“So what now?” said Mel? “Do we go
back?”
“It’s clear we can’t go on. She needs
medical attention,” said Charlie.
I stood with my arms crossed. Without
my coat to shield me from it, the breeze smothered my skin. I walked around the
barn to keep warm. In the corner I saw a rusted rake resting against the wall
and next to it was a wheelbarrow filled with bricks.
“What about the helicopter? If
someone’s alive, we need to get to them.”
Mel leaned forward. “And how about
Lou? You know, your friend? She needs help.”
Reggie turned away from the door. His
face was haggard.
“I hate to break this to you. But we
don’t exactly have five star medical facilities back in camp. She won’t be much
better off there.”
“And if we go back now,” I said,
“there might not be a camp for much longer.”
Lou stirred on her bed. She hadn’t
opened her eyes for hours, but her chest rose and fell as she slept. I hated
seeing her like this. She had always been the strong one, and it didn’t seem
right for her to be so weak. I knew she needed help but at the same time,
Reggie was right. There was nothing at camp that could help her. Charlie was
the only one with a slight amount of medical knowledge, and he was here with
us.
I knew that we had to go on. If we
went back empty handed, then the people would side with Darla. They would start
to leave camp in groups, and most of them would find nothing on the road but
death. There was more at stake than just one person, and going back now would
have made a mockery of Lou’s injury. It would have meant that she had suffered
it for nothing.
“What if we make her a crutch?” I said.
Mel shook her head.
“It’ll be a couple of days before she
can walk . Even then, she’d still be going at a snail’s pace.”
“I could stay with her,” said Reggie.
“You guys could press on, find the helicopter.”
I rubbed my head. There was no sweat
this time, but my skin felt cold.
“I don’t know.”
Reggie walked up to me. When he
stopped in front of me, I saw how bloodshot his eyes were. His hair was so
greasy I could smell it.
“Just leave me some food. I have my
knife, and if we’re quiet and keep the barn closed, we’ll be fine.”
I thought about what to do. More than
anything I wanted Lou to be okay, but I knew that I had to find the helicopter.
I felt like it was the most important thing any of us could do. As I considered
the options, I heard the twang of guitar strings. Above us, Gregor picked at
his guitar and played a maudlin tune.
I turned toward Lou.
“Wake her up,” I told Mel.
“But Kyle…”
“Just wake her up.”
Mel put her hand on Lou’s shoulder
and softly shook her. After a few seconds Lou stirred, and then her eyelids
flickered. When she opened her eyes there was a lost look in them, as though
she didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. Then she looked down
at her leg, and recollection flooded back.
“We need to ask you something,” I
told her.
Lou moaned.
“We don’t know what to do, Lou. I
mean, we have a plan. But it means you staying here with Reggie. And I wanted
to know what you thought, because I won’t leave you unless you’re okay with
it.”
Lou turned her head toward me, but
her eyes were unfocussed. She opened her mouth to speak.
“Ugh. Kyle, I don’t-”
Her head dropped back onto the bag
beneath her. Mel put the back of her hand on Lou’s head.
“She’s burning up.”
I turned my head toward Charlie.
“She must be infected,” he said.
On hearing the word infected,
Reggie’s head snapped toward the scientist. His hand reached for his knife. The
movement was slow and instinctive, and when he recognised he was doing it, he
pulled his hand away.
“I don’t mean that kind of infection,”
said Charlie. “Her leg. There’s a reason they don’t just pour whiskey over a
wound and then call it a day. It isn’t exactly medicinal.” Then he looked at
me. “We need to get her some antibiotics. There’s no two ways about it.”
“Where from?” said Reggie.
“You’re not going to like it,” said
Charlie.
I nodded. I knew what he was going to
say. “From town.”
Charlie nodded. “A pharmacy in one of
the towns will have them. They’re probably years out of date by now, but we don’t
have much of a choice. It’s either the antibiotics or…”
“Or what?”
“She could lose the leg.”
I didn’t like the idea of going to
town, but it was clear that I couldn’t just stay idle. I had already chopped
off Charlie’s arm, so I didn’t like the idea of being responsible for Lou losing
a leg. There was no other choice.
“Okay,” I said. “But only two of us
will go. I don’t want to get there and attract the wrong attention. The rest of
you will stay here.”
Chapter
14
Sometimes it took going near a town
to remember what we used to have and how our lives used to be. Among the oak
and willow trees, the swaying grass and cresting hills, it was easy to forget
about the machine-driven smog and commercialisation of our old lives. It had
been sixteen years since I’d held money in my hands, yet my palms didn’t feel
empty for its absence. I never carried a wallet anymore and I never worried
about bills.
