Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 (15 page)

“Don’t know,” I answer. “A brother… the
hammer…”

We made a mistake. A terrible goddamn
mistake. We were so very stupid. Why did we trust these guys for even one
second? We should’ve shot Billy when we first met him. No discussion. No
debate. We should’ve pressed a gun barrel against his temple and pulled the
trigger. I find myself thinking about killing people in this manner a lot. A
simple and quick execution. No fuss. No muss.

And Billy? Yeah, we should’ve killed him,
simply because we didn’t know him. Because he was an outsider. I’m pretty sure
wars have been started for less.

Anyway, that’s what we should’ve done.

This is a ruthless thing to do. It is cold
blooded. But this is the world we live in now. And we can never go back. The
man in the gas mask was right. We can never go back to the way things were.

But we needed water, I think to myself.

And Billy led us to water.

Billy saved us.

And then Marko saved us.

He
saved us twice.

I realize now they were doing this to gain
our trust. This was the only reason.

And I need to keep reminding myself not to
trust strangers.

Do not take candy from strangers.

Do not accept rides from strangers.

Do not take water from strangers.

Even in the desert.

Even during a zombie apocalypse…

Especially during a zombie apocalypse.

Trust
no one.

Another gunshot erupts in the dark of the
night. It’s impossible to know where it came from, but it sounded close.

We continue running blindly through the
Boneyard, through the darkness.

“We have to go back for Kenji,” I say,
struggling to catch my breath. “I can’t leave him behind.”

“Not safe,” Sarah whispers, barely able to
speak. “We need to…we need to re-group.”

“Re-group? Are you kidding me? Re-group?
There is no group left. It’s just you and me. The others are a million miles
away. They might as well be on another goddamn planet. And they’ve got Kenji.
He could be dead…”

Sarah grabs me with her one good hand. She
pulls me behind the hull of an aging bomber. This particular plane looks like
it served in a war. Like it flew over hostile territory, through hostile
airspace. It looks like the kind of plane that carried a nuclear bomb, once
upon a time. I know nothing about planes, other than they are unbelievably
effective and devastating killing machines, but this one… this model, it had a
certain gravity about it.

We lean up against the metal frame, we lean
up against a relic. “We have to be smart,” Sarah says. “We have to think. Right
now, fear is screwing with your brain. And believe me, when fear takes a hold,
it’s impossible to think straight.”

Sarah talks to me, trying to calm me down.
It’s not working. And the entire time she is speaking words of wisdom and
advice and comfort, her eyes are closed. They are closed tight.

She is in so much pain.

Her hand continues to shake uncontrollably.

She moves to the side, leaning against the
plane for support. She throws up from the pain. She stumbles and nearly falls
over.

I hold her up.

“Did you see what they were doing to the
girl,” she whispers. “They were wrapping her up in plastic cling wrap. They
were preserving her. Keeping her fresh. They won’t kill Kenji. They won’t kill
him for a very long time.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

My mind is taken back to the Fortress, and
I am instantly reminded of the old man on the boat. And Doctor Hunter. They had
been forced to hide on that boat, they had been cut off, starved. They had been
forced to feed on human flesh.

They had been desperate. Hungry.

Have
you ever been hungry?

“This is a good thing,” Sarah says.

“A good thing?” I ask. “Are you crazy?”

“It means we have time.”

I stop and think. Maybe she is right. Maybe
this is the silver lining to this messed up situation. The situation being…
that because these bastards are going to eat Kenji… they will keep him alive.

Fresh
meat.

They will eat the girl first.

And then they will eat the Evo Agent.

And when there is no meat left, when they
have used their bones to make soup… then and only then, will they eat Kenji.

“Come on,” Sarah whispers. “Maybe we can
hide in one of these things.”

We are about to make a move, but as soon as
we step out into the open, as soon as we begin to search for a way inside the
massive plane, a truck, Marko’s Landcruiser, roars towards us, its headlights
blinding us. We freeze, like deer, like prey. There is gunfire all around us,
and the dirt ground at our feet explodes. I am completely disorientated. I have
dust in my eyes and the sound of gunshots in my ears. I throw my hands and my
arms up to protect my face. And not knowing what else to do, we once again turn
and run blindly through the Boneyard.

To my right, I hear a scream. A howl.
Similar to the infected. But different.

We run down a row, an aisle of fighter
jets. To our right, running parallel with us, chasing us and herding us, is the
big man.

