Текст книги "Fear the Dead: A Zombie Apocalypse Book"

Автор книги: Jack Lewis

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In the corner of the room I found a small grill camping stove with a rubber tube that connected it to a gas canister, as well as two bottles of water that I deemed drinkable through their lack of any offensive odour. I twisted the knob of the camping stove to feed it gas, and I pressed in the ignition to create a spark that sent blue flames shooting underneath the grill. Despite it being evidence that the Vasey scouts used this shack on their trips, it was a fantastically lucky find. If I'd had a calendar with me, I would have checked to see if it was my birthday.

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."

Chapter 6

Justin’s feet thudded on the forest floor and smashed every twig and leaf in their path. With each crunch and snap I looked around me to make sure we hadn't drawn the unwanted attention of an infected.

"Do you have weights in your boots?"

Justin looked at me. His face was looking wearier, a little less cocky and there was two days of stubble sprayed on his cheeks, though most of the hair was light and the growth was sparse. "What do you mean?"

I put a hand on his shoulder and forced him to move slower. "Walk a little quieter. It's like you're trying to invite them over for a chat."

We had covered thirty-five miles in the last two days. The first day after Justin had joined me we only walked fourteen, because despite getting something to eat, I still felt zapped. I also found that travelling with someone else held you back in other ways. The kid couldn't match my pace, and though he never asked me to stop or take a break, there were times when his breathing got heavy and I could tell his steps were tough for him to take. The second day was better, and we managed twenty-one miles, but this was because we got out of the woods and managed a full day's walk over flat terrain.

We moved over the English countryside, and under different circumstances I might have said it was beautiful; it was green, hilly and clear for miles. You didn’t have to worry about an infected jumping out at you because you could see everything around you in all directions, and that meant you could afford to walk a little quicker. For two days our view had been nothing but swaying fields with grass high enough to reach our ankles. Now though, we had hit woodland again.

"How thick is this patch?" I asked him.

His eyes looked up and to the side, as though he were searching his brain for data. "I don’t know. The GPRS didn’t have a route through the trees. We should be on the road somewhere over there,” he said, and pointed east of us.

I looked up. Through the slots of the tress I could see the sky, and it looked grey. Darkness was starting to creep in, and soon the whole woodland would be black. I looked as far through the trees as I could but there didn't seem to be any shelter. There wasn’t going to be any scout shack like back in Vasey, because there were no populated areas in this neck of the woods. This made me sweat. I didn't want to be out in the open again when the stalkers came.

"How far’s the nearest town?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "I dunno."

"I forget that you're not Google."

"Eh?"

I shook my head. "Never mind."

"Are we stopping?" asked Justin.

I dropped my rucksack to the ground. It was about five times heavier than it had been two days ago, and though this meant extra weight to carry, I was glad of it. Justin had brought enough supplies with him to get us a hell of a lot closer to the farm, and the first thing I'd done when I agreed to let him join me was to transfer most of them to my own bag. The kid thought it was because I wanted to help him carry the load, but really it was because if he screwed up and got himself killed, I didn't want to be left starving.

I took a look round us and, seeing nothing, lowered myself to the forest floor. The mud was a little damp from a light shower in the morning, but it had been a long time since I had cared about something like that. Justin sat down, felt the wetness of the dirt and instead put his bag underneath him.

"Think we're going to have to hold up here for the night. Don't know exactly where we are, but I got an inkling there's a village a few days away."

Justin blinked. "You don't trust me, but you’ll trust an inkling?"

"An inkling never got me killed."

Truth was I had been here once, many years ago, so I had a dim recollection of the area. Back then though, I had been with Clara, and I had been too focused on how beautiful my new wife was to take in the scenery.

"Won't 'they' come out? The things?"

"Stalkers." I said.

"That's what they're called?"

I nodded. "That'd be the dictionary term, if someone out there was still printing them. Truth is I don't know if they’ll come out here. But I think we're good for miles on either side – there's nothing here but fields. Stalkers stick near towns and villages where they know there are people.”

Justin tilted his head to the side. "What are they?"

I swallowed. I didn’t want to spend time thinking about the stalkers. "Don't ask. Just if we ever see one, for god’s sake do what I say."