I turned to Mel. We were the only
ones going to town and we were comfortable, both with each other and with our
silence.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure Kyle.”
“I was just thinking how long it’s
been since we had to carry money. More than sixteen years. But even after all
this time, for some damn reason I still remember the pin number for my bank
card. Do you still remember yours?”
She arched her eyebrows. “I was,
like, eight when the outbreak happened. I didn’t even get pocket money, let
alone a debit card.”
A brown sign welcomed us to Larkton
and informed us that its population was thirty thousand and that it was twinned
with a town in France.
Your population isn’t thirty thousand anymore,
I
thought.
“Eight. That’s rough. I forget what
it’s like for people like you. At least I had something of a life. I was
married, I had a career. You barely had time to learn long division.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how things go. I
spent fifteen years of the outbreak terrified and one year getting stronger.”
“How so?” I said.
“That’s when I met you and Justin.”
“What about your parents? Back then,
I mean.”
She put her hands in her pockets and
looked at the floor as he spoke.
“You’re getting awfully talkative.”
“What can I say? I’m becoming a
people person.”
“My mum lived in Tenerife, so I don’t
know what the hell happened to her,” said Mel. “Dad was fifty five when it all
started. He was old as dad’s go, and not really in the best of health. He
passed away a couple of years into the outbreak when we lived in the government
camp just outside of Newcastle. Lucky it was nature that got him, and not the
infected.”
We passed the ‘Welcome to Larkton’
sign. The air changed once we properly stepped into the town. It became heavier
somehow, as if it was weighed down with things that you didn’t find in the wide
open fields. It was the smell of crumbling buildings, of infected collapsed in
doorways, and long-dried blood smeared on the pavement. The only sign of life
was a dog as it scurried down the street in front of us. We walked the road
which led into the centre of the town. The centre was usually the target of our
scavenging trips, but I wanted to avoid it today. The whole point of only two
of us coming to Larkton was that we would be able to sneak through.
In the distance, rising above the
slanted roofs of the shops and houses, were the twin chimneys of the Larkton
cheese factory. They were dirty and grey and stood fifty feet tall. There would
once have been a constant stream of smoke drifting from the tops, but now they
stood silent, like sentinels watching over the town.
We walked slowly down the right-hand
side of the road. Mel looked across the road to our left and kept on watch for
infected. I scanned the shops to our right. It was all too easy for an infected
to be lurking in a doorway or on a street corner. Once they saw us, it would
take just seconds for them to grow hungry.
“Hang on,” I said. “Check this out.”
We stopped in front of the window of
a shop named Express Newsagents. The glass was covered in dust. There didn’t
look to be anything useful in the shop itself, since chocolate biscuits and
milk didn’t fare so well sixteen years into the apocalypse. I bent down to my
knees and felt a faint pain in the scar on my leg.
Halfway down the window there were
little index cards. Each of them was written in different handwriting, some
printed, some ornate and slanted. The ink was black, red and blue.
For sale: Trampoline, 2 years old,
10ft. Collection only. Call Tom and Heather on XXXXX.
Wanted: Owners for four Schnauzer
pups. Free to a good home.
There were cards advertising every
aspect of people’s lives, from baby cots for sale to funerals with an open
invite. Most of them had gone unfulfilled as the outbreak started and the world
began to end. It just seemed so pointless. At one point, the focus of Tom and
Heather’s life had been the sale of a used trampoline. It was probably in their
back garden now, collecting rain and growing moss, while Tom and Heather were
either dead or infected.
Mel stood above me and read out the
headlines from pages of Larkton Evening News which were stuck onto the glass.
“Vigil held for missing girl,” she read.
“Hundreds of residents attended a vigil outside Mount Hope church to pray for
the healthy return of Gilly Moss, six.” She looked at me. “That’s all I can
read, the rest is covered in crap.”
“We better go,” I said.
It all seemed so empty. It was easy
to forget sometimes that life had stopped dead while we were in the middle of
it. People were selling trampolines, finding homes for puppies, holding vigils
for missing girls. Then everything had been uprooted.
I leaned forward and read more of the
index cards. I knew that we had to leave, but it was addictive to scan over
them and see what people wanted and what was happening in the world back then.
As I read, a face appeared against
the window. Its skin was falling away from its cheeks. Its eyes were bloodshot.
It stared at me and snarled, and its teeth were so brown that I could almost
smell its foul breath through the glass.
The shock of it made me fall back
onto the pavement. In a second I had straightened up again and grabbed my
knife. I got to my feet, and from inside the shop the infected got to its feet
too, following my movements like a decayed mirror image. It raised its hands
and pounded on the glass, its fist making a dull thud on the double glazed
windows.
