The Dying & The Dead 1: Post Apocalyptic Survival (11 page)

8

A Family

Somewhere on the Mainland.

Damien
took one last look out of the window. Somewhere, too far in the distance to
know exactly where, black smoke rose into the sky and met with a grey
overhanging cloud. He picked up a wooden board, placed it over the window and
felt his heart grow heavy as he smothered out the last trace of daylight.

He
felt like his body was shaking, but when he looked down at his hands they were
still. He felt crushed under the weight of responsibility but he was scared
that there would be nothing left of him if it were ever gone. It worried him
that decades from now his body would melt and his bones would be dust, and he
wondered what would remain after that. He hoped and feared there would be
nothing.

He’d
done things the usual way, at first. He fell for a girl a year his junior after
giving her his last cigarette in the bathroom of a Black Bassoon concert. By
the time he realised his first marriage wasn’t going to work out the punk ethos
was just a memory, and he based his second marriage choice around the fact that
his bride’s dad owned a chain of oriental all-you-can-eats. Then, when he
realised money didn’t fill emotional holes, he gave up. He ploughed through
life for a while, then slowed down, then drifted. He drifted all the way into a
third marriage and into being a father of two.

It was
the cycle of Damien’s life. Periods where he’d fight like hell with his back to
the ropes, followed by painful defeats and then lifeless drifting. Which cycle
was he in now? Since the outbreak he thought that the fight had been knocked
out of him, but then what was he doing, if not fighting? You couldn’t drift
your way to survival these days, yet here he was.

He
looked at the bottle on the bedside counter, and then his stare lingered on the
two children in the double bed. They might have been sleeping, though he knew
they weren’t. Only one of them needed the insulin, and Damien had tried it
first to make sure it wasn’t dangerous. He never trusted the trader. Damien
looked at his daughter and felt sorry for her. He knew it was wrong to think
it, but he blamed Sara for this. She was the one with diabetes in her family.

He
looked at the walls around him and was glad of their protection. It was a two
bedroom house on the end of a block. Fields of grass surrounded the row of
homes, though it wasn’t as remote a place as he first thought. A half mile away
was a hamlet of fifty houses, and two miles west was a village that seemed
perpetually under a barrage of rain.

The
house had been surprisingly easy to settle on, which made Damien laugh at
first. He remembered when he and Sara had been looking for a family home, back
when you actually had to buy them. He remember the build-up of anticipation
before viewing one, followed by a crashing fall as he saw something wrong with
it within seconds of crossing the doorway. Despite the hours spent and the
countless frustrations, he thought of the period as one of the happiest of his
life. Jack was a year old, and Sara’s belly was swollen with his
soon-to-be-born sister, and Damien and Sara held hands as they inspected
kitchen surfaces and measured outdoor space. It was a rare moment in his life
when he saw the future with any kind of clarity.

The
wooden tread of the doorway creaked under the pressure of someone behind him.

“Did
you fix the barricades?”

It was
Sara, hair greased back from weeks without a wash, eyes dark and a stained
shirt slack around her thin frame. Damien put his hand to his own hair and felt
the dryness of it. He’d washed himself a couple of days earlier, which had
caused a ruckus between them. She’d started it, but she had a point. Boiling
water to wash was a waste when they needed it to drink.

“Yeah
I fixed them.”

“Even
the kitchen window?”

“I
told you, it’s done.”

“I
think we might go to the Dome,” she said.

“Don’t
you think that’s joint decision?”

She
folded her arms. “It’s the safest place to be.”

Damien
closed his eyes and shook his head. This again. He felt the irritation rise in
him.

“You’ve
heard the rumours. I told you what Wes said about the Dome.”

“You
mean the trader you don’t trust? They’ll say anything to get a sale.”

“That’s
as maybe, but we can’t go anywhere yet, can we? What’s the point in even making
plans for the future if everything could be over in the next hour?”

Sara
glanced over his shoulder and at the bed where the little figures didn’t stir.

“Don’t
talk that way. They might wake up fine.”

“What
are their odds?” He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice, but he knew it
wasn’t for her, not really.

“This
isn’t poker.”

He
turned and looked at his children. Their faces were drained of colour and their
breaths were shallow. Lindsey’s skin glistened with sweat, and the veins on
both their heads were unnaturally prominent, almost as if their bodies were
translucent.

Sara
joined him at his side.

“Let
some air in, will you?”

“I’ve
just fixed the boards.”

“They’re
burning up.”

He
made a show of stomping over to the window, though again he knew the act of
annoyance had no target. Sara was right, always. She was right that the windows
needed to be boarded up, and was right when she said they needed to be taken
down again. He pulled at a corner of the board and pried it loose, as happy at
how easy it was as he was annoyed at the poor job he’d done.

Once
he pulled the window open he felt the touch of cool wind on his face, and then
he shivered as it crawled down his back. The breeze wasn’t the only thing blown
in. From outside came a groaning sound.

