Mel walked out of the middle of the
road and toward the warehouse. She didn’t take her eyes off the window for a
second.
“We don’t have time for this,” I
called after her. “It’s just infected. Don’t rile them up.”
A figure moved in one of the
warehouse windows. It was tall and skinny, with blonde hair that was messed up
and stuck out around the crown. From its shuffling movements, I knew it was
just another infected.
I looked around me. Where the hell
had Ben gone? It seemed impossible that he would run to Grey Fume on his own,
yet where else could he be? If he was here, surely he would have seen us.
“Kyle?” said Charlie. He crouched
down in the road.
“Yeah?”
“You need to come see this.”
Across from me, Mel took a step
toward the building. She couldn’t take her eyes off it, though I didn’t know
what was so important that it had stolen her attention. The blonde figure in
the window swayed from side to side. It seemed to stare out at us, though the
darkness of the warehouse covered its face from view.
Charlie stood up. He held something
in his palm.
“Kyle,” he said.
“What is it Charlie?” I said, without
looking at him. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mel. She took a few steps forward
toward the warehouse. The figure in the window was still.
“More beads from Ben’s necklace,”
said Charlie.
I turned around. Charlie opened up
his palm. There were little beads in it. The edges of them were smooth and
plastic, and they had holes in the centre where a piece of string once
connected them together.
“Is it definitely his?” said Reggie.
Charlie nodded. “He used to sit there
playing with it all day while I was working. I’d recognise it anywhere.”
Reggie was sat on the floor next to
Lou, his long grasshopper legs stretched out in front of him.
“Think he dropped it?”
The scientist looked at the beads,
and then back at Reggie.
“He’d never lose it. I know that
much. It was the last piece of Alice that he had. If he dropped it, there was a
good reason for it. And he damn sure wouldn’t have let it break.”
“So what does this mean?”
Lou stirred.
“It means someone’s taken him,” she
said, voice croaky. “And he left it as a sign.”
“How could he possibly know that we’d
come this way?” I said.
“He’s a bright kid,” answered
Charlie. “Or he has a lot of faith in us.”
To my left, Mel bolted into a run
toward the warehouse. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t stop her, and I
watched for a few seconds as she closed the gap and headed toward the shutter
door. As she ran, she shouted out.
“Justin!”
“What the hell are you doing?” I
said.
“It’s Justin in the window,” she
shouted, without even pausing to slow down.
The figure in the window had moved
out of view. I thought about what Mel had said, but it was so crazy that the
words wouldn’t settle in my brain. The figure in the window had blonde hair and
it was tall and lanky, but that didn’t mean it was Justin. What would he be
doing in a warehouse in Grey Fume? It didn’t make any sense.
“It’s not him,” I called out after
her.
I was too late. Mel had reached the
shutters. She put her fingers under it and her face strained as she pulled the
door up. The clacking of the metal disturbed the calm of the night. The hinges
squealed impossibly loudly, and I looked around me to make sure nothing lurking
in the area around us had heard the noise.
When the shutters reached the top,
Mel shouted out in alarm and took a few steps back. Her heel hit a rusted
exhaust pipe on the ground, and she almost fell over. The squealing of the
shutters stopped, but another noise replaced it. This one was quieter in volume
but more terrible in what it meant.
Inside the warehouse, waiting to be
freed, were a crowd of infected. There was so many of them that they seemed to
fill the entire factory floor. They squirmed against each other and jostled
forward. Their smell drifted out of the warehouse and spread over the street.
Instead of the oil of the warehouse machinery and nose-wrinkling dust, the
aroma was one of death.
Mel stepped forward. She grabbed the
top of the shutter and tried to pull it down, but I could tell that the metal
fought against her. She grunted and I saw her face turn red, but the shutter
didn’t budge.
“Oh shit,” said Reggie. He got to his
feet.
Mel backed away further. The
infected, seeing her now, started to walk forward. A few at the front groaned,
and the sound rippled through the crowd until those at the back made their own cries
in answer. I was struck again with how much like communication it sounded. Had
the ones at the front raised a question? Had they given an order?
