The Dying & The Dead 2 (9 page)

He wasn’t Tammuz anymore. Now, stood
in the pale light that filtered through the Dome’s glass hexagons, he had shed
his Capita Five persona. He was no longer the man who decided which towns the
Capita would take by force. Just as he had changed his mask in the tunnel, he
had changed identity, too.

Now, he was Baz Worthington.

It was the name his parents had given
him. He presumed that they'd decided upon it seconds after a doctor slapped his
bare bum and then handed him to his mother. His real name was Barry, of course,
but the other kids at school had basterdised it until it became Baz.  If only
they could see him now. He bet they never imagined that the small boy would
become one of the Capita Five, responsible for invading towns like Kiele. Then
again, nobody imagined how the world would change because the outbreak had
happened so suddenly. As much as he’d like to shove it in their faces, they’d
never know. Nobody would. Outside of the chamber, he would forever be Baz.

On his way home through the Dome, he
passed by hundreds of cheaply-made cabins that were erected within feet of each
other. From the outside, the Dome looked huge, but nothing could prepare you
for the scale of it once you were underneath the glass ceiling.

He was almost home, when he stopped
just short of his neighbour’s house. He saw them through the window, with their
cabin lit by the flicker of a candle. They were a small family consisting of
just Terry Long, his wife Georgina and their son, Kieron. Kieron and Georgina
sat on a couch, while Terry was in a chair, reading to them from a book. Kieron
sat tight against his mother; his head slumped against her shoulder. Baz saw
that the little boy wasn’t wearing his mask.

He shook his head. Baz had known for
a while that his neighbour was harbouring his immune son. It was something that
could get the parents killed and the little boy packed on a train to Dam Marsh.
He wished they’d just have a little sense and at least draw their curtains
before letting him take off his mask.

Baz knew that it was his duty as a
Dome resident to report it. He had a bigger responsibility than most since,
although nobody knew it, he was one of the Five. The funny thing was that when
Baz approached his neighbour’s house, he became oblivious to what was around
him. His memory fogged over. It was a funny thing indeed, but how was Baz
supposed to report what he didn’t see or remember?

That was the excuse he’d use if it
ever came to it. The one thing he couldn’t explain was the supplies that he
sometimes left on their doorstep. If he was ever caught doing that, he would
soon be sat in the darkness of a Capita dungeon.

A lot of the Capita’s ideals were
outdated and downright hateful. The problem was that they provided safety where
nobody else could. In a world full of the cannibalistic infected, that was
worth too much to give away. Tammuz didn’t believe in their ideology, but he
appreciated being able to put his head on his pillow at night and not have to
wonder if something would creep up on him in the darkness.

Figures turned the corner at the end
of the street. Baz stopped. There were five men ahead of him in Capita
uniforms. They marched in formation toward him, stopping a couple of feet away.
He looked at their harsh expressions and saw the weapons they twisted in their
hands. One of them spoke to him.

“Why are you out so late?” he said.

Anger flared in him at the
disrespect, but he realised that out here, he wasn’t Tammuz. He was just Baz. A
nobody. He put his hands in his pockets.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “What are
you doing around here?”

“None of your business,” said one of
the guards at the back. “If you can’t sleep, then go home, shut your eyes and
count infected.”

The guards walked past him in file.
He turned and watched as they got nearer to Terry’s house. He hoped that they
wouldn’t spot the candle light flickering in the living room. That they
wouldn’t notice the boy sat next to his mother, his mask-less lips mouthing the
words to the story that his dad read to him.

He thought he should say something,
but he pictured the dungeons again, and knew that he couldn’t.

He clenched his hands into fists in
his pockets. The guards walked closer to Terry’s house. As they drew nearer,
one of them stopped. Baz’s heart raced in his chest. Was this it? Would Terry’s
stupidity finally tear his family apart?

The guard bent down to his boots and
tied his shoelaces. He straightened up, and the unit moved on, beyond Terry’s
house and down the street. Baz watched as they stopped at the door of a
different house further down. They paused for a few seconds, and then one of
them stepped back. He lifted a boot and kicked the door open.

Baz stood on the empty street and
listened to the shouts of surprise as the Capita guards carried out their raid.
He knew that he shouldn’t concern himself with things like this. As Baz, he was
nobody, but as Tammuz, his responsibility was greater. The Capita would expand,
and Tammuz would drive them through it.

He turned up his collar and walked
along the darkened street, thoughts of Kiele turning in his mind.

Chapter
Nine

Eric

It was funny how everyone’s faces melded
together when they were part of a crowd. The rest of the new arrivals all stood
in the middle of the yard, bunched tight as if stepping out alone would isolate
them and draw the attention of the guards. The shoes they had given him made
Eric’s feet hurt, and when he walked through the yard and he felt the stones
dig into his soles.

