Fear the Dead (Book 3) (8 page)

Victoria let
out a sigh. Her shoulders sagged a little. A drop of blood trickled from her
palm from where her nail had dug too hard and pierced the skin.

“Who was
that?” I said.

Victoria
took a deep breath and then straightened up again. The tension left her. “Ewan
Judah. A contemptuous little shit who has ideas above his station. He wants my
seat, and he doesn’t make much of a show to hide it.”

She walked
to her desk and opened a drawer. She took out a roll of toilet paper, tore a
piece off and then brushed her chair with it. She sat down, the leather
creaking as she sunk into it.

“Do me a
favour, Kyle. Go and see Charlie.”

“Charlie?”

“He’s the
scientist I mentioned. He’ll tell you about our stalker problem.”

11

A stalker hung from a metal hook that pierced the skin just above its
neck. Black blood dripped onto the floor from a cut that ran across its chest
and over its belly and stopped at its groin. It looked like a pie that someone
had sliced through the middle and allowed the sloppy insides to slide out. 

Charlie Sturgeon’s laboratory was once a restaurant kitchen but he’d
customised it to fit his needs. Formaldehyde-filled beakers lined the shelves.
Next to them were jars containing pickled body parts that I guessed had come
from stalkers. Blood stains covered a metallic counter that was once used to
prepare food.  It was more of a slaughter house than a kitchen. Stalker flesh
was scattered around at random, and blood stains, both wet and dry, covered
every surface. Even Whittaker's lab had been cleaner than this.

Charlie stood next to a fridge with a giant metal door. I didn’t even
want to think what was in it. He wore a lab coat that was in the middle of a
battle between the original white of the fabric and the blood stains that
covered it. It was half and half now, but the white would soon lose the fight.
It made him look like an abattoir worker.

“Lift your head up a little,” he said, and clicked on a torch.

Justin sat in front of him, his hair ruffled and his shoulders sagging.
Melissa leant against a metal worktop and watched the two men intently.

Justin looked up at me. He nodded. “Kyle,” he said.

Charlie moved away from Justin and stood straight. He put the torch
back in his pocket, and rubbed a smear of blood across his chest in the
process, though I had no idea where it had come from. It was as though
Charlie’s skin secreted it, and he constantly had to wipe it on his coat. His
eyes poured over me as if scanning for data. He lifted his hand and ran it
through his slick hair, spreading blood all over his forehead.

“Can I help you?” he said.

I was expecting him to sound like Whittaker, the deranged biology
student who I had to kill. Whittaker had been kidnapping people in the Wilds
and injecting them with his ‘cures’. Charlie's voice and tone couldn't have
been more different. Despite his blood-soaked appearance, warmth backed his
voice and his smile looked genuine.

‘How’s Justin?” I said.

“I’m fine,” said Justin. “You don’t need to talk about me like I’m not
here.”

I nodded. “Sorry, kid.”

Charlie put his hand on Justin’s shoulder. “We’re pretty much done
here.”

Justin got up and stood next to Melissa. She wrapped her arms around
him immediately and squeezed him tight as if the few minutes separation had
been too much. Charlie walked over to a sink and turned the tap on. Water
dribbled out and pattered against the chrome surface. He spoke over his
shoulder.

“Did Vicky send you?” he asked.

“Vicky?”

Charlie grinned. “She’d go mad if she knew I called her that. Let’s
keep this between us.”

“Yeah she sent me,” I said. “She wanted me to talk to you about a
stalker problem.”

He walked to a trolley that stood next to a wall. It was the kind that
would have been used to wheel out a large meal or dessert to the dining area of
the restaurant. He pulled it back and turned, the wheels squealing. He guided
it underneath the stalker that hung from the hook. He moved onto his tiptoes,
strained to reach the hook that sunk into the stalker’s skin, but he was an
inch short of grabbing it.

“Get that for me?” he asked, his face turning red with the strain.

The stalker’s skin sagged from the loss of blood, and there was a
hollow cavity in its chest from where Charlie had removed its organs. Its face
hadn’t changed in death. Its teeth were still sharp enough to chew through
bone, its incisors capable of tearing through flesh with ease. I wondered what
it would feel like to get bitten by one, to feel two rows of teeth ripping my
skin apart.

