Fear the Dead 2 (17 page)

25

“Wait here,” I said.

Lou opened her mouth, but I lifted my
hand.

“I have to do this on my own.”

I walked to the end of the corridor,
opened the door and stepped into the room. There were weapons spread on a table
at the right hand-side. I saw Lou’s machete, Alice’s crowbar, my knife. At the
far wall there was a desk covered in paper, some sheets arranged in piles,
others scattered. All of them were covered in the black scratches of
Whittaker’s handwriting. Beside the desk was a box of liquid-filled plastic IV
bags, with tubes hanging from the bottom.

Whittaker stood at the end of the
room and stared out of a window. He held his hand to his forehead and looked
into the distance, engrossed in something I couldn’t see. It was only when my
footsteps echoed from the floor that he turned.

Black rings hung underneath his eyes
and his sharp cheekbones pressed against his skin. His shoulders sagged as
though something weighed down on them, and his thin body was swallowed by his
long lab coat. When he saw me, a flicker of surprise registered on his face,
but it was quickly swept aside. He put his hands to his face and sighed through
his fingers.

“A piece of me died you know,” he
said, his voice cracked. “Every time a batch failed.”

I didn’t hide the contempt in my
tone. “And every failure was another person dead.”

He shook his head. “Their lives meant
nothing. What’s a man or a woman, in the grand scheme of things?”

My muscles tensed. I glanced at my
knife on the table and thought about how quickly I could walk over and pick it
up. Whittaker saw me and frowned.

“That would be ignorant of you.”

What was stopping me from grabbing my
knife? What could he possibly do? He wasn’t a fighter, and he didn’t seem to
have any weapons on him. I stepped over to the table and picked up my blade.
Whittaker didn’t move.

I nodded at the plastic IV bags. They
were the ones that had been dripping fluid into Justin on the worktop upstairs.

“What are those?”

Whittaker raised an eyebrow. “Those
were keeping your friend alive.”

I gripped my knife in my hand and
stepped toward him. “What was in them?”

Whittaker reached over to his desk
and pulled the chair from underneath it. He turned it to face him and then sat
down. His body sagged when his back hit the seat. He picked up one of the
plastic bags and squeezed it in his hand.

“They keep him hydrated and full of
nutrients.”

My knuckles turned white around the
grip of my knife. “What did you do to him?” I asked.

Whittaker drummed his bony fingers on
his knees. “You should be thanking me,” he said.

A lump formed in my throat. I
swallowed. “How’s that?”

He looked up at me, the whites of his
eyes shot with veins. “I’m so close to the cure. You don’t even understand how
near it is.”

Something banged outside the room. I
looked back toward the door, but I couldn’t make anything beyond the frosted
glass. My heartbeat sped. I had already known what I needed to do as soon as I
had stepped into the room, and all of this talk was just delaying the
inevitable.

Looking at Whittaker, with his Black
Sabbath t-shirt and his DIY haircut, I could almost have thought he was human,
but being human didn’t just mean being alive; the infected were alive in their
own fashion. You had to do something more to give meaning to your existence.
And sometimes, that meant doing things you didn’t want to do.

I stepped across the room until I was
a few feet away from Whittaker. He stood up, and the chair shuffled behind him.
He saw the look on my face and the knife in my hand, and he must have known
what was coming.

“You don’t understand what you’re
doing.”

I took a deep breath and fought to
keep my pulse under control. “How many more were there?” I said.

He glanced to the side. “How many
more wh-“

I raised my voice. “How many people
died for your cure?”

He stepped back and almost tripped
over his chair. He reached his hands back and scrambled for the desk.

“The number who lost their lives was
nothing compared to the cause they gave it up for.”

My whole body quivered and my blood
ran hot. The handle of the knife dug in to my skin.

“They didn’t give up anything, you
bastard. You took it from them.”

I grabbed him by the collar and
heaved him toward me. As his body fell into mine, I swung my left fist into his
face and felt it sink into his cheek. Whittaker cried out and raised his arms
to his head. I pushed him so hard that he fell to the floor.

I stood behind him and took hold of
his hair. I pulled it back tight so that the strands pulled away from the
follicles. Whittaker’s throat quivered.

“We all want to save the world,” he
said, his Adam’s apple gulping against my knife. “I was just prepared to do the
things that most people weren’t.”

I thought of Justin, his limp body,
and the coma he might never leave. I thought about all the others Whittaker had
taken. He had called Justin ‘Specimen thirty six’. How many of the other
‘specimens’ left behind husbands, wives, children? How many had died in fits of
agony in Whittaker’s lab?

I remembered Whittaker’s voice on the
radio and the hope it had given Justin. I realised that even I had felt that
hope, but I’d hidden it from myself. The things Whittaker had done under the
guise of finding a cure could never be forgiven.

I had killed twice before, but only
in self-defence. The thought of doing it again made my stomach lurch. But if I
didn’t, others could die. It didn’t matter how murdering him would affect me; I
had to sacrifice my conscience so that others wouldn’t give up their lives.

