Fear the Dead (Book 4) (5 page)

Chapter 7

I was glad that the wind picked up on
the way back to camp. I felt it crawl down my chest and snake its way around my
stomach and then seep deep into my bones. It was an unpleasant feeling, but I
didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and the breeze was so
loud that it felt like it was screaming into my ear, and it made conversation
difficult.

Samuel was the first person in weeks
to die by the hands of the infected. There had been the bodies found at the
edges of camp at night time, but nobody thought those to be the work of
infected. The Scottish highlands were so remote that the infected had begun to
feel like an annoyance rather than a problem. Today had proved that it didn’t
matter where we went. They would always follow.

The silence was broken a few minutes
later when Reggie joined me at the front of the group. At first he didn’t say
anything. I gave him a sideways glance and saw that his right eye was even more
swollen than before.

“What happened to your eye?” I asked.

Reggie screwed up his forehead, as if
he was wondering what to tell me.

We walked for a few minutes more
before I tried again.

“Come on, Reggie. You obviously want
to say something.”

The camp was in sight now. When I saw
the lines of tents, I didn’t feel the pang that a person should feel when they
had been away from home for a while. I don’t know what I felt at that moment. Was
it emptiness? I had so many questions, but one was chief among them. Would
there ever be a place we could really call home?

Reggie coughed. He spoke, but his
voice sounded strange, as though it was the first time he’d used it and his
vocal chords weren’t used to the exercise.

“It’s Kendal,” he said.

“What about her?”

I didn’t speak to Kendal much, but
when I did, she always left me feeling that I’d lost an argument that I never
knew I was having. Plenty of others felt the same, too. Lou couldn’t stand her.
The thing was, sometimes Kendal would give you this great big smile, and it
genuinely made you feel warm. Then she’d follow it up with a cutting remark and
you’d walk away from her muttering curses under your breath.

Reggie coughed again.

“She’s…ah…she’s… Hell, it’s hard to
say it.”

He looked at me. His swollen eye was
closing shut now. His other eye looked just as damaged, but this wasn’t
physical damage. There was a deep sadness welling in him, the kind that I
couldn’t even come close to imagining.

Clara and I had talked about having
kids, but we’d never gotten round to it. There had been a scare, once. The joy
we felt when she did a test and it came back negative told us all we needed to
know about our decision to be childless. We’d get round to it one day, we
always told people when they asked. When that would be, we didn’t have a clue.
As it turned out, one day never came.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I
told Reggie.

“That’s the thing, Kyle. I have to.
And you’re the only one who I could say it to.”

“Say it then.”

He looked at me again. The eyelid of his
purple eye flickered.

“Kendal. She…hits me. Beats me. See
this,” he said, and pointed to his eye as if I wouldn’t have noticed it had he
not pointed it out. “She did  this. Smashed her elbow in my eye while I slept,
and I woke up to blinding pain.”

“Was it an accident?” I said,
thinking of all the times in bed when I had turned too quickly and given Clara
a shove.

Reggie shook his head. “She’s done it
for years. Punching, biting, slapping. She used to beat Taylor, too.”

I thought about Reggie’s teenage son.
I tried to remember him as a smiling, sometimes surly teenager, but all I could
think about was his dead body on the table, his chest torn open.

“When Taylor was five,” said Reggie,
“She broke his arm. I had to drive him to accident and emergency, and it was pretty
hairy because I’d had a couple of drinks. I wanted to leave her. I was planning
to. I’d found an apartment and everything.”

“So what happened?”

“The outbreak happened. And suddenly
I couldn’t leave her. She gets this look in her eyes sometimes, Kyle. Like she
wants to kill me.”

Thirty minutes later the wind had
dropped down. A cloud spat rain down on us, and I felt the patters splash on my
forehead. My legs felt heavy and each step was becoming more difficult. I
wasn’t cut out for long walks these days.

I slowed down until I was next to
Lou. In contrast to me, she seemed fine. I got the impression that she could
have kept on going for hours, as if something powered her that the rest of us
didn’t have.

“Don’t suppose you heard me talking
to Reggie?” I said.

“You never say anything interesting
enough to eavesdrop on,” said Lou.

I explained to her what Reggie had
told me, and it sounded even worse in the re-telling.

“Always knew she was a bitch,” said
Lou.

