Fear the Dead (Book 3) (7 page)

Despite how
weak they appeared, they looked like they were ready to riot. Some held
rudimentary weapons in their hands; chunks of wood, bars of metal. I stopped in
my tracks. My heart hammered. As I scanned their faces, I recognised some of
them.

Realisation
shot through me. These starved-looking people were from Vasey. They were the
ones who had abandoned the rest of Vasey to their fates with the stalkers.
Seeing them was bad enough, but a worse thought hit me and took the breath out
of my chest. These were the strangers Victoria had talked about. They were the
ones who left Vasey, and if they were here, then that must mean that Moe was
too.

10

The echoes
of my boots bounced off the steps leading up to Victoria's office. A guard
waited at the top, a baseball bat in his hand. He eyed me with suspicion and
tightened his grip around the bat. He straightened his back as if standing to
attention.

“Need to see
Victoria,” I said.

He gave a
tap on the wooden door.

“I told you
not to bother me,” she replied.

“Got one of
the strangers here to see you. The one with the beard and the gimpy leg.”

A pause,
then “Let him in.”

He opened
the door. I walked through, heard it shut behind me. I expected to see Victoria
engrossed in some serious occupation. Making plans, deciding strategies, I
didn’t know what. Instead, she stood at the window with a canvas in front of
her and an easel in her hand. A white apron covered her clothes. She didn’t
look at me. Instead she tickled her paintbrush into a blob of paint and drew a
faint line on the canvas.

She looked
out of the window from time to time, then back at her painting, as though she
were illustrating the landscape in front of her. Only, instead of the grey
streets of Bleakholt, the dull winter sky, the dirt-cracked cobblestones, she
painted a scene of colour. Sunlight pouring from the sky and bathing the
streets. Happy faces, children running, a dog jumping with a grin on its face.
The buildings and the streets were of Bleakholt, but it was from a different era.
As though she were painting how Bleakholt had looked like in better times.

If it were
me painting, I’d have needed just black and white paint. The streets would be a
shade of grey, the buildings greyer. Dark faces, glum and angled at the ground.
Maybe a trace of red to blotch the pavements. Red was the only colour I saw
these days; blood seeping out of a wound, spraying from a torn throat,
dribbling out of a bite mark-ridden arm. I was never any good at symbolism.

She put the
easel on her desk and took off her apron. Underneath she wore her sleeveless
jacket, and her muscles bulged from her well-toned arms.

“Kyle,” she
said. “Didn’t expect to see you. Decided to move on?” she said.

I shook my
head. “My guys aren’t ready just yet.”

She walked
behind her desk, sat down. She took out her tobacco pouch. I wondered where she
got it from. With the rate she smoked, she couldn’t have much of a supply left.

“Want one?”
she said.

“I quit.”

She grinned.
“Doesn’t seem to be any sense in denying oneself the small pleasures these
days. None of us are going to be collecting our pension.”

She gestured
to a chair in front of the desk. I sat down, sank my weight into it. Despite
all the sleep I’d been getting, I felt exhausted. My mind wouldn’t stop
turning, wouldn’t stop thinking about what was coming for us.

She lit the
cigarette and let the smoke rise. My nose twinged. I couldn’t tell which smell
was worse, the sickly compost that hung ever-present in the air, or the sweet
tobacco that made me want to reach out and grab the cigarette.

“You can
only stay a few more days, you know,“ she said.

I shifted in
the chair. “That’s what I came to speak to you about.”

She looked
down and the desk. She thought about something, then sighed. “Look, Kyle. I’ll
be blunt. I made a mistake letting the strangers camp outside Bleakholt. I’m
going to deal with them, but it will be tough. There will likely be violence,
and I can’t bring myself to give the go ahead just yet. You on the other hand,
will be easier to get rid of. There’s only a few of you.”

“I don’t
want to stay,” I said. “That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

Something
rumbled outside. I looked out of the window. Billy drove a quad bike down the
cobbled roads, his arms tense on the handles, smoke trailing from the exhaust.

