Fear the Dead: A Zombie Survival Novel (4 page)

Five minutes later
I had a chicken soup sachet cooking in the pot. The smell was salty and about
as far away from chicken as you could get, but the aroma of warm food was
enough to make my mouth water. I could almost hear my stomach thanking me in
anticipation.

While the soup
simmered I reached into my bag and took out my GPRS. I turned it round in my
hand looking for nicks or scratches, and once I was satisfied there were none I
rotated the screen toward me. It was time to see just how much further I had
left to go. I thought of the detour of the past two days, and I clenched my
jaw. I knew I must have at least four hundred miles left, and I could cover
about twenty five a day if I got my arse in gear. This had been was two whole
days wasted, fifty miles not walked.

I pressed in
the rubber ON button and waited. It usually took a moment and then the screen
turned blue, but now it was completely blank. I left it a few more seconds, but
the tight feeling in my chest made it hard to be patient.

I pressed it
again. And again. This time I pressed the button in deeper, held it in longer.
The screen stayed black.

I ran my
fingers through my hair. If the GPRS was broken, I was absolutely screwed. The
farm was so far away that I would never get there without directions, and though
I'd been told where it was, I had never been there myself. My only link was the
GPRS, into which years ago Clara had programmed the coordinates ready for a
trip that we never got to make.

The idea of the
farm and carving out a life there was a dream, really, because there was no
telling what kind of state it was going to be in. But I had to make it. I owed
it to Clara, because I'd promised I'd get us there once. I promised her that no
matter how run-down it had gotten, we would put the work in and make it our
own; that we’d make a safe home in a world where death stared in from all
sides.

And now the
screen was black. I twisted the unit in my hands again looking for signs of
damage. In my haste I dropped it to the floor. I snatched it up again, held my breath,
and pressed the button.

Nothing.

I stood up. I
put my hands behind my head and paced the room. It was broken, that much I was
sure of, and the chances of getting the parts to fix it, even if I had the
know-how, were slim.

I couldn't
breathe, but I couldn't stay still. Everything was ruined.

The door of the
shack burst open. I snapped my head to the doorway and felt every nerve in my
body fire. Within a second I tensed my muscles ready to snap on anything that
moved toward me.

A thin figure
appeared in the doorway and stepped out of the night. It was Justin. He looked
at me, and then looked at the GPRS on the floor.

"Damn,
that's too bad," he said, his voice hollow, his lips curled into a smile.

That was when I
knew it was him.

Chapter
5

Before I could
even recognise my actions I had stomped across the room. I towered over Justin,
my nostrils flaring as I took big breaths. I knew that he had done something
with the GPRS but I just didn’t know what, and I knew it was going to take
every ounce of my self-control not to beat it out of him.

 I wasn’t a
violent man, and he was just a kid, but if he had broken the GPRS then I was
screwed. Stupidly, I didn't know the way to the farm by heart; I relied on the
machine to tell me. I’d once tried to learn the way so that I’d have a back-up
in case the worst happened, but after two days of straining I had to give it
up. I guess my brain just doesn’t work that way. It’s not like I could just ask
someone where it was either; of the two people in the post-infected world who
knew the farm, one of them was dead and I never wanted to see the other again.

I poked a
finger into Justin's chest. His body was so soft that my finger seemed to sink
in, and he took a faltering step back toward the wall. He looked strangely
calm.

"What the
fuck have you done?" I said with a tight voice.

Despite how I
loomed over him, Justin didn't shrink away. This was a far cry from the kid I
had seen in town, the one with the awkward gait who couldn't even balance his
own shoulders. He cleared his throat. "Does it really matter, now, huh?
It’s done either way."

I turned away
from him. I could feel my face getting red. I walked across the room in three
strides, picked up the GPRS and then walked back. In front of Justin, I pressed
in the 'on' button, but the screen stayed dead. Justin watched me with a bored
expression. I shook the GPRS in his face.

"Tell me
what you did. Show me how to fix it."

He took the
GPRS out of my hands, flipped it over and slid a finger along it. A plastic
latch started to open.

