Fear the Dead 2 (8 page)

Justin turned away, his face grey. He
took deep breaths as though he was fighting the urge to be sick.

Dan stood up, brushed a few meat
crumbs from his shirt. “Now we’ve got a problem,” he said.

There were over thirty infected on
the high street now, far too many for us to fight. If we let them move any closer
they would trap us.

Faizel stroked the fur of the dog’s
severed head, his eyes shut. He stood up and wiped the blood from the blade of
the axe and then slipped it into the loop on his belt. He caught my eye and I
knew I had to say something to him, but there wasn’t time for the words to
form.

“We have to move,” said Faizel.

I pointed at the farmhouse with the
solar panels. We needed to slip out of the village centre and hide out for a
while. We could spend the night there, and then in the morning this should have
blown over.

I grabbed Justin’s arm and helped him
to his feet. “We need to go, kid.”

***

We managed to leave the high street
without having to kill any of the infected. We skipped over a stone wall and
hiked up an overgrown field. The farmhouse lay at the top, and as we got closer
I realised how big the place actually was.

Whoever had built this was filthy
rich. There had to be at least ten bedrooms. A balcony jutted out of one side
of the house, and there was a Jacuzzi on it. A thought flashed into my mind.
Solar panels. Jacuzzi. Is it possible that it was working, and that the house
had power?

Faizel reached the front door first,
the incline of the hill having no effect on him whatsoever. He tested the
handle and the door opened straight away.

“Wait,” I said.

I got to the top of the hill and
stood outside the front door. I let my breath catch up with me. My left leg
throbbed, so it was a good thing we were stopping for the night.

“Let me go first,” I said.

I hadn’t been able to handle things
back at the pub. I knew the dog had to be silenced, but I couldn’t bring myself
to do it, and Faizel had to step in. Now I needed to make up for it.

“I’ll check it’s clear,” I said, “and
then I’ll signal you guys in.”

I took my knife out of my belt and
gripped the handle. I took one step over the doorframe and into the house. It
smelt damp as though water had gotten into the walls and started to rot them,
and the floor was paved in stone that looked like it would be cold to the touch.
A staircase was in front of me, and on my right were two doorways.

When I turned to my right something
dark and heavy swung at me, too quick for me to react. My head burst in agony.
 Everything flashed to black, and I fell to the floor.

8

I opened my eyelids and light seeped
in through the cracks. A sting of pain pierced my temple, and my stomach
lurched as though I was going to be sick. My eyes adjusted to the light. I got
to my knees and let the room stop spinning.

Voices drifted in over the ringing in
my ears. I saw walls. A bookshelf. Paintings hung up. A woman and a boy tied to
chairs.

Hands hooked under my armpits and
lifted me onto a couch. I sank into it and let the room move into focus. It was
the living room of the farmhouse. Justin sat next to me and stared with concern
on his face, as though he expected me to die. Faizel stood by the window, and
Dan perched on the edge of the couch, a hammer in his hand.

In the centre of the room a
middle-aged woman and a young boy were tied to wooden kitchen-chairs. The boy’s
eyes were wide with fear and he struggled against the rope. The woman sat
quietly, her arms gripping the arms of the chair but not straining against her
bonds. There was a big red bulge underneath her left eye.

I leaned forward, rubbed my temple.
The thudding slowed. “Who the hell are they?” I said.

Faizel shrugged. Dan wouldn’t take
his eyes off the woman. “She’s the bitch who hit you,” he said.

I got to my feet and a wave of nausea
sent me woozy. “What happened to her face?”

Dan looked at his right hand. His
knuckles were swollen red.

A deep thud boomed through my head,
and I took a faltering step back. Justin stood up and put his arm around my
back. I shrugged him off.

“I’ll be fine.”

I walked over to the boy and took out
my knife. His eyes grew so white it looked like his pupils had been swallowed
up. He struggled against his chair, rocking it so much that a leg lifted off
the ground. He was strong for his age. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Easy,” I said.

I ripped the tape from his mouth,
peeling off skin as I teared back the adhesive. I held my knife to the ropes
around his wrist and cut through them.