“Spill it,”
said Victoria.

I sighed. I
felt like a broken record, I’d had this conversation so many times with so many
people. Most didn’t want to hear it. But I had to try.

“Me and my
group are leaving in a few days. And not because you’re kicking us out. We were
going to leave anyway once we’d gotten our shit together. It’s not safe here.”

A grin
spread on her lips. “If you know somewhere safer, I’d love to hear about it.”

“It’s not
the place. It’s what’s headed toward it. Nowhere is safe.”

I told her
about the half a million infected who were headed north. An unstoppable march
of the undead that eviscerated any living thing they came across. I told her
what happened to Vasey. How we’d travelled for weeks and how we’d keep on
travelling still. The wave of infected would just keep walking, because they
had nothing stopping them. They were driven by the instinct to feed, and they
didn’t have the human trappings of needing to rest. If anything was inevitable
in this world, it was the fact that they would eventually reach us.

Victoria
breathed out a trail of smoke. She ground the cigarette into the ashtray. She
wiped her ash-covered fingers on the wooden desk. If what I had said worried
her, she sure as hell didn’t show it.

“What do you
suggest?” she said.

“That you
gather up what provisions you can. Get all your people together. Leave
Bleakholt, and go north.”

I said the
words, but I knew they wouldn’t have any effect. I had to try, for the sake of
my conscience.

“And then
what?”

“Then
nothing.”

“We just
keep walking north with no aim and no place to go like alcoholic tramps after a
litre of cider?”

I nodded.
“It’s the only way to stay ahead of them.”

“Seems like
we’d be on borrowed time.”

I leant
forward. “That’s all the time we’ve got these days,” I said.

A silenced hung.
Victoria stared out of the window, tapped her chewed fingernails on the desk.
Outside, the litter-man walked down the street with his bin liner. Figures
moved on the fields in the distance. Grey clouds hung overhead, ready to
splatter the crops with rain.

“We’re never
going to leave,” said Victoria. “This is the only place that will ever be a
home. I was like you, you know. Before I got here, I wandered place to place,
foraging for food, living one day to the next. Every morning I’d look down at
my ribs and measure how much they stuck out. I joined groups, watched them get
torn apart. An endless cycle of death. There’s no life out there, Kyle. Only
running and survival. The only way to live is to take a stand.”

With that,
she stood up. She walked to the window, stood next to her canvas.

“Join me
here a sec,” she said.

I got up,
stood next to her. I looked at the bright, happy scene on the canvas and
compared it to the grey reality outside, a colourless landscape almost metallic
in its coldness. This was real life, and the canvas was just a dream world.
Victoria pointed at the west side of the town.

“See that
building with the grey playground? Hopscotch painted on it? Children running?
It was a school before the outbreak, and it’s still a school now.”

I nodded.

She carried
on. Her finger drifted east, wavered over the field. “We’ve got enough food
growing to see us through the next few years.” Her hand moved even further
east. “And the buildings with solar panels on the roof? They’re going to keep the
lights running. We’ve got power. Education. Food.”

She looked
at me. There was life in her eyes, a hint of a smile at the corners of her
mouth. “We’ve got a life here, Kyle. You won’t find that anywhere else.”

It all
sounded too good to be true. Ever since the outbreak, that’s all we had ever
wanted. I remembered the first few years after the outbreak when Clara and I
lived in the Wilds, avoiding the infected by day and stalkers by night. Closing
my eyes for sleep and wondering if it would be the last time. Waking up with my
forehead mottled in sweat, a cold chill in my body. Clara with her head on my
chest, her eyes flickering from a dream or a nightmare. Nowhere was safe, back
then. A place like Bleakholt would have been paradise.

I looked at
Victoria’s canvas again and I saw it for what it really was. The happy scene,
children playing, people living their lives. It wasn’t a painting of some
golden past. She was planning Bleakholt’s future. I could tell that she was the
kind of woman who would stop at nothing to get it. She’d let her own body burn
out in the effort to make a future for everyone.

