Fear the Dead (Book 4) Read online

  I glanced at my watch, but I knew what time it would say. Eight forty-five. That couldn't have been more wrong, because judging by the deep darkness in the sky it was definitely past midnight. I'd always looked for watch batteries whenever I came close to a town or village, but I had never found any. I wouldn’t take it off though. The face was scratched and the strap scuffed but this had been a birthday gift from my parents, and it was the last thing of theirs that I had.

  I stepped out of my tent and into the air. Cold wind slapped my face. I stood for a minute or two as it teased across my skin, and I drank in the utter silence of the camp. All the fires were extinguished, all the tent doors shut. The only people awake would be me, and whoever Lou had put on watch for the evening.

  It took me thirty minutes, but I made a lap around camp. This was something that I had done every night lately. It started a few weeks earlier when I took a midnight walk to clear my head, and soon it became a ritual. I started to think that unless I did a lap of the camp at night, something bad would happen. It was as though my footsteps were the only protection against unseen eyes that waited in the shadows.

  I felt the responsibility as sure as a physical weight. It felt like I had a ton of bricks on my back, and every passing day someone added a new one to the load. My spine was starting to crack, my face beginning to strain, and I didn’t know how much more of it I could take.

  As I walked across the field and felt my boots squelch into the mud, I thought about Darla. I could hand over power to her in an instant, and the people would respect her. But Darla was like the rest of them. She’d never lived in the Wilds, and she’d rarely ever seen true danger. I was the only one who could lead them, but my power was slipping. Darla was chipping away at it piece by piece, and it wouldn’t be long until she broke through. The question was, could I hold it together for long enough?

  I needed to resolve the problem of the dead bodies. We had to know what was doing it, and why. The people needed answers and they were becoming restless. If this carried on, I didn’t think I was going to be able to control them for much longer.

  I saw a shape in the field in front of me. It was long and dark and it seemed to blend into the grass. As I walked over to it the shape became clearer, and I felt my chest start to tighten and my breath struggle in my throat. Soon I stood over it and saw it for what it was.

  In the field, laying on the mud and grass, was the body of a teenager. Something had torn apart his chest and cut open his stomach.

  Chapter 3

  Rain battered down on the canvas of the tent. The rain was frequent in Scotland, and at night I would lay on my sleeping bag and listen to the drops on the fabric. It used to sound like little fingers tapping on it, asking me to let them in.

  After I’d recovered from the shock of discovering the body, I had found Lou and Darla. Lou dismissed the man that she had put on watch, and Darla and I carried the body carefully around the outskirts of camp. The last thing we needed was panic spreading, and luckily nobody saw us.

  We were in a spare tent on the west side of the camp. We placed the body on a net-less old ping pong table that we’d found in the boot of a van nearby. The vehicle hadn’t started but the table was easy to assemble, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

  “Whatever it was, it made a mess of him,” said Darla.

  She had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and patterns of blood were splattered on her arms. She didn’t seem to care that crimson patches covered her clothes. The fact that most people had only one or two outfits meant that a lot of folks were beyond caring about appearances. Gregor Horlock religiously washed his clothes in the stream each day and stayed in his underwear while they dried, but he was the exception rather than the rule.

  “He looks like a slab of beef,” said Lou.

  “You’re as sensitive as ever,” I said.

  I looked at the body. It was a teenage boy. His eyes were closed, his skin white and cold to the touch. His face and legs were as they should be, but his chest looked like it had burst, and his torso was cut open from hip to hip. I was no doctor, but even I could see that there were things missing from him. It didn’t seem as though all his organs were there. That wasn’t the worst of it. Finding the body had been bad enough, but when I saw his face I felt dread well up inside me.

  “Where’s Reggie?” I said.

  “Probably asleep,” said Lou.

  Darla walked around the body and stood by his head. She stroked her fingers through the teenager’s blonde hair.

  “We should get him,” she said.

  “For god’s sake keep Reggie away. For now, at least.”

  “You can’t hide this from him,” said Darla.

  “I’m not hiding anything from anyone.”

  “You’re trying to blind people to the dangers of staying here. That’s the same as hiding.”

  I tried to bite back on the anger that was growing in me. Something about Darla got deep inside and tweaked my nerves. It wasn’t just that she stood against me on some things, because I could deal with that. It was something about her as a person. That was my dilemma.

  “How is this helping? Can’t you do something constructive?”

  Darla gave a knowing smile. “Oh I am helping,” she said.

  “We need to clean the boy up,” said Lou. “Then we need to go get Reggie and tell him what’s happened to his son. He and Kendal need to grieve.”

  For a second all I could think about was how much more pressure this would put on me. Darla wouldn’t hesitate to use this as a way of turning people against me. Person by person she was whittling away my leadership, and soon I were going to find myself out of supporters.

