The Dying & The Dead 2 (26 page)

One of them had a rifle slung at his
side. He brought his horse to a stop and held the gun in his hands.

Heather tried to climb up onto Ken.
Charles had a saddle that he had modified so that Lilly could ride. The two of
them took up all the leather, and that didn’t leave any room for Heather to
grip onto.

The soldier brought the rifle to
shoulder height and looked down the barrel. He took a breath and fired, and
Heather saw dust kick up a few feet away from her. The proximity of the bullet
set her pulse into a panic.

She climbed up onto the horse.
Charles pulled onto the reins, and Ken sped forward along the path. She heard
the soldiers shouting behind her, but within a minute the wind whipped against
her face and they started to put distance between them and their pursuers. She
gripped onto Lilly’s waist as they rode.

There was another crack. A bullet dug
into the dirt. Heather flinched, and instinctively put her head down. The dogs
behind her rolled on the floor, and she could still smell the sour aroma of
burning hair. She wanted to put her hands to her ears to drown out their cries
of pain. The throaty cries of the infected were bad enough, but nothing matched
the squeal of a burning dog.

After ten minutes, the Capita horses
showed no signs of slowing. The soldier with the rifle continued to fire, each
bullet tearing into the ground around them. The clamour behind them grew, and
Charles hunched forward in the saddle and spurred Ken to go faster.

She saw something in the distance.
Buildings bunched together with a metal fence surrounding them. It looked to be
the ruins of an old town, but Heather had never been to this part of the
Mainland before. Charles seemed to be guiding Ken toward it.

Another shot boomed. This time it
didn’t hit the dirt. Ken gave a cry and reared up on his back legs, and Heather
had to grip Lilly’s waist tighter so that she didn’t fall off. Charles patted
the animal’s body.

“It’s okay,” he said.

Heather knew that it wasn’t okay. The
bullet had hit Ken on the side, and the horse shook his body as if he was
trying to free himself from the piece of lead in his flesh.

With Ken’s pace slowed, the soldiers
advanced. Charles spurred him on, head fixed firmly on the buildings and the
fence in front of them. The soldiers were so close now that the pounding of
their horses’ hooves sounded like a drumbeat.

“The saddle,” Charles said, without
turning around.

Lilly reached into the saddle pouch
and pulled out another bottle with a rag stuffed in it. She tried to light it,
but Ken’s movements were jerky, and she couldn’t keep the flame lit long enough
to ignite the rag.

Heathy took the lighter off her. She
brought it close to the bottle and let the flame take hold on the cloth. She
took the bottle off Lilly and turned around. The soldiers were twenty feet away
now. The one with the rifle raised his weapon again and took aim. One more shot
and Ken would be done.

Heather raised the bottle and threw
it. She missed the soldiers, but the bottle exploded in front of their horses
and caused the animals to rear up at the flames, wheezing at the blaze.

Charles whipped Ken’s reins and
spurred the animal forward. They reached the metal fence, and just as they
crossed through it and passed the first dilapidated building, Ken slowed.
Gradually his pace dropped until he just trotted, and there was nothing Charles
could do to press him on. Ken slackened to a stop, and then just fell over onto
his side, sending the three of them to the ground. Heather cried out in pain as
her leg was crushed by the weight of the animal and the other riders.

She squirmed free. She got to her
feet. She was thankful that her leg wasn’t so damaged that she couldn’t walk,
but she wasn’t going to be running any marathons in the near future. Charles
stood up. He went to Lilly’s side and unhooked her from the saddle.

Behind them, The Capita soldiers
reached the fence but instead of pursuing, they stopped. The soldier with the
gun held his hand in the air, and the unit pulled their horses to a standstill.

Heather looked around her. Somehow,
she knew that this was Mordeline. It was an abandoned town where the grey
buildings had been left in ruins and had started to show the strain of time on
their brickwork. Weeds pushed through the concrete pavement, and there was an
unwholesome smell. At first, everything around them was silent. There was a
tension in the air. It was a feeling so real that Heather felt it settle on her
shoulders, and she looked around as if waiting for something to happen. She
understood now why nobody came to Mordeline. With the dark shadows creeping
over every inch of light and buildings left abandoned, it was a place she
wouldn’t have wanted to travel through alone.

