Chokehold Read online

  What’s left of the city itself is hardest of all to look at. Despite the poor visibility, from here he can see all the way into the heart of the place he used to call home. He’s immediately struck by how textbook it looks—just like the black-and-white photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he remembers from history lessons. And it’s so damn quiet … But the thing that hurts most, the thing that causes an involuntary sob, is the realization that he actually feels nostalgic for the squalid, overcrowded city-camp that was vaporized in the bomb blast. He remembers his house and Jen and the Walker family and working on the garbage trucks and queuing for food and … and he wishes he were back there again. The realization of just how much he’s lost, how much he’ll never get back, hits him like a sucker punch.

  “What are you thinking?” Kara asks.

  “I’m thinking that I should have gotten Jen out of there. I failed her.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “And how would you know?”

  “Jason told me.”

  “What exactly did he tell you? How he screwed me over and got my girlfriend killed? How he let me think she was safe when all the time he’d left her behind so he could save his own skin?”

  “Actually, no. He told me how gutted he was, how sorry. He told me he tried to make her leave with him, but she wouldn’t go anywhere without you.”

  The others have caught up. “Jesus. You got us away from all that,” Tracy says. “Good job.”

  Darren’s as shell-shocked as Matt. “Fuck,” is all he can say for several overlong seconds. “They did it. Can’t believe the crazy bastards actually did it…”

  Distances are deceptive. It looks close, but the dead city is still miles away. “We’re never going to cover that distance in one go,” Kara says, and Matt knows she’s right.

  “Then we should get as close as we can for now. Find somewhere to shelter. Take it step by step.”

  8

  They don’t seem to be getting any closer, no matter how long they’re walking. They walk alongside the road, not on it, doing what they can to keep out of sight and merge into the background, and every time they pause to regroup, it seems like they’re no farther forward at all. Matt tries to pace himself, but it’s not easy being out in the open like this—his instinct is to run, but he can’t risk expending energy or making noise. There are bodies everywhere, the remains of running battles fought on the day of the apocalypse. He consoles himself with the fact that, caked in mud, he and all the others are as indistinguishable as everything else: gray specks moving slowly through a similarly gray landscape. A zigzag line of barely discernible figures, their arms loaded with the few supplies they’ve managed to cling to from their basement hideout.

  “Feels like we don’t belong here anymore,” Kara says, whispering instinctively.

  “That’s because we don’t,” Matt tells her. “This isn’t our world. It belongs to them.”

  “Bit overdramatic, don’t you think?” Jason pipes up from close behind.

  “I think Matt’s right,” Kara tells him. “It’s like we were buried in one place, then dug up in another.”

  “Exhumed,” Matt says under his breath.

  Jason sounds nervous. “I hate how fast you get used to it. All these dead people…”

  His comment makes Matt feel slightly better. He’d thought it was just him. Trudging through all this death and destruction, he just feels numb. He’s incapable of emotion. Dead himself.

  Here lies the tangled wreck of a helicopter on its side. It looks dried out and mummified, like the husk of an insect baked in the sun, its rotor blades buckled like spindly shriveled legs. It looks like it’s been here forever. Matt recalls a near miss with a helicopter when he was driving the truck away from the city that night. Is this the same one, or is he miles off course? Are they close to the airport he saw being overrun and evacuated as all hell broke loose? He shakes his head and tries to focus on the here and now again, not get bogged down in the past. If he lets himself get distracted, then—

  A piercing scream truncates his train of thought. Matt spins around and pushes past Jason, Kara, and several others to get a better view, though he already knows what he’s going to see. It was only a matter of time. He curses his shell-shocked naïvety. What the hell were they thinking being out here like this?

  A woman at the tail end of the straggly line is under attack from a lone Hater. There’s a telltale blur of movement as the Hater strikes, then another as everyone else immediately moves the other way, trying to put maximum distance between themselves and the inevitable.

  It’s the noise that bothers Matt more than anything, the effect the woman’s screams will have on any other Haters nearby. Without thinking, he pushes through the crowd, filled with a sudden nervous energy, desperate to quell the god-awful din. He’s conditioned from those torturous weeks he spent alone trying to get home. He knows too well how a situation like this can rapidly spiral out of control.

  He can see two Haters now. One young, one older, both skeletal and scrawny. Animallike. Unnaturally pallid. All wiry limbs, shaggy hair, and uncontrolled fury. It’s too late to do anything to help the woman the monsters are attacking—she has blood spurting from a savage neck wound—so Matt doesn’t bother trying. Instead, he snatches up a hefty fallen branch and moves for the nearest of the Haters.

  What he does next he does on autopilot.

  There’s no thought, no consideration of the consequences, no hesitation—just an innate, guttural need to end the attack.

  He clubs one of them around the back of the head, knocking it out cold. And the jolting force of the impact with the creature’s skull makes him focus and makes him think, What the hell am I doing? He’s always done everything he can to avoid confrontation and has used other people’s battles as a shield to hide behind. He’s rarely been the one to attack.

