Infection Z 3 (4 page)

T
he woman’s
name was Holly Waterfield.

She lay back against a plumped-up cushion in a spare room in the living quarters. Her dark hair was so sweaty that it looked plastered to her head. The dress she was wearing looked like it might have been white once upon a time, a long time ago.

Right now, it was a discoloured cream shade, a combination of sweat, dirt and blood laced through it.

On her left forearm, the exposed remains of a bite wound.

She opened her eyes when Hayden entered the room. It was night now, deep in the night, and although Hayden and the others had agreed to give her some rest, it was important to monitor this woman. Hayden couldn’t shake the feeling that she might have something to do with Callum’s old Riversford group; the ones who had fled this place. It was unlikely, sure, but there was no way of being certain how anyone was going to operate in this new world.

She stared intently at his face with her brown eyes. Deep purple bags were wrapped around the outside of them, like bruises from a punch.

“Hope you don’t mind me disturbing you,” Hayden said, keeping the metal door slightly ajar so he could still feel the cool silence of the corridor. He didn’t want to completely commit to being in this room alone with this woman. He didn’t want to risk anything.

Holly yawned and stretched out her arms. “It’s okay. Wasn’t sleeping too good anyway.”

“You looked like you were sleeping just fine.”

“Do you always watch strangers sleep?”

Hayden went to respond, but he felt his cheeks heating up.

Holly shook her head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t tease. Just … just being out there on my own for so long. I’ve missed people.”

Hayden nodded. A part of him wanted to walk closer to her, create a wider sphere of trust. But he held back. Stayed by the door. He didn’t want to get suckered in. He had no idea who to trust, what to believe, not after all the loss the misplaced trust of the group had caused already.

“You can say it,” Holly said. “This is an interrogation. You don’t trust me. I can understand that.”

Hayden was amazed at Holly’s apparent ability to read his thoughts. “This isn’t an interrog—”

“Come on, man. A spade’s a spade these days. It’s better if we’re just up front and honest. Lies don’t get anyone anywhere anymore.”

Hayden wished that was true.

“You say you were out there. Alone. How long for?”

Holly puffed out her plump lips. “About ten days. Group I was with got attacked. Nothing I could do for them.”

“You were bit ten days ago?”

Holly looked down at her arm and a paleness swept across her face. “Yeah. That happened about ten days ago. I was fleeing the cottage I was holed up in. Sprinting through some woods when one of the bastards attacked me. Thought I was a goner. Funny how things work out.”

She smiled at Hayden. Hayden didn’t have a clue how to read it.

He conjured up the courage to step a little further into the room. It felt warmer in here than it did out in the corridor. He could taste the sweat in the air, thick and muggy. “What brought you here?”

Holly scratched at her bare shins and shrugged. “Luck, I guess. I was staying in a cabin in those woods across for a while. And then … then something chased me in there.”

“Zombies?”

“Dunno,” Holly said, shaking her head. “Animal of some kind. Or animals. Maybe zombies. Maybe people. It was dark. I couldn’t be sure. But anyway. I got freaked, I ran. And I guess I’m lucky I ended up here.”

Hayden tried to keep his body language as calm and unrevealing as possible. “Were you watching us?”

“Watching you?”

“When we first saw you. You were running at this place screaming for help. Like you knew someone was in here. Were you watching us?”

Holly shook her head. She had a pretty face, really. Her brown eyes glowed in the candlelight. “You’re an untrusting man, aren’t you?”

“You’d be untrusting too if you’d been through the things we’ve been through.”

Holly tilted her head like she was weighing up Hayden’s words. “I heard the gunshots and smelled the smoke ten days ago. The day the bite happened. I thought about approaching you, but then I figured a place firing bullets and burning shit wasn’t a place I wanted to just waltz into out of the blue. Saw you rebuilding the walls, saw you popping biter brains. Bitta caution comes in handy every now and then. But anyway, I figured you’d be moving on when you heard.”

Hayden frowned. “When we heard what?”

Holly looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You haven’t heard the transmission?”