"This is
the battery compartment. See how it's empty?"

If I weren’t so
furious, I would have felt stupid for not checking that. "So you took
it."

Justin nodded.
"Not only that," he said with pride, as though I was supposed to be
happy with what he had done, "I broke it so you can't put a fresh one in.”

I could feel my
face start to burn, and I clenched my teeth. As if picking up on my cues,
Justin carried on explaining himself.  “Before you go crazy, hear me I out. I
did it to
help
you. I took the battery, so that way, if someone were to
find it they'd have no idea where you're going."

The blood was
pounding in my ears so loud I almost couldn't hear what he was saying. I might
as well have turned the cooking stove off, because right now my face felt red
enough to start a fire. I tightened my fist and felt my skin wrap around my
knuckles. I looked at Justin and the placid smile on his lips, and suddenly I
wasn't seeing a kid anymore, I was seeing a face that I wanted to smash. How
dare he do this? Did he even realise just what he had done? Without the GPRS
route everything was ruined, because I had no idea where I was supposed to go.
Without that, without something to aim for, I was lost.

I felt the vein
in my temple twitch. "Are you actually trying to get me to kill you? Do
you have a death wish? Because there are easier ways, I promise."

He dropped the
GPRS to the ground. My stomach jumped at the thudding sound it made on the
wooden floor. Justin looked up at me. "I gave you a chance to say
yes."

"You're
trying my patience."

"I asked
you nicely to take me with you. I even brought supplies, but you're so
stubborn. You're like Moe - you don't listen to anyone but yourself."

I could almost
have laughed if it didn’t feel like my throat was tightening up. "And you
think I'm going to take you with me now? I’d rather kill you," I choked
out.

My shoulders
shook and there was a tension in my legs, a restlessness that made me want to
pace around the room. I could hear the chicken soup bubbling over in the corner
and knew it was going to start spitting out onto the floor soon, but I couldn't
concentrate on anything but the smug boy in front of me. My physical advantage
was so big as to make the idea of a fight laughable, but all I could think
about was punching him in the face.

 For a
whole year I had travelled alone toward the farm, and in all that time I had
stayed away from people. Well, look how right I was. The second I came into
contact with someone, he had purposefully messed with my plans.

My head
throbbed and it was getting harder to think. All I could feel was the rush of
anger, the hot feeling as my blood flooded to my head.  I raised my hand,
extended it toward Justin and wrapped it around his throat.

I pushed him
back, and his head hit the wall with a thud. I squeezed my hand against his
windpipe and I felt the jagged contours of his neck bones as they met his
Adam's apple. Justin let out a choking sound, but he didn't struggle against
me. His eyes watched me in an almost interested way, as though he were curious
as to what was going to happen. I squeezed his neck tighter. It felt so
fragile, as if I could completely snap it if I applied more pressure.

"I'm
giving you once chance here," I said, "If you don't give me the battery
and fix it, I won't just kill you; I'll squeeze until you pass out, and when
you wake up you'll be in the middle of the forest, alone and far from here, and
I'll make sure the infected can smell you. It won't be a quick death. You'll
scream so loud that you'll wake Moe from his sleep."

He stared at me
with his wide bug eyes. He blinked once but said nothing, and this made my
temple throb even harder. I tightened my hand a little and felt the sinews of
his neck move like gristle. It would be so easy now just to squeeze a little
more and snap his neck. My breath caught in my chest, and I could feel my heart
pounding.

As I squeezed
his neck, I felt consciousness came back to me, and my head started to clear. I
looked at my hand and realised what I was doing. The image disgusted me, the
idea that I’d fallen this far. I wasn't this sort of man. I might be many
things, but child killer wasn’t one of them.

I loosened my
grip. Justin's body sagged a little, and he took in a deep breath. From the
raspy sounds he made I could tell he was struggling to fill his lungs, and I
could see red marks from where my fingers had been wrapped around his neck. He
looked at me calmly, which made my anger rise again. I gave him a hard shove
into the wall then walked away from him, scared of what I would do next.

