It seemed too good to be true. An
island off the coast. Ships, helicopters, government. Every instinct in my body
told me to keep my guard up, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but trust
Al. Jesus, I really had changed.
“What about the people at camp? We can’t
just bugger off,” I said.
Al shrugged his shoulders.
“The more the merrier.”
“And what about Lou?” said Charlie.
“There’s no way she can make a journey like that.”
He was right, I knew. Lou’s leg would
take months to heal properly, if it ever did. The journey would be long, and we
didn’t have much time to make it. Al said that his ship would leave with or
without even him, so it sure as hell wouldn’t hang around for us.
I looked at the hill behind us. Mel
walked up it, each step seeming more laboured than the last. Lou was at the
crest of the hill, stretched out on her plank of wood, her body completely
still.
I caught movement to the left of her.
It was slight, but my peripheral vision registered it. Someone was stretched
out on the grass, their head ducked down.
They looked directly at me and for a
few seconds they just stared at me, but the grass blocked most of their face so
I couldn’t tell who it was. Then, without warning, they straightened up.
“Shawn,” I said.
Charlie looked up. Al put his hand to
his forehead as if to block out sun that wasn’t there.
He had turned and ran away before I
could get a good look, but it had to be him. He had stalked us before, after
all. I didn’t think there were many other voyeuristic weirdos hanging around the
Highlands.
“I’m going to kill the bastard,” I
said.
Chapter
22
Mel reached the figure before me. She
ran after them and tackled them to the ground. They became two tangled bodies
clawing at each other on the dewy grass, before Mel threw a punch that ended
the struggle.
Al, Charlie and I followed them up
the hill. As we walked, Al spoke to the scientist.
“Stumpy,” he said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“One thing pecking my head,” said Al.
“You said your pal wasn’t bitten. So what’s your explanation?”
Charlie shrugged his shoulders. It
was one of the first times that I’d ever seen him admit that he didn’t know
something. Usually he would at least try to give some sort of an answer, even
if it took him hours to dredge it up from the murky corners of his brain.
I remember one time Lou and I had argued
over which chemical element was the rarest, and we asked Charlie to settle it
for us. I have no idea why this was the subject for our debate, but Charlie
seized his chance at proving his knowledge. He put his fingers to his temple
and rubbed them as if he had a headache.
The longer he went without an answer
the harder he rubbed, until finally he pulled his hand away and there were red
finger marks on his skin. He walked away with a mean-looking g scowl on his
face. Later, when the sky was black and every right-minded person was sleeping,
I heard him banging on my tent.
“Astatine” he said, when I unzipped
the door. “It’s astatine.”
I made a sound that I hoped conveyed
annoyance, and went back to my sleeping bag. Charlie let out a huff of air in
relief, as if he’d been holding something in for hours and had finally gotten
his release. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Lou and I had settled the
argument hours earlier by deciding that neither of us cared.
We reached the top of the hill. Lou
was to my right. Her eyes were open now, but it seemed like she didn’t really
see me. Her forehead was drenched in sweat. Her skin was like a doll’s; neutral
in colour, plastic-looking. There was no life to her.
“Are you sure one of them didn’t bite
him while you were fighting?” persisted Al.
Charlie stared down at the corpses
that littered the grass at the bottom of the hill. Most were nameless to us,
just bodies that had come back from the dead and then had met their end a
second time at our hands. I felt nothing when I looked at most of them, but
then there was Reggie. His tall frame was stretched out on the overgrowth, his
socks and ankles showing below trousers that were too short.
“Something nipped him in the tunnels,”
said Charlie.
Al closed his eyes and shook his
head.
“So he was bitten then. Mystery
solved.”
“You don’t get it,” I said. “It was a
rat bite.”
I tried to think back. Reggie had
been with me almost every second since we had left camp. The only time he
hadn’t been was when Mel and I went to Larkton. When we came back, there were
no infected in sight. There was never a point when an infected could have
gotten near the group and bitten Reggie without anyone else seeing it happen.
“Kyle,” said Mel.
I had almost forgotten about her. She
was on the ground now, sat next to the figure that was limp in the grass. Mel
must have had a hell of a punch.
I walked across to her. I reached
them, stopped and looked down at the body on the ground. It wasn’t Shawn after
all, but it was a familiar face all the same. I couldn’t believe it.
“Kendal?” I said.
Reggie’s wife lay on her back on the
floor. Her eyelids flickered, and then her eyes started to open. She blinked,
as if she was just waking up from a night’s sleep and getting hit full in the
face by a ray of sun. She was a terrible sight. She had lost weight in the
short time since I had escorted her away from camp. Her jacket was torn on the
right sleeve and covered in dark stains. Her knuckles were swollen and
scratched. I looked at her waist and I saw that she had cut a hole in her belt
and looped the metal through it, holding her jeans tight against her skinny
frame. She belonged in a hospital bed with an IV pumping her full of vitamins.
