Fear the Dead (Book 4) Page 5

  The other tall male stumbled toward Mel. She tried to get out of the way but lost her balance in the soft peat near the stream. She fell back as the infected put its hands on her shoulders and forced its weight onto her.

  As Mel fell to the ground, shocks of cold ran through my body. I ran over to her. She was on the floor now, wrestling with the bigger and heavier creature and twisting her head away to avoid the gnashing of its teeth.

  “Kyle,” I heard Samuel say behind me with a shot of panic in his voice.

  I didn’t have time to turn round. My pulse fired and my heart hammered in my chest. I grabbed hold of the infected on top of Mel by its hair and lifted it. The strands started to tear away from the roots, and as I lifted my hand the infected’s scalp peeled away from its head. Ignoring the lump forming in my throat, I threw it away. I lined up my knife and in one swift motion brought the tip down and through the infected’s skull.

  There was only a second for me to catch my breath before I heard another scream behind me. I turned around to see Lou grabbing the shoulders of an infected which crouched on the ground. She pushed it way from her, and as the infected fell back into the grass, I saw who had been underneath it.

  Samuel was on the floor now, his throat torn open, blood seeping down the flaps of skin and onto the green grass. His face had turned pale and his eyes were almost impossibly wide, as if the shock of what had happened had hammered through his brain. I couldn’t imagine the pain and the fear he had felt in his last seconds, and I felt a heaviness grow in my chest.

  He didn’t look like he had the energy left in him, so I was surprised when Samuel pushed down on the mud and struggled to his feet. Blood poured from him. It dripped down his chest and soaked into his shirt, sticking the fabric to his body. He took a few shaky steps. The look in his eyes was lost, and it was as though he didn’t even register that the rest of us were here.

  These steps were his last, and in his mind he took them alone. He barely moved before falling face first toward the ground, burying his head in the flesh of the dead cow.

  Chapter 7

  I was glad that the wind picked up on the way back to camp. I felt it crawl down my chest and snake its way around my stomach and then seep deep into my bones. It was an unpleasant feeling, but I didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and the breeze was so loud that it felt like it was screaming into my ear, and it made conversation difficult.

  Samuel was the first person in weeks to die by the hands of the infected. There had been the bodies found at the edges of camp at night time, but nobody thought those to be the work of infected. The Scottish highlands were so remote that the infected had begun to feel like an annoyance rather than a problem. Today had proved that it didn’t matter where we went. They would always follow.

  The silence was broken a few minutes later when Reggie joined me at the front of the group. At first he didn’t say anything. I gave him a sideways glance and saw that his right eye was even more swollen than before.

  “What happened to your eye?” I asked.

  Reggie screwed up his forehead, as if he was wondering what to tell me.

  We walked for a few minutes more before I tried again.

  “Come on, Reggie. You obviously want to say something.”

  The camp was in sight now. When I saw the lines of tents, I didn’t feel the pang that a person should feel when they had been away from home for a while. I don’t know what I felt at that moment. Was it emptiness? I had so many questions, but one was chief among them. Would there ever be a place we could really call home?

  Reggie coughed. He spoke, but his voice sounded strange, as though it was the first time he’d used it and his vocal chords weren’t used to the exercise.

  “It’s Kendal,” he said.

  “What about her?”

  I didn’t speak to Kendal much, but when I did, she always left me feeling that I’d lost an argument that I never knew I was having. Plenty of others felt the same, too. Lou couldn’t stand her. The thing was, sometimes Kendal would give you this great big smile, and it genuinely made you feel warm. Then she’d follow it up with a cutting remark and you’d walk away from her muttering curses under your breath.

  Reggie coughed again.

  “She’s…ah…she’s… Hell, it’s hard to say it.”

  He looked at me. His swollen eye was closing shut now. His other eye looked just as damaged, but this wasn’t physical damage. There was a deep sadness welling in him, the kind that I couldn’t even come close to imagining.

  Clara and I had talked about having kids, but we’d never gotten round to it. There had been a scare, once. The joy we felt when she did a test and it came back negative told us all we needed to know about our decision to be childless. We’d get round to it one day, we always told people when they asked. When that would be, we didn’t have a clue. As it turned out, one day never came.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I told Reggie.

  “That’s the thing, Kyle. I have to. And you’re the only one who I could say it to.”

  “Say it then.”

  He looked at me again. The eyelid of his purple eye flickered.

  “Kendal. She…hits me. Beats me. See this,” he said, and pointed to his eye as if I wouldn’t have noticed it had he not pointed it out. “She did this. Smashed her elbow in my eye while I slept, and I woke up to blinding pain.”

  “Was it an accident?” I said, thinking of all the times in bed when I had turned too quickly and given Clara a shove.