The longer-term inmates around them
carried out their jobs without paying attention, wary of stopping in case it
brought a baton down on their heads. Kim was next to Eric, and Allie stood
beside her. Across from them, five guards fixed them with hateful stares. One
of them wore thin-looking pale gloves, and Eric wondered if he was the guard
who preferred his accessories to be made of human skin.

Two men walked toward them from
across camp. Behind them were red bricked buildings that Eric knew were off
limits to the DCs. He didn’t know what went on in them, but he knew that it was
where Dr. Scarsgill worked. On the outskirts of the yard, there was a white
running track that someone had painted onto the stone. Eric wondered if the
camp had once been a training camp for athletes.

The guards gave way as the two figures
approached. One of them, wearing a long waterproof coat, was Dr. Scarsgill. He
had a tired look on his face. The other was an old man. His head only reached
to Dr. Scarsgill shoulders. He had long grey hair that looked like a woman’s,
and in his right hand he held a walking stick which he leaned on to support his
weight.

“You all know now what we expect of
you,” said Dr. Scarsgill, stopping in front of the DCs. “The presence of guards
is testament to the fact that you can’t be trusted. Day by day if you carry out
your duties, you build a little of that trust. That means the men next to me
won’t have cause to harm you.”

“Yeah, right,” Eric heard a man
whisper behind him.

Scarsgill put his hands in his
pockets.

“When you work in camp as long as I
have, people cease being people and they become a number. That means I don’t
care for you. I won’t mistreat you. After all, you can’t mistreat a number. But
if the sums don’t add up, I must start to subtract until they fit.”

He pointed to his right, across camp,
where the infected shambled beyond the fences.

“Look at some of the old numbers that
didn’t fit my formula.”

Eric picked up on a tremor in the
doctor’s voice. It was faint, but he was sure it had been there. He looked at
the infected, and he knew that the doctor was lying. Whatever else might happen
to them, Eric knew he and the rest of the DCs would never turn into one of the
creatures.

The old man next to him smiled. “What
the doctor is saying, in his usual obscure way, is that if you don’t behave
then like anywhere else, you will be punished. But nobody wants that.”

Scarsgill nodded. “Thank you, Goral.
I won’t pretend that I will always be up front with you all. It just doesn’t
work that way. But I will tell you this. You will be used to further the
species. We will take blood from you; blood that you will give freely.”

“I’m not giving you shit,” said a
voice.

A few people in the crowd gasped.
Eric looked behind him. Men and women in the crowd parted until a boy was stood
alone. Not only had his head been shaved, but he didn’t have any eyebrows,
either.

“Excuse me?” said Scarsgill.

The boy stood with his arms crossed.
There was a look on his face that Eric hadn’t seen since coming to camp. It was
an expression of defiance.

“Come at me with a needle and I’ll
punch you in the face,” said the boy.

Scarsgill nodded at the guard with
the gloves. The guard walked across the yard until he stood in front of the boy.
Eric expected him to stand down, but the stern look on his face held firm.

The guard grabbed him by the collar,
and in one easy motion lifted him three feet off the ground. The boy struggled
under his grasp, but the guard slapped him with a gloved hand.

Goral took careful steps forward. His
walking stick scratched across the stones with every move. He gave the boy a
kind smile.

“Go easy on him, doctor,” he said.
“He’s only a boy. Surely everyone had a bit of back-chat in them at that age?”
Then he laughed. “Even you, Mr. Smarty Pants.”

Goral looked at the crowd. He
focussed on a few boys and girls at the front.

“Put your hands up if you think Mr.
Smarty Pants was naughty too, at your age?”

A girl at the front laughed and
raised her hand. Eric felt Kim relax beside him, but it did nothing for the
knots in his shoulders.

“That’s enough, Goral,” said
Scarsgill. His cheeks were red.

Goral turned to the doctor. It was a
slow motion, as though his joints worked on rusted hinges.

“You’ve said your piece, doctor. Now
I’ll say mine.”

Goral turned to face them. He
reminded Eric of an old man he’d lived with once. It was before he, mum and
Luna met Dale. They stayed in a three story house with a few others survivors,
and one of them was a sixty-three year old called Hal.

His mum hated Hal for some reason,
and she didn’t want Eric spending time with him. Whenever he could get away
with it, Eric would watch Hal as he did things around the house like boarding
up windows and digging toilet trenches in the garden.

One day, Hal was outside reinforcing
the wood around one of their windows. Eric was in the house, but he could hear
the tune Hal was whistling as it drifted through the windows. He was going to
go outside to talk to him, when all of a sudden the tune stopped. Hal started
screaming, and there was a clanging sound as he dropped his hammer. They all
rushed outside to find Hal on the ground, with two infected sucking the blood
from his torn-open throat. That night, when everyone else was asleep, Eric had
pulled his blanket over his head and cried.

