Fear the Dead (Book 3) (22 page)

To the east
the double-decker bus fired to life. The headlights flickered and cast yellow
cones onto the dark mud. The wheels span forward and the bus lurched away. On
the bottom deck men and women pressed their faces against the glass. These were
Ewan’s men and women, the ones who had helped him get to power. And now they
were abandoning Bleakholt in the middle of the fight.

If the
stalkers hadn’t arrived, maybe Ewan would have stayed. I guessed he would have
helped clear the infected and then proclaimed himself a hero. As soon as things
looked bad, he had taken our only means of escape and he had fled on it. His
speech about how we couldn’t leave, how we had to stay and fight, had been
bullshit. His words were weightless and carried away by the wind.

As the bus
peeled away into the distance I wanted to run after it. It would have been so
easy to jump on the back and ride it to safety, away from the infected and the
stalkers.

The last of
the survivors sprinted behind the fences. The stalkers leapt across the ground,
yards behind, and one of them slammed into the metal as Billy pulled it shut.
It slid back onto its haunches and stared at the metal as if sizing up its
integrity.  I wondered how long the fences could hold them for.

39

We backed away from the fences like a herd of scared cows. The stalkers
crawled cautiously to the perimeter and stopped. They formed a line of twelve
and stared, each of them sizing up their prey and deciding which man or woman
would be their first.  One of them swiped at the fence  and made the metal
shake, and the people around me took a collective step back.

A stalker leapt at the fence and latched onto it, claws gripping around
the holes in the metal. The fence rattled as though a gust of wind had hit it.
One by one the stalkers leapt at it and slithered up toward the top.

A man in front of us tripped over his own foot as he moved away. He
fell to the floor and landed on his back. He cried out in pain, but he didn’t
get up. He stared ahead of him, where the highest of the stalkers cleared the
top of the fence and leapt over, landing on our side of it.

My ears still throbbed with pain, but sound slowly drifted back through
them. I heard fallen men on the plain screaming in pain. Teenagers calling out
for their parents, men crying. I wished I could turn the volume down again. I
would have taken any amount of pain not to listen to it.

“So much for getting behind the fences,” said Billy.

“Better than being out in the open,”  I said. “At least here we have
places to go.”

“Places to hide, you mean.”

“We just need time to breathe.”

The furthermost stalker slid across the ground like a komodo dragon
eyeing prey. Its arms and legs moved at odd angles, first sloping outwards and
then tucking inwards. It tilted its head up, though I knew that it wasn’t
trying to see us through its ink black eyes. Stalkers had the eyesight of a
mole, which was strange for a creature which moved almost entirely in the dark.
Their sense of smell made up for it. This stalker sniffed the air and turned
its head toward the man who lay prone on the ground.

“Get up, you moron,” said Billy.

The man stared ahead with his mouth agape and head tilted back. The
stalker rolled onto its back legs. Beside me, Billy twitched as if he was about
to move. I put my hand on his chest and held him back. I knew what was about to
happen, and we were too late to stop it.

The stalker’s calf muscles tensed until they bulged. It shrieked,
pressed into the floor and then leapt through the air. Its claws were raised
and its teeth were bared. The man looked up and his wide eyes registered the
creature, but the only sound that left his mouth was a pathetic groan.

The stalker swiped its claws at the man’s neck at the same time its
back legs touched the ground. The man’s skin slid away like turkey under a
carving knife, and blood leaked over his exposed vocal chords. The stalker
slurped at the blood, quenching its thirst until its face was dotted crimson.
The upper set of its teeth jutted from its lips, and it bent toward the man and
tore at his open neck wound like a lion.

A woman behind me screamed. It wasn’t a shout of panic or alarm, or
even one of fear. There was a warped edge to it, something deeply inhuman that
seemed to swim in desperation. It was the cry of a woman whose mind had
snapped.

A river of panic broke through the levee of reason and flooded over the
crowd. Men turned and ran, leaving thoughts of defending Bleakholt far behind
them. Women ducked into doorways and rattled the handles, crying out in
frustration at the ones they found locked. Others, those who had nothing to
lose or weren’t scared to lose what they had, turned and faced the monsters.