A
second groaning sound followed it, this time from behind him. He turned round
and saw Lindsey’s eyelids flicker. He joined Sara at the head of the bed.
Inside his heart was exploding. This was it. Since the kids had gotten infected
somehow and they’d fallen into comas, every single second of Damien’s life had
led to this. The answer to a question he had never wanted to ask. One he never
imagined having to think about when he’d held his new-born daughter in his arms
all those years ago. He reached for Sara’s hand and squeezed it tight. Sara
looked at him for a second as if startled by the contact, and then squeezed it
back. Then both their eyes fixed on their children.

Lindsey
groaned again. Her eyelids flickered like the wings of a moth and then opened.
Her eyeballs were bloodshot. Damien gripped his wife’s hand tighter and waited.
What was it going to be? What would he do if she were one of them?

“Mum?”

The
croaky sound was the greatest thing he’d ever heard. Relief poured through him
and flooded his veins.
She’s immune, and that means the immune gene is
inside one of us.
He could have gotten down on his knees and cried.

Lindsey
sat up and rubbed her eyes. Then she turned to her side and saw her big brother
sleeping next to her in the bed.

“What’s
wrong with Jack?” she said.

Damien
took hold of her head and pressed it into his chest.

“It’s
all going to be okay now,” he said, and for the first time he actually felt it.

The
sound of groaning drifted louder through the window, and for a second the joy
he felt left him, replaced by the feeling of wanting to lock himself in a room
behind a strong door. Sara put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. It was
the first voluntary contact from her in days.

“Check
the barricades again honey? Please?”

He
walked down the bare staircase, took a left and went into the kitchen. One of the
boards had come loose next to the sink in yet another display of his poor
workmanship. Across the kitchen, through a door that led to the utility room,
he heard a crash.

He
picked up a bread cutting knife from the sideboard, and to say he gripped it was
an understatement. He walked forward one slow step at a time, head turned as if
that would magnify any sounds. His footsteps seemed too loud to him, as if they
were giant cymbal crashes that would draw out predators.

The
wooden boards left little space for light to creep though, and as he got closer
to the utility room he hoped his eyes would hurry up and adjust. As he neared
the door his pulse hammered, and he gripped the knife even tighter. He put a
hand on the door handle, said a prayer to himself, and turned it. He whipped
the door open, raised his knife to head height and readied himself to meet the
danger.

There
was nothing.

Instead
of slowing, his pulse beat faster and so much adrenaline pumped through him
that he could feel it in his veins. He let out a long breath and wondered what
would have to happen for him to ever feel safe again.

Across
the house and up the stairs, there was a scream. He pushed the utility door
away from him as he span round, and this time he didn’t care about the sound of
his steps as he tore out of the kitchen. He rounded the corner and pounded
upstairs and turned into the bedroom, where he saw that his son was awake.

He was
sat on his sister’s chest, tearing at her face with greedy teeth and pulling
away strips of skin. Lindsey eyes showed that she was beyond fighting, beyond
even screaming. Damien took the room in two strides and grabbed hold of his
son’s neck. Before he could yank him away his son turned and lashed out at him
with his nails, giving him a searing hot scratch across his cheek. Then, as if
bored, he turned back to his sister.

Damien
felt his mouth open wide, but he was powerless to close it. His muscles
atrophied and severed their connection to his brain, disobeying its commands
the way a deserting army troop might disobey their general.
Do something,
he
willed himself.
Do something.

He was
dimly aware of Sara somewhere in the room, but it was like a fog had spread and
darkened everything but the children in front of him. He felt someone reach out
to him and take hold of the knife in his hand. He turned his head but it was
like his movements were in slow motion, and it was with shame that he saw his
wife approach his children with a knife in her hand.

She
looked oddly cool as she plunged the knife into their son’s head. His body
flopped to the mattress and his blood splattered across the sheets. The room
was filled with the sound of a little girl whimpering, and quiet as it was,
Damien felt like putting his hands to his ears to drown it out. It became unbearable
to him. Playing alongside it were the sounds in his head, ones that not even a
hand to the ear would silence.
You aren’t a man. You’re pathetic. You’d be
better dead.

Sara
leaned in to her daughter and kissed her forehead. She wiped her hand across it
and smoothed back her hair, and when she pulled away her mouth was smeared with
blood.

“I’m
sorry,” she said, voice choked with tears, and plunged the knife into their
daughter. The sound flowed through Damien’s ears and burnt a hole through his
brain and down his throat until it settled into his stomach and became a vast
blackness.

Sara
turned her head toward him. Her eyes were feral now; the human in her was gone.

“He
scratched you,” she said.

He put
his hand to his cheek and felt that it was wet, and when he pulled it away his
fingertips were red. He felt empty but sick at the same time. There was so much
to process, but it felt like his brain wouldn’t let any of it in.

Sara
took a step toward him, knife in hand and eyes that said she was ready to use
it. He knew that one of them was immune. Their daughter had woken from the
coma, so one of them had to be. In a selfish second that seemed to mock his
parental grief, he could only think one thing.