Fear the Dead (Book 4) (3 page)

Chapter 4

When I went to speak to Lou later
that night, she wasn’t in her tent. I found her sat on the edge of the
campsite, with her back against a sycamore tree. She stared out toward the
field in front of her, at all the blades of grass which swayed in the cold
night breeze. In the darkness they looked like waves lapping back and forth. I
felt as though walking out too far into the fields could drown me.

As I got closer, I wondered what the
fields hid. The grass was waist high, and it would have been a good idea to
chop it down. It offered protection if our enemies couldn’t see us, but it
wasn’t worth giving stalkers somewhere to prowl.

When I got closer still, Lou must
have heard my footsteps. She had a book on her lap, but when she heard me
coming she turned it over, put it beside her and covered it with her bag.

“Anything interesting?”

“Nothing for hours,” she said. “Not
seen a peep of any stalkers.”

“I don’t mean them. I mean the book.”

“Oh that?” she said. She looked at me
and gave a smile. “That’s none of your fucking business.”

I walked over and settled next to her
at the tree. We sat so close that our shoulders touched. I was never a fan of
physical contact, but it was good practice that if you were ever sat in the
open, you had something supporting your back. It meant that nothing could sneak
up on you.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you when you
suggested I let Darla take over. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

Lou’s smile was gone now. In the
faint glow of the moonlight I could see her neck. I saw the ink of the tattoos
that covered her from her chin all the way to her chest.  The tattoos
represented the inner workings of her neck and throat, so they were all bones
and veins and sinews. It was like she was showing everyone her interior, which
was strange for someone as guarded as she was. I knew that what she displayed
on her neck had nothing to do with how she was inside. Lou was a lot softer
that she made out, but at the same time she was also a lot tougher than she
pretended. She was the kind of woman who could buy you a birthday gift when she
was feeling nice, but kill you with it if you wronged her.

“Thing is Kyle, I did mean it. I
stand by what I said back then, even if it makes you pissy. You’re so stressed
and wiped out, I think you should consider delegating some responsibility. And
since Darla wants it, maybe she’s the right person to delegate to.”

“Wanting power doesn’t mean you
deserve it.”

“But learning to trust others is
something every leader should know.”

“Anyway,” I said. “What’s the book?
Come on. I saw it.”

Lou lifted her bag onto her lap. It
was a green camouflaged hold-all that she’d picked up on a supply run to a
nearby town called Larkton. She pulled on the drawstrings and opened it, and
then took out the book. She handed it across to me.

“Don’t say a bloody word to anyone
else about this.”

“
Calmness in a Chaotic World
,”
I read, turning the book over in my hands. “Unleashing the Dragonfly Within. Is
there a dragonfly inside you, Lou?”

“You’ll be getting a knife inside
your arse if you don’t shut up.”

The trunk of the tree dug into my
back. I would have shifted position, but the discomfort of it helped to keep me
awake. Between that and the night-time wind, there was no danger of me getting
drowsy yet.

“What are you doing here anyway?” I
said.

“Counting sheep.”

“Seriously, Lou. Weren’t you on watch
earlier? You’re the guard captain, so that means you can delegate. Where’s
Carlisle?”

“He quit.”

“Vernon?”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Pollard?”

“Don’t trust him either.”

I shook my head and then handed the
book back to her.

“Damn it. You can’t do this by
yourself. I didn’t appoint you captain so you could keep watch every second of
the day on your own. You need to learn to delegate.”

Lou glanced at me and arched her
eyebrow. It was only after a few seconds of staring at her that the point hit
me. Everything I had just said, she had said to me earlier. It seemed like we
were just too alike.

Something made a clapping sound in
the field across from us. Lou slid her crowbar from beside her and got into a
crouching position. I sat up further and scanned the field. I couldn’t see
anything moving in the grass, but stalkers weren’t known for being easy to
spot. One of them could have been slinking its way toward us, leaving it until
the last possible second to pounce. My heart began to thud.

“It’s just a crow,” said Lou, and sat
back down.

A crow flapped its wings and drifted
across the sky, its black feathers blending into the darkness above it. I put
my head back against the tree. How was it that even after so long, I could
never get used to the stalkers? It was the same with the infected, too. Even
though I knew how to deal with them, I could never quite get rid of the primal
fear that the undead provoked in me. When I saw their hungry mouths, my hairs
stood on end, and when I heard them groan and walk toward me, my pulse quickened.

“I don’t mind doing the watch,” said
Lou. “I’m not exactly getting my beauty sleep these days. There’s hardly anyone
I trust. When all’s said and done, I think there’s too many of us. Maybe we
should split into two or three different camps.”

“You’re sounding like Darla,” I said.

