The Dying & The Dead 2 Read online

  “Have you ever thought about just ending it?” said Ed. “We saw you on the island. You kill people to get what you need. Are all those lives really worth yours?”

  “In my eyes, they are.”

  Bethelyn shivered. Her hair was still wet, but her clothes were starting to dry in the rising morning sun. She looked at The Savage as she spoke.

  “What have you ever done to justify extending your life at someone else’s expense? I mean, what good have you actually done with the extra time you’ve been given? Sorry, I shouldn’t have said ‘given’, because nobody handed it over freely to you. Let me rephrase: So, what have you done with the extra time that you’ve taken?”

  “The only person I need to justify things to is myself,” said The Savage. “And I find myself pretty agreeable.”

  Ed wondered what he would do if he was in The Savage’s position. He liked to think that if somehow he got infected, he’d just end it. When he watched the newscasts about the outbreak and heard about the mass suicides, he thought those people had the right idea. If he knew he was going to turn into one of the monsters, he would just take a walk off the Golgoth cliffs.

  That was impossible now. Ed was immune, so nothing the infected could do would turn him. They could still kill him, of course, and it would be a pretty horrible death. He’d never join their ranks.

  He looked around him. Everything was different on the Mainland. Not in drastic ways, but in the small details that he never thought of. He’d never seen trees so close to a beach. He’d never trampled over grass so brown and fragile that it was like tissue paper. He refused to believe what The Savage said. Sure, the infection had changed things, but there had to be something good left in the world. It couldn’t be all that bad. Maybe once he’d found James, he could see some of it.

  He glanced ahead of him, and something caught his eye.

  “What’s that?” said Ed.

  In front of them, on the ground, something glinted in the sun. They walked across the dead grass until they reached it. When Ed saw what it was, he recoiled.

  “Jesus,” said Bethelyn.

  The Savage kneeled down on the floor. He reached down and picked up a severed arm. The hand was curled inwards toward the palm, and the arm had been cut just below the elbow. The wound was jagged, as if it had been ripped off. The glinting object was a chrome watch. It was still strapped to the wrist, though the owner would have no need for it anymore. A chill crept through Ed. He felt eyes watching him, but looking around, he saw nothing.

  The Savage unclasped the watch from the wrist. He turned it over in his hand and looked at something on the back. He traced his finger over it.

  “What does it say?” asked Ed.

  “To my wonderful husband. Love, KC,” read The Savage.

  He stood up. He paced around them and stared intently at the floor as if something had gotten his attention.

  “Footprints,” he said. “People were here. A few of them, from the looks of it. It seems like they were all in this spot, and then all the footprints lead off in different directions, as if they all ran away. There was something else here, too.”

  “What?” said Ed. He looked around him again, but nothing moved in the grass, and the woods seemed empty.

  The Savage bent down and picked up a few flattened blades of grass.

  “There are some pretty weird footprints. This place is beginning to make my bum itch. I have an idea where we are, and it’s not good.”

  “And where’s that?” said Bethelyn.

  The Savage gave them a grave look. His eyes were free from traces of his usual mockery.

  “Loch-Deep” he answered.

  Ed walked over to The Savage. Sure enough, he saw the footprints that seemed to go in different directions. There was another set; bigger than the rest, and misshapen. They couldn’t have been made by human feet, but he didn’t know of any animal whose paws could make a shape like that.

  “You say Lock-Deep like it should mean something to us,” he said.

  “Of course. I sometimes forget you’re a Wetgill.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “What’s Loch-Deep?” said Bethelyn.

  The Savage took a deep breath. “The only place on the whole damn Mainland where I wouldn’t want to be.”

  Ed and Bethelyn exchanged glances. He saw something in Bethelyn’s stare. It was the same look she’d given him on Golgoth, back when they first saw the infected. He didn’t know her too well, but he had already realised that she was a woman who didn’t scare easily. Yet something about this place obviously made her uncomfortable.

  He felt like it was his job to try and reassure her. After losing April there had been nothing Ed could say to her. What could you really do with something like that? He couldn’t exactly tell her that worse things could happen, because that wouldn’t be true. For Bethelyn, the absolute worst, most soul-crushing thing had already come to pass. He couldn’t let her dwell on things. After seeing her in the sea, floating limply as the salt water lapped over her face, he was worried about her. She’d given up, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  He walked over to the severed arm. He kicked it with his foot.

  “Anyone got the time?” he said.

  Jokes weren’t usually his thing, but he hoped to raise a smile to put her at ease. Instead, Bethelyn shook her head and looked away. He expected The Savage at least to laugh. All he got was a stern look.

  “There are some things you don’t joke about,” he said.