Don’t be so stupid
, I told myself.
They took slow steps toward us. There
was too many of them to fight, and even if we could kill ten each, we would
still come up short. I wondered if we even had enough time to run. We would
have to carry Lou, and that meant that whoever supported her could only go at a
pace not much faster than the undead.
Cold sweat dripped from my forehead
and over my cheeks. I knew that whatever happened, I wouldn’t leave Lou. If I
had to face my end, I would do it with my friend. The prospect still made me
shudder.
Mel joined me at my side. The
infected took steps across the factory floor. I turned to Gregor.
“Help me pick her up,” I said.
I walked over to Lou and crouched
down beside her. I took hold of a corner of her makeshift stretcher.
Instead of helping me, Gregor walked
toward the warehouse. His strides were large and full of confidence and
purpose. He was walking toward almost a hundred infected, but he didn’t show
any fear.
“Reggie, help me,” I said.
Gregor put two big hands around the
top of the shutter door. His shoulders tensed up as he tried to move the metal,
but the doors held firm. The infected were feet away from him now. They were close
to getting out of the warehouse, where they would begin a pursuit that would
see us fleeing back into the Wilds.
Gregor looked up. He seemed to notice
something inside the warehouse.
“Kyle,” said Reggie.
He held a corner of the stretcher. I
gripped my corner and we lifted it up. Although adrenaline flooded my body, my
limbs felt sluggish and ill-equipped for the weight.
“I’m sorry Kyle,” Mel began.
“Not now,” I said.
The wails of the desperate dead
shattered the night. They had almost reached Gregor now. Some wore the overalls
of factory workers, the fabric torn and stained with what looked like oil but
could have been blood. I saw the infected with blonde hair who had been at the
window. He looked nothing like Justin.
As the infected almost reached the
door, Gregor stepped inside the warehouse.
What the hell are you doing
?
I thought.
He reached up and grabbed a link of
chain that was on the corner of the door. He started to pull on it. There was a
screeching sound as the shutters began to fall, the metal moving down inch by
inch.
We watched as the shutter door
closed, leaving Gregory on the wrong side of it. The noise of the metal
couldn’t drown out the infected, and their moans and wails increased until soon
it was all I could hear.
I could only see Gregor’s legs now.
Gradually they were covered with metal until I could only see his boots, and
then finally a dozen more feet joined his at the door.
Chapter
16
I couldn’t shake the image of
Gregor’s feet at the bottom of the door. The shutter covered the rest of him
from view, and the groans of the undead became a haunting song that my ears
couldn’t shut out. When we saw shuffling feet join Gregor’s in the doorway, we
didn’t need to see him to know what happened next. Gregor cried out once, but
after that he didn’t scream in pain or beg for help.
We spent the next day searching for
Ben. The birds chirped songs as morning rose, and they carried them on through
the day as we combed the countryside fields and roads. We split up into two
groups.
Charlie and Mel walked a half mile to
our left, a hundred yards away from a reservoir which sat murky blue under a
placid sky. Reggie and I supported Lou on her stretcher. In the early morning
she tried to walk with her crutch nestled under her armpit, but within an hour
her forehead and cheeks burned red.
There wasn’t exactly a hum of
conversation. Lou was otherwise occupied with the infection her body was trying
to fight. Reggie didn’t have much to say, and I was glad of it. I ran the
events of the last few days through in my head and I tried to think of another
way they could have turned out.
So many questions demanded answers.
What if we hadn’t gone into the tunnels? The wall wouldn’t have collapsed, and
Lou’s leg would be fine. She wouldn’t have sweat pooling on her head, with her
leg losing the battle to the infection. Maybe if we hadn’t gone into the
tunnels, we wouldn’t have ended up in the barn. There would have been no need
to go into Larkton, and Ben would still be here. If the kid hadn’t run away, we
wouldn’t have gone to Grey Fume, and Gregor wouldn’t have had to shut himself
in with a factory full of infected.