“That’s our cue to leave,” I said.
We walked down the street away from
the thudding. I hoped that nothing around us heard it. I couldn’t see any
infected, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Far down the road, a brown
speck against the grey concrete, the stray dog stopped. It looked at us for a
second, and then went on its way.
We took the first right turning that
we could find. It led to a back street, and the rear yards of the town shops
looked onto it. There were wheelie bins lined up next to each gate, all of them
waiting for a rubbish collection that would never come.
“Let’s cut down here,” said Mel.
“Better we avoid the main street.”
I nodded, and we walked down the
grime-covered backstreet. The air was unwholesome, and I felt like I was
breathing in moss or mould. We followed the path and went by an old Chinese
takeaway, a haberdashery and a solicitor’s office. I wondered if it was the
solicitor’s office that Reggie had once been sent to buy, but then I remembered
that the office he told us about had been in Grey Fume, not Larkton.
“Think they’re all okay at the barn?”
I said.
“Sure. Everyone’s there,” said Mel.
“I’m worried about Lou.”
“I know, Kyle. But you’ve done
everything you can. You’re here, aren’t you? Let’s get her the antibiotics and
get the hell out of here. The smell is giving me a headache.”
Soon the only way to progress was to
go back onto the main road, so we left the dingy rear street and re-joined it.
The clouds had started to spit at us and the concrete flags of the pavement
were dotted with little splatters of rain. The pharmacy was five minutes away
on the opposite side of the road, on a left turning at the edge of the main
street.
As were about to walk toward it, I
saw movement in the corner of my eye. I felt on edge. I put my palm around the handle
of my knife on my belt, and I stepped back against the wall of the building
behind me. I crouched down. Next to me, Mel followed suit. Neither of us spoke,
but I could hear her breaths coming quicker.
The movement came from behind us, on
the opposite side of the street. A figure dressed in black stepped out of a
side street. I could tell straight away that it was a person rather than an
infected. His movements were deliberate and fluid. He paused for a second to
zip up his black jacket to his chin. He wore a hood over his head, so the only
thing I could tell about him was that his face was pasty white.
I wondered what to do. Should we
approach him? My natural caution held me back, though I knew that anyone who
could walk through a town on their own was someone who was gifted at survival.
Maybe that was the kind of person we needed.
The figure turned in our direction.
He seemed to look at us for a split second, and then his gaze passed over us.
“Did he see us?” whispered Mel.
I held a finger in the air. I waited,
but the figure didn’t move. Then, without warning, he bolted into a run down
the high street. As I wondered whether to call out or give chase, he had
reached the end of the street and turned right and then disappeared from view.
I got to my feet.
“What are you doing?” said Mel.
“I need to know who this is.”
I started to walk down the street. I
thought I saw movement from the doorways around me, but looking around there
was nothing. There was a faint sound in the air. It could have been the breeze,
or it could have been something more. For the moment, I had to ignore it.
Something about the figure in black was disconcerting, and I felt that I had to
know who they were and what they were doing.
When we reached the end of the street
and turned the corner, we saw nothing but an empty road. I wondered where the
figure had gone. Had he ducked into one of the houses? Was he watching us now
from behind a twitching curtain?
The sound in the air was louder now. I
pulled my knife from my belt.
“This is getting hairy, Kyle,” said
Mel.
We needed to turn around. The
pharmacy was behind us, and I was letting my curiosity get the better of me.
Was it really curiosity though, or was it something else? Deep down, I knew there
was something wrong about the person in the street.
I walked forward, down the right
turning. It was a short road, and I just needed to see what was around the
corner. If he wasn’t there, I would turn around. If he was there…well, what was
I going to do? What was my plan?
“Wrong way Kyle,” said Mel.
I ignored her and carried on down the
street. I felt eyes watching me from the windows of the shops around us, but
when I looked up, all I saw were dark rooms or drawn curtains. I reached the
corner, and turned it. And then I stopped and felt my heart sink.
On the street around the corner were
a group of infected. On the split second I had to count, I thought there must
have been thirty of them. As quick as I saw them, I spun back around the corner
and leaned against the wall. Mel went to take a look, but I grabbed her arm and
pulled her back.
“Don’t look. Trust me.”
The next few seconds would tell us
everything, I knew. It only took one infected to see you, and sure enough you
would have an entire gaggle of them sloping down the street after you. I must
have only been in view for a matter of seconds, but that was all they needed.
I listened. I heard them cough and
splutter. I heard their sighs. I heard them groan through torn vocal chords.
There was another noise, but what was it?