"Dammnit!
When a man is strangling you, you better show some fear," I said to him.
"Because next time it won't be someone like me, and your stupid stare will
make them go all the way."

I was sat on
the floor with my back against the wall. Justin walked over to the end of the
shack. He looked at the chicken soup bubbling in the cooking pot.

"It's
boiling dry."

"Leave
it."

He turned off
the stove, wrapped the sleeves of his jacket around his hands and picked up the
pot. As he moved it onto the floor the smell of the chicken wafted over to me,
and the way my mouth salivated reminded me of how long it had been since I had
eaten.

Justin walked
over and sat in front of me, cross legged. His eyes stared straight at mine.
"I know I've not seen much of the world, and I know in some ways I'd hold
you back, but I've got skills. Sure, I'd need you to look out for me with the
infected for a little, but I'd get used to them. And there's other stuff I can
do to help you."

His voice
sounded as young as he actually was, but the
way
he spoke was so much older.
He was obviously intelligent, a trait I could never really say I had. I was
more of the practical type, a reactionary kind of guy. I could fight fires, but
I sure as hell couldn’t figure out a way to stop them from happening.

I looked down
at the ground, because I couldn't look at Justin’s face anymore. The GPRS was
broken, and on my last count I was four hundred miles away from where I needed
to be. If I was closer – maybe ten miles away - I could have gotten lucky and
found it myself. But four hundred miles was impossible. There was someone else
who knew where the farm was, but going to see him wasn't an option.

"I can
tell you're a little sceptical," he continued, "But I learnt lots of
stuff growing up; things you couldn't learn out here. For example, I can
remember every Prime Minister and the term he served going back to 1721.”

I could feel
him poking at my patience. “Take a look outside. I can’t think of a more
useless skill to have these days than knowing who ran the country in 1968.”

Justin’s eyes
darted to the corner of his eye sockets for a split second. “Harold Wilson. But
that’s not the point. I’ve got a memory palace.”

Maybe he couldn’t
sense how brittle my will power was and how bad it would be for him if it
broke, because he took my silence as a sign that he should explain himself. He
looked me in the eyes, gave me a beaming grin, and then spoke. “What I’m saying
is, I’ve got an amazing memory.”

"Then
maybe you better remember how close I was to snapping your neck."

"I do. And
there's all sort of other things I can store up here.” He tapped his temple.
“Really interesting things. When you were unconscious in Vasey, for example, I
memorised the route stored on your GPRS tracker."

I lifted my
head. "What?"

"Your
route - I memorised it, every single step."

"Are you
screwing with me?"

Justin smiled,
and I could see one of his teeth was missing on the bottom row. Too bad there
were no dentists around these days. "Nope. I can tell you every step you
need to take to get to wherever it is you're going." He cleared his
throat. "But just where it is it we’re going to end up, exactly?"

"You
should know, apparently," I said, ignoring his use of ‘we’ for now.

"I know
the route, but I don't have a clue what's waiting there. The end point you set means
nothing to me."

It was clear
what he wanted. The GPRS unit was broken, and the kid had memorised the route.
He was my only lifeline to get where I needed to be, and he knew it. I only had
two options - give in to him and let him come with me, or give up on the farm.

Was he worth
the risk? The boy was as naive as it got when it came to surviving, and not
only would I have to look out for him, but any wrong move he made would put me
in danger as well. At some point, too, I was sure that I was going have to dig
a grave for him, because nobody lasted long in the wilds. And I had already
done too much digging.

I thought about
the farm and my promise to Clara. I thought about having to see yet another
person die, and then having to bury him.

When the time
came, I would do it. Until then, I didn't have much of a choice.

I stared at him
intensely and kept my tone firm. "You don't move unless I tell you to. You
don't do anything unless I give you permission.  You don't use this genius
brain of yours to decide anything for yourself, and you definitely don't speak
unless it's an answer to a question. Got it?"

Justin nodded
and gave a faint smile.

"And the
second we get to the end of the route, you're gone."