Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel (15 page)

Chapter
18

I walked away from the car. My face was
burning and my blood was boiling in my veins. My mind was so clouded by a fog
of anger that I didn’t even look where I was going; as long as I got away, that
was all that mattered.

I put my foot on a stone wall and hopped
over into the field. The earth was sodden and my foot was covered in mud before
I’d even walked five steps. Behind me, I heard the car door open. I took a deep
breath and picked up my pace. I wasn’t turning back this time. I wasn’t
forgiving another one of Justin's mistakes. He’d screwed me over from the start,
and now the only thing I had to cling on to was gone. The farm belonged to the
hunters now.

“Kyle”

I heard David’s voice behind me, and I
heard him grunt as he climbed over the wall.

“Shit!”

I turned round. David had slipped in the
mud and he was flat on his back in the field, his coat covered in the brown
mess.  He seemed to be waiting for me to come and help him up, but instead I turned
and carried on walking.

A few minutes later he caught up with
me. He put a muddy hand on my shoulder. I stopped and turned to him.

“Fuck off, David,” I said.

David scratched the back of his neck.
There was something weighing on his mind, but as usual he was struggling to get
the words out.

I put my hands in my pockets. “Just save
it. There’s nothing you can say. The farm is theirs now. It’s all pointless.”

Finally the words came to him. “It’s not
pointless. Not at all. You were right. The farm’s the answer; dad knew it,
Clara knew it – I know it.”

His words were coming fast. He stared at
me with narrowed eyes that were like brown marbles.

I looked across the field in front of
me. It seemed to stretch for miles and connected into other fields in an endless
bed of green and brown. I tried to see what was beyond it, whether there was
anything worth looking for, but there was nothing in the distance to cling on
to.

I looked at the floor. “Even if you’re right,
the farm’s out of the question now. Torben has it, and there’s no way I can take
on him and his guys alone.”

David sighed. “You’re not alone.  You
never were. You’ve always had people with you Kyle,  you’ve always been a
leader. But for some pig-headed reason you choose not to act like it.”

I looked at him and saw the sincerity on
his face. “A leader wouldn’t watch as many people die as I have,” I said.

“You can’t do this alone,” said David.

The wind blew through the grass, sending
the long stalks dancing in different directions. For miles on the horizon the
fields all blew in unison. They were all overgrown and muddy, same as the farm
would be, but with enough time and hard work something could be made out of
them.

With the farm in the hands of the
hunters, I felt empty inside, like someone had opened my chest and scooped everything
out. I’d clung onto the idea of getting there for so long, that it was all I
had.

Maybe David was right. Maybe we
shouldn’t give it up. Perhaps it was time to fight.

I looked at him again. This time I felt
something welling up in me, some kind of resolve. But there were something I
had to say, things I had to get out of the way.

“I can’t watch someone else die,” I
said.

“Everyone’s got to.”

I nodded. “But you and Justin – I don’t
want to see that happen on my account.”

David screwed up his nose. He wiped his
boot along the grass and let the mud slide of it.

“Sometimes you have to throw the dice,”
he said.

He was right. For all this time, all
these years of travelling alone, it wasn’t other people that I’d avoided. I had
been running away from fear. I was scared that if I let my guard down and allowed
people inside it, then sooner or later I was going to have to watch them die.
I’d thought that being alone was better than risking losing someone, but I was
wrong.

A man couldn’t live alone, especially
not in a world like this. Man was on the ropes and the world was delivering the
knockout blows. Unless someone did something, unless we stuck together, we were
going to hit the floor.

I took my hands out of my pockets and
turned back toward the car.

I noticed that the passenger door was
open, but there was no sign of Justin. I looked around, but couldn’t see
anything, and he certainly hadn’t followed us onto the field. So where was he?

***

When we got to the car it was empty. The
passenger door was open, and on the floor beside it there were blobs of blood. 
I looked around us but I couldn't see Justin anywhere, nor could I see any
infected. Besides, if an infected had got him, they would have started eating
him there and then. They didn’t drag away their kill to eat it later.

David walked round to the boot and
popped it open.

“It’s gone.”

I shut the passenger door and walked
around. I saw what he meant; the boot, where I’d left all the supplies, was now
empty. Who had done it, and why hadn’t we seen them?

 How did things get screwed up for us at
every turn?

I slammed the boot shut so quickly that
David had to yank back his hand so that it didn’t get caught. He turned round
and lent on the car.

“Who could have –“

“The hunters,” I said.

I had been stupid to think that the
hunters would drive so close to us and not see anything. Torben was a hunter,
so he certainly wasn’t oblivious to the clues and trails that people left
behind. I guessed that their stop at the Babe and Sickle probably wasn’t about
checking it for supplies. It was more likely that they stopped because they
wanted me to know that they had the GPRS and were headed to the farm. Torben
was laying a trap for me.

I snapped my head toward David. He had a
faraway look in his eyes. “They’ve taken Justin, and they want us to come find
him.” I said.

“So what do we do?” he asked.

The old me would have taken what
supplies I could, turned round and walked in the opposite direction. But I knew
what the hunters were and what they were capable of, and I couldn’t just
abandon Justin to that. Whatever the risk, no matter the cost, I was going to
have to try and do something.

I was going to be running into a death
trap, but it was better to sprint into a quick death than walk into a lingering
one.

“I can’t ask you to come,” I said.

David nodded solemnly.

I opened the car door and looked around
for what supplies I could find. I looked under the passenger seat and let out a
gasp. Tucked underneath, was our shotgun.  Justin must have hidden it before
the hunters had grabbed him. I took it out and showed David.

“Clever kid,” he said.

