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curious
as to what was going to happen. I squeezed his neck tighter. It felt so
fragile, as if I could completely snap it if I applied more pressure.
     
    "I'm
giving you once chance here," I said, "If you don't give me the battery
and fix it, I won't just kill you; I'll squeeze until you pass out, and when
you wake up you'll be in the middle of the forest, alone and far from here, and
I'll make sure the infected can smell you. It won't be a quick death. You'll
scream so loud that you'll wake Moe from his sleep."
     
    He stared at me
with his wide bug eyes. He blinked once but said nothing, and this made my
temple throb even harder. I tightened my hand a little and felt the sinews of
his neck move like gristle. It would be so easy now just to squeeze a little
more and snap his neck. My breath caught in my chest, and I could feel my heart
pounding.
     
    As I squeezed
his neck, I felt consciousness came back to me, and my head started to clear. I
looked at my hand and realised what I was doing. The image disgusted me, the
idea that I’d fallen this far. I wasn't this sort of man. I might be many
things, but child killer wasn’t one of them.
     
    I loosened my
grip. Justin's body sagged a little, and he took in a deep breath. From the
raspy sounds he made I could tell he was struggling to fill his lungs, and I
could see red marks from where my fingers had been wrapped around his neck. He
looked at me calmly, which made my anger rise again. I gave him a hard shove
into the wall then walked away from him, scared of what I would do next.
     
    "Dammnit!
When a man is strangling you, you better show some fear," I said to him.
"Because next time it won't be someone like me, and your stupid stare will
make them go all the way."
     
    I was sat on
the floor with my back against the wall. Justin walked over to the end of the
shack. He looked at the chicken soup bubbling in the cooking pot.
     
    "It's
boiling dry."
     
    "Leave
it."
     
    He turned off
the stove, wrapped the sleeves of his jacket around his hands and picked up the
pot. As he moved it onto the floor the smell of the chicken wafted over to me,
and the way my mouth salivated reminded me of how long it had been since I had
eaten.
     
    Justin walked
over and sat in front of me, cross legged. His eyes stared straight at mine.
"I know I've not seen much of the world, and I know in some ways I'd hold
you back, but I've got skills. Sure, I'd need you to look out for me with the
infected for a little, but I'd get used to them. And there's other stuff I can
do to help you."
     
    His voice
sounded as young as he actually was, but the way he spoke was so much older.
He was obviously intelligent, a trait I could never really say I had. I was
more of the practical type, a reactionary kind of guy. I could fight fires, but
I sure as hell couldn’t figure out a way to stop them from happening.
     
    I looked down
at the ground, because I couldn't look at Justin’s face anymore. The GPRS was
broken, and on my last count I was four hundred miles away from where I needed
to be. If I was closer – maybe ten miles away - I could have gotten lucky and
found it myself. But four hundred miles was impossible. There was someone else
who knew where the farm was, but going to see him wasn't an option.
     
    "I can
tell you're a little sceptical," he continued, "But I learnt lots of
stuff growing up; things you couldn't learn out here. For example, I can
remember every Prime Minister and the term he served going back to 1721.”
     
    I could feel
him poking at my patience. “Take a look outside. I can’t think of a more
useless skill to have these days than knowing who ran the country in 1968.”
     
    Justin’s eyes
darted to the corner of his eye sockets for a split second. “Harold Wilson. But
that’s not the point. I’ve got a memory palace.”
     
    Maybe he couldn’t
sense how brittle my will power was and how bad it would be for him if it
broke, because he took my silence as a sign that he