  As quickly as the thought came, I shook it away. I looked again at the boy on the table, his arms flopping over the edges, blood smeared down his waist and on the green plastic beneath him. His flesh looked pearl white. His eyelids made him seem like he was sleeping. If it weren’t for the hole where his stomach and chest had been, I would have expected his eyelids to flicker as he dreamed.

  “I’m done toeing your line Kyle,” said Darla. “I’m going to start getting support to leave this place. Don’t think that I’ll be subtle about it, either. Mum always said I was as subtle as a brick to the face.”

  The anger was becoming harder and harder to choke back, like bile trying to climb up my throat. I knew I couldn’t get angry. That was what she wanted, and it would show that she could play me like Gregor’s guitar.

  “What we need,” I said, “is to find the stalker nest.”

  Darla threw her hands in the air.

  “I give up.”

  She left the tent. Even though she was gone, her aura hung in the air as if it was a perfume too strong for the breeze to break up. My chest felt tight, my legs restless. I needed to sleep, but all the same knew I wouldn’t be able to.

  “How are you so sure it’s stalkers?” said Lou.

  I looked at the body again.

  “We need to have Charlie take a look at him. He’ll be able to tell us more. In the meantime, we need to get a group together to go on a hunt. We’ll find the stalker nests and tear them apart while they sleep.”

  Lou leaned with her hands on the table inches away from the boy.

  “You’ll struggle for volunteers, Kyle. You’ve got a camp full of people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Everyone’s got the shakes. Anxiety. Depression. Most people are too scared to get out of bed.”

  I heard a commotion at the front of the tent. Someone on the outside was trying to pull the zipper down so they could get in, but it seemed like their hands were too shaky. They stopped trying to pull the zipper and banged on the tent.

  “Open the damn door,” they said.

  I knew the voice, and I knew we couldn’t stop him from coming into the tent. I just wished there was some way we could clean up the boy before we let Reggie see him. I couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to look at your teenage son with his body so mutilated.

 
As Reggie entered the tent I looked at his face and saw how creased it was. The wrinkles on his forehead foilded with despair, and his eyes screwed up as though his grief was closing them. Then I looked closer and saw that one of his eyes was swollen and the skin around it was blue. He stood over the table and stared at his son’s body, his clothes covered in mud and blood, chest peeled back and insides showing. When Reggie’s eyes welled up, I had to look away.

  ***

  I left the tent and walked across the camp. Some people had heard the commotion and stood at the entrance of their tents and peered out into the darkness to see what was going on. One man called out to me as I walked by him. He wore nothing but a pair of tight boxers.

  “Kyle,” he said, in an accent so thick it flowed through my ears like treacle.

  “Go to sleep Gregor,” I said.

  “They’re saying there’s been another body.”

  “Just go back to sleep.”

  “Think I could take a look at it?”

  I ignored Gregor and carried on walking across the camp until I reached the tent I was looking for. A glow came from it, as I knew that it would. While some people had the luxury of sleep when the sun had fallen, I knew that one person preferred to carry out her job in the dead of night.

  I tapped twice on the tent and then unzipped it. I walked inside and saw a wooden bench. A plastic sheet covered the surface, on which was the body of a pig. A girl stood above it wearing a white shirt that was so dotted with blood that she looked like an artist who had been gone wild with a tin of paint.

  “Hey Kyle,” she said, and lifted her right hand to her hand. She held a cleaver in her palm, and she ran the back of her hand across her forehead and wiped a smear of pig blood on her skin.

  “Evening Mel,” I said. “Haven’t seen you much lately.”

  “I’ve been busy,” she said, and nodded down at the table.

  She had cut portions off the pig, but it looked like she still had a way to go. Mel was important to the camp. Her task was to butcher the hunter's kills and make sure they stretched enough to feed everyone. It was the last job I would have ever expected a person like her to take, because she’d always been so quiet. When Gregor Horlock told me that he was looking for an apprentice, I was shocked when Mel stepped forward.

  Mel raised the cleaver and brought it down sharply. There was a squelching sound as it cut through flesh, and I smelled blood in the air.

  “What can I do for you, Kyle?” she said. Sweat mixed with the blood on her forehead.

  “There’s been another body,” I said.

  Mel looked at me, nodded, and then looked back at the pig.

  “You don’t seem too bothered,” I said.

  “It’s been a long time since I was squeamish. Death’s a part of life.”

  I took a step closer.

  “I’m organising a hunting party. We’re going to look for stalker nests and put an end to this. I was wondering if you could join me.”

  “I’m a little busy,” she said.

  “We might find Justin out there. You never know.”

  Mel dropped the cleaver to the table where it clanged. Her face started to turn red.

