The Dying & The Dead 2 (25 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Six

Heather

Glass exploded all over the living
room floor. Heather lifted her arm to her face and covered her eyes, but an
umbrella would have been more use as the shards rained down on her. She moved
her arm away to see the carpet covered by pieces of the front window. On the
floor there was a bottle with a burning rag stuffed into it, and black smoke
started to seep out of the rim and spread into the air.

The smell hit her, and her throat
closed up. Spikes of glass fell from her hair and shoulders. Charles took hold
of Lilly’s wheelchair and pulled her toward the door. Voices shouted outside,
and her eyes watered as the smoke spread from the floor and covered the walls
and ceiling. Through the black mist, she saw dim figures approach the house.

Another window smashed. Her vision
was impaired by smoke so thick that it was like a gassy tar, and her eyeballs
stung. The second smash sounded like it came from the side of the house, though
she didn’t know the layout well enough to pin it on a specific room. There was
a booming sound, and then the tell-tale clang of a letter box. They’d busted
down the front door.

“It’s in my hair, Dad,” said Lilly.

Charles wheeled her out of the room
and into the hallway. Following him, Heather caught a glimpse of masked Capita
soldiers in the doorway, twenty feet down the hall. They seemed to be waiting
for the smoke to clear before coming inside, or perhaps the glass bottle and
smoke was intended to drive Heather, Charles and Lilly out.

“I need to get to Ken,” said Charles.
“Where’s your horse?”

“Out back.”

“Ken’s at the front, but there’s too
many of those brainless drones outside. I need you to get on your horse and
ride out. Follow the trail at the back of the house. When you get far enough,
fire this.”

He handed her a small pistol. It was so
tiny that it was engulfed in his hand, and the barrel was only big enough for
one bullet. It was the type of gun that would have looked better in a rich
woman’s handbag, rather than in the hands of a bounty hunter.

“There’s too many of them,” said
Heather. With only one bullet, she wasn’t sure her aim would even be good
enough to take out a single soldier.

“It’s to get their attention. I’m
taking Lilly to the basement. We’ve got some things down there I need to grab,
and there’s a hatch behind the boiler that leads outside. I need you to draw
them away. When they’re gone, we’ll scarper. I’ll get Ken and meet you further
along the trail, and then we can all sing songs on the way to Mordeline,” said
Charles.

“And what about me?” said Heather.
“Won’t they run me down?”

“Trust me. When we get to Mordeline,
they’ll stop following.”

Lilly looked at her father with a
scowl on her face. Her missing nose made every look seem that little bit more
brutal.

“Come on, Dad. Stop wasting time.”

“What’s so bad about that place?” said
Heather.

“You’ll see.”

They heard shouting. Smoke drifted
out of the living room and filled the hallway, and it was clear that the Capita
soldiers were waiting for it to disperse before storming the house. Heather
didn’t know if it was really a tactic, or if they just hadn’t thought about
what would happen when they threw the burning bottle inside.

“You’re really going to help me get
to camp?” she said.

Charles looked at his daughter. Her
missing nose made every expression a scowl, and the bite marks on her legs
looked painful, even though it must have been years since they happened.

“I don’t have much of a choice.”

Heather found her horse out back. It
had the rope in its mouth and it was trying to chew itself free from the
tether, but it dropped it when it saw her.
You’re learning already,
she
thought. Maybe the shouting and the smashing had spooked it, though she had
thought that Capita horses would be used to a lot worse. She unknotted the rope
and stroked the horse’s back to soothe it.

Judging by the shouting behind her,
the Capita soldiers were ready to advance into the house. That didn’t give
Charles and Lilly long, and Heather knew she had to draw the soldiers away. She
hoped that Charles wasn’t selling her out again, but like him, she didn’t have
a choice. She either trusted him and hoped that he led her to Kim, or she went
her own way and wasted precious time trying to get there herself.

She found the trail at the back of
the house. Like everything else in the Mainland, it had been made by man but
had fallen into ruin after the outbreak. Not that anyone could be to blame.
With the constant battle in most people’s lives being the need to have food and
water, maintaining a pathway over the wasteland’s rocks and plains was a bottom-of-the-list
priority.

The horse took her along the path.
Every few seconds she risked a look behind her, and she saw that the Capita
soldiers weren’t following. Hopefully Charles had gone down into the basement.
She wondered what stuff he could possibly need to get, but she knew that they
must have been important. The bounty hunter wasn’t one to idle.

For a second, a thought latched onto
her as it drifted past, scratching its claws into her and then crawling into
her head and scurrying around.
What if she just left him there?
After
all, she was never going to be able to trust him, and there was something about
his daughter that made her uneasy. Another thought sat in her mind as a counter
balance, stronger than any other belief she held.
She would do anything to
find Kim. If that meant placing her trust in the bounty hunter, so be it.

She wanted to speed up the horse. She
thought that the way to do it was to nudge it in the sides, but it seemed
cruel.
Cruel. What a stupid thought
. She had torn a man’s throat with
her bare teeth and tortured information out of another, yet she couldn’t give a
horse a light tap on the side.

