him for some time, lying there in the bed. He didn’t look over at me – all he did was stare ahead of himself, looking down at his hands a little as his chest rose and fell desperately, each breath becoming more and more of a struggle.

              We had had discussions with outsiders in the past. Intruders arrived every so often, it was just something unavoidable that I had come to terms with. It was the reason that the lookout posts were a necessity, because you never knew when anybody was going to show up.

              On a couple of occasions we had had travelling salesmen show up. They passed by, paying no mind to the fact that we had built a community. All they did was knock on the door, ask if we wanted to trade, and we did so. We swapped anything we had in abundance for anything that we needed, before they went off on their way without another word.

              Some people simply suited the apocalypse and adapted naturally to it.

              This man clearly wasn’t one of those people.

              I took up the wooden chair Mae had been using and sat down at his bedside, keeping my distance and looking over at him. His hands were still tied.

              For some time I watched him, he refusing to look over at me despite the fact that I knew he was aware of his surroundings.

              ‘What should I call you?’

              A pause, then-

              ‘Morgan.’

              His voice was husky, but at least I had gotten something from him.

              ‘How are you feeling?’ I finally asked. ‘Gave me a bit of a shock there when you came through the forest.’

              Silence.

              ‘Look; you can talk and we can have a friendly discussion, try and do our best to help you live, or we can dump you in the forest to die. I won’t have anybody threatening the sanctity of this place, or the people who live here. We keep to ourselves, don’t mean any harm to anyone, including you. Unless you decide to-’

              ‘You’ve no idea what’s coming for you, boy.’

              When he finally did speak, his words came out with such surety and measure that it daunted me. It wasn’t so much the foreboding nature of what he said, but the conviction with which he said it. It intimidated me more than I would like to say, and I struggled to keep my shock under wraps, hidden away from showing on my face.

              ‘What’s coming for me?’

              ‘For all of you. Those things, they just… There were so many of them. It was insanity. Coming at me like animals…’

              ‘What things?’

              ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

              ‘You can’t be infected,’ I said, looking him up and down. ‘Anybody the virus can kill it killed a long time ago. No mutated strains, either. None that we know of, anyway, and I seriously doubt that the first case has just so happened to show up at our town out of nowhere.’

              ‘First time for everything…’ He said with a cough, spluttering wildly. Spats of blood flew onto the sheets before him, and I felt myself unconsciously moving away from him in my chair. ‘We let her in, just like you let me in… The biting, it was... They just bite, over and overand if there’s anything left of you then you come back as one of them…’

              ‘One of what?’ I asked, staring him down as my heart raced.

              ‘She took a while to die, but… But…’ The man sighed, before an odd, discomforting smile appeared on his face. ‘It’s funny, really. The way this has all gone. We never found out where she got it from… But she came from the south. Out cold before we could get a word from her…’