  “Fuck Justin.”

  She took shallow breaths as though she was trying to hold back her anger. She picked up the cleaver, raised it in the air and brought it down harder than before on the pig. Blood splattered back on her shirt.

  Mel used to be so nervous. She wouldn’t get pushed around, but she was nervous all the same. She had been perfect for Justin. When the two of them got together I had been sceptical, but it was easy to see that she was good for him. I wondered how Justin being missing was affecting her, and whether her manner was just a front.

  “Listen Kyle,” she said. “Justin is dead. You know it, I know it. He went without even a thought for me.”

  “He sacrificed himself to save – “

  “He’s a selfish bastard.”

  I stepped forward until I was inches away from the table. The smell of blood was pungent enough to pinch at my nostrils. When cooked the pig meat would make me salivate, but when it was cold and dead it was disgusting.

  “He’s not dead, Mel. When he walked toward the infected, they didn’t attack him. They let him pass. Whatever Whittaker injected him with, it made the infected see him as one of their own.”

  A year earlier, a scientist named Whittaker had kidnapped Justin. Whittaker believed he had found a vaccine for the infection. He injected Justin with it, and ever since then Justin had started to change. He became sadder, more withdrawn. He told me once that he felt alienated from people.

  Later, when we were fighting against a wave of infected outside Bleakholt, Justin had sacrificed himself. He detonated a bomb that trapped the infected and stopped most of them reaching us. It was Justin’s actions that had swung the battle our way, and it was the only reason that we were all alive today.

  “Look,” I said. “I know he’s alive. And he’s my friend, so I can’t abandon him. I want to find him, but at the same time I can’t just get up and go. It’s the life of one person, versus the lives of fifty.”

  Mel lifted the cleaver over her head and threw it across the tent.

  “Didn’t you hear me? Fuck Justin. I don’t care if he’s alive or not. Can you guess what I did last night Kyle?”

  “What?”

  She leaned forward with both hands on the table. Her face was scrunched up, her forehead covered in sweat and blood.

  “Last night, after I finished here, I went to Peter Jenkin’s tent and let him screw my brains out. Two nights earlier, I went to Kieron’s and did the same. I don’t care about Justin.”

  Chapter 4

  When I went to speak to Lou later that night, she wasn’t in her tent. I found her sat on the edge of the campsite, with her back against a sycamore tree. She stared out toward the field in front of her, at all the blades of grass which swayed in the cold night breeze. In the darkness they looked like waves lapping back and forth. I felt as though walking out too far into the fields could drown me.

  As I got closer, I wondered what the fields hid. The grass was waist high, and it would have been a good idea to chop it down. It offered protection if our enemies couldn’t see us, but it wasn’t worth giving stalkers somewhere to prowl.

  When I got closer still, Lou must have heard my footsteps. She had a book on her lap, but when she heard me coming she turned it over, put it beside her and covered it with her bag.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Nothing for hours,” she said. “Not seen a peep of any stalkers.”

  “I don’t mean them. I mean the book.”

  “Oh that?” she said. She looked at me and gave a smile. “That’s none of your fucking business.”

  I walked over and settled next to her at the tree. We sat so close that our shoulders touched. I was never a fan of physical contact, but it was good practice that if you were ever sat in the open, you had something supporting your back. It meant that nothing could sneak up on you.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you when you suggested I let Darla take over. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Lou’s smile was gone now. In the faint glow of the moonlight I could see her neck. I saw the ink of the tattoos that covered her from her chin all the way to her chest. The tattoos represented the inner workings of her neck and throat, so they were all bones and veins and sinews. It was like she was showing everyone her interior, which was strange for someone as guarded as she was. I knew that what she displayed on her neck had nothing to do with how she was inside. Lou was a lot softer that she made out, but at the same time she was also a lot tougher than she pretended. She was the kind of woman who could buy you a birthday gift when she was feeling nice, but kill you with it if you wronged her.

  “Thing is Kyle, I did mean it. I stand by what I said back then, even if it makes you pissy. You’re so stressed and wiped out, I think you should consider delegating some responsibility. And sinc
e Darla wants it, maybe she’s the right person to delegate to.”

  “Wanting power doesn’t mean you deserve it.”

  “But learning to trust others is something every leader should know.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “What’s the book? Come on. I saw it.”

  Lou lifted her bag onto her lap. It was a green camouflaged hold-all that she’d picked up on a supply run to a nearby town called Larkton. She pulled on the drawstrings and opened it, and then took out the book. She handed it across to me.

  “Don’t say a bloody word to anyone else about this.”

  “Calmness in a Chaotic World,” I read, turning the book over in my hands. “Unleashing the Dragonfly Within. Is there a dragonfly inside you, Lou?”