Fear the Dead 2 (15 page)

21

There was obviously some history
between Whittaker and Lou, but you would never have thought it with the way she
treated him; cold indifference, she hardly even acknowledged he was there.

“We need to decide what to do with
him,” I said.

My thoughts were on Justin. We needed
to get him out of here, and get back to Vasey. I didn’t even know if we could
look for the wave anymore; I didn’t know if I had it in me to carry on after
this.

Lou fingered the handle of her
machete. “Kill him,” she said.

Whittaker’s cheeks quivered and
creases lined his mottled forehead. “You don’t know what you’re doing. I can’t
die; humanity can’t afford it.”

Alice screwed up her face. “Humanity
would come out better for being one wanker short.”

I nodded toward Justin. “Tell me what
you’ve done to him.”

Whittaker dropped back into a sitting
positon. He rubbed his knees. “He’s in a coma,” he said.

My throat burned, my arms tensed. I
thought about the knife on my belt.

“Reverse it,” I said.

His eyebrows arched and he looked at
me as if I was speaking German.

“Take him out of the coma,” I
repeated.

He closed his eyes for a second. “He
has to come out of it on his own.”

Alice dabbed at Justin’s face with a
tissue. “And will he?”

Whittaker shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t know.”

He said it as if he’d been asked what
time the shop closed, as though the question meant nothing. Sweat pooled on my
forehead, and my arm twitched.

“You seem pretty fucking blasé about
this,” I said.

“My calling runs higher than people,
or individuals. I have to separate the ego from the id,” said Whittaker.

“You’ve got your psychology terms
mixed up,” said Alice.

I put my hand to my belt and gripped
it around the handle of my knife. “And just what is ‘your calling’?”

Whittaker straightened his spine, and
his gaze hardened.

“There is a cure for the infection.
And I’m the man to find it.”

Recognition flooded my brain. I knew
who he was, how I knew his voice. He was the man we’d been hearing on the radio
broadcasts in Vasey, the one who had given us hope that there was a way out of
the hell the world had been thrown in to.

To think that Justin had spent hours
by the radio trying to communicate with the same man who would put him in a
coma. How many other lives had Whittaker ruined in his search for a cure? I
couldn’t let him go on. There was no cure; just a man who got off from playing
God.

I pulled my knife from my belt and
grabbed Whittaker by the collar. Sweat poured down the back of his neck, and he
put his wiry fingers on mine and scratched at me.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,”
he said, his voice a mixture of contempt and fear.

I clenched my teeth, bit my cheeks.
My heart pounded and my fingers shook, so I tightened my grip around my knife.

Tears hung in the corners of
Whittaker’s eyes, and the flesh of his face was a sickening grey. A thick vein
on his neck pulsed. One stab and this would be over; Whittaker would bleed onto
the floor, and he could never hurt anyone again.

His eyes were bulbous. He rested his
cold fingers on mine.
“Please
don’t do this. Everything I did was so we could survive.”

I paused a second too long. I should
have raised my knife and plunged it into his neck, but instead I let his words
worm their way into my brain. I relaxed my grip on my knife and took a step
back.

“For fucks sake,” said Dan at the
back.

Lou looked at me, her eyes
questioning. “What’s wrong?”

I hung my head. “I can’t kill him.”

Whittaker sank back into a sitting
position, and his whole body sagged. “Thank you.”

Hate spat in my voice. “Don’t thank
me. Just tell me what the hell we can do to bring Justin out of the coma.”

Whittaker traced a hand across his
head and wiped away the sweat. “I told you, you can’t. He has to wake up
himself.”

I looked at Lou. “There’s rope in my
pack,” I said. “Tie him up, and we’ll decide what to do with him later.”

22

Maybe there was a way Whittaker could
live. Perhaps somewhere inside him was a man who could be redeemed. After all,
his motives were to help the human race to survive. It was just that where his
motives were grey, his methods were black.

I rolled my sleeve over my hand and
wiped a smear of dust off the window. The streets below were empty save for a
few infected stumbling across the concrete. I still couldn’t believe that
somewhere out there, there might be half a million of them travelling as one.

The hours went by and the need to
make a decision grew. Alice and Ben stayed with Justin. She still hadn’t spoken
to me, but looking after Justin seemed to make her feel better. I knew that she
had a soft spot for him after he had protected Ben from Whittaker.

The door behind me opened. Lou walked
in, a clutch of notepads in her hands.

