I grabbed hold of the man’s hair, held it tight and then smashed the end of the chair leg against its face. The leg was so square and blunt that all it accomplished was breaking the skin and making putrid blood ooze from the infected’s face. I pushed the infected to the ground. When it was on the floor, I lined my boot with its face and brought it down as hard as I could. Its head didn’t smash straight away, and it took three tries before I heard it crack. When I looked down, my boot was covered in dark red blood and bits of grey flesh.
I turned, ran over to David and knelt beside him. He looked at me, and his voice was so quiet that it was hard to hear him over the battle cries of the hunters and the groans of the infected.
“You need to go,” he said.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “We need to go,” I agreed, and give him a squeeze.
I heard footsteps run over to us, and then Justin was next to me. He bent over and took a few shallow breaths. His hands were covered in blood.
“You okay?” I said, looking for the tell-tale marks of a bite.
“It’s not mine,” he said. He held his hands up.
Behind us there was a scream, and I knew another hunter had been taken by the infected. How many more were left? I glanced over, but I couldn’t see them all. It didn’t matter; the hunters were outnumbered twelve to one.
Justin leaned in to David. Panic spread across his face. “Shit, David,” he said.
David nodded. Shit. No other words needed to be said.
I looked at Justin. “We need to go, right now. I don’t care where, we just need to get out of here.”
Justin swallowed. “Their truck,” he said, and pointed past the farmhouse. The hunter’s pick-up truck was parked on the stone driveway that led to the farm.
I nodded at him. This was as good a plan as any. Right now we just needed to get as far away from the farm as possible. What happened after, whatever we were going to do later didn’t matter, now we just had to escape.
“What about the keys?” I said.
“They keep them in the ignition for quick getaways.”
I grinned. “Smart.”
We picked up David and between us we supported him over to the truck. Behind us the sounds of the gunshots faded as the hunters ran out of ammo, and I knew that most of them would now be reaching for their knives. If they had any sense, they would slit their own throats. There were too many infected swarming in for the hunters to have any chance of winning.
We set David down next to the wheel of the truck. I opened the door, jumped in and reached for the keys. The ignition was empty.
My heart began to pound and my chest flooded with panic. The keys had to be here somewhere. Our luck just couldn’t be this bad, surely. I looked all around the dashboard and found plenty of chocolate wrappers, but no car keys.
I got out. Justin and David looked up at me, but I shook my head.
“Shit,” said Justin.
I knelt down next to David. His face was so grey that he looked like he should be in a morgue. I put my hand on his arm. “Listen, pal. We need to leave, we can’t stay here. Think you can make it just a little bit further?”
He looked up at me. His lips were dry and his eyes were dark. “Just leave me. I’m dying anyway.”
I couldn’t leave him. I’d already done that once, and I knew that I was going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. I couldn’t change the past, but what happened in the present was still up to me. And I wasn’t abandoning him again.
I squeezed his arm and started to pull him up.
“Nobody’s leaving you. Get up and stop moaning,” I said.
Justin and I heaved David to his feet. For a second he was able to support himself on his own.
“Thanks, Kyle,” he said, and smiled at me. “Let’s go.”
A shadow leapt over the truck, and quicker than I could react it pounced on David, pinned him to the floor and tore a chunk out of his neck. Blood sprayed out like mist and covered the ground. I looked at the creature on top of him, and every nerve in my body screamed out. I felt my blood freeze, and for a second I couldn’t even move.
It was a stalker.
By the time I forced myself to move, David had stopped breathing. The stalker turned its head toward us, and despite its disfigurement I swore I could see something of a grin, some sort of human expression. It stared at me with hatred, and I saw its legs kneel up behind it, ready to propel it into a pounce.
I reached for my knife but then realised I didn’t have it with me. I gulped.
The stalker twitched and got ready to jump. Then, something next to me exploded, and half the stalker’s face tore away. It made a rasping sound and fell back to the floor with a thud. I looked to my left, and Justin stood with the revolver in his outstretched hand, smoke drifting from the chamber.
I looked at David’s lifeless body on the floor. A huge chunk of his neck was missing, and blood sprayed out from the torn veins like water seeping out of a broken pipe. I grabbed his hand and felt his wrist, but his pulse had stropped. I had failed him, I knew. I had brought him into this, and I had let him die.
“We need to leave,” said Justin.
I nodded and stood up. It was time for us to go. The farm was lost, but at least we could escape with our lives.
“Here,” he said, and passed me my revolver. The barrel was hot to the touch. I slipped the gun into my pocket.
We started to walk down the driveway and away from the farm, when I heard the stones crunch behind me.
“Where are you going?” said a voice.
I turned round and Torben was stood in front of me with his rifle raised. He pointed it at me and pulled the trigger, and I felt the bullet tear a hole in my leg.
Chapter 22
I clutched my leg. The hole burnt from where the bullet had pierced it, and I felt like shouting out with the pain. I looked up at Torben. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me like that.
Torben’s face looked weary, his hair was messed up and his jacket was smeared with blood. There was a dark look behind his eyes, the look of a man who had stared too long into the abyss and had finally been broken by it. His jacket sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and there were long red scratches across his arms.
Justin twitched, and I could see he wanted to do something. I looked at him. “Don’t get yourself killed,” I said.
Torben took a few steps closer. “That’s what we’re all doing though, isn’t it? Getting ourselves killed.” He lifted his hand to his face and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about our differences,” he said, “And you know, I come up blank. My thinking is, me and you are pretty much the same.”
I clutched my leg and felt it throb. “I’m nothing like you,” I choked out.
H knelt down so that our heads were level. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and had lost some of its usual roughness. “I’ve always felt alone. Even when there were twenty people in my group, I still felt like it was just me and a bunch of shadows.”
He looked at the ground. I thought back to the warehouse and the conversation I had heard, about how Torben was looking for his wife and boy who I assumed had run away. I knew the pain of losing someone, but it wasn’t the pain that defined you. It was what you did after it.
What we had both done spoke volumes about us. I wasn’t proud of abandoning David and going my own way, but at least I’d never gone down as dark a path as Torben.
The hunter propped his gun next to him. “You were right to be alone. On your own, you’re safe. Where men gather, death hovers.”