Fear the Dead (Book 3) (6 page)

“I’m
impressed,” said Melissa.

“Don’t stoke
her ego,” said Billy.

Lou gave him
a glance, and then shot her eyes straight at the floor.

“It sounds
good,” I agreed.

I meant it.
I wanted more than anything for this to be true. I wanted the promise of
Bleakholt to be real so much that my chest hurt. But I knew what waited out in
the Wilds; the infected desperate to feast on flesh, stalkers creeping under
the twilight.  It made any kind of hope hard to cling to, like trying to stay
in a dream when your body wants to wake you up.

Victoria
leaned forward and straightened her bony shoulders. She probably weighed less
than eight stone, but her posture made her seem bigger than she really was.

“So with
that in mind,” she said, “you’ll understand why you can’t stay here. Our
resources are too precious, the balance too fragile. And we’ve already got a
stranger problem that I’ve yet to sort out.”

“What kind
of stranger problem?” said Alice.

Billy took a
step forward. “Bunch of travellers turned up outside the settlement a month
ago. Fuck knows how they got here, but we can’t get rid of them.”

“When I was
younger, I worked in a hotel kitchen,” said Victoria. “We had a rat problem.
They came day after day scavenging food, and no matter how much poison we left
down they always came back. Once we had a business delegation in the hotel on a
conference. They’d ordered a grand dinner for all fifty of them. It looked like
a royal feast. But the rats got into the food. They squirmed through the
spaghetti, gnawed on the meat. They ruined everything.”

“You should
have joined a union,” said Lou.

Victoria
ignored the sarcasm. “Once people see an easy meal, there’s nothing that can
turn them away. The strangers that turned up at our gates expected sanctuary.
They expected us to feed them, no questions asked. They didn’t even stop to
think that we had our own people to worry about.”

I started to
get an idea of who these strangers were. I hoped I was wrong. “Who are they?” I
asked.

Victoria
shook her head. “Doesn’t matter, we’ll deal with them somehow. Only, I can’t do
it by force. I just won’t do that. I know they’re people, but we still can’t
support them.”

Billy
screwed his face up. “I could get rid of them in a day if you’d let me.”

Victoria
nodded. “I know you could, Billy. But we’d be cleaning blood of the streets for
weeks if we let you have your way.”

She leant
forward on the table, crossed her arms. She held my gaze, her stern expression
locked onto mine.

“But I hope
you’ll understand that you and your friends can’t stay, Kyle. I’m afraid you
will have to leave. The boy should be better in a day or two, and once he is,
I’m afraid it is back into the Wilds for you.”

9

Dawn
cracked, and weak sunlight spilt through the sky. The rise of the sun marked
another night survived, and it should have been a celebration. After hearing Victoria’s
words, I didn’t feel like throwing a party.

I’m
afraid it’s back into the Wilds for you.

Staying in
Bleakholt was never on my agenda. I knew that the infected would catch up to
us, whether it took them a week or a month. I looked round the room. Alice
stood in front of the horrible horse painting, wincing when she put weight on
her injured leg. Justin’s expression was blank. Melissa’s face was grey, her
eyes tired. I thought of Ben, wherever he was in Bleakholt, recovering from
exhaustion. Our group couldn’t go back into the Wilds. Not yet. It would be the
death of us.

Victoria
drummed her fingers on the table again and waited for a response.

 “Look,” I
said. “Let us stay awhile. We’re running on empty here, we need a bit of
respite.”

Victoria
shook her head. “Sorry folks. I gave charity to strangers once, and now we
can’t get shut of them. I’ve got my own people to worry about.”

“You don’t
know what’s out there,” said Melissa, and started to get to her feet.

Justin put
his hand on her shoulder, pulled her back into her seat. “You’re not going to
persuade her,” he said.

Victoria
pushed her chair out a little. “I know too well what’s out there. There’s the
infected. If that’s not enough, we’ve also got the stalkers to worry about.”

Billy crossed
his arms. “Loads of the fuckers around here,” he said.

Lou looked
at me and arched her eyebrows as if to say ‘do something’. Victoria didn’t seem
like the kind of cold hearted person who could let someone die. She wasn’t like
Moe. But then, she was leader of this settlement, and I knew too well what it
took to be a leader. You had to make sacrifices. For me, it had meant giving up
a little bit of my conscience and killing a man named Whittaker. I hated doing
it, but it had been for the greater good. Victoria had made an error in letting
strangers stay in Bleakholt. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake again no
matter how bad it made her feel.

