Chokehold Read online

  “Tell you the truth,” he says, “it doesn’t matter who’s in charge; the odds are stacked against us. We can’t take any risks. All it’ll take is for us to run into a pack of Haters who aren’t half-dead, and we’ve had it.”

  “So work with Darren.”

  “Happily. It’s him who has the problem with me, though, in case you hadn’t noticed. He’s the big I am.”

  “I get that. He was spinning his future of the human race bullshit from the moment the group got together. I think you’re a threat to him. He needs to be the alpha male. He’s worried everyone will realize what a useless dick he is and start looking to you for guidance. After all, you’re the one who saved them.”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want the responsibility.”

  “Well, I don’t reckon you have much choice. I’ve watched you in action. You got out of the bunker before it was too late, and you didn’t disappear—you stayed close. Deny it all you like, you were looking out for the rest of us.”

  “Some of you, maybe. Well, you.”

  “I don’t think we’ll get far without you, Matt. Even tonight, after the rest of them had all disappeared indoors, I saw you clearing up after them, getting rid of our footprints in the mud.”

  “I just don’t think they realize how precarious our position is. Even the slightest trace might be enough to attract attention. We can’t afford to leave any clues.”

  10

  The Car Hypermarket

  It’s ice cold out here, even sitting around this fire. The flames seem to give out ten times more light than heat. Camp tonight for Keller, Bryce, and their combined pack is the office of a long-silent car dealership. The Car Hypermarket, no less (according to the signs). Parts of the dealership appear largely untouched, but one-quarter of the site is a total ruin. There was a fire here at some point. The flames must have jumped from vehicle to vehicle unchecked; upward of a hundred cars have been gutted.

  This place offered shelter and a decent stash of fuel. That’s why the enemy had once been here. McCoyne spotted the signs and led the pack to the remains of a couple of Unchanged hidden in the sales office with a reasonable supply of looted food to keep them going. They’d escaped the violence, it seemed, but not the radiation.

  When daylight returns, Keller, Bryce, and the others are due to return to Cambridge and report back to Johannson. For now, though, they rest, stomachs full. One of Keller’s men rigged a few basic traps to alert them if anyone comes near: precariously balanced piles of scrap that’ll topple and fill the air with noise.

  It’s a good thing the others are sleeping soundly, though, because they’d not be best pleased if they could see what’s happening right under their noses. McCoyne waited until the rest of them had all clocked out to help himself to a few looted items from each of their backpacks—not enough for any of them to notice individually, but enough of a stash to keep him going for several days, maybe as long as a week. Plenty of time, he thinks, to put some distance between him and everyone else.

  McCoyne wants out.

  He’s worked his way back through the traps and burned-out cars and is now on the other side of the dealership. With a gutful of nerves but no guilt at all, he’s gone.

  Sometimes you just can’t compete with the big boys (and girls). Sometimes it’s not even worth trying. McCoyne’s not stupid, he used to tell people before all of this happened, he just sometimes finds it hard to give a shit. He’s done with Johannson and her merry band of psychopaths. It’s time to look for somewhere they won’t find him, where he can wait for this all to blow over, because the longer this goes on, the harder he thinks it’s going to get. Before long, staying alive in the company of killers will become impossible for someone like him.

  He’s leaving what’s left of the human race behind for good.

  11

  The House by the Road

  When Matt wakes up, the light levels are almost the same as when he went to sleep. He’s confused—did he sleep for hours or just minutes? He’s not even sure if he’s slept at all. Kara’s not here, and now he can’t remember if she ever was. Christ’s sake, he can’t make sense of anything. Has the radiation gotten to his brain already?

  A creak of the door and she reappears, holding on to the doorframe as she leans back into the garage. “Morning,” she says with more energy and effervescence in her voice than he has in his entire body. “Lovely day out there.”

  “Is it?” he asks, momentarily wrong-footed.

  “What do you think?”

  Annoyed, he doesn’t reply. He picks himself up, turns his back on her, and pisses in the corner.

  “You’re a real charmer, Matt.”

  She’s doing nothing to help his mood. He pisses harder. Makes more noise.

  He’s not the only one who’s needed to answer a call of nature. When he looks out through a dust-covered window, he sees a line of several figures squatting down behind the house. Despite the degradation, he still feels embarrassed watching this most necessary and personal of acts. He turns away, finishes what he’s doing, then shakes himself dry.

  “So what do you reckon?” Kara asks.

  “About what?”

  “What we do next.”

  “Let the boss decide,” he answers, jabbing his thumb in the general direction of the house next door.

  “No, Matt, I want to know what you think we should do.”

  “Did he put you up to this? I’m not babysitting. Think I might just stay here.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Come on, then,” he goads. “You’re so smart, you tell me what we do.”

  She shuts the door behind her and clears her throat. “I think we got lucky yesterday. I think things could have been much worse when we were attacked. If they’d been any stronger or there’d been more of them, they’d have wiped us out.” She tries to gauge his reaction, but his face remains impassive. “I know you’re more worried about being attacked than you’re letting on because you mentioned it several times last night. You’re also worried about those tire tracks out front.”

