The Dying & The Dead 2 (20 page)

Goral crossed his legs. “You know
why. My work. Some of the children here are special, Marta. You don’t even know
how much. But we have a problem. There’s a girl, one of the new arrivals.
Scarsgill drained some of her blood and used his little lab to study it.”

“They do that to everyone, don’t
they?” said Marta.

Goral nodded. “This girl is special.
There’s something magnificent in her veins. Blood that could cure the
infection, not just fight it off after it has occurred. Scarsgill believes that
the makings of a vaccine are in her little body.”

“Great news.”

Goral shook his head. He rolled his
eyes as if he was having to explain something for the thousandth time.

“No, sister. As much as it intrigues
me, this is bad for us. If she is the key to a vaccine, what do you think
happens to Dam Marsh? Do you think they’ll be any need for camp? Do you think
the Capita will have any use for us?”

Marta looked wistfully out of the
window. “I suspect not,” she said. “But is that such a bad thing?”

Goral stood up. Eric saw that his
back was slightly bent, and it seemed like the old man would never fully be
able to straighten it. He took a step, and his necklace shook. Eric saw it
clearly now. It was a collection of fingernails, pierced in the middle and
bound together by a length of string.

“I’m going to kill the girl,” said
Goral.

“Is that wise? What about Scarsgill?”

“Don’t worry your wrinkled face about
that.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Marta, and
touched the creases on her forehead.

“At least I’ve learned something in
my age, Marta. You’ve regressed. Your mind is still back in Vostock playing in
the fields. Wake up to the real world. Join me in it.”

Marta leaned over and rubbed her
ankle. She hadn’t walked anywhere, but her leg had swollen around the bone. She
sighed.

“Scarsgill will know if you kill
her.”

Goral paced around. “He won’t know a
thing. You see, this girl has a condition of the stomach. I have watched her
for a while. She can’t eat any of the camp food. If she died, it would merely
look like her condition had finally beaten her.”

Eric almost gasped. He leaned back in
the wardrobe, and the sleeve of one of Marta’s blouses brushed over his nose.
The musty smell almost made him cough. He knew that Goral was talking about
Kim, but he didn’t understand any of it. He looked around him, but there was no
way of escaping the cabin until Goral left. He hoped Kim was okay. He prayed
that the guards hadn’t stormed the cabin door and dragged her out of her bed.

Marta glanced over at the wardrobe.
Eric hoped he hadn’t made any noise.
Don’t look at me
, he thought.

“If he has the girl and uses her
blood,” said Goral, “there is no need for us anymore. But don’t worry. I’ll
take care of it.”

Marta looked at the wardrobe again.
Eric’s palms were wet.

Goral followed her glance.

“Why do you keep looking over there?”

He started to walk over to the
wardrobe. Eric wanted to shrink back, but he knew there was nothing behind him
but the wooden side of the wardrobe. He took another noseful of the musty
smell.

“Goral,” said Marta.

The old man turned around.

“Are you hiding something from me,
Marta?”

“I need my sleep,” she answered.

Goral looked at the wardrobe. Eric
wondered if the old man could see him through the thin slat in the door.

He took another step toward Eric.

Marta heaved her body out of her
seat. She winced as she hobbled on her swollen ankle.

“I want you to leave, Goral,” she
said.

“Just one minute-”

“I want you to go!”

Eric wasn’t prepared for the fury in
Marta’s voice. She walked over to her brother and started to push him toward
the door. Her face turned bright red and spit formed on her lips. Goral looked
at her in surprise.

“My little button…” he said.

She hit him on the arm.

“Just get out! The things you make me
do. How can you live with yourself?”

She pushed him toward the exit. Goral
seemed to have forgotten the wardrobe. He walked over to the door and then
opened it, filling the cabin with the breeze. He paused.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I have another
guest in my cabin tonight. But I won’t forget your temper, Marta.”

“No,” she answered. “The Vitch men
never do.”

Goral went to leave, and then
stopped. He looked at the wardrobe, then back at Marta. Eric’s breath caught in
his throat.

“One final thing,” said Goral. “I
seem to have lost my keys. If you were to come across them, let me know.”

The old man stepped out into the
night, and Marta slammed the door shut behind him. Eric knew that the anger had
been for his benefit; she had done it to get her brother out of the cabin.
Marta put her hand to her face for a few seconds, and tears welled in her eyes.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Ed

The further they walked, the bleaker
Loch-Deep seemed. It was as though the sun was a figment of their imagination.
Rather than walking across a landscape marked by the coming of spring, they
wandered through plains choked by winter. The trees stood bald and dark, and
the grass crunched under the weight of their boots. Flies buzzed around them,
but they looped in slow motions as if the air was too thick for them.

