"So you"re telling me you would act if you did know where it was?"
"Of course I would."
"So you"d get into a war?"
Amy shook her head. "There are better ways to go about this confrontation without involving ourselves in war."
"Really?" Riley asked. ""Cause I don"t see it."
Amy lifted a hand and patted Riley on his shoulder. "You know, when I was in my early twenties, I was depressed. My dog died. My life was in tatters. I didn"t have anything left. So I kept on going out really late and partying."
"Is this going somewhere?"
Amy ignored Riley. "I went out and partied right into the night. And then despite how mad it was, I"d always walk home. Alone. A young woman walking home alone in central Manchester. Do you know how dangerous that is?"
"Again, is this going somewhere?"
"What I"m trying to say is... subconsciously, I think a part of me wanted something to happen to me. A part of me wanted to accidentally wander out into the road and get hit by a pa.s.sing car. A part of me wanted to get hypothermia and freeze to death. It was like I was putting myself in those dangerous situations with too much alcohol in my body and not enough clothes on my flesh because I wanted to justify something bad happening."
Riley felt his throat tightening. He could see where this was going there. But he feigned dumb, anyway. "And how"s that supposed to relate to me?"
"Don"t take this the wrong way, but I think you"re so focused on getting revenge that you don"t really care if you die doing it. In a way, I think you kind of want to die doing it. And that"s why I"m holding you back."
Riley smiled. He shook his head. "You"re off the mark. Way, way off the mark."
Amy tilted her head to one side. "Just a thought. Like you say, I"m probably way off."
She patted Riley on the shoulder and stood, then walked over towards the women practising their targets.
As she walked off, Riley held on to that smile.
He tried to keep calm. Tried to keep his composure.
But the demon inside kept on telling him that Amy was right.
He did want to die in battle.
And he"d be totally content with that.
Chapter Four.
Mattius looked out of his fifth storey window and he felt grateful to still be alive in this world.
The sun was setting as the day reached its close. It"d been a nice day. A frosty, crispy day, the kind of day that Mattius always enjoyed. It took him back to the days before his wife Ca.s.sandra pa.s.sed away. The winter walks the pair of them would take together. The sheer absorption in the present moment as they crunched their feet through the fallen leaves, their breath frosting up in front of each other.
Ca.s.sandra was so good for him. She kept him level-headed. She brought out the positive in him. The optimistic.
When she"d died, things had changed.
He still missed her to this very day.
But in a way, he was thankful she"d never known this harsh, cruel world.
Below him, he saw movement. His people. Their community was strong, now. Forty people, many of them armed. Besides, they had thick, tall walls, too, rendering it nigh on impossible for anyone to sneak inside. They had people watching the fences at all times. They had people beyond the walls, keeping track of the one-mile perimeter. This place was a fortress, which was exactly what it needed to be.
They had something important here. Something very important that they had to keep safe.
And although he never used to think he would, Mattius was sure that he would die for that certain something now.
He heard footsteps clattering up the stairs, heading up to his floor. His stomach turned, and he sighed. He enjoyed his moments of peace, his moments of tranquillity. He didn"t like it when those moments were broken. But for certain, he knew someone was coming his way with news right now.
Good news?
Bad news?
It didn"t matter. All of it was just news now.
He took a deep breath of the cool air and in the distance, he could smell the dead. They weren"t a problem. His people had them covered. There was always the threat of them surrounding the walls, sure. Every now and then, they"d face a siege-like scenario, where they were trapped inside without the ability to go hunting or scouting for days.
But they pulled together, as a community. They pulled together, as people. And they"d never had to go longer than three days, so these situations were certainly manageable.
They pulled together, because that"s what people did.
"Mattius?"
His tranquil respite was broken completely when he heard Ricky"s voice.
He turned around and looked at Ricky. He was short and skinny, with dark curly hair. He had beaming blue eyes. He didn"t look all that tough. But make no doubt about it, Ricky was one of Mattius" most trusted allies.
Any news of dissent within the community, Ricky would find out.
Mattius would find out.
That dissent would soon be snuffed out.
Harsh, but the only way to run a place like this.
"What"ve you got for me, Ricky? Something good? Something bad?"
"A little of both," Ricky said, walking up to Mattius" side and staring out of the window.
"Give me the bad, first. Warm me up."
"The bad news is that we"ve got another wave of undead coming. A big one."
"s.h.i.t."