  Ed couldn’t believe that The Savage, a man who he had seen hunt down and butcher an innocent person, had just given him a reprimand. When he looked at The Savage he couldn’t see his nose or mouth through his mask, but he could tell from his eyes that the man was spooked. Seeing that look on someone who hadn’t seemed scared of anything made Ed wish they were back on Golgoth.

  “If we’re in Loch-Deep,” said The Savage, “that might be the last joke you ever make.”

  Chapter Four

  Heather

  Outskirts of Kiele

  It was a motorway once. Like everything else made by the hands of men, nature had reclaimed it once the outbreak reset priorities. It wasn’t important to keep the roads tarmacked anymore, because there were few cars left to travel on them. Even if someone did have highway maintenance on their minds, the Capita were the only ones with any kind of resources. Their thoughts were fixed on collecting the immune and expanding their territory.

  They’d followed the motorway for a day, walking through the wild grass and weeds. Every so often they could see where the grey concrete resisted the spread of nature. They’d come across a few cars with leaves covering the bonnets and vines twisting over the framework. There was a camper van with the windows smashed and cupboards ransacked, and on the back was a sticker that read ‘The closer you drive, the slower I go.’

  “We should have followed the train tracks,” said Heather.

  Charles Bull answered gruffly. “The train’s miles away. Follow the tracks all you want, you won’t catch it unless you’ve got an engine up your skirt.”

  “I’m not wearing a skirt.”

  “It’s a figure of speech, Heather.”

  They shared few words as they travelled. Heather had no desire to speak to Charles, and she couldn’t help the feeling of hate that burned inside her when she looked at him. The bounty hunter had separated her from her daughter, Kim, who was on a train with Eric headed deep into the arse of the Mainland. Heather had to force herself not to think about it. She was going to find Kim, but if she dwelled on it then she would break down.

  Charles held his horse by the reins and walked beside it on foot. Every so often he’d lead it around an obstruction in the road, talking softly to the mare. “Come on, Ken. That’s it. This way.” Heather thought that at any moment the man and horse would gaze into each other’s eyes and declare their undying love.

  Max rode in front on a black stallion, never stopping to look behind him at Heather and C
harles. For him, the only way was forward. He needed to get back home to Kiele. After spending years undercover as a member of the Capita guards, he was counting every step until they reached town.

  He had told Heather to ride Charles’s horse. “Take his horse and let the old bastard walk,” he said. She climbed on top of Ken and jerked the reins, but the animal refused to budge for anyone but Charles. They let the bounty hunter guide his horse along with them, but Max refused to allow him to ride it.

  As a bitter afternoon wind lapped over them, they passed an old service station. A ten foot high sign advertised petrol at decent prices. Across the forecourt there was a shop, and a banner was spread across the window offering hot sausage rolls and coffee. Heather had stopped here once. It was years ago, back when it still offered drinks and pastries, and people still had cars that they needed to refuel.

  She and her husband had been on a road trip back then, and Heather was desperate for the toilet. She normally wouldn’t have gone in a place like this to relieve herself, but Kim was inside her and pressing on her bladder. The urge was more than she could control.

  She went inside the grubby toilet and made her husband wait outside the door. After a few minutes passed, she heard him tap on the wood. He spoke to her in the irritated tone that she had grown to hate.

  “Can’t you do a simple thing like take a piss?” he said.

  Feeling under pressure, she strained and strained but nothing would come. It was as if being in such a crappy toilet had shut off the urge to go. Her husband banged on the door and told her to hurry up and that there were people waiting. Panic built up inside her. She didn’t want him to get cross again. He was a nightmare once the anger took him.

  That was a long time ago, and the person Heather was back then was nothing but a memory. This very morning, Heather had squatted behind a bush and relieved herself while Max and Charles stood only ten feet away. She measured progress these days by how freely she could empty her bladder.

  Max stopped his horse.

  “What are you looking at?” said Max. “You know this place?”

  Heather shook her head. “It’s all new to me,” she said. The past was better left where nobody could see it. She wasn’t that person anymore.

  Max climbed down off his horse. He glanced her way, and she saw the wide smile that he’d painted on the front of his mask. The expression didn’t match his eyes. He was always so serious, turning every conversation around to what they needed to do and where they needed to be. Charles would sometimes try to goad him, but the Resistance fighter didn’t humour him.

  Max bent down to the floor. He took hold of a bunch of daisies which sprouted from the ground, and he carefully pulled them away.

  “You shouldn’t have,” said Charles.

  “They’re for my daughter,” said Max. He nodded at Heather. “You should have kept trying with the horse. We could have broken him.”

