Fear the Dead (Book 3) (21 page)

36

The drones of the engines faded to a stop and the sound of the battle
carried through the air. For a second I almost asked Billy to switch the quad bikes
back on. At least the firing of the engines had covered the screams of the men
and women as the infected tore them apart.

Justin lifted his leg over the side of the quad and planted it on the
ground. I walked over to him, calmly at first, but when I was a few feet away I
nearly ran. I stood in front of him and then gave him a hug, squeezing him
until he wheezed.

I dropped him and then stepped back. I wasn’t one for emotion, but the
time felt right. People were dying all around us, and here was my friend, back
after I thought I would never see him again.

Justin flicked his fringe away from his eyes.

“Where’s Melissa?” he said.

“She’s safe.”

Justin looked concerned. “Where is she?”

“With the kids. They’re far enough away.”

Billy stood at the end of his quad. He fiddled with something on the
back of it, reached down and then pulled out his mallet. He gripped it tightly
with one hand and beat the end against his palm. His face was set in a grimace.

“Where did you find him?” I said, still trying to take in the fact that
Justin stood here in front of me.

Billy pointed over towards the woods that hid the quarry.

“I went back to the nest,” he said. “I wanted to burn it, figured I
could get rid of the breeder. But then I heard the horn, and I knew things had
gone to shit here. On the way back, I bumped into this guy. I give him a lift
into town and we picked up an extra quad.”

A woman screeched in the distance. I darted my eyes over to her just in
time to see two infected drag her to the floor and tear chunks out of her
shoulders as her body flopped. The image was a cold shower of reality.

“It’s all fucked,” I said. “There’s too many coming through. Maybe we
better get the bus.”

“No way,” said Ewan.

My forehead started to heat up. “I don’t want to let the fuckers win,
but there’s going to be a hell of a lot of corpses before long.”

“What happened with the dynamite?” said Billy.

Charlie groaned by the fence. He moved forward and tried to sit up but
he winced and sat back. His face was a sheet of ice from the pints of blood
that had drained from him and sprayed over the ground.

“My fault,” he said. “I messed up.”

I shook my head. “He didn’t mess up. We just didn’t have enough time.”

“We’re not leaving,” said Ewan.

I put my hand to my forehead. I felt it start to pound. “Haven’t you
been watching? Look over there. See how many of them there are. Now look at the
hills and see them pouring through. The tap’s been turned on and it’s going to
overflow.”

“So we need to get to the dynamite,” said Billy.

I looked over to the hills. The passage way looked like a hole in an
anthill, where dozens of the insects spilled through.

“Impossible.”

Justin looked at me. For the first time in god knows how long, there
was a light in his eyes.

“I have an idea,” he said.

Ewan rested on his cane. “Go on, boy.”

Justin folded his arms across his chest. “The infected ignore me. I could
walk up to one, spit in its face, and it wouldn’t blink.”

The idea hit me like a punch in the guts. There were too many infected
in the hills for anyone to get through to the dynamite without being lost in
the swarm. I knew where Justin was going with this.

“You’re going to set the dynamite to blow?” I said.

Justin nodded. “Being a freak’s gotta be useful for something.”

37

The darkness crept into the sky as if someone had suddenly dropped a
black sheet over us. The screams of battle raged on, but people started to tire.
One man, his face shocked red with blood, bent over and let out wheezy breaths.
An infected crept behind him, grabbed his shoulders and sunk its teeth into his
back. The man cried out and tried to swing a hammer, but another infected took
hold of him and dragged him down to the floor. His face twisted in agony as the
infected feasted on him, and his screams drifted over the plains.
I watched Justin as he sped on his quad across the plains. So far away, he was
a speck on the horizon drowned in the shadow cast by the hills. His quad
stopped, and he got off it and walked to the dynamite.
Dozens of infected shuffled ahead of him. My heart pounded as I watched him
move closer to them and toward the path. I knew that they wouldn't touch him. I
had seen them ignore him before with my own eyes. But a part of me still
wondered if maybe it was all a cruel trick. Would the infected turn on him,
grab him and tear him apart? My arms felt tense, and I couldn't imagine how
Justin must have felt being enveloped by a crowd of the dead.
Charlie let out a groan behind me. His cheeks dripped with sweat and trickles
of blood ran from the stump that jutted out from his shoulder.
"We need to move him," said Billy.
"Let's get him to the mayor’s office. Lou and Melissa can look after
him."
"Won't that scare the kids?"
"They've got a hell of a lot more to be scared of."
Ewan tapped his cane against his shoulder. If the chaos around us affected him,
he didn't show it.
"He needs to get help," he agreed, "but you two are best on the
battlefield. Let the boy take him on the quad."
He gestured over to Reece, who stared wide eyed at the battlefield. All emotion
had left his face, as if hearing the news of his father had emptied his brain.
"Think you can handle it?" I said to Reece.
Charlie cried out in pain. This shook the teenager out of his stupor.
"What?"
"Can you take Charlie to the mayor’s office?" I said.
"My dad..."
"Reece," I said, not bothering to hide the urgency in my voice.
"There's a time for that. Believe me. But it isn't now. We've got a hell
of a lot of work to do."
An explosion blasted across the plains. At first it was a rumble that blew
along the grass but as it got closer the sounds of the detonation screamed at
us.
Half of the battlefield stopped and stared. For some the second-long of lapse
in concentration cost them dearly, because the infection didn't take heed. One woman
shrieked as an infected bit her neck and tore away a strip of flesh. This
shocked the rest into action, and they heaved their weapons at anything that
came of them. Now, they were outnumbered six to one.
A film of dust in front of the hills hovered in the air and then started to
settle. Rocks tumbled from the sides of the hills and blocked the passageway
like a dam. The stem of infected had been stopped, and it looked like no more
of them would be able to pour onto the plains.

