“Oh, I beat them alright,” she said,
her eyes never leaving mine.
I shivered. I felt like I was staring
into the frozen tundra, falling deep beneath the ice to places where daylight
couldn’t follow. There was something wrong about this woman.
“You need to watch your friends,
Kyle” said Kendal.
“What?”
“Your friend Lou. She’s a bomb
waiting to explode. I wouldn’t put any faith in her.”
“Lou’s never let me down,” I said.
“She’s a rock.”
“That’s as maybe. But she’s one
stumble away from falling into the chasm. And when she does, she’ll reach out
and drag you in with her.”
My mind reeled as I tried to process
what she was saying. Not content with implying that Mel and Gregor were the
camp murderers, she implied that Lou was about to crack. Part of me thought
that she was playing me, but when I looked at her and saw her blank face, her
expression flat as if it had been ironed out of her skin, I knew that she meant
every word she said.
I saw movement in the corner of my
eyes. I pulled my knife from my belt and turned around, but there was nothing
on the road but the dead sheep. I felt cold all over. I turned back toward
Kendal.
“This is where I leave you,” I said.
In truth I had planned to leave her
five miles away from here. She didn’t know the area, but we were still too
close to camp. Kendal was an unpredictable woman, and I couldn’t risk what
would happen if she reappeared at camp. I knew I should have kept going, but I
couldn’t spend another second in her company.
“I know what I did, Kyle. But I
couldn’t help it.”
“Save it,” I said.
I set down a bag in the middle of the
road.
She eyed it for a few seconds, and
then looked back at me.
“You might as well kill me. I’d
prefer it, rather than leaving me here.”
For a short time, doubt flickered
through me. I didn’t want to kill her, but was leaving her here any better? I
thought about the pain she had caused. I remembered the world we were in, and I
knew it had to be one that didn’t tolerate people like her.
I threw a knife down at her feet.
“It’ll take you a couple of hours,
but you’ll be able to cut yourself free. After that, what you do is your
business. But if we ever see you in camp, you better be sure I’ll kill you.”
Before any more doubts could take
hold and I started to wonder if this was right, I turned my back on her and
started down the long road home.
Chapter 9
When I got back to camp the tents
were bathed in the black of night. Only one showed any signs of life. It was in
the middle of the sea of tents, and I couldn’t remember who it belonged to. It
was a two-man tent, smaller than mine with hardly enough room for a person to
stand up in, and from inside an orange glow flickered. Whoever it was had lit a
kerosene lamp, which was a ridiculously dangerous thing to do in a tent. I was
going to knock on the entrance flap and tell them to stop being so stupid, when
I heard a low chanting coming from inside.
“Dead God, you give us back what we
lose. You take away what we love and return it, corrupted. Spare us, Dead God.”
I felt a chill run through me, and
the night seemed to close in as a blanket of blackness and cold. Through the
dim glow in the thin tent material, I could see a figure that seemed to be sat
cross-legged on the floor. It was a bulky figure, with thick shoulders and
chest. Recollection came to me, and I realised that it was Gregor Horlock.
He was a butcher by profession, and
his job was one of the only ones that had stayed useful after the outbreak.
People didn’t need I.T. technicians anymore. Postmen were useless. Salesmen had
nothing to sell. There were no more stocks for the brokers to push, but people
still needed their meat carved up. I had watched Gregor work sometimes, and it
amazed me how he could slice a dead cow or sheep without leaving a single scrap
of it to waste.
After the fall of Bleakholt, Gregor
had been one of the survivors who decided to travel with me. He announced that
he needed an apprentice, and to my surprise, Mel had stepped forward. The bulky
butcher had taught her how to carve up an animal. He’d removed the
squeamishness and fear of blood from her, and now she could slice open a
carcass as easy as cutting a loaf of bread.
“Spare us all, Dead God. Do not take
us yet. Do not return what is not departed.”
Exhaustion swept through me. There
were no stars above us tonight. Instead the sky was an endless void, under
which everything was still. Everything except the things that took their turn
in the night, like the stalkers who woke hungry in their dens.