The rest of the stalkers, seeing the first creature gorge itself on the
man’s flesh, slithered forward. Their black shapes seemed to meld into the
night. Their mouth opened wider and their second sets of teeth poked out, spit
dripping over them and onto the floor. They sniffed the ground, hissed, and
stepped forward. They began to fan out to the side as though spreading into a
formation. One crouched and then leapt through the air. One by one the others
followed, and within two leaps they caught the fleeing men and women who
scampered wildly away.

Claws connected with skin. Teeth tore through flesh and crunched
through bone. Blood spat through the air and drenched the floor. Screams welled
in throats and then were cut short as claws snapped vocal chords. Some, seeing
how impossible it was to run, stopped to fight. Others ran until either their
burning lungs told them to stop or a set of teeth ripped a chunk out of them.

“Kyle!” I heard Billy shout.

I turned to my right in time to see a stalker diving through the air. I
stepped to my right and watched it sail past of me. My nerves lit on fire, as
if thousands of tiny pokers pressed into my skin. The stalker reared back,
corrected its balance and then prepared to leap again.

I held my knife tight in my hand. The stalker pushed itself forward and
cleared five feet in one leap. I waited as long as I dared as it sailed toward
me, and at the last second I stuck my knife forward but tilted my body to the
side. The blade of the knife snagged against the stalker’s skin and ripped
along it as though it were tearing into a sheet of fabric. There was a
pattering sound as black blood fell to the floor.

The stalker writhed on its back, teeth gnashing and a snort coming from
the back of its throat. A long fault line of a cut ran from its neck to its
groin. Billy stood above it, raised his mallet and then brought it down,
crushing the stalkers face into the ground.

Billy looked up.

“This is fucked,” he said with a tremor in his voice.

I had never seen him show fear. The infected didn’t bother him, and the
stalkers were an annoyance. Hearing his voice wobble set my skin on edge. But
as I listened to the sounds around me, I knew that he was right. Screams of
pain rang into the night sky, a fresh one every second as the stalkers hunted,
and caught, their prey.

Billy walked to the front of the gate where his quad bike was parked.
He swung his leg over the side and slid into the seat. With a flick of a switch
the headlamps glimmered, two narrow searchlights that punctured the dead
darkness.

A few stalkers perked their head up ahead of us. Their eyesight was
awful, but they couldn’t have missed the sudden beams of yellow that cut through
the air.

“What the hell are you doing?”  I said.

Billy turned the ignition and the engine coughed. Another turn and it
roared to life. Fumes drifted from the exhausts and the wheels seemed tensed
and ready to scream across the plain.

“I’ll draw them away,” he said.

“Draw them where?”

“I’ll just drive.”

I ran my hands through my hair and felt something wet on my forehead. I
didn’t know if it was sweat or blood.

“Are you looking to die?”

“Things are screwed here, Kyle. I’m swapping one suicide for another.
At least this way a few more of these poor bastards might live.”

“You don’t need to do this,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”

Billy twisted the handlebar and the engine screamed out. A few more
stalkers perked up and stared at him.

“I’ll keep riding until its light. I’ll get them miles away from here
and see how the fuckers cope with daylight.”

“There’s no way you have enough fuel for that.”

Billy looked at the ground and closed his eyes. When he looked up at
me, they were dark and sad. “Just let me have this, Kyle. After all the things
I’ve done, I need it. This isn’t just for everyone else. It’s for me.”

I swallowed and felt my dry throat contract. “Lou told me what
happened.”

“Then shut the fuck up and let me do this.”

He twisted the handlebars again and made the engine shout out until it
drowned out everything else.  The stalkers perked their heads up like dogs
hearing the dinner bell. Slowly they turned into Billy’s direction and took
tentative steps forward. Billy rolled the quad down the path and toward the
fence.

“Get the gate for me,” he shouted.

I walked to the gate, slid the bolts and pulled it open. I turned
behind me and saw a dozen stalkers crawl toward us, drawn by the hum of the
engine.

Billy stuck out his hand toward me. He gripped mine and shook it. He
had a strange look in his eyes.

“You think this makes up for  what Lou and me did?”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

He breathed into, then clenched his teeth. “I do.”

He twisted the accelerator and sped out onto the plains. The stalkers,
seeing him leave, picked up speed. As they got closer I realised that they were
going to have to run through the gate. I shrank back against the metal and held
my breath as they pounded past me, the sour smell of their skin strong enough
to make me gag.

The headlights of Billy’s quad sped into the distance, the trail of
stalkers following behind. They faded into the black of the night and
eventually disappeared into it completely.

