Fear the Dead (Book 4) (8 page)

In less than a day we would all be on
our own. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the people here would still be
alive a year from then. The only chance we had was to stick together, but I had
failed to keep things that way.

The breeze seemed to close in around
me and wrap itself around my bones. Mel kept hold of my shoulder but her touch
seemed weaker, muted as if she were miles away. I tried to think of the magic
words that would turn this in my favour, but when I looked at the crowd before
me, I knew there was nothing I could say.

“We won’t take everything, Kyle. I
might be a bitch but I’m no monster. But you can’t come with us when we leave.
Your road will split away from –”

There was a noise overhead. At first
I thought it was the choppy gust of the wind, but it grew louder and louder
until I couldn’t hear myself think. The noise raised something in me, a feeling
that started as confusion but grew into recognition. I hadn’t heard anything
like this in years. More than a decade, even.

One by one everyone lifted their
heads and looked into the sky. The roaring sound drowned everything else out
until it seemed to shake the whole valley. It grew until its decibels were loud
enough for some of the people to put their hands to their ears.

 I turned my head and looked up just
in time to see a helicopter tear across the sky.

Chapter
11

At first, I thought that the
inevitable had finally happened. After all these years, after all the fear and
the stress, my mind had cracked. If it was just the sight of a helicopter in
the distance, a shape too blurry to see in detail, I would have convinced myself
I was losing it. After all, eyes could be easily fooled, and it could have been
a hallucination.

The rotary blade spun in circles, and
the yellow tail stretched out from the body with the words “MNN News” printed
on it in white. We heard a rumble in the air, like a thunderstorm brewing miles
away from us. I could believe that one of my senses was faulty, but I refused
to believe two of them had lost it.

Some of the people around me had
their mouths open. One woman, her fringe covering her forehead and fingers
stained brown from field work, covered her ears. I understood why, in a way. It
wasn’t that the sound was loud. It was just that we hadn’t heard anything like
it in over a decade. It had been over a year since I had even heard the sound
of a car, and it seemed lifetimes ago that I had seen anything in the sky but
dark clouds and flapping birds. Seeing the helicopter cut through the air was
like being thrown back into another time. We were time travellers to a world
that used to be our own but had been taken from us.

I wanted to reach up into the air,
grab the helicopter and pull it down. It was a relic from the past. A link to a
world that, tucked in their sleeping bags in the dead of night, many of the
older survivors dreamed about. Longed for. And now this relic had drifted
overhead and was leaving, without making the slightest sign it had seen us.

Lou held her hand against her
forehead and squinted at the sky.

“What do you make of it?” I said.

“Do you think it’s from the army?”
said Lou.

“It had the name of some news channel
on the side. MNN.”

Lou arched her eyebrows.  “Never heard
of it. ITV, BBC and Channel Four were the only channels I had.”

Reggie was beside me now. He didn’t
even look at the helicopter. It seemed that for him, it could have been a fly
buzzing in the air for how interesting he found it. Maybe with everything that
had happened to him recently, nothing could surprise him anymore.

“It might have been a digital
channel. You know, a subscription station.”

“Wouldn’t know,” said Lou. “I didn’t
have the money to spend on things like that. Or I did, but I wouldn’t have been
able to eat. I had to make do with the free channels. Good old BBC and ITV. I
remember that during the day it was all antique shows and poorly-scripted soaps.”

“You didn’t have a job?” said Reggie.

I could feel the conversation start
to get tense. “Come on now. We’ve got more important things to discuss now,
wouldn’t you say?”

Reggie nodded. “Sure.”

Lou gave him a last look. Not so much
dripping in hate, but there was a flash of it. Had Reggie touched a nerve?

“I was freelance,” she said, before
folding her arms and looking at the sky.

The helicopter was smaller now. It
was hard to judge distance over the sky, but I thought it might have been thirty
miles away. The question was, where was it going? But that wasn’t the only
thing I needed to know. Asking one question was opening a door, and soon
everything else poured through the gap. Who was flying it? Where had they come
from? What did they want? Was it really a news crew? Who, after all these
years, had the know-how and resources to have a working helicopter?

Just as quickly as the questions
rose, they were forgotten. As I stared into the sky at the helicopter which was
growing smaller and smaller, I watched it dip. At first it was like an airplane
hitting a patch of turbulence, bouncing up and down on the crest of invisible
waves. Then it jerked and fell twenty feet. It straightened and then veered to
the right, as if the pilot was struggling for control.

Across from me, the woman with the
long fringe put her hand to her mouth. A sound let her lips. Not quite a gasp,
but the true sound of surprise, which was more of a choking exhalation of
breath. All around me were wide eyes and arched eyebrows. Even Lou stared at
the horizon in concentration.

The helicopter wobbled up and down.
It dropped a few feet, straightened up, then dropped again. Suddenly this
didn’t look like turbulence, and I started to feel afraid for the pilot. From
the shaking movements of the chopper it was clear he was losing his battle.
Keep
control
, I thought.

The helicopter plummeted. It happened
in seconds, but felt like it lasted hours. We stood and watched as the
helicopter disappeared from view, no doubt smashing into the ground miles away
from us.

The group broke into nervous chatter.
One man looked inexplicably pale, as if he had watched a loved-one fall from
the sky. Gregor Horlock stood at the outskirts of the group, his head taller
than the rest of the crowd. He folded his arms, and he had rolled up his shirt
sleeves rolled up to show tense muscles with veins sticking out against the
skin. He started to walk forward. At first he gently pushed his way through the
crowd, but soon others moved out of the way for him. Some were scared of him, I
knew. Others felt he was a friendly giant. I still didn’t know what to think.