I tried to see Justin, but it was impossible to make him out under the falling
sheet of dust. As the crumbling rocks settled and the air started to clear, I
realised that I couldn’t see him. Where was he? Realisation hit me like a
bullet. Justin was trapped on the wrong side of the explosion.
The plan had worked, but I couldn’t celebrate. Justin was a hero, and he wasn’t
here for me to tell him. But I couldn’t dwell on it. There were still hundreds
of the infected to kill and a rapidly depleting number of people left to do it,
but we had a chance. We’d turned the tap off and now we just had to pull the
plug and let the water drain out.
Adrenaline exploded inside me. I turned to the battlefield, ready to burst into
it and smash as many infected skulls as I could. I would stab them until I
couldn’t move my arms. I wouldn't stop until I was drenched in sweat, my body
drained.
I turned and looked at Billy. "Are you ready?" I said.
Billy stared at the plains. He held up his mallet and tensed his muscles.
"It's about time."
As we walked toward the battlefield, a dozen shrieks pierced the air. Louder
than the groans of the infected, more terrible than the cries of the men and
woman who were torn apart. The shrieks rose above us and seemed to suck the
rest of the noise out of the sky.
 
"Kyle," said Billy, his voice shaking. He stretched his arm out and
pointed to the woods.

I stopped walking. My stomach
turned to liquid, and I felt like my organs were going to slide out of me.  I
looked over to the trees, where an army of stalkers crawled out of the shadows.

38

Nothing has
ever spiked my adrenaline more than the sight of a dozen stalkers slinking
across the open plain. My feet melded to the ground, trapped in place as though
roots had twisted from the mud and wrapped around them. Billy put his hands
behind his head and watched, his eyes wide in desperation.

A man twenty
feet ahead dug the end of his crowbar into the head of an infected. He pulled
it back, wiped it on his jeans and then looked to his left, ready to meet the
next oncoming threat. He realised it wasn’t another infected coming at him but
an army of  stalkers with teeth shining like daggers. His face became a mask of
screams.

The lead
stalker, smaller than the others but with bigger muscles, opened its mouth wide
and shrieked. It was a cry that cut through the air and rained down in shards
that stabbed at the eardrums of anyone unfortunate enough to hear it.

It shook me
out of my daze, unlocked my feet as if the roots had unwrapped and dissolved
into the dirt. I looked at Billy. His clenched jaw stuck out, but his
marble-sized pupils were as black as a winter night sky.

“The plains
are too open. Think the fences could hold them back?” I said.

Billy turned
his head and stared toward the hill passage, which was now a dam of rubble.
Fifty men and women fought on, raising their weapons and smashing them down on
the infected in automatic movements. Some strained their faces in anguish as
they smashed through bone and were splashed by blood. Others lifted their arms
in weaker and weaker arcs like wind-up toys that needed another twist.

Billy turned
to me. He had a look in his eyes as though he stared at me and behind me at the
same time. His body was here, but his mind was somewhere else. It was like the
sight of the stalkers stretched the elastic of his brain to snapping point. We
all had this point inside us, the time when the horrors just became too much to
handle. Maybe Billy’s brain was reaching his. How much pressure would it take
to break it?

“Does
getting behind the fences mean giving up?” he said.

“The only
way we’re giving up is if we stay in the open. It’ll be a slaughter.”

“There’s
only a few hundred infected now. I could handle a dozen on my own.”

