Fear the Dead (Book 4) Read online

  I expected her to beg. I thought she would plead with me to let her stay in camp or tell me how it was all a misunderstanding, a big mistake. There was none of it. Instead of begging, Kendal had been calm ever since we left camp. Before I had first slid the hood over her face, her eyes had locked coolly on mine with no trace of fear, and they still showed none now.

  I slid the hood back over her head. She mumbled something into the cloth.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Her foot hit a rock and she stumbled forward, regaining her balance in time to avoid falling.

  “Don’t you have lackeys to do this for you?”

  “Do what?” I said.

  “Exile people from camp. I’m assuming that you’re walking me far enough away so that I can’t find my way back. If that’s the case we might as well stop now, because I’m useless with directions. Feels like I lost my way decades ago and I’ve been trying to find it ever since. Besides, don’t you have other things to do? Camp stuff?”

  I stared straight ahead. Half a mile away I saw a sheep walking down the slope of a hill that met the side of the road. Its fur was patchy, with areas of skin showing as if someone had gotten only halfway through shearing it. Its legs were stick-thin and its steps uncertain. It stopped at the edge of the road and then stood motionless. I thought about racing ahead to catch it, because Mel could have fed the camp for a day or two even with the meagre meat from the animal. As I contemplated the best way to grab it, the sheep fell forward onto the road, revealing the side of its body that had been blind to me. Its wool was dyed a dark crimson, and its insides showed through a jagged hole gouged into its torso.

  “The way I see it,” Kendal carried on, “You have the right idea with the exiles. But it’s not people like me you need to shoo away. When you’re at war, you don’t cast away the strong. You identify the weak and then rid yourself of the weakness.”

  “We’re not at war,” I said, unable to take my eyes away from the dead sheep.

  “Our whole lives are war. When you wake up and force yourself out of bed, even knowing what shit you’ll have to face, that’s war. When we get through the day and reach night and then go to sleep knowing the whole sodding mess will repeat itself the next day, that’s war. When we can’t let children play in the fields for fear something will eat them, that’s war.”

  “And when you beat the crap out of your husband and son?” I said, not caring to hide the scorn from my voice.

  Kendal turned her head in my direction, though she couldn’t see me with the hood on and her head wasn’t fully facing mine.

  “That’s war,” she said.

  In truth, when I had made the camp rule that violence meant banishment, I hadn’t contemplated a situation like this. I had made the law to stop people thinking that just because society had fallen, they could get away with violence. In my time in the Wilds I had seen people murdered for their sleeping bags. I’d stumbled upon a group of women forcing themselves on a scared teenage boy, and intervening had cost me a beating. With the fall of society, morals had begun to dissipate.

  People thought in extremes these days. Every passing morning was the start of a battle for survival, the odds forever changing but never for the better. The infected population was self-replenishing, and the stalkers bred as much as time would allow. Normal, healthy humans were the minority now, and that meant we couldn’t turn on each other.

  “You know, I kind of admire you in a way. You’ve got guts, Kyle. More guts than most of those ball-less wasters. I can count on one hand the people I’d back in a fight.”

  “Those being?”

  “Gregor Horlock. He seems simple, but he’s scary as hell. Mel, too. I’ve seen that girl butcher a pig, and I’ve never seen such hate in someone eyes. Funny, now that I think about it. Didn’t the bodies start to turn up when Gregor taught her how to butcher meat?”

  Her voice was calmer than it had any right to be. When she spoke of bodies, I knew that she wasn’t just talking about strangers. Her own son had been the latest body to appear, his chest torn open and his organs removed. Her boy had been murdered and mutilated, and she talked of the killings as if she were reading a newspaper column.

  I stopped walking. I tugged on the rope. Kendal didn’t move so I tugged again, harder. Her shoulder jerked, but this time she took steps toward me. I took hold of the rough edges of the hood and slowly lifted it over her nose and then up over her head, letting it drop to the floor.

  I looked properly into Kendal’s eyes and searched for something in them. Emotion, sadness, anything. Instead all I got was cold, blue glass. Hers was a gaze so dead that she could have been an infected staring back at me.

  “You’re an icy bitch,” I said. “Your son was killed. Hell, this whole time you’ve never said anything about why we’re here. About what you did to Reggie and Taylor. I’d even prefer it if you denied beating them, at least that would show something.”

  “Oh, I beat them alright,” she said, her eyes never leaving mine.

  I shivered. I felt like I was staring into the frozen tundra, falling deep beneath the ice to places where daylight couldn’t follow. There was something wrong about this woman.

  “You need to watch your friends, Kyle” said Kendal.

  “What?”

  “Your friend Lou. She’s a bomb waiting to explode. I wouldn’t put any faith in her.”

  “Lou’s never let me down,” I said. “She’s a rock.”

  “That’s as maybe. But she’s one stumble away from falling into the chasm. And when she does, she’ll reach out and drag you in with her.”