She squinted at me, and there was a
desperate look on her face. It was as if weight wasn’t the only thing that she
had lost; there was much more missing than that. The woman that I had escorted
out of camp used to have something behind her gaze. It was a primal energy that
made the whites of her eyes brighter than most. Since I had last seen her
something had put a crack in her, and her energy had leaked out of it and left
her body shrivelled.
Mel got to her feet and stepped back.
She gave Kendal a look so full of disgust that it chilled me.
“You,” she said, making the single
syllable sound as venomous as possible.
Kendal put her hands down on the
ground. She tried to push herself up, but she was too weak.
Al walked over.
“Have you lot lost your manners?” he
said.
He put a hand out toward Kendal. She
took hold of it.
“You’re freezing, love.”
He pulled her to her feet. For a
second it looked like she was going to fall to the floor, but she kept her
balance. She ignored Al, and instead looked at me. The skin around her eyes had
the darkness of an insomniac forty hours into a spell of sleeplessness.
Tiredness had cut cracks in her face and they seemed to run to the corner of
her eyes and down her cheeks.
I braced myself for an outburst of
scorn, but Kendal kept me waiting. It was as if the rage left her, sucked out
of her by the desolation of the Wilds. In the absence of anger she would need
to find something else to fill her, but it seemed like she was still trying to
work out what that was.
“Look, Kyle,” she said. Her voice was
softer than I had ever heard it, barely a whisper above the wind.
“Don’t listen to the bitch,” said
Mel.
Kendal gave a solemn nod.
“I don’t deserve much from you. Lord,
I’m not gonna ask much. Just don’t leave me. I can’t face it again. Before I
saw you, I stopped walking. I sat down on the grass and thought that was it for
me.”
Mel’s gaze was full of fire. “Think
about what she did.”
Kendal’s expression was the opposite;
the flames of anger gone, and replaced instead by pleading.
“Think about Reggie,” she said. “What
he’d want. He wouldn’t want you to leave me.”
Al turned his head from Kendal, to
Mel and then to me.
“Am I missing something?” he said.
Mel held her cleaver in her hand. Her
hand wrapped around the handle as if it had a life of its own and could just
fly off in any direction without her firm grip.
“We evicted her from camp. Kyle ran
her out and told her to never come back.”
“Why?” said Al.
“She was abusing her husband. And her
son.”
“So you just left her to die?”
I nodded. “One of our rules. If you
harm another person without cause, then you’re on your own.”
Al put his hand to his forehead,
rubbed it, and then turned his back on us.
“Hellfire. You guys really have gone
savage, haven’t you?”
Kendal reached out and grabbed my
hand. Her touch was icy, and it spread a chill up my arms. I pulled away.
“Please, Kyle,” she said. Her voice
was getting more desperate by the second.
I knew that the decision would be
down to me. The question was whether we let her come with us, or if we left her
here. There was a biting wind in the air, and not much around us other than the
grassy mounds and hills which loomed in every direction.
I couldn’t face Kendal like this. She
was half a person, the life-force drained out of her and replaced by emptiness.
With her weight loss and the rings around her eyes, marks of endless nights
without sleep, she looked almost dead already. I had condemned her to die in
the Wilds once before, but I couldn’t do it again.
“Fine,” said Al. “Far be it from me
to mess with your rules. Bring her or leave her, but make your bloody mind up.”
I had heard people say in the past
that everyone deserved a second chance. I never subscribed to that; some things
made forgiveness impossible. That was old world thinking, though. The landscape
had changed, and morality had to adapt to it. I searched inside my heart and I
found that I wasn’t cold enough to leave her to die a second time.
I held Kendal’s gaze. I looked at her
hollow eyes, unblinking, and spoke.
“I’m ready to kill you, Kendal. If I
have to. I’ve done worse. I don’t want to see your eyes on mine or hear you say
my name. You stay at the back, and you keep your mouth shut.”
“Thank you Kyle. Really.”
“He said keep your mouth shut,” said
Mel.
Kendal looked down the hill at the
corpses on the ground.
“Reggie turned,” she said.
She looked at her feet. Everyone was
silent for a few seconds, even Mel. It was as though, despite everything, basic
human decency meant that we had to give her this. Her husband was dead, and
we’d let her have a few seconds to think on it.
Al adjusted the weight of the
rucksack on his back. There was a badge sewn into the strap. He saw me looking,
and he stretched the strap out toward me. It was a picture of a bonfire, with
logs burning on it and smoke drifting up toward the sky.
“The first badge I ever earned,” he
said. “Got it about a month after joining scouts. Our leader said I was the
quickest in our group’s history at getting it.”