There had to
be a way to persuade her. What did we have to offer? We were seasoned
survivors, and we knew how things worked in the Wilds. Maybe that would be
useful to them. Then again, Bleakholt had people like Billy in it. He looked
like he could rip a stalker apart with his hands. So we needed something else.

A bookcase
ran the length of one wall of the room. The wood was stained dark brown like
the sides of a casket, and the shelves sagged underneath the weight of the
books. The books were of varied subjects, and they were organised in categories
like a mini-library. Fiction, photography, politics, science.

Science.
That was it.

I leant
forward. “You said you had a scientist here?”

“Yeah,” said
Victoria, and opened her tobacco pouch again. I noticed that the tip of her
index finger was stained brown. “Charlie Sturgeon. He worked with the Scottish
government researching renewable energy. But his forte is biology.”

I nodded.
“We have something that might interest him.”

“What’s that
then?”

I looked at
Billy. “Did you keep my pack when you put me in the fence area?”

He nodded.

“Then you
better go get it. Because we’ve got the cure for the infection.”

***

I told
Victoria about the notes we’d taken from Whittaker. He was an insane biology
student who had taken it upon himself to find a cure for the infection. He had
injected Justin with a chemical solution that he thought was the cure, and I
still didn’t know what it had done to my friend. After I murdered Whittaker we
took his research notes, thick wads of paper covered in the scientist’s
scrawls. Inside those pages, there was the cure. Whittaker had told me he was
sure of it, and I had started to believe him. Mad as he was, he had researched
the infection more thoroughly than anyone I had ever met.

Billy
fetched my pack and dug out the papers. He passed them to Victoria, and we
stared in silence as she read. Lou rapped her knuckles on the desk. Alice
sighed, shifted her weight back onto her good leg.

“Want my
seat?” I said.

She shook
her head. “Your leg’s worse than mine. At least mine will heal.”

Victoria put
the papers down, pushed them away from her.

“Okay,” she
said. “You can stay for a few days while Charlie has chance to look these over.
You have leave to walk around town, but don’t be disturbing anybody. Most of us
have jobs to do.”

She looked
up at Billy. “Make sure they all get ration cards.”

Billy
nodded.

“Sounds like
the Blitz,” I said.

“It’s the
only way to keep track of who gets what. The cards will get you two meals a
day. It’s not Michelin star stuff. Our lovely Scottish gruel in the morning,
some meat and veg in the evening.”

“Thanks,” I
said. It wasn’t the most gracious offer in the world, but it was the best we
were going to get. We had to stay on Victoria’s good side until the rest of the
group recovered. Once they felt better, I’d be able to persuade them to hit the
road again and get as far north as possible.

Victoria
patted Whittaker’s notes with her palm. “These are ours now, obviously.
Charlie’s going to see if there’s any merit to them.”  She looked up at Justin.
“And you, lad, I want you to go checked out by him.”

Justin
flinched. “Why?”

“Don’t think
I haven’t noticed your eyes. You have the same look as the infected. I don’t
think you’re a danger to us, but other people round here don’t think as clearly
as me. I want you checked out.”

Justin
turned to me. “Kyle?”

I nodded.
“Just humour them.”

Melissa
stood up and looked Victoria in the eyes. She showed no trace of fear. “I’m
going with him.”

Victoria
smiled. “I was crazy about a bloke once too. You go, love. Knock yourself out.”

Alice walked
forward, leaned over the desk. With her strong arms and big frame she looked
intimidating, and in a fight she would turn Victoria into a punch bag. Victoria
didn’t seem worried.

“I want to
see my son,” said Alice.

“Billy will
take you when he gets back.”

Alice raised
her hand in the air and brought it down on the desk. The loud thud made Melissa
jerk back.

Victoria
gave a smile. “That’s a mistake for me to learn from. Never keep a mother from
her son. Step outside and talk to Steve minding the door. He’ll take you to
Ben.”

“Thanks,”
said Alice, though her face was cold.

Victoria
stood up and patted down her trousers as though they were covered in dust. “Oh
and Alice? After you’ve seen how well we’ve treated him, I want you to come
back and see me. I’ve got a job for you.”

Alice looked
confused. “What kind of job?”

“You’ve got
something about you. There’s a group of fence workers who could use a stern
hand to get them to shift their arses.”

“We done?” I
asked.

“We are,”
said Victoria.

I got out of
the chair, turned to leave.

“Kyle?”

I span
round.

Victoria’s
face was set in a grimace. “Don’t fuck about. I never make the same mistake
twice.”

***

My body
ached and my limbs felt like weights were dragging them down. Billy showed me
to my sleeping quarters, which turned out to be the second bedroom of a
townhouse. The first thing I did was slump to the bed and sink so hard into the
mattress it felt like I was melting into it.