“I just think it’s mad for you to try
and be responsible for fifty people. It’s too much for one person. The way I
see the future isn’t us staying in one place. There’s no Eden, Kyle. We’d be
much safer just travelling from place to place in roving bands. Never settle
anywhere, never go soft. Never let our guards down.”

“We need to put down roots.”

“When you put down roots, you get
stuck.”

Lou turned her whole body and looked
at me.

“I’m going to ask one more time,” she
said. “Give up power. Let Darla take over. Then you, me, Mel and whoever else
wants to come can just leave and look after ourselves.”

Hearing her mention Darla again put a
lump in my throat. It was one thing that Darla wanted to take power from me,
but it was another that one of my closest friends was encouraging me to let
her. Whose side was she on, anyway?

“Good to know who your rooting for,”
I said.

“Oh for God’s sake, Kyle. Don’t be a
bitch about it.”

“You don’t know the first thing about
support, do you?” I said.

My voice was getting loud. The anger
was starting to flow through me, and I didn’t care enough to hide it.

Lou got to her feet.

“I don’t know about support? Really?
Do I have to remind you that I saved your life when we first met?”

“And I’ve repaid that.”

“I don’t see anyone else around who’s
been beside you for so long.”

I got to my feet this time. At six
foot two I towered over her, yet somehow I felt the smaller person.

“I don’t see people queuing up to be
your friend either,” I said.

As soon as I said the words, I wished
I hadn’t. Lou put out an I-don’t-give-a-shit exterior, but deep down I knew
that she wanted to be liked. Not by everyone, maybe, but by some people. Like
every other human being, she still needed some degree of support and
companionship.

“Get some sleep Kyle. You’re getting
crabby. And you’re being an arsehole.”

I knew I should apologise, but the
words wouldn’t form. Instead I folded my arms and tried to let the anger fade
away. It worked, to a degree, and I felt my chest start to loosen. Lou was the
first to speak again.

“I’ve been thinking on this for a
while,” she said. “And the fact is that I’ve decided that I’m leaving. I don’t
know when, but soon. And you’ve got an open invite if you want to leave with
me.”

“But in the meeting with Darla, you
defended this place. You said it covered some of our basic needs.”

“I was defending you, Kyle. Not the
place. Now are you going to come with me, or not?”

Across from us, the crow flapped its
way back across the field. It drifted to the side and flew up into a tree,
where it settled on a branch and then disappeared from view. A cloud drifted
over the quarter moon and blocked out the sliver of pale light.

I thought about Lou’s offer, but I
knew I couldn’t take it. As much as being responsible for all these people was
a weight on my shoulders, it was one I knew I couldn’t shed. It wasn’t just a
case of rubbing my hands together and disappearing into the night. If I left
here, I’d leave with a stained conscience.

“I can’t,” I said. “They need me. And
they need you. Nobody here has survived like you have, Lou. Don’t give up on
them.”

“They’d get along just fine if I was
gone.”

“Just think on it,” I said.

“And you think on it too.”

“Like I said. They need me.”

Lou bent down and picked up her
rucksack. She slung one strap over her shoulder.

“This isn’t about them, Kyle. It’s
about you. You need to be needed. You won’t admit it, but it’s true.”

It was a thought that I couldn’t face
right then. Personal truths and startling epiphanies were the luxury of someone
who had nothing to worry about, and that wasn’t me. Besides, it couldn’t have
been true. Since when did I need to be needed? Maybe when Clara was alive I
felt good knowing I could keep her safe, but look how that had ended. It
couldn’t have been further away from the truth.

“Anyway,” I said. “I’m going to set
out tomorrow to find the stalker nest. Mel’s coming, and I was hoping you would
too.”

“Sure,” said Lou.

I smiled. “You realise it’s gonna be
dangerous? That we might have to deal with the stalkers there and then? We’re
gonna be gone days and it’ll be rough.”

Lou swung the other strap over her
shoulder and took the weight of the bag on her back. Her neck tattoo was a
shadow that disappeared under coat as she zipped it up. She fixed me a stare
that seemed to go right through me.

“Did you think that would bother me?
Let’s go take our rage out on something that’s already dead.”

Chapter 5

The sky burst with light and then
sank into darkness twice before we got back to camp.  My leg throbbed from my
gunshot wound and reminded me that I wasn't cut out for long scouting trips and
hunts. Mel and Lou matter-of-factly told me that I wasn’t, with smiles on their
faces at first, but later with scowls. By the time we got back, after endless
hours, we had nothing to show for our efforts but sore feet and glares.

We walked back to camp through the
woods on the west end. These were the Grey Basin Woods, a thirty acre expanse
of mud and trees made famous by the murder-suicide of Atton-Wool. He was a
Scottish landowner whose business ventures went sour. In response, he turned a
shotgun on his wife and then, despite having a shell left, hung himself from
the branch of a birch tree.