  The second Hater pushes itself—herself, he realizes when her flaps of ragged clothes fall open—away from her victim and charges directly at Matt. Christ, this evil monster is a fearsome sight. What she lacks in physical bulk she more than makes up for in aggression and intent. She runs straight at him, wide eyes filled with rage and utter hate.

  He swings the heavy branch around and clubs the woman with enough force to knock her clean off her feet. Then he panics, scared she’s going to get up and fight back. Even in this pitiful state, he knows she could do some serious damage, and so, before she can move, he unloads on her. He brings the branch down across her face with such force that the wood splinters and snaps. He’s left with a makeshift stake, which he drives down into her belly. He turns it around in his hands, grinding her guts and tying them in knots.

  Matt’s aware of the other creature stirring nearby, and quick as a flash, he cracks the Hater across the back of the skull again. The vile fucker tries to get up, but Matt’s having none of it. He jabs it twice in the face, pushing it farther and farther back, then swings wildly at its head and almost decapitates it.

  Matt shakes a lump of gristle from the end of his stick and holds it ready like a bō. He looks up and around, checking for other attackers, and realizes he’s now the sole focus of attention. “What?” he grunts.

  The rest of the group just look at him. Stare at him. Some move away from him.

  “What?” he asks again.

  The silence is all consuming. He’s conscious he’s still holding the stick like a martial arts weapon, but he doesn’t want to let it go. He’s shaking with nerves, but he won’t let them see.

  “Cover the bodies,” Kara says as she starts to drag one of the dead Haters off the road they’ve been following. Others help while Matt kicks the leaf litter, then mixes spilled blood into the mud. To leave those nasty bastards out in the open, brutally hacked down, will leave any even nastier bastards nearby in no doubt that a potential enemy could be close.

  “We have to keep moving,” Matt says once he’s satisfied their tracks have been sufficiently disguised. “There will be more of them. There always
are.”

  He marches away. Kara goes to follow, but Jason blocks her way forward. “Do you think he’s killed like that before?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got to get used to it. If Matt hadn’t done what he did, more of us would have died. We have to think like them if we want to stay alive. Act like them.”

  “And you believe that, do you? It makes us as bad as they are.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Do you think any of us are safe when he’s capable of killing in cold blood like that?”

  “I think the more we’re capable of doing that, the safer we’ll be.”

  Kara stops talking and sidesteps Jason, not wanting him to see that she’s as concerned as he is. She doesn’t think there’s any turning back from what just happened.

  9

  More of them. Another three, at least.

  It’s like something out of a horror movie as they emerge from the chaos—spindly shadow creatures that move like monsters, creeping, then pouncing.

  This time, Matt’s rooted to the spot. It’s somehow harder the second time around. Knowing he’s already killed is one thing, but the thought of having to do it again is altogether different. His arms are heavy with nerves, and the thing in his hands feels like a branch again, not a weapon. He looks around and sees that he’s on his own, the rest of the group having all stepped back, volunteering him by default.

  The first Hater is lame and covered with grime. He scrambles over a mound of ash-covered masonry, his instinctive desire to kill forcing him to try to move faster than his malnourished limbs allow. He trips and falls, but Matt still holds back, nervousness increasing. He alters his grip on the branch and shifts his weight, trying to work out how best to attack, knowing that he’s overthinking the process, that he should just go with his gut and lash out like they do. The Hater picks himself up and stands fully upright, towering over Matt. His face is badly burned, scar tissue covering the entire right side of his skull. There’s a shriveled mass where his ear used to be. He throws himself at Matt, and Matt trips over his own feet trying to get away. He’s quicker than the Hater, in much better physical shape, and he boots the creature in the crotch. The Hater yells with pain and rolls away, and Matt gets up and kicks him in the side of the head. And again. And again. And again, this time hard enough to boot a ball from one end of a football pitch to the other. The first Hater stops moving just in time for the second to reach him. Kara grabs the Hater from behind, giving Matt time to reclaim his bō and inflict enough damage to prevent this bastard from ever killing again.

  Other members of the shell-shocked group are fighting at last, growing in confidence now they’re aware of the physical gulf between them and their poisoned, bomb-scarred enemy. The third Hater is tackled by Darren, then finished off by Jason, who drops a lump of concrete onto its head. It’s almost comical watching the foul creature’s limbs thrashing for those final few seconds before its crushed brain loses all control and its life is ended.

  Dr. Tracy is carrying a knife. She makes short work of the last of them, driving the blade up into its gut, then yanking it out and stabbing again.

  The panic is over as quickly as it began. “Makes you wonder why the hell we were hiding away for so long,” Darren says, fired up by the violence and the victory.

  “Don’t you get it?” Tracy answers, breathless. “It’s precisely because we’ve been hiding away that we can do this. Look at these poor bastards. These are the sick, the injured, the poisoned, the dying … we wouldn’t have stood a chance if any of them had been at full strength.”

  “And there’s likely to still be thousands more of them out here,” Kara warns.

  “Yeah, and it won’t be long before we’re in the same state if we don’t find shelter and food and water. We’re living on borrowed time here.”