A few hours later the woods were cloaked in darkness. Somewhere in the tree above me a bird shuffled in its nest, and aside from that the only sound was the regular chirp of crickets. A breeze blew cold on my cheeks, and with it came the smell of spring onions from a patch that must have been growing nearby. The sky was so black that I couldn't see whether it was cloudy or not, though the absence of stars wasn't a good sign. The last thing we needed when we didn't have shelter was for it to start raining. I'd spent some long, wet nights out in the open over the last few years, and I didn't plan to spend many more if I could help it.

Justin had his back against a log that was led horizontally on the forest floor. The middle of it was hollow and looked like it had been chewed by something, but the hole wasn't big enough to get inside. I rested my body against a tree, but I kept my mind alert. It felt good to sit down. I could actually feel the tiredness seeping out of me; it was like a warm energy that drained from my limbs. It was a good feeling, but it would have been even better would be to get some sleep.

 I looked over at the kid. He had his eyes focussed on his hands, and he seemed to be picking dirt from underneath his fingernails. Could I trust him to keep watch tonight, I wondered? I really needed to get some shut eye, even if it was just for an hour, but I didn't want to go to sleep and leave the kid watching out for me.

No, I couldn't do it. No matter how scratchy and red my eyes were, no matter how much my shoulders felt like a weight crushing me down, I couldn't sleep while he sat watch. I was just going to have to snatch ten minutes here and there when it was light. My body ached at the thought of the next morning, of another day of hiking on tired limbs.

"Justin," I said.

He looked up. His eyes were puffy. "Yeah?"

"You should get some sleep."

He put his hands on his lap. "How long've you been out here Kyle?"

"Don’t talk, just go to sleep. I'll keep watch."

Justin put his bag in front of him then led his head on it. He wrapped his green raincoat round his body and tucked it tight up to his chin. It only took fifteen minutes, and then he was out for the count. As the kid lightly snored the night away, I began to wonder how we were going to cope for the next few hundred miles. He wanted to experience what it was like out here in the wild, in the real world, but he had no idea whatsoever how to live in it. If we were going to make it to the farm without further incident, then I was going to have to teach him how to survive.

The fact was, as soon as we reached the farm he was on his own, and whether he decided to carry on living in the wilds or he decided to go back to Vasey, he was going to have to do it independently. I knew I would never buckle from the decision to leave him, but I could at least prepare him better for when the time came.

The night sky reached its peak of darkness and the visibility in the forest was less than a couple of metres. The temperate had plummeted, so I zipped up my coat and tucked my chin inside. In a way I was thankful for it, because the cold helped keep me alert.

Despite having potential hypothermia as an ally, though, my eyelids were starting to feel heavy. My head was light, my body drained of energy, my eyes closing. I struggled to keep them open as my brain coaxed me into a soft sleep, and soon I felt myself surrendering against the feeling.

                                                        ***

I opened my eyes. My brain felt fuzzy from the sleep I had just accidentally taken. Somewhere to my right, I heard something crunch. I felt my face drain of blood, and one word automatically leapt into my brain: Stalker.

My shoulders went tight and my hands were clammy, but I took a deep breath, held it in and tried to control myself. I looked at Justin. The only movement coming from him was the rise and fall of his chest. I turned my head to the right and listened intently. If it was a stalker, it probably wouldn't make another noise, I knew. There were two possibilities: either it had caught our scent and it was working its way toward us, in which case the first we would know about it would be when it tore one of us apart. The second possibility was that it was a lone infected, just another corpse shambling through the forest.

Please be an infected, I thought.

Justin stirred. No, I thought, don't wake up. That would be the worst damn timing ever. To my right there was another crunch, and the sound of something dragging. I stared as intently as I could but my eyes couldn't puncture the thick curtain of darkness. Whatever it was could be metres away, and we wouldn't have the slightest idea. I looked up at the sky. Never in my life had I wished more for a little bit of moonlight.

Justin moved again. I got to my knees and crawled toward him as quietly as I could, taking care to brush my path for any twigs that could snap underneath me. When I reached him, he was waking up. He mumbled something unintelligible, and then shoved the rain coat off his chest. He was about to sit up when I put my hand firmly on his chest, pushed him down and put my hand over his mouth.