As soon as we got back into camp, Lou
walked off without a word. We’d bickered during the hunt and things had gotten
a little frosty. Stood beside the first camp tent, Mel turned to me.

“I would say it’s been fun, but I’d
be lying,” she said.

“And I’d say it’s good to be home,
but I’d be lying too,” I said.

As Mel walked off toward her own tent
I looked at the camp around me. Some of the tents were big enough for a group
of adults to stand up and walk around in, others so small it was a squeeze for
two people to sleep. The grass had given way under the feet of the people
trampling over it each day and it had turned to mud.

I used to go to a lot of festivals
when I was younger. It amazed me that the farmers  let thousands of people jump
up and down on their fields to rock music. The grass would start pea green and
then gradually morph into a murky brown. There would be beer bottles
everywhere. If you were unlucky, there would be bottles of urine lying around,
and if you were spectacularly unlucky, one of the bottles would have flown
toward your head at some point.

I smiled to myself for a second, and
then I looked at the scene before me. With the mud and the tents, this wasn’t
so dissimilar to the scene of the festivals I used to go to. Except that now
there was no joy to be had. People tried to force a sense of happiness with
their camp songs and storytelling. When I walked by in the orange sunset and I
looked at the smiles they gave me, and I saw how empty they were.

Darla walked toward me from across
the field. As she got nearer I could see that her eyebrows were furrowed and
she had a sense of purpose to her strides. Again she reminded me of a younger,
female Churchill striding across the grass.

“We found nothing,” I said as she got
closer.

A few feet away from me, she stopped.

“We need to talk.”

“What about?”

“People are sick, Kyle.”

I looked around me. It was
approaching lunchtime, yet there was nobody walking around. Usually people
would have been walking in and out of camp. The hunters tracking the local
wildlife, others gathering firewood and collecting water. Today, the field was
getting a rest from the trampling of feet.

“What’s going on?”

She folded her arms. She wore a baggy
blouse that billowed around her. On her right cheek, parallel with the top of
her nose, there was a tiny dent which must have been a scar from some accident
years ago. I had one of my own on my left forearm from where I had managed to
smash a dinner plate over myself.

“It started just after you left.
Vomiting, diarrhoea, fever. Nobody can keep their food down and they sure as
hell can’t work. It’s getting so bad I can smell it in the air. I’m surprised
you didn’t. “

“My nose has been blocked for the
last twenty years. Or it feels that way, at least. What is it?” I said.

“I think it’s something in the food.”

I looked around me; the absence of
footfall in the camp told me more than Darla’s words ever could. Overhead
clouds gathered, grey and heavy, and the day seemed to take on a darker tint.

Plenty of people got sick when our
sanitation systems failed and hospitals shut their doors. It was the stupidest
things that made them ill, the activities they took for granted that fell
behind the wayside. For some reason, after the world fell, people stopped
washing their hands. They took a chance on food that was days past being fit to
eat. They drank from water sources that were questionable at best, downright
dangerous at worst.

“So what about a supply run?” I said.
“There’s a pharmacy in one of the towns nearby. We can get medicine.”

Darla shook her head. “Not even
enough healthy people to go. We’re focussing on the essentials right now;
getting water, making sure we have food. You’re not going to find a queue of
volunteers for a supply run.”

“So maybe I don’t ask for volunteers.
I think we’re getting beyond relying on people’s goodwill.”

Darla shrugged.

“What about you? Why aren’t you
sick?” I said.

“I’ve got a strong constitution,”
said Darla.

***

I walked across the camp and to find
Charlie Sturgeon. There was an outbuilding on the edge of camp which had once
housed toilets and showers. Since plumbing was another much-wished-for thing of
the past, Charlie had taken it as his lab.

The room was sparse. Tiles covered
walls that had once been white but had taken on a film of grime. Looking at the
dirt which lined the cracks in the tiles, I could almost smell the bleach and
urine that would have once filled the room. Charlie had set up a workbench in
the centre. He’d laid a sheet of thin plastic over the surface and driven nails
into it to hold it in place. On one end were his tools; a hack saw, hammer,
sharp meat knife and a pair of pliers. This was Charlie’s autopsy kit, but it
made him look like a serial killer.

Reggie’s son was on the table,
stretched out and pale, his arms beside him. His chest and stomach were torn
open, and the skin nearest to the wounds had shrivelled. Charlie stood above
with a knife in his good hand. His other arm, hand and forearm missing and
giving way to a stump, hung off his body like a clipped wing.

“He was cut open by something that
knew what it was doing,” said Charlie, without even looking at me. He stared at
the body in front of him without emotion, as though the tragedy of what this
teenager represented couldn’t touch him. He could have been looking at an ant
farm for all the effect it had on him.

