The Dying & The Dead 2 (23 page)

“So just explain to them,” said
Heather. “Tell them you’ve been away. I’ll hide, and when they’re gone, we can
go find Kim. I’ll go upstairs into one of the bedrooms. But I’m taking Lilly
with me. If you say a word out of place, I’ll kill her.”

She tried to make it seem like she
meant the threat, but even she knew there was no intention behind it.

“No, Heather,” said Charles. “They’re
here to kill me.”

“And they’ll kill me too, in that
case. So what the hell do we do now?”

Lilly spoke.

“We can leave.”

Charles looked at his daughter, and
nodded.

“We can go to your mum’s old place on
the coast.”

Lilly shook her head.

“We’ll go with Heather to the camp.
You can’t keep me going on your blood forever. Come on Dad, you know that. I
need flesh.”

It made Heather sick to hear a child
talking this way. For this little girl, drinking blood and eating flesh had
become a way of life. Her condition had twisted her mind until she had become a
little monster. Despite that, Heather knew the girl wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t
her fault she’d been bitten.

As the Capita soldiers walked toward
the cottage, Heather knew that she had no choice. As much as Charles sickened
her, she needed him.

Chapter
Twenty-Four

Eric

She was getting worse by the day.
When he looked at Kim on her bed, he couldn’t help but remember how bad his
sister, Luna, had looked after she drank some water before mum boiled it. She
spent the next week making constant trips outside to go to the toilet. So much
so that they had to move on a day later because the smell was attracting foxes,
and the foxes drew the infected.

Kim’s face was ghost white, and the
bones in her cheeks stuck out like they were trying to get away from her skin.
He’d persuaded her to try and eat more of the camp gruel, but it didn’t seem to
do her much good.

Eric had spent the last day
persuading some of the others to escape. He knew he couldn’t do it alone, and
Kim wasn’t going to be a lot of help. He had to be careful who he asked,
because some people loved to tell the guards what others were up to, because
they thought it would get them special privileges.

Although he didn’t like him, he had
chosen to tell Martin Wrench. After watching him in the race and seeing him
trip up the other boy, Eric knew that Martin was devious, and that he was
prepared to do anything. He made no secret of how much he hated camp, and although
he had admitted he was scared, he seemed willing to risk danger.

“You’re cleverer than me,”
Martin had said. “
Work out what
to do, and I’ll help.”

The plan was to convince Marta to use
Goral’s keys and drive them out of there on the train. He would need to create
a diversion somehow, because he needed to distract the guards and take as many
DCs with him as possible.

“All well and good having a train,”
said Martin. “
but there are still
the guards.”

“I’ve got a plan for that,”
Eric told him.

Later that night Eric told Kim to
cover for him while he sneaked out of the cabin. She sighed and nodded her
head, and then she put her hand on her belly as if it was hurting her. Eric
didn’t know if she’d really heard what he said, but he didn’t have a choice.

He crawled across camp. When a
searchlight swooped nearby he stayed still –
pretend it’s a wasp –
and
he took his time. He realised that people made mistakes when they tried to rush
things. That’s how the other boys had been caught, he decided. They’d tried to
escape without being patient and having a real plan.

He went all the way across the yard
to the section where the red brick buildings were. He had never been this far
before, and at first he thought there would have been lots of guards. The stars
twinkled in the sky above him, and the moon was hidden behind a cloud so dark
that it melted into the sky. All the guards were asleep. Either that or they were
drinking and playing cards. Sometimes they took DC women from the cabins out
for a walk, but Eric didn’t know what they did with them or why these women got
special privileges.

The train was beyond the kennels and Dr.
Scarsgill’s building, fifty metres past the fence that ran around the perimeter
of camp. To get there he was going to need to do something about the infected
who wandered freely between the metal, and he was still going to have to
persuade Marta to agree to drive the train.

Deciding that he’d learned enough for
one night, he started back across the yard. His footsteps made little noise on
the stone, although sometimes he stopped and stayed really still, sure that he
heard something nearby. When he finally got to his own cabin, he froze in
place. All of a sudden, his heart sped up.

The lights in his cabin were on, and
through the window, he saw guards walking between the beds.

It’s an inspection,
he thought.
And they’re going to
see that I’m not there.

His first emotion was panic so cold
that it was as if a guard had gripped his neck and plunged him into an ice
bath. He pictured them walking through the cabin and tearing it apart to find
him. Finally they’d find the hatch that he used to sneak out from. They’d seal
it up, punish Eric and probably do the same to the rest of the DCs just for
being in the same cabin.

He knew that Kim was good at lying.
Her mum, Heather, was forever scolding her for it, but for some reason Kim just
couldn’t help herself. If something took an hour she’d say that it had taken
five, and if the sky was blue she’d say it was grey. They were pointless and
mostly harmless lies. Maybe she could put them to good use and make up a reason
for Eric not being there.

All he had to do was get back into
the cabin. The problem was that if he went back in through the hatch he’d make
too much noise, and they’d wonder why he was at the back of the cabin rather
than in bed. And he could hardly just walk back in through the front door,
either. What would he say? ‘
Sorry, I just went out for a walk. The yard is
lovely at this time of night.’

Stood in the yard with a shivering
wind hugging him, he was alone. This was the first time during any of his
late-night wanderings that he’d really felt any danger. He knew what the guards
would do to him if he was ever caught, but he’d pushed it to the back of his
mind, to the same place where he kept the worry he felt about his mum and
sister.

Eric had always been good at shutting
things off. It was one of his talents; that when something bad happened he
created some space in his mind, put the bad thing in there and then imagined a
big metal door clanking shut and leaving it in darkness. The problem was that
these days everything was bad, and he worried that soon there’d be so many bad
things locked away in his head that there’d be no room for the good.

