“I’ve doubled the watch. I’ve
allocated everyone a time to take watch, and that includes you, Charlie.”
Charlie went to speak, but I put my
hand up to stop him.
“I can’t play favourites,” I said.
“And at the minute, I owe you nothing. Your chair’s been empty at every meeting
this week, and that makes me look bad. But until we find out what the hell is
going on, everyone takes a watch. I’m going to send a work party out to cut all
the grass in the fields around us. It’s too high, and we’re leaving too many
places for stalkers to hide.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said
Charlie.
“I’m no military leader, but I’m
doing my best. It’s hard enough looking after myself sometimes, let alone
everyone else. If there’s anyone I owe it to, it’s Ben. It’s my fault he’s
alone.”
“Really Kyle? So I suppose you were
the one who ate his mother?”
I shot a look at Ben.
“Damn Charlie, keep it down. You think
he needs to hear that?”
“He’s asleep.”
Sure enough, Ben slumped in the chair
with his head tucked forward and resting on his chest. His right hand was in a
fist in his lap, with the bead necklace wrapped around it.
I lowered my voice. “Does he blame me?
For what happened to her?”
“This going to be hard for you to
hear.”
“Just tell me.”
Charlie put his hand on the table.
“Yeah. He does blame you.”
“I thought as much.”
Charlie looked up at me. “Nobody else
does, Kyle. It was the infected, for Christ sakes. We’ve all lost someone to
them. We all know what they’re like, what they can do.”
I turned by back on Charlie and tried
to collect my thoughts. I wondered if I should sit down with Ben and talk about
it with him. Maybe if I told him exactly what happened that night, it might
make a difference. Or maybe it would be better to just let him blame me, rather
than give him graphic images of how his mum died.
As I tried to let my mind settle I
looked around the room. The tiles had once been white but were discoloured now.
Some had cracked and others had fallen away to reveal the wall behind them,
with red brickwork that seemed covered in mold. In a corner of the room there
was another table, a smaller one, and a chair. Stacks of paper littered the table
top. I walked over and glanced at them, and I had an idea what the papers were.
After we had met the unhinged
scientist Whittaker and I had killed him, we had taken his research notes with
us. I’m not sure why I saved them, other than the fact that I knew that it
wouldn’t have done any good if he was right and I had destroyed his notes.
“Are those what I think they are?” I
said, pointing at the notes.
Charlie followed my finger with his
gaze. I couldn’t say for sure, but I thought I saw his eyes widen for a split
second.
“They are the notes of Barry
Whittaker, yes,” he said.
“Barry, huh? Never had him down as a
Barry. It doesn’t really seem like the right name, for a mad scientist.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Mad
scientist. That’s an offensive stereotype.”
“A true one, in this case.”
Charlie crossed the room and stood
over the table in the corner. He picked up a file and began to leaf through it.
Casually at first, but I noticed that the pages seemed to suck him in, and
within a few seconds they had enraptured him. I felt like waving my arms to
remind him that I was in the room. Eventually, he looked up.
“He was getting close,” said Charlie.
His voice sounded strange. “So close that I bet he could almost taste it.”
“What do you mean?”
Charlie scanned the notes in front of
him again. His eyes seemed to bounce from word to word.
“He could have had a cure if he’d
gone about it slightly differently. I could figure it out myself, it’s just
that there’s no way to test it. Except if…..”
The seconds drew out while I waited
for Charlie to finish his sentence. I grew tired of the subject.
“Forget it,” I said.
Any topic that involved Whittaker was
a dark one, and I don’t want to lead Charlie down a path filled with shadow. We
needed him too much.
“Listen,” I said. “I suppose you’ve
heard about the sickness going around camp?”
“People are shitting their arses
off,” said Charlie.
I moved my head back in surprise. I
had never heard Charlie swear before.
“It’s a phrase I heard Gregor Horlock
use,” he explained.
I shook my head. “Anyway. Some people
haven’t eaten in days, and a lot of them are struggling to make it out of their
tents to actually go to the toilet. Only, some of us are okay. I was away from
camp a couple of days, so I guess that explains why I’m still perky. How about
you, Charlie? You seem fine to me. So how come you aren’t sick?”
“I did put a little thought into it.
It comes down to this, to my mind. I boil my water before drinking it.”
“How come?”
He shrugged. “Just the way I am. An
old boyfriend used to say that I wouldn’t even go for a pee without wearing
gloves.”
“Is that true?”
“He was exaggerating.”
“Anyway, Darla thought it was the
food,” I said
Charlie dropped the notes back onto
the table and turned to face me.
“It’s the water. We don’t all eat
exactly the same food, but we all drink from the same stream.”
“And you didn’t think to say anything
to anyone else?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve been
busy.”
“Okay then,” I said. “I guess I
better go check the stream.”