“How much farther?” said Ed.

The Savage rested his boot on a rock
and took a deep breath.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He glanced around him as if he
expected a crowd of infected to be creeping up on him. The Savage had seemed
spooked since the attack in the cabin, and Ed was surprised that such a
seasoned survivor had reacted that way. He guessed that no matter how many of
the monsters you came across, your eyes never really adjusted to the sight.

“Is something worrying you?” said Ed.

The Savage scratched his neck. “My hairs
are standing up. I keep getting this feeling that something’s looking at us.”

“It is,” said Bethelyn. “Ripeech.
He’s watching us.”

“That thing can’t be real,” said Ed.
“It’s the hunger talking. I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t survive on
berries and still have enough in the tank to keep walking.”

Earlier that morning, The Savage had
caught a squirrel and roasted it on a small fire. The meat was chewy and there
wasn’t much of it, but it was the best thing Ed had eaten in days. The rest of
the time he’d had to make do with whatever mushrooms and berries The Savage
found. Ed had a hard time trusting that they were edible.

“You’re still not grasping it, are
you?” said The Savage. “After everything you’ve seen, you’re still looking at
the world through the same little boy eyes. Things have changed, Ed. You were
safe for a while on Golgoth. You were spared some of the stuff the rest of us
had to deal with. But now you’re going to have to face up to it.”

“So where were you when it all
started?” said Bethelyn.

The Savage lowered himself down and
sat on the rock. Sweat wet the ends of his hair. The front of one his boots was
torn.

“At home with my parents, if you must
know,” he said.

It was the first time he’d ever
really told them anything about his past. Ed wondered if being in Loch-Deep had
broken him.

“I’d just been laid off at the
microchip plant,” he continued. “Some smart bastard found a computer that could
do calculations a lot faster than I could, and I guess they preferred its
personality to mine.”

“Never had you down as doing
something like that,” said Ed.

“At least I had a job, Wetgills. It
wasn’t easy, you know. Going home to my wife and…”

Ed was shocked. “You had a wife?”

“Let him finish,” said Bethelyn.

The Savage looked down at the ground.
“Going back to your wife and saying ‘Hey honey, guess what? I’ve been replaced
by a box of circuits and wires, so I guess we’re not going to make our mortgage
payment this month. But look on the bright side, at least we can move in with
my parents.’
”

“That’s rough,” said Ed.

“That doesn’t even approach rough,”
said Bethelyn. “Try losing your daughter.”

Even The Savage was silent now. The
breeze picked up and blew across a bunch of dandelions, sending their fluffy
seeds into the air. A grey cloud smothered the blue sky above. Somewhere behind
them was the cabin. Ed wondered if the infected were still in it. Maybe they
had figured out that the three of them had left, and right now they were
following them across the plains.

He thought about the diary that
they’d found. He still couldn’t understand it. Someone had written about their
infection, and about how they hoped they could survive it by meditating. What a
croc. There were some things in life that having a positive attitude and
clearing your mind of negativity couldn’t change.

After mum died, Ed’s dad had started
practicing mindfulness. Ed was full of anger, and he couldn’t believe that his
dad was finding solace in a bunch of new-age hokum. James had calmed him down.

“It’s only crap if it doesn’t work,
Ed. Give him a break. He and mum were together half their lives. We’ve lost a
mum, but dad’s lost a whole part of himself. Just give him time.”

Ed changed the subject.

“So what do we do when we get out of Loch-Deep?
Where do we go? I’ve never even been to the Mainland before.”

The Savage looked up. His eyes were
dark.

“You want to find your brother, don’t
you?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’ll help you. Both of you.
Just keep the blood coming.”

Bethelyn walked over to him.

“Give me a little room,” she said.

The Savage budged over and offered
her the end of the rock. Bethelyn sat down, shifted her body and then looked at
him.

“You really don’t want to go back to
what you used to be, do you? The killing and the cannibalism.”

“It’s still cannibalism if he drinks
blood,” said Ed.

“But this way I don’t have to kill
you to get it,” said The Savage.

~

Just before evening, they were
thinking about stopping to take a rest. Ahead of them was a bunch of trees, and
there was a structure just beyond, propped up against the trunk of an oak tree.
It looked like someone had made a make-shift hut out of a jagged tin roof and
rectangle-shaped piece of plastic.

“Hold on,” said Ed. “Let’s be careful
about this.”

As they approached the hut, they
heard the sounds of a man groaning.

“It’s Ripeech,” said Bethelyn. “He’s
trying to trick us.”

Ed shook his head. “Don’t be stupid.
If it’s anything, it’s an infected. Just be careful.”