  Reggie shook his head. “She’s done it for years. Punching, biting, slapping. She used to beat Taylor, too.”

  I thought about Reggie’s teenage son. I tried to remember him as a smiling, sometimes surly teenager, but all I could think about was his dead body on the table, his chest torn open.

  “When Taylor was five,” said Reggie, “She broke his arm. I had to drive him to accident and emergency, and it was pretty hairy because I’d had a couple of drinks. I wanted to leave her. I was planning to. I’d found an apartment and everything.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The outbreak happened. And suddenly I couldn’t leave her. She gets this look in her eyes sometimes, Kyle. Like she wants to kill me.”

  Thirty minutes later the wind had dropped down. A cloud spat rain down on us, and I felt the patters splash on my forehead. My legs felt heavy and each step was becoming more difficult. I wasn’t cut out for long walks these days.

  I slowed down until I was next to Lou. In contrast to me, she seemed fine. I got the impression that she could have kept on going for hours, as if something powered her that the rest of us didn’t have.

  “Don’t suppose you heard me talking to Reggie?” I said.

  “You never say anything interesting enough to eavesdrop on,” said Lou.

  I explained to her what Reggie had told me, and it sounded even worse in the re-telling.

  “Always knew she was a bitch,” said Lou.

  “This goes way beyond being a bitch. Look at Reggie’s face. He looks like someone took a cricket bat to his eye.”

  Lou shoved her hands in her coat pockets.

  “Well you know the rules, Kyle.”

  Ever since we had gotten to camp, I had made the rules clear to everyone. I knew all too well what happened when there was no discipline among survivors. I had decided that although I would be fair in the way I ran camp, I would be firm too. Our rules were few in number, but they were severe and they were unbreakable. Number one above all others, was this; deliberately hurt or injure another member of camp, and we would expel you.

  “It means she’ll die,” I said. “Expelling people gives them a chance, but they’re as good as dead on their own. I can’t help but feel we’re letting the infected do our dirty work.”

  “There’s also hunger, thirst, dysentery.”

  “Come on Lou.”

  “I’ll do it then,” said Lou.

  I shook my head.

  “If
it’s my decision to make, then I’ll see it through.”

  ***

  The welcome party at camp reminded me of a group of mourners greeting a hearse as it pulled into the cemetery gates. Lou slipped through the crowd and walked toward her tent. Reggie stood in place and watched as his wife walked toward him.

  I wondered how she would react. Her husband had been away from camp, and he had put his life on the line to help the rest of them. Would Kendal appreciate that? I watched her walk toward him, and I couldn’t help but feel disgusted with her.

  When she reached Reggie, she stopped. I thought she might try to hug him, but instead she crossed her arms.

  “You selfish bastard,” she said.

  With that she turned her back on him and strode off back toward camp. I felt the heat of anger start to warm me. In a few seconds I had caught up to her.

  “Kendal,” I said.

  She stopped and turned. When she looked at me, she scowled.

  “What do you want, Kyle?”

  I wondered how to phrase it. How to speak to her without letting the bile of anger leak out.

  “I know what you did,” I said.

  She looked at me with a confused face.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Reggie’s eye didn’t blacken itself, did it?” I said. “What about Taylor? What screwed up shit did you do to him over the years?”

  The realisation hit her that Reggie must have told me what she had done, and her stern expression disappeared. Then, a second later, the shield was back up again.

  “You know what I have to do,” I said. “You know the rule.”

  She gave me a sneering grin.

  “Darla won’t let you expel me. She won’t stand for this.”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “Darla won’t have a choice. You’re leaving camp right now, Kendal.”

  Chapter 8

  We walked five miles north of camp across fields of overgrown grass. In every direction jagged hills reached up toward a misty sky, and gigantic rocks were littered around us. Our going was slow, for the most part due to the brown sack I had put over Kendal’s head. Lack of vision meant that her steps were slow and tentative. I had tied a rope around her left wrist and connected it to my right arm, which meant that I could make sure she didn’t try to run away. It also made sure that I could give a gentle tug and alter our course when the terrain was too rocky.

  I thought I could smell fire in the air, but there was nobody around to light one. Maybe it could have come from one of the camp fires if Mel had butchered meat, but it couldn't have travelled five miles to meet my nose. That was the thing these days; I couldn’t rely on my sense of smell. Most of the time I smelled death in the air, even when there were no infected around. It was as though years of dealing with the dead had made their rotten smell cling to my nostrils.

  Soon we hit upon a road. It was a single lane with lay-by stops every few hundred metres. Years ago it would have meant that if two cars met each other on the road, one would have to pull to the side and allow the other to pass. There were no cars now, but I hoped we didn’t run into anyone else on the road today. The days of courtesies between strangers were over.