“The cuts are sharp and there aren’t
many,” he continued, “Implying accuracy. The stomach, liver, bladder, kidneys
and spleen have been removed. Pretty much like the other bodies, give or take
an organ or two.”

“Can I see it?” said a voice.

I snapped my eyes to the corner of
the room. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him earlier. In the corner, sat
on a plastic chair with his feet swinging an inch above the floor, was Ben. A
dark shadow covered him.

“What’s he doing here?” I said.

Lately, I had tried my best to watch
over Ben. It was the least I owed him; after all, I had killed his father. The
fact that his dad was a cannibalistic hunter who had tried to murder me didn’t
matter, because I had left Ben without a dad. Later his mum, Alice, had been
ripped apart by infected in an attack at Bleakholt.

Sometimes, lying on my sleeping bag
with the moon casting glows on my tent, I would think about that night. Even
now I could still hear the groans of the infected and their hungry cries as they
moved towards us. I heard the soft thud as knives sunk into dead flesh. I heard
the ripping and tearing as four of them dragged Alice to the ground and made a
meal of her meat and skin. I could still smell the blood, still hear her
screams.

Ben played with something in his
hands. When I looked closer, I saw that he was toying with a bead necklace.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

Ben ignored me. He stood up off the
chair and looked at Charlie. It amazed me how much the nine year old had grown
over the last year, despite a diet that many would say was lacking.

“Can I see the body Charlie?” he
said.

“You know you can’t, buddy,” said the
scientist.

Ben’s shoulders slumped. He sat back
down in the chair and twisted the beads along his fingers. The scientist and
the boy seemed to have a bond between them. I felt a twinge of guilt flash
through my mind. Since Alice had died, I had tried to spend time with Ben, but
I just had too much to do around camp. I felt like I was on a rack getting my
arms and legs stretched, and soon they would just pop out of their sockets and
disconnect from my body. Every time I got something done the ropes slackened,
but then somebody else stepped up and made them taut again.

I walked over to Charlie and stood a
foot away from the work bench. I tried not to look at Reggie’s son’s face,
instead focussing on Charlie. Sweat covered his forehead. When he moved he
still looked awkward, and it seemed that even so much later he still hadn’t
gotten used to having one arm. I felt like he blamed me sometimes. He had a
point in a way, since I was the one who cut his arm off after all. I had done
it to save him, because he had been bitten and without my intervention he would
have been a corpse long ago.

“I don’t want Ben watching this kind
of stuff,” I said.

“The boy’s lonely.”

“Still. He shouldn’t be here,
Charlie.”

“You sound like Alice.”

He was right. Ben’s mum had always
been fiercely protective of her son. I used to think that we shouldn't shield
children away from the grim realities of the world we had found ourselves in.
That had been easy to say before I was responsible for one. Since Ben became my
problem – not problem, responsibility – my view was starting to change. The
body in front of us was pale and stained with blood, his chest carved open at a
sickening angle. It was something no boy should see.

“So what do you think?” I said,
nodding at the teenager on the table.

Charlie put his knife on the surface
of the table. Coagulated blood stained his fingertips red.

“Reggie’s lad, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I’m surprised he hasn’t been by
yet,” said Charlie.

“Reggie and Kendal are grieving.
They’ve got a lot of hurt and it’s going to be a long time before it stops
stinging.”

Charlie’s curly black hair flopped
over his fringe and then stayed there, stuck in place by the sweat. I was
always surprised that Charlie was as clever as he was. I don’t know why, but I
found it difficult to picture him as a scientist. I imagined him more suited to
an office job, stuck far back in the corner where nobody else went.

That impression couldn’t be more
wrong. Charlie was devoted to science in a way that I have never seen with any
person in any vocation. Truth was, Charlie was starting to worry me a little
lately. He had missed council meetings despite knowing how much I needed him,
and he had spent more time in his make-shift lab with the corpses that we had
found in camp.

Still, Charlie’s knowledge was
indispensable to me. He wasn’t a qualified medical doctor, but he had spent a
year training as a clinical scientist with a pathology specialty. He only
dropped out because his mum had gotten ill. Charlie’s input was vital if we
were ever going to find out what was happening to these people.

“So what do you think did it?” I
said. “Stalkers?”

Charlie pinched the bridge of his
nose as though he were squeezing answers from it. “Perhaps. They’re getting
more sophisticated in the way that they hunt, and that scares me.”

I thought about the stalkers. I
pictured them crawling through the grass, their black bodies blending into the
shadows. They were agile and they made even less noise than the whisper of the
wind. In the Wilds, if a stalker had chosen you, then you rarely found out
about it until it leapt on you and tore strips away from your neck. Even now
they sent a shudder through me.