Free Fear the Dead (Book 4) by Jack Lewis

was
Reggie. I thought about everything he had lost in the last week, and I wondered
how he could even drag himself out of bed. Maybe he was stronger than I
thought.
     
    The other residents were those who
had survived the battle of Bleakholt and travelled North with us. Just normal
men and women, ages ranging from thirty to sixty. They were people who had
survived the initial apocalypse and had struggled during the sixteen years
since. Some of them would have been teenagers when it all happened, and they
had spent their formative years in a world forever changed. Others had seen
their world ripped apart, watched their loved ones die and witnessed their
lives torn to pieces by the undead. I remembered the words that I had heard the
night before.
     
    “Dead God, you give us back what we
lose. You take away what we love and return it, corrupted. Spare us, Dead God.”
     
    Although they were a hundred yards
away in the forest to my left, I heard the singing of the birds in the trees.
They didn’t seem like happy sounds, more like nervous chatter. They were
warnings that the birds gave each other, words of caution about the dangers
they had seen on the flights in the land around.
     
    Darla was the first to break the
quiet.
     
    “Quite a turn out, isn’t it Kyle?”
she said.
     
    I looked at the circle of residents.
A couple caught my eye, and I saw a look on their faces that I recognised all
too well. Fear.
     
    “I take it everyone else is still
sick?”  I said.
     
    Darla nodded. “What do you think?
Most of them are still shitting out everything that’s left in them. Don’t tell
me you can’t smell it in the air. This whole place stinks.”
     
    “We cleared the river,” I said. “We
need to boil our water for a while, but it should be safe to drink soon. There
was nothing I could have done. No way I could have known.”
     
    “Tell that to the dead.”
     
    “What?”
     
    A woman stepped forward. She was in
her forties, with blonde hair that curled at the ends and whole patches that
had turned grey. I knew that her name was Stacey Blackwell, but not much else
other than she was married to a man named Trevor and that they had lost their
teenage son in the Battle of Bleakholt.
     
    “Trevor’s dead,” she said. “He passed
last night.”
     
    She looked down at the ground.
     
    I didn’t know what to say. I knew
that words were needed, but I was finding sympathy hard. Day by day I felt my
insides turn to stone. Death used to be something dreaded and unspoken, but the
last sixteen years had changed that. It was something you couldn’t look away
from anymore. There was no use pretending death didn’t exist, because we were
confronted by it every day as sure as the morning sun.
     
    “I’m sorry, Stacey. I really am.
Trevor was a good man.”
     
    “Save it,” said Darla. “We’re not
here for condolence card sympathies. We’re here because time is running out.
Look around you. Smell the air. This place isn’t somewhere we can settle, Kyle.
It’s tainted, and we need to leave.”
     
    “And go where? You say it’s tainted,
but tell me somewhere that isn’t? I’ve spent my time travelling, and I never
found somewhere that stayed safe for long. This place is as good as the next.
Better, in most ways. There’s a water source, so we need never worry about
thirst. It has wide open fields so that we can see dangers when they come. Go
to a town or city Darla, and tell me how you find it. Because I guarantee as
soon as you see what’s out there, you’ll think this field is paradise.”
     
    Darla’s face told me that she wasn’t
persuaded by my words.
     
    “This might be somewhere we can
survive. For now. But the people don’t want to just survive. They want to live.
Otherwise what’s the point?”
     
    I thought about my time in the Wilds.
I had spent years moving from place to place, never settling. Later, I had
joined a community in a town called Vasey, and after that I had