  At the side of us there was a cobblestone wall. It stood over a farmer’s field that hadn’t seen the wheels of a tractor or turn of a plough in years. As we walked the road we passed an inn called ‘The Quarryman’s Secret’. It was named after a wealthy quarry owner who had killed his cheating wife and buried her under tons of limestone. After we left the pub behind, the road promised nothing but miles of wild grass and hills that stayed silent and unmoving at our side.

  Kendal said something, but the sack over her head muffled it. I looked up and saw that there was a pothole in front of her, so I gave the rope a tug and pulled her closer to me. She tried to speak again, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I lifted the hood over her lips.

  “I need water,” she said.

  The dry sound of her voice made me question myself. The rope around my arm rubbed on my skin, and it made me feel like a slaver taking his prize to the market. I had to remind myself who this woman was and what she’d done. The years of abuse that Reggie had finally told me about, that Kendal had admitted with barely a trace of guilt. The infected were always searching and the stalkers were always hunting. The world was a dangerous enough place as it was, so it was unforgivable that someone could treat another person that way. Especially those who she was supposed to love.

  I looked around me. I knew where we were from studying maps of the area. Kendal wasn’t a native of Scotland. She had fled there post-outbreak after a thousand infected had crawled out of the tide on Blackpool beach. Before the outbreak, she had inherited a bed and breakfast hotel from her mother who had died of lung cancer.

  I tried to decide if it was safe enough to take off her hood. There was no way she could find her way back to camp from here because she didn’t know which direction we had travelled, and I was going to let her loose in five miles anyway. I had too much to do in camp to be away for much longer. I went to pull the hood further over her head to bare more of her skin to the air, but my natural caution held me back.

  I took a plastic bottle out of my bag and passed it to her. It was filled with water taken from a different part of the stream, further up from where we had found the dead cow. I hoped that in a week or two, the stream would be completely uncontaminated again now that we had removed the cause of the sickness. For now, we had to boil our water and then let it cool before drinking.

  I handed the bottle to Kendal with the cap unscrewed. She lifted her left arm, tugging on the rope which connected us. She sighed, then put the bottle in her other hand and lifted it up to her lips. The water had a yellow tint to it, like tea made too weak. She lifted it and took big gulps. When it was halfway gone she stopped drinking and held it out to me.

  “I’ve got my own,” I said. “You keep it.”

  “Where are we going?” said Kendal.

  “We’re nearly there. A few miles ahead we’ll come to a fork in the road, and that’s where I’ll leave you.”

  Kendal seemed to stare ahead into the distance, though with the hood on her head I knew that she couldn’t see the same things as I did. The road seemed endless, a concrete intrusion in an unchanging landscape. Yet I knew that two miles away a hill would suddenly sprout up in front of us, and at that point the road would divide into two.

  It was called Dragney Pass. There was a Scottish folk story about a man named Dragney Sam and his clan of cannibals who would ambush the rich on the highland roads. They used to murder them and then eat them. I once taught a module on folklore and its roots in reality, and I had used Dragney Sam as an example of it. The story of Dragney and his inbred family had always thrilled and disgusted the pupils in equal measure, but I had to stop teaching it after getting a letter from the parents of a boy who couldn't sleep because of it.

  I could still remember sitting in front of the headmaster’s desk that day. I read the letter, screwed it into a ball and threw it across the office. Headmaster Baldwin watched the paper ball loop in the air and then make a perfect drop into a bin, and then his eyes snapped back on me.

  “They’re children,” he said. “Your job is to educate, not to scare. You’re the youngest teacher here by a decade, and we hired you for fresh ideas. But God knows that we didn’t want this. Not me, not the board, not the parents.”

  “It’s just a story,” I answered.

  The headmaster slammed his hand on the table, but he didn’t put enough weight behind the gesture to make it dramatic.

  “It stops now,” he said.

  After that I’d dropped Dragney Sam and his cannibalistic chums from the curriculum. In the end though, the headmaster’s orders and the parent’s wishes hadn’t been worth a damn. Sixteen years later the kids were learning the lesson just the same, except that now the cannibals were no longer just legends.

  “Kyle?” said Kendal.

  I sho
ok myself out of my thoughts and looked over at her. The hood was hallway up her face now, so I reached across and pulled it off. Her eyes were harsh, but I didn’t see any hate in them. Her hair was tied in a ponytail that stretched back the skin on her forehead. It was a practical haircut, and one which was worn a lot around camp. It made sense to have your hair as short as possible because gave the infected less to grab hold of. Lou had taken this to an extreme, of course, by hacking off most of her hair and then greasing it back. Kendal’s style was typical.

  She took a deep breath. She looked at the sky and blinked as though she was being blinded by rays of sun. Her cheeks were colourless, but parts of her forehead were red from where the sack had rubbed on it.