“Are you mad?” said Dan.

“He’s just a little boy.”

“And she looks like a lunch lady, but
she still knocked you out cold,” Dan said, and pointed at the woman.

I nodded at Faizel. “Can you cut her
loose?”

He stood up and walked over to her.
In a minute, both the woman and the boy were free. The boy stood up and climbed
onto his mother’s lap. I took the seat he had left, turned and faced the woman.

“What’s your name?” I said.

Her hair looked tough and wiry, and
strands of grey ran through it. She had a large frame and her arms looked
strong. She’d certainly been able to swing something with enough force to knock
me out, anyway. I expected her to be scared, but aside from the purple-red bump
that stuck out underneath her eye, she seemed fine.

She rubbed the top of her son’s head.
“This is Ben. I’m Alice,” she said in a Yorkshire accent.

I didn’t see any point in skirting
round the issue with her. She still had one good eye, so she could see what
position she was in here. There were four of us and one of her, and she’d
already attacked us. She was dangerous, and we would be on our guard.

“Alice, my friends and I have to
decide what to do with you,” I said. My temple throbbed, and I put my hand to
it. A knife of pain stabbed through my head so sharply that I winced.

“There’s paracetamol upstairs,” said
Alice.

I turned to Justin. “You mind?” I said.

He got up and walked out of the room.

Faizel crossed his legs. “What are
you and Ben doing here, Alice?”

She bit her lip and half shut her
eyes, as if she was sizing Faizel up. Then she turned to him. “Running away
from my husband.”

“Why?” I said.

Dan stood up. “Enough of this shit.
Who cares why she is running away? If her husband had any sense, he’d run away
from
her.
Let’s tie them up again, get through the night then get the
hell out of here.”

Faizel grabbed hold of Dan’s belt,
tugged him back to his seat.

My stomach rumbled, and bile rose up
my throat. I took a deep breath. “Why were you running?” I said.

Alice looked at her son. She put her
hands over his ears.

“My husband has gone mad,” she said.

I nodded. When the outbreak first
happened, I’d seen a lot of people lose their minds. Not everyone was built to
cope with the transition from normal to nightmare, and the only way some people
held on to their mind was by sacrificing the majority of it to madness.

I dragged my chair closer to them.
“You two can’t survive alone. Take us to your husband. Maybe we can help him.”

She shook her head. “No, Torben can’t
be helped. He’s so far gone that there’s no bringing him back.”

I bolted upright. That name. I hadn’t
heard it in a year, and the sound of the syllables sent a cold shiver through
me, made the gunshot scar on my leg sting as if it was fresh. Torben Tusk, the
man hunter.

He’d stalked Justin and me over a
year ago for the sole purpose of killing us. I had a suspicion that he planned
to eat us, but that wasn’t his end game. Torben took joy in the hunt, from
watching someone run and then killing them. He had killed my brother in law,
and he’d put a bullet in my leg.

“You okay Kyle?” said Faizel.

My face was cold. The throbbing in my
temple had disappeared, wiped out from the shock. Faizel looked worried, and
even Alice stared at me with concern in her eyes.

Footsteps moved into the room, and
Justin held out a packet of paracetamol. I threw two in my mouth and swallowed
them back.

“You need one for your eye?” I said.

Alice shook her head. “I’ve had
worse.”

Alice said she was running away from
Torben, so she obviously didn’t know he was dead. I’d killed him a year ago,
during the battle at the farm. I shot him in cold blood because it was a simple
choice between his life and my own.

I wondered if I should tell her. If
she was scared of him, maybe she’d be glad to know he was dead. But then there
was the kid. It took a lot for a kid to hate his father, and I bet Ben still
had some love for Torben. I couldn’t tell them.

Dan stared at me, his head titled and
his eyes squinting as if he knew something. I changed the subject.

“How far have you been travelling,
Alice?”

“Not much further than here. We
walked around some, but we ran out of food. Then we found this farmhouse and I
decided to stay here a while. When you get over the damp smell it’s a palace.”