“This goes way beyond being a bitch.
Look at Reggie’s face. He looks like someone took a cricket bat to his eye.”

Lou shoved her hands in her coat
pockets.

“Well you know the rules, Kyle.”

Ever since we had gotten to camp, I
had made the rules clear to everyone. I knew all too well what happened when
there was no discipline among survivors. I had decided that although I would be
fair in the way I ran camp, I would be firm too. Our rules were few in number,
but they were severe and they were unbreakable. Number one above all others,
was this; deliberately hurt or injure another member of camp, and we would
expel you.

“It means she’ll die,” I said.
“Expelling people gives them a chance, but they’re as good as dead on their
own. I can’t help but feel we’re letting the infected do our dirty work.”

“There’s also hunger, thirst,
dysentery.”

“Come on Lou.”

“I’ll do it then,” said Lou.

I shook my head.

“If it’s my decision to make, then
I’ll see it through.”

***

The welcome party at camp reminded me
of a group of mourners greeting a hearse as it pulled into the cemetery gates.
Lou slipped through the crowd and walked toward her tent. Reggie stood in place
and watched as his wife walked toward him.

I wondered how she would react. Her
husband had been away from camp, and he had put his life on the line to help
the rest of them. Would Kendal appreciate that? I watched her walk toward him,
and I couldn’t help but feel disgusted with her.

When she reached Reggie, she stopped.
I thought she might try to hug him, but instead she crossed her arms.

“You selfish bastard,” she said.

With that she turned her back on him
and strode off back toward camp. I felt the heat of anger start to warm me. In
a few seconds I had caught up to her.

“Kendal,” I said.

She stopped and turned. When she
looked at me, she scowled.

“What do you want, Kyle?”

I wondered how to phrase it. How to
speak to her without letting the bile of anger leak out.

“I know what you did,” I said.

She looked at me with a confused
face.

“Excuse me?”

“Reggie’s eye didn’t blacken itself,
did it?” I said. “What about Taylor? What screwed up shit did you do to him
over the years?”

The realisation hit her that Reggie
must have told me what she had done, and her stern expression disappeared.
Then, a second later, the shield was back up again.

“You know what I have to do,” I said.
“You know the rule.”

She gave me a sneering grin.

“Darla won’t let you expel me. She
won’t stand for this.”

I gritted my teeth.

“Darla won’t have a choice. You’re leaving
camp right now, Kendal.”

Chapter 8

We walked five miles north of camp
across fields of overgrown grass. In every direction jagged hills reached up
toward a misty sky, and gigantic rocks were littered around us. Our going was
slow, for the most part due to the brown sack I had put over Kendal’s head.
Lack of vision meant that her steps were slow and tentative. I had tied a rope
around her left wrist and connected it to my right arm, which meant that I
could make sure she didn’t try to run away. It also made sure that I could give
a gentle tug and alter our course when the terrain was too rocky.

I thought I could smell fire in the
air, but there was nobody around to light one. Maybe it could have come from
one of the camp fires if Mel had butchered meat, but it couldn't have travelled
five miles to meet my nose. That was the thing these days; I couldn’t rely on
my sense of smell. Most of the time I smelled death in the air, even when there
were no infected around. It was as though years of dealing with the dead had
made their rotten smell cling to my nostrils.

Soon we hit upon a road. It was a
single lane with lay-by stops every few hundred metres. Years ago it would have
meant that if two cars met each other on the road, one would have to pull to the
side and allow the other to pass. There were no cars now, but I hoped we didn’t
run into anyone else on the road today. The days of courtesies between
strangers were over.

At the side of us there was a
cobblestone wall. It stood over a farmer’s field that hadn’t seen the wheels of
a tractor or turn of a plough in years. As we walked the road we passed an inn
called ‘The Quarryman’s Secret’. It was named after a wealthy quarry owner who
had killed his cheating wife and buried her under tons of limestone. After we
left the pub behind, the road promised nothing but miles of wild grass and
hills that stayed silent and unmoving at our side.

Kendal said something, but the sack
over her head muffled it. I looked up and saw that there was a pothole in front
of her, so I gave the rope a tug and pulled her closer to me. She tried to
speak again, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I lifted the hood
over her lips.

“I need water,” she said.