Ivan.

He disappears behind a jet and then
reappears. He runs with a heavy stride, on powerful legs. He is screaming and
moaning as he runs. In his right hand is the sledgehammer. I can’t see clearly
in the dark, but in my mind’s eye it is dripping with blood.

Kenji’s blood.

“He’s coming for us,” I say to Sarah. “We
need to move. We need to get away from him.”

We change direction, ducking underneath the
wings of a fighter jet. We keep moving. I completely lose sight of Ivan and his
sledgehammer. But I can’t shake the feeling we are being herded.

We turn the corner quickly and for a second
I think we are in the clear.

But we are not.

Marko is already there. He has cut off our
pathetic attempt at escaping.

“Play time is over, ladies.” He says this
with a gun in his hand and a smile on his face.

He shows us the gun. But he doesn’t use it.

He doesn’t need to.

Because behind us is a monster.

I turn around just in time to see Ivan
raise his sledgehammer, just in time to see the moonlight glisten off dark
steel.

“Don’t kill her,” Marko says.

I brace myself for impact.

But it never comes.

Ivan lowers the hammer and steps forward.
He grabs me by the throat and picks me up off the ground.

He begins choking the air from my lungs.

I try and break free from his grip.

I try and struggle.

But it is no use.

I look into his eyes.

I see hate.

I see pain.

Half his face is burnt and it looks like
the skin has melted off. He has long black hair. It is greasy and tangled. It
covers his face and I get the impression that he hides behind it.

All this flashes through my mind in an
instant.

And then everything goes dark.

Ivan drops me on the ground.

But my legs don’t work.

I collapse into the red dust. I collapse in
the Boneyard.

I drift in and out of the world. In and out of semi-consciousness.

Right now, I am vaguely aware that I am
being wrapped up in plastic. Turned over and over and over. I try and move my
legs, my arms. But I cannot. I am being wrapped up in
spider’s
silk.

I am being cocooned alive.

They
won’t kill him. Not for a very long time.

I cling to these words, to this belief. I
have to.

I hear voices.

“Where were you going? Where did you come
from?”

“We’re just lost,” Sarah says. “We’re on
the run. Our homes are gone. Like everyone else’s.”

“And now you’ve been caught,” Billy says.

Someone… Marko starts singing, ‘
Incy
Wincy
Spider’.

My heart starts to race.

“You know, Ivan…” Marko says. “He actually
ate a spider once. Back when he was a kid. It was a goddamn Funnel Web. One of
the deadliest spiders in the world. It fell from the roof, the ceiling, into
his bowl of cereal. You see, Funnel Webs are wandering spiders, they prefer the
ground. They’re not the best climbers. Anyway, it fell into his cereal. And
instead of throwing it out, instead of freaking out like any normal person
would, you know what he did? He ate it. Didn’t
ya
?
You stupid Muppet. He ate the whole thing. It was still alive. And he just
popped it into his mouth. Legs and fangs and venom and all. It must’ve bitten
him on the way down. He was sick for days. Weeks. He was throwing up. Speaking
weird languages. It’s why he can’t talk properly. The venom, it’s a neurotoxin.
Messed his nerves up. Do you know anything about neurotoxins?”

There is no response from Sarah.

“Neurotoxins are the worst, right?” Marko
continues. “Or the best. Yeah. They’re the best. They’re the best at what they
do. Which is killing. I had a pet taipan a while back, found him when he was
just a little baby. He was on the hood of my truck, catching some sunrays.
Anyway, I picked him up, held him in my hands, he was docile enough. So I
decided to keep him. But I made sure I learnt everything I possibly could about
its venom. About the neurotoxin it possessed. And the thing is, the reason it’s
so deadly, it acts instantly. At the speed of light. At the speed of however
fast your nerves can send signals throughout your body. The most venomous
snakes, spiders, whatever, the most dangerous ones, they all possess a
neurotoxin. They all kill quicker and better than anything else in the food
chain. And guess what? Now we do to. The infected. The zombies that now inhabit
this world, they were humans once. And now they possess a kind of neurotoxin.
It’s in their blood. It’s in their saliva. It messes with their brains, their
nervous system. And when they bite you, they pass it on. The infection. The
venom…” he trails off.