“You’ve got to see this,” she said.

She slammed the papers down on the
desk in front of me. There were at least a thousand sheets of A4 lined paper,
and each one was covered back-to-font with tiny black handwriting.

“What’s this?”

Lou turned a paper over. It was dated
three years earlier. “It charts his research for ‘the cure’. Every fucking
minute of it.” She slid the paper over to me. Her forehead creased. “Who the
hell is he?” she muttered.

I arched my eyebrow. “Thought you
knew him?”

She shook her head. “This isn’t the
man I used to know.”

I lifted the paper to my face. It was
covered in black scratches of ink. “I don’t have time to read this.”

She dragged a stool out from under a
workbench and sat down. “That’s okay, because I already have.”

“And?”

“It’s disgusting.”

Lou picked up a sheet of paper and
talked me through it. Whittaker’s records told of his search for the cure,
starting from years ago, seemingly after he and Lou had parted ways.

“What happened with you two?”

She lifted her head. “You’re never
letting this go, are you? We had a relationship, okay?”

“And then what?”

“He fell away piece by piece.”

I put my hand to my chin. “You’re not
upset?”

She shook her head. “The person I
knew died a long time ago.”

She carried on reading. Whittaker’s
research notes detailed everything from his theories to how he put them into
action. In one section, he mentioned that he needed live research specimens.

“Does that mean infected, or people?”
I said.

Lou stared at me. “I think it means
both. Listen to this.”

Specimen four. Female, dark hair,
green eyes.  Rendered unconscious during capture, visible signs of
distress when awakened in the lab.

Injected batch 4 into her arm.
Subjected thrashed, begged for her life. Her body shook. Blood pooled in her
eyelids and ran down her face. As it progressed blood loss occurred through
every orifice. Subject screamed throughout. Number seven marked as failure.

Bile rose from my stomach. What kind
of sick person could do this, and then write about it in such a neutral way? I
couldn’t see any way back for him. Searching for the cure had turned Whittaker
cruel beyond belief.

“There’s more. Much more,” said Lou.
“And there’s an entry for Justin. You might not want to hear it.”

“Read it,” I said.

Specimen thirty-six. Male adolescent.
Hopes are high as this one was born post-outbreak.

Batch 36 injected at four AM. Four
hours later, specimen entered coma. Vital signs stable but subject is
unresponsive.

Research note: May consider move away
from vaccine, and look at treatment.

The words swam in my brain; specimen,
subject. Justin’s life meant nothing to Whittaker. For all his talk of saving
the human race, the man wasn’t human himself. In a way, he was worse than the
infected. At least they had no control over their instincts.

“There’s something I gotta show you,”
said Lou.

She led me out of the room and into
the corridor. The building ran on a generator that powered the lights and
electrical outlets, and apparently Whittaker had found a way to keep it
running. Even so, the lights above us gave off only a pale glow, so that the
corridors seemed like a tunnel system.

Rooms spread out on each side of us.
All of them had blinds on the outside that covered a window, some open, others
wound shut. Lou stopped in front of one and put her hand to the blind.

“Watch this.”

She twisted the blind and the room
came into view. It was completely bare save for the three infected inside. Two
of them were slumped against a wall, and the other one paced the room. It
snapped its head toward the window and saw us.

It let out a groan and pressed its
head against the glass. With the window separating us I moved to within an inch
of its face, closer to an infected than I had ever been without having to kill
it. I looked into its eyes and blinked in surprise. Little red flecks floated
in the middle of the infected’s pupils.

“You ever noticed that?” I said.

Lou leaned in to the glass. “What?”

“Look at the eyes.”

“They look like parasites,” said Lou,
and screwed up her face.

The infected banged on the glass, and
Lou jumped back. So many questions formed on my tongue, but I could only ask
one. “What’s his game?” I said.

Lou twisted the blind, hid the
infected from view. “Same as everything he does. Research.”

We paced further down the corridor,
passing multiple rooms with their blinds shut. Lou assured me that she had
checked each one. It seemed Whittaker had been busy building his infected
collection. We stepped outside a room at the end of the corridor.

Lou turned to me. “You won’t believe
this one.”

I arched my eyebrow. “Nothing
surprises anymore, Lou.”

“No? Then look at this.”

She reached for the blind and
twisted. When the window cleared I realised she was right. My veins froze, and
it felt like my heart had stopped beating entirely.