The dry sound of her voice made me
question myself. The rope around my arm rubbed on my skin, and it made me feel
like a slaver taking his prize to the market. I had to remind myself who this
woman was and what she’d done. The years of abuse that Reggie had finally told
me about, that Kendal had admitted with barely a trace of guilt. The infected
were always searching and the stalkers were always hunting. The world was a
dangerous enough place as it was, so it was unforgivable that someone could
treat another person that way. Especially those who she was supposed to love.

I looked around me. I knew where we
were from studying maps of the area. Kendal wasn’t a native of Scotland. She
had fled there post-outbreak after a thousand infected had crawled out of the
tide on Blackpool beach.  Before the outbreak, she had inherited a bed and
breakfast hotel from her mother who had died of lung cancer.

I tried to decide if it was safe
enough to take off her hood. There was no way she could find her way back to
camp from here because she didn’t know which direction we had travelled, and I
was going to let her loose in five miles anyway. I had too much to do in camp
to be away for much longer. I went to pull the hood further over her head to
bare more of her skin to the air, but my natural caution held me back.

I took a plastic bottle out of my bag
and passed it to her. It was filled with water taken from a different part of
the stream, further up from where we had found the dead cow. I hoped that in a
week or two, the stream would be completely uncontaminated again now that we
had removed the cause of the sickness. For now, we had to boil our water and
then let it cool before drinking.

I handed the bottle to Kendal with
the cap unscrewed. She lifted her left arm, tugging on the rope which connected
us. She sighed, then put the bottle in her other hand and lifted it up to her
lips. The water had a yellow tint to it, like tea made too weak. She lifted it
and took big gulps. When it was halfway gone she stopped drinking and held it
out to me.

“I’ve got my own,” I said. “You keep
it.”

“Where are we going?” said Kendal.

“We’re nearly there. A few miles
ahead we’ll come to a fork in the road, and that’s where I’ll leave you.”

Kendal seemed to stare ahead into the
distance, though with the hood on her head I knew that she couldn’t see the
same things as I did. The road seemed endless, a concrete intrusion in an
unchanging landscape. Yet I knew that two miles away a hill would suddenly
sprout up in front of us, and at that point the road would divide into two.

It was called Dragney Pass. There was
a Scottish folk story about a man named Dragney Sam and his clan of cannibals
who would ambush the rich on the highland roads. They used to murder them and
then eat them. I once taught a module on folklore and its roots in reality, and
I had used Dragney Sam as an example of it. The story of Dragney and his inbred
family had always thrilled and disgusted the pupils in equal measure, but I had
to stop teaching it after getting a letter from the parents of a boy who
couldn't sleep because of it.

I could still remember sitting in
front of the headmaster’s desk that day. I read the letter, screwed it into a
ball and threw it across the office. Headmaster Baldwin watched the paper ball
loop in the air and then make a perfect drop into a bin, and then his eyes
snapped back on me.

“They’re children,”
he said.
“Your job is to educate,
not to scare. You’re the youngest teacher here by a decade, and we hired you
for fresh ideas. But God knows that we didn’t want this. Not me, not the board,
not the parents.”

“It’s just a story,”
I answered.

The headmaster slammed his hand on
the table, but he didn’t put enough weight behind the gesture to make it dramatic.

“It stops now,”
he said.

After that I’d dropped Dragney Sam
and his cannibalistic chums from the curriculum. In the end though, the
headmaster’s orders and the parent’s wishes hadn’t been worth a damn. Sixteen
years later the kids were learning the lesson just the same, except that now
the cannibals were no longer just legends.

“Kyle?” said Kendal.

I shook myself out of my thoughts and
looked over at her. The hood was hallway up her face now, so I reached across
and pulled it off. Her eyes were harsh, but I didn’t see any hate in them. Her
hair was tied in a ponytail that stretched back the skin on her forehead.  It
was a practical haircut, and one which was worn a lot around camp. It made
sense to have your hair as short as possible because gave the infected less to
grab hold of.  Lou had taken this to an extreme, of course, by hacking off most
of her hair and then greasing it back. Kendal’s style was typical.

She took a deep breath. She looked at
the sky and blinked as though she was being blinded by rays of sun. Her cheeks
were colourless, but parts of her forehead were red from where the sack had
rubbed on it.