By the third
day I got sick of sleeping. I had averaged twelve hours a day, and most of the
time I couldn’t get out of bed save to eat or go to the bathroom. Every so
often nightmares broke my sleep. I saw half a million hollow-eyed corpses
walking toward me, their feet pounding on the ground and booming out like a
bomb. Their groans drifted across the plains like a sick orchestra, and the
smell clawed its way up my nostrils and tugged on my gag reflex.

I woke up in
the middle of the afternoon and unzipped my sleeping bag. Pale light crept in
through a gap in the curtains. My body felt fine but I had a heavy tiredness in
my head. I dressed and went outside. I had been shut away too long, and I
needed to see what the rest of the group were doing.

The air was
tinged with frost and the cold seeped into my bones. I zipped up my coat to my
chin and felt the wind blast my face. The streets of Bleakholt were almost
empty. A man walked past me with a bin liner in one hand and a mechanical fork
in the other, stopping from time to time to pick up litter. The streets were
free of rubbish, but dirt lined the cracks between the cobblestones. The
windows of the buildings were covered by a film of grime, and their stonework
was blasted with dust. The smell of compost weighed heavy in the air and
reminded me of the rot in my nightmares.

Every so
often I passed people on the street. Some nodded, but most ignored me and went
on their way. Nobody idled in the street; everyone had a place to be. Victoria
kept things tight and gave everyone a purpose. The men and women of Bleakholt
were as cold as the air that blew through the streets, but it was because they
were practical.

I reached
the house where I knew Lou was staying. It was a two-storey cottage that looked
like it had been built when Queen Victoria sat on the throne. The windows were
shut save one on the ground floor, and the curtains were drawn.

I hadn’t
seen Lou since the meeting with Victoria. I knew it was because I had slept
most of the time, but it was strange that she hadn’t come to see me. Something
had happened in Victoria’s office. There had a curious exchange of glances
between her and Billy that I had seen despite their attempts to hide it.

I stopped
outside the front door. Lifted up my hand and prepared to knock. Then I
stopped. I heard hushed voices sneak out through the open window.

“You’ve
gotta keep it together for fuck’s sake,” said Lou.

“I wished to
hell you’d never come here,” said a man’s voice. It was Billy.

“Well you’re
going to have to get over it.”

“Do they
know?”

“Who?”

“The people
you’re travelling with.”

I heard a
bang, as though something heavy dropped on the floor. Then Lou spoke. “Look, we
did what we had to do. It was either them or us, you know that. Would you
rather be dead?”

There was
silence. Then Billy’s voice. “Yeah. Sometimes, I’d rather be dead.”

I stepped
away from the door, careful to avoid making any noise. I’d always known there
was something Lou wasn’t telling us. We all had secrets in our past, but Lou
had something heavy in hers.

***

I went to
see the gardens before the daylight drained away. Victoria hadn’t lied when she
bragged about the size of them. There were acres of ploughed soil with
vegetables springing out. Onions, leeks, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage.
There was enough to supply a supermarket. It seemed like they had enough food
to last them the winter, and come summer they would rotate the crops and get
other things growing.

Workers
filled the fields. Some picked vegetables from the ground and put them in
baskets. Others turned the soil, dug drainage holes or spread compost. The
whole place was a sea of colour; brown soil, lush green leaves, orange carrot
stalks. The only dull colours were on the faces of the Bleakholt workers, who
wore stern expressions on top of grey skin.

I stood and
watched the people work, and I couldn't help feeling impressed. It was
everything I had envisaged back in Vasey and more. When I had started the crop
growing programme in Vasey, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.  I learned
on the job and made mistakes. Here, they had expertise. I guessed there had to be
more than a few farmers putting their skills into making this work. Maybe this
really was salvation after all.

I walked
away from the gardens and back to the town centre, letting the compost smell
fade behind me. Drops of rain pattered from the sky and landed on my face and
my coat. Darkness seeped into the sky and made it look like coffee. When I got
to the centre I saw the statue and the dried–up fountain. I heard voices shout.

There was a
crowd of people, some stood on one side, and others stood across from them. On
one side the people looked clean and well fed. On the other, the people were
gaunt and they wore dirty clothes. Their faces twisted in anger. I got closer
and heard some of the gaunt people shout.

“Selfish
bastards”

“Fucking
hogs.”

“You’re
letting us die.”

They looked
painfully thin. Their bony arms seemed like twigs wrapped in blankets. They
stared at the Bleakholt people with dead eyes, and their sick-looking skin
reminded me of the infected.