“Have you heard anything about a
group of infected heading from Manchester?”

She pinched her earlobe between her
fingers and rubbed it. There was a hole where an earring had once been. “Torben
had a radio. We heard a broadcast from Manchester once, but nothing about
infected. It was something about a cure. Torben said it was horseshit. “

“And what do you think?”  I
asked.

She put her arms around Ben’s chest.
“There are lots of university labs in Manchester. Clever people doing clever
things. It’s not impossible that someone’s found a cure.”

I sat back against my chair and my
energy seeped out of me. Outside the sky started to turn black, the last
minutes of daylight draining away like water down a plughole.

Faizel got out of his seat, walked to
the curtains and drew them. “It’s getting late,” he said.

I checked my watch. It was six
o’clock in the evening. Soon it would be pitch black, and the stalkers would
come.

“Let’s get some rest everyone.”

Dan stood up, his hands clenched. His
body shook a little, as though he were a ball of energy. “What about them?”

I smiled at Alice. For now, I’d
forgiven the near concussion she had given me, because I understood why she did
it. She was a mother looking after her son, and we all had the right to protect
the people we loved. Some of us were just better at it than others.

 “They need rest too,” I said.

9

By nightfall the paracetamol kicked
in and my head cleared. A dark lump stuck out from my forehead and I had to
stop myself from pressing it from time to time, but otherwise I felt human
again. I wanted to be useful, so I volunteered for first watch.

I sat on the balcony that stuck out
from the side of the farmhouse. Justin had found a power generator with a few
dregs of fuel left in it, so the house had power. Despite that, the
rainwater-filled Jacuzzi didn’t work. I leant back against the window of the house.

The streets of Stowham were bathed in
darkness. A few infected lurched across the road, woken up by the events of the
afternoon. Thankfully, none of them had followed us to the farmhouse.

The door behind me slid open, and
Justin stepped out onto the balcony. He took a seat beside me.

“You should get some rest, kid,” I
said.

He pulled his knees up to his chest
and hung his head. His face drooped.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “It’s just
Melissa.”

“What about her?”

He scratched his knee. “You think
we’ll make it back?”

“Of course we will.”

He nodded. “I just miss her, I
guess.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. I was
still pissed at him, but I had to remember that deep down, despite everything
he’d seen, he was just a dumb teenager going through his first crush. I changed
the subject.

“I’ve been thinking. I want to tell
Alice about Torben.”

Justin’s eyebrows arched. He swept
the curls of his fringe back from his forehead. “I don’t think that’s a good
idea.”

“I just think she needs to know what
happened to him, maybe it would give her some closure. She needs to know what a
dickhead he was.”

A sliver of the moon peaked from
behind a cloud, and it cast a shard of white light on the balcony. Below, the
faint moans of the infected were carried by the wind. Despite the danger it
posed, the sound made me drowsy. I’d spent years sleeping rough in the Wilds,
using their moans as a lullaby. When I got back to Vasey, I thought I’d done it
for the last time. It was going to be a long night.

Justin tucked his arm behind his head
and leant against it. “I think she already knows what he was like, Kyle. That’s
why she was running from him.”

“She needs to know the truth.”

“Sometimes the truth doesn’t do any
good,” said Justin, in words that sounded far older than he was. Sometimes he
talked sense, and I had no idea where it came from.

I pulled my coat closer to my chin
and tucked it in. “I’ll keep it to myself for now. Listen, you better go and
sleep for a bit,” I said.

Justin got up and opened the sliding
door. “Night Kyle.”

Justin had only been gone a few
minutes when the door opened again.

“Listen, kid, you need to get some –
“

“It’s me Kyle.”

Faizel walked onto the balcony. He
went to the edge and looked down on the village streets below. Stood in front
of me, cast in the moonlight, it was hard not to be impressed by him. Despite
everything he’d been through in the past few days – leaving his family, his
wife not talking to him, killing the dog – he didn’t let the strain show. His
back was straight, his shoulders high.

