Read Fear the Dead (Book 4) for Free Online Page B

have
to come, that we would understand if he needed to be with Kendal. He looked at
me though his one good eye. The other was bruised and swollen.
     
    “I have to do something,” he said.
“I’ll go out of my mind.”
     
    I nodded.
     
    “What happened to your eye?”
     
    Reggie looked at the ground. “It
doesn’t matter.”
     
    All I had to do was ask Lou and Mel
to come with me and they had said yes. Despite the occasional argument and how
busy we all were, it seemed like I could always rely on them. I remembered my
conversation with Lou a few nights before and I hoped that she hadn’t meant it.
If Lou left camp, things could become difficult for me.
     
    Samuel was the only surprise in our
party. He was a man who kept himself to himself. If I gave him a job he did it
without complaint, and at night he’d sit at the mouth of his tent and just
stare out into the blackness of the night. He walked with his head tucked
forward and his back bent. Not so much like a hunchback, but more that his
whole body seemed to lean forward when he took a step. His centre of gravity
was just an inch or two away from sending him falling to the floor every time
he moved his legs.
     
    Samuel reminded me of a supply
teacher in my old school. He’d never covered any of my classes, but I had met
him from time to time when the maths teacher, Glenn Mack, took one of his
hangover days. This supply teacher had walked around the school in much the same
way as Samuel. He had seemed quiet, but boy, did he get mean when he was angry.
I wondered if Samuel also had a nasty temper.
     
    It was a grey day that lent a bleak
look to the Scottish countrywide, and in turn I felt a shadow cross my mood. I
started to wonder if maybe Darla was right and Charlie was wrong, that it was
possible that the food was the cause of the sickness.
     
    With the camp a mile and a half
behind us, we found the answer. In the stream, our only source of water, there
was a dead cow.
     
    Its body was thin and its skin was
wrapped tightly around its bones, though a large part of it had been stripped
away to reveal its ribcage. The skin on its head had been peeled away to show
raw red flesh, and hundreds of flies lined it. As soon as I saw the cow I
smelled the aroma of death, so thick that I could almost see it hang in the air
and drift toward me.
     
    Reggie turned away from the body. His
skin turned as pale as the overcast sky, and I watched him put his hand to his
mouth. He took deep breaths, but each intake of air looked like it was making
him feel worse. He kept his hand against his mouth and battled against it, but
eventually he had to bend over and retch. Mel put her hand on his back and
rubbed it.
     
    Lou walked over to the carcass. She
swatted at a few flies which buzzed near her head, and she put her hand to her
chin. From the look on her face she could have been in a gallery admiring a
painting rather than staring at a rotting cow in the middle of a stream.
     
    She turned to look at me.
     
    “You know we’re going to have to move
it, right?”
     
    Samuel grimaced.
     
    “The skin looks so slimy. It looks
like it would just slip away from the bones if we tried to pick it up.”
     
    Reggie gave another retch. Mel rubbed
his back even harder.
     
    “Still,” I said. “It’s got to go.
It’s either that or we find another drinking source, and I don’t think there
are many of them around. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not going back to
camp and explaining that we couldn’t fix the problem because we felt a little
sick.”
     
    Reggie’s skin had lost so much colour
that I could almost see through his skin. Poor bastard, I thought. He came with
us to take his mind off things, and this is what he gets.
     
    “There’s no way I’m touching it,” he
said.
     
    “It could be full of parasites,” said
Samuel.
     
    Lou rolled her eyes.
     
    “After everything we’ve seen.
Infected eating people, stalkers with blood dripping from their