Bodies started to emerge from the
rubble and lurched out of open doorways. One, an infected woman with a long,
ratty plat in her hair, gurgled and then stumbled out of a light fitting shop.
Another walked from the entrance to a pizza parlour, and it tripped over a
loose car exhaust that had been left on the street. More joined them, and the
streets of Mordeline filled with the rasping chorus of the infected. They moved
with jerky steps, stretching as though they hadn’t walked in weeks.

“We need to get cover,” said Heather.

With Lilly free, Charles’s focus was
solely on his horse. He kneeled by Ken’s side and stroked his hair. Ken gave
shallow breaths, and blood leaked out from the wound on his side. Charles’s
eyes were wide and black, and they looked on the verge of welling with tears.

“Charles,” said Heather, trying to
get his attention.

He stroked the animal’s head. He took
hold of it and lifted it to his own.

“Come on, Ken. Come on, lad,” he
said.

The infected edged closer. Some of
them wailed, as if they were giving a signal to the others that a meal was here
and if they didn’t act soon, they would miss it.

Heather looked to her right. There
was a building with a gothic archway, and pillars supporting a roof that was
covered in ivy. Spirals were carved into stone work that was turning green with
the spread of moss. A sign above the door read ‘Mordeline Community Municipal
Theatre.’

Lilly dragged herself over to her
father. When she was by his side, she leaned back and then slapped him in the face.
Charles snapped his head toward her, and a blaze of anger met with the sadness
welling up in him. He seemed to notice the infected around them now.

He gave Ken another stoke, and then
got to his feet. He picked up Lilly, and without a word walked over to the
Mordeline Theatre and went through the archway. Heather followed, with the
dragging footsteps of the monsters behind her.

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

Tammuz
(Baz)

He’d never seen a real battle before,
and this definitely wasn’t what he expected. In his head he’d imagined two
opposing forces meeting outside of Kiele, standing under the rising morning sun
and sizing each other up. Men clinging to their weapons and hoping this
wouldn’t be the last day they’d ever get to use them. Maybe one party would send
a messenger over to the other and give them one last chance to surrender. It
showed just how naïve he really was.

In reality, Hanks had ordered his two
stealthiest men to creep to the town gates and kill the guards. The rest of the
unit pressed forward, passing the decapitated heads on the spikes along the
way. The sight of them, with the wood driven through their wide-open mouths,
made Baz turn his gaze. Hanks, on the other hand, patted the hair of one of
them as he went by it on his horse.

When they went beyond the gates and
stood in Kiele, Baz saw something that he hadn’t laid eyes on in a long time.
Kiele was an actual town. The buildings were rundown, but it was clear that the
townspeople had maintained them as best they could. People pushed wheelbarrows
full of food produce along the pavement. Others idled on the street and chatted
while across from them, children ran away from each other, careful to avoid getting
tagged and becoming ‘it.’

“Got you,” Baz heard one of them say
as he hit his friend. He wore a red t-shirt with a faded image of a man in a
cape on the front. “Now you’re Ripeech.”

There was something liberating about
standing in a settlement that wasn’t covered by a glass ceiling. He’d never
considered that the places beyond the Capita lands could be safe. All this time
he’d planned raids on Mainland towns, and he’d settled his conscience by
telling himself that the Capita were bringing safety to the wasteland. Maybe
all they brought was fear and death.

None of the townsfolk had noticed
them yet. Hanks signalled to the back of the unit. Five Runts brought the
defanged infected forward, dragging them by ropes tied around their necks.
Their skin was scratched red from how tight the knots were around their
throats. They tried to cry out, but all their mouths could produce was a hollow
rattle.

“Set them loose,” said Hanks.

The Runts untied the infected and
pushed them away. At first Baz thought that the monsters might just turn around
and try to grab the Capita soldiers, but one of them saw the children, and gave
a wheezy cry. The others followed suit, and soon they walked forward onto the
streets of Kiele, keen to join the children’s game of tag, but with a darker
motivation.