Dead God, you give us back what we
lose. You take away what we love and return it, corrupted. Spare us, Dead God.

Even remembering the words chilled
me. What did they mean? It sounded like a religious chant, as though that night
I had caught the butcher in prayer. Religion itself didn’t bother me, but his
choice of deity did. What the hell was the Dead God? Was it the infected?
Stalkers? Later I had heard Ben use the words. I didn’t know if he had even
spent that much time around Gregor, but I didn’t like it.

Gregor reached the middle of the
group and then stopped. He folded his arms and looked thoughtfully at the sky.
His lips moved as he repeated words that I couldn’t hear.

“So Kyle,” said Lou. “What do you
think of that?”

The question of leaving camp was cast
aside amid the excited murmurings about helicopters and governments. Fingers
pointed in the air and traced the helicopters route and guessed where it had
landed. Others looked south and threw guesses at the helicopters origins. Was
it Birmingham? London? Further afield? France or Belgium maybe?

The question that few seemed to ask
was the most important one. As I pondered it, a few people approached me.
Charlie was there, with Ben at his side. The scientist ruffled Ben’s hair with
his good hand. Mel stood with her thumbs wedged in her pockets, tipping back
and forward on the heels of her boots and driving them into the mud. Lou had
zipped up her jacket so that her tattoos were covered. She was doing that a lot
these days, as though she permanently had a chill.

I scanned the crowd around us. Gregor
stood motionless in the middle, his body still but his lips moving with silent
words. Reggie was talking to a worried-looking older woman who I recognised as
one of our foragers. The only person I couldn’t see was Darla.

“In my opinion,” began Charlie.

“Time for chemistry 101,” said Lou.

Charlie shook his head as if he had
heard something preposterous. “I used to study renewable energy for the
government, and before that I was a clinical scientist. It’s got nothing to do
with chemistry.”

“It all sounds like the same old
boring crap to me. Theories, theories, theories.”

“That’s because you didn’t listen in
school,” said the scientist.

Lou scowled. “Maybe not. But I used
to go to judo classes. I can show you, if you like?”

I held my hand out. “Cut out the
bullshit. Charlie, tell me what you’re thinking.”

The scientist pulled his hand away
from Ben’s hair. He went to fold his arms across his chest, but then stopped.
With only one good arm, folding them wasn’t an option anymore.

“This is going to sound farfetched,
but the best ideas always do. The idea that penicillin could be made from
mouldy bread, for instance. Had that been suggested before Fleming, you would
have been laughed out of the country.”

It was starting to get cold and dark.
We were approaching the season where daylight left us earlier and earlier,
exposing us to longer nights where unseen shapes prowled. Something was out
there, watching and waiting. We didn’t have time to waste.

“Get to the point,” I said.

Charlie took a breath. He seemed to
be mentally stripping what he was about to say, as if he had a speech prepared
and was being asked to edit it on the spot. Finally he spoke.

“I think someone knows we are here.
And that they are advanced. And despite knowing where we are, they are content
to observe us, rather than help us. In short, I think we are being watched.”

I took a few seconds to process the
words. The idea that there was a settlement which had managed to stay
relatively advanced was something I had thought of before. If Victoria kept
Bleakholt running with schools and farms and generators, then surely there was
another settlement which had thrived through the apocalypse. The idea that I
hadn’t contemplated, though, was that they might not want to help others.

“Then why fly over us in a
helicopter?” I said. “If they just want to watch but don’t want to say hello,
there are subtler modes of surveillance.”

“I think that whoever it was has
known about us for a while. They’ve watched us, and they know we’re not a
threat. So they can afford to fly overhead and look at us even closer, and they
don’t care if we know it.”

“This is all getting a bit X-files,”
said Lou. “Are you talking about aliens?”

A smirk bent on the corners of
Charlie’s lips. The scientist must have realised that Lou could easily knock
him to the floor, because the expression vanished.

“I’m not suggesting that it’s E.T. I
mean a settlement of people out there who are doing a good deal better than we
are, and are probably sizing us up.”

Ben sat down in the muddy field with
his legs crossed. He pressed his right cheek against his palm and stared into
the ground. Mel stopped pivoting in the mud and pulled her thumbs from her
jeans. I saw that her nails were still lined with dried blood. She must have
been butchering that morning. Either that, or she just didn’t care about
washing any more.

“Whoever it is, it seems pretty clear
to me,” I said. “The helicopter crashed and we need to go and find out what
happened. I need to know where it came from, and what they want. I need to know
if they can help us. Less than an hour ago most of the people here were ready
to leave camp and split up. This has bought us some time.”

“I would exercise caution,” said
Charlie.

I patted the knife on my belt. “The
apocalypse is sixteen years old, and I’m staring at the wrong side of my
forties. If I didn’t know how to be careful, I wouldn’t even have got this far.”

Lou was staring into the distance
toward the helicopter. Although we couldn’t see it through the miles of hills
that blocked it, it was obvious where it had gone down. Lou turned to me.

“My dad once took me out on a helicopter.
It was one of those gift card things, you know? An experience day.  My old man
got it for his birthday, and he decided he’d take me along. Thing is, I hated
heights, and the old bastard knew it. I begged him not to take me, but he just
laughed and said I needed to get over it.”

Her eyes looked clouded, and the skin
on her forehead was wrinkled. The breeze blew a greasy lock of hair out of
position so that it twisted in front of her face. She swept it back with her
hand, and when she brought her hand away from her face, her eyes seemed clear
again.

“I know Scotland,” she said. “Grey
Fume is in that direction, and it’s the biggest town in miles. Odds are the
helicopter was headed there for something. Problem is, we don’t know how close
it got. I’m all for finding the helicopter, but I don’t want to get to Grey
Fume.”