Dead Days: Season 8 Part 7

Riley stopped, then. He turned around.

He squinted into the distance.

He couldn't see Kane. He could still hear the creatures groaning, though.

He thought about running back there. Thought about going and checking Kane was alive. He needed to know where that location was. He needed- He felt a smack across his face and he collapsed to the ground.

His head spun. His hearing went echoey. He wasn't sure what'd happened.

Not until he looked up and saw Kane standing over him.

He had the knife to Riley's face again. He didn't look best pleased.

"That's not the way to co-operate with me," Kane said. "That's a very, very unappreciative thing to-"

Riley booted Kane, right in his b.a.l.l.s.

He stood up and he kicked Kane down, right into the earth. Behind, he heard the creatures marching closer. He knew it wouldn't be long before they were onto their position.

He pressed his foot down onto Kane's chest. He pushed down, really hard.

"Mattius' camp," he said.

Kane smiled, blood building between the cracks of his teeth.

Riley pressed down harder on his chest. "Where is it?"

Kane laughed. He was practically in hysterics. "Like I'd tell you."

Riley booted Kane in the chin out of sheer frustration more than anything.

The creatures were just metres away.

"So go on," Kane said. "Leave me to the dead. Leave me to die. And watch my secret die with me. I dare you. Go on. I dare you."

Riley wanted to. He wanted to watch Kane get torn apart. He'd take a kind of sinister pleasure out of it, and in a way he wished he'd killed Kane when he'd first had the chance.

"Go on!"

But now Kane knew something. Or maybe he didn't. Maybe he was just bluffing.

"Go-"

But still, Riley couldn't take the risk.

"Shut up," Riley said.

He ran into the trees again. He left Kane behind, lying on his a.r.s.e. He'd left Kane's fate to Kane. If he got away, he'd still be here to help Riley find Mattius, and find Kesha-even if he intended to do great harm to Kesha, Riley would find a way of dealing with Kane before he got that opportunity.

Or maybe Kane really would die now. Maybe that secret he claimed he had would die with him.

Riley left it all to fate.

He looked over his shoulder. Again, it was too dark and too full of trees to see whether Kane had made it. He hadn't screamed, so he supposed that counted for something.

Then he looked back in front.

Someone was standing there.

Jordanna.

He collided with her and fell to the ground.

He blinked a few times and realised it wasn't Jordanna at all.

It was a woman. Mousey blonde hair. Green eyes. Skinny.

He'd seen her somewhere before.

Then it clicked...

"I know you," the woman said.

And Riley knew her too.

He remembered her standing there, alongside Bob, as Mattius killed Chlo and Jordanna.

He remembered her looking on as Mattius' people took Kesha away.

"Riley," she said. "You're Riley."

Riley tried to struggle free.

But the woman pulled out a pistol and pressed it to his head.

"I don't think so," she said, a wry smile on her face. "Oh, I don't think so at all. You're a prize find, my friend. And a prize find that Mattius is looking forward to having in his possession. He let you slip once. Won't happen again. Oh no."

Riley tried to swing at the woman, but his hands were still cuffed. She blocked him and started to squeeze the trigger. Behind, the echoey groans of the creatures got closer.

"No, you're all ours now," she said. "You're all ours. And you're coming with me."

Riley waited for her to stand.

But she didn't.

Her face dropped.

Blood ran down from the top of her skull.

Her eyes went bloodshot.

"He's not yours at all," a voice behind her said.

She fell to the floor when Kane pulled the knife from her skull.

Then he reached down and grabbed her gun.

He smiled at Riley.

"You're all mine to kill. Now on your feet, p.r.i.c.k. It's time we finished up this little journey of ours."

Chapter Nine.

Amy looked inside the prison cell where they'd been keeping Bob and right away, she knew what'd happened.

It was early. Earlier than she usually woke up and that was saying something. She liked to be awake for the sunrise. A habit she'd always enjoyed, even before the world fell apart. She found she was more productive in the early hours. In her old life, when she wasn't at work, she spent a lot of her time blogging. The real goal was to eventually be making enough money from freelance blogging and writing work that she could quit her job. But honestly, she was barely making ends meet. Turned out n.o.body wanted to hire her to freelance. That bubble, once possible to make gains in, had been burst.

s.h.i.+t. She'd always been late to jump on trends.

Outside, the weather was cool and breezy, the sun barely peeking over the horizon just yet. But in here, aided by her torchlight, she was kind of relieved that it wasn't fully light.

She could build enough of an image of what had gone down simply through the glimmers of red in the torchlight.

Dark red.

Blood red.

There were the smells, too. You might think you know what a bad smell is. And sure, there were plenty of bad smells in this world. But one of the worst, most distinctive smells was the smell of someone who had been disembowelled.

All that partly-digested food dangling there in slimy tubes.

Not something you wanted to smell first thing in a morning.

"And Kane's gone too?"

Melissa nodded. "That b.a.s.t.a.r.d must've escaped."

"You were watching him. Right?"

Melissa looked at Amy and right away, Amy could see her guilt. "He was tied up solid."

"But he got untied, somehow."

"You trying to say I've done something?"

Amy put a hand on Melissa's shoulder. Outside, she could hear the murmurs and mumbles as the rest of the camp woke up and came round to a stark new day. They were back to the old order. An order of only women. Suddenly, in one fell swoop, every man had been taken out of this place.

"I'm not trying to say you did anything. I just... understand. That it's been hard to adapt to our latest guests. And if you did do anything, well, I can get why you'd do it."

Melissa's eyes went watery. She tutted, and shook her head. "Like I'd do anything."

Amy smiled and nodded. She could question Melissa some more. Chances were, if Kane had got out, there had been some accident that led to his escape, and seeing as Melissa had been taking Kane's food to him lately, as well as helping him empty his guts, it made sense that she might be involved somehow.

But Amy had no time to be paranoid. She'd spent enough of her life struck down by paranoia. It started in her youth, to be honest. A healthy self-consciousness that struck everyone down.

But it never went away. When she got older, she got that sense people were laughing at her. She got the feeling people were talking about her, behind her back. In the end, she'd got so bogged down by paranoia-the imagined voices of other people-that she'd ended up having to drop out of uni for a year and spend some time on medication.

She'd got better. She'd recovered.

But that niggling paranoia still ate away at her, especially in times like these.

She took a deep breath and let it go.

She had to, especially if she wanted to lead.

She walked outside, Melissa by her side, and headed over to the fences. She climbed the ladders, peered out over the woods. She didn't know where they'd gone, Kane and Riley. But she could guess at two things. Either Riley had taken Kane in his unstable, vengeful state. Or Kane had taken Riley, in his own brand of vengeance.

Judging by the state of Bob, Amy took a guess that Kane had one-upped Riley somehow.

Unless Riley had found out where Bob and, therefore, Mattius' camp was, leading him to kill Bob when his purpose waned.

"We found something," Melissa said. "Something on Bob's body."

She lifted a little black box and held it out in front of Amy.

"What is that?"

"Portable camera, by the looks of things."

Amy narrowed her eyes. "A camera?"

"It was strapped to his chest. And it looks like it's a 3G camera, so it wouldn't require a WiFi network to connect to wherever it's being viewed from."

"But the mobile networks are down. There's no way this could've bounced a signal back to... well, wherever."

"Not unless they've found a way to create their own signal. Their own network."

Amy held the camera in her hand. She looked into its lens. She felt like someone was looking at her, through the other side.

"So what do we do about them now?" Melissa asked.