The Dying & The Dead 2 (12 page)

“This is why I’ll always come up
smelling of roses,” said Charles, looking down on her. “I’m willing to do
anything. And this is why you’re sitting on the floor with a sore arse. Enjoy
your trip to the Dome.”

He gave the Capita soldiers a nod and
then whipped Ken’s reins. The animal started into a gallop and carried the
bounty hunter away.

Chapter
Twelve

Ed

“Something’s watching us,” said
Bethelyn.

A rock carving was spread across the ground
ahead of them, seeming to emerge from the mud. It was a stone likeness of a
woman in a relaxing pose, though time had chipped away at it and left parts of
her missing. She stared at them with one eye open, the other shut tight. Grass
had grown along her back and covered it. How long would it be before nature
reclaimed the carving completely and buried it in a carpet of vines and wild
grass? Ed wondered who had poured hours into shaping the stone just to leave it
abandoned for the birds and the rats.

“Feel my arms,” said Bethelyn. “My
hairs are standing up.”

Daylight peeked through the breaks in
the trees and seemed to fall to the ground like rain. The deer was long behind
them now, its head caved in by The Savage, though Ed thought he could still hear
it cry.

“It’s a trick of the mind,” he said.
“Nothing’s watching us. It’s a primeval instinct programmed into us. New places
mean danger, and I guess our ancestors spent a lot of time in the forest
looking over their shoulders.”

“No,” answered Bethelyn. “There’s
something about this place. It feels rotten. It’s like I’m back in the school
gym changing room with Mr. Thompson standing in the background. Like I’m being
watched.”

“I’ll keep my eyes to myself now
then,” said The Savage.

He still walked in front of them,
though he didn’t so much bound ahead, as creep. Something about the deer in the
trap had filled him with caution, and Ed sensed that even The Savage felt wary
about Loch-Deep.

The Savage stopped and rested against
a tree.

“There’s an easy way through,” he
said. “I studied maps back when I was planning the expedition.”

“What’s so special about this place?”
said Bethelyn.

“Like I said, some people think this
is ground zero for the outbreak.”

“And what about you?”

The Savage looked up. A thin sliver
of light cut across his mask.

“I don’t know about ground zero. But
there’s something else here. There’s a reason not a single expedition here ever
made it back.”

Ed bent down and touched his calves.
The muscles were tight. Back on Golgoth, you could finish a lap of the island
in just under an hour. On the Mainland, things were different. Even this forest
seemed endless. Part of it snagged his curiosity, but when he looked at the
trees and listened to the snapping of twigs, he felt like zipping up his coat
to ward away a creeping chill.

“If it’s so dangerous,” said Ed, “and
there’s something here, why do people keep coming?”

The Savage kicked at a stick in front
of him. He cast his gaze over to the carving, where the moss crawled over the
squinting lady.

“Some people got the idea that if we
could find out why all this happened, then we could make a cure. Sounds like
the best idea since my drama group cast me as the lead in Macbeth, but it would
have been nice if even one person had made it back. I’ve thought for a while
that there was something dark in Loch-Deep. It can’t just be the infected
here.”

He looked around him. Sure that
nothing was watching them, he continued.

“We sent a few guys here a while ago.
These lads were mean. I’m talking about the kind of guys who make killing
infected a sport. They chew metal and shit steel. Not a single one came back.
There’s something here, Wetgills. And it’s a damn sight uglier than the
infected.”

Ed’s back was cold. He suddenly had
the urge to hold something sturdy and sharp. With nothing like that available,
he took a few steps forward and picked up the fallen limb of a tree. He gripped
it in his hands and wondered if it could crack through the skull of infected. A
few seconds later, answering the question in his own head, he threw it back on
the ground.

“I’m not in the wood for fetch,” said
The Savage.

Bethelyn huffed.

“Why do you have to be so cryptic
again? Whatever this thing is, just tell us. I don’t really give a shit what’s
out there. Whether we make it out of Loch-Deep or not, I couldn’t care less.”

The Savage shrugged.

“It’s a character flaw, I guess. I
have an air for the dramatic.”

“So…” said Bethelyn.

The Savage sprang away from the tree.
He lifted his leg and bent it back at the knee, then stretched his thigh
muscles.

“There’s a creature here,” he began.

Bethelyn shook her head. “Oh, come
off it.”

“After everything you’ve seen, you
really have room for doubt? We live in a world where people fall into comas and
turn into blood-thirsty monsters. If I tell you there’s a unicorn flying around
shitting rainbows, you better at least give it a bit of thought.”

He paced again, shaking his head.

“I know Golgoth is inbred, but I
would have thought your mind had expanded a little over the last couple of
days.”

“I’m not from Golgoth,” said
Bethelyn. “I was born on the Mainland. I’ve never been down here though. I
don’t even know where ‘
here’
is.  Are we in the south?”

The Savage nodded. “As south as you
can get without falling off the edge.”

“Tell us about the creature,” said
Ed.

“Well,” said The Savage. “It might
not have a birth certificate, but it’s got a name. Don’t know where it got it,
or how.”

“Which is?”

