Fear the Dead (Book 4) (11 page)

“Bloody git bit me,” he shouted.

I dragged Ben behind me and stopped
above Lou.

“Look after him,” I told Charlie.

As the rats moved nearer and the
infected closed in from the other side, we lifted Lou to her feet. She gave a
scream of pain as she put her weight on her left leg. With one of her arms over
my shoulder and the other over Mel’s, we carried her to the branching tunnel.
The others followed behind us, and we all fled into the darkness with the
screams of the rats and groans of the infected echoing behind us.

Chapter
13

It seemed like we fled for miles
after we left the tunnel. With Lou unable to run and the rest of us moving on
fumes, we crossed a field, climbed a crumbling wall and skirted around another
field until we reached a building. It was a small barn standing desolate in the
grass, and when we pulled on the doors they resisted against us. It took me,
Mel and Gregor to heave them open.

The infected from the tunnels had
pursued us some of the way, but I couldn’t see them now. I knew that they wound
find us eventually, but that was a problem for another time. We went inside the
barn and shut the door. It was dark save from patches of daylight which poured
in through the glass-less windows and a hole in the roof. The floor was muddy
and damp, and there was a foisty smell in the air. In the far left corner there
was a sleeping bag, but the mold that had grown on the fabric indicated that
whoever had used it was long gone. Next to the bag was a copy of an old horror
paperback. On the cover was a demonic-looking child stood in a doorway, dark
shadows gathering behind her. The paper of the pages had curled from the damp
in the air.

We put Lou on the floor, directly
under the stream of daylight which bled down from the roof. I knelt beside her
and felt my heartbeat begin to level out. Lou’s face was the colour of snow. Her
eyelids were half shut, making her look like she was waking from sleep. I
traced my gaze across her face, down over her jacket, stopping when I saw her
legs. I couldn’t help a quick intake of breath.

Ben stood next to me. He was crying.
I looked up at Mel.

“Take him over there, will you?”

She gave a nod and led the boy to an
overturned bathtub near the door. She made him sit down and then took her place
next to him. She drew him close to her.

“It’s okay,” she said.

Ben tried to get up.

“Charlie,” he said.

Mel drew him back down.

“Charlie’s busy.”

The scientist joined me beside Lou.
His hair looked thicker, and it stuck out in curls. He saw me staring at him.

“It frizzes in the humidity,” he
said. “At school they used to call me Brian May.”

“Brian May?” said Mel.

“You know. The guy from Queen.”

“Bet you got all the girls.”

Charlie scratched the back of his
neck and then looked at the floor.

“Yeah, well, not quite…”

Reggie paced back and forth on the
muddy floor. His eyes were serious. The bruise had gone now, but he still had
dark rings under his eyelids. He held one hand in the other, rubbing the skin
between his finger and thumb.

“Can we focus?” he said. He winced in
pain.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” I
said.

“Bloody rat bit me in the tunnel. I
told you it was a bad idea going in there.”

“No you didn’t,” said Charlie. “Make
sure you wash the bite.”

Gregor walked across the room. He
stopped in front of a ladder which led to a wooden platform suspended above us.
There didn’t seem to be much up there except a dark shape which might have
started as a hay bale, but after sixteen years untouched was a tangled mess.
Gregory climbed up the ladder. At first I wondered if it would hold his weight.
The last thing we needed was for someone else to get injured.

Lou moaned. She moved her head to the
left, and opened her eyes.

“I feel sick,” she said.

“Mel, hand me my rucksack,” said
Charlie.

Mel passed the bag to the scientist.
He rummaged through it, finally pulling out a plastic packet with a
yellow-brown powder mixture in the bottom.

“What’s that?” I said.

Charlie shook the bag.

“Willow bark, turmeric and cloves.”

Lou tried to sit up but the effort
was too much for her.

“Are we making a casserole?” she said.
She didn’t so much speak the words, as sigh them. She leaned her head back
against the ground.

Charlie knelt beside her. He swept
the edge of his coat away from his knee. His joints cracked as he got closer to
the ground.

“You should take up yoga,” Lou sighed.
“What’s the powder for?”

“Natural pain remedies. We don’t
exactly have a pharmacy round here. Chew some of this. It will taste bitter,
but it’s worth it.”

Lou chewed some of the mixture. She
grimaced, and then coughed. I could smell the cloves in the air; they were
sour, and sharp enough to cut through the aroma of damp. I looked at my friend
and I started to worry.  I had tried to avoid staring at her leg, but it drew
my gaze.

Her left calf was a mess. Her shin
bone had been snapped by the rock which had fallen on her, making the bottom of
her leg sit in a grotesque shape. Even worse, a jagged fragment of bone had
pierced the skin. The bleeding had stopped, but her calf was covered crimson.

With a delicate touch, Charlie
inspected the wound. He tried to push Lou’s jeans up her calf, but when he got
near the wound, she flinched. Charlie put his hand to his forehead and stared
at her. The wooden treads above me groaned under the weight of Gregor’s boots
as he walked across the platform.

Charlie stood up and walked away from
Lou. He stopped by the door of the barn. Daylight peeped in through the slats
and cast bright lines on his face.