I nodded.

“I’m coming with you,” said David.

“You sure?”

He nodded his head. “You have to be able
to depend on people.”

I slammed the car door, took a deep
breath and looked to the east, where the farm was waiting. I could already feel
the adrenaline flowing inside me. This was it.

I looked up. Above us, a mean-looking
black cloud loomed.

Chapter
19

We ducked down into a ditch so that we
had a wide view of the farm but couldn’t be seen by the hunters. I counted six hunters
patrolling the farmland, and past the fields there was a farmhouse where there
would probably be even more of them inside. Outside the house there was a large
tank with ‘petrol’ written in red letters, no doubt used in better days to
supply the tractors with fuel.

The farm wore the scars of fifteen years
of neglect. The fields were choked with weeds, a lot of the fences had blown
over and water poured into the farmhouse roof through the gaps left by missing
slates. The place had gone to hell, but I still saw some potential in it. If you
looked past the weeds and the mess, the heart of the farm was still there and
it could be turned into something good.

Some of the hunters walked up and down
the fields, stopping occasionally to stub a cigarette under their boots or talk
with another hunter as they walked past. Across the fields and under two
branching elm trees there were two tractors, their paintwork flecked with rust.

Next to me, David was quiet. “Wishing
you hadn’t come?” I said.

He shook his head. “Wishing we had a
lorry or something. We could just ram into them.”

“If we’re going to wish, then let’s go
big. A tank would be pretty handy right now.”

David smiled for a second, but the
gesture soon dropped from his face. “We’re going to have to fight, and I’m
gonna hold you back,” he said.

I looked at him. His body was wiry and his
pants were held up by the last rung on his belt. His eyes were small, his hair
receding. His hands were curled into fists, bony and white at the knuckles. I
tried to think of something to tell him, something I could say to reassure him,
but the fact was that he was right. He wasn’t a fighter.

I picked up the shotgun and passed it to
him.

He waved his hands. “No Kyle, you have
it.”

I pulled out my knife from my belt. “I
know how to use this,” I said. “You’re more use to both of us if you’re armed.”

He nodded, took the gun from me and then
laid it down next to him. He pointed out across the field, toward the tractors,
and whispered. “Suppose we steal a tractor. Smash into the farmhouse. They
won’t know what’s happening.”

A distraction would be good, I knew, but
it was risk. “You think they’ll still be working?”

David shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe,
Maybe not. Probably not, really. But we won’t be worse off for checking.”

We snuck over to the tractors. Along the
way, we got within a few feet of two hunters as they stopped for a chat. Their eyes
looked dark and their skin was pale. I guessed that lately the world had been
as harsh to them as it had been to us. Their voices were hushed.

“He’s got a thing for the lad,” said one
of them, and took a long drag on his cigarette. The wind whipped at his coat
and made the material flap.

The other hunter screwed up his face.
His long fringe blew across his forehead. “Nah, he’s using him for bait. He’s
obsessed with catching the other fella.”

“So he don’t really want the lad to join
us?”

The other one shook his head. “Once we
catch the bloke, Torben’s gonna gut the boy.”

I shuddered at the idea of what Torben
had in mind for us all. I knew they were hunters, and that Torben loved his
trophies, but were they also cannibals? From their tired eyes and their sunken
cheeks, I guessed the hunters weren’t getting their five fruit and veg a day.
Hunters tended to eat what they killed, and there was no reason for these guys
to be any different.

We moved slowly around the sides of the
farm and to the tractors. One of them was so rusty that the body was practically
orange, and it looked like if I tapped it the whole thing would fall apart.
Next to it was a newer one that looked slightly more stable, though I didn’t
know if it would start.

“I never found a car that worked, “ I
said. “That’s why we had to come to you. So I doubt we’ll have much luck here.”

David held his hand to his chin. I knew
he was scared of the hunters and the potential of fighting but right now, stood
in front of this machine, he was going into engineer mode.

“Hang on,” he said.

He walked to the side of the tractor. The
vehicle was fifteen feet tall and the wheels were large enough to crush a man. David
put his foot on a step on the side of it and reached up and grabbed the handle
of the driver door. The door opened, and something large spilled out from the
seat. David screamed.

He crashed to the floor and landed on
his back with a thud, followed shortly after by an infected. David’s face went
white and his usually-small eyes widened. The infected struggled on top of him,
trying to get a grip on his limbs.

It all happened so quickly that I
struggled to process it. My veins ran cold and my breath caught in my chest. I
grabbed my knife and moved toward them as quick as I could, but I was already
too late.

David pushed the infected off him. He
turned his body round, held up the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The gun
exploded with a booming sound that broke the stillness of the farm. To our left
a bird flew from a tree, and even the wind died down, as though it were
surprised to hear the noise.

The infected’s head sprayed across the
floor in so many pieces that even if I had been a genius at jigsaws, I wouldn’t
have been able to piece it back together. I wondered who the infected had been,
and why it was sat in the tractor. I looked at David.

“Was that your – “

He shook his head. “Wasn’t dad.”

I scratched the back of my neck. “You
okay?” I said.

David was quiet for a few seconds. Then,
he stuck his arm out toward me. His cost was ripped down to the skin, and there
were grooves in his flesh from where the infected’s teeth had punctured him.
Blood started to ooze out of them and drip away.

He was bitten.

Before I even had time to process what
this meant, I heard a voice next to me.

“Torben’s been looking for you,” said
the hunter with the long fringe. Next to him were two other men, and one of
them pointed a rifle at my chest.

“Drop the knife,” he said.

I weighed up my odds, and I came up
short. I dropped my knife to the floor.