The Dying & The Dead 2 (22 page)

As his fist crunched into The Savage’s
face, the man’s mask dislodged. He stumbled back, and his mask fell to the
floor. When he looked up at them, Bethelyn gasped.

The Savage’s top lip was missing. It
looked like it had been chewed clean off his face, and where the skin should
have been, all he had were red gums above white teeth.

Ed backed away. The thudding in his
head started to subside, displaced for the moment by shock. His stomach
churned.

The Savage looked up at them slowly.
Without his top lip, it looked like he was snarling at them. His eyes seemed
sad, and Ed couldn’t help but feel pity as he stared into them.

”So now you’ve seen it,” said The
Savage.

“I’m sorry,” said Ed. An overwhelming
shame flooded through him. His arms and legs felt exhausted, and he just wanted
to sink to the ground.

“What happened?” asked Bethelyn.

The Savage stared at them, and for
once, Ed felt like he was looking at his true face.

 “This was the last kiss my wife ever
gave me. It was my own stupid fault. Thinking that she could become one of
them, but still be the same person. I didn’t know what they were back then. It
was in the beginning. None of us really understood what they were. I was like
you, Wetgills; green as a country pasture. I thought that if I could treat her
like I used to, her brain could fight through the infection. So I did something
unbelievably stupid, and this is what I got in return.”

He lifted his hand to his mouth and
ran his fingers across the jagged skin near his nose. Ed felt revulsion in his
stomach, but he ignored it. He was sorry that he hit The Savage. The man was
right; in many ways, he was just like them. Just another person trying to
survive.

The white of the sky above them was
starting to dilute with the onset of night. A chill crept up on them.

“It’s getting late,” said Ed.

The Savage turned away.

Ed walked over to him. He reached out
to touch his shoulder, but then stopped himself.

“I need your penknife,” he said.

The Savage turned and looked at him.
He handed Ed the knife.

“And the container,” said Ed.

He pricked his middle finger with the
knife and watched the blood well up. It came out in tiny drops, so he used the
knife to deepen the cut, biting back on the pain as the blade slid through his
skin. He held the plastic underneath his finger and let the blood pool in the
bottom.

It was nothing to him anymore. It
didn’t repulse him and it didn’t make him angry. It seemed routine, like
something that he just had to do. He stared at the corpses of the infected as
the blood dripped into the plastic. Somewhere in the distance, Ripeech cried
out to them, and the noise shook the limbs of the trees.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

Heather

Her body ached as she rode deeper
into the darkness. It seemed like an endless rocky plain with the occasional
tree or bush, but every so often she’d come across an abandoned car or a
campfire that had burned out long ago. Her horse seemed to have no trouble
forging ahead into the night, and the patters of its hooves lulled Heather into
drowsiness. She started to wonder if it was time to take a short nap. She
straightened herself and shook on the reins. The horses gave a snort.

She needed to stay awake. Charles’s
house wasn’t far from here. There would be no sleep for her until she found her
daughter. If that meant she had to ride until her body broke down, then so be
it.

She heard a growling in the darkness.
The hairs on her arms pricked up. She looked around her, expecting to see the
glowing eyes of a wolf. Maybe there were even cougars this far away from the
Dome and other populated areas.

The growl drifted from her right. She
pulled the horse to a stop. She still had the Capita soldier’s knife, and she
held it in her hand as though it was a part of her. The handle was sweaty
against her palms.

Soon, the sound of footsteps matched
the growl. Her eyes adjusted to the black around her, and she saw a figure
approach. She took a breath and got ready to use the weapon.

The figure was small. As it got closer,
she saw that it was a little infected girl wandering lonely over the dirt.
There was a pained expression on her face; something more than the usual hunger
that the infected showed.

She wondered how long the girl had
been wandering across the wasteland. When had she become infected? What had
happened to her parents? The Mainland was full of lost children, it seemed, and
it wasn’t always the Capita’s doing.

She climbed off the horse. The girl
took shaky steps closer. She snarled and showed white teeth under thin lips.