I reached into my pocket and pulled
out a packet of cigarettes. I put one to my lips and flicked the lighter. The
orange flame wavered in the breeze, and I hesitated before bringing it to the
end of the cigarette. Finally I let the flame fan the tobacco, and took a deep
breath of smoke that shot straight into my lungs. For a minute everything went
fuzzy, and I closed my eyes.

“Those’ll kill you,” said Faizel.

I let out a billow of smoke. “I’ve
got better things to worry about right now.”

He leant against the balcony wall,
his back to the street. His face was shrouded by the night. “I didn’t know you
smoked.”

I flicked ash onto the floor. I
pressed my finger to it and smeared it into the stone, leaving a sooty stain.
“Haven’t had one in twenty years.”

“Then why start now?”

“Better time than any,” I said.
“Found them in the house.”

He turned his head to the east and
then put his hand to his brow as though it would focus his vision. “You can see
Vasey from here.”

I sat up straighter. “Yeah? Take it
they haven’t all packed up and gone?”

“They’ll all be in bed. The place
looks fragile, though. It’s hard to believe those walls keep us safe.”

I took another drag, then coughed. It
tasted like crap. I stubbed the cigarette out onto the floor, screwed up the
packet and threw it across the balcony. “Believe me, those walls are as good as
it gets.”

“I know, Kyle. I’ve been scouting for
Vasey for years, and I’ve spent my fair share of time in the Wilds.”

I remembered back to when I’d first
met Faizel a year ago. I’d been out in the Wilds, alone, and I came across a
wooden shack he and Dan were staying in. It was the dead of night and the
stalkers were coming out, and I needed a place to crash. They offered to let me
stay in the scout shack with them, but despite how much I needed it, I refused.
I didn’t trust anyone back then.

“Why did you come, Faizel?” I asked.
“Your wife wasn’t talking to you. Your kid was crying his eyes out. You didn’t
have to do it.”

Faizel crossed his arms. His shirt
was folded up to his elbows. A long white scar ran along his left arm, as
though the flesh had been seared.

“I didn’t want to leave them. But I
believe in Vasey. I know it’s the only way forward for us, and if we give it
up, then we’ll have nowhere else to go. Sometimes you have to do something you
don’t want, to get something you
do
want.”

A bird flapped its wings above us and
then flew under the glow of the moon. The grass swayed in the fields
surrounding the house, and something barked in the distance. I thought of the
collie again, of its cold, dead eyes and its dismembered head. Sickening as it
was, I admired Faizel for what he’d done. If he hadn’t had killed the dog, we’d
have had a few dozen of infected on us in minutes. It was a horrible thing to
do, but he’d stepped up.

The rumbling sound of a car engine
cut through the silence of the night. Faizel turned round. I got to my feet. My
left leg ached, and standing up so suddenly made my head light. I walked over
to the balcony and leaned over.

A van pulled into the middle of the
high street and stopped. The driver cut the engine, got out and shut the door.
I couldn’t see much of him from here, other than he was of average height and
he wore a black coat that reached to his waist, and the lapels of longer coat
trailed out below. It was white, and looked like some sort of lab coat. He held
a long metal pipe in his right hand.

An infected saw the man and shifted
in his direction, dragging one lame leg behind it and fighting to stay
balanced. As it got closer, the man swung his pipe. It connected at the
infected’s knee, twisting the cartilage so badly that I could almost hear the
sound of the gristle popping. The infected swayed backward, and the man gave it
an awkward kick and sent it to the floor.

There was a sense of panic in his
movements as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a rope. He tied it
around the infected’s arms and legs, staying as far away from its straining head
as he could.  When this was done he opened the back of the van doors,
heaved the infected into the back of the van and then shut them again.

More infected had heard the struggle
by now, and they moved toward him. He got in the driver seat and the engine
came to life. He turned on the headlights and drove away.

Faizel and I had kept quiet out of
instinct, but as we saw the van drive away from Stowham, I turned to him. For a
second his eyes held the faint glimmer of surprise, but then the slate was wiped
and his face lost expression.

“Who the hell was that?” I asked,
knowing that Faizel didn’t have an answer.