Dead Days: Season 3 (Books 13-18) (42 page)

“Found who?” Pedro cut in. “Dom? And‌—‌and Chloë?”

The armed guy glanced at Pedro and Tamara like he’d just realised they were in his presence. Upon realising, he leaned in closer to Jim, whispered more effectively into his ear.

Jim’s eyes widened. Colour seeped from his cheeks in an instant.

“What’s wrong?” Pedro asked. “What’s happening?”

Jim looked at Pedro.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said.

Chapter Eight

“What about now, eh? You not fancy letting us take a peek behind your wall now?”

The goggly-eyed man’s voice buzzed around Chloë’s head. Her face was sore. Sore right from the forehead, through the eyes, across her cheeks and on her chin. So sore that she wasn’t sure it would ever feel right again. Her throat was sore, too‌—‌sore from her own screaming, from Jordanna’s screaming, from squeezing her eyes and trying not to feel what the goggly-eyed man was doing to her with his sharp knife.

On the concrete below her, she saw her mum’s locket, snapped into two, the silver heart split into loads of little pieces.

She saw something drip beside it. Something red. Blood.

And with the way her face stung, she knew it was her own.

“So now you know we ain’t pissing around here,” Goggly-eyes said, walking back over to Dom, crouching over him as he spat more blood from his beaten-up mouth. “I’m gonna ask you again. Are you gonna let us inside your little den here, or are we gonna have to keep on flushing the rats out?”

Dom’s lips quivered. He stared at Goggly-eyes like most people would stare at the monsters.

“They…‌they won’t come,” he said. “The…‌it’s policy. No…‌no interference in‌—‌in other people’s problems.”

Goggly-eyes stepped back and laughed. “Hear that, boys? No interference in other people’s problems. Well that’s just a grand shame, isn’t it? Looks like whoever’s at the top of these walls are just gonna have to watch some more shit go down.”

He booted Dom in his side and Chloë heard something crack. Dom rolled over, shouting out as he hurt his bleeding out leg in the process, his face getting more and more white the more blood that came out of him.

And then Goggly-eyes stepped over to Jordanna.

Jordanna didn’t try to get away. She didn’t say a thing. Her eyes just widened and she started breathing heavier.

Goggly-eyes grabbed her cheeks. Grabbed her, stepped right up close to her and looked at her like he was a doctor inspecting a patient, only a nasty doctor who hated people.

“Bit of a scrub and you’ll look just fine, honey,” Goggly-eyes said. He had his gun pointed at her tummy, his bloodied knife slipped under his belt. Chloë bit her lip through the stinging pain all the way down her face, one of the other two men pointing their gun at her now. She hoped Jordanna wouldn’t have to go through what she’d gone through. She wouldn’t want to watch. Ever.

Then Goggly-eyes pushed Jordanna to the ground. She smacked her head on the hard concrete, let out a little shout as her skull thumped against it. Goggly-eyes pinned himself on top of her‌—‌on top of her so she was looking at him, not like Chloë had been.

He reached for the knife in his belt. He was slavering like an animal, his eyes big and scary like something evil.

“I want to see the look in your eyes when you realise how fucked you are,” he said, bringing the knife over Jordanna, then snipping his way through her coat and her shirt. “I want to see the look on everyone’s face when you realise there’s no way you’re getting out of this‌—‌”

Something plunked just in front of Chloë. Like a whoosh of a firework into the sky hitting something solid.

It was only when she saw the man with his gun pointed at Dom tumble to the ground with a hole in his head that she realised what was happening.

More bullets whooshed through the air from up the road. Up the road, where they were heading before they’d bumped into these nasty people.

“Peters? Fuck!” Goggly-eyes threw himself off Jordanna, stuffed his knife in his back pocket and ran over to a car that was on its side. He got his gun out and fired up the road, fired up towards the people all coming their way, shooting at them.

“Get down, Chlo!” Jordanna shouted. She ran over to her, crouched down, and wrapped her arms around her. Chloë squealed as she did, her face searing with pain.

“Oh God.” She looked at her face in horror. “I’m sorry. I’m…‌We’ll be okay. People are coming for us now. People are coming.”

The bullets rattled all around them. They were so loud and fast that Chloë didn’t even have time to think. Goggly-eyes and his friend were firing at the people coming towards them, and those people were firing back.

