The Dying & The Dead 2 (6 page)

Eric sat on the end of Kim’s bed. She
was wrapped up with the thin blanket, ignoring the itchiness of the fabric in
favour of staying warm. Her skin was so drained it would have to brighten two
shades to even be called pale.

“You need to eat,” said Eric.

“I can’t.”

“It’s not doing you any good ignoring
it. What would your mum say?”

“She’d say,
‘Kim, you have a stomach
condition. You can’t eat the slop they put in front of you.’
”

“We need to find you something else,”
said Eric.

Kim held one hand in the other and
rubbed her fingers. Her skin was raw from a day of sanding down the outside of
the cabin walls. Whether the wood really needed sanding or it was just a
pointless task to keep her drained, Eric didn’t know.

She leaned in closer to him.

“I think we should go with them,” she
said.

“Keep it down.”

She lowered her voice. “If the boys you
told me about are escaping, we should join them.”

“I don’t know, Kim,” he said.

She rubbed her hands.

“What’s the alternative? I need to find
my mum. It’s worth the risk.”

“And what about
my
mum?” said
Eric. He became aware that his voice was more than a whisper, so he spoke
quieter. “What about Luna?”

“How many cabins have you checked?”

The search light beamed across their
window and illuminated the cobwebs on the glass. The glare caught Eric in the
eyes, and it took a few seconds for his vision to clear.

“Nearly all of them,” he answered. “I
just know they’re here. Where else would they be? Any DCs that the Capita catch
get brought here, by the looks of things. I just need to know where they’re
keeping them. What about the brick buildings at the end of the camp?”

“I’ve seen the guards go in there. And I
think it’s where the man from the train works.”

“Scarsgill?”

Kim nodded. “I thought I saw him there
earlier today.”

Kim’s stomach made a whining sound. She
put her hands against it.

“You’re starving,” said Eric.

“I know. I just can’t eat it.”

“Can’t you try?”

The girl pulled her blanket closer to
her. The search beam ran across again, casting a light over Kim’s shaven scalp.
Eric saw a dent just below her crown from a scar that had healed over.

“It’s not a matter of trying. If I eat
any of that stuff, I’ll be sitting on the bucket for days. And that’ll be worse
than being hungry. How do you know your mum’s here? I mean really, how can you
be sure? They might be in the Dome.”

He remembered being back on the meadow.
The worried look on his mum’s face as Charles Bull ordered his soldiers to take
them all. The scream of pain she made when Charles hit her. At the time, Eric
had been so scared that all he wanted to do was run. When he thought back on
it, anger replaced the fear.

He started to wonder if there was any
point. Everywhere he went in camp, guards waited. When he did manage to speak
to anyone about his mum, they couldn’t help him. It was locked door after
locked door. He was just a boy, and he had the Capita and all their power and
their soldiers against him. Some of the camp residents had been here for years.
He could tell from their slumped shoulders and vacant looks that they’d given
up. Would that happen to him, too?

The window was illuminated again, but
this time it wasn’t just the search light. Beams of yellow shot out from all
across the yard. He heard men shouting, and from the far side of camp, near the
shoe shed, came the sound of dogs barking.

He climbed onto Kim’s bed and crawled
over to the window. All the lights were aimed at one part of the camp. They
shone at a fence on the east side. The array of yellow beams made it hard to
see properly.

“What is it?” said Kim.

He just about made out two small figures
at one of the fences. From so far away he couldn’t be positive, but he guessed it
was the boys from earlier. One of them gripped the wire mesh and pulled himself
up the fence. The other waited at the bottom, hands held in the air, unable to
move as the searchlights and the torches shone in his eyes.

“It’s them,” said Eric. “They’re trying
to escape.”

The boy almost reached the top of the
fence. When he gripped it, a gunshot boomed out. The boy let go of the fence
and fell to the floor. If it weren’t for the hole in the head, the fall might
have killed him anyway.