 
40

Limp bodies
lay strewn around me. Before Billy led them away, the stalkers had managed to
tear through us, leaving piles of corpses behind. One man pulled himself across
the ground on his belly, blood trailing from his neck like a reel of claret
ribbon.

Outside the
gates, the infected walked towards us. I looked around me. Only fifteen or so
men and women stood on their feet, and some had lost their weapons in the
chaos. It wasn’t enough to fight the hundred infected who walked our way.

They dragged
their feet across the grass, some of them stumbling over corpses of
fellow-infected. If they registered that one of their own had fallen, they gave
no response. That was the difference between us. There isn't a man alive who
can look at a fresh corpse and fail to feel a shudder of revulsion. The
infected don’t care though; they've only got one thing on their mind.

The iron
stench of blood was thick in their air. Across from me a woman heaved herself
onto her knees. She turned and saw the infected coming towards us. She looked
at me with pleading eyes, as if begging me to take her out of the nightmare.
She coughed, and a spray of blood hit her shirt. She fell forward and cried
into the dirt.

I felt
alone. Alice was dead. Victoria was gone. Justin was trapped behind the debris
of the explosion in the hills, and Billy had sped off on his quad bike to die.
I wished that I had someone with me. I wished that Lou was by my side but she
was in the mayor’s office with the kids, and that was the safest place for her.
For now.

What would
happen to Lou, Melissa and the kids when the infected tore us apart? Ewan had
taken the bus, so there was no question of escape. Would the infected finish
off the fighters at the gates and then go looking for the children?

I felt sick
rise in my stomach and burn my throat. I remembered when we first got to
Bleakholt. I had warned everyone to leave, but Victoria had persuaded me that
Bleakholt was the only hope for the future. I’d allowed myself to buy into it,
and look at what had happened. I gripped my knife in my hand and squeezed the
handle until my knuckles started to sting. I was going to give every last drop
trying to protect the people who were left.

I walked out
of the fence and onto the plains. The wind bristled against my cheeks and snuck
down my coat, freezing the sheen of sweat on my back. The emptiness of the
plains seemed to swallow me, as though it were a vacuum of darkness that sucked
in everything in its path.

I heard a
din of voices to my right. My adrenaline spiked. It sounded like the rest of
the infected had somehow found a quicker way around the hills and now they were
pouring in from the sides. Soon there would be hundreds of thousands of them,
so many that they would cover the ground like spores.

Then I saw
what the noise really was. My heart beat against my chest as though it were
begging to be let out. To my right, walking across the plains, there were no
infected. Instead, it was the people of Vasey.

When they
got closer I saw that Moe and Sana led at the front. Moe held a meat cleaver in
his hand, the silver blade square and shining. Sana carried a baseball bat with
nails driven into the side. Her face seemed set in a cement grimace, as though
she’d scowled once and then her features had hardened. The survivors from Vasey
were behind them. Fifty men, women, and teenagers who carried makeshift weapons
and wore faces of fear and anger.

When I saw
Moe, revulsion twisted my stomach like a wrung dishcloth. My whole body shook
as hate coursed through me. This bastard had killed Alice. He’d abandoned us in
Vasey and left half the townsfolk to die, and as if that wasn’t bad enough he
had found new depths to crawl to. I wanted to stick my knife in his belly.
Images flashed through my head of blood pouring out of his mouth, his eyes wide
as I buried the blade deep in his guts.

Ten feet
away from me, Moe held his hand in the air. The Vasey campers stopped as though
he were a general who had called a halt to a march. Sana looked at me, and I
felt her stare burn through my skin. Moe turned and faced his people.

“You know
what to do,” he said.

He swept his
hand in the air like a conductor, flicking it across the plains where the
infected shambled toward us.

“Clean up
the mess, and Bleakholt is ours.”

The Vasey
people shifted uncertainly. Some cast worried glances over at the infected.
Moe’s face reddened, and he clapped his hands together.

“Come on!
Stop shaking.  Stop being babies. This is when you prove what you’re worth. And
if you don’t, then you aren’t worth shit. They've kept us in the shadows for
too long. Forced us to scrape and beg for the things any decent person
deserves. This is your chance. Clean up the dead and take what you’re owed.”

