Fear the Dead (Book 4) (16 page)

Chapter
17

“Think they’ll be okay?” said Mel.

A stone path was buried somewhere
under the wild grass and bracken, but sixteen years without maintenance had
allowed nature to reclaim its patch. It must have been the early hours of the
morning now, and the nocturnal insects and birds of prey buzzed and shrieked
into the night.

To our right there was a wall made of
stone of various shapes and sizes all jammed together. Next to it, looking out
of place in the remoteness of the landscape, was a wooden bench. The oak seat
was sodden and scratched. A plaque was fastened onto the backrest, black and
made from metal that had resisted the rusting of nature. It read ‘
Dedicated
to the memory of John Arthur. He would sit here sometimes. Other times he’d sit
somewhere else’.

I looked at Mel. She and Reggie were
the only ones walking the rough path with me.

“There wasn’t much choice,” I said.
“In any case, Charlie has a knife. If they stay quiet, they’ll be fine.”

The man we had seen near camp had
fled in this direction, but the countryside spread wide and it made no effort
to help our search. Instead we relied on instinct, with our tired legs fuelled
only by a desire to find the stranger.

Chance encounters with strangers were
rare, and most started with a wary nod and ended with polite tidings. This one
had been different from the beginning; the man had run away from us, and now we
had caught him spying on our conversation.

“I used to beg my dad to take me to
Loch Ness,” said Mel. “But he always said we were skint. I remember seeing that
grainy photo. You know, the black and white one with the monster sticking out
of the water. Man, I was obsessed with it.”

“You know the photo was a hoax?” said
Reggie.

“Yeah, I do now obviously. But I was
a kid.”

“Guess I know what you mean,” said
Reggie. “I used to think Jurassic Park was a documentary.”

Mel looked at me.

“We’re confusing Kyle. He was never a
kid. He was born a forty year old man with a frown on his face.”

I tried to smile, but the expression
felt wrong. I glanced from left to right and took in the details of the
landscape. Green grass, some patches overgrown, others yellowing and lolling in
the breeze. Purple flowers buried under tangled weeds. I had never been a plant
person, so I couldn’t even begin to remember what they were called.

 I tried to look deeper.  Small
shrubs formed natural dividing lines across the open fields. A thread of barbed
wire was above the wall and ran along it into the distance. Somewhere north the
shimmer of a loch glinted in the sun.  In front of us, close enough to a cresting
hill that it looked like it was being devoured, was a cottage.

The changing of our direction served
as our wordless pact to follow the path toward the house. Hills rose on either
side of us, curved blocks of rock and stone that were covered in parts by
grass. It felt like we were walking through a valley that tolerated our
presence now, but could easily have closed in on us and crushed our bones.

The cottage had a thatched roof that
seemed to droop over the edge of the building. The brickwork was beaten by age
and wore patches of moss. Drawn curtains covered the windows. The garden had
sprouted into a jungle of weeds, dandelions and grass. The plants had spread
over the bonnet of an abandoned hatchback, and looked like they were trying to
swallow it whole.

Mel stopped walking. She put her hand
out to lean on the stone wall of the garden, but then pulled her hand away.

“Okay. Now I’m uneasy.” She turned
her head toward me. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”

I saw what she meant. The house looked
corrupted, and it felt unwelcoming. Everything about it seemed designed to
repel people; from the hungry garden to the ivy slithering over the walls.
There was something waiting for us in this house, I decided. But then, there
was something waiting in every house, in every town, in every city. We lived in
a world where danger was a constant, and the chance that Ben was here meant
that we had to go inside.

The concrete flags of the path to the
front door wobbled under our steps. I led the way, my knife clutched in my
hand, with Reggie and Mel walking behind in single file.

“Something just moved,” said Reggie.

I stopped cold. I didn’t see
anything.

“The room on the top floor. Far left.
The curtain twitched.”

The window frame seemed too small, as
if it was three quarters the size of normal dimensions. A pale yellow curtain
covered the glass and didn’t give even an inch of a view of inside the house. I
kept staring, but nothing moved or twitched.

“You’re seeing things. Try and keep
it together,” I said. I paused, then added: “But tell me if it twitches again.”

We crowded around the front door. So
far nothing had happened. No infected had burst from the undergrowth, no
suspicious homeowners had ran at us with kitchen knives. Yet my heart kept a
rapid tempo and I had a feeling on the back of my neck as if unseen eyes stared
at it.

“Guess this is it,” said Mel. “Who
wants to do the honours?”

She nodded at the door handle. It was
metal, and at some point it had started out gold but the paint had worn away to
reveal silver. It looked as cold as the rest of the house.

“I’ll go,” I said.

I gripped the handle and sure enough,
the metal was freezing against my skin. I started to turn it, expecting the
door to be yanked forward and for someone, or something, to be waiting on the
other side. The lock let out a whine as the handle turned.

“Should have brought some oil,” said
Reggie.