I couldn’t
ask Alice to leave here. She had Ben to think about, and the kid needed some
stability. Justin and Melissa would eventually want to settle down, and this
seemed like the kind of place to do it. And Lou, well I didn’t know what the
hell she wanted or what was going on with her.

Victoria
said we could only stay a few days. There was no way the wave of infected would
make her abandon Bleakholt. So now I had to convince her to let us stay. I owed
it to Alice and the others, because until now, I’d let them down. A part of me
ached for Victoria’s vision to be true.

“Listen,
Victoria,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I know you
don’t want us to stay. I get that you need to look after your own people. I
don’t want to stay here either, because I’m still not convinced this place is
still going to be standing when the wave hits. But if you let the rest of my
group stay, I’ll help you prepare for it. Build defences, try and make sure the
infected can’t destroy you.”

Victoria put
her hand to her chin, then turned and looked outside. The wind kicked up a gust
of dust, sent a tin can clanging down the street. She opened her mouth to say
something, but there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,”
she said.

A man
entered.  He looked to be in his forties. Wide-rimmed train-spotter glasses
that looked like they were cut from the bottom of milk bottles. He wore a smart
shirt and trousers, and shoes that had somehow seen a polish recently. There
was a knife in the loop of his belt which made him seem like a business man on
a camping trip. His knuckles were misshapen, his shoulders stocky. The mark of
a fighter.

“Ewan,” said
Victoria. “How nice to see you.” She didn’t do a good job of hiding the scorn
from her voice.

“Victoria,” he
grunted. His voice sounded like it was filtered through a hundred cigarettes.
He walked to the desk and ignored the chairs in front of it. Instead he walked
behind it and sat in Victoria’s chair. He put his feet up on the desk and leant
back, as if he was challenging her.

“Your shoes
might be polished but they better stay on the floor,” said Victoria.

He slid his
feet off the desk and let them thud on the floor.

“Spotters
have found something,” he said. “Fifty miles east, near Ardroath. Looks like a
Grouse factory.”

Victoria
rolled her eyes. “So?”

“Think we
better check it out. Would be good for morale, get a bit of decent whisky
flowing.”

I looked out
of the window, tried to see what he was talking about. Beyond Bleakholt, all I
could see were the giant hills. From here they seemed to stretch to the sky.
Folds cut across them like wrinkles in skin, and the rocks jutted out from the
grassy knolls. Through the centre, I could just about make out the passage way
that cut through the middle. It was wide enough for a car, but not much else
would be able to get through. It was the only direct route to Bleakholt, and it
seemed that the only other way to get here was to take a detour at least a
couple of dozen miles long.

Victoria
leant against the window and put her hand to her chin. Liver-spots dotted her
hands.

“Not worth
it. It’d take too much fuel, and we haven’t scouted that area properly. God
knows what’s waiting there.”

Ewan shook
his head. Gave a slimy grin. “You know best, Victoria.”

He stood up.
He was six feet tall, but the heels on his shoes gave him at least an inch of
that height.

“Guess I’ll
tell the fellas that they can’t have their whisky because you don’t think it’s
worth it. Shame, a bit of morale would have gone a long way. Guess that doesn’t
matter to you.”

Victoria
straightened up, took a step forward. Her face was a sea of calm, but her
fingers were curled into her palms, and I could see the nail of her index
finger digging into her skin.

“How about
you leave morale concerns to me, and get on with your job? Or is it too much
for you to handle?”

“I can
handle the fences just fine. You’ll never see a crack in them.” He nodded at
me. “Hope you don’t have a taste for a tipple of the golden nectar, stranger.
Because you won’t get it here.”

He walked to
the door. Before he left, he turned round. This time his face was a sneer, one
that he didn’t make any effort to hide.

“Keep up the
excellent work Victoria,” he said, contempt dripping over his words. He walked
out of the door and let it slam shut behind him.