The men and
women seemed to drink in confidence from Moe’s words. They breathed it in and
let it fill their chests. They held their weapons high, looked toward the
plains and one by one they walked toward the infected.

As they
reached the first of the infected, a man at the front of the group raised a
hatchet in the air. He cried out and then brought it down on to the head of the
creature, splitting its skull across the hairline. Others followed, and before
long they were hacking and stabbing at every infected that came their way.

The air once
more carries the groans of the infected. Men and women screamed as they raised
their weapons and sunk them into every corpse that they saw. Every so often a
wail punctured the air, and a man or woman would fall to the ground screaming.
As blades cut through dead flesh and stabbed into brain tissue, more infected
slammed into the ground never to get back up. I joined the fight and hacked at
everything I saw, pushing my knife through infected skulls until the blade was
red and my arm ached.

I heard
footsteps behind me. I turned and saw the remaining people of Bleakholt had
walked out of the fences and joined the fight. Their faces were grey and
haggard, their arms tired from hours of fighting. But they saw their chance.
The tide was starting to turn, and now they had to sail into the heart of it.

In the heart
of the battle there was a heat in the air, as if the energy expended as each
man and women sliced at the infected warmed the wind. The air stank of sweat,
blood and rot. Shouts of anger were cut by shrieks of pain. Men fell, clutching
wounds made by the teeth of the infected. For every person that hit the ground,
never to get up, more infected met the same fate.

An infected
lurched my way. It was taller than me and with a barrel-shaped chest that was
bitten down by decay. It grabbed my shoulder in a burning grip and leaned its
head toward me, teeth slimy and desperate for my flesh. I lifted my arm and
drove my knife through its neck and up into its head, feeling a squelch as my
blade pierced its brain.

A hand
grabbed my shoulder. I span round, knife ready, but saw that it wasn’t an
infected. Instead, Sana stood in front of me. Despite the mayhem around her,
her face was pale and free from sweat, as if her pores were sealed shut. She
held her baseball bat at her side, rusty nails sticking out from the wood.

“I just want
you to know Kyle,” she said. “About my son. About what happened. I thought you
should know…”

Was she
trying to make peace with me? She had hated me for so long, and I understood
it.  Grief twisted your thinking. It squeezed your brain until all reason
dripped out and the only thing you could cling to was the idea that there had
to be someone to blame. For Sana, that person was me. Hating me had helped her
struggle through the tragedies in her life, and I was willing to take that.

“Look, Sana.
I get it, okay? You don’t need to say anything.”

Her cheeks
moved, as if she were trying to soften her features into a gesture that
wouldn’t come. The cement had already set, and there was no room for smiles on
her face.

“I do, Kyle.
I need to tell you.”

“Okay.”

She stared
deep into my eyes. "I need to tell you that Faizel and my son…”

I waited for
the tumble of emotion, my heart leaping against my chest.

“I wanted to
tell you that it was your fault.”

The words
hit me cold in the chest. Sana raised her baseball bat and before I could react
she swung it at my leg. Pain screamed through my thigh as a nail drove into it.
The metal gouged through my skin and deep into my muscle, tearing at my nerves
and sending a wracking agony through me. I stumbled forward onto my knees.

Sana lifted
her bat above her head. I wanted to move, but the pain spread through my legs,
my chest and up into my brain, where it filled my head like a fog. I felt
blind, as though it was seeping through my eyes.

I sucked in
a deep breath. I was dimly aware of the fighting around me, of knives sinking
into rotten flesh, decaying teeth ripping through skin. Screams and shouts,
blood trickling onto the floor. I couldn’t move for the pain twisting through
me. I waited for the baseball to fall and crack my skull.

Sana’s mouth
opened impossibly wide, as though it worked on a busted hinge. A raspy wail
left her mouth. She coughed and a splatter of blood left her mouth and hit my
face like ocean spray. A knife pierced her throat and broke through her neck
until the blade winked at me.

A hose of
adrenaline doused the pain that burned inside me. Sana gurgled, reached up to
her throat and fell to the floor. Lou stood behind her, a bloody knife held
tight in her hand. She held it at her side. She looked down at Sana and her
eyes seemed drowned in darkness.

“What the
hell are you doing here Lou? Where’s Melissa? Where are the kids?”

The lost
look left Lou’s eyes, and she smiled as if she were putting on a mask.

“You’ve got
a hell of a way of saying thanks,” she said.