Or perhaps none of it mattered. Maybe
our decisions were just dust blown around by the wind, and whichever way the
breeze blew, we could do nothing but follow it. We’d set out with seven healthy
people, and now there were five of us.
No. There are still six,
I told myself. I wasn’t giving up on
Ben.
As the day wound on we all met on the
field and settled next to a tangled bush. The trail had gone as dead as the
darkening sky above us, and everyone wore grim expressions. When Charlie joined
us, he walked over to Lou and knelt by her side. He put the back of his hand on
her head.
“If we had a thermometer she’d be
melting the mercury,” he said.
Lou groaned. Her lips looked cracked
and raw, like tectonic plates rubbing against each other.
“Give her some water,” I said.
“How are we doing for supplies?” said
Reggie.
He paced in front of us. His
shoulders looked strong now, as if every passing minute lifted the weight of
Kendal from him. I knew that part of it was an act. Sometimes, when he thought
nobody was looking, he would stare out into the distance with an empty look.
His eyes peeled back the landscape and found nothing in it.
“Can you hand me the bags, Mel?” I
said.
Mel sat with her back to us and
stared in the direction of Grey Fume. Losing Gregor had hit her in the gut. He
had been a strange guy but he was one of us, and he had given his life for the
group. Mel had been close to him in camp, I knew. She and the butcher had spent
a lot of time together while he trained her. Maybe he had filled a role that
had been empty since she lost her dad.
“Mel?” I said.
She turned around. She lifted a
rucksack and threw it over to me. The ease in which she tossed it worried me,
because it meant that the bag had lost a lot of weight. We should still have
had enough supplies to get to the helicopter and back, but the journey was going
on a lot longer than I expected it to.
Lou groaned again. She tried to sit
up but strained at the effort, and Charlie gently pushed her back down. Seeing
her like this made me feel sick. We needed to do something for her.
“What’s going to happen?” I said. “If
we can’t treat the infection.”
Charlie stared at me with wide eyes
as if he was trying to tell me to shut up.
“We need to talk about it,” I said.
“Kyle’s right,” said Lou, her voice
weak.
Charlie squeezed her arm.
“You need to rest.”
She shook her head.
“I want to know what’s going to
happen to Me. Don’t treat me like a kid, damn it. I won’t have you talking to
me like that. Or talking about me as if I’m not here. Just tell me what the
hell’s going to happen.”
Charlie’s face looked as grave as the
grey countryside around him. He sat in the muddy field, his curls stuck to the
sweat on his head. The scientist had adapted a lot better to the expedition
that I had expected.
“You could lose the leg,” he said.
“That the worst case?” said Lou.
“That’s the only case. If we don’t
treat the infection, you’ll lose it.”
“Love your bedside manner.”
“If you ask for the truth, I won’t
mince my words.”
Lou’s head sagged back down onto the
wooden stretcher, as if the effort of talking had been too much for her.
“I’m holding you back,” she said.
Reggie stopped pacing. He rubbed his
temples with his index fingers.
“I feel sick,” he said.
His right hand was starting to swell,
the skin between his thumb and index finger inflamed and red raw. It reminded
me of when I was a kid and I had been stung on the thumb by wasp whilst
climbing a tree. This was no wasp sting though; who knew what kind of diseases
the tunnel rats carried?
I sat up straight and felt the thorns
of the bush dig into my back. I thought about what we had seen over the last
couple of days. First there had been the stranger in Larkton who had run away
when he saw us. When we had followed him we had run into a crowd of infected. I
replayed the scene in my head and I still couldn’t decide if it was an accident
or if the man had led us to them. Then there was the infected in Grey Fume, the
one tied up next to the fountain. The image of the ropes stretched over his
newly infected skin disturbed me.
“One thing I’ve been wondering,” I
said. “About the guy next to the fountain. He was tied up.”
“He’d been there a while,” said
Charlie.
“The question is who put him there?