For a second, Heather felt so much
pity that she almost wanted to give the girl a hug. Then she collected herself.
The girl walked closer, and Heather struck her with the machete, carving
through her skull like a grapefruit.

She looked down at the girl’s limp
body as her blood spread over the ground. She couldn’t help but think how
similar the girl looked to Kim, and an overwhelming pain spread through her.

Get a grip, Heather,
she thought.

~

By the time she reached Charles’s
house, dawn had cracked like an egg and started to run across the sky. It was a
small cottage that sat alone in a barren landscape. The roof was thatched, and
ivy spread across the walls. Charles’s horse, Ken, sat out front, tethered to a
wooden stake in the ground. He lifted his head as he chewed on a mound of
grass, and his tail swished in the breeze.

It was far from what she expected.
The cottage almost seemed picturesque. She had always imagined that Charles
lived somewhere dark and dingy. A place where happy thoughts were smothered by
dark shadows, and the rooms were empty and cold. There’d be no furniture. Bare
walls, and water dripping from a tap so incessantly that you heard it in your sleep.

She got off her horse and tethered it
to the side of the house using its reins. She walked around the outside,
ducking under the living window, until she was at the back door. There was a
small window which showed the kitchen. She saw an oak table with stained brown
wood. Against the wall was a stove with two hobs, the surface gleaming as if it
had just been cleaned. Charles stood at the kitchen counter.

He had a child’s doll in front of
him, and a needle and thread in his hands. He squinted in concentration as he
pierced the needle through the side of the doll and then wound the thread
through it. Gradually a hole in the doll’s side began to tighten. After a few
seconds Charles tied up the knot and then stood back and looked at his handiwork.

Heather walked over to the back door.
She gripped the handle and started to turn it slowly, scared that it was so old
it might make a whining sound that would give her away. With shaking hands she
gripped the knife and pushed the door open.

Before Charles could react, Heather
had crossed the room and held the blade at his throat. Up close, he smelled of
sweat.  He held the needle between his thumb and index finger. The top of one
of his fingertips welled with blood from where he’d poked himself.

“It’s always so nice to see you,
Heather,” he said.

He started to turn around. Heather
stepped back and banged into the corner of the table. She ignored the pain and
kept the knife tight against Charles’s neck.

“Back up. Slowly,” she said.

She didn’t have a plan from here. She
just knew that the kitchen was full of knives, and she knew how dangerous the
bounty hunter could be. If she had her way, she'd hogtie him and put him on the
back of her horse, just like the Capita soldier had threatened to do to her.
The problem was she didn't know how to hogtie someone. It seemed like something
they did in old Western movies.

“You want a tour of the house?” said
Charles.

“Into the living room. Don’t make any
movements.”

Charles stood as stiff as a board.

“Okay,” Heather said through gritted
teeth. “You can walk, obviously. But don’t move those flabby arms of yours.”

She backed him through the hallway.
The carpet smelled musty. There were photographs of a family on the wall, but
Charles wasn’t in any of them. Maybe it wasn’t really his house. She guessed
that after the outbreak, real estate deals weren’t brokered by agents and
contracts. If you saw a house that you liked, then you took it.

When they got into the living room,
she saw a girl sat on a wheelchair. She had a book in her hands, and her eyes
moved as she scanned across the pages.

“Meet my daughter, Lilly,” said
Charles.

Part of her had always thought he was
lying, yet here was proof that Charles had a daughter. The girl had a blanket
on her lap that covered her thighs, but the pale skin of her lower legs showed
underneath it. Heather saw that they were covered in bite marks.

She had straight ginger hair that had
been roughly cut just above her shoulder. Charles wasn’t much of a hairdresser,
it seemed. She had a sweet face with freckles that seemed to glint on her skin.
She could have been a pretty girl, but there was just a mound where her nose
had once been, and the skin around it was red and dried.
What happened to
this poor girl?

“Are you going to kill my dad?” said
Lilly. “Because I wouldn’t blame you.”

When she breathed, the air left her
like a snort. Her voice sounded too old to come from such a young girl. Her
hands rested on the arms of her chair. The spokes around her wheels were made
of metal, but rust had started to gather on them.