“Don’t worry, he’s quite dead,” said Charlie.

There was no trace of death in its eyes. They were completely black,
though its pupils were a shade darker and seemed to swim in the eyeball. They
looked alert, as if they could snap on me at any minute. I expected the stalker
to jerk alive and pull itself off the hook. Even without organs they made me
shudder.

The stink of blood was thick in the air. It reminded me of visiting the
butcher’s shop as a kid and breathing the sickly smell of minced beef while mum
bought our week’s meat. Even worse, once, in the Wilds, I found a house. It
seemed empty. I went upstairs and opened the bathroom door. The sour iron smell
of coagulated blood hit me and made me stumble back, gagging. The homeowner had
crawled into the bathtub, slit their wrists and let their blood drain out. For
some goddamn reason they’d put the plug in the plug hole and let the bathtub
fill.

I reached up past the stalker’s teeth, expecting its head to turn and
its mouth to open. I took hold of the hook, grabbed its neck by the skin and
yanked. It wouldn’t budge.

“You’ll need to hold its head and pull,” said Charlie.

I didn’t want to get any closer to it than I already was. It was like
my body was hardwired to flinch at the sight of them. Despite the fact this one
was dead, it still activated those survival instincts. They were the kind of
creatures that inspired fear at first sight. Even at the beginning of the
outbreak there had never been any doubt over the danger that stalkers posed.
Hate oozed out of them, as though their slick black skin swarmed with evil.

I put my hand on the sides of its head. Its skin was clammy with
moisture as if it was sweating. I tightened my grip and then pulled. There was
a squelching noise, and blood fell to the floor and covered my boots. I turned
my head away and looked at the other side of the kitchen as if this would spare
me from the smell. I pulled the stalker away until it was off the hook and then
I threw it onto the trolley. It clanged onto the metal, and its arms drooped
over the sides. I felt bile rise up my throat.

Charlie took hold of the trolley and wheeled it across the kitchen to a
metal surface next to the sink.

“That’s the reaction they provoke in most people,” he said. “I used to
think it was because they are predators, and we’re programmed to fear the
things that hunt us.”

Melissa’s face was white. She clung to Justin’s waist and looked over
at the stalker. She took a deep breath, moved her arm away from Justin. She
gritted her teeth and walked over to Charlie.

“Mel?” said Justin.

The closer Melissa got to Charlie and the stalker the more her steps
faltered. She pushed herself through her fear until she stood an inch away from
the trolley. Charlie turned, arched his eyebrows.

“You’re looking a little peaky,” he said.

Melissa turned her head toward the stalker’s cadaver slowly, as though
looking at it would make it come back to life. Finally she forced herself to
stare.

“They terrify me,” she said.

“Then come back over here,” said Justin. Her crossed his arms and then
unfolded them again, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself when Melissa
wasn’t by his side.

Melissa stretched out her right index finger. She moved it toward the
stalker. The closer her finger got the more she shook, but she didn’t stop. She
took a breath and pressed the tip of her finger into the stalker’s skin. She
pressed her palm against its jet black arm and slid it down toward the elbow.
It reminded me of a show I had seen once, where a hypnotist convinced a woman
with a fear of snakes to pet a king cobra.

Charlie stared, unsure what to make of it. Melissa turned her glance
toward him.

“I’m sick of being scared of them,” she said.

That took guts, and I was impressed. Put me in a room with an
Australian funnel-web spider, and there’s nothing on earth that could have made
me touch it. Melissa had forced herself to get over her fears in a way that
most people couldn’t.

“What are they?” said Melissa. “Are they human?”

Charlie crossed his arms. “Maybe once, but not anymore. Their DNA has
mutated and made them something else completely. Imagine a caterpillar
suspended in a cocoon. Only instead of emerging a butterfly, this horrible
thing crawls out.”

“So they have cocoons?” I said.