I thought about Kendal. Would the
stalkers find her on the road? Had I condemned her to die, and if that was the
case, was I right to do it? Did I have the moral authority to make a decision
like that about someone else’s life? I thought of her son and the abuse she had
inflicted on him, and I left the question unanswered in my head.
I walked away from Gregor’s tent and
found my own. My makeshift camp bed was how I had left it, unmade and stinking
from the sweat of weeks of tossing and turning. I should really have given it a
wash at some point. Nevertheless, it had never looked so inviting.
Just as I was about to get in my bed,
I saw something on top of it. Looking closer, I saw that it was a book. I
picked it up and tuned the cover to face me.
Unleashing the Dragonfly
Within.
I smiled. “Thanks Lou,” I said aloud.
My voice sounded alien in the dead of night.
I regretted arguing with Lou. She
might have been brash, but she had changed a lot since I had met her. She used
to be aloof, uncaring, a loner who wouldn’t let anyone else near. She was
hardly a people-person now, but I had grown close to her. We had been through
too much together to argue.
I lay down on my bed and within
seconds felt my body melt into it. As my eyelids started to close I realised it
had been too long since I had slept. I felt like I could finally allow myself a
few hours of nothingness.
There was a rapping sound. I sat up
and realised that it came from the entrance of my tent. I felt anger flicker
through me.
Was a single hour of sleep too much to ask for?
“Come in,” I said.
The tent was unzipped from the
outside and the figure stepped in. When I saw who it was, I felt my whole body
start to tighten up.
“Darla,” I said, knowing there wasn’t
a single person I would like to see less than her at this hour. Hell, I would
even have preferred Gregor Horlock in my tent, chanting about his Dead God or
whatever he had been talking about.
Darla’s face was set in stone, her
features cruel in the darkness of the night. There were no rings round her
eyes, no creases in her skin from lack of sleep. I wondered if she was stronger
than me, or if I was just weak.
“We want a meeting,” she said.
I rubbed my eyes and felt them sting.
“Check with my assistant,” I said. “I
think I can squeeze you in between half nine and ten.”
She crossed her arms. She was a foot
shorter than me, but something about the way she carried herself made her seem
bigger.
“I’m not joking, Kyle. The people
want a meeting. A proper one. There are things we have to discuss.”
***
We had the meeting at first light. We
were on the east side of camp, away from the tents where the sick residents
slept and vomited and sweated into their clothes. To say the people had wanted
a meeting, there wasn’t much of a turn out. Only ten had been well enough to
drag themselves away from their tents, the rest feeling too weak to even move.
There would be no jobs done today, I realised. No water collected, no game
hunted.
We stood in a circle. Darla was
opposite me, showing no more signs of tiredness than she had a few hours before
in my tent. Lou was at the opposite end of camp on watch, and Charlie was
nowhere to be seen. Although we were in a circle the other residents seemed to
bunch closer to Darla, and they looked up at her as if waiting for her to
speak. I felt alone, devoid of allies and searching for a friendly face but
finding none. Mel was there, but she barely looked at me.
There was one person who I was
surprised to see at the meeting. Across from me, with sagging shoulders, was
Reggie. I thought about everything he had lost in the last week, and I wondered
how he could even drag himself out of bed. Maybe he was stronger than I
thought.
The other residents were those who
had survived the battle of Bleakholt and travelled North with us. Just normal
men and women, ages ranging from thirty to sixty. They were people who had
survived the initial apocalypse and had struggled during the sixteen years
since. Some of them would have been teenagers when it all happened, and they
had spent their formative years in a world forever changed. Others had seen
their world ripped apart, watched their loved ones die and witnessed their
lives torn to pieces by the undead. I remembered the words that I had heard the
night before.
“Dead God, you give us back what we
lose. You take away what we love and return it, corrupted. Spare us, Dead God.”
Although they were a hundred yards
away in the forest to my left, I heard the singing of the birds in the trees.
They didn’t seem like happy sounds, more like nervous chatter. They were
warnings that the birds gave each other, words of caution about the dangers
they had seen on the flights in the land around.
Darla was the first to break the
quiet.
“Quite a turn out, isn’t it Kyle?”
she said.
I looked at the circle of residents.