“Kyle,” he said.

I joined him by the door. Next to us,
on the bathtub, Mel and Ben watched. Charlie stepped closer to me. As he spoke
to me in a hushed tone, I smelled the cloves from the bag in his hand. It
reminded me of all the times I had tried, and failed, to make decent jerk
chicken for Clara and me. After the fifth failed attempt, no doubt wanting to
protect my ego, Clara had told me she was allergic to cloves.

“Must be a new allergy. It’s not your
cooking, I swear.”

I didn’t really believe her, but it
was convenient to pretend that I did. It meant that I could stop trying to
perfect a dish that just wasn’t my forte. I never forgot it though. I wasn’t
the kind of guy who liked to admit defeat.

“What do we do?” I said. We were
already in unspoken agreement that things had gone wrong.

“It’ll get infected for sure if we
don’t treat it. She could even lose her leg.”

Ben’s eyes widened. I was going to
ask Mel to take him somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. I felt
trapped. After being in the tunnels and now holed up in the barn, I completely
understood Lou’s claustrophobia.

“So what now?” I said.

“We need to try and set the break.”

We made Lou chew some more of the
pain remedy. At one point she looked like she was going to be sick, so I tipped
some water into her mouth. She took one gulp, swallowed it, but then spluttered
when I tipped more in.

“This is going to hurt,” I said, “But
it’ll be okay.” I didn’t know who I was trying to reassure; myself, or Lou.

I took hold of her leg. My hands
shook, and I kept looking at her face to see if she flinched.

“Do it quickly,” said Charles.
“Quickly but carefully.”

There were more footsteps overhead as
Gregor walked over the platform. Reggie paced back and forth, sliding his boots
along the mud. Mel held Ben close to her, but she didn’t take her gaze away
from Lou. Sounds came from outside the barn and at first I thought it was the
infected. Listening more intently, I realised it was just the wind.

I held her leg. I started to move it,
but Lou cried out in agony. Her face turned even paler.

“I can’t do it,” I said. “Look at
her. She’s in agony.”

“I’m fine,” spat Lou. Even her lips
were losing colour.

I grabbed her leg again, but as soon
as I touched her she shrieked in pain. I moved away from her.

“There’s got to be another way,” I
said, standing up.

Reggie stopped pacing.

“Sure. Just take her to A and E.”

“You’re not helping,” I told him.

“And you’d know all about help,
wouldn’t you?”

The words left his mouth and then
hung in the air. They seemed to take on weight as we all thought about what
they meant. The words were sharp, and I felt the sting of them more than
anyone. I knew exactly what Reggie was saying.

Mel gently pushed Ben away from her.

“For God’s sake,” she said.

She walked across the barn and knelt
by Lou.

“I’ll do it.”

I turn my head toward Ben.

“Look away,” I told him.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Look away, Ben. You can’t watch
this.”

“I don’t have to listen to you.”

Mel held Lou’s leg. She took a deep
breath. She had steely look in her eyes. In one swift motion she pushed on the
leg, and there was a sickening crack as the bone slid into place. Lou screamed
out, put her hand in her mouth and bit down on it until blood welled on the
skin.

“We need a splint,” said Charlie.

Reggie rushed around the barn until
he found a piece of wood. He held it out to the scientist, who turned it over
in his hand.

“Before we do anything else, we
better disinfect the wound.”

Lou’s cries of pain turned into sobs,
and then faded away as she choked them back. Ben looked away. I sensed he
wasn’t doing it because I told him to, but because he couldn’t stand the scene.
His outburst had reminded me once again what a lousy guardian I had been. He
was right; he didn’t have to listen to me.

“How do we disinfect it?” I said.

“Here,” said a voice from above us.

Gregor leaned over the wooden
railing. He had something in his hand.

“Catch.”

He tossed it toward me, and I caught
it. It was a three-quarters empty bottle of Bell’s whiskey. Charlie took it off
me, and then turned toward Lou. He unscrewed the cap and took a sniff. He
brought the bottle to his lips and let some of the liquid drop onto his tongue.
He closed his eyes. When he re-opened them, he kept his gaze on Lou.

“This is going to hurt,” he said.

***

Hours later, we still hadn’t seen the
infected. Daylight no longer poured through the hole in the roof. Silver
moonlight streaked in through the slats in the barn door and cast lines on the
floor. Somewhere, maybe miles away, an owl shrieked.

We bundled our bags together and took
out anything with an edge so that we could give Lou a makeshift bed. I covered
her with my coat. I wished that we had brought our sleeping bags, but we had
decided not to take them because we couldn’t afford the extra weight. This was
to be a quick journey, and if we slept in our coats we would have been warm
enough since the Scottish winter hadn’t quite taken hold yet.

Charlie leaned back against a wooden
beam which reached up and supported the roof. Ben was stretched on the floor
next to him. Mel sat next to Lou with her hand on her forehead. The two women
had never been good friends, but Mel seemed to have taken Lou’s injury to
heart. Reggie stood at the door of the barn and peered through the slats to the
darkened fields outside.