Chapter 6
The stream which supplied our
drinking water was to the east of camp, and it ran a twisting channel away and
into the countryside. With Lou, Mel, Reggie and a guy named Samuel, we followed
the stream out of camp without a clue as to what we were looking for. We just
hoped that we would know when we saw it.
I had told Reggie that he didn’t have
to come, that we would understand if he needed to be with Kendal. He looked at
me though his one good eye. The other was bruised and swollen.
“I have to do something,” he said.
“I’ll go out of my mind.”
I nodded.
“What happened to your eye?”
Reggie looked at the ground. “It
doesn’t matter.”
All I had to do was ask Lou and Mel
to come with me and they had said yes. Despite the occasional argument and how
busy we all were, it seemed like I could always rely on them. I remembered my
conversation with Lou a few nights before and I hoped that she hadn’t meant it.
If Lou left camp, things could become difficult for me.
Samuel was the only surprise in our
party. He was a man who kept himself to himself. If I gave him a job he did it
without complaint, and at night he’d sit at the mouth of his tent and just
stare out into the blackness of the night. He walked with his head tucked
forward and his back bent. Not so much like a hunchback, but more that his
whole body seemed to lean forward when he took a step. His centre of gravity
was just an inch or two away from sending him falling to the floor every time
he moved his legs.
Samuel reminded me of a supply
teacher in my old school. He’d never covered any of my classes, but I had met
him from time to time when the maths teacher, Glenn Mack, took one of his
hangover days. This supply teacher had walked around the school in much the same
way as Samuel. He had seemed quiet, but boy, did he get mean when he was angry.
I wondered if Samuel also had a nasty temper.
It was a grey day that lent a bleak
look to the Scottish countrywide, and in turn I felt a shadow cross my mood. I
started to wonder if maybe Darla was right and Charlie was wrong, that it was
possible that the food was the cause of the sickness.
With the camp a mile and a half
behind us, we found the answer. In the stream, our only source of water, there
was a dead cow.
Its body was thin and its skin was
wrapped tightly around its bones, though a large part of it had been stripped
away to reveal its ribcage. The skin on its head had been peeled away to show
raw red flesh, and hundreds of flies lined it. As soon as I saw the cow I
smelled the aroma of death, so thick that I could almost see it hang in the air
and drift toward me.
Reggie turned away from the body. His
skin turned as pale as the overcast sky, and I watched him put his hand to his
mouth. He took deep breaths, but each intake of air looked like it was making
him feel worse. He kept his hand against his mouth and battled against it, but
eventually he had to bend over and retch. Mel put her hand on his back and
rubbed it.
Lou walked over to the carcass. She
swatted at a few flies which buzzed near her head, and she put her hand to her
chin. From the look on her face she could have been in a gallery admiring a
painting rather than staring at a rotting cow in the middle of a stream.
She turned to look at me.
“You know we’re going to have to move
it, right?”
Samuel grimaced.
“The skin looks so slimy. It looks
like it would just slip away from the bones if we tried to pick it up.”
Reggie gave another retch. Mel rubbed
his back even harder.
“Still,” I said. “It’s got to go.
It’s either that or we find another drinking source, and I don’t think there
are many of them around. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not going back to
camp and explaining that we couldn’t fix the problem because we felt a little
sick.”
Reggie’s skin had lost so much colour
that I could almost see through his skin. Poor bastard, I thought. He came with
us to take his mind off things, and this is what he gets.
“There’s no way I’m touching it,” he
said.
“It could be full of parasites,” said
Samuel.
Lou rolled her eyes.
“After everything we’ve seen.
Infected eating people, stalkers with blood dripping from their lips. And
you’re afraid of a dead cow. It isn’t coming back to life, you know. The virus
hasn’t jumped species yet.”
“But it will jump a few species the
day you get bitten,” said Mel.
I turned and looked at her. Mel had
always been a bit scared of Lou, and I hadn’t expected such a bitchy remark to
come from her.
“Just kidding,” she said.
I took my coat off and felt the chill
of the breeze as it slivered through the sleeves of my shirt and teased its way
up my arm. As well as the infected and the stalkers, the Scottish gusts were
another thing that I didn’t think I would ever get used to.
“Okay,” I said, and started turning
my coat inside out so that the inner layer of black fabric showed. “If you’re
all going to be babies about it, here’s what we’ll do.”
I took my knife from my belt and cut
around the inner layer of my coat until I pulled it free. From there I cut it
into sections and then handed two of them to each person.
“We’ll use these to hold it. That
way, you don’t actually have to touch the thing.”
Lou and I stood at the head of the
cow, and Mel and Samuel stood by the legs. Reggie watched, his skin slowly
regaining some of its colour.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
I bent down and put my hands on the
cow’s head. Flies flew off its raw flesh and buzzed around me. I let go of the cow
to swat them away. I took a deep breath and held it in, worried that if I
stopped for air then the flies would seize the opportunity to enter my mouth. I
wished I was back at camp.