The boy wearing the superhero t-shirt
saw the infected. He screamed, and this brought the attention of a group of men
who were talking and smoking next to an old butcher’s shop. One of the men,
with a goatee beard on his chin and his cigarette pinched between his thumb and
index finger, jerked his head back in surprise. He flicked his cigarette and
rushed over to the children and ordered them to go indoors.

One of the infected stumbled over to
the man. Lacking weapons to fight with, he looked around him in panic. He
didn’t know that the infected had been defanged, so his response was natural.
He turned to his friends.

“Fetch our blades. And go tell
Rushden and Max,” he said.

Hanks watched the scene with straight
shoulders and a firm gaze. He turned to the Capita unit and nodded.

“Okay boys,” said one of the
officers. “Runts first. Go for the men, then the women. If anyone fights back,
I want a pile of bodies.”

The Runts stormed forward, followed
by the rest of the unit. Too many of the Kiele townspeople were caught unaware,
and some only realised that they were being attacked when a blade sliced
through their skin. Blood splattered onto the grey pavement. The children
scampered indoors. One of them crossed the road and made for a house, but an
officer kicked the side of his horse and cut the child off. When the child was
caught under the horse and crushed beneath a hoof, Baz felt sick.

He stood in the middle of the street
and watched the fight rage around him. More Kiele men had emerged from the
mouths of buildings, with weapons in their hands and adrenaline-filled
expressions on their faces.

Nothing could have prepared Baz for
the noises. The sickening sound of knives cutting through flesh. Men falling to
the floor and screaming, giving cries so full of pain that they were scarcely
human. Runts who, on the journey here, had seemed calm, bellowing and charging
at the townsfolk in front of them. The screams and the moaning and the yells
mixing with the gurgling of the infected.

Some of the Kiele fighters fell for Hanks’s
ploy, and instead of focusing on the Capita soldiers, they tried to kill the
infected. This was Hanks’s genius; his knowledge that where men and infected
were concerned, a person’s first instinct was to go for the monsters.

A man ran at Baz with a pike. He held
it horizontal at shoulder level, and charged forward with the spikes aimed at his
chest. As the man got nearer Baz sidestepped. There was a millisecond where he
had the opportunity to slice the man with his knife, but the weapon stayed in
his sheath. Baz’s heart pounded so hard it felt like it was going to break
through his chest. The man rounded, and he looked at Baz again and prepared for
another charge. As he did, an officer galloped past and with one swipe of his
sword cut halfway through his throat until his head hung off like loose skin.

Black dots danced in his vision and
bounced over the carnage around him.
Was he having a panic attack?
The
atmosphere of fear was so strong that he could smell it; the air was filled
with an aroma of blood and sweat. He heard so many screams that his ears hurt.

This was his reality now, he
realised. As he stood in the middle of the chaos, he finally understood that
decisions didn’t end in the Grand Hall. He knew that acting as Tammuz, he had
created this. The blood from every wound might as well have poured over his own
hands, because although his skin wasn’t stained by crimson, he was responsible
for every drop that hit the pavement.

This was what he didn’t see when he
sat in the Grand Hall and wore his mask. Was it all worth it? Were the cries
and screams of innocents a worthy goal? There was no doubt that Kiele was a
home for the Resistance, but these people weren’t evil. It was clear that they
were just folks trying to get by.

A crowd of men approached from the
east of the town, walking in file past an abandoned fishmonger shop and a
cobbler’s. One of them had a wide smile painted on the front of his mask, and
for a second it looked as if he saw the carnage in front of him and grinned.
The smile didn’t reach his eyes. With clipped words, he ordered the others into
formation.

The Kiele fighters couldn’t have
looked any more different from Baz’s unit. The Capita soldiers at least looked
like an army, with the starched uniforms and stern expressions that seemed to
be requisite if you were from the Dome. The Kiele men seemed to have something
that the Hanks’s men lacked; they had fire in their eyes. Their clothes were
mismatched and their weapons looked like they’d been scavenged from a DIY
store, but they had passion and purpose.

Another man stood beside the one with
the smile. He was tall, with shoulders that looked as if they would take the
weight of a battering ram, and his ginger hair stuck up like the coarse fur of
a dog. This man had a meaner look in his eyes than the rest, and he watched the
battle in front of him like a drunk faced with a row of whiskey bottles.