  Charles patted his horse on the head. “Ken won’t break for anyone. He’s a stubborn old git. That’s why we get on so well.”

  “I don’t mind walking,” said Heather.

  She meant it too. Back before the outbreak, Heather loved nothing more than a hike across green pastures. The smell of the grass, the blowing of the breeze. The feeling that when you were in nature, everything was right with the world.

  Things couldn’t have been more different. Nature was reclaiming the things that man had built, but it wasn’t using green grass or bright flowers to do it. Instead it was vines twisting over metal, weeds straining and spreading across the streets. It seemed like something was seeping across Heather’s mind, too. A network of roots that fed anxiety into her brain. She couldn’t stop thinking about Kim and Eric. Where were they? Where was the train taking them?

  She knew what the Capita did. When she was a teacher, she had seen Charles Bull take a girl from her class. Jenny had been immune, and somehow the Capita found out. When the bounty hunter led her away Heather knew she should have done something, but the truth was that she was scared. Now Jenny was gone, and it was more than likely that her daughter and Eric had been taken to the same place.

  “I don’t like the idea of you walking when there’s a perfectly good horse there,” said Max. “I don’t care if it’s stubborn. You deal with it the same way you deal with stubborn people. You grind them down.”

  “Like I said, I don’t mind it.”

  Charles tugged on Ken’s reins and pulled him away from the weeds he was chewing. “It’s not the miles that are the problem anyway,” he said. “It’s the things that follow you when you walk them.”

  “Like what?” said Heather.

  “You’re looking for Kim, yes? Help me help you. I need to get to my daughter, too.”

  She had heard that Charles had a daughter, but somehow she never believed it. He was such an uncaring man; an emotional void where anything happy was sucked in and the joy was stripped away. She couldn’t imagine him taking care of someone else.

  “You’re bullshitting,” said Max.

  “Hand me my things and I’ll prove it,” said Charles.

  “I’ve spent enough time with you to know not to believe the garbage that comes out of your mouth. Heather, when we get to Kiele I’ll get you a horse. One that actually walks. And then you can go find Kim and Eric.”

  Charles’s mouth was hidden behind his mask. It was a standard issue, this time. He used to wear a mask that smothered his face. It was made of leather and had a long beak producing from his nose, making him look like a plague doctor from the fourteenth century. Max had taken it off him and put it with the rest of Charles’s things in his saddlebag. “I can’t look at him wearing it,” he had told Heather.

  Despite not being able to see his mouth, Heather knew from the shape of his eyes that Charles was smiling.

  “You don’t trust me?” he said. “Rich words coming from a man who spent three years pretending to be someone else. Where were your family while you lived in the Dome, Max? What were they doing while you were playing soldier and drinking and whoring?”

  Max gave him a stern look. He snapped his saddle bag shut.

  “I never went whoring.”

  The mischief grew behind Charles’s eyes.

  “And what about all the Darwin’s Children you helped me round up? What of the things they do to them in the Capita’s dungeons? You knew what we did, and you helped me put them there.”

  “It was for a bigger cause. I don’t have any regrets.”

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” asked Heather.

  “Lilly,” said Charles.

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t asking you.”

  Max unzipped his coat. The midday sun had broken through the clouds and cast pale yellow over the ground. A crow flew down and perched on the petrol sign across from them. It gave a croaky squawk.

  “Kiela,” Max said.

  “Interesting name,” said Charles.

  “We named her after Kiele. It seemed right.”

  “And what about your wife?” said Heather.

  “Lauren.”

  “She doesn’t mind you being away for three years?”

  “She understands. I guess. We needed someone who could live in the Capita and pretend to support them, and I used to be an actor. Back before the outbreak, that is. Before you ask, no, you probably never saw me in anything. But yeah, I don’t have much of a relationship with her or Kiela. Some causes mean you’ve gotta forgo stuff like that.”

  Heather felt a flinch of anger. Her daughter was miles away in the Capita’s hands, and Heather would have cut off her own legs to get her back. She knew that no matter what happened, she wouldn’t stop trying to find Kim until her own body broke down. She couldn’t believe that this man would voluntarily leave his daughter for so long. It seemed wasteful; frittering away the most important bond you could ever have just to play spy.

  “You’re cold,” she said.

  Max sighed and closed his eyes, as if it was an argument he’d
had many times before. The smile on his mask achieved the reverse of its intended effect. Now it just looked sad.

  “It’s the opposite, really,” he said. “I’m not cold. I’m warmer than anyone else. I’m not content to look after my own and say a big ‘screw you’ to the rest. I want to make things better for everyone, and I’ve sacrificed a hell of a lot to do that. Whereas you, you’re only interested in yourself, and Kim.”