Whittaker’s hands flopped to his
sides. “I’m begging you, okay? I’m begging you not to do it.”

My arms shook. I let anger rush
through me and heat my tensed muscles. I gripped the handle of the knife,
stabbed the blade into Whittaker’s neck and sliced across it.

 I clenched my teeth as the
knife cut through his skin, his blood spraying out as I dug deeper. Whittaker
screamed, but as his throat opened up his cries turned into a desperate gargle.
He tried to clutch at me, but his hands quickly flopped away and fell to his
sides.

I let go of his hair and stepped
back. Whittaker’s body shook, and then he fell forward and smashed his face
into the floor. For a few seconds he lay there, quivering. I held a breath in
my chest and forced myself to watch him until he stopped moving completely.

My muscles felt soft. My face was
flushed, and I felt like I was going to empty my stomach onto the floor. I
swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat.

The door opened behind me. Lou saw
me, and stopped. Blood seeped from Whittaker’s neck and formed a puddle of
crimson around his lifeless body. Lou ran her hand through her hair. Neither of
us said anything.

My stomach lurched. I span round, ran
to the window at the side of the room.

“Kyle!” said Lou, concern etched in
her voice.

I flipped the catch and pushed the
window open. Cold air rushed against my skin, and the flush faded. When my head
cleared, I realised I could hear a droning sound from outside. I looked up to
see what it was, and I fell to the floor in shock.

Outside, miles into the distance, the
landscape was completely covered in a sea of the infected, their rotted faces
filling the horizon. It was a mountain of undead; half a million of them, the
volume of their desperate cries loud enough that even here, so far away, it was
enough for me to cover my ears.

Lou lifted me to my feet and
supported me as I struggled to balance.

“It’s true,” I muttered to myself. “Harlowe
told the truth.”

I stepped away from her and stood on
my own. Neither of us spoke. Instead, we watched the army of infected as they
put one foot in front of the other, specks on the horizon that headed in our
direction.

26

We left Manchester behind us and
walked back to Vasey. Exhaustion slowed our pace, but even at our slow speed we
still outwalked the wave of infected. We could stay ahead of them for now, but
it didn’t matter. Their march toward Vasey was inevitable. When we got to the
town, the black gates were already open.

“Is this really your safe haven?”
asked Lou.

I shook my head. I ran my hand along
one of the black bars and followed it down to the latch. The chain and pulleys
seemed okay, and I couldn’t see any damage to the steel.

“We never leave this open,” I said.

Ben craned his neck up at the gate,
his eyes wide. The kid had proved to be the toughest of the group during the
trip back to Vasey. We’d walked for two days with barely any sleep to stay
ahead of the infected, and Ben had moaned the least out of all of us, save for
Justin. It was hard to complain about anything when you were in a coma.

We’d found a rectangle shaped sheet
of metal by the side of a skip just outside of Manchester. It was perfect to
carry Justin on. One person held one end and someone else held the other, and
there was even room on the stretcher to put the IV bags that we kept hooked up
to him. When Alice had found Lou and me staring with our mouths open at the
wave of infected, she’d had the foresight to grab the IV bags and take them
with us.

I wiped my hand across my forehead
and brought it away covered in sweat. My arms ached and my leg throbbed.
Despite finding a river to wash in on the way back, my hands felt sticky as
though they were still covered in Whittaker’s blood.

During the quiet times on the journey
home, I had thought back to that moment. I still heard Whittaker’s skin peel
back as my knife cut through it, the patter of his blood as it sprayed onto the
floor. It was something I wanted to forget, but I knew that I needed to keep
the images fresh. If I was going to lead Vasey into the future, I needed to
remember how it felt to do the right thing even when it made me sick.

We walked past the gates and into
town. On the high street, one of the busiest parts of town, we were met with
silence. It was a silence that followed us as we moved through the rest of the
streets. Every so often, trails of blood were splattered across the stone
pavement, the smears getting thicker as our route wound toward the centre.

“Poor bastards,” said Lou, and
pointed.

We stopped at the edge of the town
centre. A couple of weeks ago, Moe had stood here and held a knife to Harlowe’s
throat, and the stranger had told everyone about the wave.

Now, it was covered in blood. Sticky
patches of crimson stuck to the paving, different sized splashes that looked
like a tin of paint had exploded. Despite the excess of blood, there was no
sign of the people.

A shiver built up in my arms then
worked through my body until it stuck in my chest. No matter where I looked the
scene was the same; empty streets, silence, blood-splattered stone.

Ben covered his eyes. Alice took his
fingers and moved them away from his face.

“What are you doing?” said Lou.

A wet film glinted in Alice’s eyes.
“I’m not going to hide things from him anymore. He needs to see the world he’s
growing up in.”

I walked onto the square and knelt
against the ground. I traced my finger along a smear of blood. When I turned it
over, my skin was stained red.

“It’s fresh,” I said.

Lou paced a few feet, then stomped
her boots. “Someone tell me what the fuck is going on.”

A door slammed open across the
square. Lou slipped the machete from her belt and held it in her hand. Alice
pulled Ben closer to her and held the boy in one arm and a crowbar in the
other. I straightened up.

