Fear the Dead 2 (16 page)

“What the hell? Someone got the key?”
she said.

“I thought you had it?”

She patted her cargo pants. “It was
in my pocket. Hang on, where the fuck is my machete?”

23

The door was locked and our weapons
were gone. Looking at Dan, it was obvious what had happened. He’d taken the
watch after Lou, and in his weakened state he had passed out. Why hadn’t he
told us he was bitten?

Lou pounded at the door. “Whittaker
you bastard!”

I slumped against the floor. A wave
of exhaustion flooded though me.

“It’s useless,” I said.

The glass of the door was three
inches thick, and without a key the only way to release the lock was to press
an access key against the reader next to it. The reader glowed red.

“We’re just going to have to wait for
him to come back.”

“I’ll be ready when he does,” said
Lou.

Alice sat at the back of the room
with Ben. Her eyes were vacant as she was turning over thoughts in her head. I
could guess what those were; she was thinking about her husband. No matter how
much you hated someone, hearing they were dead washed some of that away.

I walked over to her and crouched in
front of her. Ben leant against her shoulder, his eyes flickering with sleep. I
rubbed my forehead.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “Back
then, it was just him or me.”

She opened her eyes, looked at me
with hard steel. “I don’t give a shit about Torben.”

I nodded. “I know. But it can’t be
easy.”

She spoke through gritted teeth. “I
don’t care that he’s dead; I used to feel sick when I looked at him. It’s that
you didn’t tell me. When we met you guys, I thought that we’d found people we
could trust.”

I reached forward and put my hand on
her shoulder. She shrugged me off.

“Don’t touch me.”

I sat back, felt my energy discharge
from my body. “I didn’t think it would do any good. You were running away from
him; I didn’t want to bring up old wounds.”

She tightened her grip around her
son. “You should have told me straight away.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Dan groaned at the back of the room.

“He doesn’t look good,” said Lou.

Dan slumped against the floor. His
face was pure white, and blood leaked from the bite in his neck and seeped
through the fabric of his shirt. His body shook, and his breaths were raspy.

I walked over and knelt beside him. I
grabbed his wrist and felt the faint beat of his pulse. He looked at me, the
whites of his eyes pale as though they were diluted. He spoke in a whisper.

“I’m sorry, Kyle.”

Anger burnt in my stomach, but I knew
it wouldn’t do any good to let it out. Dan was dying, and at times like this,
some things had to be put to one side.

He grabbed my wrist and gave it a
weak squeeze. I put my hand on his shoulder. The bad things he’d done wouldn’t
be forgotten about in death, but the least I could do was not remind him of
them while he was dying.

As if reading my thoughts, he spoke
in hoarse breaths. “I was just scared, Kyle. After all this time, they still
terrify me.”

“I know, Dan.”

Silence hung in the air. The blood
leaked from Dan’s bite wound as his body drained of colour and shut down. His
pulse slowed to a sparse tap and his chest rose and fell with his struggled
breaths.

Lou leant against the door. “Kyle.”

I walked over to her. Her blue eyes
stared coldly into mine. “We need to do something about him.”

I knew what would happen. The
infection would reanimate him just minutes after he died. His eyes would turn
grey, his skin would freeze. He would rise up again, dead except for one primal
instinct.

I took a deep breath, held it in my
chest. “I know.”

Lou shot a sideways glance at Alice
and Ben. “You can’t wait for him to turn. You need to do it now. Better do it
before the boy wakes up.”

I looked around me. We had no
weapons, and if Dan reanimated, we would have to deal with an infected with our
bare hands. That was too dangerous.

A tingling spread through my
shoulders and then turned into a shock of adrenaline that flooded through my
body. I looked at Dan as he lay limp on the floor and clung to life, and I knew
what I had to do. I crouched in front of him, wrung my hands. My fingers felt
tense, my biceps shook.

“Dan,” I said.

He turned his head toward me.

“You know what I have to do,” I said.

His pale eyes widened as realisation
hit him. Instead of refusing or begging for his life, his features hardened. He
sucked in his cheeks, and his shaking body tensed up.

I put my hand on his shoulders.
Sadness welled in his eyes, and his skin sagged. I couldn’t let him go like this;
couldn’t let him die with a weight of guilt.

“I forgive you,” I said. “I want you
to know that. We all forgive you.”

The faint trace of a smile curled on
his lips, but it was lost as a shock of pain ran through him.