“Ripeech,” said The Savage.

The wind picked up and swirled around
them in a howl. Ed pulled his coat closer to him. He looked at the woman on the
ground again. Her stony body was half-covered by the forest. He wondered how
many other things were buried in the dirt, and whether there was also a hole
freshly dug somewhere for the three of them.

He’d spent most of his adult life as
a skeptic. He could date the closing of his mind to the night he found his dad
eating a mince pie in his room, dispelling the myth of Santa Claus in a blink.
After that, Ed was a serious kid who turned into a stern teenager. He
remembered overhearing his mum and dad talking about him once.

“
He’s going to be a tax inspector
,”
said his dad.

Mum leaned back in her chair and
laughed.

“He’s just a thinker, that’s all. You
should be glad he doesn’t believe in ghosts and stuff.”

Years later, when scenes of the
outbreak flashed on his television screen, he hadn’t believed it. He’d heard of
a radio producer once who had made a play about an alien invasion. When he
broadcasted it, he fooled a nation into thinking that monsters from Mars were
coming to invade. Maybe the newsreels of men chasing women down the street and
tearing chunks from them was the same. Perhaps it was all a big put-on, he’d
thought back then.

Later, when televisions stopped
signalling and the Mainland stopped answering Golgoth’s transmissions, Ed knew it
was all real. His mind was starting to open, and he knew that anything was
possible now. So when he heard of a creature called Ripeech who stalked Loch-Deep,
he knew that he had to at least entertain the possibility. To ignore it would
leave him vulnerable.

“That’s why we’re taking the
shortcut,” said The Savage. “It’s going to miss out the area that they say is
ground zero, which is a shame. For a while, I saw my face on a plaque, with
fancy writing underneath it reading ‘
Here lies The Savage. The man who found
the cure.’
But going this way means we can miss the heart of Loch-Deep and
take the scenic route instead. We’ll skirt around the edge and avoid going
anywhere near Ripeech.”

“How do you know so much if you’ve
never been here?” said Bethelyn.

The Savage rolled his eyes. “Did you
get hit on the head? I planned a few expeditions. I was going to come on the
last one, but I couldn’t.”

“Too scared?” said Ed.

“Actually, an infected got into town
and took a liking to me. I was too busy fighting infection to come on a forest
trek.”

They walked past the stone carving.
Up close, Ed saw centipedes scurry across it and then crawl into the moss. He
kneeled down so that he looked directly into the woman’s open eye. Someone had
painted the iris a deep black, and it gave the impression that she was looking
right through him.

Ed went to stand, when the moss coat
of the statue wriggled. He leaned away from it, thinking that a mouse or rat
had taken refuge and was annoyed with the disturbance.

“Wetgills?” said a voice across the
forest.

Ed turned his head and saw that The
Savage and Bethelyn had walked ahead of him. He looked back at the statue, when
a hand shot out of the overgrowth and reached for him.

He fell back onto the ground. The
grass on the statue started to shake. Ed got to his feet. Something thrashed
under the moss. Ed backed away slowly as a figure emerged from underneath.

It was a man. His clothes were
covered in mud, and bits of moss were stuck in his hair. His face was
scratched, and part of his sleeve had been torn away to show a wound. From the
inflamed skin, Ed knew that the cut wasn’t fresh, and he could see the gouges
of tooth marks on the skin.

The man opened his mouth and
shrieked. He launched at Ed, falling face first off the carving and onto the
forest floor. Ed looked around him for a weapon. As the infected man
straightened himself up off the floor, Ed wished that he hadn’t thrown away the
stick.

He looked to his right. The Savage
and Bethelyn were further away now. He knew that he couldn’t just catch up to
them; the infected would follow them relentlessly unless he did something about
it.

It cried out again and took shaky
steps toward him, arms outstretched. It seemed like a lifetime ago since Ed had
last seen an infected, back on Golgoth. He tried to take steady breaths to calm
himself, but as his heart pumped, his lungs demanded more air.

He darted a look to the others. He
saw their shapes dimly through the darkness of the forest, too far away to
help.

The infected walked closer. Ed saw a
gold cross hung around its neck, which shook as it took steps toward him.

He didn’t want to be scared. This was
going to be his life now, he knew. The infected were everywhere on the Mainland,
and Ed didn’t want to have to look over his shoulder every time he took a step.

Without thinking, he launched at the
infected. He grabbed it by the neck and with all the force he could summon, he
pushed it back toward the carving on the ground. The infected scrabbled in his
grasp and Ed felt hot pain as it scratched its fingernails across his arm.

The pain nearly threatened to make
him lose his grip. Ignoring the stinging, he tensed his arm and then pushed the
infected’s head sharply against the stone. The infected wheezed, but Ed dashed
its head against the statue until he it stopped struggling.

He let the infected fall to the
ground. He watched it for a few seconds, and when he was certain it wouldn’t
move, he bent over and panted. When he looked up, the open eye of the carving
stared at him as blood dribbled over her iris.

When he caught up to The Savage and
Bethelyn, they were stopped.

“What happened to the last
expedition?” Bethelyn said to him.