  “Darren tell you about that?”

  “No, I did a recce for myself after you went all Sleeping Beauty on me and passed out. Personally, I think whoever’s still driving around here is almost certainly bad news and we should keep our distance.”

  “And what do you think they think?” Matt asks.

  “What, our lot? I think they’re on a high … they’re still alive, and after yesterday, I reckon they’re thinking they might be able to win this fight after all. Personally, I think that’s a mistake.”

  “You might be right.”

  “You know I am. I think that having to spend all that time hiding—first in the camp, then when we were in the chapel basement, then under the printing house—it left blokes like Darren and Jason feeling worthless … emasculated, even. Now they’re looking for a chance to prove themselves. That’s another reason why they’re so shitty toward you.”

  “Hadn’t thought about it that way,” he admits.

  “See. You’re not the only one who likes sitting in the corner figuring everyone else out.”

  “Is that why you keep checking with me?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I just like being around you? Or I’m just trying to protect myself? You’ve seen more of this than anyone. I think following your lead might be a pretty smart thing to do.”

  “I don’t want to be followed. I just want to be left alone.”

  “We don’t have that luxury. Like I said, I think those tracks could mean bad news. If it’s people like us, they’ll shoot first, ask questions later. If it’s Haters, they’ll attack first and not bother asking any questions at all. We need to keep out of the way.”

  He nods approval. “Absolutely. And that’s why these people are such a fucking liability. All that effort yesterday to keep them hidden, and now there’s a bloody line of them crapping outside the back door. Might as well have written We’re here in shit on the wall.”

  She
laughs. He likes that noise. Wasn’t expecting it. Had almost forgotten it.

  “Right. So we pack them up, head out, and find somewhere more substantial that’s way off the beaten track until we’ve fully worked out what’s going on in what’s left of the world.”

  He nods. “Sounds like a plan.”

  * * *

  They’re on the move within the hour, all of them tucked up tightly against the unruly hedgerow that marks the length of a vast furrowed field. They move in silence and in line. Some have arms loaded with the sparse food and belongings they’ve managed to cling to, others look after the five children left alive. How do you explain something like this to a kid? How do you make them stay quiet? How do you make them understand why it’s suddenly okay to kill some people but not others? Matt brings up the rear and watches them with sadness and concern, thankful he never had children himself. Always wanted to, never going to.

  The closer they get to the remains of the city-camp and the epicenter of the blast, the fewer signs of life they see. They’re in the field, deliberately keeping off the road, and despite the rain, the frozen soil here is hard underfoot. It’s obvious nothing’s going to grow in this dead zone for a long time, if ever. The uniformly planted rows of wilted yellow shoots add insult to injury. The world’s changed beyond all recognition since these crops were sown.

  Darren has the lead with Jason close behind, but the Hater attack comes two-thirds down the line. The lone woman has been sleeping rough, and though she barely seems to have enough energy to move, her instinct and hatred are such that she’s compelled to strike. They didn’t even see her till she moved; she looked like a long-discarded bag of rag and bone until she was disturbed. She collides with one of the kids. Kara grabs the boy and pulls him clear, covering his mouth with her hand to stop him screaming. Spoiled for choice, the sickly Hater turns on the next available Unchanged. Bad move. It’s Matt. Still carrying the stick from yesterday, he clubs her to the ground, and though she continues to fight and halfheartedly lifts her arms to try to defend herself from the beating, the end is inevitable. Matt’s barely out of breath by the time he’s killed her.

  But where there’s one Hater, there are almost always more.

  They can see them on the other side of the hedge in the road they’re walking parallel with, the most active of them reaching and stretching, trying to find a big enough gap to get through to the Unchanged in the field.

  “What do we do?” Darren asks Matt.

  “We can take them, right?” Jason says.

  “Be my guest,” Matt tells him. “We’ve been lucky so far. Won’t last. All we need is to try taking on one of them that’s in a half-decent state and we’re in trouble. There are, what … six of them in the road. Double that number and we’d be screwed.”

  “Yeah, but look at them. Some of them can barely stay standing.”

  “Don’t assume,” Matt warns. “Sick or not, they’re still vicious bastards. We’re not.”

  “Says the man who’s battered three of them to death with a fucking stick in the last twenty-four hours. Come on, we can do this,” Jason says, fired up.

  Darren agrees, but Matt grabs his arm and pulls him back. “Don’t. They’re stuck in the road. There’s no need to fight.”

  “We need to kill them.”

  “You don’t. That’s Hater mentality. Try to take them on at their own game and they’ll kill you eventually, no question.”

  The Haters are going wild on the other side of the hedge, but there’s no way through. Matt keeps walking. Kara follows him, as do the others. Soon only Darren is left standing by the hedgerow, watching the rabid creatures still trying pointlessly to reach him from the other side.

  Kara quickens her pace to catch up with Matt. He lowers his voice so that only she can hear him. “We can’t afford to take chances. Idiots like Darren and Jason will get us all killed.”