Kim joined him at the window, eyes wide.
She gripped the window ledge, seeming to have forgotten the pain of her
callouses for the meantime.

“We need to help them,” she said.

“Do you want to die?

“We can’t just do nothing.”

“That’s exactly what we’ll do,” said
Eric. “If you want to live, we’ll do nothing.”

The cabin started to stir. The girl on
the end broke her crying and sat up. The man in the bunk above her put his
hands to his face and rubbed his eyes.

“What’s happening?” he said.

The other boy was alone at the fence
with his friend’s body at his feet. Guards with torches surrounded him, and the
furious barking of the dogs grew louder. Soon the boy was surrounded. One of
the guards stepped forward. He pointed at the boy. The dogs moved onto their
haunches, heads held aggressively low.

“We should do something,” said Kim.

Eric wanted to help, but he knew that he
couldn’t. It was no secret what would happen to him the minute he stepped out
of the cabin. He shook his head.

Kim tuned away. “I can’t watch.”

The boy backed up against the fence. He
seemed surprised when his back hit the metal. Behind him, the infected who
walked the perimeter had gathered. One grabbed the collar of his shirt and
pulled him, but the boy shook himself free.

The pointing guard suddenly dropped his
arm. On the command, the dogs leapt forward and tore at the boy, their teeth
chewing on whatever part of his body they could grip. The boy collapsed to the
ground and covered his face. The animals bit and scratched at him. Though the
sound was faint, Eric heard the boy screaming. It was a sound so terrible that
it almost wasn’t human, and he felt his bones chill to the marrow.

The guards stood in a circle and watched
as the dogs ripped the life away from the boy. Eventually, the searchlights
dimmed and the torches moved away. The two escapees were left lifeless on the
ground. Their bodies would wait in the night air until morning, when one of the
other inmates would have to move them.

Chapter
Six

Heather

She remembered the decapitated heads as
they stared at her from the top of the stakes, and after that everything faded
to black. When she woke up, the first sight to greet her was a row of metal
bars. She was stretched out on a thin bed joined to a wall. She sat up, and as
she rose a pounding started in her temples. She rubbed her head. It was like
she’d spent all night drinking whisky and had woken with a thumping headache
and a hate for the world.

She’d seen the inside of a police cell
before. It was years ago, at a time of flaring acne, underage drinking and
pointless rebellion at anything her parents ever told her to do. She’d been out
at the shopping centre with her friend, and they were just leaving a pharmacy
when the anti-theft barriers lit up. The store detective rushed over and
demanded that her friend give back the condoms that she’d stuffed into her
pockets. Heather was innocent, but she was still treated to a trip to the
station.

Her father came to collect her hours
later. She heard heavy footsteps march down the corridor, and somehow she just
knew that it was him.

“I don’t need to tell you how
disappointed I am,”
he said.

“Then don’t.”

He sighed at her in his signature way,
where the greys of his moustache bristled as he exhaled air.

“You can be so much more than this,
Heather.”

She scoffed at him at the time. A month
later, the advice sunk in, and from then on she left her old group of friends
behind and she buried her nose in books. She didn’t see her father’s moustache
bristle much after that.

Like her first visit to a cell, she was
innocent this time too.
I don’t have time for this,
she thought. Images
of Kim crossed her mind. She pictured her on a train with the other DCs. She
didn’t want to think about what was happening, she just needed to find her.

She got up from the bed. She was in a
cell that had barely enough room for her to turn around, and a row of steel
bars hemmed her in. Beyond them was a cream wall, and on it was a poster with a
young teenage girl dressed for a night on the town. ‘
Think 18,’
it read.
‘
Know your limits.’

A whistling sound came from beyond her
cell. Listening closely, she recognised the tune as one that Charles Bull made
when they were travelling. She knew it from another context, too. From a
different place and time, and whistled by a different person.