Just hearing the word “transmission” made Hayden’s skin crawl. The last transmission led him here. Led Newbie to his death. Led Clarice to her execution. “What transmission?”

Holly whistled. “Wow. You really have been living the Amish life. When I was with my last group, we heard a transmission. Some freak signal broke through to a guy called Harry’s mobile. There was news on there. News about extraction points. One of them’s in Holyhead.”

Hayden shook his head. “You heard a signal? That’s impossible.”

“I’ve no reason to bullshit.”

“Then why didn’t you … why didn’t you follow it?”

Holly smiled and raised her left forearm. “The second anyone saw this, I thought I knew what they’d do to me. Everyone knows what they’d do to me. And hell, I guess I gave up when shit went down in my last group. Resigned myself to just—just making it on my own. And then I bumped into you people, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe there’s a chance.”

Hayden saw the glimmer in Holly’s eyes. And although it didn’t
feel
like her story added up—although the talk of signals and transmissions and a ten day old bite seemed impossible—here she was, alive, talking to him with a bite wound and showing no signs of turning.

“A chance of what?” Hayden asked.

Holly leaned forward. “A chance to go to Holyhead. To get the hell out of here. And … and to take me with you.”

Hayden shook his head and stepped back. “We’ve got a good place here. We can’t take any more risks. And what’s to stop whoever’s there just executing you like you worried about in the first place?”

“Maybe so,” Holly said, her voice raspy. “Maybe they will just shoot me on sight. Maybe my gut’s right and maybe you’re right. But you let me in. I didn’t … I didn’t expect you to let me in, but you did. Even after seeing my frigging wound, you let me in. Gave me a pillow to sleep on. My own frigging
room
. So I dunno. Call it a revival of faith. Something like that.”

Hayden pondered Holly’s words. She’d been bitten ten days ago and she was still alive. There was some kind of extraction point on the Holyhead coast.

But all this talk of transmissions and signals … He couldn’t take another risk. Not again.

“We’ll sleep on it,” Hayden said, with no intention to even debate Holly’s proposals. Way too risky. They couldn’t just sacrifice all the good work they’d done on the minuscule chance of hope.

“Please do,” Holly said. “Because … not to blow my own trumpet, but I’ve not met anyone else bit who hasn’t, like, turned. So yeah. Maybe they will just shoot me like I thought all along. But maybe there’ll be someone who sees beyond the bite. Someone who sees … I dunno. Potential, or whatever. Don’t you see that?”

Hayden walked back to the door. He smiled and nodded at Holly. “Get some rest. We’ll speak again tomorrow.”

Holly looked back at him with those glistening eyes. Beyond the grease and the sweat, he saw a hidden beauty. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

Hayden closed the door and stepped out into the dark silence of the hangar corridor.

A transmission. An extraction point.

A cure?

He shook his head. Walked down the corridor towards his room.

Faint hope had cost him too much already.

He wasn’t putting anyone else at risk. Not now. Not ever.

But a tiny voice in the corner of his mind whispered, “what if? What if?”

And as Hayden lay down his head and closed his eyes, he saw the person behind the voice. Saw Holly’s glistening brown eyes, her seductive smile, all the time repeating the same two words again and again.

What if?

What if?

M
att sat
on the edge of the bed and stared down at his still wife, his even stiller son.

Karen had been sleeping for a while now. She’d laid beside Tim and wrapped her arms around his cooling body. And he knew it was wrong. He knew it was damned wrong, and he knew how weird it might look to other people, other people who hadn’t lost a son like them, other people who didn’t understand.

But Karen needed her time with their boy. She needed her time to grieve in her own way.

Matt needed his time, too.

He leaned back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling. The cream paint was fading away. Mould was gathering in the top corners. It was something Matt had never noticed before. Something he’d been too overwhelmed by the positivity of the new world that Hayden and the others allowed his family to live in to even think of noticing.

But he saw it now. Saw it clearly. Thick black mould spreading across the corners of the room, swallowing it up from within with its endless darkness.

