“Fuck off, David,” I said.
David scratched the back of his neck. There was something weighing on his mind, but as usual he was struggling to get the words out.
I put my hands in my pockets. “Just save it. There’s nothing you can say. The farm is theirs now. It’s all pointless.”
Finally the words came to him. “It’s not pointless. Not at all. You were right. The farm’s the answer; dad knew it, Clara knew it – I know it.”
His words were coming fast. He stared at me with narrowed eyes that were like brown marbles.
I looked across the field in front of me. It seemed to stretch for miles and connected into other fields in an endless bed of green and brown. I tried to see what was beyond it, whether there was anything worth looking for, but there was nothing in the distance to cling on to.
I looked at the floor. “Even if you’re right, the farm’s out of the question now. Torben has it, and there’s no way I can take on him and his guys alone.”
David sighed. “You’re not alone. You never were. You’ve always had people with you Kyle, you’ve always been a leader. But for some pig-headed reason you choose not to act like it.”
I looked at him and saw the sincerity on his face. “A leader wouldn’t watch as many people die as I have,” I said.
“You can’t do this alone,” said David.
The wind blew through the grass, sending the long stalks dancing in different directions. For miles on the horizon the fields all blew in unison. They were all overgrown and muddy, same as the farm would be, but with enough time and hard work something could be made out of them.
With the farm in the hands of the hunters, I felt empty inside, like someone had opened my chest and scooped everything out. I’d clung onto the idea of getting there for so long, that it was all I had.
Maybe David was right. Maybe we shouldn’t give it up. Perhaps it was time to fight.
I looked at him again. This time I felt something welling up in me, some kind of resolve. But there were something I had to say, things I had to get out of the way.
“I can’t watch someone else die,” I said.
“Everyone’s got to.”
I nodded. “But you and Justin – I don’t want to see that happen on my account.”
David screwed up his nose. He wiped his boot along the grass and let the mud slide of it.
“Sometimes you have to throw the dice,” he said.
He was right. For all this time, all these years of travelling alone, it wasn’t other people that I’d avoided. I had been running away from fear. I was scared that if I let my guard down and allowed people inside it, then sooner or later I was going to have to watch them die. I’d thought that being alone was better than risking losing someone, but I was wrong.
A man couldn’t live alone, especially not in a world like this. Man was on the ropes and the world was delivering the knockout blows. Unless someone did something, unless we stuck together, we were going to hit the floor.
I took my hands out of my pockets and turned back toward the car.
I noticed that the passenger door was open, but there was no sign of Justin. I looked around, but couldn’t see anything, and he certainly hadn’t followed us onto the field. So where was he?
***
When we got to the car it was empty. The passenger door was open, and on the floor beside it there were blobs of blood. I looked around us but I couldn't see Justin anywhere, nor could I see any infected. Besides, if an infected had got him, they would have started eating him there and then. They didn’t drag away their kill to eat it later.
David walked round to the boot and popped it open.
“It’s gone.”
I shut the passenger door and walked around. I saw what he meant; the boot, where I’d left all the supplies, was now empty. Who had done it, and why hadn’t we seen them?
How did things get screwed up for us at every turn?
I slammed the boot shut so quickly that David had to yank back his hand so that it didn’t get caught. He turned round and lent on the car.
“Who could have –“
“The hunters,” I said.
I had been stupid to think that the hunters would drive so close to us and not see anything. Torben was a hunter, so he certainly wasn’t oblivious to the clues and trails that people left behind. I guessed that their stop at the Babe and Sickle probably wasn’t about checking it for supplies. It was more likely that they stopped because they wanted me to know that they had the GPRS and were headed to the farm. Torben was laying a trap for me.
I snapped my head toward David. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “They’ve taken Justin, and they want us to come find him.” I said.
“So what do we do?” he asked.
The old me would have taken what supplies I could, turned round and walked in the opposite direction. But I knew what the hunters were and what they were capable of, and I couldn’t just abandon Justin to that. Whatever the risk, no matter the cost, I was going to have to try and do something.
I was going to be running into a death trap, but it was better to sprint into a quick death than walk into a lingering one.
“I can’t ask you to come,” I said.
David nodded solemnly.
I opened the car door and looked around for what supplies I could find. I looked under the passenger seat and let out a gasp. Tucked underneath, was our shotgun. Justin must have hidden it before the hunters had grabbed him. I took it out and showed David.
“Clever kid,” he said.
I nodded.
“I’m coming with you,” said David.
“You sure?”
He nodded his head. “You have to be able to depend on people.”
I slammed the car door, took a deep breath and looked to the east, where the farm was waiting. I could already feel the adrenaline flowing inside me. This was it.
I looked up. Above us, a mean-looking black cloud loomed.
Chapter 19
We ducked down into a ditch so that we had a wide view of the farm but couldn’t be seen by the hunters. I counted six hunters patrolling the farmland, and past the fields there was a farmhouse where there would probably be even more of them inside. Outside the house there was a large tank with ‘petrol’ written in red letters, no doubt used in better days to supply the tractors with fuel.
The farm wore the scars of fifteen years of neglect. The fields were choked with weeds, a lot of the fences had blown over and water poured into the farmhouse roof through the gaps left by missing slates. The place had gone to hell, but I still saw some potential in it. If you looked past the weeds and the mess, the heart of the farm was still there and it could be turned into something good.
Some of the hunters walked up and down the fields, stopping occasionally to stub a cigarette under their boots or talk with another hunter as they walked past. Across the fields and under two branching elm trees there were two tractors, their paintwork flecked with rust.
Next to me, David was quiet. “Wishing you hadn’t come?” I said.
He shook his head. “Wishing we had a lorry or something. We could just ram into them.”
“If we’re going to wish, then let’s go big. A tank would be pretty handy right now.”
David smiled for a second, but the gesture soon dropped from his face. “We’re going to have to fight, and I’m gonna hold you back,” he said.
I looked at him. His body was wiry and his pants were held up by the last rung on his belt. His eyes were small, his hair receding. His hands were curled into fists, bony and white at the knuckles. I tried to think of something to tell him, something I could say to reassure him, but the fact was that he was right. He wasn’t a fighter.