It was a song that her dad used to
whistle, usually after he’d had a fight with Heather’s mum. As a girl she sat
on the bottom step of her staircase and listened to her parents’ raised voices.
After a while her mum would storm out of the house, and her dad would compose
himself for a few minutes, and then leave the room. He’d walk out with a
troubled face, but when he saw his daughter waiting for him, he replaced the
expression with a smile and a whistle. Thinking harder, Heather remembered the
words he sometimes added to it.

Always look on the bright side of
life.

There was a window behind her. Trying
it, she found that it was fastened shut. She walked across the cell and took
hold of the bars and shook them. She hadn’t expected it to do anything; it
wasn’t as if she had superhuman strength.

“Have a nice sleep?” said Charles, from
the cell next to her.

“Where are we?”

“In a prison cell in Kiele, I expect,”
came his reply.

A door opened. Footsteps echoed on the
plastic flooring, and soon Max stood outside her cell. There was a red spot on
his neck from where Rushden’s knife had pressed too hard into his skin.

Heather touched the back of her head. A
lump was already forming just above her crown.

“Is this how your town welcomes people?”
she said.

Max scratched the back of his neck. She
could tell by his stance that he was several hours into an unhealthy sleep
deficit.

“Things changed while I was gone,” he
said. “Rushden called a vote, and they elected him leader.”

“Why did he have the knife? I didn’t
expect a cup of tea and a biscuit, but what the hell am I doing in here?”

“Rushden’s just being cautious.”

Heather shook the bars, but they stood
firm. “If this is caution, I’d hate to see him when he’s really got something
to worry about.”

“While I was gone, Rushden got whispers
that the Capita are planning a raid. We think it’s on a town nearby. I don’t
need to tell you that it’s made everyone just a little bit anxious, even if
it’s not us in the crosshairs.”

“Are they part of the Resistance too?”

“Doesn’t really matter. The Capita take
what they want, Resistance or not. If you’re with the Resistance, it just means
they’re a little rougher about things.”

She started to feel dizzy. She backed
away from the bars and sat on the bed. The lining of it was waterproof. She
guessed it was to prevent accidents or dirty protests back when this was a
police station. In the corner there was a steel toilet, and Heather didn’t
blame someone for wanting to use the bed instead of it. She heard Charles
making noise in the cell next to her, but she didn’t know what he was doing. It
sounded like he was messing with something metal.

“So who is Rushden, anyway?” she said.

“If you think I’m dedicated to the
cause,” said Max, “then wait until you meet Rushden. He’s something else. Some
people go by the book. Rushden sleeps with it under his pillow. You can’t even
begin to understand the lengths the guy will go to protect the Resistance.
He’ll do anything, and that includes torturing friends if he’s had a sniff that
they’ve lost their loyalty.”

“Is that what he did to you?”

Max nodded.

“So how come he let you out?”

“I gave him the blood promise.”

“And that is…?”

Max unbuttoned the first few buttons on
his shirt. He pulled it back to show his chest. A rough-looking ‘R’ had been
carved into his skin. The wound was still fresh, and blood formed where the
knife had met his skin.

She was getting too caught up in things.
The Resistance’s fight wasn’t hers. She had her own priorities and her own
family to look after, and she needed to leave the cell. She wanted to get on a
horse and ride through the gates of Kiele. For all she cared, the decapitated
heads could stare at her as she went, just as long as she left them behind her.

“I need to find Kim,” she said. “Can you
spare me a horse? And some food and stuff?”

“You’re not leaving yet.”

“What?”

Max took a breath. “Like I said;
Rushden’s cautious.”

“I can’t stay here, Max,” she said. She
got to her feet. Bright spots jumped in her vision, and for a second she felt
so faint that she might fall to the floor. It reminded her of the dizzy spells
she used to get when she was pregnant with Kim.

“What about
my
family?” said Max.
“Kiela won’t talk to me, she just sulks. I’ve been to see her, and she wouldn’t
even look at me. And my wife is…with someone else.”