"Yeah. We"re gonna be pretty pinned back in for at least a week. It"s a crowd unlike any we"ve ever seen. A f.u.c.king tidal wave of dead. Thousands of the things headed right in our direction. So yeah. Now"s the time to stock up on final rations from outside before locking down. It"s not gonna be an easy one to defend, this storm."
Mattius sighed. Ricky sounded serious about this, which wasn"t a good thing considering his usual level-headedness. "And the good news? Something to really cheer me up?"
"The good news is that our old friends bit the bait."
Mattius turned around and narrowed his eyes. "What?"
"We got eyes on Bob and the people who took him away. It"s that woman"s group. The one where..."
Ricky"s voice faded into the background then because of the memories swirling around Mattius" head.
Slamming that machete against the girl"s arm.
Cracking her skull open.
Stabbing the woman through the back...
He hadn"t enjoyed doing that. It made him feel sick to even think about it. Sometimes, he woke up at night and thought he saw the pair of them standing at the bottom of his bed, their dead forms haunting his consciousness for eternity.
But he"d done what he had to do. He"d taken out his revenge on the man called Riley. He"d broken him; then he"d tied him up and left him for dead.
But he"d never known for certain what"d happened to Riley.
"And?" he asked.
"Bob did good," Ricky said. "Not that he had much choice, with his brother hanging over the zombie pit."
That made Mattius feel a little sick, too. The zombie-pit wasn"t a nice invention. But it was a necessary one. They"d basically dug a trench and filled it with undead. When someone needed a little persuading doing something, they just hung someone close to them over that pit of zombies.
Bob had dissented. He"d been caught trying to spark tension within the ranks to boost his own stature.
And Mattius really, really wanted to know what was going on inside that old camp where he"d left Riley to die.
Hanging Bob"s brother over the zombie pit seemed like a perfectly viable option.
Mattius and Ricky walked away from the window. They descended the stairs, smiling at people-citizens-as they pa.s.sed.
"And you heard back from Bob?" Mattius asked.
Ricky nodded as they made their way outside, to the back of the main building Mattius called home. It was an old hotel, right on the edge of the woods. One of those woodland retreat kind of places. Hidden in plain sight. "The camera we strapped to him ran out of battery a few hours ago. But before it did, we saw this."
Ricky pulled out a tablet computer. There was a weird battery pack attached to it, and the back of the tablet had been prised away. It looked c.u.mbersome, like one of the IT nerds had fiddled around with it using technical means that Mattius was way too old to understand. But the important thing was, it worked. They had a way of communicating.
And Mattius was looking now at recorded video footage of...
He saw the man pulling his fist back.
He saw him kicking Bob"s head.
He saw him being dragged away, frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog.
There was no mistaking who it was, and the anger and fury in his eyes.
Riley.
He sensed Bob wanting to open up, as he walked slowly out towards the zombie pit. He sensed his fear, and wanting to tell Riley the truth about how he"d been sent there to spy, his brother used as leverage.
But he didn"t.
Of course he didn"t.
"Oh, s.h.i.t."
Mattius heard Ricky and he looked up, wondering what the problem was.
It didn"t take him long to see it.
"d.a.m.n," Mattius said.
Bob"s brother, Paul, was hanging over the zombie pit by his wrists.
Somehow, the zombies had reached him. They"d stretched right up and yanked at his ankles, dragging his legs down.
They dangled onto his legs with their teeth.
His body had been so pulled down by the undead that it had split in the middle, stretching his skin and tearing his intestines out.
The look on Paul"s gagged face was one of fear. Total fear.
He hadn"t turned yet. It must have only happened recently.
"Well, that is a shame," Mattius said, as the zombies feasted away on Paul. "A real shame. Make sure none of those zombies can get out of that pit."
"I"ll get Trev on it." Ricky started to walk away. "About Riley, though. What do you want to do about him?"
Mattius wasn"t sure what to say, in truth. Mostly he just wanted to know if he was alive. He was out there, the man who"d butchered his people. Who"d set his old home alight, burned his face in the process. He was out there, and sure, he looked broken. But he looked angry, too. Very angry. "We"ll monitor the situation," Mattius said. "For now, we batten down the hatches and brace for the siege. Riley"s irrelevant to us right now in the grand scheme of things."
Mattius left Ricky with a few of the others to clear the zombies from Paul and pull him down from the post above the pit.
He walked back inside the main building. He climbed to the fifth floor, then back into his room with his favourite window, his favourite view.
He looked out and in the distance-far, far in the distance-he swore he saw a cloud of dust and mist.