It must have
been centuries since the British countryside had been strewn with so many
bodies. The infected piled up in their hundreds, twisted heaps of rotting
torsos and snapped limbs. A survivor, with a weapon and enough space to move,
could kill tens of infected. The danger of the infected was not in the way they
attacked; it was when they caught you in a tight space.  It was when a crowd of
them trapped you, nowhere to go but into their death embrace.

If we stayed
to fight then Billy was right. Given enough time, we could deal with the
infected that had gotten through the hills before the pathway was blown. A
stalker was different. They moved with such speed and agility that open spaces
meant nothing to them, because they could cover it with a single leap. Faced
with a stalker, space was your enemy

“We need to
get behind the fences and regroup. The infected can wait but the stalkers
won’t,” I said.

“So what
now?” said Billy.

I needed a
way to get the attention of the people on the battlefield so that we could
order them behind the fences. With the screams of the dying, groans of the infected
and shrieks of the stalkers, there wasn’t room for anything else. We needed
something loud.

“Get the
spotter to blow the war horn,” I said.

Billy looked
up to the roof top where the spotter sat. The spotter stared out to the east,
toward the woods. Billy waved his hand in the air as if he were trying to hail
a helicopter. The spotter continued to look away from the battlefield as though
he was waiting for something.

“Dumb
bastard,” Billy muttered under his breath, “Look over here.”

“Wait here,”
I said.

“Where are
you going?”

“Just wait.”

I ran across
the plain and back to Bleakholt. I opened the fence and let it slam shut behind
me. My heart worked like a train engine, and my chest grew tight. By the time I
got to the spotter’s building, my lungs felt like they were going to melt and
flood up my throat.

I opened the
front doors and sprinted up the stairs. It was an old furniture shop called
Timber Furniture Land and along the walls were prints of old Dali paintings. As
I ran up the stairs I watched clocks melt over tables and an elephant with
impossibly large legs walk across a desert.  I reached the top and burst
through the fire doors that led to the roof. Outside the nip of the wind lashed
my cheeks. I bent over and sucked in air.

The spotter
span round, rifle raised. He stared through the sights with his finger held
tense on the trigger. After a few seconds, he realised I wasn’t infected.

“What the
hell are you doing up here?” he said.

“I’m Kyle,”
I said, panting.

The spotter
had long black hair swept over his forehead and a thick black beard that grew
on him like moss. His eyes stared through narrow crevices, as though they never
opened fully even when awake. He looked like he’d make a good policeman, with a
stare that seemed to regard everything with a hint of suspicion.

“I know who
you are,” he said. “But shouldn’t you be fighting?”

I couldn’t
help the anger that started with a bubble in my chest and then rose like a
poison air up my windpipe. He had the cheek to question me, when he hadn’t even
been looking at the battlefield. I couldn’t believe the incompetence of him.
What the hell had he been doing?

“Take a look
that way,” I said, pointing at the plain. “Notice anything different?”

He followed
my eyes toward the battlefield and shrugged his shoulders.

“I know.”

“Then what
the fuck were you looking at?”

His eyes
narrowed further until they looked like specs of coal.

“Ewan had me
watch the side of town. Said he would give me a signal when it was time to go.”

“What do you
mean, ‘time to go’?”

As I stared
to the east side of town, a bus turned a corner and rumbled to a stop. Lumpy
brown bags were secured to the top with rope. Across the side was a narrow
strip of paper advertising a movie that had been released sixteen years ago. 
The top deck seemed to be full of tents, sleeping bags and assorted jars and
containers. Twenty people sat on the bottom deck. Most of them looked down at
their laps, pointedly ignoring what was happening on the plains.

“What’s
going on?” I said.

The spotter
blinked. “I think you know.”

My throat shrank
so much that air struggled to get through. Ewan was running away, I realised.
After  all his bullshit about doing the best for Bleakholt, he was saving his
own arse. 

I took a
step toward the spotter. He treaded back and raised his gun at me. The green
sling slapped against his shoulder.

“Best you
don’t move,” he said.

I knew that
one squeeze of the trigger would send a shard of lead through me, but somehow I
didn’t care. It was if a giant strip of sandpaper had scratched away at my
insides and left my fear as a pile of dust on the floor. What threat did a gun
have when death waited in every direction?

I stepped
forward again. The spotter jerked his arms and pointed the gun at my head. I
moved until I was only an inch away from him. I reached forward, took hold of
the gun by the barrel and pulled it away from him. The spotter, faced with the
prospect of actually having to kill a man, froze.

I turned the
gun around. With the barrel now pointed at his own face, the spotter moved. He
bared his teeth and made a grab for the gun. I swung the barrel and caught him
on the mouth. There was a crack as the metal smashed his front teeth. He
collapsed to the floor, blood gushing out of his gums.

