The Dying & The Dead 2 (8 page)

“Then why stay with us?” said Ed.

“I need something you can give me.
But I think you know that, already.”

Ed knew what he meant, but it was a
subject he was hoping they didn’t have to address. Like his driving licence and
university forms, he wished he could just push it to the back of his mind until
it went away. This was different, though. It wasn’t a matter of taking driving
lessons and deciding which lectures he wanted to fall asleep in. The Savage
needed blood and flesh, and he wanted it from Ed or Bethelyn.

“One thing I need to know,” said Ed,
changing the subject. “Why wear the mask? You’re already infected, so it’s not
as if you need it.”

“There are lots of reasons one might
wear a mask, and a virus in the air isn’t the only one.”

“Ooh, how cryptic,” said Bethelyn.

They heard a crashing sound from deep
within the forest. Ed couldn’t see anything moving, but it sounded like a
rotten limb falling off a tree. It was as though the whole place was falling
apart piece by piece; leaves fell to the ground and crumbled into dust, and
trees shed their branches like useless skin.

“Do you do this on purpose?” he said.
“The mysterious stuff?”

The Savage shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s why you wear a mask, isn’t
it? To pretend you’re this enigmatic nob head.”

The Savage bent down and started to
collect broken wood from the floor. Ed knew that he should help, but he didn’t
want it to seem like he was following The Savage’s lead. Bethelyn straightened
up and stepped away from the deer.

The Savage shifted a bundle of wood
under his arm.

“We should talk about our needs,” he
said.

There was another crash. This one was
louder, but it seemed like it had come from a completely different direction. Ed
slipped his hands into his pockets. He wanted to look behind him, but didn’t
want to risk The Savage thinking he was scared.
Damn
, he thought.
Why
do I give a shit what this guy thinks of me?

“Talk about our needs?” said
Bethelyn. “How much will this session cost, counsellor?”

“Well, Ed wants to find his brother.”

“I
will
find him.”

“And you need me to do that.”

Ed shook his head. “That’s debatable.”

“And I require something else,”
continued The Savage.

Bethelyn gripped a thick stick in her
hand. She wiped it on her coat and left a smear of mud on the fabric.

“Go on,” she said.

Ed had had enough. He realised that
no matter how much he avoided it, the subject was going to come up again and
again. As the hours went by, the urgency of it would become inescapable.

“You know what he needs, Bethelyn, as
much as I do. We saw him from the window in Golgoth, when he fed flesh to the
old man. He needs our flesh and blood to stop the infection taking him.”

“The infection is sat on a float, and
it’s using my blood as a lazy river. You need me to get you through Loch-Deep,
and I need you to avoid developing a taste for kidneys and livers. So what’s it
going to be? Or, rather,
who
is it going to be? Given the choice, I’d pick
Bethelyn. I think your blood would be too bitter, Ed.”

Ed thought about it. He needed to
find James more than anything. With the rest of his family dead and his home
lost to the infected, reaching his brother was the only thing that had meaning
anymore. If making a deal with The Savage was what it took, then he was just
going to have to live with it.

More sounds came from deep in the
forest, and Ed heard a moaning noise carried by the breeze. It was something that
his ears had become attuned to since Golgoth, and hearing it made his stomach
quiver. There were infected nearby, he realised. Who knew, maybe the woodlands
were infested with them.

“You can have my blood,” he told The
Savage. “But not until you lead us out of here.”

“It’ll be too late by then. Can you
hear them groaning, Ed? They’re closer than you think. There’s one of them
standing right in front of you, too. Look at me. It’s a faint line that stops
me becoming one of them.”

The darkness of the forest crept up
on him. He heard a rattle that sounded like it was made by rotting vocal cords.
The noise moved closer, though he still couldn’t see anything but the decaying
tree bark and winding ivy. He looked at the deer and the blood around its
mouth, and he realised that he wasn’t much different. He was caught in a trap
too, and like the animal, he was going to have to chew himself free.

“Like I told you, when we get out,”
he told The Savage. “So maybe you better move quickly.”

Chapter
Eight

Tammuz (Baz
Worthington)

Underneath
the Dome

They’d changed the incense in the
Grand Hall. The smoky spices had been replaced by an aroma of cloves so
overwhelming that Tammuz’s stomach lurched. He looked at the tray of grapes and
half-cut apples in front of him, and he pushed them away.

Most people would have killed for a
platter like that. For Tammuz, a bit of fruit was nothing new. His face grew
hot behind his giant mask. He looked at the other members of the Capita Five
who sat along the same table. The marble arches of the Grand Hall were above
them, and a screen of bulletproof glass was in front. There was Grand Lord
Ishkur, Marduk, Nabu, Sin and himself.