She dug her boots into its body and
felt the pace pick up, the horse’s hooves making a clip-clop on the ground as
the wasteland went by. After a few minutes, she brought it to a halt and turned
it around.

A couple of Capita soldiers were at
the back of the house, and the rest must have been searching inside. With some
satisfaction she remembered that there was a time when Charles Bull would have
been leading house raids like this. Maybe now he’d understand what it was like.

She held the gun in her hand. It felt
like a toy, and she wondered if it would even make enough noise to draw the
soldiers’ attention. Maybe when she pulled the trigger, a red flag saying
‘bang’ would pop out.

She raised the gun in the air. This
was it. Pulling the trigger was akin to signing a contract with Charles Bull.
Once she helped him get out of the house, there was no going back.

She fired it. The boom was so loud that
it took her by surprise, and she held onto the reins as the horse stepped back
in shock.

The soldiers outside the house turned
in her direction. One stared at her, and the other ran inside. Sure that they’d
seen her, she turned the horse around. She whipped the reins and continued on
down the path. Somewhere along the way, Charles was supposed to meet her.

There were voices shouting behind
her. She risked a look, and saw that the soldiers had mounted their horses and
had started to follow. Heather knew she’d built up enough of a lead to keep
them at bay, but she didn’t know where she was going.

She heard another noise, but this
time it wasn’t shouting. She looked around, and saw a soldier walking by the
side of the house. He held long leads in his hands, and a pack of dogs strained
at the ends, jumping up and down with excitement. The solider kneeled down and
unclipped them, and without a second of pause the dogs picked up the trail and
started running toward Heather.

The barking seemed to put her horse
on edge. She leaned forward and rubbed its head, but she didn’t have much time
for reassurance. She knew that the Capita kept its dogs hungry, and there
wasn’t much that could match the speed of a dog with an empty belly, especially
ones bred for aggression.

She kicked the horse in the side. It
sped up, but not fast enough. Excited yelps grew louder behind her, and six of
the dogs bounded over the path. Their heads were low and their eyes looked
wild. It was as if they hadn’t eaten for days and didn’t see Heather and her
horse in front, but instead saw one lump of meat riding a larger lump.

Where was Charles?
As her horse covered the ground,
Heather began to get the feeling that the bounty hunter had betrayed her. In a
few minutes the dogs would catch up and they’d bring the horse to the ground
and then tear Heather apart. Maybe being ripped open by dogs would be a mercy,
because there was plenty worse that the Capita could do. Perhaps the hounds had
been trained to leave people alive, and the soldiers would take her back to the
Dome where a cell of horrors awaited her.

She kicked the horse again. The wind
hit her face a little bit harder, but it was no use. The barking grew louder,
and when she turned her head, she saw that they were only ten metres away.

One of the dogs rounded her on the
left side and the other went right, while the others in the pack stayed behind.
In an attack that seemed as coordinated as the tactics of a football team, the
left and right dogs leapt and sunk their teeth into the horse’s legs, bringing
the animal to the ground in a fit of whinnying.

Heather put her arms out to stop her
fall, but she hit the ground at ten miles an hour and felt her nose squash
against the pathway. Stones scratched her skin as she rolled to a stop. She sat
up, stomach winded.

The dogs gave her barely a blink to
recover, forming a circle around her before she could move. They hung their heads
just an inch above ground and showed her pointy teeth, and their throaty growls
warned her that they were more than happy to use them. The dungeons it was,
then. The dogs were just going to surround her until the Capita soldiers came.

Sure enough she heard the sound of
horse hooves trampling toward her. When she looked back, three Capita soldiers
were trying to make up the gap between them. A sound came from her right, and
she saw Charles Bull break through a clearing of trees to the side of the trail.
Ken pounded toward her, carrying the bounty hunter and his daughter as if the
weight was nothing to him.

The dogs snarled and bunched together
when they saw Charles. As they got closer, Heather saw Lilly lift up a bottle with
a rag stuffed in the top. Brown liquid swished against the sides. Maybe this is
what Charles had meant when he said he needed to grab supplies. It made sense
that the Capita’s bounty hunter would have the same tactics as its soldiers. Lilly
flickered a lighter in her other hand and set the rag on fire, then held it
above her head.

“Toss it,” said Charles.

Heather got to her feet. Lilly closed
one eye, squinted, and then threw the bottle at the dogs. It landed in the
middle of the pack and exploded in a cloud of flame, with the yellow fire
leaping from dog to dog, singeing hair and burning skin. Heather flinched at
the yelps of pain.

The Capita soldiers had made up some
of the distance. Charles stopped in front of Heather.

“Get on,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be much room on
the horse with Charles and Lilly already riding.

“Can he carry all of us?”

“Ken’s back is made of iron. He’ll be
alright. Get on.”

The soldiers were close enough that
Heather could hear them shout. She heard one of them call out in shock.

“The bastards burned the dogs!”