He closed his eyes and took a shaky breath. There was a lingering sour smell in the air, and Matt knew exactly what it was. He’d smelt it before when his Uncle Jim, a mortician, let him down in the mortuary one warm summer afternoon. As a six-year-old Matt walked past the endless stacks of bodies, tags attached to the toes, the one thing he’d never forget was that awful smell of sourness. Not strong, but subtle, like off-milk left to warm up in the next door neighbour’s window.

But he knew the smell. He recognised the smell and he smelled it again right now, and that just brought the reality home to Matt.

Tim’s gone. My boy’s gone. He’s dead and gone and he ain’t ever coming back.

He listened to the sound of his own raspy breaths rising and falling. In his right ear, a slight drone of tinnitus that he’d developed ten days ago when one of the bastards holding his family and him hostage blasted a gun right beside him. It seemed such a minor problem at the time. It kept him awake at night, but it was something he told himself he’d get used to. Something he’d adapt to.

But now, he felt the volume of the drone creeping up a decibel, felt it scratching at the side of his skull and threatening to rip his brain out of its shell.

Tim’s gone he’s gone you lost him you loser lost him gone gone gone.

Matt cleared his throat to shift the sound of the drone, even just for a split second. His throat was raw and dry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink or anything to eat, for that matter. He’d tried to eat some of the tomato soup Martha had made earlier, but the tanginess of it just made him want to puke.

And the redness. Rich, thick red, like blood.

Like the blood on Tim’s face.

Dripping out of his nostrils.

His eyes.

Bloodshot red.

Terrified.

Matt shook his head again. He could feel his heart picking up. He had to pull himself together. He had to be strong, for Karen. Karen was struggling. She was down there on the floor holding their fucking dead son while Matt just sat back on the bed and … and did what?

Nothing, as always. Nothing at all. You lost him. He’s dead. He’s—

“Karen,” Matt mumbled. But it was more to break the barrage of his own thoughts than anything.

He listened for a response.

Nothing.

He didn’t say her name again. Couldn’t bring himself to wake her up. She needed time. He’d be cruel to deny her that. And sure, it was wrong clinging on to their dead boy like she was. But those rules of right and wrong were made in the old world. The world where other people decided what was right and what was wrong based on their own messed up ideas of how society should be. Things were different now. It was rare that a mother got a chance to lay next to her boy, to say a final goodbye to him. Merciful, almost. Cause Matt had seen what happened to most of the kids Tim’s age. Bites all over their necks. Stuffing their faces in the family dog, and the dog’s sad eyes looking up and wondering what in the hell they’d done to deserve such a betrayal.

It was peaceful to give Tim a goodbye like this. Different. Precious.

So Matt opened his eyes and pulled himself to the edge of the bed. He’d be damned if he didn’t get a chance to kiss his boy on the head one last time, stroke his dark, curly hair, hold him and Karen and pretend they were back at home on a Sunday morning when Tim used to hop in with them and they’d all just lay there, all sweet and perfect and together.

He reached the edge of the bed and he saw Karen move.

“I was just coming down there,” Matt said, and he realised then just how weak his voice was; how damned wiped out he sounded.

Karen looked at him. And at first, Matt thought he saw complete sadness and grief in her bloodshot eyes. They were so red. Red like he’d never seen.

And then he saw the blood drooling from her lips and he knew something was wrong.

“Karen? What’s …”

But Matt trusted his wife enough to allow her to stand.

Allow her to throw herself at him.

And when he started struggling, when he understood what was happening, he was already too late.

He felt Karen’s teeth stab the left side of his neck, heard his flesh tearing like scissors through a chicken fillet. And then he felt the blood. The warm spray of blood that fountained from the point of agony on the side of his neck covered his wife’s hair, covered the bed, covered the sleeping bag that his dead son lay under.

As Matt struggled to the edge of the bed, his wife scratching and snapping at him, he saw his son’s eyes staring up into nothingness. His body was still, his eyes were vacant. There wasn’t a glimmer of life in him.

Or a glimmer of undead.

And then he felt another bite sink into his left shoulder and he knew it was over.