And why? Someone fastened him to the fountain and left him for the infected.
Who the hell would do something like that?”
Reggie looked up.
“There are bad people in the world.
No sense trying to see what makes them tick; they’re driven by something else.”
“Actually,” said Charlie, “there’s
every sense in trying to see what makes them tick. We need to learn what drives
people like that. Did you know that the FBI used to interview convicted serial
killers to get an insight into their minds?”
“What the hell could you learn from
those maniacs?” said Mel.
“You can learn what drives people to
do despicable things.”
Reggie scoffed.
“Some people don’t have anything
driving them except evil.”
Mel fixed her stare on Charlie.
“Don’t tell me the FBI used to give
them reduced sentences?”
Charlie shook his head. “On the
contrary. They promised the killers nothing except time to talk and an ear to
listen. The murders loved to make themselves heard. They yearned to be
understood.”
As the group talked around me, their
voices started to fade. I stared at the overgrown fields and overcast sky. A
flock of birds were so far in the distance that they looked like dots swooping across
the clouds. Life went on, I realised. No matter what happened to the people on
it, the world would carry on in ignorance. If we were to survive, we’d have to
do it ourselves because we’d get no help from the world around us.
Guilt sloshed in my stomach like
spoiled milk. I looked at Lou, her face pale but burning up at the same time
and her broken leg starting to swell with infection. I had let her get injured.
Not only that, but I had allowed Ben to run away. True, I hadn’t been there
when it happened, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t my responsibility. Everything
that had happened so far was down to me and my stupid need to be a leader. Back
in camp when we’d argued, Lou had been right. This wasn’t about helping
everyone else, it was all about me. I really did need to be needed.
I stood up. Charlie stopped
mid-sentence and looked at me.
“I owe you all an apology,” I said. I
rubbed the back of my head. “Shit. I’m no good at this. Guess the fact is that
I’m not much of a leader after all. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time.”
Mel crossed her legs. “Kyle, you
don’t have to – “
Before I could say anything, Reggie
stopped and turned his head.
“What was that?” he said.
We all stopped talking. I listened,
but I couldn’t hear anything. I looked at Reggie.
“I heard something,” he said.
I listened again. Sure enough, there
was a sound. Something soft pattered across the grass. Whoever it was, they
walked nearby but took care to hide their footsteps.
I got up off the ground. I pulled my
knife from my belt. Deep in my heart I hoped that the sound was Ben coming back
to join us, but I had learned not to hope for best case scenarios. The only
saving grace was that I didn’t hear the groan of the infected.
The footsteps came from behind us,
but the bush blocked my view. I stayed on my knees and moved to the side so
that I could get a view of whatever was behind us. Daylight was draining down
the plughole of the sky, but there was still enough light for me to make out a
figure in the field behind us.
Even though he crouched low so that
he could sneak through the fields, I knew that the figure was too tall to be
Ben. He wore a hood over his head. His entire outfit was black and seemed to
meld into the shadows around him, but the crunching of his boots on the ground
gave him away.
I turned around. Everyone looked at
me.
“It’s him,” I said, in a low voice.
“Who?” said Charlie?
“The guy we saw in Larkton.”
“I’m going to kill that bastard,”
said Mel.
I held my hand up to stop her.
“Quiet. I don’t want him to run
again.”
Back in Larkton, the man had sprinted
away as soon as he saw us. He was fast, and right now he had a fifty yard head
start on us. We needed to be careful about this if we were going to catch him.
I got to my feet. I would watch him
and wait for him to turn his back to us, and then I would creep up on him.
Lou stirred behind me. She tried to
sit up but failed, and she slumped onto her back. She let out a moaning sound
as if she was trying to speak but her brain filtered the words and made them unintelligible.
The figure in the field looked up. He
turned his head in our direction. I knew that I had to make my move. As I rose
to full height and started running, the figure bolted into a run and trampled
the fields with the speed of a sprinter. I gave chase but my leg started to
ache, and I watched as his black frame disappeared into the horizon.