“So, we are all agreed then?” said
Ishkur. His tone was octaves lower than anyone else in the room, though Tammuz
suspected that he faked it.

Ishkur wore a white mask of death. It
covered his face and went all the way to his jawline, and the edges had been
melted into him so that skin and plastic were as one. The front was painted
black in places, with a dark circle around his mouth to make it look bigger.
Plastic teeth showed under thin lips. His eyes were drawn large and oval, and they
gave the impression that you were staring into a dark and endless pit. He
sometimes seemed to wear a smile, but it would change to a snarl with just two
wrong words. That wasn’t possible, of course. Not really. It was just a mask.
Nevertheless, its expression seemed to change.

“Let’s run over it again,” said
Marduk. “I’m not satisfied that Tammuz has explained everything.”

Beside him, Nabu nodded like a dog.
Sin sat on the edge of the table with his elbow leaning on the claret silk
cover. He picked up a grape, put it in his mouth and sucked it. A few seconds
later he spat the shrivelled fruit onto the tray in front of him.

Tammuz bit back on the irritation
rising in him.

“Okay, Marduk. What do you need
clarification on?”

Marduk flashed Ishkur a look before
speaking, though the Grand Lord didn’t return it.

“Your numbers seem awfully vague, if
you don’t mind me saying. You can’t give an accurate figure on how many
soldiers we are to send, how long it will take and how many men we must station
there afterwards.”

“There’s no science to war,” said
Tammuz. “The town could see us and get on their knees, or they could fasten
bayonets to their rifles and fight to the death. There’s no way of knowing.”

“Capita expansion is your job,” said
Nabu, next to Marduk. The two sat close to each other. “So it’s something you
should
know.”

Tammuz sighed. He sensed the black
eyes of Ishkur watching him. At the end of the table, Sin spat another grape
onto the silver tray.

“It’s like this,” he said, “Kiele is
one of the largest Resistance towns on the Mainland. I say one of, because the
nature of the Resistance is that they are quite secretive, and we don’t know
who else is out there. Are you with me so far, Marduk?”

Marduk nodded. His mask had squinting
eyebrows that made him seem on the verge of a sneer. His cheeks were painted a
rosy red, and wrinkles were melted into the plastic around his eyes. The mask
was painted brown, and he wore a black shawl around his head.

The look on his mask was one of a
schoolboy laughing at a peer, but not in a jovial way. It seemed malicious, and
Tammuz had no trouble imagining Marduk as a school bully in his youth. It
seemed fitting, then, that Capita Security and Policing were part of Marduk’s
responsibilities. Not that all of the Capita police were bullies, but power
seemed to draw those who craved both authority and the excuse to wield it.

“So,” carried on Tammuz, “I propose
that Kiele is our next target. We’ve always known that the Resistance are
there.”

“Then why not squash them now?” said
Sin. In front of him was a tray that was now full of grapes with the juice
sucked out of them.

It was Sin’s job to keep Capita
bellies full, and he achieved this through effective use of the land
surrounding the dome. In summer you could walk across Sin’s fields and see rows
of corn and carrots and all manner of other vegetables. He wasn’t a man who
lusted for power, and half of the time the meetings of the Five seemed to bore
him.

In another life, Sin was probably a hardworking
man whose only concern was that his crops yielded enough produce to support his
family. Having to provide for the Capita had warped him. Tammuz heard stories
of teenagers caught stealing from the fields and being executed by Sin. Some of
them were stuffed and then used as scarecrows.

Tammuz straightened up. He knew he
needed to keep his posture straight to seem more dignified, but sometimes he
found himself slumping.

“We’ve kept them where we can see
them,” he said, looking at Sin. The man seemed too big for his chair. His
posture couldn’t have been more relaxed if he’d tried. “We even had a member of
the Resistance close to us, for a while. He was one of Charles Bull’s men. He
didn’t know that we
knew
that, of course.”

“And where is the bounty hunter?”
said Ishkur.

Marduk picked up a fig from the tray
in front of him and twisted it in his fingers.

“He’s been dark for a few days.
Nobody has seen him.”

“Most unlike him,” said Ishkur.

“You know the Bull,” said Nabu. “He
always comes back when we wave the red flag.”

Ishkur turned to Tammuz.

“Tell me again about the plan.”

Tammuz took a breath and gathered the
details together in his head.

“It’s a town fifty miles from the
Dome. Not too far away from Mordeline. On the face of it, it looks like any
other settlement. People scratching in the dirt to get by, and pretending that
they’re a civilisation. Underneath that, men whisper conspiracies against the
Capita and plot how best to strike against us.”

Ishkur laughed. “A noble pastime,” he
said.

“With a single squadron, striking at
the right time, we can ruin them. We can kill the men who don’t submit, and put
the women and children to work. We would keep the town as it is, but flying
under the Capita mask, rather than the Resistance.”