  My mind reeled as I tried to process what she was saying. Not content with implying that Mel and Gregor were the camp murderers, she implied that Lou was about to crack. Part of me thought that she was playing me, but when I looked at her and saw her blank face, her expression flat as if it had been ironed out of her skin, I knew that she meant every word she said.

  I saw movement in the corner of my eyes. I pulled my knife from my belt and turned around, but there was nothing on the road but the dead sheep. I felt cold all over. I turned back toward Kendal.

  “This is where I leave you,” I said.

  In truth I had planned to leave her five miles away from here. She didn’t know the area, but we were still too close to camp. Kendal was an unpredictable woman, and I couldn’t risk what would happen if she reappeared at camp. I knew I should have kept going, but I couldn’t spend another second in her company.

  “I know what I did, Kyle. But I couldn’t help it.”

  “Save it,” I said.

  I set down a bag in the middle of the road.

  She eyed it for a few seconds, and then looked back at me.

  “You might as well kill me. I’d prefer it, rather than leaving me here.”

  For a short time, doubt flickered through me. I didn’t want to kill her, but was leaving her here any better? I thought about the pain she had caused. I remembered the world we were in, and I knew it had to be one that didn’t tolerate people like her.

  I threw a knife down at her feet.

  “It’ll take you a couple of hours, but you’ll be able to cut yourself free. After that, what you do is your business. But if we ever see you in camp, you better be sure I’ll kill you.”

  Before any more doubts could take hold and I started to wonder if this was right, I turned my back on her and started down the long road home.

  Chapter 9

  When I got back to camp the tents were bathed in the black of night. Only one showed any signs of life. It was in the middle of the sea of tents, and I couldn’t remember who it belonged to. It was a two-man tent, smaller than mine with hardly enough room for a person to stand up in, and from inside an orange glow flickered. Whoever it was had lit a kerosene lamp, which was a ridiculously dangerous thing to do in a tent. I was going to knock on the entrance flap and tell them to stop being so stupid, when I heard a low chanting coming from inside.

  “Dead God, you giv
e us back what we lose. You take away what we love and return it, corrupted. Spare us, Dead God.”

  I felt a chill run through me, and the night seemed to close in as a blanket of blackness and cold. Through the dim glow in the thin tent material, I could see a figure that seemed to be sat cross-legged on the floor. It was a bulky figure, with thick shoulders and chest. Recollection came to me, and I realised that it was Gregor Horlock.

  He was a butcher by profession, and his job was one of the only ones that had stayed useful after the outbreak. People didn’t need I.T. technicians anymore. Postmen were useless. Salesmen had nothing to sell. There were no more stocks for the brokers to push, but people still needed their meat carved up. I had watched Gregor work sometimes, and it amazed me how he could slice a dead cow or sheep without leaving a single scrap of it to waste.

  After the fall of Bleakholt, Gregor had been one of the survivors who decided to travel with me. He announced that he needed an apprentice, and to my surprise, Mel had stepped forward. The bulky butcher had taught her how to carve up an animal. He’d removed the squeamishness and fear of blood from her, and now she could slice open a carcass as easy as cutting a loaf of bread.

  “Spare us all, Dead God. Do not take us yet. Do not return what is not departed.”

  Exhaustion swept through me. There were no stars above us tonight. Instead the sky was an endless void, under which everything was still. Everything except the things that took their turn in the night, like the stalkers who woke hungry in their dens.

  I thought about Kendal. Would the stalkers find her on the road? Had I condemned her to die, and if that was the case, was I right to do it? Did I have the moral authority to make a decision like that about someone else’s life? I thought of her son and the abuse she had inflicted on him, and I left the question unanswered in my head.

  I walked away from Gregor’s tent and found my own. My makeshift camp bed was how I had left it, unmade and stinking from the sweat of weeks of tossing and turning. I should really have given it a wash at some point. Nevertheless, it had never looked so inviting.

  Just as I was about to get in my bed, I saw something on top of it. Looking closer, I saw that it was a book. I picked it up and tuned the cover to face me. Unleashing the Dragonfly Within.

  I smiled. “Thanks Lou,” I said aloud. My voice sounded alien in the dead of night.

  I regretted arguing with Lou. She might have been brash, but she had changed a lot since I had met her. She used to be aloof, uncaring, a loner who wouldn’t let anyone else near. She was hardly a people-person now, but I had grown close to her. We had been through too much together to argue.

  I lay down on my bed and within seconds felt my body melt into it. As my eyelids started to close I realised it had been too long since I had slept. I felt like I could finally allow myself a few hours of nothingness.

  There was a rapping sound. I sat up and realised that it came from the entrance of my tent. I felt anger flicker through me. Was a single hour of sleep too much to ask for?

  “Come in,” I said.

  The tent was unzipped from the outside and the figure stepped in. When I saw who it was, I felt my whole body start to tighten up.

