Fear the Dead (Book 4) Read online

  “You’ll be getting a knife inside your arse if you don’t shut up.”

  The trunk of the tree dug into my back. I would have shifted position, but the discomfort of it helped to keep me awake. Between that and the night-time wind, there was no danger of me getting drowsy yet.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” I said.

  “Counting sheep.”

  “Seriously, Lou. Weren’t you on watch earlier? You’re the guard captain, so that means you can delegate. Where’s Carlisle?”

  “He quit.”

  “Vernon?”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “Pollard?”

  “Don’t trust him either.”

  I shook my head and then handed the book back to her.

  “Damn it. You can’t do this by yourself. I didn’t appoint you captain so you could keep watch every second of the day on your own. You need to learn to delegate.”

  Lou glanced at me and arched her eyebrow. It was only after a few seconds of staring at her that the point hit me. Everything I had just said, she had said to me earlier. It seemed like we were just too alike.

  Something made a clapping sound in the field across from us. Lou slid her crowbar from beside her and got into a crouching position. I sat up further and scanned the field. I couldn’t see anything moving in the grass, but stalkers weren’t known for being easy to spot. One of them could have been slinking its way toward us, leaving it until the last possible second to pounce. My heart began to thud.

  “It’s just a crow,” said Lou, and sat back down.

  A crow flapped its wings and drifted across the sky, its black feathers blending into the darkness above it. I put my head back against the tree. How was it that even after so long, I could never get used to the stalkers? It was the same with the infected, too. Even though I knew how to deal with them, I could never quite get rid of the primal fear that the undead provoked in me. When I saw their hungry mouths, my hairs stood on end, and when I heard them groan and walk toward me, my pulse quickened.

  “I don’t mind doing the watch,” said Lou. “I’m not exactly getting my beauty sleep these days. There’s hardly anyone I trust. When all’s said and done, I think there’s too many of us. Maybe we should split into two or three different camps.”

  “You’re sounding like Darla,” I said.

  “I just think it’s mad for you to try and be responsible for fifty people. It’s too much for one person. The way I see the future isn’t us staying in one place. There’s no Eden, Kyle. We’d be much safer just travelling from place to place in roving bands. Never settle anywhere, never go soft. Never let our guards down.”

  “We need to put down roots.”

  “When you put down roots, you get stuck.”

  Lou turned her whole body and looked at me.

  “I’m going to ask one more time,” she said. “Give up power. Let Darla take over. Then you, me, Mel and whoever else wants to come can just leave and look after ourselves.”

  Hearing her mention Darla again put a lump in my throat. It was one thing that Darla wanted to take power from me, but it was another that one of my closest friends was encouraging me to let her. Whose side was she on, anyway?

  “Good to know who your rooting for,” I said.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Kyle. Don’t be a bitch about it.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about support, do you?” I said.

  My voice was getting loud. The anger was starting to flow through me, and I didn’t care enough to hide it.

  Lou got to her feet.

  “I don’t know about support? Really? Do I have to remind you that I saved your life when we first met?”

  “And I’ve repaid that.”

  “I don’t see anyone else around who’s been beside you for so long.”

  I got to my feet this time. At six foot two I towered over her, yet somehow I felt the smaller person.

  “I don’t see people queuing up to be your friend either,” I said.

  As soon as I said the words, I wished I hadn’t. Lou put out an I-don’t-give-a-shit exterior, but deep down I knew that she wanted to be liked. Not by everyone, maybe, but by some people. Like every other human being, she still needed some degree of support and companionship.

  “Get some sleep Kyle. You’re getting crabby. And you’re being an arsehole.”

  I knew I should apologise, but the words wouldn’t form. Instead I folded my arms and tried to let the anger fade away. It worked, to a degree, and I felt my chest start to loosen. Lou was the first to speak again.

  “I’ve been thinking on this for a while,” she said. “And the fact is that I’ve decided that I’m leaving. I don’t know when, but soon. And you’ve got an open invite if you want to leave with me.”

  “But in the meeting with Darla, you defended this place. You said it covered some of our basic needs.”

  “I was defending you, Kyle. Not the place. Now are you going to come with me, or not?”

  Across from us, the crow flapped its way back across the field. It drifted to the side and flew up into a tree, where it settled on a branch and then disappeared from view. A cloud drifted over the quarter moon and blocked out the sliver of pale light.

  I thought about Lou’s offer, but I knew I couldn’t take it. As much as being responsible for all these people was a weight on my shoulders, it was one I knew I couldn’t shed. It wasn’t just a case of rubbing my hands together and disappearing into the night. If I left here, I’d leave with a stained conscience.

  “I can’t,” I said. “They need me. And they need you. Nobody here has survived like you have, Lou. Don’t give up on them.”