“Let’s play a game,” said Goral. His
accent was tinged with something exotic. “A competition, and the winner gets a
meal in my cabin. Imagine that! A hot meal that doesn’t look like sick slopped
into a bowl.”

Some of the kids tittered.

“The game is simple,” continued Goral.
He leaned into his walking stick. “You all run around the race track until you
just can’t run anymore. Whoever stays running last, wins.”

Kim tugged on Eric’s shirt.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “My
stomach feels like its eating itself.”

Eric was going to speak, when Allie
cut in.

“You have to, Kim,” he said.
“Scarsgill is watching. This is a test.”

Eric looked at the doctor. He stood
straight as a board and watched them all, eyes scanning the crowd from face to
face. He’d never seen a man who looked so cold before.

“One of the men in the canteen warned
me about it,” said Allie. “Whoever stops running first gets taken away.”

It made sense. Eric didn’t believe
for a second that Goral just wanted to play a game with them. There was a point
to everything they did in camp, no matter how stupid it seemed. The guards
shaved them because they wanted them to feel small. They gave them mind-numbing
jobs to tire them out. And if they wanted to play a game, there was a hidden
motive.

He grabbed Kim’s hand.

“Just outlast a few of the other kids
and you’ll be okay.”

Kim held her stomach.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You have to. Just think of your
mum.”

~

They all lined up at the start of the
track. Some of the older men and women stayed at the back and stretched out
their legs. A few kids waited at the front with eager faces, the prospect of a
hot meal in front of them.

Eric glanced over to his left where
Scarsgill, Goral and the guards watched. One of the guards leaned in toward his
friend and whispered something that brought a smile to the other man’s face.
Scarsgill looked at them with his cold stare.

He was convinced that Allie was
right. There was more to this than just a competition, but he didn’t plan on
finding out what that was. As long as Kim was okay, that was all that mattered.

“Think you’ll win?” said Kim.

“I don’t know. Allie seems up for it though.”

The boy had left Kim’s side and gone
to the front. He stood at the starting line with his hands clenched and stared
straight ahead.

“My stomach,” said Kim, and put her
hands across her belly.

Eric didn’t trust a word that Goral
had told them, but he knew that Kim needed food. Maybe if he could win the
race, there really would be a prize. He could get some hot food in Goral’s
cabin and when the old man wasn’t looking, he’d sneak some in his pockets and
take it back to Kim. For all he knew there wasn’t a prize, but Eric was going
to try and win regardless. He didn’t have many other options.

“Ready?” said Goral. He stood beside
the starting line.

Allie turned to him and nodded.

“Then go,” said the old man, and
swept his arm forward.

They set off into a run. At the
front, men bustled into the children. One man put a hand on a woman’s shoulder
and shoved her away from him, using the space to gain a few precious metres.

Idiot,
thought Eric.

Goral had said the last person
running would win. That meant that this wasn’t a race, but an endurance test. A
question flickered in his mind, and he wondered why the doctor and the old man
would want to test their stamina. It didn’t matter. He needed to win so that he
could get food for Kim.

The stones dug into Eric’s feet as
they ran. Kim had started the run close to him, but inch by inch she was
dropping away. Eric slowed so that he was beside her. Ahead of them, Allie
bounded along the track with ease.

The cabins passed them by on their
left and right as they rounded the track. The other DCs in the yard carried on
with their work, though one man sneaked a look at them as he rested on his
pickaxe.

“I don’t feel good,” said Kim.

Her pace slowed an inch. Eric grabbed
her shoulder and squeezed.

“We’ve nearly done the first lap,” he
said. “Everyone’s tired. Someone will drop soon. Just hang in there.”

He didn’t like talking that way,
because he knew that something bad would happen to the first person to drop.
The problem was that someone had to take the fall, and he didn’t want it to be
Kim.

Soon enough Scarsgill and Goral were
ahead of them, and Eric and Kim jogged by. As they completed their first lap,
Eric caught the doctor leaning into Goral to speak to him. He didn’t catch
everything, but he definitely heard the words ‘
the girl.’

He slowed a little more and squeezed
Kim’s arm. A man went past them and jostled her shoulder.

“Hey,” said Eric.

The man ignored them and ran on, the
only thought in his head a warm meal in a nice cabin.

As they went around the track again,
they jogged by the dog kennels. The metal fencing excluded some of the dogs
from view, but the animals grew wild as the DCs ran. Eric imagined someone
walking over and letting them loose, and he pictured Kim falling to the floor
as a pack of hounds swarmed her.