I expected her to beg. I thought she
would plead with me to let her stay in camp or  tell me how it was all a
misunderstanding, a big mistake. There was none of it. Instead of begging,
Kendal had been calm ever since we left camp. Before I had first slid the hood
over her face, her eyes had locked coolly on mine with no trace of fear, and
they still showed none now.

I slid the hood back over her head.
She mumbled something into the cloth.

“Yeah?” I said.

Her foot hit a rock and she stumbled
forward, regaining her balance in time to avoid falling.

“Don’t you have lackeys to do this
for you?”

“Do what?” I said.

“Exile people from camp. I’m assuming
that you’re walking me far enough away so that I can’t find my way back. If
that’s the case we might as well stop now, because I’m useless with directions.
Feels like I lost my way decades ago and I’ve been trying to find it ever
since. Besides, don’t you have other things to do? Camp stuff?”

I stared straight ahead. Half a mile
away I saw a sheep walking down the slope of a hill that met the side of the
road. Its fur was patchy, with areas of skin showing as if someone had gotten
only halfway through shearing it. Its legs were stick-thin and its steps
uncertain. It stopped at the edge of the road and then stood motionless. I
thought about racing ahead to catch it, because Mel could have fed the camp for
a day or two even with the meagre meat from the animal. As I contemplated the
best way to grab it, the sheep  fell forward onto the road, revealing the side
of its body that had been blind to me. Its wool was dyed a dark crimson, and
its insides showed through a jagged hole gouged into its torso.

“The way I see it,” Kendal carried
on, “You have the right idea with the exiles. But it’s not people like me you
need to shoo away. When you’re at war, you don’t cast away the strong. You
identify the weak and then rid yourself of the weakness.”

“We’re not at war,” I said, unable to
take my eyes away from the dead sheep.

“Our whole lives are war. When you
wake up and force yourself out of bed, even knowing what shit you’ll have to
face, that’s war. When we get through the day and reach night and then go to
sleep knowing the whole sodding mess will repeat itself the next day, that’s
war. When we can’t let children play in the fields for fear something will eat
them, that’s war.”

“And when you beat the crap out of
your husband and son?” I said, not caring to hide the scorn from my voice.

Kendal turned her head in my
direction, though she couldn’t see me with the hood on and her head wasn’t
fully facing mine.

“That’s war,” she said.

In truth, when I had made the camp
rule that violence meant banishment, I hadn’t contemplated a situation like
this. I had made the law to stop people thinking that just because society had
fallen, they could get away with violence. In my time in the Wilds I had seen
people murdered for their sleeping bags. I’d stumbled upon a group of women
forcing themselves on a scared teenage boy, and intervening had cost me a
beating. With the fall of society, morals had begun to dissipate.

People thought in extremes these
days. Every passing morning was the start of a battle for survival, the odds
forever changing but never for the better. The infected population was
self-replenishing, and the stalkers bred as much as time would allow. Normal,
healthy humans were the minority now, and that meant we couldn’t turn on each
other.

“You know, I kind of admire you in a
way. You’ve got guts, Kyle. More guts than most of those ball-less wasters. I
can count on one hand the people I’d back in a fight.”

“Those being?”

“Gregor Horlock. He seems simple, but
he’s scary as hell. Mel, too. I’ve seen that girl butcher a pig, and I’ve never
seen such hate in someone eyes. Funny, now that I think about it. Didn’t the
bodies start to turn up when Gregor taught her how to butcher meat?”

Her voice was calmer than it had any
right to be. When she spoke of bodies, I knew that she wasn’t just talking
about strangers. Her own son had been the latest body to appear, his chest torn
open and his organs removed. Her boy had been murdered and mutilated, and she
talked of the killings as if she were reading a newspaper column.

I stopped walking. I tugged on the
rope. Kendal didn’t move so I tugged again, harder. Her shoulder jerked, but
this time she took steps toward me. I took hold of the rough edges of the hood
and slowly lifted it over her nose and then up over her head, letting it drop
to the floor.

I looked properly into Kendal’s eyes
and searched for something in them. Emotion, sadness, anything. Instead all I
got was cold, blue glass. Hers was a gaze so dead that she could have been an
infected staring back at me.

“You’re an icy bitch,” I said. “Your
son was killed. Hell, this whole time you’ve never said anything about why
we’re here. About what you did to Reggie and Taylor. I’d even prefer it if you
denied beating them, at least that would show something.”