  “They’d get along just fine if I was gone.”

  “Just think on it,” I said.

  “And you think on it too.”

  “Like I said. They need me.”

  Lou bent down and picked up her rucksack. She slung one strap over her shoulder.

  “This isn’t about them, Kyle. It’s about you. You need to be needed. You won’t admit it, but it’s true.”

  It was a thought that I couldn’t face right then. Personal truths and startling epiphanies were the luxury of someone who had nothing to worry about, and that wasn’t me. Besides, it couldn’t have been true. Since when did I need to be needed? Maybe when Clara was alive I felt good knowing I could keep her safe, but look how that had ended. It couldn’t have been further away from the truth.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I’m going to set out tomorrow to find the stalker nest. Mel’s coming, and I was hoping you would too.”

  “Sure,” said Lou.

  I smiled. “You realise it’s gonna be dangerous? That we might have to deal with the stalkers there and then? We’re gonna be gone days and it’ll be rough.”

  Lou swung the other strap over her shoulder and took the weight of the bag on her back. Her neck tattoo was a shadow that disappeared under coat as she zipped it up. She fixed me a stare that seemed to go right through me.

  “Did you think that would bother me? Let’s go take our rage out on something that’s already dead.”

  Chapter 5

  The sky burst with light and then sank into darkness twice before we got back to camp. My leg throbbed from my gunshot wound and reminded me that I wasn't cut out for long scouting trips and hunts. Mel and Lou matter-of-factly told me that I wasn’t, with smiles on their faces at first, but later with scowls. By the time we got back, after endless hours, we had nothing to show for our efforts but sore feet and glares.

  We walked back to camp through the woods on the west end. These were the Grey Basin Woods, a thirty acre expanse of mud and trees made famous by the murder-suicide of Atton-Wool. He was a Scottish landowner whose business ventures went sour. In response, he turned a shotgun on his wife and then, despite having a shell left, hung himself from the branch of a birch tree.

  As soon as we got back into camp, Lou walked off without a word. We’d bickered during the hunt and things had gott
en a little frosty. Stood beside the first camp tent, Mel turned to me.

  “I would say it’s been fun, but I’d be lying,” she said.

  “And I’d say it’s good to be home, but I’d be lying too,” I said.

  As Mel walked off toward her own tent I looked at the camp around me. Some of the tents were big enough for a group of adults to stand up and walk around in, others so small it was a squeeze for two people to sleep. The grass had given way under the feet of the people trampling over it each day and it had turned to mud.

  I used to go to a lot of festivals when I was younger. It amazed me that the farmers let thousands of people jump up and down on their fields to rock music. The grass would start pea green and then gradually morph into a murky brown. There would be beer bottles everywhere. If you were unlucky, there would be bottles of urine lying around, and if you were spectacularly unlucky, one of the bottles would have flown toward your head at some point.

  I smiled to myself for a second, and then I looked at the scene before me. With the mud and the tents, this wasn’t so dissimilar to the scene of the festivals I used to go to. Except that now there was no joy to be had. People tried to force a sense of happiness with their camp songs and storytelling. When I walked by in the orange sunset and I looked at the smiles they gave me, and I saw how empty they were.

  Darla walked toward me from across the field. As she got nearer I could see that her eyebrows were furrowed and she had a sense of purpose to her strides. Again she reminded me of a younger, female Churchill striding across the grass.

  “We found nothing,” I said as she got closer.

  A few feet away from me, she stopped.

  “We need to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “People are sick, Kyle.”

  I looked around me. It was approaching lunchtime, yet there was nobody walking around. Usually people would have been walking in and out of camp. The hunters tracking the local wildlife, others gathering firewood and collecting water. Today, the field was getting a rest from the trampling of feet.

  “What’s going on?”

  She folded her arms. She wore a baggy blouse that billowed around her. On her right cheek, parallel with the top of her nose, there was a tiny dent which must have been a scar from some accident years ago. I had one of my own on my left forearm from where I had managed to smash a dinner plate over myself.

  “It started just after you left. Vomiting, diarrhoea, fever. Nobody can keep their food down and they sure as hell can’t work. It’s getting so bad I can smell it in the air. I’m surprised you didn’t. “

  “My nose has been blocked for the last twenty years. Or it feels that way, at least. What is it?” I said.

  “I think it’s something in the food.”

  I looked around me; the absence of footfall in the camp told me more than Darla’s words ever could. Overhead clouds gathered, grey and heavy, and the day seemed to take on a darker tint.

  Plenty of people got sick when our sanitation systems failed and hospitals shut their doors. It was the stupidest things that made them ill, the activities they took for granted that fell behind the wayside. For some reason, after the world fell, people stopped washing their hands. They took a chance on food that was days past being fit to eat. They drank from water sources that were questionable at best, downright dangerous at worst.