“It’s been three years, Max,” said
Charles, from the cell next door. His booming voice bounced against the walls.
“You don’t have enough of a sparkly personality to make her wait.”

Heather decided that a gentler tone was
needed. As much as she wanted to reach through the bars and slap Max in the
face, it wouldn’t work here.

“Who’s she with? Your wife?”

“Rushden,” said Max. “She’s got a thing
for power-hungry gingers.” The smile painted on his mask looked sadder than
ever, but his stance was relaxed. He leaned against the wall behind him.

“You don’t seem too cut up about it,”
said Heather.

“I told you before. Some things are more
important than my personal problems. Mum used to call me and my dad stoic; she
said we might as well have been made of stone. Besides, Charles is right. I can
hardly blame her.”

He seemed blasé about it, but Heather
could tell from Max’s eyes that anger was smoldering in him. Sometimes it was
easier to put on a front than admit that something bothered you. Having to wear
a mask all the time made it easier than ever to keep truths hidden away.

A high-pitched scream came from the end
of the room. Heather walked to the bars and strained to see beyond them. At the
end of the corridor was a closed door, and a pain-filled cry came out from
behind it. It was enough for her to want to cover her ears.

“It’s the trader, Wes,” said Max. “He
got here a few days before us. Rushden put him straight in the interrogation
room and set his best men to work on him.”

Wes was a trader who used to operate
from a district just outside the Capita border. Heather would sometimes go to
him and barter for supplies that she couldn’t get anywhere else. The two had
developed something that wasn’t friendship, but was more than just being
acquaintances. That changed when Wes had given Heather, Kim and Eric up to the
Capita in exchange for his own safety. When she heard Wes screaming in the
Kiele police station, she didn’t exactly feel tears welling up inside her.

“That doesn’t explain why he’s screaming
so much,” said Heather.

“That’s the sound a man makes when his
fingernails are being peeled away,” said Charles. “I should know. I’ve done
enough of it myself.”

“Poor bastard,” said Heather, picturing
it. Then she remembered how the trader had given her away to the Capita to save
himself, and the pity she felt dissolved away.

Max let out a long sigh. He moved closer
to the bars. He spoke in a gentler tone this time.

“You’ll get the same. Both of you. I’m
sorry, Heather, but Rushden doesn’t take any chances.”

Heather heard Charles get up from his
bed. His boots thumped on the floor and bounced off the walls.

“I bet this Rushden fella was the health
and safety officer wherever he used to work. I met enough of those people in my
time. Never happier than when they’re following guidelines and punishing people
who stray.”

Screams filtered through to them from
the door at the end of the room. As the seconds went by they became louder and
more high-pitched, and Heather just wished that it would stop. It wasn’t
through pity that she wanted it, though. The trader was getting what he
deserved. It was with the knowledge that she would be next.

~

Max left them alone. Hearth stared at
the ‘
Think 18’
poster across from her. It showed a girl in a short
dress, her face covered in enough makeup to deplete the cosmetic shelf at a
department store. Behind her there was a bar with spirits lined up in bottles on
it, and the room was lit neon. Despite her attempt at glamour, there was
something naïve about the girl’s expression. There was a youth in her stare
that gave away the lie she had tried to make about her age.

Her daughter would never have a life
like that, Heather knew. Kim’s fate was to live in a world where the infected
roamed the streets and attacked anything that looked vaguely made of meat. For
years to come the Capita would continue their march across the Mainland, taking
what they wanted. Kim would never have a carefree life where her biggest worry
was tricking a bouncer into letting her inside a club.

“I admire them, you know,” said Charles.
She heard him pace in the cell next to hers. “Complete control. They’ll do
anything, and that’s what’s kept them alive. For now, at least. But life is
fickle, and the Capita is too strong. The Resistance won’t amount to much when
all’s said and done.”