A couple caught my eye, and I saw a look on their faces that I recognised all
too well. Fear.
“I take it everyone else is still
sick?” I said.
Darla nodded. “What do you think?
Most of them are still shitting out everything that’s left in them. Don’t tell
me you can’t smell it in the air. This whole place stinks.”
“We cleared the river,” I said. “We
need to boil our water for a while, but it should be safe to drink soon. There
was nothing I could have done. No way I could have known.”
“Tell that to the dead.”
“What?”
A woman stepped forward. She was in
her forties, with blonde hair that curled at the ends and whole patches that
had turned grey. I knew that her name was Stacey Blackwell, but not much else
other than she was married to a man named Trevor and that they had lost their
teenage son in the Battle of Bleakholt.
“Trevor’s dead,” she said. “He passed
last night.”
She looked down at the ground.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew
that words were needed, but I was finding sympathy hard. Day by day I felt my
insides turn to stone. Death used to be something dreaded and unspoken, but the
last sixteen years had changed that. It was something you couldn’t look away
from anymore. There was no use pretending death didn’t exist, because we were
confronted by it every day as sure as the morning sun.
“I’m sorry, Stacey. I really am.
Trevor was a good man.”
“Save it,” said Darla. “We’re not
here for condolence card sympathies. We’re here because time is running out.
Look around you. Smell the air. This place isn’t somewhere we can settle, Kyle.
It’s tainted, and we need to leave.”
“And go where? You say it’s tainted,
but tell me somewhere that isn’t? I’ve spent my time travelling, and I never
found somewhere that stayed safe for long. This place is as good as the next.
Better, in most ways. There’s a water source, so we need never worry about
thirst. It has wide open fields so that we can see dangers when they come. Go
to a town or city Darla, and tell me how you find it. Because I guarantee as
soon as you see what’s out there, you’ll think this field is paradise.”
Darla’s face told me that she wasn’t
persuaded by my words.
“This might be somewhere we can
survive. For now. But the people don’t want to just survive. They want to live.
Otherwise what’s the point?”
I thought about my time in the Wilds.
I had spent years moving from place to place, never settling. Later, I had
joined a community in a town called Vasey, and after that I had joined
Bleakholt. I knew that nowhere was permanent anymore. There was no such thing
as living; survival was the best we could hope for.
“Think about what you’re saying,” I
said. “What are you searching for, Darla? Some kind of utopia? It doesn’t
exist. Every day you spend with your heart beating and lungs breathing are a
victory.”
I looked up at the people around me.
“Surely you don’t all agree with
her?” I said.
“We’ll have a vote,” said Darla. “The
ten of us. To stay or leave.”
As the morning wore on we debated
back and forth until my head began to throb. I threw the same arguments at
Darla and she spat words back at me. Other residents would chip in from time to
time, most of them supporting Darla.
When it came time to vote, I looked
at the faces of the people in the circle and I felt empty. I didn’t see any
sympathy in their eyes, and I knew that this was a vote I was sure to lose.
That meant that the people would follow Darla, and they would leave camp.
They’d follow her to their deaths.
Just before the vote, one man raised
his head to speak. He had stayed silent throughout the meeting, but now Reggie
looked like he had something to stay. I knew this wouldn’t work in my favour.
Reggie’s son had been brutally killed while in camp, and I had personally
exiled his wife. Under my watch, Reggie’s family had been torn apart.
“We’re making a decision that will
change us forever,” he said, his voice croaky. “The kind of thing we need to
get right. We need to. I’ve lost as much as anyone here.”
He looked down at the ground and
paused for a few seconds as if he was thinking about what he had lost. From
somewhere across camp came the pathetic sound of someone retching. The birds in
the forest were silent.
Reggie looked back up.
“And even with everything I’ve lost,
I still follow Kyle. There are kinds of men who can keep themselves alive in a
world like this, and then there are the kinds who allow others to survive. Kyle
doesn’t just look after himself. He does what he needs to do, and he does it
because he’s the only person with the resolve that we need. I’d follow him
anywhere. If he said we need to go, I’d leave. And if he says we should stay,
then I’ll stay.”