“And is the expansion worth the
effort?”

Tammuz nodded. “Anything that gives
the Capita more land and people is worth it.”

“So be it,” said Ishkur. “Are we all
agreed?”

“This chair makes my arse ache,” said
Sin. “So yes, whatever.”

Nabu shrugged. “I suppose so.”

Marduk stayed silent and stared at
the fig in his hand.

“Then make preparations, Tammuz,”
said Ishkur. “Put your cold mind to work. I want Kiele under Capita control
within the week.”

Sin stood up. At six foot seven, he
towered over everyone, even Ishkur. His clothes were so tight around him that
the stitching frayed under his armpits.

“If we’re all done, I have a carrot
haul that needs bringing in,” he said.

Marduk held a finger in the air.

“One final thing, if I may.”

Ishkur nodded. Sin sat down and
sighed.

“I would like to take a trip to Camp
Dam Marsh and see how things are progressing. We give Dr. Scarsgill and Goral a
little too much thread at times, and I would like to visit and check the
stitching.”

“Is there something wrong?” said Ishkur.

Marduk shook his head. “Nothing
apparent. But a camp full of the Darwin’s Children is a precious thing. I would
like to make sure the doctor and the old man are attending to it as they
should.”

“You have my leave,” said Ishkur.

~

As he left the Grand Hall, Tammuz
couldn’t help noticing an eerie feeling. It was like cold fingers gently
stroking his skin. The candle in his hand lit the crumbling brickwork of the
tunnel around him, and he watched spiders scurry away and disappear into
cracks.

A breeze hit the candle and
extinguished the flame. In the dark, with the walls constricting against him,
he felt like he wasn’t alone. It was as if someone peered at him through the
cracks in the stone, and any minute a hand could stretch out and unmask him.

It was something all of them were
wary of, he knew. None of the Capita Five had ever seen each other’s faces.
Furthermore, they all carried a vial of acid so that even if one of them died, the
others could disfigure them beyond recognition.

Ishkur’s reasoning for this was that
if a man’s true identity was known, he was constrained by it. He would feel his
reputation weighing down on him as he made decisions. Having no identity was freeing,
and it meant that your conscience could never hold you back as you decided the
fate of the Capita.

Tammuz knew that this wasn’t the real
reason. He’d figured out long ago that Ishkur didn’t want any of the other Five
to have any ideas on his power. Ishkur was a big believer that no man could
rule alone. He needed the opinions of others to help him make decisions, yet he
didn’t want them conspiring against him. If not even the Five knew each other’s
real faces and names, there was no way they could ever meet up in secret and
make plans.

Tammuz struck a match. The flame lit
the yellow stones but it didn’t reach too far into the darkness ahead of him.
He brought the match to the candle wick and suddenly the light expanded.

The tunnels were part of the secrecy,
of course. When their meetings ended, the Five all left the Grand Hall
separately via their own individual tunnels. These stone mazes ran underneath
the Hall, twisting and turning until finally they came out at random points in
the Dome. None of the Five knew where the other’s exits were, so there was no
danger of them ever meeting each other.

The only exemption to this was Grand
Lord Ishkur. He didn’t need a tunnel. He left the Hall by the steel double doors.
Since his mask was melted into his skin, nobody would ever see his true face.

Tammuz reached the end of the tunnel.
In front of him was a ladder, and at the top of it, a hatch. Next to him, cut
into the stonework, was a bench. He set the candle down and picked up a square
box. He shook it and heard it rattle, and then reached inside and pulled out a
cigarette. One of his few pleasures in life was inhaling smoke and letting his
thoughts run through his mind until they tired themselves out.

He thought of Kiele. He imagined the
men and the women fleeing in panic as the Capita soldiers and their dogs
stormed through the streets in bloodlust. It was sad to see blood flow so
freely, but it couldn’t be helped. The Capita couldn’t coexist with those who
conspired against them.

He took off his mask and set it down,
and straight away he felt his skin breathe. So far underground, this was one of
the few places where a mask wasn’t needed, and he could enjoy his cigarette
without a weight pressing down on him.

Once he was finished, he picked up
another mask, standard issue this time. He attached it to his face, took hold
of the ladder in front of him and started to climb. At the top he lifted the
hatch, and a cool wind blew against his forehead. He climbed out of the hatch
and let it drop shut behind him.

He was in the Dome. The wind came
from vents in the ceiling sixty feet above them, though they could be shut with
the press on a button. Most things in the Dome were mechanical and didn’t need
power, which was handy. When the structure had first been built, a
post-apocalyptic civilisation hadn’t been its purpose. On the contrary, it was
made to be as eco-friendly as possible. It was just funny that something built
to help protect the world had become so useful once it had ended.