  “So what about a supply run?” I said. “There’s a pharmacy in one of the towns nearby. We can get medicine.”

  Darla shook her head. “Not even enough healthy people to go. We’re focussing on the essentials right now; getting water, making sure we have food. You’re not going to find a queue of volunteers for a supply run.”

  “So maybe I don’t ask for volunteers. I think we’re getting beyond relying on people’s goodwill.”

  Darla shrugged.

  “What about you? Why aren’t you sick?” I said.

  “I’ve got a strong constitution,” said Darla.

  ***

  I walked across the camp and to find Charlie Sturgeon. There was an outbuilding on the edge of camp which had once housed toilets and showers. Since plumbing was another much-wished-for thing of the past, Charlie had taken it as his lab.

  The room was sparse. Tiles covered walls that had once been white but had taken on a film of grime. Looking at the dirt which lined the cracks in the tiles, I could almost smell the bleach and urine that would have once filled the room. Charlie had set up a workbench in the centre. He’d laid a sheet of thin plastic over the surface and driven nails into it to hold it in place. On one end were his tools; a hack saw, hammer, sharp meat knife and a pair of pliers. This was Charlie’s autopsy kit, but it made him look like a serial killer.

  Reggie’s son was on the table, stretched out and pale, his arms beside him. His chest and stomach were torn open, and the skin nearest to the wounds had shrivelled. Charlie stood above with a knife in his good hand. His other arm, hand and forearm missing and giving way to a stump, hung off his body like a clipped wing.

  “He was cut open by something that knew what it was doing,” said Charlie, without even looking at me. He stared at the body in front of him without emotion, as though the tragedy of what this teenager represented couldn’t touch him. He could have been looking at an ant farm for all the effect it had on him.

  “The cuts are sharp and there aren’t many,” he continued, “Implying accuracy. The stomach, liver, bladder, kidneys and spleen have been removed. Pretty much like the other bodies, give or take an organ or two.”

  “Can I see it?” said a voice.

  I snapped my eyes to the corner of the room. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him earlier. In the corner, sat on a plastic chair with his feet swinging an inch above the floor, was Ben. A dark shadow covered him.

  “What’s he doing here?” I said.

  Lately, I had tried my best to watch over Ben. It was the least I owed him; after all, I had killed his father. The fact that his dad was a cannibalistic hunter who had tried to murder me didn’t matter, because I had left Ben without a dad. Later his mum, Alice, had been ripped apart by infected in an attack at Bleakholt.

  Sometimes, lying on my sleeping bag with the moon casting glows on my tent, I would think about that night. Even now I could still hear the groans of the infected and their hungry cries as they moved towards us. I heard the soft thud as knives sunk into dead flesh. I heard the ripping and tearing as four of them dragged Alice to the ground and made a meal of her meat and skin. I could still smell the blood, still hear her screams.

  Ben played with something in his hands. When I looked closer, I saw that he was toying with a bead necklace.

  “Where did you get that?” I said.

  Ben ignored me. He stood up off the chair and looked at Charlie. It amazed me how much the nine year old had grown over the last year, despite a diet that many would say was lacking.

  “Can I see the body Charlie?” he said.

  “You know you can’t, buddy,” said the scientist.

  Ben’s shoulders slumped. He sat back down in the chair and twisted the beads along his fingers. The scientist and the boy seemed to have a bond between them. I felt a twinge of guilt flash through my mind. Since Alice had died, I had tried to spend time with Ben, but I just had too much to do around camp. I felt like I was on a rack getting my arms and legs stretched, and soon they would just pop out of their sockets and disconnect from my body. Every time I got something done the ropes slackened, but then somebody else stepped up and made them taut again.

  I walked over to Charlie and stood a foot away from the work bench. I tried not to look at Reggie’s son’s face, instead focussing on Charlie. Sweat covered his forehead. When he moved he still looked awkward, and it seemed that even so much later he still hadn’t gotten used to having one arm. I felt like he blamed me sometimes. He had a point in a way, since I was the one who cut his arm off after all. I had done it to save him, because he had been bitten and without my intervention he would h
ave been a corpse long ago.

  “I don’t want Ben watching this kind of stuff,” I said.

  “The boy’s lonely.”

  “Still. He shouldn’t be here, Charlie.”

  “You sound like Alice.”

  He was right. Ben’s mum had always been fiercely protective of her son. I used to think that we shouldn't shield children away from the grim realities of the world we had found ourselves in. That had been easy to say before I was responsible for one. Since Ben became my problem – not problem, responsibility – my view was starting to change. The body in front of us was pale and stained with blood, his chest carved open at a sickening angle. It was something no boy should see.