“Quick,” Jordanna whispered, helping Chloë to her feet. “We’ve‌—‌we’ve got to get away. Get away while they’re‌—‌they’re distracted.”

Chloë let Jordanna pull her away from the middle of the road, but all the time her eyes were focused on Goggly-eyes, as he fired his gun. She wanted to take that knife and she wanted to stick it in his chest until he coughed up blood and then she wanted to take it out and do it again and again and again until he bled to death.

She hated him. She hated him for holding her down and for putting that sharp knife against her skin.

But mostly she hated him for breaking Mum’s necklace. For breaking the only thing she had left of Mum on the day she was supposed to be giving it to her.

“What about‌—‌about Dom?” Chloë asked. Dom was still in the same position in the middle of the road, wincing and spitting out blood as the bullets whizzed over him.

“There’s…‌there’s nothing we can do for him,” Jordanna said. “We’ve got to leave it to these two to fight it out now.”

They disappeared around the side of a blue van at the side of the road. Bullets whacked against it, rattling the metal. Chloë just wanted to hold her ears and squeeze her eyes shut. She wanted to hold her mum’s necklace and ask her for help, ask her to be there for her like she always was.

But she couldn’t. She was gone.

So instead, she cried.

Chloë heard another thump, like an apple hitting the ground. When she peeked around the side of the van, she saw Goggly-eyes’s other friend on the floor now, holding his neck and gargling as blood splurged out of it and his mouth. Goggly-eyes stared at him with even gogglier eyes than before.

Chloë looked at the people firing. She couldn’t properly make them out because they were all wearing weird black masks with binocular things on. She hoped they were good people. All she wanted was some good people on Christmas Day.

All she wanted was her mum, but she wasn’t going to get that either.

“Hey!”

The shout came from Goggly-eyes. Chloë’s tummy tingled for a moment as she thought he was shouting at her. But when she looked, she realised he was doing something else.

He had Dom on his feet. He was holding a gun to his head, shuffling backwards. Dom was bleeding out onto the road, trying to struggle free. The firing had stopped.

“Why aren’t they shoot‌—‌”

“Ssh!” Jordanna said.

Goggly-eyes edged further away, Dom still wrapped in his arms.

“You’ve got a choice here,” Goggly-eyes shouted.

“Looks to me like you’re the one with a choice, bruv. Hand him over.”

Chloë recognised the voice and her heart jumped. Pedro.

Goggly-eyes smiled. He twisted the gun right into the side of Dom’s head, so hard that there’d be a bruise there. “No. You see, I know how you people work. I know you wouldn’t dare put a bullet in me, especially not when I’m holding one of your men at gunpoint. No. I’ve heard about yer little peace treaty. So here’s your choice.”

“Don’t make us prove you wrong,” another voice said. A man whose voice Chloë didn’t recognise.

“You can fire,” Goggly-eyes said. He burrowed his head into Dom’s back so that he was hidden underneath him, using him like a shield. Pressed his gun against the back of his skull. “You can fire your bullets at me or get your snipers to mush my brains in. But you’ll have to hit your pal here to get to me.”

He turned his gun away from Dom and pointed it over at the blue van where Chloë and Jordanna were.

“And the second you pull the trigger, I’m gonna pull this trigger and fire three shots over at that blue van there. That blue van where your lovely ladies are. And trust me, they don’t wanna be standing behind that van when I hit the back of it. Fucking miracle they’ve not exploded into a thousand pretty little pieces already with your wayward shots.”

Jordanna, who was holding Chloë, went rigid. Chloë’s heart pounded. She understood what Goggly-eyes was saying. There was a bomb in the blue van. A trap of some kind.

“Bullshit,” Pedro shouted. “Why should we believe you?”

Goggly-eyes smiled. He teased the trigger with his finger. “I’ll show you if you‌—‌”

“No, no, wait,” another one of the six masked people said. “We…‌we don’t have to do that. Just‌—‌what is it you want? Who are you and what do you want?”

Goggly-eyes kept on smiling, kept on backing away with Dom, using him as a human shield as he bled out onto the road.

“You can call me Cameron,” he said. “As for what I want, well. I wanted the bald cunt who killed my friends. I wanted him and his blonde bitch to suffer for what they did to my friends down on the motorway. He’ll remember.”

Pedro was quiet at this. What had Pedro done? Had he done something bad? Is that why this was all happening?

“But now, now I’m not so sure. Now, I’m looking at you all kitted out and all organised, and I’m starting to figure I could get summat else from you. Something more…‌substantial.”