This speech, this fascination with venom
and neurotoxins, it all sounds so familiar. I try and remember where I’ve heard
it before. But my mind is clouded and sluggish. I try and sit up but I can’t
move. My whole body aches. I feel heavy. This is a familiar feeling. I should
be used to it by now. But I’m not.

“Wake up, darlin.”

I try opening my eyes but it is almost
impossible. My vision is blurry and hazy. I can only see shapes. Lightness.
Darkness.

We are in a room. The room where they
tortured the Evo Agent to death. The room where they had hung the little girl.
This room is now lit with candlelight. The girl is nowhere to be seen. The Evo
Agent is gone.

“Please,” Sarah begs. “Please, let us go.
You don’t have to do this. We don’t know anything. We don’t know that guy. He
tried to kill us for crying out loud.”

I lift my head slightly. Sarah is on her
knees. Billy is standing behind her. He has a huge knife in his hands.

No. It is not a knife. It is a butcher’s
cleaver.

My vision finally comes into focus. The man
with the melted face, the big man, Ivan, he is standing over me, he is wrapping
me up in plastic. He stops briefly to inspect my forearm. He sees the bullet
wound. He runs his fingers over the stitches, admiring Daniel’s handiwork.

Marko is sitting down against the wall.
Knees bent. He appears to be exhausted. He has his head lowered. He is not
looking at me.

And then he is looking at me.

And the first thing that hits me is how
normal he looks. Even now, even after I know who he is and what he does, he
looks like a normal guy. A farmer. A small town cop. A hardware store owner. He
looks like someone you could trust, like someone you
want
to trust.

This is why we trusted him. Because he
looks normal and harmless. And this is why he is so dangerous.

He picks up a dirty, filthy, blood soaked
rag and throws it at Ivan. “Hey! I told you not to wrap her up yet. What are
you doing, you idiot? You bloody half-wit. We’ve got two others to get through
yet. It’s
gonna
be weeks before we need to wrap her
up.”

Ivan slumps over like a dog getting in
trouble for peeing on the carpet. He slinks away, leaving the room. He doesn’t
say anything. He just makes a weird grunting noise.

Marko stands up and walks over to me. He
takes out his knife and slices the clear plastic away from my body.

I realize that my arms, my hands aren’t
tied. My legs aren’t tied.

I am free.

But I’m not.

Marko holds his knife in front of my face.
“You try and run, I put this knife in your spine.”

The knife is eerily familiar. It is a
hunting knife. Curved tip. Serrated edge.

I suddenly realize I am lying on a table.
But it is not just an ordinary table, it is a chopping block.

Marko leans over me and slaps me in the
face. “Hey! Are you paying attention? Are you with us yet?”

I look him in the eyes. I don’t see pain. I
don’t see hate. I see a kind of happiness. “What the hell are you?”

“You already know what I am. You already
know who I am. And you already know how this goes. Anyone who has survived this
long, in this hellhole, knows exactly how this goes. I mean, it’s amazing how
quickly people just flat out turned on one another when it got really bad.
Happened everywhere. Cities. Towns. Suburbs. The bush. The desert. Everywhere.
You take away people’s food, take away their water, they’ll start killing one
another pretty soon. It’s the human thing to do. Throw in an unstoppable,
incurable plague, and society will tear itself apart. Civilization will
literally eat itself.”

He is right.

And the man in the gas mask was right.

“I know you have seen the badness,” Marko
continues. “I know you have seen the worst.”

“What do you want from us?” I whisper. “Why
are we still alive?”

My eyes fall to Sarah. I see her shake her
head slightly. She is pleading with her eyes. She is telling me to be quiet.

Do
not talk.

“I need information,” Marko says. “I’ve
asked Sarah, but she has not been forthcoming. This is why I needed you to wake
up.”

I realize he wants to know where the town
is. He wants to get behind the walls. And if we talk, if we tell this madman
where the town is, we put everyone in that town in danger. This killer, these
butchers, cannibals, they will weasel their way inside. They will infiltrate,
and they will gain trust. And then he will kill them all. He will butcher them,
one by one.

“What information could you possibly want
from us?” I ask, playing dumb, trying to convince myself that I know nothing
about a walled town. “What could we possibly tell you that would be of any use
to you?”

Marko smiles. “When Billy found you, you
were on foot. You had hardly any water. Barely any food.”

“Billy found us? No. We found Billy. He was
all alone. He was…”

“No, my dear. Billy found you. Stalked
you.”

He pauses for a second. He lets that fact
sink in.