Mel grabbed hold of one leg, Samuel
the other.
“One, two, three,” I said.
As we all lifted, I felt the soft cow
flesh on my fingertips, and realised that the coat lining around my hands
wasn’t big enough. It felt cold and slimy, and I knew already that even if I
washed my hands a hundred times, I still wouldn’t feel clean after this.
We held the cow four feet off the
ground and moved it away from the stream. Samuel and Mel took careful steps
backwards.
“You’re okay,” said Reggie. “That’s
it. Careful Sam, there’s a rock near your right foot. Good. Nearly there.”
I listened to Reggie as he guided us
out of the stream. I tried to focus on his voice, but all I could hear was the
wind. It was starting to gather in power, and I thought that I heard it shriek
at one point. A few seconds later, it sounded like it groaned. I felt a chill
run up my arms, and I had the urge to just drop the cow head and step away from
it.
Again I heard the wind moan at me. I
looked over to Reggie, and this time I dropped the cow head. With Mel and
Samuel still holding the legs, when the cow head fell to the floor it snapped
off at the neck.
“What the hell Kyle?” said Samuel,
dropping the legs and stepping away.
The smell of putrid flesh was in the
air now, but it wasn’t just the cow creating the aroma. I looked over Reggie’s
shoulder and saw that ten feet away, a crowd of infected stumbled their way
across the grass towards us.
I felt a momentary flinch run through
me, and cold panic began to flutter through my chest. I wished that I knew my
kill count so far into the apocalypse. The total must have run into the
thousands, yet the sight of the infected still made my fingers shake ever so
slightly as I reached for my knife.
There were six of infected; three
grown men, two women and a child. The child was missing his right hand, and two
of his fingers on his left hand had been chewed down to the knuckle. The men
were tall and strapping, their skin swollen and discoloured to look like
bruised peaches. The women walked with their arms outstretched. One had nails
that were an inch long and sharp at the end. The other infected’s chin hung
loose from her face, probably due to a dislocated jaw.
I stepped forward, put my hand on
Reggie’s shoulder and moved him away. He seemed surprised at first, but then he
turned and saw the infected, and I heard him yelp. Within seconds Lou and Mel
were by my side, Lou with a red crowbar raised at shoulder height, Mel with a
cleaver.
I had thought about standardising
weapons at one point. It seemed to me that rather than knives and cleavers,
long, sharpened sticks and poles would be the way to go. That way we could
pierce the brains of the infected without getting close to them. In practice,
it hadn’t worked. The fact was that people had gotten used to their individual
weapons; to the feel of them in their hands, and the weight as they swung them.
One of the male infected cried out
and stretched towards us with a step so large that it almost lost its balance.
Lou was the first to move, by jamming her crowbar through its eye socket until
the eyeball popped and juice ran down the rusted metal.
The other tall male stumbled toward
Mel. She tried to get out of the way but lost her balance in the soft peat near
the stream. She fell back as the infected put its hands on her shoulders and
forced its weight onto her.
As Mel fell to the ground, shocks of
cold ran through my body. I ran over to her. She was on the floor now,
wrestling with the bigger and heavier creature and twisting her head away to
avoid the gnashing of its teeth.
“Kyle,” I heard Samuel say behind me
with a shot of panic in his voice.
I didn’t have time to turn round. My
pulse fired and my heart hammered in my chest. I grabbed hold of the infected
on top of Mel by its hair and lifted it. The strands started to tear away from
the roots, and as I lifted my hand the infected’s scalp peeled away from its
head. Ignoring the lump forming in my throat, I threw it away. I lined up my
knife and in one swift motion brought the tip down and through the infected’s
skull.
There was only a second for me to
catch my breath before I heard another scream behind me. I turned around to see
Lou grabbing the shoulders of an infected which crouched on the ground. She
pushed it way from her, and as the infected fell back into the grass, I saw who
had been underneath it.
Samuel was on the floor now, his
throat torn open, blood seeping down the flaps of skin and onto the green
grass. His face had turned pale and his eyes were almost impossibly wide, as if
the shock of what had happened had hammered through his brain. I couldn’t
imagine the pain and the fear he had felt in his last seconds, and I felt a
heaviness grow in my chest.
He didn’t look like he had the energy
left in him, so I was surprised when Samuel pushed down on the mud and
struggled to his feet. Blood poured from him. It dripped down his chest and
soaked into his shirt, sticking the fabric to his body. He took a few shaky
steps. The look in his eyes was lost, and it was as though he didn’t even
register that the rest of us were here.
These steps were his last, and in his
mind he took them alone. He barely moved before falling face first toward the
ground, burying his head in the flesh of the dead cow.