He looked up at the wall.

“You aren’t getting inside those walls in a million years,” an unrecognised voice said.

Cameron smirked as he reached the side of a silver Mercedes like Chloë’s friend’s mum used to have. Sweat dribbled down his head. “We’ll see about that.”

And then he yanked open the car’s rear door and pulled Dom onto the back seat.

A few stray bullets flew at Cameron as he climbed forward into the front seat. The window of the Mercedes shattered. It couldn’t work. No cars worked.

But this car spluttered to life. It spluttered to life, turned around, and sped off down the abandoned street.

“Follow him! Follow the fucker and‌—‌he’s got Dom. He’s
fucking
got Dom.”

But nobody followed him. Gunshots fired at him, hit the back of the car, but it made no difference.

Everyone watched as the Mercedes took a left and disappeared.

Everyone watched as Cameron took Dom away.

“Come on, kid.”

Chloë turned around. Saw that Pedro was standing over her. His face looked thinner and more beardy than she remembered. But he was holding a hand out to her.

Holding a hand out to her, but looking at her face. Looking at it like people usually looked at the monsters. Her face, it hurt so bad. So, so bad. She hoped she was still pretty.

She turned back. Looked at the mess that was her mum’s necklace in the middle of the road. Thought about all the horrible things she wanted to do to goggly-eyed Cameron for slicing the knife across her face, for what he’d done to her, what he’d taken away from her.

Then, she took Pedro’s hand and walked towards the other five people, Jordanna by her side.

Chapter Nine

“Hold still, love. Hold still and it’ll be okay.”

Pedro winced as a nurse pressed an alcohol-laced sponge onto Chloë’s face. The nurse was dark-haired and dressed in a white lab coat, and she was pretty attractive. But hell‌—‌didn’t every woman look attractive after so long without screwing?

Didn’t all women look attractive anyway?

As Chloë screamed out when the sponge pressed against her disfigured, bloody, sliced-up face, all Pedro’s thoughts of hot women petered out. He bit into his lip as he watched the poor girl shaking, tears rolling down her mangled cheeks as she lay on a table. The stench of alcohol made him dizzy, which was a turn for the frigging books. Tamara, the meth-face called Jordanna, Jim Hall and a bloke called Harry looked on with similar wide-eyed expressions.

“And you say he just drove away?” Jim said. His voice was shaky. He sounded more gutted about that prick called Cameron driving off than he did about what he’d done to Chloë‌—‌the cuts on her face, stripping away her normality and her innocence forever. Then again, they did have one of his men, Dom.

Harry shrugged. He was wearing his goggles on top of his head‌—‌goggles that Pedro still had no idea what they were for. He had a gaunt face, and specks of wispy blond hair peeked out from under his black hat. “We tried to stop him. Shot at him. But‌—‌but the bomb‌—‌”

“Ah yeah,” Jim Hall said, nodding. “This mystery bomb in the blue van. How did that turn out?”

Harry lowered his head as Chloë let out another stomach-turning squeal of pain, the nurse reassuring her all along. “The…‌no bomb. Nothing‌—‌nothing we could find. But we didn’t want to‌—‌”

“No, no,” Jim said, raising his hand and shaking his head. “It’s…‌no. You were right not to engage in combat earlier. Although an explosive is always unlikely, so too is…‌well.” He looked at Chloë through narrowed eyes. “Sadism for sadism’s sake.”

“You’d be surprised,” Pedro grunted. “Might want to pay a visit to the outside world, bruv. Not as pretty as you think.”

Jim Hall sighed. Nodded. He looked stressed‌—‌really fucking stressed. Kept on scratching at his bald patch in the middle of his short dark hair, making nasty flakes kick up into the air. Figured he wasn’t having the happy Christmas he thought he was gonna have when he woke up this morning.

“Engaging in combat with the outside world is not what we want, Pedro. It’s not what we stand for. In fact, we actively stand against it. If anyone wanders into these walls with existing enemies that might pose some kind of threat to our well-being, we respectfully turn them away.”

Chloë squealed as the nurse applied a bandage to her face.

“So what’re you saying?” Jordanna cut in. She was frowning all the time, and she looked as convinced about this place as a clever little lamb in a slaughterhouse. “You’re just gonna turn us away? Send us back on the road because some nutjob decides he wants to slice up little girls’ faces?”