It was the door of the theatre where
we’d had the town meeting a couple of weeks earlier. Three people took
tentative steps out of the doorway. I recognised two of them, but my brain
couldn’t find their names, and the other was Melissa, Justin’s girlfriend. When
they got closer, I looked at Lou. She tapped her machete against her chest.

“Relax,” I said.

Her forehead creased. “That’s the
last thing I’m gonna do.”

When Melissa got closer she ran to
me, her eyes wide. She looked at me, Lou Ben and Alice in turn. Her eyes
narrowed.

“Where’s Justin?”

I stepped to my side, showed her
Justin behind me on the stretcher. The blood left Melissa’s face. She got to
her knees beside him and grabbed his hand. Her body shook.

“What happened to him?” she asked,
her voice breaking.

I told her as much as I could, but
everything that happened was still a blur to me, and I had hardly processed it
all myself.

I swallowed. “Look, I know how you’re
feeling -”

“You don’t have a clue how I’m
feeling.”

“He’s my friend,” I said.

She snarled at me. “If you cared
about him, you wouldn’t have let him go with you.”

My heart thudded. I couldn't deal
with everything on top of this. “Look, Melissa, I need to know what the hell
happened here. Where is everyone? Whose blood is it?”

If my words even reached her ears,
they were lost as she pressed her head to Justin’s chest. A man shifted next to
me. I recognised him as the Irish guy who had spoken up at the town meeting. He
hadn’t said much, but I remembered him arguing against me.

“You’re Martin, right?” I said.

“Michael.”

I was too tired and confused to care
about getting his name wrong. “What happened, Michael?”

He coughed.  “A few days after
you went, Moe gathered everyone up. He told us he was leaving, that you were
never going to make it back.”

“And people went?”

He nodded. “Most of them, yeah.”

I put my hand to my face and covered
my eyes. Anger built in my stomach. “What about the blood?” I asked, through
clenched teeth.

The man looked down at the ground.
“Some of us stayed, but things turned to shit. We started drinking all day. We
drank every drop of whatever booze we could find. Nobody was running things.”

I folded my arms. “And you started
fighting?”

Lou scoffed. “Does this look like a
pissed-up brawl to you?”

The man shook his head. “One night,
someone left the gates open. The stalkers got in while we slept.”

I gritted my teeth. So this was all
it took to destroy Vasey; an old man leaving and a drunken dickhead forgetting
to shut the gates. A splitting pain throbbed through my skull. Everything came
down to Moe, when I thought about it. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have left
to find the wave. Justin wouldn’t be in a coma. Vasey wouldn’t have ben
deserted, and those who stayed wouldn’t have drunk themselves into a stupor,
left the gates open and gotten slaughtered.

I would make sure Moe died for this.

A shock of pain split through my
head. I knelt to the ground and rubbed my head.

“You okay, Kyle?” said Alice. She
walked over to me and put her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged her off.

“Leave me,” I said.

Something groaned behind us. I took a
deep breath and stood up. The only thing I could focus on was taking out my
anger on the infected that had picked today to stumble into Vasey.

I pulled my knife from my belt and
span around. The infected I expected to see wasn’t there. Instead, the groan
had come from Justin as he stirred on the stretcher. He moved his fingers.

Melissa grabbed his hand and
squeezed. “Justin! Can you hear me?”

My pulse hammered. I crouched on the
other side of Justin and took his other hand.

“Welcome back, buddy,” I said.

Justin coughed, and his body
thrashed. I put my hand on his chest to stop him moving too much.

“It’s me, Justin,” said Melissa, her
forehead creased. She stared at him with unblinking eyes.

Justin curled his fingers. His
eyelids flickered, and the whites of his eyes began to show. Adrenaline washed
through me as I watched my friend wake up. All the way home, my thoughts had
alternated between hoping he would pull through, to trying to accept he never
would. Seeing colour seep back into his skin filled my muscles with a nervous
energy.

“He’s waking!” said Melissa.

Justin gave an unintelligible moan
and opened his eyelids. When he turned his head and his eyes snapped on mine, I
gasped and fell back. A shiver ran through my body and chilled my limbs.

“Kyle,” said Justin, and rubbed his
head. “How long was I out?”

Melissa and I exchanged glances,
neither of us able to speak. I looked again at Justin’s eyes. Red worm-like
flecks swam in the centre of his oil-slick black pupils. I had seen those
flecks before in the eyes of the infected.

It was too much to process. Between
killing Whittaker, and getting back to find Vasey destroyed, I felt like my
mind was falling apart. I’d done so much for this town. I’d slit a man’s throat
and left a red stain on my conscience, but even that wasn’t enough.

I watched Melissa grip hold of
Justin’s hand. Lou sat on the floor and rubbed her neck, her eyes staring
blankly at the ground. Alice stood with her arms wrapped around her son, tight
enough to squeeze the air out of him. I realised it didn’t matter how I felt; I
had to carry on for them. We couldn’t let this be the end.