My chest tightened and I felt my arms
turn to stone, too heavy to move but too full of agitation to stay still. My
stomach liquefied. I reached forward, put my hands around Dan’s throat and
squeezed. His neck bones felt fragile against my hands. Dan struggled to suck
in raspy breaths as I held them tighter.

Dan’s pupils dilated until they
looked like discs. The only sounds in the room were his hoarse gulps as he
tried to breathe. My stomach flooded with bile and wetness welled in the
corners of my eyes. I wanted to release my grip and stop the horrible sounds
that left his throat.

I held in my breath as though it was
me being strangled. I tensed my hands around him, squeezed his neck tighter and
felt the bones move. His pale face flooded with red. He tried to raise his
hands up to mine, but even his survival instincts couldn’t match the weakness
of his body. His raspy chokes rose and then died down as his body gave up the
fight.

I released my grip when his body went
limp. I sank back. Adrenaline surged through me, and a shock of cold snapped
across my chest. I looked to Alice and Ben. Her face was turned away, but the
boy had watched the whole thing.

Something smashed behind me. A glass
beaker lay smashed on the floor, and Lou stepped forward and passed me a shard
of glass. I wrapped my sleeve around the thick end.

“One last thing to do,” said Lou.

I nodded. I pressed the tip against
Dan’s temple, held my breath and pierced through the skin, forcing myself to
carry on until I felt it sink into his brain.

The lights flickered above us, and
then faded. A rush of panic hit me and I dropped the glass to the floor. Lou
passed behind me, Alice and Ben got to their feet.

“Generator must have gone,” said Lou.

I looked behind me, toward the door.
The red glow of the card reader had faded.

“Check the door,” I said.

Lou felt for the handle, and it gave
a whine as she twisted it.

“The lock’s open,” she said.

24

The ends of the tubes punctured
Justin’s skin and fed liquids into him through an intravenous drip. I had no
idea what the murky liquid was, and the idea of messing with the setup made me
uneasy. Perhaps the liquid was to help bring him out of the coma, or maybe it
was to keep him in it. Maybe if I unplugged the tubes I would make things
worse, but we needed to go, and there was no way I could leave him there.

I pulled the tubes from his arm and
lifted Justin from the worktop. Despite how thin his body was, my arms ached
with exhaustion. I followed Lou out of the room with Justin’s body limp in my
arms. Alice and Ben followed behind.

The darkness of the corridor felt
like a spider’s web that would break if we walked through it. It smelled
faintly of bleach, which meant that Whittaker took the time to clean it once in
a while. The rooms with blind-covered windows were spread on each side of us.
Lou led the way, the echo of her footsteps bouncing from the walls.

“Down the stairs at the end of the
hall,” she said. “We’re on the first floor, so it should just be one flight of
stairs.”

 “You okay Alice?” I asked.

“Don’t know about okay but I’m here,”
said a voice behind me.

“What if we see Whittaker?” said Lou.

There was only one answer to that.
“We kill him.”

The darkness pressed in as we walked.
Something felt wrong when we passed the first room on our right. In the
doorframe, instead of the hard wood of a closed door, there was an emptiness
that stretched back into the room. A dull groan drifted out of the depths and
sent a shot of panic across my chest.

“All the doors are open,” I said,
fighting to keep my voice under control.

These were the rooms where Whittaker
kept the infected. Whether it was through the power cut or an intentional move
on Whittaker’s part, the doors were open, and the infected were free.

A body stepped out of the doorway,
arms outstretched. In the darkness I couldn’t see its rotted face or
crater-filled skin, but I knew it had sensed me. A wail twisted from its
throat, thick with a sick desire. Another infected shuffled behind it.

“Oh shit,” said Lou.

More infected fell out of the doorway
in front of her. Phlegm-filled moans escaped from their throats. The darkness
weighed in on us, as though it were trying to shrink the corridor and trap us
with them.

I thought about my knife. I’d never
wished more for the feeling of the handle in my hand. But even if I wasn’t
carrying Justin, Whittaker had taken our weapons while we slept. We were stuck
in the corridor with the infected with nothing to defend ourselves.

Ben whimpered, and his feet shuffled
on the floor.

“Hold my hand,” said Alice.

An infected lurched at me. I stepped
back, kicked my foot out. I connected with its waist and pushed it back, but
Justin’s weight knocked me off balance. I sprawled back and fought to stay on
my feet. Ahead of me, the dim outline of Lou’s shape smashed something against
the wall. There was a crack, and a body hit the floor.

“Get to the stairs and get them out
of here,” she said.

I tensed my biceps and shifted
Justin’s weight in my arms.