He looked around him to see what his
options were. It only took him a split second, because Dam Marsh was dead end
after dead end, closed door after closed door.

There were the cabins, but he
couldn’t get in his own and it wouldn’t do any good to go into another one. ‘
Sorry,
forgot which cabin was mine. What was I doing outside? Err…’
There was the
metal fence that surrounded the perimeter, and the infected shuffled back and
forth beyond it, but it wasn’t time to use them yet. Finally, he saw the red
brick buildings at the back of camp. One of them was Dr. Scarsgill’s lab. The
guard barracks was somewhere out of view, and beyond that was the train.

The only building he could see
properly was the kennels. He supposed this was so that the DCs had plain view
of the guards’ snarling hounds, so that they knew what would be let loose on
them if they ever had the stupid notion of defiance or escape.

Torch lights flickered in his cabin.
A burly man in a Capita uniform stood in the window, blocking the inside of the
cabin from view. They weren’t quite at Eric’s bed yet, but it wouldn’t be long
now. If Kim tried to lie for him and got caught, she’d be in as much trouble as
him.

He walked across the yard. Stopping
thirty feet away from the kennels, he reached down to the ground and picked up
a stone. He twisted it in his fingers, and yellow dust crumbled away and
covered his skin.

The dogs were sleeping in their
kennels. Some held their paws out and stretched their heads across them, while
others curled up into the tightest ball they could. One was on its back, limbs
stretched wide into the most uncomfortable sleeping position imaginable. Like
this, they were almost cute, but Eric had seen them in the day. Black eyes
staring out of angry-looking faces, mouths wide open to show teeth sharp enough
to snap bone. Spit spraying out with every bark. Sometimes, even the guards
gave a wary glance as they walked past them.

He squinted at the dog directly in
front of him. He tensed his arm, took his aim, and then threw the stone. It
clanged against the bars in front of the dog and then bounced off to the side.
The dog wiped a paw against its sleepy face.

He picked up another stone. He
breathed like he’d seen the guards in the watchtowers do before they fired
their guns. He imagined the stone hitting the dog’s head.

He threw it. It lopped in an arc,
staying on a true course toward the dog as it fell. It hit the dog on the nose,
and the hound was on its feet in a second. The dog started giving a bark that
sounded throaty at first, like a man waking up in the morning and coughing his
throat clear. The bark grew louder, and soon the other dogs stirred. On waking,
the first thing they did was return the gruff sound, and soon enough the entire
section of camp was drowned out by the wild shouting of the canines.

Eric sneaked away and hid behind the
corner of a cabin. Sure enough, his own cabin door opened, and the guards filed
out. Their torch beams bounced over the ground as they ran toward the kennels.
As they ran past him he held his breath, but the men and women were too
distracted by the dogs to even glance around them.

When he got into his cabin, he walked
over to Kim’s bed. She saw him, and she reached out and grabbed him, and pulled
him into a hug. It seemed as if the act drained the last scrap of energy from
her body, because afterwards she pushed him away and slumped back onto the
pillow.

“You were
this
close,” she
said. “I swear to God, they were almost going to check your bed. And I don’t
think my handiwork would have fooled them.”

He glanced at his bed. Kim had put
his pillow under the bedsheets so that it looked like he was sleeping in it,
but there was a problem with the disguise; he didn’t appear to have a head.

Back in his cabin, with the stale
sweaty air and water buckets, he missed the breeze of the yard. At the same
time, there was something about being out there that made him feel vulnerable,
as if things crept up on him from all sides. The odds were against them both,
he realised. Between the guards and the dogs and the infected, the Capita was
sure to catch them if they escaped. It wouldn’t stop there, either. With their
resources, the Capita would pursue them across the Mainland, hunting them down
until they were too tired to run anymore.

“I’m worried, Kim,” he told her.
“Even if we get out, they’ll hunt us all our lives. We’re just too valuable to
them, aren’t we? Do you ever get the idea that it’s just our fate to be
victims?”

Kim shook her head.

“Snap
out of it.
Mum told me ‘
everything
you want is on the other side of fear.
’
I never understood what she meant, but I see the infected on the other side of
the fences, and I
know everything we want is
somewhere beyond them.”

~

Later that night his body jerked
awake. It took his mind a few seconds to catch up, but once it did, he saw a
cabin covered in darkness, with the other DCs snoring around him. His blanket
covered his legs but his bare chest was exposed to the cold air, and goose
pimples welled on his skin.

The door of the cabin whined as
someone opened it. Eric stayed still. He watched as a figure walked inside. He
wondered what the guards were doing here at this time. Maybe one of them had
already seen that Eric hadn’t been here earlier, and they’d come to take him
away. There was nothing he could do now. He would just have to act dumb. Tell
them he’d been here all along and didn’t know what they were talking about.

He didn’t hear the heavy thuds of
Capita boots, and didn’t see the green, over-starched uniforms. Instead there
was a tall man in a plastic coat, a beaky nose protruding against the fabric of
his mask, his cold skin matching the air around him.

What the hell was Scarsgill doing
here?

Scarsgill walked into the cabin. He
was so tall that it wouldn’t have taken much more for him to hit his head on
the ceiling. He looked around him from bed to bed, until finally his gaze
settled just beyond Eric. Eric couldn’t turn to see what Scarsgill was looking
at, because he didn’t want the doctor to think he was awake.

A guard followed the doctor into the
cabin. Scarsgill’s shoes made pattering sounds as he crossed the floor. When he
walked past Eric’s bed, he caught the scent of something that seemed like
cigarettes but was stronger, as if the doctor had smoked five of them at once.