They found a man in the hut. His skin
was pale as if he’d lost pints of blood, but his eyes were human, and he didn’t
make any attempt to grab them when he saw them. Ed was glad that the man wasn’t
infected, and he couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

He wore a green khaki coat that he’d
unzipped to his waist, and his bare skin was beneath it. There was a long wound
stretching from his neck down to his pelvis. It opened across his skin like a
fault line in an earthquake. Stepping into the hut, Ed had to hold his breath
to ward away the smell of rot and urine.

The man was laid down on a bed of
leaves. Next to him was a bag. There was a green drinking canteen, and in the
other corner of the hut was a bear trap. Flies buzzed around the man’s chest.
Ed wondered how long he’d been living here.

The man moaned. His breaths were
raspy. Sweat stuck his greasy brown hair to his face, and acne scars dotted his
skin. He wore a belt around his trousers, but he’d cut a new hole into the
leather so that it would wrap around his skinny frame.

The Savage stood at the entrance.

“Avon calling,” he said.

Ed glared at him. “It’s okay to make
jokes now?”

“When I’m hungry, I can’t help it.”

The man looked at him. There was a
vacant look in his eyes. He lifted his arm to his face, but he moaned with the
effort. He rubbed his eyelids and then opened them again, as if he had expected
them to be a mirage.

“Did Rex send you?” he said,
grimacing as if each syllable sent shocks of pain through his body.

“What are you doing here, buddy?”
said The Savage.

“You’re not with the rest of them?”
said the man.

Ed shook his head. “What’s your
name?”

“Cillian.”

“What the hell happened to you,
Cillian?”

Cillian reached out toward the
drinking canteen. The Savage picked it up, unscrewed the lid and passed it to
him. Cillian took three painful gulps.

“If you see Rex or Andre, tell them I
found it.”

The Savage patted Cillian’s knee.

“We don’t know who the hell Rex or
Andre is, pal. But I’ll tell you our names. I’m The Savage – don’t bother
asking if that’s my real name - and this is Wetgills and Beth…something or
other. I don’t remember.”

“Touching,” said Bethelyn.

“We were shipwrecked and ended up on
this fine part of the Mainland,” said The Savage. “Not the way we wanted to go,
but we sure as hell aren’t staying. Now that’s our story. Take a deep breath,
guy, and tell us yours.”

Water dribbled down Cillian’s chin,
but he didn’t make any effort to wipe it. His chest heaved, and as he breathed
in, the wound across him expanded. The flesh was swollen red, and Ed didn’t
think he’d ever get used to the smell. They had to do something for him.

“I’m a hunter,” said Cillian. “Came
here for Ripeech. Had Saxon with me, but he ran when we saw it.”

“Coward,” said The Savage.

Cillian shook his head. “Saxon’s my
dog. He scares easy, though. Found him when he was a pup, he’d been living
under the crawlspace of a house in an infected neighbourhood.”

He leaned forward a little and
coughed. He cried out in pain.

Ed looked at the swollen red flesh.
It left a gaping hole in the man’s chest, and it made Ed sick to look at it. He
turned to Bethelyn.

“Can you do something?” he said.

She shook her head. “You could have
all the stitching in the world and you wouldn’t be able to fix this mess.”

Ed leaned in toward The Savage. He
spoke in a whisper.

“We need to do something. We can’t
leave him like this. And if Bethelyn can’t fix him, then we’ll have to do the
right thing.”

The Savage stared at him in
amazement. “You’re getting tougher, Wetgills.”

Tears formed in Cillian’s eyes.
Another wave of pain flowed through him, and he gripped the lining of his coat
until his knuckles turned pure white. Ed grabbed his hand and squeezed.

“Tell us about it,” said The Savage.
“About Ripeech.”

Cillian let out a raspy breath. “It’s
a creature, just like they say, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Its body
was rotten and a weird shape. And the smell… It even made Saxon nauseous, and
that damn dog would eat anything. Its skin was bloated up like a balloon and it
dragged its leg behind it like it was crippled or something. But when it
decided to move…boy. There’s no getting away from it.”

“Sounds lovely,” said Bethelyn.

“I tried trapping it,” said Cillian.
“Set a whole load of bear traps in its hunting grounds. It’s a devious son of a
bitch, though. Before I knew it, Ripeech was hunting me, not the other way
round. Saxon ran away and left me alone, and I spent a week hiding from it.”

“So what happened?”

“I let my guard down. Fell asleep
with a fire burning outside the hut. Next thing I know I wake up and it’s in
here with me. Stood over me and staring. Stinking the place up like you
wouldn’t believe. I thought it was gonna rip my face off, but it didn’t.”