Fear the Dead (Book 4) Read Online Free

sound as it cut through flesh, and I
smelled blood in the air.
     
    “What can I do for you, Kyle?” she
said. Sweat mixed with the blood on her forehead.
     
    “There’s been another body,” I said.
     
    Mel looked at me, nodded, and then
looked back at the pig.
     
    “You don’t seem too bothered,” I
said.
     
    “It’s been a long time since I was squeamish.
Death’s a part of life.”
     
    I took a step closer.
     
    “I’m organising a hunting party.
We’re going to look for stalker nests and put an end to this. I was wondering
if you could join me.”
     
    “I’m a little busy,” she said.
     
    “We might find Justin out there. You
never know.”
     
    Mel dropped the cleaver to the table
where it clanged. Her face started to turn red.
     
    “Fuck Justin.”
     
    She took shallow breaths as though
she was trying to hold back her anger. She picked up the cleaver, raised it in
the air and brought it down harder than before on the pig. Blood splattered
back on her shirt.
     
    Mel used to be so nervous. She
wouldn’t get pushed around, but she was nervous all the same. She had been perfect
for Justin. When the two of them got together I had been sceptical, but it was
easy to see that she was good for him. I wondered how Justin being missing was
affecting her, and whether her manner was just a front.
     
    “Listen Kyle,” she said. “Justin is
dead. You know it, I know it. He went without even a thought for me.”
     
    “He sacrificed himself to save – “
     
    “He’s a selfish bastard.”
     
    I stepped forward until I was inches
away from the table. The smell of blood was pungent enough to pinch at my
nostrils. When cooked the pig meat would make me salivate, but when it was cold
and dead it was disgusting.
     
    “He’s not dead, Mel. When he walked
toward the infected, they didn’t attack him. They let him pass. Whatever
Whittaker injected him with, it made the infected see him as one of their own.”
     
    A year earlier, a scientist named
Whittaker had kidnapped Justin. Whittaker believed he had found a vaccine for
the infection. He injected Justin with it, and ever since then Justin had
started to change. He became sadder, more withdrawn. He told me once that he
felt alienated from people.
     
    Later, when we were fighting against
a wave of infected outside Bleakholt, Justin had sacrificed himself. He
detonated a bomb that trapped the infected and stopped most of them reaching
us. It was Justin’s actions that had swung the battle our way, and it was the
only reason that we were all alive today.
     
    “Look,” I said. “I know he’s alive.
And he’s my friend, so I can’t abandon him. I want to find him, but at the same
time I can’t just get up and go. It’s the life of one person, versus the lives
of fifty.”
     
    Mel lifted the cleaver over her head
and threw it across the tent.
     
    “Didn’t you hear me? Fuck Justin. I
don’t care if he’s alive or not.  Can you guess what I did last night Kyle?”
     
    “What?”
     
    She leaned forward with both hands on
the table. Her face was scrunched up, her forehead covered in sweat and blood.
     
    “Last night, after I finished here, I
went to Peter Jenkin’s tent and let him screw my brains out. Two nights
earlier, I went to Kieron’s and did the same. I don’t care about Justin.”

 
    Chapter 4
     
    When I went to speak to Lou later
that night, she wasn’t in her tent. I found her sat on the edge of the
campsite, with her back against a sycamore tree. She stared out toward the
field in front of her, at all the blades of grass which swayed in the cold
night breeze. In the darkness they looked like waves lapping back and forth. I
felt as though walking out too far into the fields could drown me.
     
    As I got closer, I wondered what the
fields hid. The grass was waist high, and it would have been a good idea to
chop it down. It offered protection if our enemies couldn’t see us, but it
wasn’t worth giving stalkers