Fear the Dead (Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

happiness with
their camp songs and storytelling. When I walked by in the orange sunset and I
looked at the smiles they gave me, and I saw how empty they were.
     
    Darla walked toward me from across
the field. As she got nearer I could see that her eyebrows were furrowed and
she had a sense of purpose to her strides. Again she reminded me of a younger,
female Churchill striding across the grass.
     
    “We found nothing,” I said as she got
closer.
     
    A few feet away from me, she stopped.
     
    “We need to talk.”
     
    “What about?”
     
    “People are sick, Kyle.”
     
    I looked around me. It was
approaching lunchtime, yet there was nobody walking around. Usually people
would have been walking in and out of camp. The hunters tracking the local
wildlife, others gathering firewood and collecting water. Today, the field was
getting a rest from the trampling of feet.
     
    “What’s going on?”
     
    She folded her arms. She wore a baggy
blouse that billowed around her. On her right cheek, parallel with the top of
her nose, there was a tiny dent which must have been a scar from some accident
years ago. I had one of my own on my left forearm from where I had managed to
smash a dinner plate over myself.
     
    “It started just after you left.
Vomiting, diarrhoea, fever. Nobody can keep their food down and they sure as
hell can’t work. It’s getting so bad I can smell it in the air. I’m surprised
you didn’t. “
     
    “My nose has been blocked for the
last twenty years. Or it feels that way, at least. What is it?” I said.
     
    “I think it’s something in the food.”
     
    I looked around me; the absence of
footfall in the camp told me more than Darla’s words ever could. Overhead
clouds gathered, grey and heavy, and the day seemed to take on a darker tint.
     
    Plenty of people got sick when our
sanitation systems failed and hospitals shut their doors. It was the stupidest
things that made them ill, the activities they took for granted that fell
behind the wayside. For some reason, after the world fell, people stopped
washing their hands. They took a chance on food that was days past being fit to
eat. They drank from water sources that were questionable at best, downright
dangerous at worst.
     
    “So what about a supply run?” I said.
“There’s a pharmacy in one of the towns nearby. We can get medicine.”
     
    Darla shook her head. “Not even
enough healthy people to go. We’re focussing on the essentials right now;
getting water, making sure we have food. You’re not going to find a queue of
volunteers for a supply run.”
     
    “So maybe I don’t ask for volunteers.
I think we’re getting beyond relying on people’s goodwill.”
     
    Darla shrugged.
     
    “What about you? Why aren’t you
sick?” I said.
     
    “I’ve got a strong constitution,”
said Darla.
     
    ***
     
    I walked across the camp and to find
Charlie Sturgeon. There was an outbuilding on the edge of camp which had once
housed toilets and showers. Since plumbing was another much-wished-for thing of
the past, Charlie had taken it as his lab.
     
    The room was sparse. Tiles covered
walls that had once been white but had taken on a film of grime. Looking at the
dirt which lined the cracks in the tiles, I could almost smell the bleach and
urine that would have once filled the room. Charlie had set up a workbench in
the centre. He’d laid a sheet of thin plastic over the surface and driven nails
into it to hold it in place. On one end were his tools; a hack saw, hammer,
sharp meat knife and a pair of pliers. This was Charlie’s autopsy kit, but it
made him look like a serial killer.
     
    Reggie’s son was on the table,
stretched out and pale, his arms beside him. His chest and stomach were torn
open, and the skin nearest to the wounds had shrivelled. Charlie stood above
with a knife in his good hand. His other arm, hand and forearm missing and
giving way to a stump, hung off his body like a clipped wing.
     
    “He was cut