  “Darla,” I said, knowing there wasn’t a single person I would like to see less than her at this hour. Hell, I would even have preferred Gregor Horlock in my tent, chanting about his Dead God or whatever he had been talking about.

  Darla’s face was set in stone, her features cruel in the darkness of the night. There were no rings round her eyes, no creases in her skin from lack of sleep. I wondered if she was stronger than me, or if I was just weak.

  “We want a meeting,” she said.

  I rubbed my eyes and felt them sting.

  “Check with my assistant,” I said. “I think I can squeeze you in between half nine and ten.”

  She crossed her arms. She was a foot shorter than me, but something about the way she carried herself made her seem bigger.

  “I’m not joking, Kyle. The people want a meeting. A proper one. There are things we have to discuss.”

  ***

  We had the meeting at first light. We were on the east side of camp, away from the tents where the sick residents slept and vomited and sweated into their clothes. To say the people had wanted a meeting, there wasn’t much of a turn out. Only ten had been well enough to drag themselves away from their tents, the rest feeling too weak to even move. There would be no jobs done today, I realised. No water collected, no game hunted.

  We stood in a circle. Darla was opposite me, showing no more signs of tiredness than she had a few hours before in my tent. Lou was at the opposite end of camp on watch, and Charlie was nowhere to be seen. Although we were in a circle the other residents seemed to bunch closer to Darla, and they looked up at her as if waiting for her to speak. I felt alone, devoid of allies and searching for a friendly face but finding none. Mel was there, but she barely looked at me.

  There was one person who I was surprised to see at the meeting. Across from me, with sagging shoulders, was Reggie. I thought about everything he had lost in the last week, and I wondered how he could even drag himself out of bed. Maybe he was stronger than I thought.

  The other residents were those who had survived the battle of Bleakholt and travelled North with us. Just normal men and women, ages ranging from thirty to sixty. They were people who had survived the initial apocalypse and had struggled during the sixteen years since. Some of them would have been teenagers when it all happened, and they had spent their formative years in a world forever changed. Others had seen their world ripped apart, watched their loved ones die and witnessed their lives torn to pieces by the undead. I remembered the words that I had heard the night before.

  “Dead God, you give us back what we lose. You take away what we love and return it, corrupted. Spare us, Dead God.”

  Although they were a hundred yards away in the forest to my left, I heard the singing of the birds in the trees. They didn’t seem like happy sounds, more like nervous chatter. They were warnings that the birds gave each other, words of caution about the dangers they had seen on the flights in the land around.

  Darla was the first to break the quiet.

  “Quite a turn out, isn’t it Kyle?” she said.

  I looked at the circle of residents. A couple caught my eye, and I saw a look on their faces that I recognised all too well. Fear.

  “I take it everyone else is still sick?” I said.

  Darla nodded. “What do you think? Most of them are still shitting out everything that’s left in them. Don’t tell me you can’t smell it in the air. This whole place stinks.”

  “We cleared the river,” I said. “We need to boil our water for a while, but it should be safe to drink soon. There was nothing I could have done. No way I could have known.”

  “Tell that to the dead.”

  “What?”

  A woman stepped forward. She was in her forties, with blonde hair that curled at the ends and whole patches that had turned grey. I knew that her name was Stacey Blackwell, but not much else other than she was married to a man named Trevor and that they had lost their teenage son in the Battle of Bleakholt.

  “Trevor’s dead,” she said. “He passed last night.”

  She looked down at the ground.

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew that words were needed, but I was finding sympathy hard. Day by day I felt my insides turn to stone. Death used to be something dreaded and unspoken, but the last sixteen years had changed that. It was something you couldn’t look away from anymore. There was no use pretending death didn’t exist, because we were confronted by it every day as sure as the morning sun.

  “I’m sorry, Stacey. I really am. Trevor was a good man.”

  “Save it,” said Darla. “We’re not here for condolence card sympathies. We’re here because time is running out. Look around you. Smell the air. This place isn’t somewhere we can settle, Kyle. It’s tainted, and we need to leave.”

&n
bsp; “And go where? You say it’s tainted, but tell me somewhere that isn’t? I’ve spent my time travelling, and I never found somewhere that stayed safe for long. This place is as good as the next. Better, in most ways. There’s a water source, so we need never worry about thirst. It has wide open fields so that we can see dangers when they come. Go to a town or city Darla, and tell me how you find it. Because I guarantee as soon as you see what’s out there, you’ll think this field is paradise.”

  Darla’s face told me that she wasn’t persuaded by my words.

  “This might be somewhere we can survive. For now. But the people don’t want to just survive. They want to live. Otherwise what’s the point?”

  I thought about my time in the Wilds. I had spent years moving from place to place, never settling. Later, I had joined a community in a town called Vasey, and after that I had joined Bleakholt. I knew that nowhere was permanent anymore. There was no such thing as living; survival was the best we could hope for.