We have been hunted. We were never in
control.

“I want to know where you were going,”
Marko says. “I want to know where you came from. I want to know everything.”

“We came from a military base,” I explain
quickly. “It became overrun. We barely escaped with our lives.”

“I figured as much.”

I breathe a small sigh of relief.

“There was so much activity around here
during the early days of the outbreak,” Marko says, remembering back. “Endless
military convoys on the roads. Cargo and troop carriers in the sky. Choppers.
Fighter jets. Drones. And now? Now it’s so damn quiet. They must’ve come
through this place early on. They cleared out a lot of ammo. Not much else. I
guess they didn’t really need anything here. It’s not like they were fighting
an enemy that was shooting their planes out of the sky. Anyway, they cleared
out the ammo. Missiles. Bombs. The convoys ran night and day. All over these
roads. The drones were the last to go. And then it just stopped. And then
suddenly, more and more dead folk kept turning up at the gates. At the fence.
They just wandered in from the desert, like they’d been walking out there this
whole time. And the more I saw, the more I smiled, the happier I became.
Because the more dead, the less living. This is no place for the civilized. Not
anymore. It’s like all my prayers had been answered. This is a gift.”

The words from Marko’s lips are absolute
madness. He stares at the flame of a candle as he speaks. The weird thing is,
I’m happy for him to talk. Because as long as he is talking, he is not hurting
us, he’s not torturing us.

“So,” he says. “Tell me, where were you
going?”

“We don’t know,” I lie. “We barely escaped
with our lives. We have no plan. We have nothing.”

“Stop lying.”

“I’m not lying. This is the truth.”

“That’s not what Billy thinks. It’s not
what I think. And it’s not what your friends say.”

I look at Sarah. She is terrified. But
there’s no way she would’ve said anything.

“Friends?” I ask.

“Maria,” he says. “Jack. Kim.”

No. There’s no way. How?

I know there is a look of shock and horror
on my face. I know my face has betrayed me. I try and keep my cool anyway.

“We don’t have any friends,” I say.
“Everyone we ever knew is dead. We’re travelling alone.”

“We found your friends,” he says, ignoring
me, ignoring my lies. “We found them hiding in the wreckage of a helicopter.
They were in pretty bad shape. Initially, they were happy to see me, well, not
initially, but after I gave them water, gave them food, showed them my winning personality,
they warmed up to me.”

“Did you hurt them?” I ask. “Are they…”

“They’re alive for the moment. But their
wellbeing really all depends on how helpful you are to me right now.”

“We’re dead either way,” I say, trying to
call his bluff. “Why should we help you? You’re going to kill us no matter
what. Just get it over and done with.”

“Wrong answer, little girl.”

I act brave. I act tough. But it is not
enough.

“Maybe I’m not making myself clear,” Marko
says. “Yes, you are going to die. Yes, we are going to kill you. But how we
kill you, how quickly, how painlessly, these are all factors you can decide.
You want it to be quick? You want it to be painless? Then you better start
talking.”

“We’re telling you the truth,” I say,
unable to sell out a town of people I don’t even know.

“Remember, this is your choice.”

Choice. Freedom.

The freedom to die quickly.

This is the new world.

“Ivan!” Marko shouts. “Get in here.”

No response.

“I think you upset him,” Billy says.

“Bloody hell. When did everyone get so goddamn
sensitive? Go and get him.”

Billy immediately runs off to find Ivan.

Marko takes his gun out of his holster and
points it at Sarah. “You try anything stupid, I shoot your kneecaps. Do you
understand?”

Sarah nods her head slightly.

He then fires a shot into the wall to scare
her, to scare everyone. The noise is deafening. “Do you understand!?”

“Yes!” Sarah answers loud and clear.

Marko laughs and the happiness I saw in his
eyes was genuine. He is so goddamn happy. “Man, we live in exciting times. You
know, a few days before we found you, we found a man. Actually, I’m not sure if
he is a man. He might be something else. Something stronger. Anyway, we found
him in the gorge, same place I found you. And this guy, I don’t even know where
to begin.” Marko is shaking his head and smiling. “He has scars. Scars all over
his body. His skin is mutilated with old wounds. I think they’re all
self-inflicted. I mean, they have to be. Or maybe he’s been tortured before. I
don’t know.”

Scars.

Marko had stumbled across another monster.
A killer. Creator. Destructor.