  12

  Freedom

  McCoyne’s relieved to finally be alone out here, not constantly looking over his shoulder. There’s no weight of expectation when the only person you need to think about is yourself.

  He’s hungry and cold, though. Then again, he can’t remember the last time he wasn’t. Even when he was sitting around the fire with the others last night, he couldn’t feel any heat. He threw up half of what he ate. Nervous about being caught by Bryce after going AWOL, probably. But that doesn’t explain why he felt the same way yesterday morning, or the day before that, or the day before that. He thinks everybody’s probably in the same boat. The bomb filled the air with so much toxic shit that it would have been just about impossible for anyone to avoid breathing it in. He hopes he’ll start to feel better soon, but he doesn’t think he will. That’s why it’s important he has some me time to rest and build up his strength.

  Easier said than done.

  Christ, even the basics feel like impossibilities now: the food he’d taken for granted, the flat he’d called home, the family he’d shared it all with, the warmth of lying alongside another person who wanted to hold him, not kill him …

  He blocks it all out. Can’t risk going down that route again. Can’t think about any of it. It’s a dead end. All gone now. Never coming back. None of it.

  He’s been walking for hours, and his twiglike legs are numb with cold. The skin on his burned back feels tight and rubs under the straps of his backpack. His lungs sound like they’re filled with dirt. Tastes that way, too. When he spits, it’s brown. I’m a fucking wreck, he thinks.

  He gets off the road, worried that Bryce will track him down if he sticks to obvious routes. But he soon thinks he might have made a mistake, because the path he’s following is getting wetter and wetter. He sinks ankle-deep but keeps going until he reaches the edge of a vast pool. It might have been a quarry once, might have always been here, it’s impossible to tell. The semi-constant mist makes it difficult to see too far in any direction. He staggers on through the sucking mud until he reaches the point where low, murky waves lap up against the shore. If he had a boat, he thinks, and he knew how to sail, he’d maybe head out onto the water and look for an island. That’d be best. A little speck of dry land he could call his own where no one would find him or want anything from him.

  There’s something floating on the water, coming toward him. Driftwood? Something worth keeping hold of? He finds a branch nearby and uses it to hook the thing and drag it over. Just a corpse. He’s seen enough dead people to last a hundred thousand lifetimes, and this one is nothing special.

  Or is it?

  Something about this particular stiff has piqued his interest. He flips it over onto its back and sees it’s like him, not Unchanged. There’s some bloat to the face, but it looks like a relatively recent kill. A single stab wound to the neck. It puts him on edge, because it strikes him as a quick, clean, and controlled way of dispatching someone.

  He remembers reading something once about how bodies swell up like a balloon after death and float on water because of all the gases brewing in their rotting guts. He pushes the cadaver away, but it only drifts a few meters deeper into the mist before butting up against something else and stopping again. Intrigued, McCoyne wades a little deeper in.

  Another body.

  This place is obviously bad news, and he turns to head back to shore but catches his breath when he finds himself face-to-face with a third corpse. This one is bent over double, bobbing in the rippling waves with its feet weighed down. And now he can see two more. And another couple beyond them. All like him, none of them Unchanged. Several have had their throats cut, others have less obvious wounds, all have obviously been murdered. He doesn’t want to know who did this, he just wants to get away fast before they find him. He’s met some foul fuckers since the war began, but the butchery on display here is on another level.

  13

  Exposed

  Late morning, and the rain’s pelting down so hard it hurts, soaking everything and everyone. Jason spots a building in the near distance and points it
out to Darren. “What do you think? Got to get under cover soon,” he says, and Darren doesn’t argue. They’re desperate for shelter.

  The building was a leisure center. There’s a gym with lines of dust-covered exercise machines, and a long-empty swimming pool with a mound of bodies dumped at the deep end. The glass ceiling directly above the pool is damaged, and rainwater pours in, steadily refilling it. There are a couple of inches of standing water covering the tiles and lane markings. Even at this rate, it’ll be weeks before the water reaches any depth. It’s loud like a waterfall, though. An unstoppable, clattering torrent.

  Matt finds a small café area. There’s some food and drink in a stockroom, which he brings out and distributes. It’s probably full of all kinds of radiation, but it tastes so good and has such a positive effect on the others that he decides it doesn’t matter. The food probably only has a fraction of the toxicity of the rain.

  The leisure center is relatively isolated and appears more substantial than the house where they’d spent last night. In comparison to the endless gloom they’d endured under the printing house, it feels positively luxurious with space to move around, high ceilings, and light-colored walls. Matt, Jason, Kara, and several of the others check the building from top to bottom, making sure it’s clear and looking for anything that might be of use. There’s clothing in the changing rooms—dry clothes, thermal layers, too—and equipment they can repurpose and use as weapons if need be. Matt spools a leather jump rope and hangs it from his belt like a cowboy’s lasso.

  Despite the space that’s suddenly available to them, all the group gravitate around the café. There’s safety in numbers.