Charlie shook his head. “That was just a metaphor. Nobody knows how
they breed. Nobody living, at least. You’d need to find a stalker’s nest and
walk through it, and I doubt there are people willing to do that.”

I shuddered at the thought of wandering into a stalker’s nest by accident.
Through all the years I had spent in the Wilds I had never seen one, and I had
never met anyone who could claim to have done so.

“So why did Victoria send me to see you?”

Charlie reached behind him and picked up a scalpel from the counter. He
took hold of the stalker’s leg and turned it so that the calf muscle bulged at
him. He squeezed it, and the muscle bunched up against the skin.

“There’s a high concentration of them in the area, or ‘loads of the
fuckers’ as Billy would put it. We don’t know where they come from or where
they nest. They prowl the fences at night. They pick off anyone stupid enough
to be alone when it gets dark.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Same wherever you go.”

“Perhaps Vicky thinks you can do something about them.”

If Victoria thought I would face a nest of stalkers for her, she was
crazy. I got a sinking feeling that she was going to leverage our stay in
Bleakholt against me helping her with the monsters. Why did she think I was the
right guy for this? I’d spent my share of time in the Wilds, but that counted
for shit. Put any person in the world one on one with a stalker, and the
monster would come out on top.

Charlie pinched the scalpel between his thumb and index finger. He put
it against the stalker’s calf muscle and pressed the knife into it. I expected
it to pop like a balloon, but the knife tore through the muscle like it was a
tough steak and left a line of blood behind it. Melissa held onto the trolley
and watched Charlie work. Justin hung back and looked at the ground.

“I don’t feel well,” he said.

I nodded. He’d been through a lot lately. Back in Vasey he’d only been
out of a coma for less than a day before we’d been forced to hit the road. He’d
never had a respite from it all. Whatever Whittaker injected him with had
changed him. He seemed normal but when you looked into his eyes, you saw red
flecks that swam in the fluid like parasitic worms.

“Go home,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

Charlie dropped the scalpel with a clang. Blood droplets splattered
over the steel trolley.

“Im afraid that’s not an option,” he said.

I looked up. “What?”

Charlie screwed up his face. “Victoria wants him quarantined.”

Melissa shook the handles of the trolley, made the stalker’s leg flop
over the side. “Why? What are you talking about?”

Charlie turned to the sink and twisted the knob. Water dripped out. He
washed off some of the blood but then rubbed his hands over his lab coat,
staining his palm with blood again. I wondered why he'd even bothered washing
them.

“I’ve read Whittaker’s notes,” he said, “and I have examined Justin.
There’s a cure in his papers, and that cure is in the boy. But we don’t have a
clue what it has done to him. Is he dangerous? Is he contagious? If Justin were
to bite you, would he infect you?”

He looked at Melissa, and his cheeks flushed crimson.

“If someone were to have…relations with Justin, would they get
infected? If he were to impregnate them, would the baby be born as an infected?
So many questions, and they will take time to answer. Until that point, I’m not
happy to let him walk through the settlement. Vicky agrees with me.”

Melissa’s face burnt red. She twisted her hands around the trolley
until her knuckles turned white. She shook it as though she was transferring
the energy of her anger onto the metal. The stalker’s body flopped to the side,
threatened to fall onto the floor. Melissa reached out and pushed it back, her
hands covered in black blood. Her squeamishness around them was long gone.

“You can’t be bloody serious,” she said. “Look at him. He’s fine. Does
he look infected?”

Charlie closed his eyes and sighed. “Frankly, yes. It’s not that he’s
one of them. It’s the virus that he carries.”

“I don’t give a shit. He’s a human just like you and me. You can’t just
lock him away like he’s got rabies,” said Melissa. Her voice was strained, the
ends of her words sheared off by the tightness of her throat.

Justin stared at the ground. He didn’t care about anything anymore. It
was a far cry from the lanky teenager I’d met a year ago. Back then he had
wanted to see that world so much that he tricked me into taking him on my
journey. After that, he’d fallen in love with Melissa and decided that she was
more important than seeing the world. Now, his face was a blank slate, his head
empty of thoughts.  No emotions or feelings, just a slab of contaminated meat.