I shook my head even though the
darkness would hide the gesture. “You’re coming with us.”

“Of course I am, I’m not suicidal.
Get to the end and I’ll follow you.”

I looked behind me. “Alice, stay
close.”

More infected streamed from their
rooms. I darted down the corridor as fast as I could with Justin’s weight
straining against my arms. The clomp of Alice’s feet followed me. Lou lagged
behind, stopping every so often to push an infected away or smash one into the
wall. The corridor filled with their desperate groans, the bile rising from
their throats and making rasping sounds that bounced across the tiny
space.  We reached the door ahead. I braced Justin’s weight and then
kicked it open.

“Hurry up,” I said, my voice
strained.

She ran past me and dragged Ben
behind her. Lou was still in the corridor.

“Lou?”

“Coming.”

She pushed an infected away from her
and sent it off balance. Her footsteps thudded from the floor and came toward
me. A metre away she stopped dead.

My eyes still couldn’t puncture the
thick sheet of darkness. “Okay Lou?”

“Shh.”

I couldn’t see what had stopped her,
but I heard it. The patter of claws scraping on the stone like nails scratching
a chalk board. It came from the door that was between me and Lou. Something
slunk from the bottom of the doorframe, a shape that groped against the ground
and sniffed.

My body flooded with ice. My arms
weakened, the muscles in my legs turned soft, and it was a fight to keep hold
of Justin. I knew what this was. I had heard the snarl before; a sound that
seemed to strike deep in your stomach and flood your body with panic.

 The stalker crawled out of the
doorway, its thin arms scuttling across the floor, the black outline of its
body hugging the ground and slinking toward Lou. I turned to Alice.

“Can you carry him?” I said, struggling
to keep the panic from my voice.

“I’m a damn sight stronger than you.”

“I can’t leave her,” I said.

Alice let go of Ben’s hand. The boy
cried out, but she ignored him. She stretched her arms out toward me.

“Pass him here.”

I shoved Justin toward her and let go
when I felt her take the weight. My heart pumped, and my ears amplified the
sound of the stalker’s claws dancing across the stone floor.

I turned toward it. My body screamed
at me, and every instinct told me to turn around and leave. I’d only just met
this woman. Why risk my life to save her? Would she have done the same for me?

I clenched my teeth, swallowed the
feelings down. I took a step back into the corridor. The stalker’s head snapped
toward the echo of my boots. I tightened my hands into fists and felt my arm
muscles tense tight enough to burst.

“Lou, are you listening?” I said.

She was frozen in place. The sight of
the stalker had affected her the same way it did everyone unlucky enough to see
one so close, no matter how tough they were.

“Lou!”

The black outline of the stalker
shifted in the darkness.

Finally she answered me in a cracked
voice.  “I’m here.”

I swallowed and felt my throat
tighten.  “In a second, I want you to run.”

“What are you going to do?”

I didn’t have time to answer. The
stalker slid into a crouch. I ran forward until I was a foot away and heaved my
boot into its skull as hard as I could until I felt my foot crack against the
bone. Its head jerked to one side, and its body lurched. Lou ran forward. I
dragged her back and pushed her past me.

“Go!”

The stalker took less than a second
to recover. By then we were running toward the door. As it span round, crouched
back and leapt, I shut the door behind us and heard it slam into the wood. I
turned and ran down the stairs.

Alice and Ben waited on the ground
floor. Weak light filtered in through a window and cast a glow on Alice’s pale
face. She held Justin’s body against her, his head hung over her arm. A
corridor span off to our right, and there was a door with a frosted glass
window at the end of it.

My heart hammered like a steam engine
chewing through coal. I thought I was going to pass out. The exit was in front
of us, and the streets of Manchester waited outside. Alice walked to the door
and pushed it open. A rush of air flushed the staleness of the hallway and blew
cold on my skin. The streets had never looked so inviting.

“What now?” said Lou. Her voice was
strained but her stare was hard.

“We go,” I said.

“What about Whittaker?”

I sighed. “Nothing we can do about
that.”

Upstairs something pounded against
the door, and I wondered how long the wood could hold out against the infected
and the stalkers. Whittaker was still in the building, somewhere, but I didn’t
know where, and I didn’t have time to find him. We had Justin, and that was all
that mattered.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I stepped forward, ready to feel the
fresh air on my skin. I took one last look down the corridor, and then stopped.
The outside air would have to wait. At the end of the ground floor corridor, a
tall figure was blurred against the frosted glass window of the door.