Two stalkers lay on the floor. A
halogen light bulb hung from the ceiling of the room, and the stalkers shook
under the white rays as if every splash of light caused them pain. I would have
felt sorry for them if I didn’t know how dangerous they were.

Lou held Whittaker’s research notes
in front of me. “He’s got a whole section on stalkers. He thinks he knows where
they’re from.”

I nodded. “Put them in my pack.”

We walked back down the corridor. My
mind raced, and my body was only just recovering from the flood of panic that
seeing the stalkers had brought. It didn’t matter that they were locked in a
room and weakened by the light; the fear response triggered by seeing them
washed over any sort of rational thought.

“Listen, Kyle,” Lou said.

“Yeah?”

Lou’s boots thudded on the stone
floor. “You know he’s gotta die, don’t you?”

I sighed. “Yeah.”

Lou squeezed my shoulder. “Sometimes
good people have to do bad things, and sometimes a person has to take a little
stain on their soul to stop others from dirtying theirs.”

I knew what I had to do. It wasn’t
going to be pleasant, but I couldn’t let Whittaker live. Some men did bad
things and came back from them, but Whittaker’s conscience was too black for
redemption. Lou was right; I had to do this horrible thing so that other people
didn’t. If I was going to be a leader, I was going to have to make a sacrifice.

***

We used Whittaker’s keys and locked
him in one of the rooms in the corridor. At first I threatened to throw him in
with the infected, which would have saved me some trouble, but I couldn’t do
that to him. If he had to die, I would let him die humanely. First, I needed
sleep. I would let Whittaker spend the last few hours of his life tied up with
nothing but his own diseased mind for company.

After we locked him up, Lou looked at
me. A question formed on her face, but she didn’t ask it.

“I’ll kill him in the morning,” I
said.

The truth was, my body ached and my
mind was exhausted. I knew that when it came to the final moment, Whittaker was
going to beg for his life. In my current state, I didn’t have the resolve to
refuse him. I needed to rest so that I could face what I had to do.

We decided to spend the night in the
room with Justin. I took my sleeping bag out of my pack and gave it to Alice.
She rolled it out next to the worktop that Justin lay on. She pulled the zip
and opened it up, and Ben squirmed his way in. Dan sat at the opposite end of
the room, his knees drawn up to his chest, his eyes staring vacantly at the
floor.

“He hasn’t spoken in hours,” said
Lou.

Usually silence from Dan would be a
welcome change, but something was wrong. Perhaps it was guilt eating away at
him. It was possible that he’d realised what he had done when he took the car
and abandoned us.

I turned to Lou. “You take first
watch, okay?”

She nodded.

“Dan, can you take second?” I said.

He lifted his hand in the air in
acknowledgment but kept his eyes pointed at the floor.

I lay down on the cold floor. Every
cell in my exhausted body needed to shut down and recuperate, but my brain
wouldn’t rest. Instead, questions and worry flooded my mind.
Was Justin
going to wake up? What would I do if he didn’t? Would I be able to kill
Whittaker? Was the wave of infected out there, heading our way?

Eventually my thoughts slowed to a
stop. I shut my eyelids and felt the room fade. My arms and legs tingled, and
then relaxed, and my mind drifted into darkness.

***

“Kyle, wake up.” Cold fingers touched
my shoulder.

I bolted upright, reached for my
knife, but it wasn’t on my belt. I must have put it down somewhere. My blurred
vision snapped into focus. Lou was next to me, her eyes red. Alice sat below
Justin with Ben’s head resting on her lap. Lou tapped my shoulder and pointed
to Dan.

He was slumped against the wall, his
head resting against his arms. My first instinct was a rush of anger as I
realised he’d fallen asleep on watch. But something wasn’t right. His skin was
a pale yellow colour, as though he  were hit with jaundice. His eyes were
closed, and I could hear the raspy sounds of his breath as he sucked in air.

I was familiar with this look and I
knew what the symptoms meant. I walked over to Dan, put my hand to his cheek
and felt the sheet of ice that was his face. I moved his head gently to one
side. Dan’s shirt was open, and a red jagged line stretched from his neck down
to his collar bone. He’d kept it hidden by his shirt collar until now, but
there was no mistaking it. Dan had been bitten.

I turned to Lou. “He’s going to turn
soon,” I said. “I want you, Alice and Ben to leave.”

Lou got to her feet, walked to the
door. She turned the handle, but it didn’t budge.