  “Where’s he gone?” Jason asks, concerned.

  “Who?”

  “Matt.”

  They look around, but he’s not there.

  Darren starts to get the rest of the group ready to carry on down the road when Matt reappears, bursting through a gap in a stretch of brittle-looking hedgerow. “This way,” he says, and he leads them along an overgrown garden toward the rear of a dilapidated house with a naked-looking, tile-stripped roof. “This was their nest,” he explains. “It’s clear inside now, I checked. That must have been all of them.”

  “We can shelter here, then,” Darren suggests.

  Matt agrees. “It’ll do for tonight.” He hands Darren a supermarket carrier bag containing a few tins and packets of food. “Found this. It’s all they had.”

  Darren takes the bag from him. “Good,” he says, doing his best to sound more authoritative than he feels. He hadn’t even thought to work out where the Haters were coming from or check if there were others nearby.

  Darren’s still deciding whether or not to follow Matt’s advice and hole up here for a while, but the group is voting with their feet and is already heading for the house.

  “We should keep a couple of people on watch, just in case,” Matt suggests.

  “Okay.”

  “And there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  As the others enter the building, Matt beckons Darren to follow him along the side of a separate garage out front. Matt stops when they reach the edge of the road.

  “I’d have expected the Haters to be more nomadic around here, wouldn’t you? We’re close to what’s left of the city, but they’ve got the whole country to choose from.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think they were here for a reason. I don’t think we’re the only recent visitors.”

  “What?”

  “Look at your feet.”

  Nonplussed, Darren does as he’s told. There are tire tracks in the mud. “Fuck.”

  “Exactly. This could be a problem. Doesn’t matter if they’re like us or like them; whoever’s been here is clearly better equipped than we are, so we have to assume they’re stronger than we are, too. There are more than two sets of tracks, so there are either a decent number of them or they’ve been using this route regularly. Think about what’s happened here. There might have been other routes until recently, but the landslide’s changed the landscape, maybe forced them to come this way. I say we stop here and catch our breath, then move on when we can.”

  “Do we tell the others?”

  “Up to you. They’re your responsibility, so you do what you think is best. Personally, now we’re out of the bunker, I wouldn’t share this. You want them to stay calm and collected, not freak them out. Be economical with the truth. Only tell them as much as you think you need to.”

  * * *

  It gets dark earlier than it should. The sun occasionally peeks out when the clouds are thin enough, but most of the time its evening descent is hidden behind an opaque gray-black curtain. The group settles in the house, away from doors and windows, huddled together in the shadows. This is uncomfortable, hell on Earth, but there’s no complaint. This is as good as it gets for now. Even the kids who’ve survived remain quiet.

  The house feels overcrowded, and Matt decamps to the garage next door. It’s a cold, cluttered space full of junk, but he finds himself a relatively comfortable spot, sinking into a bagful of rags and decorator’s dust sheets. He sits diagonally opposite the side door, in a position where he also has a clear view of the up-and-over garage door. It’s buckled, jammed in its frame, left six inches open at the bottom. It lets the biting wind in, but it also lets him see out.

  He counts the concrete blocks that make up the wall, trying to work out how many it took to build the entire garage. It’s a coping mechanism, distracting himself with pointless crap to avoid thinking about anything else. He’s exhausted, but he doesn’t want to sleep. When he sleeps, he dreams about Jen and their house and the mushroom cloud. When he’s awake, he feels like the others are constantly looking to him for advice he doesn’t feel qualified to give. Asleep or awake, he can’t
switch off.

  “You staying out here all night?”

  Kara catches him by surprise. He curses himself for dropping his guard. Again. “Don’t know yet. Came out here to be by myself.”

  “’Course you did. I was looking for somewhere to bed down. Mind if I join you?”

  “As long as it’s just you,” he says.

  She shuffles herself into half a space next to him, almost on top of him. They both appreciate the warmth of each other.

  “I’m not much company,” he tells her.

  “I know that. You’re a miserable bugger.”

  “Then why do you want to stay with me?”

  “Because you make me feel safe.”

  “I doubt that. I don’t have the best track record for keeping people safe.”

  “It wasn’t your fault what happened to your missus.”

  “It was. I let her down. I trusted someone else. Won’t let it happen again. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Shut up, then.”

  “With pleasure.”

  The silence doesn’t last long.

  “You’re not going to walk out on us, are you, Matt?”

  “And go where?”

  “I don’t know. I just get the feeling you’re not planning on sticking around. We need you. I need you.”

  “I’m not needed. You’ve got Darren and Jason. They’ll see you’re all right.”

  “Now say it like you mean it.”

  But he can’t.

  Kara shuffles around to get comfortable. She puts her head on his chest. He puts his arm around her. Awkward. Self-conscious. From where he’s slumped, he can see through a window up into the house next door. The slates, he thinks, were ripped from the roof by the atomic blast. Matt closes his eyes, and he can almost feel the shock wave battering the building, can almost smell the carbonized stench as the curtains caught and the paper burned away from the walls, can hear the screams of any poor fuckers who were still out here …