“Mind if I go to the kitchen?” asked
Charles.

Heather held the knife behind her
back. It seemed wrong to hold a blade to a man’s throat in front of his
daughter. She felt like she needed to keep up the pretence that everything was
okay.

She nodded at Charles. He walked out
of the room and into the kitchen. As she heard his footsteps come back, Heather
gripped the weapon, ready to use it if the bounty hunter came back with a blade
of his own. Instead, he came back with a milk bottle made of glass. Water
dripped down the outside of it, but claret liquid swirled in the bottom.

He handed the bottle to Lilly. The
girl cupped it in her hands.

“Drink it down,” Charles told her.

“You’re not wearing your mask,” said
Heather.

She had seen him without a mask
before. Back then it was the first time she’d seen him without his plague
doctor costume, and looking at his normal face tricked her into thinking he was
an actual person with feelings and emotions. She wouldn’t make the mistake of
letting her guard down this time. Not when she knew what he was capable of.

Lilly made huffing sounds through her
wounded nose as she drank down the liquid. Heather had already guessed that it
was blood. From the bite marks across her legs and the damage on her face, it was
clear that Lilly had been attacked by the infected.

“Tastes funny,” she said. She looked
at her father. “Have you been eating well? It doesn’t taste like you have.”

“You’re infected, aren’t you?” asked
Heather.

Lilly smiled. “I hope so. If not,
then I’m just ugly.” She traced a finger around her wounded nose.

“Don’t say that,” Charles told his
daughter. “They’re war scars. You should be proud of them.”

“Cut the crap, Dad.”

“What happened?” asked Heather.

Charles walked over to a couch and
sat on it. His body sunk back into the fabric. He sighed.

“We used to live in Huddonold,” he
said. “Back when the Capita was just a handful of people with a lust for power
but not much to show for it. Lilly was in school when it was attacked by
infected. By the time I got there, three teachers and fifteen boys and girls
were dead. Lilly had climbed into the janitor’s closet to hide, but she didn’t
realise that the janitor was in there, too. And he was infected.”

“I killed him with his gardening
shears,” said Lilly, and smiled.

Charles looked over at his daughter,
and a sad look spread across his face. “You did, Lilly. You did.”

There was a time when children had
the luxury of being innocent.
It was such a pure thing
, thought Heather.
Watching kids run around, oblivious to the dangers of the world. There always
came a time when the spell had to break, though. It had happened to her
daughter, Kim, and it sure as hell had happened to Lilly. She looked at the
ginger-haired girl with her disfigured face, and she just wanted to give her a
hug.

“I need to find Kim,” said Heather.
She held the knife at her side. “Your dad is the only one who can take me
there.”

“She’s in the camp, isn’t she?” said Lilly.

“How do you know?”

“I told dad to work there after I got
bitten. It was the only way to get supplies.”

She couldn’t believe how old the girl
sounded. It was as if someone had taken the brain of an adult and grafted it
into her skull. Heather thought that Kim sometimes sounded clever beyond her
years, but this girl was something else. There was something about her that
nagged away at Heather. There was a look in her eyes; a sense of cunning, or
even cruelty. It could have been a trick of the light, or maybe she took after
her father.

She walked over to the window. The
glass was covered by a white knitted curtain. When she pulled it back, she saw
a unit of Capita soldiers advancing on the cottage. With them, shoulders
slumped over a tired-looking horse, was the Capita soldier who she had left in
the wastelands.

She turned around to face Charles and
Lilly.

“How the hell did they find me?” she
said.

Charles stood up.

“Don’t flatter yourself. They’re here
for me. I’m assuming I’m going to be relieved of my duties, given my absence
from the Dome.”

“I told you this would happen,” said
Lilly. She pushed the wheels of her chair and positioned herself so that she
could see out of the window.

“The Five aren’t patient and they
don’t give second chances. They’re either assuming I’m dead given my lack of
reports over the last week, or they think that I’ve joined the Resistance.
Ishkur and his friends are more paranoid than you would ever believe.”