I turned it again. I realised that I
was starting to breathe quicker, so I took a lungful of air and held it in and
tried to settle the drumbeat thumping in my chest. As the handle screeched, I
felt the latch opening.

I stepped back and readied my knife.
I don’t know what I expected; infected? Stalkers? A crazy farmer with a
shotgun? Instead there was nothing but a carpeted hallway that smelled of damp.
The door opened onto a lobby which turned into a hallway filled with four other
doors.  At the end of the lobby was a staircase.

“Ladies first,” said Mel, and pushed
passed me.

When she stepped over the door, her
foot snagged on something and she fell over. She didn’t have time to put her
hands out and she landed awkwardly, hitting the yellow carpet forehead first.
Reggie stepped forward and put his hand on her back.

“Okay Mel?” he said.

She turned around. The skin on her
forehead was grazed and her cheeks were red, but otherwise she was okay.

“I’ll make it. Guess that’s karma,”
she said.

I looked down at the door step. At
the bottom of the doorframe, just an inch above ground, a silver wire was tied
from one side to the other. It was so thin that it was easy to miss at first
glance, yet it looked sturdy.

“Not karma. Just a trip wire,” I
said. I pointed down at the doorframe. “Look.”

“There’s something wrong here,” said
Reggie.

“Let’s not go rushing in.”

Mel got to her feet. She licked her
fingers and then rubbed her head, wincing as she touched the graze.

“Wait until I catch the bastard who’s
playing games,” she said.

The air was musty, like fabric that
had gotten wet with rainwater. There was an atmosphere inside, something heavy,
and it felt like we had disturbed it. Paintings lined the walls, oil depictions
of a desolate landscape. In one of them, a lonely man pushed a wheelbarrow down
a deserted road while the sky darkened around him. I wondered if the paintings
were of the local area.

“Four doors, three people. Better get
exploring,” I said. “I would say we should split up to save time, but I’ve seen
my share of horror flicks.  Given how many times I’ve called people idiots for
splitting up, it’d be pretty ironic for me to tell us to do the same thing.”

Reggie nodded. He seemed pleased that
we would be searching the house together.

“Let’s start here then.”

We opened the first door on the
landing. The room was dark save the daylight that snuck in through the gaps in
a net curtain. It made for a dim illumination, but my eyes soon adjusted. When
they did, I felt my breath catch in my chest.

Reggie must have seen it too, but he
lost his footing and nearly tripped over the edge of a couch.

“What the hell?” he said, straightening
up. He stared at the walls around him.

Handwriting covered the walls. The
size of the words changed from sentence to sentence. Some were written in giant
block capitals, and others were so small that I had to press my nose against
the wall to read them.

“Is that what I think it is?” said
Mel.

She pointed at one wall, where all
the writing was in a deep red colour. Looking around, I saw that only two
colours had been used for the scrawlings; crimson red and dirty brown. It made
it pretty obvious which natural resources the writer had used for his ink.

The writing didn’t mean much. Most of
it was a variance of a single sentence.

Shawn keeps them fed.

Keep them fed, Shawn.

Feed us Shawn. Feed us. Feed us feed
us feed us.

“Interesting design choice,” said
Mel. “Not exactly welcoming.”

She walked to the end of the room,
gripped the net curtains and pulled them. With the curtains gone, daylight
filled the room. If Mel had done it to make the room seem less cold, then she
had failed.

I wished the room was dark again. I
looked around me. I put my hand to my mouth and coughed, and felt my stomach
start to bubble. Reggie turned around and walked straight out of the door.

On the table in the centre of the
room was an array of body parts. The wooden surface was covered in dismembered
arms and legs that someone had lined up in a perfect row. I started to get a
dizzy feeling. I tried to keep it together. Why was it that years after the
outbreak, after everything I had seen, certain things still brought up a
feeling of revulsion in me?

“Why don’t they smell?” I said.

Mel stood over the table. She picked
up a severed leg. The wound had been cauterised and the skin was a dull pink.
It looked like it should have been hanging from a hook in a butchers shop. Mel
twisted the limb in her hands.

“It’s been salted,” she said.
“Someone preserved it. Did a pretty good job, too.”

There was a crashing sound in the
hallway. I turned my head and saw that Reggie was struggling with someone
outside the door. A figure had latched onto him and they wrestled in the
hallway, slamming each other into the walls of the house. A painting slid off
its hook and fell to the floor, the glass frame shattering into hundreds of
pieces. Reggie grunted with pain as his back thudded into the wall.

I ran out into the hallway. The
figure wrestling Reggie was dressed in black, with a hood over his head. I
grabbed the hood and yanked him away, putting my shoulders behind the effort.
The man was surprisingly light. When I threw him into the wall behind me, his
head slammed back and his hood fell down.

He was just a teenager. He looked to
be Justin’s age, and he had a similar flop of blonde hair. His eyes were green
and almost feral, and inch-long fine hairs grew from his chin. His eyes looked
dazed but they soon cleared, and when they did he stared at me with a look of
hate. I saw him reach for his pocket.