I slung the
rifle over my shoulder and walked to the edge of the roof to where he had
stood. The horn was propped up against the roof ledge. It was an old war horn
made of weathered ivory. Three iron bands were wrapped around it in intervals,
with swirling patterns chipped into them. It belonged in a museum. It seemed
that a previous mayor of Bleakholt had been something of a collector.  The
ivory felt frail enough to fall apart in my hands, and I was amazed that it
could make such a booming sound.

I looked over
to the plains where the survivors fought. The infected dropped to the floor,
their broken heads slamming against the dirt. A man edged backwards, away from
two infected. He stumbled over something and fell onto his back. The infected
followed, landed on his chest and ripped at his flesh as he screamed.

I put the
horn to my mouth, filled my chest and then blew.  The sound was louder than I
could have imagined. It felt like it smashed through my eardrums and then swam
in my brain, squeezing it until all I could do was drop the horn to the floor.

I put my
hand to my ears. A pulsating wave ripped through my ear canal and twisted
around my head. The sound around me faded as if driven out by some unseen
forced. A stabbing pain poked at my head and twisted my stomach.

A hand
grabbed my shoulders and hauled me back. My first thought was stalkers, but as
I managed to spin round I saw that it was the spotter. He stood shakily on his
feet, blood dripping from his mouth. He pointed to his ears.

“You should
wear plugs when you blow that,” he said.

My vision
lurched from side to side like a boat rocking in a raging sea. The world around
me was drowned out, and sound seemed to travel slowly as though it waded
through water. My eardrums throbbed in nauseous pulses that made me want to
empty my stomach.

I glanced
behind me for a second and looked at the plain. The fighters looked up at me.
They’d heard the signal, and they knew that they had to retreat. Some of them
started to run toward the fences.

The
stalkers, seeing their pray fleeing, crouched back. Those within distance leapt
on the retreating men and women. A stalker landed on the back of a blonde
haired woman, and the weight of it sent her sprawling to the floor. Her mouth
opened wide, but I couldn’t hear the scream that I imagined left it as the
stalker tore a mouthful of flesh from the back of her neck. The woman thrashed
against the ground, but another bite stilled her movements. Her blood sprayed
across the ground like paint from the end of Jackson Pollock's brush.

The spotter
took a step toward me. He tried to stare deep into my eyes, but for a second
his glance darted toward the gun. I tried to bend down to get it but a well of
agony dripped from my eardrums. I put my hand to my head and felt a sticky liquid
running from my ears.

The spotter stuck
his boot out and connected with my ankle. I cried out but I managed to stay
balanced. A channel of pain ran from my ear and into my head. I took a deep
breath and tried to ignore the lurching of my stomach.

A fist flew
at my face. I tried to duck from it but with two busted eardrums my balance was
gone, and my nose cracked under the force of his knuckles. Blood gushed down my
lips and over my neck. Another fist connected, this time with my chin. Fuzzy
spots covered my eyes and I tipped over onto my back like a felled tree.

As soon as I
slammed onto the floor I acted on instinct. I reached to my right and felt the
cool metal of the rifle against my fingers. I gripped it, swung it to the
spotter and pointed it at his chest, ignoring the pain that ripped through me.
My heart jarred as I pulled my finger tight against the trigger. It moved back
slowly, as if it were reluctant to fire. As it slid further and further back
time seemed to slide to a stop. I stared deep into the spotter’s face and
expected fear. Instead, his narrow black eyes were calm. The trigger slid all
the way back and the gun clicked.

The spotter
smiled. He spoke to me, but the words drifted at such a low volume that my
battered eardrums only picked out a few of them.

“Ran out of
…weeks ago. Ewan told me….up here and keep pointing it at …. Make sure people
saw me doing it. He said it … them feel safe.”

He reached
into his coat and pulled out a long knife with a worn yellow handle. The silver
of the blade was scratched and dull. He pointed it at me.

“He also
told me to … … for you,” he said.

As the
spotter moved cautiously toward me, his blade pointed at my stomach, I moved
into a crouch. I sprang to my feet and drove the barrel of the gun at the
spotter’s neck. I roared as the end of it drove into his throat and cracked
through his windpipe.

The spotter
clutched his throat tightly as if to stop the air from seeping out. His mouth
opened wide and then clenched shut like a fish suffocating on dry land. Blood
trickled from his neck, ran over his hands and dripped onto the floor. He fell
onto his back. He held one hand on his neck and stretched the other toward me,
as if there was something I could do.

Below, on
the plains, people started to reach the fences. Their faces were shot white
with panic, their eyes glazed like trench soldiers with shell shock. Billy held
the fences open and herded them in as though he were a shepherd guiding
frightening sheep away from the wolves.