"Don't make a sound. There's something out there, but I don't know what and I don't have a clue where it is," I whispered.

I moved my hand away from his mouth. Justin quietly sat up. He looked around him, but he could see about as much as I could. His eyes were squinting into the darkness.

"Stalker?" he said.

I listened again. I could hear the dragging sound, but it seemed to be going further away. I let out a breath and felt a wave of relief. This was no stalker, and if it was, it was a pretty damn bad one. At any rate, whatever was out there was moving away from us. What worried me more though was falling asleep while on watch. That was dangerous for both us.

"Talk to me about something," I said to Justin.

He straightened up and rubbed his eyes. "You actually want to talk to me?"

I nodded. "Got to keep awake somehow, unless you got some coffee tucked away somewhere."

"What should we talk about?"

"You got a water bottle?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Pass it here then."

I took a big drink, letting the first few gulps of the cold water take care of my thirst. I sloshed another gulp round my mouth to clear the dryness. I spat it out onto the forest floor. "Ask me a question," I told him.

Out in the distance, the dragging sound got even fainter. "What happened to your wife?" Justin asked.

It was like a sucker-punch in the stomach. I'd expected him to ask something light and easy, but instead he'd gone straight in for the big question.

 "Not about me," I said. "You wanted to know about the world and what it’s like living without Vasey’s walls Well, I’ve lived out here almost as long as you’ve been alive. So ask me about it."

He cleared his throat. "Why do you let some of the infected walk away? How come you don't kill all of them?

I sat back against the tree trunk. There was something sticking out from it into my back, but I didn't move. The uncomfortable sensation made it easier to stay awake.

"Just a case of conserving energy and making as little noise as possible. Don’t kill something that you know isn't going to kill you, because it's a waste of time. Plus, killing things at night attracts stalkers. They can smell blood being spilt, even if it's the clotted stuff that leaks out of the infected.”

"So it's not because you think they're still people?"

I almost laughed at the thought. "Fifteen years ago they were people, kid. Those days are long gone."

"I always wondered what it was like to live back then. Moe told me you could get on a plane and visit other countries."

I looked up at the sky and thought about the last time I’d seen something flying up there. It was seven years ago, when I was with Clara, her brother David and the rest of the group. We'd seen a helicopter hover over us for a few seconds, and then it flew away.

"Is Moe your dad?" I asked him.

"Dad's dead." said Justin. His words were automatic and sounded hollow, as though it was an answer he'd been taught.

It made me think of my parents. I wondered what had happened to them, how things had ended. I liked to think that they'd died peacefully, but somehow I doubted it.

"Why did you really want to come with me?" I said. “And don’t give me this ‘seeing the world’ bullshit.”

He took a few seconds to consider the question. When he spoke, his voice was a whisper. "It's too confined there. They're just waiting to die, all of them. They never think or plan, they just drink and smoke and fight. One day they're gonna run out of food or someone's gonna leave the gate open and a load of infected will get in. Either way, I had this feeling that if I stayed there, I was gonna die.”

I nodded. “You’re not wrong.”

Justin looked at the ground.  “I had a dream where Moe let one of the infected into my room while I was asleep and it ate me."

I shook my head slowly, though in the darkness I doubt Justin saw it. "It's not much better out here," I said.

I was starting to feel sorry for him. Sorry that he had been born into this world and had never known anything else. At least I'd had something of a life before all this – I had a job, a house, a beautiful wife. I was forty-two now, so I'd already had twenty seven years on earth that I didn't have to spend worrying about being eaten or seeing other people get eaten. This world was all Justin knew, and all he'd ever know. I didn't blame him for wanting to leave town, because I felt the same way as him. But that didn't change anything.

"Justin," I said.

The kid looked up.

I stretched my legs out in front of me. "As soon as we get to the farm, you're still on your own. If it comes down to life and death along the way – between me and you – I choose me every time. Don't ever forget that."

A thick cloud hung above us in the night sky. Slowly rain started to drip down, hitting the leaves of the trees in heavy patters and then falling onto us. It soaked into my clothes and skin, and made me shiver. Despite being cold and wet, I was thankful for the rain, because at least it helped me keep my eyes open.