At a signal from the ginger man, the
Kiele fighters rushed into the battle. One Capita soldier was caught unaware,
and he sank to the floor as a Kiele knife stabbed through his Adam’s apple. The
smell of blood grew thicker, and Baz’s lungs gasped for air. Suddenly he prayed
that he was back in the Grand Hall, and he had the stupid thought that even
Marduk’s sneering face would be a welcome sight.

If he could go back now, he wondered
if he would make a different decision. Maybe he would go down a path that
didn’t lead to the slaughter of a town; of the clanging sound of blades meeting
blades, and the sight of concrete paving stained with splattered crimson.

A little girl darted out of a doorway
and ran toward the Kiele fighters. She dodged past a Capita soldier who, in the
adrenaline-soaked heat of battle, swiped at her with his knife, but missed. An
officer galloped on his horse from the opposite end of town, and it was clear
that the horse’s hooves would cross with the girl’s small steps.

Baz’s breath caught in his throat. He
wanted to reach out and scoop the girl up, but he was too far away. Men
screamed around him, and people crawled on the floor to escape battle, some of
them with deep wounds in their bodies.

The officer on his horse hadn’t seen
the girl, and he was going to trample her. Baz wondered if seeing her would
even make a difference to the man. A look of cruelty twisted in his face, and
Baz sensed that this was the expression of a man drenched in bloodlust.

A Kiele fighter locked eyes with Baz.
Baz realised that his hands were shaking, and that he hadn’t even loosened his
knife from his sheath. He pulled it out and gripped the handle so hard that his
knuckles ached.

The man ran at him. Baz readied
himself and held the knife at waist level. As the man grew nearer, something
fell on Baz and knocked him to the ground. He looked up to see an infected,
newly-dispatched, slumped over him. Blood spurted from its neck and covered his
hair and forehead. The man stood above Baz now, his face distorted by rage. He
lifted a hatchet in the air.

Baz stabbed his knife into the side
of the man’s knee, and digging it deep into the kneecap. The man screamed and
fell to the floor. The blood drained from his face, and he dropped his hatchet
and clutched his leg.

He got to his feet. The girl was
stood still, paralysed with fear at the onset of the officer charging toward her.
Just as the horse galloped head-on toward the girl, Baz ran across the paving.
He scooped the girl up in his arms and dived to the side, just out of reach of
the officer. The Capita man looked down on Baz in surprise, and he stopped for
a second, wondering how to act on the mutiny of a Capita soldier.

“She’s just a girl,” said Baz.

The officer looked as if he was going
to say something, when the man with the wide smile walked up to the horse and
plunged a blade deep into its belly. The horse buckled, and both officer and
beast crashed to the ground. Blood spilled from underneath the horse, and the
rider struggled to get free of the dying animal. Without pause, the man with
the smile walked across and slit the officer’s throat.

He walked over to Baz and stood over
him. With the girl in his arms, Baz couldn’t use his knife. He gulped. He
smelled the blood in the air, and his stomach turned to water.

“Dad,” said the girl.

Baz released her from his grip, and
the man with the smile gathered her in his arms. He stared at Baz for what
seemed like minutes, before finally nodding at him.

As he turned to walk away, Hanks
galloped up on his horse, lifted his sword and smashed the handle down on the
Resistance fighter’s head.

Hanks stopped his horse. The sounds
of battle started to die, replaced by the pathetic cries of the wounded. One by
one blades ceased meeting flesh and instead hung loose in tired hands. Some of
the Capita soldiers sank to the floor and gulped air, relieved that the battle
around them was simmering to a stop.

Hanks nodded down at the man with the
smile. “Take this one alive,” he told one of the officers. “And the
ginger-haired one. Let’s see what they know.”

Baz sank onto his back and stared up.
Rather than the clear blue of an afternoon sky, he saw dark clouds above him.
Raindrops fell onto his face and pattered onto the pavement around him. He
closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he hoped he would be somewhere
else. A place that was calm and clean. He knew it wasn’t to be; the rain would
brew into a storm, and it still wouldn’t be enough to wash the blood off the
streets of Kiele.